Second Chance (7 page)

Eventually a shadow fell across me. “I’m sorry, Chaz.”

“You didn’t do anything,” I said to my knees. “I got frustrated and lost my temper.”

“No. I did do something. To you. We all did.”

That got me to uncurl and look at him, though my vision was blurred. Tears don’t fall in zero gee. I waited.

Matt hooked an elbow around a nearby structural element. He started to speak, hesitated. Tried again.

“You died just a week before scan number two—almost six months after your last scan. You know that, right?”

I just looked at him.

“Haven’t you wondered what happened during those six months?”

I considered the question. “No more than any of the rest of the two years I don’t remember.”

He turned away from me, spoke to the transparent plastic of the wall. “Chaz, this is going to hurt you. But you deserve to know.”

“Okay, let me hear it.” I wasn’t really ready to hear any bad news, but this was the first time in months anyone had even started to talk straight to me and I wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip by.

Matt sighed. “Okay.” A long pause, then he turned back and looked straight into my eyes. “Not long after the first scan, you and Mari started dating.”

“Mari.” Oh, Jesus.

“Yeah. You didn’t know. About her, um, personal history.”

“No. I didn’t. Were we... intimate?”

“Alas, yes. And when you found out... well, it was pretty traumatic, for both of you. You were...” A rueful little smile came to his eyes. “Well, Chaz, frankly, you were a real shit about it. Railing up and down about how you’d been deceived, how filthy you felt. You told me that when you came home that day you stood in a scalding hot shower and scrubbed yourself raw for over two hours.”

If Mari had had sex with me without revealing she was really a he... oh, dear Jesus. No amount of love-thy-neighbor could have gotten me to accept that kind of dishonesty. I felt nauseous just thinking about it, and it hadn’t even happened to me. Not in this body, anyway.

“After that, it got really ugly. You refused to be in the same room with her. And when Bobb got tired of you going on and on about it—basically, how awful it was to have sex with another man—he told you about himself, and that made the situation even worse. The mission planners had to halt the training while we all went through counseling together. I think you wanted out just as much as we wanted you out, but
Cassie
had already launched, with all our cell samples on board—we
had
to learn how to work together.”

My mouth was dry. I worked up some spit and swallowed. “Did it... did it work?”

Matt thought about that for a minute. “I think it was starting to. But then you got hit in that crosswalk.” He turned away from me again. “To be honest, once we got over the initial shock, we were... relieved. Until we realized we would
still
have to work with you when we got to Tau Ceti.”

I had nothing to say. The silence stretched out between us.

Matt turned his head to me, but his body still faced away. “Chaz... you have to imagine how it was for us. After two years of training, we were more than a family, we were a
unit
. A finely honed machine with no extraneous parts. And every day we knew that we were going to wake up on
Cassiopeia
and have to deal with... you. Touchy, rigid, unforgiving, homophobic. With all kinds of bad history with Mari and Bobb, and to a lesser extent with all of us. And completely untrained—”

“I’m not ‘completely untrained.’ We crammed in a lot of training in the first six months. They wouldn’t have launched with those initial scans unless they thought we knew enough to complete the mission.”

Matt shook his head slowly. “We all thought that at the time. But after two more years of training we could see how naïve we’d been.” He held out his hands in an appeal for understanding. “Imagine you’re a senior in college. And you know that when you graduate you’re going to have to go into business with... no,
marry
, your freshman roommate. Who hasn’t changed a bit. Still a freshman. Still as ignorant, immature, and annoying as he was back then, while you’ve turned from a high school kid into a functioning adult. But you can’t get out of the deal.”

“You could have given me a chance...”

Matt closed his eyes, shook his head hard. “You hurt too many people, too badly. We voted not to vive you.”

I blinked, trying to assimilate what he’d said. They’d voted. Not to vive. Me.

Matt opened his eyes. “We had to meet in secret. The mission planners would never have agreed. But it was unanimous.”

They’d voted not to vive me. Unanimously. “How...”

“It wasn’t hard. You were in the third group. Once Bobb was awake, he just jiggered the software so you wouldn’t wake up.”

That wasn’t what I had been about to ask. I’d been starting to say “how could you?” But... I could see how. And why. I imagined what I might have done if Matt or Bobb had turned out to be a rabid white supremacist. I might have voted the same way.

Matt was still talking. “But we didn’t want to... uh, to dispose of... you. Your body. We just left it in the capsule. Too uncomfortable to think about, I think. And we were busy.”

Another long silence. This time I broke it. “So... why did you change your minds?”

Matt sighed, deep and long. “See, that’s the thing. We didn’t.”

“You... didn’t?”

“Nope. When you woke up, it was a surprise to everyone... or at least, everyone
said
it was a surprise. Bobb swears it wasn’t a hardware or a software glitch. So, on top of the stress of having you around, we’ve all been trying to figure out what... or
who
... made it happen.” The wry little smile returned. “Under the circumstances, I’d actually say we treated you comparatively well.”

My mind was awash. Too much to take in. “Why are you
telling
me all this?” My voice cracked as I said it.

He blew out his cheeks. “Damn good question. Maybe I thought we weren’t being fair to you. Maybe I just got tired of the strain of keeping secrets.” He shrugged, spread his hands. The light of Tau Ceti, shining through the vines and leaves, dappled his shoulders. “Anyway. There it is, and here you are, and here we all are. So what are we going to do about it?”

“Matt... it wasn’t
me
.
I
didn’t do any of those things. I didn’t even know they’d happened.”

He paused, considering, rubbing his cloverleaf tattoo. “That’s as may be. But even so,
we
still have all that bad blood with
you
. And you might do the same things again.”

“But I
haven’t
! And I
won’t
!”

He fixed me with a hard stare, like the one he’d given me in the airlock when I messed up with the oxygen. “Not in the same way. But you’ve still been cruel to Mari, and to Bobb. And me.”

I curled up again, hugging my legs to my chest, leaves crinkling against my back. “I’m sorry,” I said to my knees. It seemed painfully inadequate, but it was all I had to offer. “At least... at least now I know. I can try to change.”

There was a long silence. “Yes,” Matt said at last. “You can try.”

I raised my head and saw that he was reaching out a hand to grasp my shoulder. But when he saw I was looking, he drew it back.

“I’m sorry,” I said again.

Without a word he turned and made his way back to the ship. I heard the lock close behind him.

-o0o-

After that conversation, I cried. A lot. And I prayed, and cried some more.

Eventually I came out of the greenhouse. But I found I couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. Every time I met Mari or Bobb, in the kitchen or while passing from one module to the next, as soon as I opened my mouth to speak my throat tightened up and forced me to silence. How could I ask their forgiveness when I didn’t even have first-hand knowledge of what I had done to hurt them? Indeed, could I truly be forgiven for acts I myself had not committed?

And even though I had not hurt any of the others as badly, to talk with them was just as impossible. It was a difference of degree, but not of kind.

So I kept to myself. And I continued to pray for guidance.

And I kept working, on mission science as well as the lack of communication with Earth. Because I had always found that engaging my intellect in a scientific or technical problem was the best way to free up my soul for deep contemplation, and there were so many questions that still needed investigation, no matter how badly messed up my personal situation was.

Thus it was that I came to knock on Matt’s door, four days later.

“Sup sup?”

“Matt, it’s me. I need to talk to you.”

A moment later, Matt opened the door. He wore only a towel tied around his hips. “That’s a change.”

I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “Please.”

Matt’s eyes never left mine as he moved to one side, silently pulling the door open for me.

“I’ve been looking some more into the question of Achebe’s crustal temperature. Balzac and Voltaire have moons that are also warmer than expected, and I’m beginning to wonder if they might be hospitable to life.”

“I’ll help if you like, but that’s really Mari’s specialty.”

“I know.” I swallowed again. “I... I can’t talk with her.”

“So you want me to be your intermediary? I’m sorry, I can’t—”

“No,” I interrupted. “I need your help in... changing my attitude.”

Matt looked a question at me.

“I want a tattoo.”

He blew out his cheeks and pulled his bare legs up under himself. “I see. You want to mark yourself as a new man.” He gestured at his cloverleaf. “Like me.”

“Yes. But... um, where would it hurt the least?”

He grinned at that. “Someplace with plenty of meat between the skin and the bone. Bicep is good, or buttock. Depends on whether you want to show it off or not.”

“Bicep. I want people to see it.”

“And have you thought about what kind of image you want?”

“I have. I want a lamb.” The lamb of God, but I didn’t say that. “To represent new life, a new start.”

Unfortunately, neither Matt nor I had any artistic talent, and I twitched away from the pain a couple of times. So the lamb came out looking more like a rain cloud—a lumpy blob with four jerky lines coming down from it—crudely sketched in blood and ink. But I knew what it meant.

It still took me a couple of days to steel myself to face Mari. I floated at the bottom of Epsilon work bay, watching her as she jotted notes on one monitor while staring intently at another. Finally I squeezed my still-bandaged arm—the pain reminded me that whether or not I was the person who had done those hurtful things, I was not the man I had been; I was born anew, with a chance to begin again. I kicked off the bulkhead and drifted up behind Mari.

She noticed me immediately; her body language told me that. But she refused to acknowledge my presence, continuing to work, her back turned to me.

Her hair had grown long and loose and curly, the way it had been back on Earth. From here I could imagine everything else was as it had been as well. I could understand the attraction my earlier self had felt.

I waited. Though I wanted desperately to leave, to avoid confrontation, to not think about what this person had under her coverall, to keep pretending we were not all trapped in a tin can together for the rest of our lives... I waited.

Finally she stabbed her stylus back in its holder. Without turning, she said “Well?”

I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “I would like your help.”

Now she did spin to face me, and her dark eyes were hard. But as soon as she saw the bandage on my arm they softened a little. “You’re hurt.”

I waved dismissively at the bandage. “It’s nothing. No, I need your help on a scientific problem.”

She cocked her head—not making any promises, but willing to listen.

I told her how I’d done infrared observations of the moons of the three gas giant planets, trying to confirm my analysis of Achebe, and had found several moons whose surface temperatures were unexpectedly high even after applying the Pederson/Wu equations. Voltaire’s moons Cunegonde and Paquette were close to their primary, and tidal squeezing might be enough to explain the difference. But Balzac’s fourth moon, Bianchon, was much warmer—more than warm enough for liquid water, in fact—though Balzac itself orbited barely within Tau Ceti’s habitable zone and any water on its moons should have been frozen solid for most of its year.

“Have you looked for greenhouse gases in Bianchon’s atmosphere?”

I had, and the results were most intriguing, but I wanted her opinion... and I needed to work on my humility. “Well, I’m not sure I know how. Could you give me a hand with the spectrographic analysis?”

Mari scooted to one side, allowing me to fit my legs into the other restraint at her work station, and called up the spectrograph control software on the monitor. “Where’s your data?”

I learned a lot from watching her work—she guided the software with delicacy and finesse, teasing and cajoling meaning from the raw data many times faster than I’d been able to. “Huh,” she said as the graphs built up on the screen. “That’s odd...”

“What?”

“Greenhouse gases, all right. Carbon dioxide, methane, and... looks like... oxygen?” Her eyes widened at that last.

As I’d thought. I was pleased to have my analysis confirmed, and also to be working side-by-side with Mari on the question. It was a start, anyway.

We worked together for hours. I was familiar with the data, because I’d collected it; she knew what it meant, and how to use the tools. But as we worked I realized her understanding of the ship’s computer systems was shallow—expert though she was in her specialist software, she made almost no use of automation or datastreaming. So, as we went on, she learned from me even as I was learning from her. And together we discovered that Bianchon was a very interesting place.

There were what Mari called “anomalous indications of biological activity.” Might be life, might be something else, but
something
was generating oxygen there. The atmosphere might even be breathable—cold and thin, but capable of sustaining human life. Perhaps.