The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 23rd Annual Collection (98 page)

She placed the flat of her hand on the blank wall. It’s only two years, she thought. In two years I’ll be out of the ship, if the planet around Zeta Reticula is habitable. But she shivered. Only two subjective years. She’d spend most of the trip in the long-sleep cocoon. If the technology worked, she would leave the ship in 4,000 real years.

Teague was right, though, about untested technology. Nearly every element of the expedition was a prototype. Could a human-manufactured device continue to function after 4,000 years, even with constant maintenance? The Egyptian pyramids were 4,500 years old, and they still stood, but they were merely rocks in a pile, not a sophisticated space vehicle. After 4,000 years, the pyramids weren’t expected to enter an orbit around a distant planet while maintaining a sustainable environment against the deadliness of space.

And what of the people on board? The only test of the technology that kept a person alive for 4,000 years and preserved the seeds and fertilized ova would take 4,000 years. Dr Arnold, who knew all their medical charts by heart, told her that what she felt was homesickness. Like Meghan and the rest of the crew, he was in his twenties, but he spoke with maturity. Meghan trusted him. “Look for these symptoms,” he said, “episodic or constant crying, nausea, difficulty sleeping, disrupted menstrual cycle.” He consulted his notes. “Of course, those symptoms may also be induced by long sleep.” His assistant, Dr Singh, nodded in agreement.

“Doctor Arnold, I’m two hundred years late on my last period.”

Already she felt old. Already, with the sun no more than a bright star in their wake, she felt creaky and removed, a part of the dead. I shouldn’t be able to sense Earth’s pull from here, she thought. I shouldn’t have come. They should have known that a hydroponics officer wouldn’t do well away from Earth, away from forests and long stretches of mountain grass. Even when we arrive, if everything works, if the planet is hospitable, it will take years and years to grow Earth trees to sit beneath. I’ll never see an aspen again.

I won’t make it.

Isaac scooted his stool closer to the tiny woodstove. If he sat close enough, long enough, the warmth crept through his mittens and the arms of his coat. His knees, only a few inches from the stove, nearly blistered, but the cold pressed against his back. It slipped around the sides of his hood. He eyed the tiny pile of wood by the stove, the remains of the table he’d broken into pieces the day before. All the cabin’s goods sat on the floor since he’d burned the shelves earlier. Beside the remains of the table, the only other wood was a small box of kindling in case the fire went out, and the chair he sat on. Outside, snow covered the ground so deeply that there was no hope of finding deadfall. Besides, every tree within a mile had either been cut down for mine timbers or had its low branches cut off for firewood. He’d hauled the wood he’d been burning for the last ten days from a site four miles upstream, but that was long before the storm moved in, cutting visibility to a few feet.

In the room below, machinery thumped steadily. Water poured through a sluice to turn a wheel connected to a squat generator. Cables ran up the mountain to the mines’ compressors, clearing dead air from the tunnels and powering the drills, but Isaac couldn’t tell if the miners were still working. They probably were hunkered down like he was, in their bunk houses near the digging, or they were stuck in the town of Crystal. If they were working, the compressors needed to run.

He looked out the window. Thick frost coated the inside of the glass and snow piled half way up outside dimmed what light the dark afternoon offered. The window in his tiny, second story maintenance room was at least fifteen feet above the ground. Two weeks of non-stop snow had nearly buried the building. Ten days ago, when the supplies clerk dropped off a bag full of dried meat and two loaves of bread, he’d said, “First winter in the mountains, boy? It’ll get so cold your piss will freeze before it splashes your boots.”

Isaac hadn’t been able to open the outside door for the last three days. Heavy snow blocked it. He rubbed his mittens together, trying to distribute the heat. A steady wind moaned outside. Trees creaked. Something snapped sharply overhead. He glanced at the thick timbers supporting the roof. How much weight could they hold? How much crushing snow lay above him?

He sighed, unwilling to leave the stove’s meager heat, but he had a job to do. Checking for candles in his coat pocket, he walked down to the darkness of the generator room, a “Tommie Sticker” in hand to hold the light. It was a fancy one, with a brass match holder and a screw-on cap to keep the matches dry serving as the handle. Ice covered the stairs, and the air smelled wet and cold. He jammed the spike end of the Tommie Sticker into the plank wall, then carefully lit the candle, using both hands to hold the match steady against his shivering. Oil for the lamp had run out two days ago. The wavering candle revealed water pounding through the sluice against the horizontal wheel, turning it ponderously counter-clockwise.

Isaac used a two-pond hammer and chisel to clear ice from the water’s entrance and exit points. If the machinery stopped, miners would be without ventilation or power. Ice blocks as big as his head broke free from the structure and clattered to the unlevel floor, where they slid to the far wall. Despite the cold, he soon built up a sweat. He pulled his hood back and unfastened the coat’s top. When he finished, he would strip his coat and layers of shirts, replacing the damp undershirt with a dry one. If he didn’t, he’d be too cold to sleep later.

The work wasn’t unlike living in the monastery, he thought, complete with a vow of silence and constant labor to keep his hands busy. He thought about God and God’s plan. He never felt as close to heaven as he did when he worked alone, cut off from human conversation and the daily distractions. In a way, he hoped the storm would hold. As long as the weather cut him off, he could replicate life in the monastery. He had loved his room there. The rough-hewn bed and the blanket thrown over a thin mattress. He’d read by candlelight there, too. Yes, the generator house reminded him of the monastery. The wooden building felt like a cradle of the miraculous, a miracle that never occurred when he had been an initiate.

It hadn’t been this cold, though. No, not nearly so cold at all.

*  *  *

Meghan came awake slowly and in pain. Dr Arnold had decided four cycles ago that the powerful painkillers they used to soften the shift from the long sleep’s near death to full wakefulness were damaging, so they didn’t flood her system with them before they woke her. Lying as still as she could in the cocoon, her elbows and knees ached, as did her ankles and wrists. Even her knuckles hurt. A tear squeezed out of each eye and raced into her ears as she thought about clenching her fists for the first time on her own in a hundred years. Every move would hurt, at first, even though the mechanical manipulators flexed her joints daily.

When she’d gone to sleep last, crew chief Teague had refused. She’d shaken his hand before heading to her cocoon. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll have a rich and long life, working in the ship. In twenty-five years I’ll greet the next work crew.”

“I’ll never see you again,” said Meghan.

“Maybe you will. I’ll be old though.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “I can’t face the dark.”

Meghan could say nothing to that because she understood. Each time, climbing into the cocoon seemed like entering death. A one-hundred year long instant later she woke to pain. Even her skin hurt, the now active cells firing neurons back and forth, renewing contacts that had laid moribund for so long, but as she lay in the cocoon this time, she thought about Teague wandering through the ship, all the crews sleeping, and he would wander for years and years and years, twenty-five of them completely alone until the next crew woke, and what could he say to them? He’d have a quarter of a century of experience that none of them could share. For them, Earth was only a couple months in their wake. They were still young in all ways except years. Teague would greet them. “Hi,” he might say. “I’m what you will be someday.” In him, they’d watch their mortality.

Then, he’d wait twenty-five more years, alone, if he lived, and as an elderly man, he would welcome the next crew to their two weeks of busy wakefulness.

It was unlikely he would meet a third crew. He would be ninty-seven years old, and despite what he said, he certainly would not be alive when she awoke.

She had closed her eyes as the cocoon’s lid came down. Her muscles tightened. In a blink, the pain would come, the one-hundred year blink.

And it did.

It took several hours before she could shuffle to the infirmary. Waking was worse this time. Doctor Arnold said, “We haven’t gone a fifth of the way, yet.” He massaged her hands, lighting them with a million wincing tingles. “Some of the medical staff may stay awake longer than the two weeks for research.” Even though he was young, like her, tiny creases that would become worry lines were evident on his forehead.

She thought his eyes were kind, though. He flinched when she flinched. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m trying to be gentle.”

When Meghan reached her room, she pulled the protective plastic off her bed and found a fragile note folded on her pillow from crew chief Teague, who wrote, “Try the wall now.” He had signed and dated it twenty years earlier. An old man wrote this, she thought.

She waved her hand at the sensor, provoking a cascade of pain down her side. The wall flickered. The speakers whispered. Then the Crystal River winked into existence. Water burbled over rocks. Leaves rasped against each other. A long cloud in the distance slid slowly across a mountain top.

How long had Teague worked on the wall? A present for a young girl he would never see again.

The speakers popped twice, like a computer chip crunching somewhere and the sound turned off, then the image brightened and washed into a pure white. Meghan shaded her eyes before it too vanished. His repair lasted for ten seconds. How long had he worked on it? She tried to open the service panel, but it remained stubbornly closed. Frustrated, she slapped her hand against it, then grabbed the iron candle stick holder from under the bed. Its sharp end pried the small hatch open. Looking at the circuit board underneath revealed nothing, though. Circuit boards were not her area of expertise. The hatch wouldn’t reclose.

Meghan stared at the blank wall for a long time before seeking out Dr Arnold and his soft, kind hands.

“What is that?” he asked, pointing to the candle holder.

Meghan turned the artifact over in her fingers. She hadn’t realized that she still carried it. “It’s all I have from Earth. It’s a miner’s light.”

She slept with him for the rest of the two weeks until they returned to the cocoons again. The first time, as she pulled his shirt over his head, he said, “You’re going to have to quit calling me Dr Arnold. My name’s Sean.”

Once, she woke up, still unfamiliar with Sean’s shape, and listened to his breathing in the dark room. If she tried hard, it reminded her of wind through the leaves.

Isaac considered the various forms of meditation. He’d learned to plant a question in his mind, then to spend the day or days or weeks contemplating its implications and meaning. While pondering the question, he would read from the Bible or the many studies in the monastery’s library. Meditation was best during his vows of silence. At length, the question would glow in his head, like campfire coals. Now, lying on his bed, squeezing his arms close to his body, trying not to shiver, he considered why God allowed cold. Genesis told him that cold was one of the ways God showed man that the Earth would continue. It said, “While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.”

Twice in the night, the roof creaked loudly, the second time dumping a pile of snow onto the floor. Holding the Tommy Sticker high, he could see where a board had broken. He wondered how he could get outside of the generator house to knock snow off the roof, but the wind roared and the window showed no outside light at all now. He wasn’t sure if it was day or night. Was such a storm normal? He had no mountain experience. The monastery had been challenging, but it didn’t teach him how to survive here. If it had snowed for forty days and forty nights for Noah, instead of raining, it could hardly be worse than this.

The Bible wasn’t clear on snow. Mostly it appeared in the comparison “white as snow” in a dozen passages. He remembered somewhere the prophets linked it to leprosy. By candle he found the verse in Numbers. Turning the pages with his mittens was impossible, so he shucked them off and put them between his legs to keep them warm. The passage said, “And the cloud departed from off the tabernacle; and, behold, Miriam became leprous, white as snow: and Aaron looked upon Miriam, and, behold, she was leprous.” In Exodus he came across Moses turning a rod into a snake and back into a rod again. Then God said to Moses, “Put now thine hand into thy bosom. And he put his hand into his bosom: and when he took it out, behold, his hand was leprous as snow.”

Even God didn’t like snow.

The roof creaked again, sending another icy spill to the growing pile.

The door wouldn’t move. Forcing the weight that rested against it was impossible, so he tried the window and pushed it up. A solid white wall stood revealed. He jabbed a shovel into it, dumped snow on the floor, dug in again. A half hour later, he’d cleared a tunnel to the surface, about a foot above the window. He pushed the snow shoes out the hole and then climbed after them. The wind slammed into his face when he rolled to the surface, and his arm sank to his arm pit when he tried to right himself Strapping on the broad snow shoes took longer than he wished. Snow worked its way into the top of his shoes, froze into little balls on his gloves and fell down his collar. He couldn’t see even to the trees that stood twenty yards away from the generator house. His eyes watered, and his cheeks stung. The air’s gray luminosity revealed that it was day, but he could barely tell, nor did it matter.