Straying From the Path (3 page)

In the army, I kept watch for death, waiting for death that rained on us in the form of missiles, that snatched us from under the earth in the form of mines, that killed us with fever in the night, that crept invisibly with poisonous gasses. Every inch we walked, we watched. Every night, I hardly slept; the buzz of crickets sounded like jet engines to my tense hearing.

What killed most of us, and what finally killed the Pan-Asia Conflict, wasn’t the weapons of mass destruction—we’d had them for decades and never used them. Most nations seemed content to brandish the threat of chemicals and bioweapons without actually deploying them. Enough defenses had been developed to make their worth doubtful, and the danger to their own troops was always a consideration. In the end, disease killed more people than died in the two world wars combined.

A fast-mutating strain of streptococcus developed that was resistant to penicillin, erythromycin, a dozen other antibiotics. This plague could be cured—in laboratory conditions, with expensive, experimental medications. But during the war several million soldiers from a dozen countries were traveling all over the world, living in primitive conditions, exchanging their infections as they went. The plague mutated and new cures had to be developed. In a short time, a half-dozen different strains had invaded most of the population.

Once, countries fought as if their supply of soldiers was endless. By the end of Pan-Asia, generals staged battles in which no troops were healthy enough to fight. They faced a choice: they did not have the resources to fight both the war and the plague.

The night before the ceasefire, I kept watch over my platoon. I had to, because I was the only one standing, apart from the one medic still healthy enough to tend the ill. Soldiers lay on bedrolls on the ground, wet from recent rains. Row after row of bedrolls. Stripped to t-shirts and briefs, men complained of the heat and tossed, dehydrated, sweating with fever, coughing, grimacing, unable to swallow with searing throats. I made sure the fires we used to boil pots of water kept burning; we’d run out of butane and propane stove fuel. We always, always boiled our water.

I imagined them all dying. We were supposed to meet the battalion in two days. I’d have to go myself, carrying the stack of dogtags of my dead friends. If we were attacked now, we wouldn’t survive. One or the other, the plague or the Chinese, would destroy us. But the plague had leveled them just as badly. No one would be fighting when the armies met at Beijing.

Light, smoke from the fires that burned in the Beijing suburbs obscured the night sky with a hellish red glow. For a year I had waited to die, looked on every sweaty, noisy night as my last. I was prepared, I thought. I expected it. But still I kept watch. Something kept the plague from striking me, some obscene luck kept me from any injury greater than a cut from shrapnel.

That obscene luck meant that even if only one of us could join the battalion, one of us would, carrying the dogtags, ready to report.

But we didn’t join the battalion in two days. Orders came to hold our position, and we held for a week while supplies arrived, new medications that, if they did not induce miracle cures, at least stabilized many of the ill. Not all of us died. Those of us who were well enough to march met with the decimated battalion and arrived in Beijing for the armistice two weeks later.

Once, I’d been ready to be the last.

I kept my dogtags in a cardboard box with my medals, my old insignia, odds and ends and souvenirs that had seemed like a good idea at the time, and a sheaf of official papers: shipping orders, discharge papers, that sort of thing. A box of relics that wouldn’t mean anything to anyone but me. I hadn’t looked at that stuff in years. I avoided the urge. Let the kids find it when I’m gone. And so they didn’t wonder, maybe I would write those memoirs. A few pages of explanation, of memory. Just for them.

Fifteen years after the armistice, resentment from the last war festered into new conflicts. Diseases continued to make populations unstable, and the supply of soldiers was unreliable. Governments started using machines to fight their wars. When they found they could claim territory and win arguments with machines, they didn’t need people anymore.

Machines didn’t care whether or not they were buried with military honors.

I asked Ken to email me every day. Nothing elaborate, just a note, a line: I’m alive. One last time, I keep watch, downloading my email every day, looking for that one note: I’m alive. When the day arrives that I don’t get that message, I will know.

I wait for my last funeral.

Metaphors tell of the cold light of the stars, but her body felt warm when she wrapped her arms around me, smiling at her reflection in the faceplate of my helmet. I had been looking at the stars—at nothing, at vacuum—and then I saw her, shining face, silver eyes, long pale hair floating weightless.

Her slender fingers raised the shield over the faceplate, so at last we looked into each other’s eyes. She pressed herself close to me; I could see she was naked. She couldn’t have been, she couldn’t have lived—she should have been dead. But she smiled.

Even through the suit I could feel her reaching for me, and I held her, clenching my bulky gloved hands against her while she worked the catch of the faceplate. I couldn’t wait for her to open the helmet so I could taste her lips. Making love to starlight.

The plate went up, her lips met mine. She kissed me, smoothed my face, my hair. My eyes closed, and I forgot what she looked like.

So I looked again, inhaled, and drowned.

I gasped at vacuum, reached for my helmet—gone, long gone. She smiled like an angel. I tried to scream as my lungs imploded, and she laughed at me, a sound of crystal bells, a sound starlight might make . . .

“Barrie!”

I breathed. I breathed one desperate inhalation after another. I tried to touch my face, and the faceplate—shield down, seals intact—blocked me. My hands shook, my gasping continued, and I saw the hull of the ship, the gray arc of Europa, and the stars. Nothing else.

“Barrie! What’s wrong? Your vitals spiked, your heart rate’s tripled—”

“Alvy?” My voice cracked, I couldn’t help it. The sound of my own breathing overwhelmed me.

“What’s happening out there, Barrie?”

The tether still held me to the probe. I’d have spun off into the void otherwise. Drifting, gently tugged now and then by the lifeline, I patted my helmet, my neck, every joint of my suit, convincing myself that I was well and whole.

I couldn’t explain to Alvy what had happened. Making love to starlight.

“Might—might be a suit malfunction. I think I should come in.”

Alvy’s voice on my helmet inset turned tired but no less anxious. “Just what we need right now. I’ll meet you this side of the airlock.”

Alvy had to talk me to the airlock hatch, telling me to breathe slowly, one breath in, one breath out, until I matched her steady coaxing. In, out. My hands stopped shaking by the time air cycled into the airlock, and I could finally take off the suit—safely.

I started trembling again when Alvy helped me lift off the helmet.

“What spooked you, Barrie?” Alvy—Teresa Alvarez—loomed over me, where I sat on the bench in what served as our combination medical unit and EVA prep room. Together, we’d peeled off my suit; like a headless corpse, it slumped by the airlock door, waiting for a diagnostic.

Her short brown hair stood straight up, she hadn’t changed her jumpsuit in days, and her face was so pale and lined, she looked ten years older than her thirty-odd years. Twenty years older. Like she was ready for retirement.

I didn’t want to know how I looked. I could feel the stubble on my chin growing. “I couldn’t breathe. I thought—I thought something had happened to the helmet. I saw—” I hadn’t meant to say that.

“What did you see?”

My hands lay in my lap, too heavy to lift to even rub my face. Neat trick in weightlessness. “I didn’t see anything.”

“So you were hallucinating? Did something happen to your oxygen mix?” She punched a few commands into the panel of the suit’s control unit and snapped out the data chip, which she plugged in to the medical comp terminal. “Something must have happened to your mix. Maybe for just a second. Another problem to add to the list. Command’ll scratch any more EVA work now.”

A momentary glitch in the oxygen flow. It sounded so logical.

My rational self responded to that thought, and backed by years of training and drills, began to gather my scattered wits. “So I managed to get the transmitter on line before I—before the malfunction?”

Alvy didn’t turn from her data readout to talk. “Yes. But that just means we have to report to Command. If I decide I like the blackout better I may send you out to foul it back up.”

Her joke stayed with me the rest of the day. Not because it was funny—although these days, the strangest things seemed hilarious—but because I wanted to go out again. Rationally, logically, I told myself I needed to overcome a developing phobia, a sense of suffocation that crept up on me every few hours or every few minutes, a claustrophobia that would be crippling on a small, two-person observer probe like
Benjamin
. If I didn’t get back out and prove to my psyche that space did not (necessarily) mean an inability to breathe, I’d end up sedated in the med unit.

That was the excuse. It was a good excuse—if exaggerated. But truthfully, I wanted to go back to find what it was I’d really seen.

Benjamin’s
mission was the pipe dream of the century reduced to a bureaucratic joke: life on Europa. After the possibility of life on Mars went bust, Europa gained prestige as the System’s most likely candidate for supporting non-Earth life. Several dozen fly-bys, a dozen probes, a handful of remote landings and a hundred years of scrutiny later, Europa had lost all that prestige.

Regulations stipulated that a world with the potential for sustaining native life must have direct human confirmation that no life existed before it was declared lifeless and opened to mining and industry. The purpose of this admittedly impractical rule was to avoid the sabotage of automated probes or corruption of transmitted data by unscrupulous economic interests. The crewed mission to study the moon was the final, preparatory phase before Trade Guild lifted the environmental quarantine and sent surveyors to Europa.

No one expected us to find life, but enough politicians and naturalist groups supported the ideal behind the regulation that Trade Guild Command had to make at least the semblance of a serious effort to look for life one more time. The trouble was, I really wanted to find life. I believed the automated data was still inconclusive, and that Trade Guild shouldn’t lift the quarantine. We may not have found life there now, but Europa might develop life in the future, if left alone. Some of us wanted to protect the moon, if we could.

Ours was a mission of pure idealism and wishful thinking, and it was doomed from the start. Ideological and political difficulties aside, mechanical problems had plagued us the entire three months of the mission. We’d had a series of equipment malfunctions; tools and gear went missing at least once a week. So far, these glitches were annoying rather than life-threatening. But we all felt that sooner or later a true disaster would strike. Alvy and I were battling time—any day now, Command would send a recall order, shutting down the mission because of the mechanical problems, leaving Europa open for mining.

The day after my own personal malfunction, life aboard
Benjamin
returned to normal. Things went wrong. I sat at my lab station, collating data gathered the day before from our dozen or so scopes. Alvy called to me from another part of the ship.

“Barrie, have you seen that chip?”

“What chip?”

“The one from your suit.”

“Did you leave it in the medical computer?”

“I checked already. Are you sure it isn’t in with your chips?”

“Yes. Did you put it back in the suit?”

“I checked there.” She always checked everywhere.

“Well, it has to be somewhere on board. It can’t have gone anywhere.”

“That’s what I said about my wrench last week. Still haven’t found it.”

I knew what came next; she’d search the ship top to bottom, the chip wouldn’t turn up, just like the wrench hadn’t, and she’d stew about how the universe had it in for her.

A couple hours later I had the scope data ready and gave it to Alvy with the rest of the probe reports. She made the weekly transmissions to Command. This week’s was three days late because of the malfunction in the transmitter, which had required me going out to reconnect a cable that had broken loose.

About when she should have been uploading the data to the transmitter, her shouted expletive filled the ship.

I thought she’d blown up the computer, sliced off her leg, something truly horrible—as horrible as losing one’s helmet on an EVA. Hand over hand, I pulled myself from my station to control, kicking in weightlessness, to see what had happened. She met me halfway.

“Data’s gone,” she said.

She wasn’t bleeding, air wasn’t hissing out of any cracks in the hull. So matters couldn’t have been too cataclysmic.

“What?”

“Data’s gone. I went to transmit and got an error message. Zero bytes to transfer. I had it all on the chip, Barrie. A gig of data, ready to go, then a second later it was gone. Just disappeared. Where did it go?”

The same place as the wrench? “So something’s wrong with the computer.”

She covered her eyes with her hands and moaned. “Please tell me there was a backup.”

“Isn’t that your job?” I squeezed past her through the narrow corridor and went to control.

The message light still flashed on the display. Zero bytes. Nothing to upload. Communication canceled. I punched up some commands, searched the memory. The computer contained stored copies of previous reports for the last three months, but no sign of this week’s. I searched every database.

So the computer had a bug. I could almost hear the thing scratching away at our systems, carrying away loose gigabytes and wrenches.

If I listened very closely, I could hear it tapping on the hull outside the station. Something scraped hard nails on
Benjamin’s
steel shell, as though looking for a way to get inside.

“Maybe you didn’t fix the transmitter after all.”

“I don’t think the transmitter could have eaten the data.” The transmitter had never left dormant mode. But something made a noise, tapping on the hull hard enough for the vibrations to travel through the steel, through the station’s atmosphere, to my ears as sound. “Do you hear something?”

“The air cycling. The electronics.”

“No. Something outside.”

“Are you joking?”

There I was, hallucinating twice in as many days. I wasn’t even outside this time. I couldn’t blame it on bad air.

I changed the subject. “You think I should go back out and check the transmitter?”

“I think we should run some diagnostics first.” She pushed me out of her seat and dove into the computer systems herself. Last night, we ran tests on my space suit. The diagnostic came up clean, no obvious malfunctions.

I retreated to the sensor and observation deck, where most of the scopes and other receivers were mounted. There, a bubbled viewport revealed the space outside.

The streaked gray surface of Europa filled most of the view, Jupiter most of what was left. The light reflecting from them both washed out the stars and most of the well-defined shadows characteristically formed by the unmediated sunlight in space.

One shadow—long, slender, like a raised arm—lying along a bare curve of the ship that shouldn’t have held a shadow, remained. Something slipped along the hull. I saw movement—I shouldn’t have, not outside the probe.

“Alvy, I’m going back out,” I said, passing through control on my way to medical.

“But I don’t think it’s the transmitter.” She followed me; I hardly noticed.

“It wouldn’t hurt to check.”

“Barrie, do you think you should go out? After yesterday?”

I acted confident, assured. Shoulders straight, chin up. “I’m fine.”

She lifted a skeptical brow. She knew me too well. I usually slouched, and only straightened my shoulders when I was nervous.

“It’s probably not the transmitter,” she said.

I’d already climbed into the body of the suit, checking seals and oxygen charges as I went. Reluctantly, she helped me with the gloves and joint bindings.

“Why do you really want to go out? Some getting back on the horse thing?”

I could have left it at that. I’d already convinced myself of the excuse. But—I was supposed to trust Alvy. We’d been living out here for three months. We’d developed the project together, and Command had approved it and assigned us to
Benjamin
because we worked well together.

If I was going crazy, Alvy had a right to know.

“I saw something. Outside, through the viewport.”

She put her hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling well?”

Not really. My lungs still hurt from yesterday’s episode. “I’m well enough to go out. Just for a little while, for a walk around the probe. I just want to check things out.”

“What did you see?”

“A shadow. Something moving. Like something was trying to get in.” It sounded silly now, explaining it aloud. I was sure I didn’t remember it right.

“And what did you see yesterday?”

I probably didn’t remember that right, either. “Flashes. Light. All around me, sparkling. I thought I was drowning in it.”

Alvy frowned and tried to get me to look at her, but I stared at my bulky, gloved hands in my lap.

“The Mercury astronauts reported seeing flashing specks of light outside their capsules. Fireflies, they called them. Total mystery. People have been seeing things outside their spacecraft for over a hundred years, Barrie.”

No one ever saw a woman, a woman of starlight come to seduce them to their deaths. That is, they never said they saw a woman.

“Humor me, Alvy. I just want to look around.”

“All right. But I’m going to be on the radio talking to you the whole time. Keep your tether tight.”

She sealed my helmet, I entered the airlock, it emptied, and I was out.

I heard the same noise, a purposeful scratching on the hull, which was impossible. Not unless the sound was transmitting through Alvy’s radio.

“How you doing, Barrie?”

I didn’t answer, straining to hear the background noise.

“Barrie?”