Brad Torgersen: Outbound

Planemos. Planets without stars. Worlds unto themselves.

Perhaps the Outbound had ultimately reached and settled on one of them? After a voyage spanning centuries?

Howard diverted our course on several occasions in order to investigate anomalies that showed up on the observatory’s impressive sensor array.

In each case, we found nothing, even if the comets and icy worldlets themselves were interesting.

Mostly, they were rocky bodies that had accrued a shell of water and gas ice. Perfectly routine, once you got out beyond Pluto.

On only one of these did we find something that indicated humanity.

It was a smallish snowball of a world, irregularly shaped, yet giving off radioactive emissions from one of its many craters.

Closer inspection with the telescopes revealed signs of mining, long since abandoned.

It was enough to make Tab whoop and spin, shaking her hips side to side while she floated through the observatory’s control center and Howard jabbered with as much excitement as his computer-cooled mentality could muster.

We matched with the ice body and Tab and I went outside in one of the observatory’s two dories. Landing, we then took suits—one of which I’d helped Tab extensively modify to fit me—and we were disappointed to find only ice-crusted garbage and a small pile of spent fissile material.

No messages. No clue to how long the Outbound had stayed, or where they had gone.

There was no sign of Pioneer 10 either.

We returned to the search.

Twice more in two years, we found similar pit-stops on similar worlds. The Outbound had needed hydrogen isotopes and reaction mass for their fusion drives. It must have taken them many decades to travel as far as we had gone in just a few years on antimatter drive.

Tab risked active communications, tight-beamed to the fore.

For weeks we waited for a reply, and nothing came.

The longing to see other living humans became like an itch to me. Beyond missing my family, I also missed the wide open plazas and parks of home, where I’d been able to race my electric chair between the fountains and startle the pigeons and laugh like a boy ought to laugh.

At ship’s night, I began dreaming of home, and… other things. It was embarrassing to talk about with Tab. I had an easier time talking about it with Howard, who had been a man once, and before that, a teenaged boy.

Howard said he was surprised that I was getting the kind of physical response I was getting, even though I had never felt anything below my hip bones my entire life. When our conversations turned specifically to women and women’s bodies, Howard hesitantly uncorked a database of pictures he’d been keeping—pictures that my mother would have been scandalized by, had she caught me looking at them on my laptop back at home.

“Don’t tell Tab,” Howard had warned in a fraternal fashion. “She’s liable to erase me if she finds out I’ve shown you this.”

I promised Howard I would not tell, and was actually grateful to have something I could share with another male, even if he was just a computer recording. We talked more and more, Howard and I, while Tab and I remained close, if gradually more separate. One evening when Tab thought I was asleep, I slipped out of bed and moved silently through the air to the doorway to her room, where I heard her and Howard talking. Pillow talk, my mother would have called it, made strange by the fact that Howard was not actually in the bed with his wife.

“He’s going to be a man soon,” Tab said sadly.

“He became a man when his daddy died,” Howard replied.

“Probably true. But you don’t know how happy I’ve been, finally having a young one around to look after. We tried so hard, all those years, you and I. And nothing. Then, like Sarah, God sends me this boy in my old age. Only I never got to have him as a baby. He was mostly grown up when he came, and now…”

I felt a lump form in my throat while Tab quietly wept.

“He’s a good boy, Tabitha. We can both see that. And I think he loves you. He won’t say it when I talk with him, but I can feel it.”

Tab barked out a mocking laugh. “Hah! A computerized man who can feel!”

“You know what I mean, woman. Now hush up. My sensors tell me the boy is lurking at your door. He’s probably heard everything we’ve been saying.”

“Sorry,” I said, letting myself in, sheepishly smiling.

Tab was there, wiping tears from her eyes. “Don’t be, Mirek. I’m just a sad old lady who never had a chance to have any children of her own. Don’t mind it if I’ve become too attached to you.”

In fact, I didn’t mind it. I didn’t mind it at all.

Using my arms, I launched from the hatch and grabbed Tab in a bear hug, squeezing her as tightly as I remembered her having squeezed me that first day I decided to stay with my new family and seek the Outbound.

She wept anew, for joy this time, and I told Tabitha and Howard Marshall how much I did love them, and how thankful I was that they’d found me and given me a home when the world had taken all such things from me.

By the time I was sixteen, I suspected that the full burden of humanity’s self-annihilation had yet to settle on my shoulders. Some crucial part of me remained numb to the idea that everyone had ceased to exist, and that all the artifacts of humanity on virtually every world had been antimattered to dust. How ironic that perhaps the only surviving tokens of human intelligence were the final remaining warbots that continued to prowl the solar system, seeking targets and enemies that did not exist. Such thoughts were depressing, and depression again became a common companion.

I’d have liked very much to have a young woman around to talk to, to touch, and to hold in my arms at night. But the way things stood, I might not ever see another woman again, besides Tabitha, and this grew to be an irritant like no other.

With Howard’s surreptitious help, I began to distill spirits from the grains grown in the farm domes.

Shortly after, Howard began to worry that he had an alcoholic on his hands.

But how else was I supposed to bear it? I had a dead past and an unknown future. The only living young man left in the universe!

Homesickness and abstract horniness accentuated my depression, giving it a melancholy flavor.

I began to drink daily. Alone. In the private module I’d built out on the face of the observatory’s foundation, where Tab couldn’t touch or talk to me. I neglected my daily exercise in the spin room. Why bother? What future awaited me now? I’d been young when I left Earth, and young I would remain for many years. But what was youth without joy? Without a girlfriend? I found myself daydreaming endlessly about all the older girls I had ever been attracted to: their faces, their expressions, the way they laughed or got angry, how their bodies had moved under their clothes. It got so that I thought I would be ecstatic to see even a single, other breathing female, regardless of her state. Just someone I could hug and who could hug me back, and who wasn’t old enough to be my grandma.

I grew distant from Howard and Tabitha both.

I got sick of them, and I think they began to grow sick of me.

We began to go days or even weeks not speaking to each other, and eventually I retreated to the privacy module almost entirely, forcing Howard to monitor and tend to the observatory all by himself, with Tabitha’s declining help.

Which was fine, at first, because Howard had always done most everything anyway.

Then, one day, there came a beacon.

It was faint. No more than a weak radio signal, sending binary.

Howard couldn’t make sense of the message, which seemed truly random—ones and zeroes in an endless stream, without pattern.