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

Only then did the Godspeed understand the terrible price she would pay for compartmentalization. Because she had been keeping the backups a secret not only from the Continuum but also to a large extent from herself, she had never thought through how she might make use of them. It was immediately clear to her that if she resent Ngong, techs would start arriving on her transport stage within the hour to fix her. The Godspeed had no intention of being fixed. But what to do with Ngong’s scan? She created a new compartment, a simulation of her architecture into which she released Ngong. Ngong did not flourish in the simulation, however. She was depressed and withdrawn whenever the Godspeed visited. Her next scan, Keach Soris arrived safely on Butler’s Planet, but Speedy loaded his backup into the simulation with Ngong. Within the year, she was loading all her backups into the sim. But as Upwood Marcene would point out some seven centuries later, dead people change and the change is always profound and immaterial. In less than a year after the sim was created, Ngong, Keach and Zampa Stackpole stepped out of airlock together into a new compartment, one that against all reason transcends the boundaries of the Godspeed , the Milky Way and spacetime itself.

So then, what do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?

Nothing at all. Once we transmitted him back to Harvest, he passed from our awareness. He may have lived a long, happy life or a short painful one. His fate does not concern us.

But what do we know about Adel Ranger Santos?

Only what we know about Upwood Marcene, Kalimah Raunda, Jarek Ohnksen, Merigood Auburn Canada, Lihong Rain and Jonman Haught Shillaber—which is everything, of course. For they followed Ngong and Keach and Zampa and some forty thousand other pilgrims through the airlock to become us.

And we are they.

Genevieve Valentine is a novelist (her most recent is near-future political thriller Icon) and comic book writer, including Catwoman for DC Comics. Her short fiction has appeared in over a dozen Year’s Best collections, including The Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. Her nonfiction has appeared at the AV Club, NPR.org, The Atlantic , and the New York Times .

After it was over, they pulled her from the sea.

Even as they lifted her into the rescue boat she was saying, “No, no; we could have made it.”

She was cradling the hand the Captain broke.

The first time Marika saw the night sky, she was terrified.

(Strange she wasn’t terrified sooner. They’d escaped the city because of the water riots. The city wouldn’t last long; the night swallowed it up one time too many, and then day just never came.

Maybe that’s what happened to her—one terror swallowing another.)

The night sky was a battle of stars, a violent seam tearing through the center like a wound badly sewn up. The points of light marshaled in ways she didn’t understand; the constellations she remembered were devoured by the hordes. Everything bled.

(This prepares her, a little, for what comes later.)

(What comes later:

A star dropping out of sight, a ship that holds three, a scattering of gold.)

It is impossible, from the ground, to look at a star.

The atmospheric interference muddies the light, drags it through the sky faster than your eyes can follow. If you’re lucky—if you’re at a high altitude, on a clear night, in a lonely place—this interference is perhaps a few dozen arcseconds out of alignment with reality. If it’s windy, or you can’t escape the summer, or you are trapped by people and lights, your problems multiply. You fall away from the truth by full seconds; you are hopelessly lost the moment you turn your face to the sky.

By the time you look up, nothing is true any more; the ghosts of the stars only flicker and shine.

Astronomers call this measurement Seeing. (Science has run out of more complicated words to explain the ways the universe has outwitted us.)

What it means: you can’t trust your eyes. You can’t trust your instruments. You can’t trust a thing, from the ground.

They made it to a boat. At night, Marika slipped from her mother’s arms and climbed to the deck to watch the sky.

Once, an old man was sitting on the railing. He was staring at something—a steady, bright star that was already setting.

The water that night was calm, past the ship’s wake; the edges of the sky were mirrored clean. The star, reflected in the water’s edge, looked like twins moving to greet one another.

The old man didn’t turn to look at her. He didn’t move at all. He watched the star setting for a long time.

When it slipped into the water, so did he.

It seemed rude that some places survived when others didn’t, but Marika and her mother found a city where lights still came on. (Her mother didn’t last six months there; too used to running.)

The city drafted for sciences; better than a war that only drafted cannon fodder. When the city came for Marika, she didn’t argue.

(They had privatized water. Mission Control got it below market price. Marika even had enough to bathe in. She still hoarded, took furtive gulps like she didn’t know when the next one was coming. It gave her away as a refugee, but she couldn’t stop. Some thirsts you never get over.)

They teach Marika how to measure light.

In some ways it’s interesting to discover that light has measures other than Safe and Not Safe, that there’s still a world in which mathematics are of any use at all. But the more she learns about candelas and albedo and gravitational lensing and seeing and the impossibility of ever knowing anything for sure, the more thinks that every light should just be classified Not Safe.

(You know as little about light as you know about why a man would slip away into the water when the shore was in sight by morning.)

But still she negotiates the unlikelihood of Gaussian distribution in phase fluctuations, and calculates probable intermittency to gauge turbulence strength, all so that someone standing at the telescope can point the lens at the sky and know where it’s really looking.

Konstantinova heads up the observation banks, and Marika tries not to look over her shoulder at the star map there. (It doesn’t matter. Not her business. Not Safe.)

When Gliese 581-d transits its star, Marika is the only one still awake working, and Konstantinova says, “Well, it might as well be you—come look at this.”

Marika leans in and watches the screen; it’s a grainy, stuttering image replaying in a slow-motion loop, tucked into a corner and drowned out by a crawl of numbers underneath. She recognizes the numbers at the very bottom edge; the initial readings are run through her model to peel away the seeing and get as close to exact locations as their numbers allow.

“It’s beautiful,” Konstantinova says.

Marika knows she’s only looking at the numbers.

Numbers are universal, Marika gets it. You have to rely on mathematics if you’re going to get anywhere, because the universe conspires against you the moment you lift your face to the sky in some warm place on a windy plain, the atmosphere sluicing across the nightscape, your meager vision blurred by tears. Marika understands.

(But she knows, she knows , you can’t tell a thing from the ground.)

This moment is their first point of contact.

(Only Konstantinova would know what that means, what will happen now; but it’s a measurement she never takes.)

Konstantinova has a knack for transit.

She watches the map they’ve made, piled with F-through-M stars (warm enough to heat a planet, cool enough to last). They’re tagged; the closest ones have telescopes dogging them, just in case.