After Earth (20 page)

Cypher felt something feathery touch his cheek. It took him a moment to realize that it was a tear. He wasn’t a robot after all. He could feel pain like anyone else. He just couldn’t give in to it.

With shaking hands, he inserted the piece of tubing into the second incision. Again using the holographic display for guidance, he slipped the tube into the ragged end of the severed artery. This time the fit was less perfect. Cypher wiggled it, almost passing out from pain. His readout told him that the arterial shunt was 87 percent effective. Looking down, he saw that blood was flowing through the piece of tubing sticking out from his leg. He had repaired the damage, at least temporarily. It was good enough for the time being.

Cypher leaned his head back against the loader, focused on the screen showing his son’s point of view, and struggled to remain conscious despite everything he had been through.

He could hear Kitai’s voice as he ran. “Five mikes out.” His voice was stronger now, more confident. “Who wasn’t advanced to Ranger? Who was it? Watch him go. Watch him go.”

Cypher stared, on the verge of losing consciousness. His eyes closed, opened, fluttered closed again. A memory came to him …

He was on a Ranger ship. It was dark. Someone was yelling, “Five mikes out!”

It was a drop captain. Cypher couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he recalled being one of the Rangers waiting in the ship. He remembered, too, the piece of smart fabric in his hands. On the fabric was a face.
Senshi’s
face. She was sitting at a table with a birthday cake in front of her. There were nineteen candles on the cake. Faia and Kitai, who was only eight at the time, looked on from the background.

Senshi held up the cake. “Dad,” she said, “you help me.”

“No,” he told her as he sat among his fellow Rangers, “you go ahead. You blow.”

“Come on, Dad,” Senshi insisted with a grin. “Blow.”

Cypher looked around at the other Rangers. They were watching him, making him self-conscious. “Now,” he told Senshi, “you know there’s no way I can actually do that from here.”

“No,” she said, full of faith, “I think you can.”

Cypher sighed and addressed his wife. “Faia, why don’t you step in here and help the girl?”

Faia came into the frame of the smart fabric and said, “You can do it.”

“I know you can,” Senshi added.

Cypher shot a glance over his shoulder. A Ranger was sitting there, stone-faced. Cypher turned back to the cake and Senshi’s expectant face. Resigned to his fate, he leaned forward quickly and blew. As if by magic, the candles went out.

Suddenly Kitai leaned into the frame, laughing. It was he who had blown out the candles. Faia was laughing, too. So was Senshi. Cypher basked in the laughter. He smiled. “Happy nineteenth birthday, Senshi.”

Just then, an alarm went off in the ship. The other Rangers turned to Cypher.

“I have to go,” he told Senshi.

He tapped the piece of smart fabric, and it turned off. Sometimes it unsettled him, seeing his family vanish with one flick of his finger. All that he knew, gone in a flash. Then he tucked it away. All the Rangers in the ship stood, strapped on their gear, and looked to Cypher. The back of the ship began to open. Cypher stared at it. “Rangers,” he called out, “in formation! Move!”

They moved.

“Hot spot one arrival,” came a voice.

Cypher blinked away the memory and checked his son’s camera. It showed him that Kitai had reached a geothermal node that was elevated from the landscape around it. Steam rose from the ground. Fallen trees were
overgrown with moss. There was decay everywhere, the product of the place’s warm, wet air.

“H-plus-forty-eight minutes!” Kitai announced, an unmistakable note of satisfaction in his voice.

Outside the geothermal zone, the forest was going into a deep, rapid freeze. Every tree in the vicinity was developing a thick skin of ice.

Kitai began to cough. “Sir,” he said, seemingly hoping for a response from his father, “I made it. I’m here.”

Ignoring his own condition, he checked his son’s vital signs. They scrolled in front of him. “Make sure you have everything,” he instructed Kitai. “Take your next inhaler. Your oxygen extraction is bottoming.”

Dutifully, Kitai opened the med-kit. His father had gotten him this far. The last thing he was going to do was diverge from Cypher’s instructions.

We’re doing all right
, Kitai thought.
Spacing out the oxygen. Had a little setback before, but I’ll be calmer next time, smarter
. Then he saw something bad—very bad. Of the five oxygen vials left to him, two were broken. Quickly, he closed the case, hiding its contents from Cypher’s view.

I don’t have enough breathing fluid
, he thought.
What am I going to do? How am I going to reach the tail section and the beacon if I don’t have enough to breathe?

“Use the next dose of breathing fluid,” Cypher said.

Kitai strained not to cough. “I’m good, Dad. I don’t need it right now.”

Cypher watched his son, knowing that he was lying but refusing to berate him for it. “Okay,” he said.

Finally Kitai coughed a deep cough, his chest making a hollow wheezing sound. He was starving for oxygen, no question about it. Still Cypher said nothing. He just watched and waited even though his son’s struggles gradually were getting worse. Kitai’s coughs became more brutal, driving home the sad but inescapable fact
that human beings no longer could breathe the air of their homeworld.

To make things worse, the cockpit’s medical computer displayed a graphic:
ARTERIAL SHUNT 70% EFFECTIVE
. Cypher was still getting blood, getting oxygen, but not as much as he had gotten before. Why?

Then he saw it on the holographic readout: His self-administered shunt was slipping on the ragged end, where the fit hadn’t been perfect. Blood was escaping from it, running down to the floor. The medical computer advised him to commence transfusion. It told him he needed four units of O-positive.

But all he cared about, all he could hear, was Kitai’s deep, racking coughs. All he could see was the pain on Kitai’s face as he fought for air. It was a tough lesson, but one Kitai had to learn:
Listen to your father
.

Kitai dragged in breath after breath, each more difficult than the last. Finally, he couldn’t stand it anymore. If he went without breathing for another minute, he would pass out. And that might be a disaster from which he couldn’t come back. Finally, reluctantly, he administered the second vial of breathing fluid.

Instantly, he could feel the oxygen spread throughout his body, meeting his needs. His breathing slowed. His strength came back to him.

“Second dose of breathing fluid complete,” he said. “Over.”

“Count off remaining so you can keep track,” his father said. “Over.”

Kitai hated the idea of lying to his father. However, he had no choice. He couldn’t take a chance on Cypher pulling the plug on the mission, especially when it was their only hope.

His face flushed with shame, Kitai replied, “Four vials remain, sir.”

Just then, a pack of wolves slinked past him, seeking a warm spot against the frigid cold. A couple of deer lay down to go to sleep. Bison crowded in, side by side with jade-eyed tigers. Everyone had sought the same refuge.
Even insects
, Kitai thought. During the day, they might be bitter enemies, but at night, when their world froze over, they enjoyed a kind of truce.

Otherwise, none of them would survive.

Kitai saw a bunch of monkeys with bioluminescent eyes staring at him. He couldn’t help staring back. Suddenly the sky opened up and unleashed a mighty downpour. Kitai ducked back into the musty hollow of a huge rotting tree, but it didn’t keep him very dry.

Right in front of him, a bee struggled to free itself from a spiderweb. The more it moved, the more it sent a signal to the spider that had made the web. Suddenly, a spider bigger than Kitai’s fist showed up and rushed down to claim the bee. But the bee wasn’t defenseless. As the spider approached, it tried to sting its captor. Kitai watched the struggle, caught up in it. Lightning flashed as the bee tried to free itself, but to no avail. The spider just hung there, waiting. Finally, the bee got too tired to buzz its wings. But instead of moving in for the kill, the spider backed up. It looked confused.

Kitai supposed the spider couldn’t find the bee unless it moved and sent a vibration through the strands of the web. The spider began testing each thread for its tension until it came upon the thread on which the bee was trapped. Suddenly, the spider made another charge. The bee flailed wildly, trying to escape from the thread that was holding it down. Meanwhile, the spider came in low, its venomous fangs visible.

Abruptly the bee went still again, ceasing to fight, and again the spider seemed to become confused. It backed up, testing the tension on the web threads until it located the bee again. By this time, the bee seemed exhausted.
It barely struggled, tracking the spider circling across its web. Then the spider came in for the kill.

Suddenly the bee snapped to life and flew up despite the thread stuck to its leg. Attaining a position over the spider, it sank its stinger into the spider’s soft exposed back. The spider twitched. Then the bee stung it again and again. The spider, poisoned with the bee’s venom, moved slowly to the middle of its web. The bee took advantage of the respite to try to fly away. But the spider’s thread held it in place. Finally the bee died, hanging from the thread.

Kitai watched it hang there. After what it had done, it seemed to deserve a better fate.

A question came to mind, something Kitai had meant to ask for a long time. “Dad …?” he said. “Dad—”

He imagined his father awakening from a state of semiconsciousness, dealing with his injuries as best he could. For a moment, there was no response.

Then Kitai heard: “I’m here. SitRep?”

“How did you beat it?” he asked his father. “How did you first ghost? Tell me how you did it.”

Cypher pictured his son, alone in an unfamiliar and hostile world. Afraid of what he could see—and especially of what he couldn’t. Now more than ever he needed to hear this.

“I was at the original Nova Sea of Serenity,” Cypher began matter-of-factly. “The settlements. I went out for a run. Alone. Something we are never supposed to do. An Ursa de-camos not more than a few meters away. I go for my cutlass, and it shoots its pincer right through my shoulder.

“Next thing I know, we’re falling over the cliff. Falling thirty meters straight down into the river.

“We settle on the bottom. It’s on top of me, but it’s not moving. I realized it’s trying to drown me. I start thinking,
I am going to die. I’m going to die
. I cannot believe this is how I’m going to die.

“I can see my blood bubbling up, mixing with the
sunlight shining through the water, and I think,
Wow, that’s really pretty
.”

Kitai was amazed that his father could come to that conclusion at such a time. Hell, it amazed him that his father thought
anything
was pretty. It was a side of him Kitai hadn’t seen before, or if he had seen it, it was so long ago that he didn’t remember.

“Everything slows down, and I think to myself,
I wonder if an Ursa can hold its breath longer than a human?
And, I think of Faia. She was pregnant with you, and close, too. Half a moon’s cycle away, maybe twenty-three days. She was so beautiful.

“And suddenly I knew one thing with perfect clarity, and it obliterated all other thoughts: There was no way I was gonna die before I’d met my son. Before I met
you
.”

Kitai felt a lump grow in his throat.
Me?

“I look around, and I see its pincer through my shoulder, and I decide I don’t want that in there anymore. So I pull it out, and it lets me go, and more than that, I can tell it can’t find me. It doesn’t even know where to look.

“And it dawned on me: Fear is
not
real. The only place that fear can exist is in our thoughts of the future. It is a product of our imagination, causing us to fear things that do not at present and may not ever exist. That is near insanity, Kitai.

“Do not misunderstand me: Danger is very real, but fear is a choice.

“We are all telling ourselves a story. That day, mine changed.”

Kitai thought about that:
We’re all just telling ourselves a story
. It made sense, as if he had known it all his life and had just never had the words to express it.

Kitai looked around the geothermal zone and took in the sight of the animals all resting in close proximity to one another. He wished his father could see it, could see the majesty of it.
Maybe someday
, he thought. He sighed. It didn’t look like he would get a lot of sleep that night.

And how could he, with his father’s words still fresh on his mind?
If we’re nothing more than the stories we tell ourselves … we can change the story, the way Dad did
.

And if the story changes, we do, too
.

From the cockpit of the ruined ship, Cypher watched the geothermal zone flood with dawn light. Somewhere, Earth’s sun was breaching the horizon.

Kitai, who had been drifting in and out of sleep as far as Cypher could tell, roused himself. He grabbed his gear and stood up.

“Fourteen kilometers from the falls,” he said, giving his son an objective. “That’s our halfway checkpoint. Over.”

“Reading you,” Kitai said.

He began his day’s trek slowly and steadily. No doubt, he was feeling the weight of the immense distance he had to cover. And without any real sleep.

Cypher spared his leg a glance. The puddle of blood on the deck below it was growing, spreading. On the holographic readout in front of him, it said: “
ARTERIAL SHUNT
—
58%. TRANSFUSION CRITICAL
.
7 UNITS NEEDED
.”
Seven units
, Cypher thought.
Be lucky if I had even
one.

He turned off the screen.
I need to focus on my son
, he thought. And that, despite the pain and the worsening loss of blood, was what he did.