Brad Torgersen: Outbound

That was okay. It was a sign that we were still on the right path. It was also enough to shock me into a forced detox.

By the time we reached the comet from which the transponder was sending, I was sober enough to take out a dory, and human enough to actually be pleasant to Tab for the first time in too long.

On the surface of the comet, I found a tunnel.

At the bottom of the tunnel, I found a grave: sixty-eight bodies, all perfectly frozen, and arranged with dignity.

I spent days examining the site for anything that might indicate where the other survivors had gone. They were of mixed racial heritage and gender, and if I’d had to guess, I’d have said they were Americans. Whether or not they came from the group of Outbounders that we’d been specifically pursuing was uncertain, but their presence was the first absolute proof that humanity had survived to that point, so far from its now-dead home.

And that was enough. I reverently went among the dead, recording their names from the steel tags attached to their bodies and taking digital pictures.

When I ultimately got back to the observatory, I was calm.

Almost too calm for Tab’s taste.

But the dead of the Outbound had helped me cross a threshold I hadn’t known needed crossing, and at once filled me with renewed resolve.

Quickly, I flushed out the privacy module and dumped every last drop of grain alcohol.

Next, I began an exhaustive catch-up on all my neglected duties, interspersed with profound and heartfelt apologies to Tab and Howard alike. I couldn’t tell whether or not the man inside the computer could feel pain, but I knew my behavior over the last few months had scared and hurt Tab. Certainly I’d treated them both badly enough. I hoped that I could make it up to them, given time. And they certainly seemed grateful and relieved to see my renewed sense of purpose.

“Forgive?” I finally said one day, when the observatory was back in order and Tab and I were sharing a meal for the first time in ages.

A very long silence.

“Forgiven,” Tab said, slightly smiling so that the corners of her eyes wrinkled warmly. She reached out a shaking, gnarled hand, and I took it gratefully, squeezing.

During the tenth year of our flight, we found the first ship. It was abandoned. Ransacked. Every last usable part taken. A skeleton of a vessel, accompanied by another mass grave.

At year fourteen, we found three more ships, also stripped, and also serving as a memorial to more people who had apparently lost—or given—their lives for the cause.

This time, I also found children, each far too young to have been born on Earth. The sight of those little ones brought up disturbing memories. They reminded me far too much of Irenka.

For Tab, who had become so old that she never left the observatory anymore, the children were actually a sign of providence.

“The day God takes away our ability to make babies, that’s the day when we know we’re truly cut off from His grace.”

I pondered Tab’s words and watched her gently maneuver through the kitchen, wrapped tightly against a chill in the air that did not exist. She’d tried over the years to bring me to Christ. Oh yes, she’d tried. Especially when I came off my bender with the grain alcohol. But somehow, I just never found the spark. I heard the words and I grudgingly listened when she read scripture, but while I respected and even admired the old woman’s faith, I could not feel it likewise.

Where Tab felt certainty in God’s purpose, I felt… nothing. In my teens I’d often questioned myself on this, suspecting some kind of internal moral failure. But now I just resigned myself to the fact that I was too much like my parents—unable to set aside the rational long enough embrace the fire and “get religion.”

As so often happened when Tab and I failed to see eye to eye, I discussed it with Howard, who had always seemed to support his wife’s belief without necessarily going great-guns himself.

“Tab’s pops was a pastor,” Howard said one night when he and I were having a quiet conversation in the observatory’s control center. “God was mighty in her family, from the father down to the youngest child. It was kind of scary, when we first got together. She’d drag me off to meetings and bible study and I went along with it because my moms had read me bible too, and it didn’t bother me any. And Tabby, well… She was just so damned attractive, I think I’d have walked into a pool of piranha if it meant I got to sit next to her and hold her hand.

“She was furious with me when she found out about you learning to distill. Almost as furious as when she found out about the pictures from the men’s e-zines.”

“Tab found out about that?” I said, laughing. “I swear, I didn’t tell!”

“I know, son. It was me. I never could keep a secret from that woman, not in my entire life.”

We shared laughter, one old man and one young man.

I sighed, and was silent for a long time.

“Howard, do you think I’ll ever get to have a wife?”

The speakers were quiet. Pondering.

“If we can ever find these Outbounders we’re on the trail of, I’d say, yes. Absolutely. Girl’d be plum crazy not to get with a handsome young guy like you.”

“But I’m still a paraplegic.”

“True. But let me tell you something: for women, a man being tall and macho ain’t the end-all, be-all. Especially the older a woman gets, and the longer she goes learning how hard it is to find a decent man, she appreciates the good ones when they come along. Don’t worry about it, son. Your woman is out there.”

“But what if I can’t make her—”

“Let that part of it take care of itself, son. Don’t fret over it now, especially when we ain’t even found these folk yet. You hear me?”

“Yessir,” I said, clamping up on the subject, even if it remained heavily on my mind.

Another lengthy silence.

“Howard,” I said.

“Yeah, boy?”

“Does it hurt?”

“Beg pardon?”

“When they recorded you. And moved you into the computer. Does it hurt?”

“Not really.”

“What does it feel like?”

“Impossible to describe.”

“You can’t even try?”

“If I did, it would probably just confuse you. But for the sake of argument, imagine going to sleep one night, and when you wake up, your body is huge, has a hundred new arms, a hundred new eyes, a hundred new mouths… It really takes some getting used to. But no, it doesn’t hurt.”

“We’ll have to record Tab soon, won’t we?”

“No. Tabby made me swear to never do that. She’s afraid it will interrupt her soul going to Jesus.”

“But you were recorded.”

“That was different. And believe me, Tab’s only reason for allowing it was because she feared being alone more than she feared my soul getting lost in space between this world and the next. I think in the long run she’s stopped worrying about me. Though she still insists that when it’s her time, nothing will stop her.”

“Does she really believe she’ll go to Jesus?”

“You know she does, Mirek.”

“How about you? Do you really believe it?”

Pause.

“I want to believe, Mirek. Whether or not that counts… I dunno.”

Disaster came suddenly, almost fifteen years after leaving Jupiter.

A micrometeoroid storm, composed of dark carbons so black and so thinly diffused we never saw them on the telescope, or the radar. One moment I was helping Tab get dressed and get her room cleaned up, the next the observatory was trembling and a sound like hard rain echoed through the corridor outside.

“Howard, what’s happening?” Tab shouted.

When no reply came, Tab and I both looked at one another in alarm and rushed to the door to look out. Sparks lit from the ceiling and tiny rays lanced down and into the floor. The cosmic dust—moving at several tens of thousands of kilometers a minute, relative to us—was penetrating through many centimeters of steel and polycarbonate plate. Tab gripped me as we stood in the doorway, not daring to move, while the eerie light show continued for several minutes, until finally it ended, and I was able to rush out to the nearest computer access panel and bring up a status report on the station.