Escape Velocity: The Anthology (31 page)

      
He cooked gourmet meals and watched reruns on television while he ate.

      
He wished for a bar stocked with his favorite brands of alcohol and stayed drunk for a week.

      
He took long baths. Each day was the same as the last.

Something had changed.

      
Mitchell Gavin awoke in his bed from sleep-not-sleep and stared at the ceiling.

      
He felt different somehow.   

      
He started to shiver and drew the blankets around his body. They had no effect on the chill that was now permeating his bones to their very core.

      
A sudden sharp pain caught him by surprise. It was as if someone had plunged a knife deep into his back. He gasped and tried to rise from the bed.
I wish for something to ease the pain! Now!

      
Instead of instant relief, an invisible force pushed him back down onto the bed. The room swirled in strange colors and the pain grew more intense. He lost consciousness.

“
Doctor, I think the patient is coming out of the anesthesia,” said the attending nurse.

      
Dr. Bowers peered into Mitchell Gavin’s face. He saw the patient’s eyelids fluttering, the head turning slowly from side to side. “Perhaps you’re right,” the doctor said. “Give him another ten cc’s, please.”

      
The nurse reached behind her for the syringe and began drawing a clear liquid into it from a vial. “Yes, doctor. I’ll have it in a moment.”

      
Mitchell Gavin opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, the central character in a bright white operating theatre. He saw a young woman holding a syringe and feeling his arm for a vein. He struggled to speak. 

       “
Wha...what...please...”

      
He felt a slight sting as the needle went smoothly into his arm. He suddenly felt very tired and closed his eyes.

       “
Did you hear that, doctor? I think he tried to say something.”

       “
Impossible. The man has been brain-dead for years. Let’s close him up and get him back down to cryogenics. Mrs. Johnson is waiting on her kidney.”

       “
I’m almost sure he spoke.”

       “
Nurse?”

       “
Yes, doctor?”

       “
Sometimes they babble a word or two when we wake them up. It doesn’t mean a thing. I would rather the patient not die on my operating table while you engage in speculation. Do as I ask, please.”

      
The embarrassed nurse quickly retrieved the needle and stitching from a nearby tray and handed them to the surgeon. “Here you are, doctor.” 

       “
Thank you.” He made a mental note to have her replaced as soon as he was finished.

The Prettiest Star

Jaine Fenn

Once, the view from here was amazing. There’s not much to see now, but I still come here every day. It’s the only place that’s anything like home.

      
My Uncle Jack was an amateur astronomer, and when I was nine, he showed me a picture of the Horsehead nebula. I gawked at the perfect, recognizable outline – yep, it looked like a horse’s head all right - and asked: Is that thing really out there in space?

      
It sure is, he said. Then he asked how big I thought Earth would be if it was in that picture. I made a few guesses (‘big as a dime?’ ‘big as my fingernail?’) while he shook his head and smiled. Finally he picked up one of my aunt’s pins and stabbed the picture.     He told me to imagine that the pin-prick was the size of the room, and then he pricked again. The second pin-prick, that tiny spot within a tiny spot, was about the size of Earth, he said. I was smart enough to grasp what he meant at once; space was bigger than I could easily imagine.

      
From that moment space was the place for me.

      
Of course I know that we only made it to the Moon last century because of all that Cold War ‘my rocket’s bigger than yours’ macho political crap. But that didn’t stop me hoping.

      
I’m an inveterate optimist, you see. Certainly not the kind of woman who’d usually consider suicide.

      
Oh. That was the first sign. I lifted my hand to scratch my nose, and felt a delay before my body responded. Loss of physical co-ordination: check. Let’s see, next I can expect a tingling in the extremities and, if I’m really lucky, mild euphoria. All I have to do is wait.

      
Anoxia is such a lazy way to die.

      
I’ve looked into other options. If I stick it out another two years then I’ll run out of the unattractive mush that passes for food up here; of course, that assumes the recycler units don’t break down. I’m just cutting my losses before the Station, or my sanity, become irrevocably screwed.

      
I did consider going EVA without a space suit. There’s a dozen fail-safes built into the airlock, but nothing except common sense to make sure you are actually wearing a suit before you open the outer doors. If I were a man, perhaps I’d have done it that way. It’s more of a grand gesture than asphyxiating whilst recording your last diary entry.

      
Instead, I’ve decided to go for the easy option, fading away rather than going out in a blaze of glory.

When I first came up to the ISS, I spent every spare moment floating next to this window and staring down at Earth. I loved watching storms form in the oceans; the swirls of cloud looked like spray-cream, and it sent a shiver down my spine to think that these delicate patterns blossoming over the deep blue of inner space were actually huge natural phenomena. And the land appeared in every color and texture: mountain, desert, forest, and plain.

      
When we went into darkness, clusters and strings of light sprung up, stretching across the globe and marking man’s territory. They were my stars, in a night that arrived every three quarters of an hour.

      
After I’d been here for a couple of months I stopped looking at the real stars, but I never tired of this view of Earth.

      
The rest of the crew would rib me about it: ‘Where’s Marianne?’ ‘Oh, she’s playing ‘I can see your house from here’, again’.

      
But I wasn’t homesick, that wasn’t it. I just loved watching my home planet from a distance. It was never that special when I lived on it, but from up here it’s glorious. Seen from space, Earth has no borders, no wars, and no politics.

      
It’s perfect.

      
One of the many ironies about the timing of the apocalypse was that we were finally getting somewhere with China. When the trajectory of the Fenris comet was confirmed, we had a couple of Chinese diplomats aboard, taking in the cramped delights of the West’s aging ‘Platform to the Stars’. The media were hailing it as the first step on the road to reconciliation.

      
Until something rather more important grabbed everyone’s attention, that is.

      
We evacuated at once. The lifeboats were designed for normal crew compliment plus one, so someone had to stay. We didn’t draw straws: I volunteered. There was nothing on Earth for me. I had no lover, no children and my parents and brother all died in the pandemic.

      
I wanted to watch the end from up here, cosmic voyeur that I am.

      
And the verdict, from my castle in the sky? Well, I’ve got to say, we didn’t do very well. Space could have been our future, and instead it was the end of us. All that ‘humanity always wins through in the end’ stuff was pathetic self-delusion. We’re nothing special. There are plenty of things in the universe that human perseverance, independence and tenacity just can’t beat.

      
A rock the size of New Jersey, for instance.

      
It’s so quiet without the air scrubbers. That’s space for you. Quiet. Pristine. Uncaring.

      
Except ... I think I’m getting a mild aural hallucination. Music. A tune from before I was born. Can’t remember the name. Something about a star.

      
Ah, tingling in the extremities. Right on cue. Actually it’s more of a burning. Not hot though, more like mild frostbite. I should burn, really. That’s the way most of humanity went, after all.

      
Whenever I think about the final moments I have this stupid image of half-naked fishermen on an azure ocean, looking up from their homespun nets, mouths dropping open in horrified surprise. Or wild central Asian nomads reining their horses in from a mad gallop over the steppes, trying to control their tossing mounts and pointing to the sky.

      
That's crap of course. Everyone knew what was coming. Okay, maybe there was still some lost tribe in Brazil or Borneo who had no idea, but I doubt it. Every country in the world has internet access.
Had
internet access.

      
I didn’t see the main impact. The ISS was over the Atlantic, and most of Comet Fenris came down in the Pacific. I saw the aftermath though. Black clouds boiling out on a wave of silver lightning. It wasn’t as colorful as I had expected. I thought we’d get lovely lethal shades of gold and red and orange, and instead we just got gray and black and silver.

      
I felt cheated; the End of the World was always in full color in those old millennial disaster movies. I didn’t let myself feel anything else, at the time. I didn’t think about what was happening to the few people who mattered to me. I didn’t think about the wealth of history and culture evaporating away in the heat and screaming winds. I didn’t think about the death of hope, the pointlessness of everything humanity had tried to achieve.

      
At the time, I just watched.

      
There’s nothing to see now. The clouds never cleared after the impact. They just closed over the Earth, sealing it off to let it heal - or decay. With nothing to see, I’ve had to resort to thinking. Over the ten months since it all fell apart, I’ve done far too much thinking.

      
We’re heading into night now. The line of the terminator is racing across the clouds, turning featureless gray to featureless black. I imagine I’ll be dead by dawn. Will I panic, before then? Perhaps. Right now, I’m as calm as space.

      
That’s odd: I can see lights. I expected dark spots, that’s what the textbooks said about anoxia, dark spots and tunnel vision. But I’m getting lights.

      
Jeez, they’re real. I’m not hallucinating. One, no two spots. Northern hemisphere.

      
About the latitude of America, or Europe. Lights, like stars fallen to Earth. Forest fires?

      
No. It can’t be that. Nothing to burn. Except ... unless ...

      
People. People made those fires. People survived.

      
Someone’s still alive down there.
And if I can see them, then that means there’s a gap in the clouds. A gap in the clouds means sunlight, and sunlight means life. Bloody human tenacity, you’re going to prove me wrong after all.

      
If they looked up now perhaps they could see the station. If I could move, I’d wave to them. Maybe I’d even make it across the cabin to turn the air back on.

      
If I could move.

      
I can definitely hear music. Twentieth century pop song, my dad used to play it sometimes. I can even hear the words, ‘Cold fire, you’ve got everything but cold fire,’ Oh yes,

      
I’ve got ‘cold fire’ all right. It’s all I’ve got now. That and this view.

      
And damnit if those stars below aren’t the prettiest I’ve ever seen.

One Way Trip

Rick Novy

Lyle McAllister sat up when he heard the guard unlock the door to his cell block. Lunch had just been served, so this visit was unusual. The guard stopped in front of his cell.

       “
Visitor, McAllister.” The guard unlocked the door. “Nice looking lawyer you've got.”

      
Nice looking lawyer?
McAllister thought.
That old fart of an attorney was born before King Tut.

      
The guard handcuffed McAllister and then escorted him to the visitor area. “Window number twelve,” he said after removing the handcuffs.

      
When McAllister rounded the corner and could see through the window, he was taken aback.

      
The black woman on the other side of the metal mesh glass was indeed very attractive, and even though she dressed like a lawyer, she was definitely not his lawyer.

      
He sat down and leaned his elbows on the table before speaking. “Who are you?”

       “
My name is Vita,” she said in a Caribbean accent. “I am working on your appeal.”

      
He knew that was a lie. He’d lost his last appeal, but McAllister decided to play along. She was better-looking than the other inmates. “What do you need to know?”

       “
There's time for that later,” she said. That accent was soothing. Silky. Sexy. “You look like you could use a friend.” Vita placed her open hand on the metal mesh of the window.   McAllister instinctively lifted his hand to meet hers. It had been a long time since he felt the touch of a woman, and even the little he could feel of her through the mesh sent a surge of warmth through his body. Then he felt something snap into place inside his mind. He pulled his hand away from the mesh as if it were suddenly red hot.