Sam Weller - Shadow Show

Gwenda had her tattoos. She’d left everything else behind.

There was the Control Room. There were the Berths, and the Antechamber. There was the Engine Room, and the Long Gallery, where Maureen grew their food, maintained their stores, and cooked for them. The Great Room was neither, strictly speaking, Great nor a Room, but with the considerable talents of Maureen at their disposal, it was a place where anything that could be imagined could be seen, felt, heard, savored.

The sleepers staggered under the onslaught.

“Dear God,” Mei said. “You’ve outdone yourself.”

“We each picked a theme! Maureen, too!” Portia said, shouting to be heard above the music. “You have to guess!”

“Easy,” Sullivan said. White petals eddied around them, chased by well-groomed dogs. “Westminster dog show, cherry blossom season, and, um, that’s Shakespeare over there, right? Little pointy beard?”

“Perhaps you noticed the strobe lights,” Gwenda said. “And the terrible music, the kind of music only Aune could love. A Finnish disco. Is that everything?”

Portia said, “Except Sully didn’t say which year, for the dog show.”

“Oh, come on,” Sullivan said.

“Fine,” Portia said. “2009. Clussex 3-D Grinchy Glee wins. The Sussex spaniel.”

There was dancing, and lots of yelling, barking, and declaiming of poetry. Sisi and Sullivan and Gwenda danced, the way you could dance only in low gravity, while Mei swam over to talk with Shakespeare. It was a pretty good party. Then dinner was ready, and Maureen sent away the Finnish dance music, the dogs, the cherry blossoms. You could hear Shakespeare say to Mei, “I always dreamed of being an astronaut.” And then he vanished.

Once there had been two ships. It was considered cost-effective, in the Third Age of Space Travel, to build more than one ship at a time, to send companion ships out on their long voyages. Redundancy enhances resilience, or so the theory goes. Sister ships Light House and Leap Year had left Earth on a summer day in the year 2059. Only some tech, some comic-book fan, had given them nicknames for reasons of his own: The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery .

The House of Secrets had lost contact with her sister five years earlier. Space was full of mysteries. Space was full of secrets. Gwenda still dreamed, sometimes, about the twelve women aboard The House of Mystery .

Dinner was Beef Wellington (fake) with asparagus and new potatoes (both real) and sourdough rolls (realish). The chickens were laying again, and so there was chocolate soufflé for dessert. Maureen increased gravity, because it was a special occasion and in any case, even fake Beef Wellington requires suitable gravity. Mei threw rolls across the table at Gwenda. “What?” she said. “It’s so nice to watch things fall .”

Aune supplied bulbs of something alcoholic. No one asked what it was. Aune worked with eukaryotes and Archaea. “Because,” she said, “it is not just a party, Sullivan, Mei, Gwenda. It’s Portia’s birthday party.”

“Here’s to me,” Portia said.

“To Portia,” Aune said.

“To Proxima Centauri,” Sullivan said.

“To Maureen,” Sisi said. “And old friends.” She squeezed Gwenda’s hand.

“To The House of Secrets ,” Mei said.

“To The House of Secrets and The House of Mystery ,” Gwenda said. They all turned and looked at her. Sisi squeezed her hand again. And they all drank.

“But we didn’t get you anything, Portia,” Sullivan said.

Portia said, “I’ll take a foot rub. Or wait, I know. You can all tell me stories.”

“We ought to be going over the log,” Aune said.

“The log can lie there!” Portia said. “Damn the log. It’s my birthday party.” There was something shrill about her voice.

“The log can wait,” Mei said. “Let’s sit here a while longer, and talk about nothing.”

“There’s just one thing,” Sisi said. “We ought to tell them the one thing.”

“You’ll ruin my party,” Portia said sulkily.

“What is it?” Gwenda asked Sisi.

“It’s nothing,” Sisi said. “It’s nothing at all. It was only the mind playing tricks. You know what it’s like.”

“Maureen?” Sullivan said. “What are they talking about, please?”

“Approximately thirty-one hours ago Sisi was in the Control Room. She asked me to bring up our immediate course. I did so. Several minutes later, I observed that her heart rate had gone up. She said something I couldn’t understand, and then she said, ‘You see it, too, Maureen? You see it?’ I asked Sisi to describe what she was seeing. Sisi said, ‘ The House of Mystery . Over to starboard. It was there. Then it was gone.’ I told Sisi that I had not seen it. We called up the charts, but there was nothing recorded there. I broadcast on all channels, but no one answered. No one has seen The House of Mystery in the intervening time.”

“Sisi?” Gwenda said.

“It was there,” Sisi said. “Swear to God, I saw it. Whole and bright and shining. So near I could almost touch it. Like looking in a mirror.”

They all began to talk at once.

“Do you think—”

“Just a trick of the imagination—”

“It might have been, but it disappeared like that.” Sullivan snapped his fingers. “Why couldn’t it come back again the same way?”

“No!” Portia said. She slammed her hand down on the table. “It’s my birthday! I don’t want to talk about this, to rehash this all again. What happened to poor old Mystery ? Where do you think they went? Do you think somebody, something , did it? Will they do it to us too? Did it fall into some kind of cosmic pothole or stumble over some galactic anomaly? Did it travel back in time? Get eaten by a monster? Could it happen to us? Don’t you remember? We talked and talked and talked, and it didn’t make any difference!”

“I remember,” Sisi said. “I’m sorry, Portia. I wish I hadn’t seen it.” There were tears in her eyes. It was Gwenda’s turn to squeeze her hand.

“Had you been drinking?” Sullivan said. “One of Aune’s concoctions? Maureen, what did you find in Sisi’s blood?”

“Nothing that shouldn’t have been there,” Maureen said.

“I wasn’t high, and I hadn’t had anything to drink,” Sisi said.

“But we haven’t stopped drinking since,” Aune said. She tossed back another bulb. “Cheers.”

Mei said, “I don’t want to talk about it either.”

“That’s settled,” Portia said. “Bring up the lights again, Maureen, please. Make it something cozy. Something cheerful. How about a nice old English country house, roaring fireplace, suits of armor, tapestries, big picture windows full of green fields, bluebells, sheep, detectives in deerstalkers, hounds, moors, Cathy scratching at the windows. You know. That sort of thing. I turned twenty-eight today, and tomorrow or sometime soon I’m going to go back to sleep again and sleep for another year or until Maureen decides to decant me. So tonight I want to get drunk and gossip. I want someone to rub my feet, and I want everyone to tell a story we haven’t heard before. I want to have a good time.”

The walls extruded furnishings, two panting greyhounds. They sat in a Great Hall instead of the Great Room. The floor beneath them was flagstones, a fire crackled in a fireplace big enough to roast an ox, and through the mullioned windows a gardener and his boy were cutting roses.

“Less gravity, Maureen,” Portia said. “I always wanted to float around like a ghost in an old English manor.”

“I like you, my girl,” Aune said. “But you are a strange one.”