Second Chance (2 page)

“Yeah. Yeah, that might be a good idea.”

She slipped through the port to the habitation bay below, neatly avoiding any contact with me, and came back with a cold squeeze-bulb of tomato juice. “I was hoping for a gin and tonic,” I said.

She gave me an apologetic grin. “You know the drill. No solid food for three days, no alcohol for a week.” Which reminded me all over again that my body was brand new—this throat had never before swallowed anything, and no food or drink had ever before landed in this stomach.

I had thought I was prepared for this. I was learning that I wasn’t. I put my head in my hands... and was startled to feel springy curls instead of the bald pate I remembered.

While I sipped my juice, mind racing, Kyra got on the intercom. “Tench tench,” she said, her voice echoing from speakers throughout the ship, “Chaz is awake. I repeat, Chaz is awake. We’re in Epsilon work bay.”

Tench tench? What was that supposed to mean?

As each of the other crew members floated into the bay, their reactions to me varied. Tien said “Oh, Chaz...” and bit her lip, eyes glistening. Bobb gave me a hug, which was very much like him—but it seemed distant, as though he were somehow not really touching me at all. Matt shook my hand and said “Welcome to
Cassie
, mate.” Nuru just inclined her head in solemn greeting.

Mari was the last to arrive, and she didn’t meet my eye.

As for my reactions to them... only the seriousness of the situation kept me from giggling, because the seven of us looked like the junior high school science club. Bobb, a bear of a man back on Earth, was now a tall gawky white guy with just a few wisps of black fuzz on his cheeks. Matt, an avid rock climber and bicyclist, lean and tanned with sinew flexing beneath his tattoos, was now scrawny and pale. Tien had always been elfin, but her Asian elegance had vanished under the same shapeless white coverall and brush-cut hair as the rest of us. Everyone was at least a head taller than I remembered them, the legacy of being grown in zero gravity. None of us would ever be able to stand up in a full gee.

Of course we didn’t expect to ever return to Earth, or to live long enough for the long-term effects of life in free fall to catch up with us, which was why the designers hadn’t bothered making the ship big enough to spin for artificial gravity. It had seemed like a reasonable decision when I’d been making it for my clone, but now that it was
me
up here, all frail and attenuated, I questioned the judgment of my previous self.

Nuru was the least changed of us, I thought at first: even floating in free fall she carried herself with the same grave dignity as before, and the deep brown eyes in that mahogany face, even darker than mine, had lost none of their wisdom. But then I realized how lithe and straight and smooth her body had become, all the infirmities of age cast aside.

And then there was Mari. My eyes kept drifting back to her, wondering what it was about her that made her look
so
different. She had the same lush black hair and dark expressive eyes, the same fine olive-brown complexion I’d always longed to touch. Maybe she’d lost more weight than some of the others...

No. More than just weight.

Breasts.

Mari was now male.

And, I realized with horror, always had been.

These bodies we wore now were freshly cloned, a pure expression of our genomes, lacking any surgical interventions we’d had performed in our previous lives. Our teeth didn’t even have any fillings. Which meant that Mari must have been born male... and had chosen to mutilate himself into an imitation of femininity. The lovely body I’d found so appealing had been nothing but a lie all along.

The realization was like biting into a ripe peach and finding it rotten inside. I knew that there were such things as transsexuals, but I’d never met one before... or so I’d thought. The idea that a person might want to change something so God-given, so fundamental, about themselves was disconcerting enough in the abstract, but seeing such a transformation in someone I’d known—and even been attracted to—was profoundly disquieting.

Before I could really come to grips with Mari, or whatever her-his name was now, Nuru clapped her hands twice. It was her usual way of calling a meeting to order. “Welcome back, Chaz,” she said, and everyone murmured assent. “As good as it is to see you again, I’m sorry it must be under such sad and unexpected circumstances for you. We had planned to delay your vival until we were better prepared to accommodate your psychological needs.” She looked around at her crew, dark eyes lingering on each face in turn. “I don’t know why you were vived just now. Bobb, would you please investigate?”

“Monit monit,” Bobb said.

I frowned. What did “monit monit” mean?

They were all looking at me. Except Mari. I shook off the question. “Thank you,” I said, to Nuru and to the group as a whole. “Though I can’t say I’m happy to learn of my own death, or to find myself on board with incomplete training, I’m excited to be a part of this historic mission. I hope that you will try to keep my... limitations in mind, and I promise to use as much caution and common sense as I can. But if you see me about to open the airlock thinking it’s the bathroom, please don’t hesitate to correct me.”

No one laughed.

“So,” I continued, trying to pretend my failed joke hadn’t been intended to be funny, “what have I missed?”

In some ways I hadn’t missed much. Nuru, the mission commander, had vived ten days ago, the others following at intervals over the next three days. So far they had checked and inventoried all of
Cassie
’s systems and performed an initial analysis on the fourteen years of data she’d gathered while building up her systems and crew.

In addition to the three gas giants we’d known about, named Voltaire, Molière, and Balzac by the French scientists who’d discovered them, the Tau Ceti system held at least three terrestrial planets, which we’d christened Achebe, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. Unfortunately, Tolstoy was a slushy iceball and the other two tiny, airless rocks—all three subject to constant bombardment from the system’s thick disk of planetesimals. Not very hospitable. But that same thick traffic of ice and rock fragments might have hidden other planets from
Cassiopeia’
s instruments, so the search went on.

All of that information was fascinating, but not entirely unexpected. On the other hand,
Cassie
herself had sprung a couple of unpleasant surprises.

For one thing, the ship was only three-fifths complete. Alpha module hadn’t made the rendezvous—lost somewhere in the vacant light-years between Earth and here. Also lost was Delta, which had made it all the way to Tau Ceti only to burn up in the first aerobraking maneuver. So instead of the planned pentagonal bundle of five cylinders,
Cassiopeia
was a shallow V, with Gamma module between Beta and Epsilon. Fortunately, three modules provided sufficient resources and space for our purposes; the mission had been designed to succeed with as little as one module, but it would have been tight quarters.

The other surprise was that we had no communications from Earth.
Cassie
had not received any data at all from back home for over thirty-three years.

“What?” I shouted as soon as Nuru dropped that bombshell. “No
Earth
?”

Nuru raised one long brown finger. “Ojer ojer. Don’t leap to conclusions.”

All three of
Cassiopeia’
s surviving modules, she explained, had suffered failures in their long-range receivers during the long trip here: Beta during year eight, Epsilon in year twenty-one, and Gamma in year forty-seven. In each module’s database, the signals were clear and strong right up to the end of the data, then cut off suddenly—all frequencies simultaneously, both natural and artificial. No disaster, natural or human-made, could have had such an effect; the problem had to be on our end.

“That’s what comes of having everything built by the low bidder,” Bobb said.

Dear Jesus, protect us from any other malfunction. “But if we can’t send our data back home, what’s the point of the mission?”

Nuru shook her head. “I didn’t say we couldn’t transmit
to
Earth. We know from the probe satellites that our long-range transmitters are putting out a good strong signal, and we have a solid navigational fix on Sol, so we can be sure our transmissions will be received. I’ve asked Bobb to prioritize this problem lower than some other tasks. We can wait a week or two to find out what happened back home while we were in transit.”

“Not that it really matters to us anyway,” Matt said.

I could see his point, but I couldn’t agree. Any news from Earth was purely academic to us, since we’d never be returning, but I did want to know what we’d missed in the eighty years since we’d launched. And we had to establish two-way communications eventually, or we’d lose the insights of Earth’s finest scientists into our findings... and we’d never know if we’d made a difference. Even a twenty-four-year wait for our data to crawl Earthward at lightspeed and the acknowledgement to return was better than nothing.

Assuming we survived that long. Amazing as it was that we had made it this far with ship and crew largely intact, we couldn’t know how long it might be before the unknown hazards of an unexplored planetary system did us in. Even though we had our whole lives here ahead of us, and
Cassie
was designed to last at least thirty years, the mission planners had drilled into us again and again that we had to move quickly—to get as much data shipped off to Earth as possible, as quickly as possible.
Cassie
had started the job, transmitting her raw data as soon as she’d arrived, but we could add our analysis and direct the instruments to research the most interesting findings more deeply.

Assuming our transmissions were reaching Earth at all. “I’d like to look into the communications problem,” I said. Though Bobb was the primary ship systems specialist and my specialty was terrestrial planetology, each of us performed multiple functions and I was secondary on ship systems. “Two pairs of eyes are better than one.”

“I’d rather have you doing science,” Nuru replied, her dark eyes level. “Now that you’re here, I’d appreciate your insights into some questions of Achebe’s crustal evolution.”

I inclined my head in acknowledgement. I couldn’t deny that science had to take precedence over ship systems—unless crew safety was at stake, of course.

-o0o-

Mari, our life sciences specialist and the closest thing we had to a doctor, gave me a check-up as soon as the initial meeting was over. “Breathe in,” she said, listening to her stethoscope and not meeting my eye.

I inhaled as requested, watching her face. Now that I saw her... him... without make-up, without décolletage—for that matter, without breasts—I saw how blocky the planes of the face were, how thick the jaw and wrists. How had I ever considered her attractive? “So,” I said on the exhale, “what do I call you now?”

She-he didn’t look up. “Mari.”

“No... I mean... what pronoun do I use?”

“She.” Mari turned me brusquely in the air and rapped on my back with two fingers. I noticed she was still avoiding looking me in the face. “Breathe in again.” I did as she asked, and then bent and stretched and presented various body parts as requested.

I tried to think of Mari as “she,” really I did, but I found it impossible to ignore the very male body that was so disturbingly close to me. And when she put on the rubber gloves and asked me to turn around for a prostate check... “No way!” I said, holding up my hands.

Mari turned away from me, seeming to gather herself, then turned back. “Look, Chaz, I know how uncomfortable this makes you, but you’ll just have to deal with it. I’m female where it counts... up here.” She tapped her forehead. “Always have been, always will be. The body you knew before, back on Earth, was simply modified to match that reality.”

“So if that... modification, is so important to you, why did you apply for
Cassiopeia
, knowing your clone wouldn’t have it?”

She sighed deeply, as though already tired of this argument. “I’ve lived as a woman since the age of thirteen, and I didn’t get the surgery until I was thirty-five. Just having a
penis
”—she spat the word—“didn’t make me male then, and it doesn’t now!” Her words began to gain speed and vehemence. “So it wasn’t much of a sacrifice! All I’ve done is step back to my physical state when I was a teen—just like all of us. Just like you! How much did
you
give up for a trip to the stars?”

“Hey, cool down!” I sputtered. “I need a chance to... to get used to the new you. Maybe we could, you know, talk it over.”

Mari threw up her arms, her face livid with anger. “You and I already hashed this whole thing out once, back on Earth, and you were a real shit about it! I don’t see any reason I should have to go through the same painful process again for your sake.”

“But that wasn’t
me
! And I don’t see any reason I should have to suffer for the mistakes of that previous person.”

“Then who should? Me?
Again?
No thanks.” She kicked off from the med station and disappeared into the work bay below.

I didn’t follow.

-o0o-

A couple of days later I was in Beta work bay, peering into a stereoscopic viewer at a pair of images from Achebe. This planet was similar to Mars, but a little smaller and a little farther from its star, which with Tau Ceti’s lower luminance meant it was substantially colder. It also showed little sign of naturally occurring radioactivity. That lack of energy should have made Achebe solid rock almost all the way to its core... yet there were signs of recent tectonic activity. Either we’d misinterpreted those signs, or the theories of planetary evolution would need to be revised. Which was, after all, why we were here.

It sure would be nice to know for sure that the data we were gathering was being successfully transmitted. Bobb was working on the communications issue but he kept running into problem after problem—hardware failures, software glitches, database snafus—and could frequently be heard cursing the subcontractor responsible for the long-range receiver. These problems made the idea that the communications failure was entirely on our end seem more and more likely, even as they made it harder to debug. I shook my head and returned my attention to planetology.