Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (31 page)

The blade was greased to keep it from corroding. I wiped it off with one of his socks. I almost took my thumb off when I let my hand stray too close to the edge, so I had to take a half-hour break to administer first aid. Five minutes for the bandaging, twenty-five to work up the courage to look at the blood. We all have our demons.

The sword was amazingly heavy, the steel beaten so dense it felt like an anvil. I cautiously took a few swings the way I’d seen in old martial arts entertainments, and managed to neatly slice the cable to the backup environment monitor, which caused the primary monitor to immediately start whooping like a drunken cowboy. I put the sword away before I put a hole in the hull.

There were some photos in an envelope taped to the lid. I pulled them out and spread them on the floor. There was nothing written on the back of any of them, and they were mostly close-ups, so I couldn’t really tell who they were by context. Many may have been of him, but could just as easily have been his ancestors. I wished I knew something about him, but we’d never really talked about ourselves. We were too busy with the jokes, trying to outdo one other, each trying to capture the audience. I tried to remember one of his jokes, but for the life of me, I couldn’t. What’s worse, I couldn’t even remember any of my own.

Day 1,701

Last locker. Meng Ruixun. Probably the person I knew the best, since I almost married his sister, until it dawned on me that she was a raving lunatic. Meng had tried to warn me, but she had such a cute overbite I couldn’t hear him.

He was the world’s worst poker player, so I’d spent a lot of time in college playing cards with him. He had the money to spare, since his mother built the biggest specialty metals business on the planet.

In return, I helped him learn Western literature. I did such a good job that he soon made me feel like a dilettante. He was one of those people that could quote Goethe or Yeats or Kim-Juan off the top of his head. I can do it with commercials, but that doesn’t impress people so much.

He was that way about anything he tackled: consumed. He gathered information about a topic like a whale sucks in krill.

When I found out he’d been assigned to the team, I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe the Service would squander such talent on what would most likely be a wild goose chase.

He was convinced that he deserved a slot in the Unit, though. When we received that famous transmission, which confusingly seemed to arrive from five widely dispersed solar systems simultaneously, he didn’t sleep for almost a week. It was his wild-ass theory about what it meant that prevailed after all the other wild-ass theories had been discredited. It was his research that found a way to assign probabilities to each of the systems as the true source of the signal. We were lucky that the closest system turned out to also be the most probable, because it was the only one we’d be able to reach.

In his locker, I found a letter from his mother. She’d made sure, before he left, to let him know what a burden he had placed on her heart by asking her to pull the strings necessary to get him assigned to the mission. She put it all down on paper so that he could refer back to it whenever his guilt started to slip.

I wasn’t surprised to find poetry. I knew he’d been writing since he was a teenager, but he’d never shown it to anyone. After I read it, I understood why.

It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good. It was poetry written by someone who thought too clearly, who always knew the route from point A to point B and never got lost.

It was, however, intensely revealing. With all the scholarship and accomplishments, he’d still found time to stop and doubt the hell out of himself.

The hardest thing was the smell. Meng had a penchant for musky, sandalwoody cologne, and it permeated his locker. It reminded me, as nothing else could, of cookouts on his patio, holding his head while he puked Coors in the dorm head, bounce-racing on Mars.

Speak of the devil—he had a bottle of Coors in the bottom of his locker. He also had a dozen empties, which disappointed me. I’d have shared with him, if I’d thought to bring some. Probably.

I waited until later in the day, after dinner, before I cracked open the beer. I sipped it all evening, toasting Meng, savoring the flavor and the memories.

Day 1,708

20 (Earth) days down. 480 (Earth) hours. 28,800 (Earth) minutes. 5.4% of a (Earth) year.

About 5,475 days left. 131,400 hours. 7,884,000 minutes. 0.36% of the remaining journey in the bag already; only 99.64% to go.

No, wait, we have an update: 7,883,999 minutes. The multiplication took me a minute.

I’m going out of my mind, which is a short walk to begin with.

Day 1,715

Since I have all day, every day, to devote to it, you’d think I could keep a decent journal. But there’s something less than satisfying about recording your thoughts and actions when all you think about is how bored you are and all you do is eat, evacuate, and count the hours until bedtime.

I tried to figure out how long it would be before I could expect a reply from Earth to my incident report, but the math is still beyond me. The computer knows, but I don’t know how to phrase the question. I know it’ll be years, not days. Years.

Day 1,718

Maybe you thought things couldn’t get much worse. I sure did. But now, I can’t sleep. I’ve been awake for over forty-eight hours. When I’m sitting up, I feel like I’m about to pass out, but as soon as I lie down my eyes pop open like sunny-side-up eggs.

I’ve gotten to the point that I can watch entertainments again without intense longing, but I’ve lost the ability to be amused. I’ve discovered that the joy of the audience depends on being able to imagine, if only in the most tangential way, sharing the experiences of the characters. I’ve lost the capacity to pretend.

Day 1,720

Some things you might not know about space travel:

—Despite traveling through mostly vacuum, the window gets dirty.

—It’s apparently cheaper to spray the food with an agent that numbs your taste buds than to make it delicious.

—Just because they spend billions and billions to build a ship, that doesn’t guarantee the speakers will be worth a shit.

—If I do find an alien civilization, I’m going to ask them for an air freshener.

—Like they say about all the sled dogs except the one in front, the view is always the same.

Day 1,723

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Day 1,724

It took me hours to screw up my courage, but I went back outside today. I needed to look into the faces of my friends again, to see if they’d died peacefully. As I did, I realized I had nothing to compare it to except my imagination.

Day 1,725

I’ve run out of things to put in the log. If you have a problem with that, complain to the morale officer.

In fact, if you’re reading this, then you probably have corpses to deal with, so why are you screwing around? The Exec Comm is going to tell you to burn the log anyway. Nobody wants to admit they allow juveniles like me into the space service.

Just bury us as a crew and pretend we died together.

If you aren’t reading this, then maybe I survived.

Day 1,728

A strange thought popped into my head this morning: Even Jesus only had to spend forty days in the wilderness.

Where that came from, I have no idea; I haven’t seen the inside of a church in twenty years, and even out here between the stars, I don’t sense any divine presence, just emptiness. If I were a believer, though, I might come to the conclusion that I’d been spared for a good reason: to mourn my friends’ deaths. Everybody deserves to be mourned.

I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet, but I was finally ready to get in the pod. Afraid my courage would evaporate if I looked at it too carefully, I let my mind go blank as I dressed and prepped the pod. I slid in, and was about to close the lid, but I couldn’t shake the notion that I’d left something unfinished.

I got up and wrote these words so that the log has some sort of an ending, in case things don’t turn out well. I’ve always hated books that end “To be continued.”

I thought long and hard about these, perhaps my last words. I was looking for something profound, something you could carve on my gravestone if you want to, but couldn’t think of anything. Only that I’d rather be floating dead through space with five of my friends than be alive and alone.

See you in six months. Call me Mr. Positive.

The end.

You know what’s funny? The cabin? It has a night light.

Afterword by Tom Barlow

I imagine, if a person came into consciousness in the womb, he would conclude that the universe is a water-filled bag only slightly larger than his body, with a shape he could adjust with a few well-placed kicks. Or perhaps he wouldn’t arrive at the concept of “me” at all, since he would have no awareness of “other.”

Unfortunately, as soon as the door opens and he’s rudely shoved out of his universe, he becomes aware of the other, usually via a slap on the rear end. And there’s no going back.

Sartre wrote, in
No Exit,
“Hell is other people,” but I think that misses the point a bit. Hell is our need for other people. Being social animals, once we identify the others, we live forever after in denial of, or acquiescence to, our yearning for them; thus the appeal of the cinematic loner, free of such shackles (and therefore something different than human; better or worse, I can’t say). This is, I think, what causes us to bond together so closely in perilous circumstances, forging fellowship with people that in our normal lives we would regard with little more attention than we give to an ear of fresh corn. Note the lack of fisticuffs among residents of the space station, compared to the antics of
Big Brother
participants.

Of course, the lonely on Earth have reason to hope that over the next hill, beyond the next wave, when the sun comes up, they will stumble upon another person. With six billion souls infesting the planet, solitude is a state that must be sought.

Outer space is a different story—this story, in fact. Once man leaves the cocoon of Earth, he/she knows for sure, positively, that there is no possibility of chance encounter. Deep space travel is as close to absolute loneliness as it is to absolute zero. That, I thought, would make it the perfect setting in which to explore the depth of our attachment to one another, and what a man would sacrifice to avoid absolute solitude. As Plato said, “Death is not the worst thing than can happen to men.”

One of those worse things is returning to the womb, as our hero does, only to realize he may never again be unaware of the universe outside.

T. S. Eliot said it much more eloquently, in
Four Quartets
:

“Do you
know what I did today, Alessandra?”

“No, Mother.” Thirteen-year-old Alessandra set her book bag on the floor by the front door and walked past her mother to the sink, where she poured herself a glass of water.

“Guess!”

“Got the electricity turned back on?”

“The elves would not speak to me,” said Mother. It had once been funny, this game that electricity came from elves. But it wasn’t funny now, in the sweltering Adriatic summer, with no refrigeration for the food, no air-conditioning, and no vids to distract her from the heat.

“Then I don’t know what you did, Mother.”

“I changed our lives,” said Mother. “I created a future for us.”

Alessandra froze in place and uttered a silent prayer. She had long since given up hope that any of her prayers would be answered, but she figured each unanswered prayer would add to the list of grievances she would take up with God, should the occasion arise.

“What future is that, Mother?”

Mother could hardly contain herself. “We are going to be colonists.”

Alessandra sighed with relief. She had heard all about the Dispersal Project in school. Now that the Formics had been destroyed, the idea was for humans to colonize all their former worlds, so that humanity’s fate would not be tied to that of a single planet. But the requirements for colonists were strict. There was no chance that an unstable, irresponsible—no, pardon me, I meant “feckless and fey”—person like Mother would be accepted.

“Well, Mother, that’s wonderful.”

“You don’t
sound
excited.”

“It takes a long time for an application to be approved. Why would they take us? What do we know how to do?”

“You’re such a pessimist, Alessandra. You’ll have no future if you must frown at every new thing.” Mother danced around her, holding a fluttering piece of paper in front of her. “I put in our application
months
ago, darling Alessandra. Today I got word that we have been accepted!”

“You kept a secret for all this time?”

“I can keep secrets,” said Mother. “I have all kinds of secrets. But this is no secret, this piece of paper says that we will journey to a new world, and on that new world you will not be part of a persecuted surplus, you will be needed, all your talents and charms will be noticed and admired.”

All her talents and charms. At the coleggio, no one seemed to notice them. She was merely another gawky girl, all arms and legs, who sat in the back and did her work and made no waves. Only Mother thought of Alessandra as some extraordinary, magical creature.

“Mother, may I read that paper?” asked Alessandra.

“Why, do you doubt me?” Mother danced away with the letter.

Alessandra was too hot and tired to play. She did not chase after her. “Of course I doubt you.”

“You are no fun today, Alessandra.”

“Even if it’s true, it’s a horrible idea. You should have asked me. Do you know what colonists’ lives will be like? Sweating in the fields as farmers.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Mother. “They have machines for that.”

“And they’re not sure we can eat any of the native vegetation. When the Formics first attacked Earth, they simply destroyed all the vegetation in the part of China where they landed. They had no intention of eating anything that grew here naturally. We don’t know if our plants can grow on their planets. All the colonists might die.”

“The survivors of the fleet that defeated the Formics will already have those problems resolved by the time we get there.”

“Mother,” said Alessandra patiently. “I don’t want to go.”

“That’s because you have been convinced by the dead souls at the school that you are an ordinary child. But you are not. You are magical. You must get away from this world of dust and misery and go to a land that is green and filled with ancient powers. We will live in the caves of the dead ogres and go out to harvest the fields that once were theirs! And in the cool evening, with sweet green breezes fluttering your skirts, you will dance with young men who gasp at your beauty and grace!”

“And where will we find young men like
that
?”

“You’ll see,” said Mother. Then she sang it: “You shall see! You shall see! A fine young man with prospects will give his heart to you.”

Finally the paper fluttered close enough for Alessandra to snatch it out of Mother’s hands. She read it, with Mother bending down to hover just behind the paper, smiling her fairy smile. It was real. Dorabella Toscano (29) and daughter Alessandra Toscano (14), accepted into Colony I.

“Obviously there’s no sort of psychological screening after all,” said Alessandra.

“You try to hurt me but I will not be hurt. Mother knows what is best for you. You shall not make the mistakes that I have made.”

“No, but I’ll pay for them,” said Alessandra.

“Think, my darling, beautiful, brilliant, graceful, kind, generous, and poutful girl, think of this: What do you have to look forward to here in Monopoli, Italia, living in a flat in the unfashionable end of Via Luigi Indelli?”

“There is no
fashionable
end of Luigi Indelli.”

“You make my point for me.”

“Mother, I don’t dream of marrying a prince and riding off into the sunset.”

“That’s a good thing, my darling, because there are no princes—only men and animals who pretend to be men. I married one of the latter but he at least provided you with the genes for those amazing cheekbones, that dazzling smile. Your father had very good teeth.”

“If only he had been a more attentive bicyclist.”

“It was not his fault, dear.”

“The streetcars run on tracks, Mother. You don’t get hit if you stay out from between the tracks.”

“Your father was not a genius but fortunately I am, and therefore you have the blood of the fairies in you.”

“Who knew that fairies sweat so much?” Alessandra pulled one of Mother’s dripping locks of hair away from her face. “Oh, Mother, we won’t do well in a colony. Please don’t do this.”

“The voyage takes forty years—I went next door and looked it up on the net.”

“Did you
ask
them this time?”

“Of course I did, they lock their windows now. They were thrilled to hear we were going to be colonists.”

“I have no doubt they were.”

“But because of magic, to us it will be only two years.”

“Because of the relativistic effects of near-lightspeed travel.”

“Such a genius, my daughter is. And even those two years we can sleep through, so we won’t even age.”

“Much.”

“It will be as if our bodies slept a week, and we wake up forty years away.”

“And everyone we know on Earth will be forty years older than we are.”

“And mostly dead,” sang Mother. “Including
my
hideous hag of a mother, who disowned me when I married the man I loved, and who therefore will never get her hands on my darling daughter.” The melody to this refrain was always cheery-sounding. Alessandra had never met her grandmother. Now, though, it occurred to her that maybe a grandmother could get her out of joining a colony.

“I’m not going, Mother.”

“You are a minor child and you will go where I go, tra-la.”

“You are a madwoman and I will sue for emancipation rather than go, tra-lee.”

“You will think about it first because I am going whether you go or not and if you think your life with me is hard you should see what it’s like without me.”

“Yes, I should,” said Alessandra. “Let me meet my grandmother.” Mother’s glare was immediate, but Alessandra plowed ahead. “Let me live with her. You go with the colony.”

“But there’s no reason for me to go with the colony, my darling. I’m doing this for you. So without you, I will not go.”

“Then we’re not going. Tell them.”

“We
are
going, and we are thrilled about it.”

Might as well get off the merry-go-round; Mother didn’t mind endlessly repeating circular arguments, but Alessandra got bored with it. “What lies did you have to tell, to get accepted?”

“I told no lies,” said Mother, pretending to be shocked at the accusation. “I only proved my identity. They do all the research, so if they have false information it’s their own fault. Do you know why they want us?”

“Do
you
?” asked Alessandra. “Did they actually tell you?”

“It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, or even a fairy,” said Mother. “They want us because we are both of child-bearing age.”

Alessandra groaned in disgust, but Mother was preening in front of an imaginary full-length mirror.

“I am still young,” said Mother, “and you are just flowering into womanhood. They have men from the fleet there, young men who have never married. They will be waiting eagerly for us to arrive. So I will mate with a very eager old man of sixty and bear him babies and then he will die. I’m used to that. But you—you will be a prize for a young man to marry. You will be a treasure.”

“My
uterus
will, you mean,” said Alessandra. “You’re right, that’s exactly what they’re thinking. I bet they took practically any healthy female who applied.”

“We fairies are always healthy.”

It was true enough—Alessandra had no memory of ever being sick, except for food poisoning that time when Mother insisted they would eat supper from a street vendor’s cart at the end of a very hot day.

“So they’re sending a herd of women, like cows.”

“You’re only a cow if you choose to be,” said Mother. “The only question I have to decide now is whether we want to sleep through the voyage and wake up just before landing, or stay awake for the two years, receiving training and acquiring skills so we’re ready to be productive in the first wave of colonists.”

Alessandra was impressed. “You actually read the documentation?”

“This is the most important decision of our lives, my darling Alessa. I am being extraordinarily careful.”

“If only you had read the bills from the power company.”

“They were not interesting. They only spoke of our poverty. Now I see that God was preparing us for a world without air-conditioning and vids and nets. A world of nature. We were born for nature, we elvish folk. You will come to the dance, and with your fairy grace you will charm the son of the king, and the king’s son will dance with you until he is so in love his heart will break for you. Then it will be for
you
to decide if he’s the one for you.”

“I doubt there’ll be a king.”

“But there’ll be a governor. And other high officials. And young men with prospects. I will help you choose.”

“You will certainly
not
help me choose.”

“It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as a poor one.”

“As if you’d know.”

“I know better than you, having done it badly once. The rush of hot blood into the heart is the darkest magic, and it must be tamed. You must not let it happen until you have chosen a man worthy of your love. I will help you choose.”

No point in arguing. Alessandra had long since learned that fighting with Mother accomplished nothing, whereas ignoring her worked very well.

Except for this. A colony. It was definitely time to look up Grandmother. She lived in Polignano a Mare, the next city of any size up the Adriatic coast, that’s all that she knew of her. And Mother’s mother would not be named Toscano. Alessandra would have to do some serious research.

A week
later, Mother was still going back and forth about whether they should sleep through the voyage or not, while Alessandra was discovering that there’s a lot of information that they won’t let children get at. Snooping in the house, she found her own birth certificate, but that wasn’t helpful; it only listed her own parents. She needed Mother’s certificate, and that was not findable in the apartment.

The government people barely acknowledged she existed, and when they heard her errand they sent her away. It was only when she finally thought of the Catholic church that she made any headway. They hadn’t actually attended Mass since Alessandra was little, but at the parish, the priest on duty helped her search back to find her own baptism. They had a record of baby Alessandra Toscano’s godparents as well as her parents, and Alessandro figured that either the godparents
were
her grandparents, or they would know who her grandparents were.

At school she searched the net and found that Leopoldo and Isabella Santangelo lived in Polignano a Mare, which was a good sign, since that was the town where Grandmother lived.

Instead of going home, she used her student pass and hopped the train to Polignano and then spent forty-five minutes walking around the town searching for the address. To her disgust, it ended up being on a stub of a street just off Via Antonio Ardito, a trashy-looking apartment building backing on the train tracks. There was no buzzer. Alessandra trudged up to the fourth floor and knocked.

“You want to knock something, knock your own head!” shouted a woman from inside.

“Are you Isabella Santangelo?”

“I’m the Holy Virgin and I’m busy answering prayers. Go away!”

Alessandra’s first thought was: So Mother lied about being a child of the fairies. She’s really Jesus’ younger sister.

But she decided that flippancy wasn’t a good approach today. She was already going to be in trouble for leaving Monopoli without permission, and she needed to find out from the Holy Virgin here whether or not she was her grandmother.

“I’m so sorry to trouble you, but I’m the daughter of Dorabella Toscano and I—”

The woman must have been standing right at the door, waiting, because it flew open before Alessandra could finish her sentence.

“Dorabella
Toscano
is a dead woman! How can a dead woman have daughters!”

“My mother isn’t dead,” said Alessandra, stunned. “You were signed as my godmother on the parish register.”

“That was the worst mistake of my life. She marries this pig boy, this bike messenger, when she’s barely fifteen, and why? Because her belly’s getting fat with you, that’s why! She thinks a wedding makes it all clean and pure! And then her idiot husband gets himself killed. I told her, this proves there is a God! Now go to hell!”