Second Chance (9 page)

Nuru cut the sleeves off of all her coveralls, and when she wasn’t working she wore a shawl over her bare shoulders. It was her way of marking personal from work time. With the light from behind her shining through the thin fabric, patterned in vivid stripes and squares of autumn colors, I could imagine her as some high priestess or village shaman, looking over the veldt at sunset.

“Chaz... I wanted to say that I’m sorry I came down so hard on you.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. Anxiety, anger, sadness, and suspicion tightened around my throat and kept the words inside.

“It’s just...” she continued, then paused. “It’s just that you didn’t seem to be accepting any more subtle direction.”

“I know you don’t want me looking into the communication problem. But it’s important.”

“I understand. But...” Her voice was more hesitant than I could ever recall having heard. “...but you mustn’t. Please don’t try any more.”

I waited to see if she would say anything more. When she didn’t, I asked “Why?”

She shook her head. “I can’t say. I wish I could.” She looked deep into my eyes, and I could not withdraw from her gaze. “I’m sorry, Chaz. But I want you to know that this is for everyone’s good. I... I do respect your judgment. And you’ll have to respect mine.”

She turned and left, leaving me shaking my head in bafflement.

-o0o-

Puzzled though I was, I meant to do as Nuru asked... leave off my nocturnal investigations, at least for a time. But when I powered the screen up again, just to close down my work before I went to sleep, it chimed and displayed something that made my breath catch in my throat.

The data from Alpha had been arriving in apparently random order, determined by its physical location in storage rather than chronologically. I’d been waiting for weeks to see what I saw on the monitor now: a purple rectangle, representing a block of Alpha data that didn’t correspond to anything already in
Cassie
’s database.

To my surprise, it wasn’t coast-phase data from after the cutoff. It was in a completely different part of the database, one with which I wasn’t familiar.

I bit my lip, but after a brief battle with my conscience, curiosity won out. I tapped the purple rectangle with my stylus.

The data turned out to be in the medical/lifesystem section.

Specifically, the crew reconstruction and vival instructions for Charles Eades.

Me.

Here was hard evidence that my vival instructions had been deliberately wiped from the system. Which only confirmed what Matt had told me. Though the news was a twist of the knife in my gut, it wasn’t a surprise.

But then I noticed something that
was
a surprise, and told me the situation was more complicated than it had at first appeared. Immediately adjacent to the purple area of new data from Alpha, I saw a thin red stripe indicating data that was present in both databases, but slightly different. There was no reason I could think of for this.

I looked more closely. The Alpha data was a straightforward prologue to the following code. The
Cassiopeia
data replaced one instruction in that prologue with a jump to another section of the database.

I followed the jump.

It led to a completely separate datastore, in a different hive—temporary mission data, not instructions that had been loaded preflight.

The linked data turned out to be identical to the new data from Alpha, but with a more recent timestamp. About eighty years more recent.

I stared hard at the screen, rubbing absently at the hot rough tissue of my new tattoo. It itched almost as much as my brain.

Matt had said the crew had voted not to vive me. But then I’d been vived anyway, and no one knew how this had happened.

Here was the answer. Someone, probably Bobb, had deleted the data, but later someone else had restored it from backup. And whoever had restored the data had put it in an obscure temporary datastore so the reinstatement wouldn’t be noticed. The link to the restored data was extremely subtle—the only reason I’d spotted it was that I had an unmodified copy of the original data to compare it with.

I drummed my fingers on my chin. The user ID on the data in the temporary store was some random number, not any of us—whoever had restored the data had concealed their identity. But I could check the system audit log. It was a write-only record of all significant system activities, intended to be impossible to evade or to modify after the fact. We had mostly ignored it in our training; the only reason it was present in
Cassie
’s systems at all was a general requirement for all government software.

The audit log told me that the restore had been performed using a temporary ID to obscure the user’s true identity. But that ID had been created only a few seconds before it was used, and the creator’s name was clear in the log.

Nuru.

I shook my head. It made no sense. Matt had said the vote not to vive me had been unanimous. As our commander, if she’d disagreed with the decision she wouldn’t have allowed it to go forward. Why would she then sneak back and undo it?

While I was digesting that information, trying to decide what to do about what I’d learned, another chime came from the monitor, and another purple rectangle appeared. This one was where I’d expected the first one to be: in the coast-phase data, a couple of months after the data cutoff in
Cassie
’s database.

I tapped the rectangle with my stylus. If nothing else, I thought, it would be a distraction from the painful news about who had vived me.

I was quickly proved wrong.

-o0o-

I worked the latch and entered without waiting for a response. There were no locks anywhere in
Cassie
.

Nuru poked her head out of her sleep sack, blinking in the light from the habitation bay outside. “What the hell?”

“698463 Teitelmann,” I said.

Sleep immediately fled from her eyes. “Close the door.”

I shut the door behind me. A sliver of light fell across Nuru’s face. I wanted to cry like a baby, to have her take me in her arms and tell me everything would be all right. I wanted to slap her hard and scream with rage. I wanted her to pray with me, to help me to understand that all of this somehow fit into God’s plans. Torn in so many different directions, I said nothing. I just looked at her, breathing hard.

“Have you told anyone?” she asked at last.

“Not yet. But I will. It’s not fair to keep them in the dark.”

She closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands. “How did you find out?” she mumbled.

“Bobb helped me download the coast-phase data from Alpha. It was all there.”

“You disobeyed my orders.”

“Yes.”

I waited. Eventually she raised her eyes to me. They shimmered with moisture. “Can you forgive me?”

It was a hard question. “I think... I think I can understand why you erased the news. I might be able to forgive you for that. But why... why did you vive me? Knowing what you knew?” My throat was choked with unshed tears—tears of rage or anguish or both. “How could you wake me up... to
this
? When you could have just left me in peace forever?”

Nuru’s face was a mask of grief. “I’m sorry, Chaz. I’m so, so sorry. But I didn’t want to be
alone
.”

I didn’t understand. “But you weren’t alone...”

“I couldn’t bear knowing that the only face like mine in the universe was the one in the mirror.”

I looked into her dark, dark eyes, shining with tears, the yellowish whites and the smooth mahogany skin. So much like mine. And I reached out and took her into my arms.

We shuddered together, racked with silent sobs.

The jumbled, fragmentary video and audio from Alpha’s data played over and over behind my eyelids. ...
asteroid 698463 Teitelmann’s orbit intersects
...
impact in as little as eight months
...
entire nuclear arsenal lacks sufficient
...
mission to Teitelmann does not seem to have
...
millions rioting
...
last few places in the shelters
...
a world prays
...
devastation even greater than
...
we are the dinosaurs
... and then the silence, oh Jesus, the silence that went on and on...

Eventually Nuru dried her eyes on my shoulder, and it all came spilling out—how she’d deleted the data, putting the cut-off at different times in the three modules to make it look like a hardware problem. How she’d kept the news of Earth’s demise to herself, and focused the crew on its original scientific mission to keep us all from falling into despair. How she’d continually sabotaged Bobb’s and my efforts to find the source of the problem. I was amazed she’d been able to retain her own sanity under that pressure, never mind the technical and psychological challenge of keeping her bright and curious crew from learning the truth, and I said so. “I’m not so sure I did retain my sanity,” she said.

“At least you won’t have to hold it all inside now...”

“No.” She gripped my shoulders, her long strong fingers biting hard into my flesh. “We can’t let them know, Chaz. Matt, maybe, but the others... they wouldn’t be able to go on. Trust me in this.”

“This secrecy is poisonous. They deserve to know.”

“They deserve
purpose
.”

“Even if it means lying to them for the rest of their lives? Lie upon lie, coverup over coverup, year after year, with nothing better to hope for than that we’ll all get killed by an oxygen leak or something before they find out the truth?”

Nuru hung her head. “I can’t take hope away from them.”

“Then don’t!” Even as I spoke, pieces of a plan were coming together in my head. “Give them a
new
hope.” I outlined my idea, sketchy and conditional though it was. She raised objections—sound ones—but, driven by desperation, I came up with answers. “It might not work. We might all die in the process. But it’s better than floating around in a tin can, gathering data with no audience and writing papers no one will ever read.”

“We don’t have the genetic diversity for a viable colony...”

“I know.” I closed my eyes hard, squeezing back the tears for a moment before I could continue. “But isn’t one or two generations better than nothing? And if there
is
anyone alive back home, maybe the information in our databases can benefit them.” The mission planners had provided us with entire libraries and museums, to support basic research and as a hedge against boredom. “We owe it to them to preserve it as long as possible—until they can dig themselves out. No matter how long that might be.”

Nuru was silent for a long time. Finally she said “Kay kay. But I need you to let me break it to them.”

-o0o-

We gathered in Gamma hab bay. I’d watched Nuru as she’d approached each crew member, letting each one know how critical this meeting was: a simple statement to Bobb, a light joke to Matt, a long held glance with Mari. Suddenly I understood in my bones just why Nuru was the commander and how she’d managed to hold us together as a crew as well as she had.

Nuru clapped her hands for attention. But once she had it, she floated in silence for a long time, gathering herself. “This is hard,” she said, and another silence followed. Moisture glistened in the corners of her eyes.

“I’ve lied to you,” she said at last. “I’ve lied to you all, at many times and in many different ways. Sometimes that’s part of the commander’s job. But now it has to stop.” She closed her eyes, took a breath. “First: I was the one who vived Chaz.”

The crew’s reaction was like a released breath. Matt jerked his head back in astonishment; Bobb nodded to himself; Mari stared sullenly at me. No one spoke.

“My reasons were selfish,” Nuru continued, “and my deception... unpardonable. But this wrong also undid a greater wrong.” She looked around. “We are all guilty of a gross injustice. We tried, convicted, and
executed
Chaz, in absentia, for a crime he did not commit.”

Tien looked dubious. “Executed?”

“We voted to deprive him of his life—his second life, this life we all share now—before it even began.” She waved one long brown hand at me. “
This
Chaz, this second Chaz, did no harm to any of us. He has no memory of the hateful things the first Chaz said and did.” She looked at Mari. Mari looked back, for a moment, then averted her eyes. “We might all, in time, have learned to forgive each other. But we were all cheated of the opportunity.” Now she looked at me. “After your death, our feelings toward you crystallized—frozen at the most terrible moment of our relationship. Chaz, can you forgive us for remembering you at your worst, and forgetting the good things we shared?”

I swallowed past the hard constriction in my throat. What I really wanted was vindication... acknowledgement that I’d been treated unfairly for crimes that I hadn’t committed, or at the very least an apology. I wanted to see the tables turned, to be the one to gloat smugly while they turned their eyes away and admitted they’d been wrong. But what was needed right now was for me to turn the other cheek.

“I’m sorry,” I managed at last. “I’m so very sorry for the things my previous self... the things
I
did to you.” I looked at Mari, though she refused to return my gaze. “That man thought he had been deceived. He was wrong, so very wrong, and because of that foolish error he did you grievous harm.” She still did not meet my eyes, so I looked around at the rest of them. “And for any injuries you’ve done to my current self... deserved or undeserved, it doesn’t matter... I forgive you. I forgive you all.”

Nuru, head held high, cast her gaze around the assembled crew. “And the rest of you—Mari, Bobb, everyone—can you forgive Chaz, this Chaz, for his ignorance, his errors, his anger?” Most of them nodded, but Mari just hung in the air, her eyes fixed on her toes. “Would any of us have done any better, if
we
had arrived here unprepared for our mission and ostracized for the sins of our earlier selves?”

“You remember how he was,” Mari whispered to her chest. “Hurtful. Cruel. Unforgiving.”

I pushed off the wall, floated close to her. “That was someone else,” I said, so softly that she had to look up. “He’s dead now... eighty years dead. Let him go.” Please God, let her give me this chance.