The Stars of Redemption: Genesis Earth Trilogy, #3

A Life Unlived

Terra

The pixelated starfield was a poor substitute for the real thing. The longer Terra stared at it, the more her mind drifted from her work. How long had it been since she’d seen the stars from space? It felt like another lifetime.

The university lab was brightly lit and uncomfortably air-conditioned. Most of the computers around her were off, the seats empty. A couple of other grad students occupied the far end of the table, eyes glued to their screens, headphones blocking out everything around them. Physically, they were all in the same room, but they might as well have been on different planets.

Terra blinked and tried to refocus on her work. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t bring her wandering mind to heel. Instead, she closed her eyes and allowed herself to imagine that she was back on the starship Icarus with its full suite of astronomy instruments. Her breath slowed, and a smile slowly spread across her lips. How she longed for that time when it had only been her and the stars.

Terra?

She sighed and came back to the present. Her advisor, Professor Armstrong, was an older man, almost in his fifties, with a bald head and a short gray beard. He wore a black yarmulke, with the equation E=MC2 stitched along the top in white thread. Terra knew it was supposed to be an inside joke, but she’d never heard it explained.

Yes? she said, pushing herself back from her lab desk.

Can you come into my office? We need to talk.

She sighed and rubbed her eyes, even though she wasn’t tired. Or was she? After staring at a screen for so long, it was difficult to tell—especially when that screen never told her anything good. She suspected that was what her advisor wanted to talk with her about.

She followed him out into the hall and around the corner. The office itself was quite cozy, with a messy stack of papers on the desk and bookshelves crammed with antique paper books. The wallscreen was powered off, but an old, tattered poster was tacked to the side of the nearest bookshelf, showing the scale of the universe. It progressed in multiple frames from Earth, to the Solar System, to the nearby stars, then to the Milky Way, the Local Group, the Virgo Supercluster, the local superclusters, and finally the observable universe itself. The visual reminder of how infinitesimally small Terra was never failed to thrill her.

Have a seat, Professor Armstrong said, motioning to the folding chair next to the door. He left the door open, giving Terra some hope that the news wasn’t as bad as she feared.

What is it, Professor?

He leaned back heavily and stared out the window for a few moments before answering. That wasn’t a good sign.

Judy let me know that she can’t sign off on the proposal for your dissertation.

Terra’s heart sank. If her committee couldn’t accept her proposal, she’d have to go back to square one—again. She couldn’t help but feel as if a rope around her neck was slowly constricting.

Did she say why?

Professor Armstrong sighed. She said that she just doesn’t find your research novel enough. The principles of graviton theory are already well understood, and she doesn’t believe that your dissertation will add anything new to our current body of knowledge.

But the theoretical implications of—

Yes, yes. The extreme upper end of the curve does provide us with some problems, but they haven’t kept us from building a functioning FTL drive or sending colony missions to the stars.

But those are only spatial wormholes. Shouldn’t the nature of spacetime mean that it’s possible to make temporal ones, as well?

I agree that it’s an interesting question—if mostly an academic one. But unless you can find a more compelling refutation of the Weingaard Principle, you’d be better off taking your research in a different direction.

Terra inwardly rolled her eyes. The so-called Weingaard Principle was one of those insufferable rules of thumb that had only entered the scientific canon because of a thorough lack of imagination. It was the general assumption that any wormhole across time would instantly collapse due to the temporal paradoxes it created; therefore, the existence of temporal wormholes was impossible. Mathematically, only a stable wormhole with a mass of at least five suns was capable of bridging time, so it was all but impossible to gather enough experimental data to challenge the point. The only such wormhole in existence was two light-years from Earth.

And Terra had already been through it.

Can I get someone else on my dissertation committee instead?

Professor Armstrong frowned. You’ve already done that, Terra. Twice.

I know, but—

I’m sorry. I know how much this means to you. Hell, if it were up to me, you’d probably have your PhD already. You’ve always done good work in the lab, and I’m happy to keep you on as long as you need in order to put your research together.

Terra didn’t know what to say to that. The moral support did her little good if her proposal was still going to be rejected. Again.

Her advisor leaned forward. Why don’t you take the rest of the day off?

She drew a long breath. The white fluorescent lights suddenly seemed too bright for her. She blinked, feeling a headache coming on, and absently rubbed her forehead.

It’s okay, she said weakly. I’m fine. I’ll be fine.

No, really. You need a break.

From what? she wanted to ask. It wasn’t as if there was anywhere else she’d rather be. The lab might be too cold, too quiet, and too artificial, but it was still the closest she could get to her beloved stars.

Get a good night’s sleep, Professor Armstrong urged her. We’ll talk about your dissertation again in the morning.

Her legs betrayed her. She rose to her feet and stumbled out the door. A few moments later, she was back in the lab, watching like a spectator in her own body as she gathered her things. A few half-hearted goodbyes mumbled to her coworkers, and she was on her way out, nowhere to go but home.

It took a good fifteen minutes for a car to arrive at the university’s student center. When it did, it smelled of cigarette smoke from a previous passenger. Terra sent it away and waited twenty minutes for the next one. Before stepping in, she double-checked to make sure it wasn’t due to pick up any other passengers between the university and her apartment. Normally, she split the car fare, but the last thing she wanted right now was to be trapped in an enclosed space with a stranger. Besides, it was still the middle of the day, and solo fares were at least somewhat reasonable. It wasn’t until rush hour that it became outrageously expensive to ride alone, especially for a lowly research assistant like her.

The carefully manicured campus landscaping soon gave way to the broken concrete and aging steel and glass of the city. The streets merged until she was on the six-lane beltway that circled the downtown area. All of the self-driving cars were evenly spaced, creating the illusion that they were standing still while the scenery moved around them. Occasionally, one of the cars broke away to take an exit, but they were replaced by enough new ones that the formation itself hardly changed.

The highway was Terra’s favorite part of her commute. It made her feel like she was in space again, where the city was Earth and the other cars were spaceships. Most of their windows were tinted, but there were a few cars that she could see into. One up ahead and to the left carried three people in business dress, a woman and two men, whose faces were buried in their handhelds. But the one just behind her had a family with three squirmy children. Terra smiled as she watched them. Then she made eye contact with the mother and realized that her windows weren’t tinted. She turned around quickly, not wanting to attract any undue attention to herself.

Or did she? Did it even matter? She clenched her fists and drew a long, ragged breath. So much of her life was governed by validation from other people. Her advisor and the members of her dissertation committee were just the latest in a long line of people she was supposed to please. When was the last time that she’d truly lived for herself, and no one else?  What should it matter what others thought of her?

But then she remembered why it was rude to look into the other cars. Each vehicle was its own little bubble, preserving the personal space of its occupants. A car could be driving barely an arm’s length away from hers, and yet the passengers would studiously avoid each other, just like the grad students at the lab with their headphones. Terra might as well smash her window with a hammer as make eye contact, because breaking that bubble was like puncturing the hull of a spaceship, destroying the only barrier between herself and the cold, dangerous void.

Strange, then, that Terra felt lonelier surrounded by other cars on the highway than she ever had staring into the silent abyss of space.

But when she wasn’t looking at the other cars, all she could think about was her soon-to-be rejected proposal. This was her fourth attempt. The first rejection had happened shortly after her master’s degree, and it had derailed her plans so badly that she’d spent the next five years trying to figure out what to do. After a brief but unsuccessful attempt to pursue a career in astronomy (All of the money was outside the solar system, and Terra didn’t want to leave Earth.), she went back into academia and tried again. And again. And again.

Had she reached a dead end? Was there really nothing she could do? It was beginning to feel that way, even if she was too stubborn to admit it. If only she were back on the Icarus. Things had been so much simpler then, when it was just her and Michael and the stars.

Michael. Where was he now? Terra hadn’t seen him for years. They had used to get together periodically, to help each other adjust to their new lives. So many things about Earth had been strange and new to them. While they’d been frozen in cryo during the decades-long voyage on the Icarus, technology had advanced so dramatically that nearly everything felt alien to them. She smiled, remembering how she and Michael had joked about how they were living in a science fiction novel. In many ways, they felt like characters from some B-list sci-fi movie who had fallen into a frozen crevasse, only to be revived hundreds of years later.

It wasn’t quite that dramatic, though. In time, both she and Michael had managed to carve out their own lives, separate from each other. Gradually, they’d drifted apart. The last she’d heard, Michael had accepted a job at one of the Martian orbital farms. Had things worked out for him? Or was he still struggling, like her?

Her thoughts turned dark again, and she glanced out the window as the skyscrapers passed slowly into the distance. White and silver spires reached skyward, some of them touching the clouds. Contrails crisscrossed the deep blue sky, while ground-to-orbit shuttles circled the spaceport, waiting to land as others prepared to take off.

So many millions of people lived in such close proximity to each other, it was mind-boggling. How, then, was it possible for her to feel so lonely?

Terra’s studio apartment was on the outskirts of the city, on the fifty-first floor of a hundred-year-old high rise. The elevator groaned as it climbed to her floor, but she was used to it enough that she barely noticed.

Good afternoon, Terra, her home assistant greeted her. You have one new—

Copernicus, shut off, she ordered. She was in no mood to deal with other people right now—even if those people were artificial intelligences. The home assistant went silent.

She closed the blinds and collapsed onto her threadbare futon. In the semi-darkness, the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling were just barely visible. They were the one decoration into which she’d put any serious thought. Her eyes traced the familiar constellations of the northern hemisphere, arranged with flawless precision. It had taken the better part of a week to get it just right, and the ceiling was still spotted with sticky residue. From the center of the room, it was almost real enough to fool her. Almost.

She closed her eyes and imagined that she was lying on her stomach, staring down at the constellations through the floor window of her childhood bedroom. That felt more right to her than staring up. In her mind’s eye, the station spun lazily, the constellations passing so close that she could almost reach out and touch them.

Then the starfield warped and lensed, and she stared into the maw of an enormous black hole. Shivers ran down her spine, and she was falling, falling, falling…

When she woke up, sunlight shone through the gaps in the blinds onto the far wall. She groaned, her body aching slightly. How long had she been asleep? From the angle of the sun slanting through the blinds, it had been at least three hours. The day was almost over. She felt a sudden wave of depression. She didn’t even feel rested or refreshed. Just exhausted.

She looked down at the scratched vinyl flooring, as if it were a window that could open on her command. But of course, she wasn’t on Heinlein Station anymore.

No, she said, shaking her head. Get ahold of yourself, Terra. It’s not that bad.

Or was it?

She clenched her fists in a sudden fury, squeezing them until her knuckles went white and her fingers tingled. Why in the hell did a part of her wish she was back on Heinlein Station? That place had been a prison for her ever since her parents’ divorce. The view of the stars from her bedroom floor window had only strengthened her resolve to get away. She would never go back there. Never.

Her shoulders sagged, and she buried her face in her hands. This wasn’t the first time she’d dreamt that she was back on the station. Was her life there, with all of its horrible memories, really better than it was now? Was she trapped in another prison—this time, of her own making?

I need a shower, she decided, speaking aloud to fill the silence. She suddenly couldn’t decide whether it was worse having to deal with people or to be totally alone.

She tossed her clothes in the laundry pile and stepped into the apartment’s tiny bathroom. When she tried to activate the shower controls, though, the screen stayed dark. She frowned, then remembered that she’d turned off her home assistant.

Hello, Copernicus, she said aloud. The screen blinked on, and the AI’s disembodied voice greeted her over the apartment’s tinny speakers.

Good evening, Terra. You have one new message. Shall I—

Copernicus, set a shower timer for four and a half minutes.

Understood, Terra. Would you like your shower hot, warm, or cold?

Terra hesitated, then decided to hell with it. Give me a hot shower, Copernicus. And make it five minutes.

Are you sure?

Yes.

Understood, Copernicus answered.

A five-minute hot shower was not an insignificant luxury on her meager budget, but she felt too depressed to be stingy. Jets of hot water soon blasted her from all sides. She gasped in sudden shock, but soon relaxed. It felt as if all of the stress of the last twenty-four hours streamed out of her body and sluiced down the partially clogged drain. A pool of ankle-deep water began to form, but she ignored it and ran her fingers through her hair, working out the knots before lathering herself up with the crusty bar of soap. Then she frowned.

Copernicus, what’s that about a message?

I’m sorry. I don’t understand. Say again?

She sighed. Copernicus, do I have any new messages?

Yes, Terra. You have one new message.

Who is it from?

Pause. I’m sorry. The sender is not in my database.

What do you mean?

Before Copernicus answered, a buzzer sounded, announcing that she had less than thirty seconds left before the water shut off. She put away the soap and hastily rinsed herself.

The sender did not use a form of ID recognized by my database. For a small monthly fee of $$9.99, you can upgrade me to the premium version, which allows me to—

Never mind, Terra groaned. Just play it.

Her personal assistant went silent. After a brief moment, the recorded message played over the speakers.

Hi, Terra. It’s Michael. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

Terra’s breath caught in her throat. The water shut off, but she hardly noticed.

Anyway, the message continued, I recently decided to move on from the Mars colonies, and I’m staying at one of the orbitals. If you want to get together sometime, my schedule is flexible. I, ah, thought it would be good to catch up.

A hundred different memories flashed through Terra’s mind as he spoke. The Icarus, the arrival at Earth, the first few months of their struggle to find their way in the new world. Her heart began to beat faster.

In any case, Michael continued, let me know what you think. I’d love to get together sometime, maybe for dinner. See you.

A brief chime indicated that the message had ended. Terra leaned for support against the wall of the shower and quietly began to sob.

The Belly of the Beast

Estee

I’m hungry, Luna whined. Hermes is hungry, too.

Estee took a deep breath and bit her lip hard. Her baby brother had been fussing ever since they’d been forced to flee Icaria, leaving behind their homeworld and everything they’d ever known. A part of her wanted to cry with him, but she couldn’t afford to do that—not with everyone depending on her now.

She glanced over her shoulder at Khalil, his rifle strapped over his back, his combat fatigues dirty and worn. He carried Celeste, her other little sister, in his arms. Her arm was nestled in an improvised sling, with a fresh bandage tied to the gunshot wound in her shoulder. She was still unconscious.

She’ll be all right, Khalil answered Estee’s unspoken question. Officer’s lounge, two levels down. That’s what the ship AI told us.

Right.

Estee inwardly forced herself to stay focused. The ship had said it would send a car, much like the one that had taken them to the bridge. She shuddered at the memory of the disorienting journey through the center of the ancient ghost ship, walls and floors at odd angles to each other with no consistent up or down. Thankfully, this part of the ship wasn’t nearly so disjointed, but something