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“Me. I did it all.” He went back to marking the page, each stroke of the pen more vehement than before.
I’d insulted him, and I tried to make up for it by inviting him to drinks with my friends and me after our session, but I should have known better. He declined with a lame excuse, but I’m sure his reasons for turning me down were twofold. His anger was a part of it, but how exactly was a man who couldn’t relax and behave naturally one-on-one going to get by in a group? If I made him nervous, what would a whole gaggle of girls in a crowded bar do to him?
But I kept trying. From there on out, every time I had a group activity planned after our lessons, I invited him. I hoped at some point he’d say yes. I thought maybe if he spent time with more people he would get better at communicating in person, but it wasn’t to be. Saul was who he was, and I couldn’t change that.
So, perhaps his first message to me on Mira shouldn’t have surprised me so much. The man I worked with closely on Earth, but never really knew, waited to reach out to me until I was stretching the distance between us to never-before-achieved proportions.
His reply to my first set of data packages was mostly what I expected: acknowledgment of the incidents I’d recorded, other Earth specialists’ professional advice related to my report, and questions about the crew’s health and productivity. But tacked on at the end was a full letter, clearly meant for me personally.
A portion was general-interest based. Saul thought we might want to know what Earth was up to. We’d been gone two weeks travel time, around four months their time, so not much had happened. Not enough to take note of, anyway, but I transferred the information to a file and sent it to Nika’s implants. She’d know what to do with it.
Throughout the second half of the letter, though, Saul told me about his work week, how he was feeling, and so on. Things friends talk about. Close friends.
I wasn’t sure what to think, let alone how to respond.
In all that time I’d been trying to get Saul to open up I’d thought him disinterested. I thought perhaps he didn’t want to come with me after lessons because he just didn’t care to get to know me. That maybe he didn’t like people, just words.
Could he have been holding out for this? For when he’d be most comfortable?
It seemed ridiculous, but as acquainted with his awkwardness as I was …
Before he’d signed off, he asked me the same question again, but made sure to come to the point:
How are you, Margarita? The convoy is fine, but are you?
The question bothered me. Other people would see these messages once he’d decoded them. They were public record. I didn’t really feel comfortable laying out personal information. He wasn’t asking how are you in the sense that you ask when meeting up with someone, when an obligatory “Fine” can mean anything from fantastic to I feel like crud.
He was asking me to confront my mental state. As though he knew I had not stopped to assess my own adjustment.
How was I? Did it matter?
I decided it didn’t. I gave him the same fine response, and sent the packets on their way.
Over the next few months, his messages were similar, and the differences in the way we were each traveling through time’s dimensions became more distinctive. While I was contacting him every week, he was only speaking to me once every couple of months. And his life was moving at speeds I could hardly comprehend.
A few of my days after launch, he’d gushed about a colleague. A woman, who apparently wouldn’t give him the time of day. After three weeks of my time, they were dating.
That in itself was a shock. Saul Biterman with a girlfriend? Highly improbable.
Two months into my journey, he was engaged. I couldn’t believe it. Who was this woman who had fallen in love with my quirky, socially-stunted tutor? Had he grown so much since I’d last seen him, or did the old saying about odd ducks hold true?
I blinked my eyes and he was married. Another blink and there was a baby on the way. I blinked a third time and the baby had been born—a boy.
I hadn’t been on board six months yet.
But four and a half years had passed for Saul and his family.
After his son came into the picture, things changed faster than ever. I hadn’t realized how quickly babies progress, and it was breathtaking to witness a child’s life on fast-forward.
Sometimes Saul even sent pictures. It was hard for me to accept that they were all of the same child.
And every time, Saul asked me how I was. Or pushed for more personal information. I always answered with fine. I didn’t see the point in giving him more.
Things that hadn’t bothered me during the test run—those two years we’d been quarantined aboard—began to pick at my nerves. I couldn’t stand to look at the cleaning robots when I’d hardly noticed them before. I even chased a wall-climber out of my cabin when it accidently knocked an old paper book off one of my shelves.
The walls felt closer than they had before, the hallways narrower, the rooms darker.
Living aboard for real was not that dissimilar from our test years—not physically, anyway. But psychologically I was in a completely different place.
It took me a while to realize it, but most of my free time was spent in front of my window, or on Eden when I could get permission.
Eden is the animal ship. It feels more like Noah’s Ark than anything. There aren’t pairs of every kind, but there is a small breeding stock of food and comfort animals.
Back on Earth I’d never been particularly fond of animals. I wasn’t one of those girly-girls who loved kittens and horses and wondered if maybe I’d rather be a veterinary expert than head communications officer. And it wasn’t the puppies or the cows that attracted me to Eden.
It was the special lighting and atmosphere. Eden looked like a light bulb from the outside: nearly spherical, but with one long protuberance. The protuberance held the docking bay and offices.
The bulb itself was split into two halves, each with its own gravitational direction; the ship’s center was down for both sections. Instead of decks segmented into cabins, each domed half was again halved by a giant see-through wall, and consisted of wide open spaces. Four zones for four climates: temperate and subarctic shared one half, arid and tropical the other. The temperate zone was filled with grazing pastures and spiraling terraces. The tropical supported a lush rainforest—though rain fern-garden might have been more appropriate, as there were only a handful of trees and numerous kinds of knee-height foliage. Arid was a red desert, spotted through with hardy plants and several oases. And subarctic was more tundra-like, really, with its short grasses and twiggy bushes.
The biodomes were themselves impressive, but the real wonder of engineering on Eden was the sun.
In testing, it had been proven that without exposure to the sun fewer animals were conceived, fewer came to term, and fewer of the live births survived to adulthood. Lamps didn’t work with the animals like they worked with the plants. With plants, as long as the chlorophyll got fed, they were happy. The animals needed more. They had to think they were outside, under the sky.
And that’s why I visited Eden. Just like the comfort animals, I would wither without it. I chose the temperate quarter, found a cow-pie-free spot in the pasture—next to the base of one of the terrace ramps—sat back and closed my eyes.
It was the little touches that made it feel real. A light breeze brushed my cheeks. The smell of fresh grass filled my nose. Bird song—piped in through hidden speakers—flitted through the air, accompanied by other background noises. Those, added to the warmth of the artificial sun, all blended together to complete the illusion. After drinking it in with my other senses, I let my sight back into the game. The sky held amazing depth. Though I knew where the domed ceiling physically lay, it felt like it went on and on for miles.
The bright orb of the artificial sun was just as difficult to look at as the real thing. It appeared to travel across the dome, even receding slightly as it made its way toward the horizon, implying a greater vastness than the ceiling actually possessed.
A curious calf came over to check me out. It made a silly, high-pitched version of an adult moo, and let me pat its nose.
That was when I realized I missed Earth.
When I’d been cooped up during the test years, I’d always known I’d go home again. That I would run in the fields again, stand on the rocky Icelandic shore, and stroll down the village parkway.
These nine ships were the whole of my reality from now on. Not only in terms of the area I had to explore, or the atmosphere, or the company, but also in terms of flow.
Children aren’t born and off to school in less than a year. That’s not right, it’s not real. If I ever chose to raise a child, he would not magically transform before my eyes as Saul’s son had.
We were separate—severed—from Earth in every possible way. It was a memory, and I found myself missing things I had been eager to leave. Father, Mother, all those who watched over us. I hadn’t been ready to receive my independence. Had anyone?
I cried then, with the baby cow nuzzling me and the pseudo-sun shining down on both of us. Homesickness was not something I’d ever had to contend with before. And it was something I simply had to learn to get over, because home was lost to me forever.
On my way back to my cabin I tripped over a vacuuming robot. I cursed and kicked it, though it only buzzed and beeped an error message in return. “Stupid machine.”
The depressive mood was not mine alone. The sparse news from Earth contributed to our sense of detachment, and most of the updates we received were negative—new conflict in South America, a tsunami in Asia, a devastating earthquake in Europe. And when Saul told me the littlest convoy had been lost, I didn’t know how to react. One of our twelve, completely gone.
But, after we hit our one-year anniversary, and the first new babies had been successfully tube grown, the unthinkable happened.
We had our first suicide.
“Mags! Margarita? Margarita, let me in!” Fists banged on my door and panicked cries stabbed through the walls. I woke up startled and disoriented. It took me a moment to place the voice as Nika’s.
My fumbling brain knew something was off before I made it through the dark to open the door. It wasn’t just the alarm in her voice; she hadn’t called me on my implants, and was ignoring the door’s buzzer.
“Lights,” I demanded of the room. I met my friend with a terse “What?”
Tears flowed down her puffy cheeks, and her lips trembled. I’d never seen Nika cry before, and these weren’t typical bad-day tears. Something horrible had happened, and she was near hysterics.
“He, he—I just found—I—” The hiccups started, and she couldn’t get any words out.
I pulled her inside, sat her down at my small table, and pulled the comforter from my bed to throw around her shoulders. Without asking I made her a cup of tea in my kitchenette and plopped it down in front of her. She barely acknowledged the mug.
Gritty sleep rimmed my eyes. Rubbing it away, I pulled up a chair beside Nika. When the hiccups stopped and her breathing steadied, I prodded. “What’s wrong?” I’d never known Nika to get unduly emotional. If she was upset, things were bad.
“I went to go see Lexi. I couldn’t sleep. He was working the night shift and— Ooh, God.” She let her forehead fall to the table. “He’s dead.”
Had I heard right? “How?” I lowered my head to her level. “Nika. What happened?” Lexi was an engineer, and Nika’s biological cousin. I thought maybe there’d been an accident, that some of Mira’s machinery had caught him. Never in a million years would suicide have crossed my mind.
But that was exactly what had happened. Lexi had hung himself deep in the bowels of the ship.
“What does it mean?” Nika asked. “Weren’t—weren’t we screened for this? We share genetic code. If he can kill himself …”
“No,” I jumped in. “You couldn’t. It won’t get that bad.” I put my arms around her, but knew we couldn’t sit there. We had to tell someone—the captain. “Nika. He’s still there, isn’t he?”
“I couldn’t touch him. I saw and I—I ran. He’s still there.” The realization that she’d left him hanging in his noose disturbed her, and she fell apart again.
Nausea made my stomach boil. The situation hadn’t hit home yet, hadn’t grabbed my emotions yet. Which meant now was the time to act, before I became a puddle like Nika.
I’d have to report this to Saul.
At the thought, I was instantly ashamed, embarrassed. But now wasn’t the time to think about that, so I pushed thoughts of later duties aside and helped Nika to her feet. “We have to let the security officers know.”
“I left him there,” she mumbled. “I ran and left him there.” She felt like a rag doll in my arms.
I’d thought to drag her to the security offices near the bridge, but she’d fallen into a stupor. Nika stared into space like she could see through the walls. My best friend was in shock, which meant I was left holding the bag.
This seemed like as good a time as any to give the convoy-wide security alert system a spin. I activated it via my implants, choosing the officers only option. A red light blinked at the edge of my peripheral vision, letting me know the alert had gone through. Immediately, I second-guessed the action. Perhaps I should have left Nika alone in my apartment and gone to the bridge myself. Maybe this didn’t constitute a convoy-wide emergency—or did it? It was our first death, and it was as unnatural as they came.
“I.C.C., are you there?”
“Yes. You have activated the—”
“I know. There’s been … Nika’s cousin …” I couldn’t get the words out.
“You are hyperventilating,” the computer observed.
I was—my hands were going all tingly.
“Close your mouth and inhale slowly through your nose.” I.C.C. was clearly more concerned with my present state than why I’d used the alert system. I wasn’t sure what to think of that. Wasn’t sure what to think about anything, actually.
Security officers busted through my door like they were performing a drug raid. My apartment-for-one became a sardine-can-for-twelve in under two minutes. The officers separated Nika and me in an instant—thinking a domestic dispute, I’m sure. It took me a few minutes to assure them we weren’t the problem. They were overly eager and hopping, as unsure in the execution as I was in the concept, but itching to do their duty, to solve whatever the problem might be.
Unfortunately, the hubbub pushed Nika into silence. I couldn’t get the exact location out of her, and bringing up Lexi’s work agenda from the cached files only told us he was scheduled to perform routine maintenance. So they left me to attend to my poor friend while they scoured the ship’s innards for a body. It took me a moment to realize our big mistake—we had all forgotten to ask I.C.C. for help. I.C.C. would know where he was.
“I.C.C., do you have Lexi’s location? Please direct the officers.”
“I will. Your breathing has normalized.”
“Thank you.”
Stupid. So stupid. I.C.C. should be programmed to alert us to this kind of thing. We shouldn’t have to stumble upon it. Privacy be damned.
Like everyone in the convoy, I knew Lexi, if only on the level of acquaintance. He’d seemed happy whenever I saw him, but I’m sure I had seemed happy to him, too.
The shrinks saw the event as a tragic failure on their part. They sent out emergency psychiatric evaluations and made sure everyone had an appointment to meet one-on-one with a doctor.
They assigned me to a session with Dr. Yassine. A nice enough guy, if a bit fidgety. Forgive me if I think doctors who work with people on the edge should be calm, collected, and stately, but if I were ever on the fence about killing myself, I think Dr. Yassine’s inability to sit still would have driven me to it. I almost got up and grabbed his hand to stop his pen from tapping. Almost.
He wanted me to “explore myself verbally.” But when you don’t feel comfortable with someone, it’s not easy to open up. I didn’t want to “explore” with him. It’s not that I had a problem telling him what was going on in my head. It was just that I knew it would be a lot more helpful for me to share it with someone else. Someone specific.
I resolved to stop telling Saul I was fine when I wasn’t. I hadn’t seen the harm in keeping my emotional distance before, but now … Keeping up appearances wasn’t worth crumbling inside.
So I made my next report ahead of schedule, and tacked on a letter for Saul. I told him everything. How I was feeling. How I was coping with the suicide.
How I was sure there would be more to come.
I wondered—in writing—about purpose. Mine seemed obvious enough. But what about the others? We’d created false purposes for them—something to keep their DNA busy until we reached the anomaly. The engineers hated being called mechanics because that’s not what they wanted to be. Nika was a historian, a diplomat, and that meant she needed to be working with people and their history. As noble as she made archivist seem, it wasn’t who she was.
Saul made all of it seem okay. He reminded me of the mission. How Earth was counting on us. We were brilliant scientists, doctors, inventors, thinkers, and Earth had given us up for a greater purpose.
I was looking at things too narrowly, he said. That our purpose was in the journey, in experiencing life as humans had never experienced it before. I found our situation—locked in tin cans hurling through a vacuum—boring, depressing. He said the people back home found it wondrous. That my messages were now studied all over the globe.
[You can’t see the forest because you’re a tree] he’d sent. [A tree might ask, Why do I grow here? Why do I produce cones instead of fruit? Or, why must I lose my leaves when that tree stays ever green? If you could show the tree how it fits into the forest, how it provides so much to the greater being that is the forest, what might it think of itself then?
[Show them the forest, Margarita. The trees are dying because they don’t see the forest.
[P.S. I have a daughter now. I named her after you. People have been naming their children after you voyagers for years now, and probably will for centuries to come.]
The metaphor might have been heavy-handed, but it and his postscript were exactly what I needed—what all of us needed.
But it took six months and three more suicides for me to take action. And I regret that to this day. As a member of the governing board (all department heads had a place in politics) I had a duty that far exceeded my station. But I was still so new to independence that I had yet to grasp my authority. I was basically a kid trying to be an adult—to be a leader. They had trained and trained and trained us until I could recite leadership principles in my sleep, but in the end, a person also has to want to be a leader. To rise to the occasion. I only wish I had found my place sooner.
I couldn’t change the past. But I was pretty sure I could change the future.
I put in a personal request to see the captain. In later years that would have put me on a waiting list as long as my arm. Back then I practically walked in.
Entering Captain Mahler’s situation room, I lead with the holoflex-sheet. In my eagerness to prove a point I’d forgotten to salute and do our introductory dance. Nothing like starting out on the wrong foot when you’re trying to save your entire community from emotional collapse.
