Patrick Lee: Deep Sky

“ Where is it? ” the man screamed. He started to repeat it, but the words caught in his throat. He’d seen the shotguns the other three were carrying, and for a second his expression flooded with fear.

Then it simply went blank.

He’d seen Garner.

After a long moment the man swallowed and said, “Sir.”

Garner accompanied the airman back upstairs to speak with the rest of the crew. Twenty seconds after they disappeared, all the alarms cut out.

Travis and Paige and Bethany sank into three of the row seats, side by side, and Travis leaned his head back and shut his eyes.

“Did they interrogate you?” Paige said.

He nodded.

“Are you okay?” she said.

He opened his eyes and looked at her. He took in every detail of her face: the strands of hair hanging past her forehead and in front of her ears, the subtle, rhythmic movements of her throat as she breathed.

“Yeah,” he said.

Garner came back down five minutes later. By then the twilight outside had deepened nearly to black, and the landscape below had lit up in soft blues and oranges: bright street grids and dotted parking lots.

Garner sat down just across the aisle from the three of them. He exhaled deeply and for a moment said nothing. Travis couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a person look so weary. He turned to Travis and said, “Tell me everything Dyer told you, so I know where to start.” He indicated Paige and Bethany. “They need to catch up on it too.”

Paige looked from Garner to Travis, confused. “Who’s Dyer?” she said.

Travis spent twenty minutes explaining it. By the time he’d finished, Paige and Bethany looked rattled, but both clearly understood it all.

“Dyer told you everything,” Garner said. “Everything I told him , at least.”

“The second half of Ruben Ward’s message,” Travis said.

Garner nodded. “I never would’ve told you any of this— either half of the message—until as late in the game as possible. I would’ve waited until days before you’re supposed to enter the Breach, if I could have. There was just nothing to be gained by telling you sooner, and plenty to lose. It adds unpredictability to bring anyone new into the fold. Even you.” He paused. “But I guess that horse is already out and galloping.”

For a long time, fifteen seconds at least, Garner said no more. He rested his hands on his knees and looked down at them.

“I’m sure all three of you have at least a grasp of the physics implied by the Breach,” he said. “The rough theories—guesses, if you like—as to how wormholes function. Maybe you’ve read Stephen Hawking, and know that space and time aren’t really separate things. A wormhole can cross both of them.”

Travis nodded, as did Paige and Bethany.

Garner looked up and met their gazes.

“On the other side of the Breach is a starship,” he said. “It’s orbiting the binary star 61 Cygni, a little over twelve hundred years in our future. The ship was designed and subassembled by General Dynamics in Coffeyville, Kansas, in the first half of the 2250s, and built in low orbit over the next twenty years. It was christened July 17, 2276, the EAS Deep Sky . It has a crew of eight hundred thirty-nine people, including an executive officer named Richard Garner, and a commander named Travis Chase.”

Travis waited. He understood that Garner was neither lying nor joking.

“Ballpark figure,” Garner said. “When do you think the last veteran of the American Civil War died? Don’t crunch the numbers. Just take a shot from the hip, any of you.”

“The 1930s,” Travis said.

Paige nodded. “My guess too.”

“Around there,” Bethany said.

“There are disputed claims,” Garner said, “but the most agreed upon candidate is a Union veteran named Albert Woolson. He died in August of 1956.”

Travis traded looks with the others.

“It doesn’t sound right, does it?” Garner said. “The mind tends to chop off the tails of the bell curve when it makes an estimate. But do the math. Three million people fought in the Civil War, most of them very young, many young enough that they had to lie about their ages to serve. You could safely estimate a few tens of thousands of them were fifteen or sixteen when the war ended in 1865. Which means they were born around 1850. Out of that number of people, a handful could be expected to live to a hundred. A much smaller handful would make it a bit further, or would’ve been a little younger than fifteen when they served. Either way, the mid 1950s would be your best guess, even if you could never know for sure.” He offered a smile. “It is right—it just doesn’t seem right. It’s strange to consider that Civil War vets and atomic bombs overlapped each another in history by more than a decade.”

He looked forward again. “It’s stranger still to learn that the first humans to become effectively immortal—ageless, anyway—were born just before the Great Depression. You’re familiar with the Methuselah Project? You must have seen the political attack ads during the midterms.”

Travis and Paige and Bethany all nodded.

“Turns out it works,” Garner said. “It comes in about fifteen years ahead of schedule, in fact, according to the message from the Deep Sky . The first real stabilization and reversal of age symptoms is achieved around 2035. Which means a tiny scattering of people born in the late 1920s will live long enough to benefit from it—will live to see their biological age rolled back until they look and feel about twenty-five, indefinitely. Many more from the 1930s, forties, and fifties will make the cut, and damn near everyone born after that will. Most of the Deep Sky ’s crew don’t yet exist in our time, but some do, and some were already adults in the year 1978—including all nine of the people Ruben Ward was instructed to take the message to that summer.”

Travis felt as if two halves of a drawbridge had just dropped together and locked with a heavy thud. He looked at Paige and Bethany and knew what they were thinking, to the last word:

Some of us are already among you .

“Who better to trust the message with,” Garner said, “than themselves?”

Paige started to respond, then stopped and frowned, as if something that’d been bothering her for the past couple minutes had finally surfaced. “It’s one thing to send us a message through the Breach, but why are they sending dangerous things like entities? If they created a wormhole to tell us something—”

“They didn’t,” Garner said. “They didn’t create the wormhole. Or the entities passing through it. That stuff is all archaic, even on the timescale of the universe. Whoever created it disappeared long ago. Probably a billion years back. These old transit tunnels full of relics are all that’s left of them. The Deep Sky ’s original purpose was simply to study the tunnels—a whole network of them, discovered earlier by the first robotic probes that went out to neighboring stars. The Deep Sky was built from top to bottom as a dedicated research ship, with the means to investigate and even exert some control over wormholes. In the end, the crew used that capability to cause the Breach to open here on Earth, in our time. They rerouted a single tunnel to some degree—enough to make sure that the VLIC’s first shot in 1978 would connect with it, and not to a primordial one teeming with parasite signals. It took an ungodly amount of power to move the tunnel, and as soon as they’d done it, they had to begin generating and storing more power to move it again—this time so they could tap into it on their end. That process—repowering—would require a little over thirty-eight years, and be completed on June 5, 2016, by our calendar. During all the time in between, they had no way of stopping the flow of entities through the system. The most they could do was set up a kind of reverb effect in the tunnel, a very specific disturbance in which they could encode a message.”