Cold Eyes (First Contact), page 4
Dali gets bored of his boredom break. A bottle of flavored milk and a crude facsimile of a chocolate chip cookie are enough to send him back for more study. Although he has no direct memories of his training, a light scan of various documents refreshes his thinking. His mind is like a sponge. Just a passing note is enough to trigger a cascade of thoughts and reactions.
The lights dim. That must be part of the day/night cycle on the Magellan, but it’s the first thing that’s distracted Dali in several hours.
He hears voices.
He’s no longer alone.
Dali springs to his feet and rushes into the hallway, wanting to see where the crew has come from. Feet appear in the distance, walking down the curved passage, slowly resolving into legs, a torso, and gently swinging arms. It’s easy to pick out each of the crew long before their heads are visible. Kari’s got impossibly thin ankles, calf muscles and thighs. She belongs on the cover of Vogue. Helios has legs like tree trunks. Sandy’s curves are somewhere in between.
“Hey,” Sandy says, waving to him as he stands outside her quarters. Helios and Kari are talking with each other, but they’re smiling. To Dali, it doesn’t look like they’re ignoring him so much as being engrossed in a discussion. Helios is animated. It seems he’s always passionate about something. His personality is as fiery as his beard. From what Dali can tell, he’s not short of an opinion on anything. They turn into their quarters as Sandy heads on toward him. She’s carrying two plates covered by cloches. Thick Styrofoam covers keep the heat circulating over their dinner.
“How was your day?” she asks, brushing past him. The door closes automatically behind the two of them.
“Oh, fine,” he says. “Interesting.”
“What’s wrong?” she asks, placing the plates on the desk.
He smiles. She really does know him quite well. He’s going to have to be more careful if he wants to fool her. One or two-word answers are a giveaway that he’s unsettled.
“How do you get from here to there?” he asks, pointing at the ceiling and the main body of the Magellan beyond it. “I mean, I looked. I tried, I really did, but there’s no shaft or ladder or elevator, not that I could find.”
She laughs. “We fly.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Fly?”
“Zoom? Soar? Jet? Which synonym would you prefer?”
Dali says, “Ah, anyone that actually explains the process.”
Sandy holds one arm in front of her chest and circles her other hand around it. “The Magellan and the living quarters are separated by a super-cooled electromagnetic bearing. They don’t actually touch.”
“Oh,” Dali says. “So no ladders or elevators, huh?”
“No.”
“And you zip between the two?”
“Zip,” she says. “See, I knew you’d come up with the perfect descriptor. The human body doesn’t do so well in prolonged weightlessness. Spinning around up here while we’re resting allows us to retain bone density and muscle mass—well, that and a ton of exercise.”
“So how do you soar, zoom, jet, fly to the Magellan?” Dali asks, deliberately leaving out the verb zip to tease her. His omission doesn’t go unnoticed. She offers a slight smile as she replies.
“There’s a transfer shuttle below the kitchenette.”
Dali snaps his fingers and points at her, “The ladder leading down to the airlock!”
“Yes.”
“So you fly a shuttle back and forth?”
“It’s a transfer couch, really—a taxi. There are a bunch of seats set on an angle. We’re squeezed in like sardines. The shuttle allows us to move people, cargo, food, spin up the torus, stuff like that.”
“But once you’re down there, I’m stuck up here?”
“Not quite. The process is automated. Hit the call button on the hatch, and the shuttle will move between vessels to pick you up.”
“So the Magellan is two separate spacecraft?” Dali asks. “There’s the main body and the torus?”
“Kind of,” Sandy replies, sitting on the edge of the desk. “The torus was retracted during our interstellar flight. Once we arrived in the system, the shell was inflated. The curved floor and ceiling sections slide out of each other like a telescopic arm, while the walls are made from fabric similar to our spacesuits. The design gives us a lot of flexibility.”
“Looks flimsy,” Dali says.
Sandy reaches out, touching the fabric that forms the hull of the torus. “We use radar to avoid micrometeorite damage. But don’t worry. If anything slips through, there’s a thin layer of foam in there that will plug holes.”
Dali waves with his arms, saying, “So you travel between stars like an arrow. When you slow down, the torus opens up, blossoming like a sunflower.”
Sandy’s face lights up. “I like that,” she says, appreciating the way he can turn a mechanical action into something beautiful. “It took me over a hundred shuttle flights to bring the furniture and cargo over from the hold on the Magellan.”
“So all this was bare?” Dali asks, gesturing to the floor around him.
“Yes, it was one gigantic open ring in the early days. No wall partitions or equipment. I used to run around it for exercise. I slept on the floor for the first month. There was nothing in here. Even the kitchenette and toilet had to be mounted after inflation.”
“So no bathroom to start with?”
“No, just a bunch of plumbing points, pipes and drains.”
Dali asks, “Did you buy the Magellan from Ikea?”
Sandy laughs. “It did come with a set of Allen keys and instructions.”
“Well, you’ve done a great job with the place.”
“Hungry?” she asks, lifting one of the Styrofoam cloches. A small puff of steam billows from beneath the upturned cover. “Soy steaks is about as good as it gets this far from Texas.”
She hands him a plate. “If you smother it with gravy and mushrooms, you can almost fool yourself into thinking it’s real.”
Dali takes the plate and sits on the edge of the bed, facing her. He balances the plate on his knees. “This looks quite good.”
“Liar.”
“It smells good,” he says, conceding her point.
Dark brown liquid soaks into a piece of faux-meat in the shape of a slice of bread. Beside it, there’s a mushy green clump and a mushy white clump. At a guess, they approximate peas and mashed potatoes. After a few bites, he lets out a slight ‘Mmmm.’ Dali ensures his gesture is subdued enough not to be called out as a lie. It has enough emphasis to suggest dinner is better than he expected—and it is.
“What have you guys been up to?” he asks between bites.
“Plotting our approach to Bee,” Sandy says. “Have you ever seen a leaf swirling around a storm drain during a flood?”
He nods, chewing on the faux-steak.
“We’re approaching Bee in much the same way, swirling around Luyten’s Star as we decelerate, slowly falling closer to the red dwarf at the center.”
“Huh,” Dali says, only now realizing the ion engines he’s seen glowing as they fire within the vacuum of space aren’t accelerating them in the direction of the nose cone. Instead, the craft is flying backward. The Magellan is decelerating like a rocket coming in to land.
Sandy says, “Bee is in a tight orbit, sitting in closer than Mercury. It’s so close, their equivalent of a year lasts only 18 days. Kari’s identified an asteroid belt between two of the gas giants in closer. The belt doesn’t look like planetary debris as it’s so widespread. Kari thinks it’s rubble left over from the system’s formation. We’re doing the math to figure out an intercept path. She wants to collect some samples.”
“Oh,” Dali says, only just following the conversation. The green mush is tasteless, but the white mush has a nice potato flavor. It’s been salted and cooked with something buttery. A bit of pepper, and it would be perfect.
“Our fuel budget allows for a couple of deviations. I don’t want to burn any more than I have to. Reserves are important, but I agree with Kari. Examining a few of those asteroids will give us a lot of detailed information on the chemical composition of the system. Besides, it allows us to swing by one of the gas giants, and they’re always spectacular.”
They finish eating and stack their plates on the bookshelf.
“What do you remember?” Sandy asks. “Anything?”
Dali shakes his head. “Everything’s blank—and then it isn’t.”
“So, you remember something?” Sandy asks, getting excited at the prospect he’s not a total flop. Dali stares at his feet. He looks around the floor, looking anywhere but at her.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “It’s okay. You can tell me.”
Dali’s not so sure she’s going to want to hear this.
Sandy repeats her admonition. “You can tell me anything.”
“Anything?”
“Anything.”
The silence between them is awkward. Oh, Sandy’s not awkward. It’s Dali that feels horribly exposed. Sheepishly, he says, “I remember skipping.”
Sandy’s response is caught somewhere between ‘Huh?’ and ‘What?’ and comes out like air rushing from a deflating tire.
“Anything, right?” he says, wishing he could melt away.
“Anything,” Sandy replies, followed by a cheerful smile. There’s silence for a moment. Sandy follows up with a question. “You mean skipping with a rope? Like at the gym?”
“Oh, no,” Dali says as though such an idea were preposterous. “Skipping on the grass. Playing around as a kid.”
“So why do you remember skipping?”
“I dunno. It’s just one of those things that gets stuck in your head, you know?”
From the look on her face, Sandy doesn’t know. She looks worried.
Dali asks her, “What emotion do you associate with walking?”
“Walking?”
“Yes, walking. How does walking make you feel?”
“I—ah—I don’t know that it makes me feel anything,” she says, shrugging.
“Exactly,” Dali replies. “What about running?”
This time it’s Sandy’s opportunity to look awkwardly at her feet. Her eyes dart around the carpet, avoiding his. “I mean, I run for exercise. I guess it’s enjoyable. It’s hard work, but I feel better afterward.”
“And skipping?” Dali asks.
Her eyes meet his. She smiles, saying one word, “Happy.”
“See?” he says. “Skipping is underrated.”
“Dear God, you’re weird,” she says, trying not to laugh at him.
“But I’m right, huh? Skipping is an act of joy. You can’t skip and not be happy. It’s fun. It’s fast. It’s efficient. For the life of me, I don’t know why people don’t skip more. Go into the city center, and all the business suits are power-walking or running somewhere. They’re uptight. Anxious. They think they’re focused. They’re not. They’re blinkered. They’re thinking only about themselves. They’re hurrying somewhere for no other reason than to be in a hurry. Important stuff must be done. But what they don’t realize is they’re missing the most important thing of all—life is passing them by.”
Sandy says, “And you think skipping would solve that?”
“It wouldn’t hurt,” Dali says. He poses a question. “If you saw someone skipping down the sidewalk toward you, what would you think?”
“I—I—I don’t know. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me—not as an adult.”
Dali points at her, saying, “You’d smile. You’d see someone full of life. You’d see someone enjoying themselves as they go about their day—and it would brighten yours!”
She shrugs. “I guess it would.”
Dali is resolute. “Skipping should be an Olympic sport.”
Sandy bursts out laughing.
Dali says, “Can you imagine the starter’s gun going off in the one hundred meters skip?”
“It would be full of confetti,” she says, playing along with him.
“Colored confetti,” Dali says, gesturing with his hands and making as though his waving fingers were flecks of confetti fluttering as they fall to the ground.
Sandy asks him, “And that’s what you remember?”
Dali has a lopsided grin. “Yep. It’s not much, huh?”
“Why do you think you remember that?”
“I think it’s because of regret.”
“You regret not skipping more?” she asks, perplexed by him.
“I guess,” he says.
“You can probably skip around the torus. It might take a bit of practice to get used to the spin.”
Dali shakes his head.
Sandy seems to read his mind. “Helios and Kari, huh? They’d think it was weird.”
Dali doesn’t reply, but she’s right. He doesn’t want to give those two any more reason to flush him out of an airlock.
Dali hadn’t noticed before as he was too focused on cramming the flight documentation into his head before dinner, but the room is mirrored. There’s an identical desk, a set of drawers, and a bookshelf on the other side of the double bed. It’s then he sees the metal track running across the ceiling and down the wall. It crosses the floor before disappearing beneath the bed. As the torus is an inflated structure, the track reaching over him has been added after the structure was pressurized. Sandy notices his interest in the tracks.
“They’re dividers,” she says. “This is two rooms joined to become one. Look, I know this is awkward. I’m a stranger, right?”
Dali wants to say, ‘No, it’s fine,’ but that would be a lie. After all she’s done to keep him alive, he owes her his honesty.
Sandy points at the bed. “It’s two mattresses pushed together. I can move them apart and lower the divider.”
Dali’s silent.
“It might be nice for you to have some privacy,” she says, screwing up her face a little.
“How did we meet?” he asks.
“Well,” she says, cracking a smile. “You were naked. You had a boner. You’d just been squeezed out of a growth pod and dropped into a glass cleaning tube.”
“You know what I mean,” he says, appreciating her humor even if it’s not subtle.
“Does it matter?” Sandy asks. She hops up on the desk, swinging her legs in front of her. “You’re right, you know. I don’t think any of us had thought about it too deeply before now, but you’re right. We’re not them. Oh, Helios and Kari might think so because their implants took so well, but they’re living a lie.”
Dali looks down at his hands clenched before him.
Sandy looks down at the socks on her feet. “I guess I am too, huh?”
“What do you remember?” he asks, turning Sandy’s original question around on her.
Sandy has tears in her eyes, but she refuses to let them roll down her cheeks. She looks up at the ceiling, daubing the corner of her eyes to catch them.
She says, “You were starting a Ph.D. at Cornell.”
“A Ph.D. I never finished,” he says. All pretense is gone, but both of them continue to use the personal pronoun to describe the people they never were. There’s an unspoken agreement between them. Whether they like it or not, this is their pedigree. These memories drove them here just as surely as the DNA within their cells formed the bodies they inhabit. They might be unique individuals orbiting a foreign star, but some part of them will always remain on Earth.
“Because of me,” Sandy says, sniffing. She points at herself. “Well, you know.”
“Hey,” he says, throwing his arms wide open. “And here I am.”
“You had all these crazy ideas.”
“Had?” he asks, raising an eyebrow and playing along with her.
Sandy is radiant. It’s not difficult to see how he fell for her. If anything, Dali wonders how the hell she ever fell for him. Her face is alive, vibrant, full of excitement as she recalls what for her must seem like a dream.
“We’ve known each other since high school, did you know that?”
“No.”
“We lost track of each other in college. I went to MIT. In my final year, I was selected for the astronaut corps. I ended up flying six missions. One that went as deep as Titan.”
“You’ve always loved the gas giants,” he says.
She points at him playfully, knowing he’s toying with her based on her comment about swinging by another gas giant here in Luyten’s system.
“Oh, Saturn. Don’t get me started on our flyby of Daphne. The only bad thing about Titan is you can’t see Saturn from the surface. It’s just a smudge in the murky sky.”
“And?” Dali asks.
“Anyway, they were putting together the Long Shot program.”
“The Magellan?”
“Yes. And there was a Christmas Gala in Houston. You were an advisor to Senator Godfrey-Smith at the time. I was only just back from the orbital lab, so NASA paraded me before the cameras. I swear, the astronaut corps was half training, half PR. Actual flights were icing on the cake. So there I am.”
“There you are,” Dali says, grinning.
“I’m standing on one side of the dance floor. You’re on the other. In between, couples are shuffling and swirling across the polished wood, and you hold your hand out as though you’re ready to take mine.”
“At a distance of what? Twenty feet?”
“More like forty. I see you, but I don’t. At first, I think, who the hell is that and why are they staring at me, and what the hell are they doing with their hand?”
