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

We all had experiences. They were difficult to dismiss.

I woke in the ‘night’ and heard someone crying out in the corridor. I went to see, hoping that it would be Hilde and I would comfort her. It was the elegant and controlled Carpazian, crouched in a foetal curl, sobbing like a baby.

“Georgiou? What is it?”

“My arm, my arm—”

“What is it? Are you in pain?”

He was nursing his right arm; he pushed up the overall sleeve and showed me the skin. “I cut myself. I have no secret weapon, the ceramic won’t cut you; I used my teeth. I was keeping tally of the ‘days’ and ‘nights’ in blood, hidden under the rim of my bunk. It’s gone. I have asked the woman called Gee, she says I never had a mark on me. I’ve fucked her but she isn’t real . This place is haunted, haunted—”

It wasn’t like him to use a word like “fucked.” There wasn’t a scratch on his right arm, or his left. “It’s the torus,” I said. “It’s warming up. That’s where the strange phenomena come from, it’s affecting our brainchemistry, it’s all in our minds. Don’t let it get you down.”

“Captain Ruth,” he whispered, “how long have we been here?”

We stared at each other. “Three days,” I said firmly. “No, four.”

The Russian shook his head. “‘You don’t know… What if it isn’t the torus? What if something got out, what if something is with us, messing with us?”

“Maybe the ghost of one of the old prospectors? I think I’d like that. You’re the Patriarch, what should we do, your holiness? Hold a séance; try to make contact with the tough old bird?”

He laughed, shaky but comforted, and went back to his cell. I went back to mine. I wondered if the system itself was telling us something through these spooky hints. That nothing is real? That only what Drummer called the soul, subtle distillation of mind and body, exists?

Hilde invited me to her cabin.

Some of us were treating the Panhandle as a Death Row singles bar, and why not? Carpazian was being kept busy, and Koffi and Mike; nobody had dared to approach Drummer aka Achmed. As captain I got to know these things… I knew it couldn’t be that . The girl couldn’t possibly be making a sexual approach, but I was unspeakably nervous.

I’d been protecting her with signs of my approval; but being careful not to make her into teacher’s pet. I’d had her on my team in the simulation room, things like that. Small, threatened groups are hungry for scapegoats. I knew I wasn’t the only one who’d been wondering why she’d been kept under such heavy medication.

She was certainly a different person, after five days clear (or was it four?). There was light in her eyes, energy in her movements. It was enough to break your heart, because something told me she had never really been free, never in her life: and now this child would go into the void without ever having walked down a street, bought an ice-cream, skinned her knee, played ball, climbed a tree.

We chatted about the animal-taming. She was going to confess something, I was sure; but I wouldn’t rush her.

I wanted to offer to comb her hair again.

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “This is too much.”

“You don’t believe that First Landfall exists?”

I shook my head, letting my hand rest on the faintly warm ‘mattress’ where her body had lain. Tastes and smells are the food of the gods; and touch, too.

“No, I can believe they’ve been identifying habitable planets hundreds of light-years away. I can grasp the science of that idea, and the science that says earth-like planets are bound to exist, though we know for a fact that there’s nothing within our material reach except hot and cold rocks; or giant gas-balloons.”

She nodded. She had no life experience but she was not ignorant or stupid. She’d proved that in our sessions, as she came out from under the drugs.

“I can even, just about, believe that the torus can send us there, in some weird way that means new bodies will automatically be generated when we make landfall.”

The void opened when I said that. None of us really believed we would wake again. The transit was a fairytale, disguising annihilation, annihilation—

I shook my head solemnly, pulling the conversation around. “But I cannot, no, I’m sorry… I’ve tried, but your captain cannot believe in the gruffaloes.”

The tawny bison-things, with the clawed paws and sabre teeth, had instantly been named gruffaloes . Hilde began to giggle, helplessly. We laughed, leaning close together, white mice trying to understand the experiment. Gallows humour!

“If we wake on that plain,” said Hilde, and she stopped smiling. “It will be the first time I’ve ever been outdoors in my life.”

Here it comes, I thought.

“Your hair’s a disgrace again,” I said. “Do you want me to comb it?”

“I’d love that,” she said. She reached for the comb, which was lying on the bunk, moving light and limber, with the grace that I’d seen like a ghost in the shell, when she was drugged to the eyeballs. But she didn’t hand it over.

“No… Wait, I want to tell you something. I have to look at you while I tell you. I have a termination-level genetic disease.”

“Ah.” I nodded, shocked and relieved. So this was the secret.

“My parents are… I mean they were… members of a church that didn’t allow pregnancy screening. Their church believed all children should be born, and then tested. So, when I was born they found out there was something wrong with me and my parents took me away, to a city; because the elders would have turned us in. When I was old enough to notice that I was different from the children on my TV, my mother and father told me I was allergic to everything, and I would get sick and die if I ever set foot outside my bedroom door. I never wondered why no doctors ever came, if I was so ill. I accepted the world the way it was.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know, Ruth. I remember my sixteenth birthday, and then it’s like a thick blank curtain with holes torn in it. A lot of screaming and crying and slamming doors. A hospital corridor, a horrible jacket that wrapped my arms together, another room where they never let me out…” She shook her head. “Just blurred scenes in a nightmare, until I was here.”

“What about your parents?”

“I suppose they got found out, I suppose they’re in prison.”

“Do you remember what they thought was wrong with you? You said ‘termination-level’. Who told you that? What gave you that idea?”

She wiped away the tears before they could fall. I saw her struggle, the way she’d struggled to speak the last time I was in here. This time she lost the fight. If she had ever known what was wrong, she didn’t know now—

“I can’t remember. I think my parents never told me anything, but maybe I heard something in the hospital, or I saw something on the TV.” She pressed her fist to her mouth, the knuckles staring white. “I don’t know, but I’m scared.”

The nail that sticks out will be hammered down. The USE saw certain ‘traits’ as enemies of the state. By no means all of the proscribed genes were life-threatening.

“You don’t have to be scared. They don’t send just any condemned criminals to the Panhandle, Hilde. We have to be aged between eighteen and forty, and normally fertile. If you’d had a termination-level genetic disease you’d have been sterilised as soon as they spotted you; and you wouldn’t be here.”

This beautiful girl was a recessive carrier for some kind of cancer they were trying to stamp out, or some other condition that wouldn’t harm her until she was fifty and past child-bearing. She’d been condemned like rotten meat by bad science.