Brad Torgersen: Outbound

Pure chance had sent my couch spinning across their path, and when Howard’s passive sensors picked up my vital signs, Tabitha demanded that I be brought aboard, in spite of the risk.

I didn’t know what to say, so I mostly kept quiet and let Tabitha—Tab, she insisted—do most of the talking.

She literally flowed with stories and spunk and an irrepressible good cheer, such that I almost forgot the depression that had sunk its teeth into my heart since Irenka had died. But the dual loss of my sister and my parents remained like a toothache—always there, and always painful.

We got me bathed and dressed in an oversized smock similar to the one Tab wore, and then she took me on a tour of the facility. Most of the compartments were sealed and cold, since the observatory’s automation did most of the upkeep and Tab herself only needed a few rooms in which to work and live. She moved like a fish in water when she maneuvered in zero gee, and she showed me the spin room where she spent at least a couple of hours every day, doing exercise and letting her body experience centripetal gravity so that her muscles and bones didn’t wither away.

“I know you can’t use your legs, Mirek,” Tab said, “but we’ll find a routine for you. Meanwhile, we can open one of the other compartments and get you a room set up. You’re going to be our guest for a while, I think.”

I stopped.

“What if I don’t want to?” I said.

Tab looked at me with a raised eyebrow, her steel-gray, close-cropped hair poking out in a mass of springy ringlets.

“Boy, you think you got any choice at this point?”

“Papa used to tell me there are always choices.”

Tab opened her mouth to argue, then stopped and looked at me carefully.

“Fair enough, child. The Lord gave free will, and it’s not mine to take away. We could put you into one of the observatory’s dories. You could take your chances on your own.”

I stared at my host. Staying here wouldn’t make the pain go away, that was for sure. But then, I wasn’t certain anything would.

Hot tears began to well up in my eyes again, and I ferociously jabbed at them with the billowy sleeve of my smock.

I cursed in Polish.

Tab sighed, and lowered her floating self down until she was looking at me eye to eye. When she spoke, her Southern Black accent was especially thick.

“It’s a damn shame any of this had to happen, Miroslaw. Your family. My family. All our people, gone. The Armageddon came, and it went, and we’re still here. Which tells me the Lord still has work for us. It ain’t an accident your couch came floatin’ by Howard and me. That much I’m certain of. I don’t know what else your papa ever told you, but let me tell you something my papa told me when I was your age. He told me that there was never any way of gettin’ out of pain in this life. Adam and Eve saw to that. Because the Lord needs us to know pain. That’s part of the test. So while I can’t make your pain go away, I can tell you that we’re all gonna be judged by how we bear that pain, and use it, and do the Lord’s will because of it. Do you understand?”

I didn’t. Mama and Papa had been physicists. Our family never went to church. Tab’s talk sounded like something out of a history book about the days when people thought religion was more important than science. It was foreign in my ears and made me uncomfortable, but I couldn’t deny the earnestness with which Tab had spoken. Nor could I deny the heartfelt kindness in her expression.

My tears flowed like a river, and I stopped trying to wipe them away.

Irenka would have liked Tab. It was a crime that Irenka wasn’t here.

I blubbered something to that effect, and then I felt myself whisked up into Tab’s arms, almost crushed by the woman’s surprisingly strong embrace.

It was the first time anyone had held me—really held me—since Papa.

I bawled into Tab’s shoulder, and she just kept holding me, singing a soft song under her breath that I would later learn was a hymn.

I chose to stay, of course.

And Tab and I talked about the Outbound.

“So where do we start?” I asked Tab. “We can’t just search blindly.”

“The largest group of Outbounders was said to have followed in the wake of Pioneer 10. Can we do the same, Howard?”

“Let me see if I have the file on that,” Howard’s voice spoke from the speakers in the ceiling. “Oh, here it is. Yes, I think we can do that. It’s lucky for us we came out of the slingshot when we did, or we’d be going in the totally opposite direction. We’ll have to wait a while longer before I can risk a second burn. We’re not far enough away from Jupiter yet.”

“No problem,” Tab said. “I think time is the one item we’re not going to run out of.”

She wasn’t kidding. Even with constant thrust, it took two months to cross the orbit of Pluto, and another eight to get as far as the inner limit of the Kuiper Belt. The observatory was well suited to long voyages. A plentiful fuel reserve, in the form of antimatter, provided power while a large hydroponics facility kept the air clean. Tab trained me to service the various automated and manual life systems of the observatory, and we inventoried and re-inventoried all the consumables and spare parts. With Howard’s help we drew up graphs and charts to see just how far we could stretch our resources.

Barring damage to the observatory, and with regular burns for course correction, Tab and Howard estimated we could go twenty years before running out of anything important. Even if the main reactor failed, a backup radioactive decay generator could provide full internal power for another ten.

Shutting down everything but the bare minimums increased these time frames by a factor of three. Which meant all we had to do was keep the hydroponics farm healthy, and Tab and I would have enough food to eat and air to breathe for decades.

Decades. My soul chilled at the thought of such a long, lonely voyage.

Howard stopped monitoring the inner solar system at sixteen months. There were no more human cries for help. All that remained were the automated signals of the few surviving death machines, each acting out its programmed orders regardless of the fact that the men and women who had given those orders were gone.

No other automated ship-to-ship communications were intercepted either, though if anyone else had survived and fled, they had likely done so in the same manner as us: deliberately silent.

Several times, Tab and I debated turning back.

But as the kilometers between Earth and the observatory grew, the very thought of going home became abstract. We were now well beyond the confines of the planetary system proper—the Sun having become just another pinpoint in the star-filled sky. What chance did we have, in going back? How would we look for anyone while avoiding the robot killers?

Better to forge on.

For my thirteenth birthday, Tab told me she would teach me to be an astronomer.

It was easy, since everything I needed to know was in Howard’s databanks. And it helped pass the time, keeping my mind off things I still didn’t want to think about. Mama and Papa and Irenka were still there, like deep sores newly scabbed over. But somehow, day by day, Tab and I grew closer. And the hurt got a little bit less, and a little bit easier to carry.

She and I manipulated the observatory’s sensors and equipment, cataloguing various large and small objects in their path.

Tab told me that, contrary to popular conception of centuries past, deep space was not a total void. The Kuiper and Oort regions were actually a combined debris field that bled inexorably into the sparser debris that populated the interstellar medium—where the planemos ruled.