Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

“We’ll come for you!”

“You can’t navigate the struts as quickly as I did,” I tell her gently. “No one knows their patterns as well as I do. By the time you get here, I will have run out of air.”

I wait until she’s quiet again. “Let us not speak of sad things. I love you.”

Then I turn off the radio and push off into space so that they aren’t tempted to mount a useless rescue mission. And I fall down, far, far below the canopy of the sail.

I watch as the sail turns away, unveiling the stars in their full glory. The sun, so faint now, is only one star among many, neither rising nor setting. I am cast adrift among them, alone and also at one with them.

A kitten’s tongue tickles the inside of my heart.

I play the next stone in the gap.

Dad plays as I thought he would, and my stones in the northeast corner are gone, cast adrift.

But my main group is safe. They may even flourish in the future.

“Maybe there are heroes in Go,” Bobby’s voice says.

Mindy called me a hero. But I was simply a man in the right place at the right time. Dr. Hamilton is also a hero because he designed the Hopeful . Mindy is also a hero because she kept me awake. My mother is also a hero because she was willing to give me up so that I could survive. My father is also a hero because he showed me the right thing to do.

We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives.

I pull my gaze back from the Go board until the stones fuse into larger patterns of shifting life and pulsing breath. “Individual stones are not heroes, but all the stones together are heroic.”

“It is a beautiful day for a walk, isn’t it?” Dad says.

And we walk together down the street, so that we can remember every passing blade of grass, every dewdrop, every fading ray of the dying sun, infinitely beautiful.

Jack Skillingstead is the author of more than forty short stories, a collection, and two novels, with a third scheduled for early 2019. He has been a finalist for both the Theodore Sturgeon Award and Philip K. Dick Award. He lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.

Michael Pennington floated in Mona’s amniotic chamber, fully immersed, naked and erect, zened out. The cortical cable looped lazily around him. Womb Hole traveling. His gills palpitated; Mona’s quantum consciousness saturated the environment with a billion Qubits, and Michael’s Anima combined with Mona’s super animus and drove the starship along a dodgy vector through the Pleiades.

Until a distraction occurred.

Like a Siren call, it pierced to the center of Michael’s consciousness. His body twisted, eyes opening in heavy fluid. At the same instant Mona , cued to Michael’s every impulse, veered in space. Somewhere, alarms rang.

Mona interrupted the navigation cycle, retracted Michael’s cortical cable, and gently expelled him into the delivery chamber. Vacuums activated, sucking at him. He pushed past them, into the larger chamber beyond, still swooning on the borderland of Ship State. A blurry figure floated toward him: Natalie. She caught him and held him.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Mona spat you out. And we’re on a new course.” She touched his face. “Your eyes are all pupil. I’m going to give you something.”

“Hmm,” Michael said.

He felt the sting in his left arm. After a moment his head cleared.

“Let’s get you properly cleaned up,” Natalie said.

He was weak, post Ship State, and he let her touch him, but said: “The Proxy can help me.”

“You want it to?”

“It’s capable.”

“You have a thing for the Proxy?”

The Proxy, a rudimentary biomech, was an extension of Mona , though lacking in gender-specific characteristics.

“Not exactly.”

“We have a thing.”

“Nat, our ‘thing’ was a mistake. If we’d known we were going to team on this mission we would never have thinged.”

“Wouldn’t we have?”

“No.”

She released him and they drifted apart. Michael scratched his head. Tiny cerulean spheres of amniotic residue swarmed about him. “You can be kind of a bastard, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’ll send the Proxy.”

Mona transitioned into orbit around the wrong planet. It rolled beneath them, a world mostly green, a little blue, brushed with cloud white.

“That’s not Meropa IV,” Natalie said, floating onto the bridge with a bulb of coffee.

“No,” Michael said, not looking away from the monitor.

“So what is it?”

“A planet.”

“Gosh. So that’s a planet.” Natalie propelled herself up to the monitor. “And what are we doing here, when we have vital cargo for the Meropa IV colony?”

“There’s time,” Michael said, the Siren call still sounding deep in his mind. “This is important.”

“This is important? What about Meropa IV?”

Michael pushed away from the console.

“I’m going down,” he said.

Once he was strapped securely into the Drop Ship, Natalie said:

“You shouldn’t go.”

“Why not?”

“You’re acting strange. I mean stranger than usual.”

“That’s it?” Michael said, going through his pre-flight routine.

“Also, I have a feeling,” Natalie said.

“You’re always having those.”

“It’s human,” Natalie said.

“So I understand.”

“Even you had feelings once upon a time. Does New San Francisco ring any bells?”

“Steeples full. I’m losing my window, by the way. Can we drop now?”

“Why do I think you and Mona have a secret?”

“I have no idea why you think that.”

Natalie looked pained. “Why are you so mean to me?”

Michael couldn’t look at her.

“ Do you have a secret?” Natalie said.

He fingered a nav display hanging like a ghostly vapor in front of his face. “I’m going to miss my damn window.”

She dropped him.

The Drop Ship jolted through entry fire and became an air vehicle. The planet rushed up. Cloud swirls blew past. Michael descended toward a dense continent-wide jungle.

Mona said: “I’m still unable to acquire the signal.”

“I told you: The signal’s in my head.”

“I’m beginning to agree with Natalie.”

“Don’t go human on me,” Michael said. “Taking over manual control now.”

He touched the proper sequence but Mona did not relinquish the helm.

“Let go,” Michael said.

“Perhaps you should reconsider. Further observation from orbit could yield—”

He hit the emergency override, which keyed to his genetic code. Mona fell silent, and Michael guided the Ship down to a clearing in the jungle.

Or what looked like a clearing.

A sensor indicated touchdown, but the ship’s feet sank into muck. Michael stared at his instrument displays. The ship rocked back, canted over, stopped.

Mona said: “You’re still over-riding me. I can’t lift off.”

“We just landed.”

“We’re sinking, not landing.”

“What’s going on,” Natalie said on a different channel.

“Nothing,” Michael said.

Mona cut across channels: “We’ve touched down in a bog! We—”

Michael switched off the audio for both Mona and Natalie. He released his safety restraints and popped the hatch, compelled, almost as if he were in the grip of a biological urge.

His helmet stifled him. He didn’t really need it, did he? Michael screwed it to the left and lifted it off. The air was humid, sickly fragrant. He clambered out of his seat, wiped the sweat off his forehead, then slipped over the side and into the sucking mire and began groping for shore. The more he struggled forward the deeper he sank. Fear and adrenaline momentarily flushed the fog from his mind.