EPTBeyond Reason
It began when the ship was seventy light years out from our home planet. A tiny event, at such incredible distance: one green diode amongst many winking out and a red one taking its place, four hundred and ten thousand million million miles - almost a full tenth of a percent of the galactic disc - from the factory where both had been stamped out of silicon and plastic.
Do you think, when ancient scholars said: "God sees each sparrow fall", that this is what they were trying to convey? Those words were written when a whole living, breathing creature represented insignificance; does it hold true even now in the age of electron microscopes, the Planck Length, the light year? We have long known that even God seems uncertain below the atomic scale; what else might escape His notice?
I wish I could take credit for that as an original idea; in truth I only parrot it second-hand. In the months of travel before our long sleep, one enterprising engineer back on Earth - we never found out who, though we toasted him every night with our tubes of concentrate - periodically disabled the carrier wave we used to calibrate our velocity and replaced it with television broadcasts. One such stuck in my mind even then, as I watched it with John in the ship's canteen. It seemed an odd choice for our nameless benefactor to make: a low-rent late-night discussion programme, all comfortable sofas and glasses of mineral water. The host - again I forget who - was joined by three guests, and between them they tossed around the chances of our mission succeeding.
The first guest I actually recognised, which is probably why the programme had been chosen for us: he was one of the engineers who had worked on the project.
"We've learned our lessons," he said. "Simplicity: that's the key. If there's less to go wrong, less will go wrong. Combine that with today's manufacturing processes and, well, let's just say I'm very confident."
The second guest, needless to say, took great exception to this assessment.
"For such a voyage to conclude successfully, across such a distance and such a span of time, the tolerance of failure must be vanishingly small. To err is human, after all; only God is capable of perfection."
I snorted and flung my empty glucose sachet at the monitor. John just sighed.
"Actually," the engineer replied, "the failure tolerance is extremely high; each sleep-pod, for example, can self-sustain for over a hundred hours in the unlikely event that the host system requires maintenance. We know things will go wrong; this isn't some blind leap of faith. We expected the worst and planned accordingly."
"It's interesting that you describe faith as blind," broke in the third guest. The expressions around the room spoke volumes: this was clearly something of a loose cannon, invited aboard in case the debate failed to sparkle.
"It's just a figure of speech," said the engineer.
"Yes, of course, but still - it is true, no, that some men of science and faith each believe the other's eyes to be closed?"
"I'm not sure what relevance this has..."
"The ancients believed the world to be flat, did they not, and supported by what you," the third guest indicated the engineer, "might call a 'pachyderm lattice'." We laughed with delight; this guy was priceless. The guest continued: "And yet they were proved wrong, by someone who disbelieved the evidence of their own eyes and senses, and set out to demonstrate that the world was round."
"And your point is...?" The engineer looked bemused. The third guest shrugged.
"Simply that we have no evidence, until we look, that anything functions contrary to our beliefs."
The engineer chuckled, leaning back on the couch.
"That's a rather fatuous statement."
"Only from the scientific perspective," said the third guest, smiling, "which is founded upon observation, or more properly upon the assumption of a definite reality beyond that of experience."
"So... you advocate faith over reason, then?" interjected the host.
"I advocate no such thing. Faith is the assumption of what might be. Science is the determination to observe what is, to pin the universe down. Both have served us well - and disgraced us - in the past; I would not presume to choose between them. Perhaps the world was always round; perhaps it was not. Perhaps it did not matter until Man set out to prove things one way or another."
"I still fail to see how this concerns our colonists..."
"It is a question of balance. Scientific knowledge has grown exponentially for many years, while our understanding of faith has stagnated. I merely wonder," continued the third guest, overriding the others' interruptions, "If God exists, how long can He keep satisfying our demand for understanding? We push our boundaries back further each day; now we have sent our finest minds deep into space - towards another world - equipped with the most penetrating scientific instruments; is it not written of God: 'Proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing?' What if that was not a warning to the faithless, but a plea for us to stop?"
The host announced a commercial break, and from then until the end of the programme the third guest did not speak another word, not even to rise to the others' occasional jibes. The broadcast ended in due course without ever concluding whether we would live or die, and two months later it seemed our anonymous engineering hero had been vanquished: the illicit broadcasts ceased.
Now it is thirty-five years later, and in that time we have overtaken that enigmatic broadcast, left it behind in our race to the stars, and still God sees his sparrows fall: one green light becoming red so very far from home.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 10 : 16 . 13
John Daley opened his eyes. Fireflies in the night, he thought, not asleep and not yet awake, his dream already fading, forgotten.
I'm alive was his second thought.
We're here was his third.
Fluorescents blinked on around the circular sleep-pod bay. Daley floated, watching frost refold its fans from the Perspex lid above him, subliming back into breathable air. The pod's internal appendages whirred, administering gentle electric reminders to his muscles, stirring his heart from its long sabbatical and commanding it to beat once more.
We're here, he thought again, and this time his body could respond with chemical excitement. It all worked. He smiled, grinned, wheezed laughter despite the pain. We're here!
DAVIS PULSE: T - 10 : 01 . 20
We congregated outside the flight deck hatch: six pasty, nude, skeletal creatures drifting and bumping and giggling in careful whispers, like a slumber party up past our bedtime. Eddie Coombs, the captain; John Daley, chief engineer; Emily Kline, Fission/Fusion engineer - we called her Fishfood, naturally - Steve Baxter; Robin Clearwater the medical officer who managed to make even bald emaciation look sexy, damn her, and me: James Bancroft.
"As captain I say we leave the rest asleep," croaked Coombs, waggling the skin where his eyebrows would eventually grow back. "I call equator; you lot can fight over the temperate zones."
There was a leaf-swirl rustle of mirth, and five hands went to throats, their owners wincing. Sleep, and all the tubing it entailed, was hard on the vocal chords.
Beside the hatch a small black panel lit up, and chimed. We cheered as best we could, clustering close behind Coombs as he touched his palm to the panel. The hatch slid open and we cascaded through like slow champagne bubbles.
"We were supposed to get five days' recuperation," grumbled Kline, struggling with switches she was almost too weak to flip. "Five days in the pods to get our strength back."
"Computer say jump, Emily" replied Daley, his voice loud and scratchy. "We say..."
"Thank Christ it's zero-gee," chorused everyone, except Emily of course, who just frowned.
"I dream of a world..." chimed in Steve Baxter, from his berth in COM/Ops.
"Where we never have to hear that joke again!" we all finished off.
We settled down then, each attending our stations, checking our readouts, running diagnostics, rerunning them, running checks on the diagnostic software - everything we were trained to do. At first there was silence because everyone was busy. Then there was silence because nobody wanted to speak. In the end it was me who made it official, made it real.
"We're not there yet."
As soon as I'd spoken I wanted to take it back; it felt like it was somehow my fault, now. The captain rescued me.
"How far have we come, John?"
"According to the simulation, about seventy LY. We're in sub-light transit; ten hours until the next pulse," reported Daley.
Seventy. Less than half way. Not that the proportion mattered; we would need to sleep again regardless to conserve air and food, but I could feel everyone sag.
"So why are we up and about?"
Nobody knew. All systems were clear, all the backups were clear. The tachyon shielding was in place, crew life support had restarted without a hitch, and the reactor hadn't deviated from ideal by more than a degree for the last hundred million million miles. The Davis drive - there wasn't really anything to go wrong with that, though I had run the tests anyway. It was currently in accumulation mode, cooking up another batch of tachyons for the next pulse, the next supra-light hop. Everything was in the green.
"Who checked Eve?" asked Robin.
Silence. Everyone looked at one another.
"Jesus," snarled Coombs, launching himself back towards the hatch, his anger all the more frightening somehow for his frailty.
"Who was supposed to do it?" I asked. Baxter caught my eye and shook his head. I understood: this was not the time.
We caught up with Coombs in the main crawlway, a ladder-lined octagonal tube running between flight operations and cryo-storage. We called it the Tow-Bar, though in reality our cargo preceded us, the great bulk of the Davis drive bringing up the rear. Flight ops, including the flight deck, canteen, main airlock and our separate sleep bay, was sandwiched between the two.
Daley reached the end hatch first and palmed the controls. There was a pause, the hatch slid open, and we went to see Eve.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 09 : 25 . 00
Emily hung back while the others filed through the hatch. She always felt uncomfortable around Eve, though she could never articulate why. That wasn't its real name, of course. The panel with the manufacturer's logo described it as 'VLSCMU model 8', and a serial number. The crew called her Eve: the mother of everyone. Emily wished they wouldn't; she didn't have the religious 'bee in her bonnet' that the others sometimes mentioned when they thought she couldn't hear, but the life support machine was just that: a machine, a thing. Comparing it - however indirectly - with God's primal creation was either hubris or belittlement. It was an argument she had long since tired of pursuing.
Robin, the last to follow apart from Emily, turned and gave her a reassuring smile.
"Come on, it'll be fine. I expect Eve's had a brain-fart, nothing to worry about. Happens all the time; usually the core cleans itself out and restarts. She probably just wants us to hold her hand this time."
Emily shook herself. She was being stupid, and she knew it. Ignoring the knot in her stomach, she pushed off the ladder wall and swung through the hatch.
Here, so close to main life support, the constant, comforting sub-bass hum of the Davis drive was overwhelmed. When the crew had first come aboard Steve had joked that L/S sounded like hotel plumbing: all whispering sighs and rumbling, liquid gurgles as the massive gas exchangers inhaled and exhaled, extracting waste, breaking it down and drip-feeding the oxygen to the sleeping guests. Nothing high-tech, nothing delicate to degrade and go wrong; in its design L/S verged on the agricultural. And in the middle of it all: Eve, undisputed matriarch, verdant in her toroidal Garden of Eden: a central column, gleaming with twenty thousand equally-spaced bright green jewels, ringed by instrumentation - and there, near the top, a single ruby dot.
Not a brain-fart: pod failure.
"Human or livestock?" asked Steve. Robin was already at the controls, bringing up page after page of readouts and frowning at all of them. Emily thought she looked a little freakish in the emerald glow, with her bald head and wasted limbs; almost elf-like, or like the 'greys' paranoids were perennially convinced were invading the planet. Their old planet.
"Human," Robin replied, not taking her eyes from the screen. "This can't be right. We need to get that pod out here. Captain?"
Coombs joined her, and together they palmed the twin panels either side of the main screen. Spotlights bloomed above a railed gantry at the far side of the room, and a circle of red indicators illuminated around an iris-shaped airlock hatch at its end.
"Buried?" asked John.
"Pretty well; fourth layer. Eve's having to do some shuffling. Here we go."
One by one the indicators faded, and soon the crew could hear the shushing of actuators and the thin whine of approaching movement on the guide rails. The hatch opened and a pod emerged, decelerating smoothly to a halt. Steve was closest, and wiped away the fog that had condensed on the lid the moment vacuum-cooled plastic hit air. He shot an incredulous look at Robin. She shrugged.
"Bullshit," said Steve finally. "What the hell is this?"
"What?" The others had held back - squeamish, Emily thought - but now they launched themselves across the room to take a look. Coombs just stared through the Perspex, his jaw muscles working. Jamie laughed shortly, and looked embarrassed. Eventually curiosity got the better of Emily, and she joined them.
The pod was empty.
"It's a spare," said the captain. "Eve's got her wires crossed."
Robin shook her head.
"The log says it was occupied," she said, "it's not one of the spares; the
serial number tallies. Look: the infusion tubes aren't stowed; the restraints
are out and secured. Someone was in here."
"Who?"
No, don't, thought Emily in sudden panic. Don't tell us. I couldn't stand knowing.
Robin checked the screen again.
"Claire Booth," she said. "Wife of Martin, mother of Charles and Mary."
Emily crossed herself reflexively. Jamie and John looked sickened.
"So where is she? How did she get out?" Coombs looked from face to face. "Come on, let's hear some ideas; a woman can't just vanish."
"Maybe she was never in - or they had to take her out before we launched?" Jamie tailed off as Robin shook her head.
"There's full biotelemetry here, stable right up to two hours ago. That's when our own defrost programs were initiated by the emergency circuits. After that there's nothing."
"She didn't wake up?"
"No."
"Then... what?"
There was an uncomfortable pause. Eve inhaled, exhaled.
"Ok," said Coombs, clapping his hands. "We have a puzzle to solve. We're smart people; puzzle solving is what they put us here to do, should the need arise. The need has arisen. I want to know where Claire Booth is, and how she got there. Jamie: no problems with the drive?"
Jamie shook his head. He dragged his eyes away from the pod.
"No. Like they say: once it's cycling it's harder to stop than it is to keep it going."
"Good. You and Steve: if you have any brainwaves in the next few hours I want to hear about them, meantime I want you both on Boosters, and then I want you suited up and out there," he pointed to the rear wall and the iris hatch "checking the exterior hull for breaches, and Mrs Booth's pod bay."
Both Steve and Jamie winced, but nodded and swung out into the Tow-Bar together. Emily gave Steve a sympathetic look, and noticed Robin do the same for Jamie. Boosters were no picnic.
"Everybody else," continued Coombs, "I want your full attention. We have one empty pod, and nineteen thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine full ones; I do not want those figures to change except for the better, is that clear? I want to know if this can happen again, and if it can I want to know what we have to do to prevent it."
Robin and John nodded, more positively this time. Emily could see them focusing, setting aside the unpleasant humanity of the situation and abstracting the problem, formulating plans of attack. Coombs was right, after all: they were there because they were puzzle solvers, and this was a challenge to relish. For an unworthy moment she wished she too could set her feelings aside so easily. She hugged herself, nibbling her lower lip, stared at the empty pod. One red light in all that green.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 09 : 15 . 20
Steve and I floated back to our pods in silence. What was there to say? We did exchange a glance of shared distaste, though, as we settled in and tapped out the boost sequence.
"See you on the other side, James." Steve reached out and, with considerable effort, swung the pod door closed. I followed suit.
Recuperation, as Emily had said earlier, usually took five days - and that was the bare minimum for comfort. It was theoretically possible, given a supremely fit subject, to accelerate regeneration to two hours fifty-five minutes. More likely the sleeper in question would suffer catastrophic failure of his or her major organs, and die a spectacularly painful and protracted death.
Boosting struck what the smirking scientists who had explained it called 'a happy medium'. It was almost guaranteed not to kill a healthy subject, and with the aid of powerful tranquilizers and painkillers could turn a sleeper into a functional human being in a little over ten hours. The discomfort of the process, and the payback when the prescribed dosage of painkillers has been consumed and worn off, were best left to the imagination.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 09 : 13 . 30
John left Robin, Emily and Coombs in with Eve, and pushed for the flight deck. The ship ticked and hummed around him, a symphony of tiny mechanical yeses. It didn't feel like anything was wrong.
It was a ticklish problem, no doubt about that. The first task, as he saw it, was to determine whether the missing mass was still on board, and the easiest way to do that was to compare their actual velocity and acceleration with that predicted by the simulation. The change would be infinitesimal, of course, but with sufficiently accurate telemetry it ought to be detectable. It was time to find out where they really were.
On the flight deck he went to Steve's console and brought up a new menu. The screen cleared and showed a schematic of the ship, highlighting a bracelet of green blobs around the main crawlway. John flipped up the cover of a switch marked 'VLIA docking override' and clicked it to 'off'.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 09 : 12 . 52
Emily, drifting along the tow-bar away from Eve, jerked in shock as a rattling hail of impacts cascaded down the length of the tube. A moment later she understood, but it had been enough to set her heart hammering. She shook her head in exasperation.
"Blast it all," she muttered, checking her pulse. Way too high for the state she was in; she would burn through her body's meagre store of carbohydrates in no time. Rather than continue through to the flight deck, she grabbed a ladder rung and arced gracefully out of the tow-bar towards the canteen.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 09 : 10 . 10
Inhale - longer and deeper than any organic lungs could ever manage. Liquid gurgled as spent cryo-fluid was exchanged for fresh. Exhale. Edward listened to Eve as he worked alongside Robin. He had been surprised when he, a lowly life support tech, was chosen to captain the voyage. They had told him why: each mission specialist had their own task. His was to make sure they all got there alive; who better, then, to put in the position of greatest responsibility and least personal danger?
Except he had already failed. How could he have been so stupid as to forget to check Eve? His eyes kept wandering back to the empty pod. His big speech earlier replayed over and over in his mind, sounding more false and meaningless with each iteration. He knew, even if the others didn't, that the pod had not been opened, either by force or by malfunction. He had worked on the prototype, for God's sake; he knew the parameters of error. For a pod to spontaneously open, disgorge its occupant and close again within the confines of its bay was unthinkable, impossible. And if it wasn't, if this was some hideous flaw overlooked in all the years of simulation and testing, then it was almost certainly a design oversight, not a manufacturing defect. Something intrinsic to every pod.
He glanced across at Robin, and hoped and prayed they would find something different behind that one red bulb.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 09 : 03 . 46
"You could have warned me, you know." Emily swung in next to John. "Want one?" She proffered a silver pouch, which he took with a nod of thanks. Emily pulled the straw out from hers and squished the foil between her fingers, triggering the chemical heating element.
"Sorry," said John. "I forgot what a racket it makes out there."
"What's the plan? Ah," Emily forestalled him. "Is she still on board; I see. Very good."
"The array will be in place in..." John pressed a button "Just under two hours. I should have our position not long after."
"Need any help?"
John pursed his lips.
"Good numbers from the reactor would help; let's say... nanosecond increments for ten seconds either side of the event?"
"No problem." Emily pushed away to her own console and strapped in, glad of something to do. John called over his shoulder to her:
"What's your money on? Assuming we still had money, of course. I still can't get used to that. No more paycheques, ever. Anyway, what do you think we'll find?"
"Honest scientific opinion, or honest gut feeling?"
"There's a difference?"
"Har har. I don't know. I think she's gone."
"Hmm."
"What?"
"Nothing. Doesn't matter."
Emily hesitated, hands hovering over the keyboard.
"What doesn't matter?" she asked.
"It's... I hope we find her, that's all. The body can tell us how it happened. I don't like the alternative."
"That we can't find out what caused the accident?"
"No: that it wasn't an accident."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 07 : 11 . 08
Robin blinked and frowned, massaging her temple. Her headache was getting worse.
"Go to the canteen; take ten and get some fluids inside you," said Coombs, not looking up from his own screen.
"I'm all right."
"Go. Now. Bring me something back, too; this isn't a macho thing. My head feels like a bass drum."
Robin took a last look at the screen and nodded.
"Back in a sec. I'll check on Jamie and Steve while I'm up there." She pushed away from the console and flipped through the hatch. It was a favourite manoeuvre; if she judged it right she could drift all the way to the flight-deck without so much as brushing the walls. This time she pulled it off perfectly. She floated, eyes closed, consciously tensing and relaxing each muscle group in turn, working the kinks out of her limbs. She loved zero-g; it would be the only thing she missed when they finally made landfall.
She opened her eyes a few feet from the far wall, caught a handrail and rebounded lightly into the crew pod bay. She checked on Steve first. His eyes were closed, his brainwaves on the monitor panel regular and even: he had evidently opted to be knocked out for the duration. She didn't blame him. His whole body was red and swollen, poked and prodded by the pod's manipulators and hypodermics.
She looked into Jamie's pod, and was surprised to see his eyes open and alert. He saw her, and winked. She touched the communication panel on the side of the pod.
"How is it going?" she asked.
He gave the tiniest of shrugs, all the restraints would allow him. Robin pantomimed a sigh, and lowered her voice.
"I can see a lot of swelling. Shame I'm out here, really; the captain told me to get some fluids inside me." She pulled herself up against the Perspex and fluttered her eyelashes at him. He mouthed the word bitch, and she giggled.
"Check on you in an hour," she said, and waved goodbye.
On the flight deck she found John and Emily together at the COM/Ops station. The screen showed a tiny image of the ship in the centre of a halo of green and blue dots. As she watched, the remaining green dots also changed to blue, and the scene shifted to make room for a frequency graph.
"Right," said John. "Interferometer array is in position and calibrated. Let's find our carrier wave."
"Can we pick that up, still?" asked Emily.
"We should be able to. We won't outpace the leading edge for another five LY or so. Let's see... yes, there we go." John pointed to a wavering spike in the leftmost quarter of the graph. "Ok, we have the carrier; let's see the signal."
Another window opened, displaying a twenty-digit decimal number. The rightmost figures were an ascending blur; most of those on the left were zeroes.
"Based on that, we're... as I thought, about five years from the leading edge of the broadcast."
Robin marvelled at his matter-of-fact tone. The signal on his monitor had been sent from Earth thirty-five years before the mission even launched, and he treated it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Then again, relativity was his bread and butter; it was in his blood, even: his grandfather had helped refine the original Davis equations.
"Is that enough to locate us?" asked Emily.
"No," said John. "The Doppler of the signal gives us our speed, but I need to triangulate on local stars to reduce the error margin on our position. I'm going to divide the array and make a hundred-point sweep; that should be sufficient."
"Before you do," interrupted Robin, "Could we take a look at ourselves? I never believed that was possible, and... well, while we're up, you know? If it won't take too long."
John shrugged.
"Won't take more than a minute." He tapped some commands into the console and waited. "Ok," he said, pointing at a broad peak much further up the graph this time. "That's us in radio, and..." he pressed another button. "That's us in optical wavelengths."
Robin and Emily both leaned in closer.
"I'll be darned," said Emily. "We really do look like we're going backwards."
Robin frowned and squinted. Sure enough the tiny image was shrinking, the magnification occasionally adjusting to compensate.
"I don't understand," she said. "We're sublight now; how can we be leaving our image behind?"
John laughed out loud, until he saw Robin's face.
"Sorry," he said. "It's like this: what you're seeing is light from our last hop, when we were FTL. Because of that, the light from the end of the hop reaches us before the light from the beginning. It's like..." he visibly searched for an analogy. "It's like when people used to send postcards home while they were on holiday, and then bring photographs back with them on the plane; the mail would arrive after they got home, so their family could see photos from the end of the holiday before a postcard sent at the start."
"So if we waited here long enough..."
"We'd see our previous sublight transit begin, travel towards us, merge with this retreating image and vanish."
Robin rolled her eyes.
"Now I remember why I studied medicine," she said, pushing away from the console. As she swung out through the hatch she heard John say:
"Ok, array division complete, starting local triangulation... now."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 06 : 57 . 50
A buzzer sounded.
Edward's hands froze on the keyboard. An alert window popped open on his monitor:
WARNING: POD MALFUNCTION. Click here to open diagnostics
"Oh shit."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 06 : 57 . 47
"That's strange," said John.
"What?" Emily tensed. Dear Lord, I'm jumpy, she thought.
"I don't... The satellites won't focus properly on the target stars. None of them can resolve an image."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 06 : 57 . 42
Edward stared at his screen, at four straight, flat, horizontal lines. Then the display was overlaid with a new window:
WARNING: POD MALFUNCTION. Click here to open diagnostics
"Oh my God..."
A third window stacked on the second, then a fourth, a fifth - more and more, in an accelerating diagonal staircase.
"Oh Jesus, God, no..."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 06 : 57 . 36
"Here we go; starting to acquire now. How very odd."
"Has that ever happened before?"
"No. What's that noise?"
DAVIS PULSE: T - 06 : 57 . 09
"Stop it! Stop it!" A small, distant part of Edward knew that he was shrieking and pounding at the screen, knew that he shouldn't be, that there was a protocol to follow, a well-drilled sequence of diagnostics, evaluation and treatment to be administered. For some reason he just couldn't stop screaming. There was blood on the monitor; how had that got there? Then there were voices shouting his name, and hands tugging at him, pulling him away, leaving a trail of black, glistening droplets. His hands... there was something wrong with his hands...
A rushing noise in his ears built to a thunderous roar, and the world shrank to nothing.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 06 : 56 . 02
"What's happening? What's he done?" Emily cowered in the hatchway. Robin and John struggled to subdue Coombs's thrashing.
"He's fitting," shouted Robin. "We need to get him to the pod bay, now. His body can't take this; it's going to pack up if we don't get him stabilised."
"Oh my God..." Emily's hand went to her mouth, her eyes huge and glistening, staring past Robin.
"Emily? Emily! We need help here? oh fuck..." Robin faltered as she too saw what had rooted Emily to the spot. Eve was bleeding.
Not literally, of course, but everywhere on the great green trunk bloomed patches and strips of red lights. There had to be hundreds of them. Even as she watched, several more green lights flickered to red. Coombs stiffened briefly, and went limp.
"What did he do?" whispered Emily.
"If we want to find that out," said John, his voice level, "we need to get the captain to the pod bay, or he is going to die. Emily: go ahead of us and make sure his pod is configured for crash recovery. Can you do that for me? Good. Go."
He turned to Robin and took her face in his hands, forcing her to look at him.
"There's nothing you can do here. If Coombs has set this off, he knows too much about Eve for you to stop it. If he didn't - and I don't think he did - then there is nothing any of us can do." He took her hands and clamped them around Coombs's shoulders. "Here is a man you can save; do it."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 06 : 54 . 25
I was starting to regret my decision to remain conscious. I checked the panel for the n'th time: a bit less than six hours to go. Perhaps I would take that knockout shot after all.
Emily sped past the front of my pod, her face tight with anxiety. What the hell?
A few seconds later Robin and John drifted past, manipulating between them the limp form of Coombs. There was dried foam around the unconscious man's lips, and his hands were bloody and looked... wrong somehow. Nobody so much as glanced in my direction.
The next ten minutes were the longest of my life. I could see and hear nothing of what went on.
Robin came back and looked in on me. Her voice came through the tinny internal speakers.
"Coombs got a bit - over excited. We had to sedate him; he'll be ok, but his hands... our bones are very brittle before regeneration." Her eyes shifted, reluctant to meet mine.
Eventually she said: "We lost some more pods, Jamie."
How, I mouthed. For once I was glad of the regimented calm imposed by the Boosting process.
"We don't know yet. Coombs was on his own with Eve." She looked frightened.
How many?
"I don't know. A lot."
I closed my eyes. I couldn't do this, couldn't lie here, trapped, and wait for something else to go wrong.
Override the process.
"Don't be ridiculous, Jamie, I'm not going to do that."
Two hours. I've been here for two; I can make it out in another two. Do it!
She shook her head. Tears scattered, lacking gravity to pull them down her cheeks. I had to wait for her to clear her vision before I could speak again.
Don't leave me in here. Please.
She hesitated a while longer, then reached down and opened the manual override panel. She tapped in new instructions, sniffing and wiping her eyes, and closed it again. I felt the change immediately; the dull burning in my limbs and spine intensified, and I had to force a grimace from my face before she could see it.
Thank you, I mouthed to her.
In reply she touched her fingers to her lips, and pressed them to the Perspex cover. The burning ramped up another level, and I closed my eyes, concentrating on memories of her from before the sleep: a wickedly arched eyebrow; a playful smile; the glossy black hair she would nibble to help her think, or to stifle her cries when we made love.
The pod beeped to itself. One hour fifty-nine minutes remaining.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 04 : 40 . 00
John checked the seal on the suit helmet, and made the 'ok' sign. Jamie's bulky, gloved hand returned the gesture. John had to resist the urge to lower the man's gold-plated sun-visor; this far from any suns such a precaution was unnecessary.
"You're good to go," he said. "Remember: stick to the hull; if you have to back off for any reason, no more than ten meters. Five circuits of the outside at regular intervals, then we'll take a look inside."
Again the 'ok' sign, and between them Robin and John helped Jamie turn and enter the airlock. Robin watched through the observation port as the lock cycled and the outer door opened. John was fleetingly glad the two of them seemed to have finally decided to come clean about their relationship; it had become a trial pretending, for their sake, that everyone on board hadn't already known. Then more pressing concerns crowded in again.
"Come on," he said, touching Robin's shoulder. "We've got work to do. I need you to patch my console into Eve's database so we can run a simultaneous plot of all onboard systems. I also need a time-coded transcript of keystrokes from the console Coombs was using."
Robin took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and nodded.
"Give me five minutes," she said.
"Ok. When you're done I want you on the flight deck with me; I need you to interpret the data. While Coombs is out of action you're the expert in the field."
The truth was he could interpret the data just fine; there wasn't a system on the ship he couldn't read like sheet music. Robin needed purpose and direction, however; they couldn't afford another personality implosion.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 04 : 30 . 20
Seventy light years, thought Emily. The grand old Apollo missions had ventured less than a millionth of a millionth as far, and when number thirteen went wrong the crew were just as on their own, just as dependent on themselves for rescue.
That wasn't true, though. They could talk to Earth, draw upon all those experts, even - had the worst become inevitable - have said goodbye to their loved ones.
If this ship foundered, it would be seventy years before anyone on Earth knew, and all her loved ones would be dead.
The point of no return had passed while they were still inside the orbit of Neptune: once the conventional propellant was exhausted the ion drive had taken over, and when that became ineffective the Davis drive had rocked them back and forth across the light speed barrier for the last twenty years. To decelerate they would deploy a solar sail - a solar parachute, really - and use the ion drive together with the sunlight of their new home to bring them down to orbital velocity. That could not happen for another ninety-two light years.
This wasn't how it was supposed to be. They had slept with Sol still bright at their backs; they should have woken to a second Sol: a new dawn before them, a new home beckoning a few short months ahead. That's what she had signed for; that's what she had chosen, not to wake half way in this... ghost ship hurtling rudderless through permanent night.
Nobody should be this alone, Lord, thought Emily. She examined the chewed stubs of her fingernails without really seeing them. Nobody should be this far from home. I know You see everything, Lord; know everything - but did You ever think we would stray this far? Can You still see us? She could just about hear the others talking, discussing options and strategies. She tucked her knees up under her chin and wrapped her arms around her shins. Just a little longer, to pray for guidance and gather her thoughts. It was nice and quiet here; nobody would disturb her; she would just stay a little longer, until she felt better, until the dreadful nothingness outside receded.
Were you with Claire Booth, Lord? Or did she slip from Your sight?
Just a little longer.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 02 : 00 . 34
"Ok, I've reached the service hatch. Did we miss anywhere?"
I waited. John's voice crackled into the suit.
"No, James: we've done five full circuits of the cargo hull, end to end."
I think you'll find I've done five full circuits , I thought, blinking perspiration out of my eyes. The ship had looked huge when my shuttle had docked with it in Earth orbit; it seemed even bigger on foot.
"Well, I haven't seen any evidence of damage," I said.
Again a pause.
"Ok, the cargo hull's intact. Proceed inside."
"What about the front-plate?"
Pause.
"If that were holed we'd all be dead already."
"Understood. Opening the service hatch now."
The hardest part of operating in space is the sheer patience required to do everything at the snail's pace safety demands. It seemed to take an age just to operate the hatch controls. I took one last look at the red-shifted panorama behind the ship - the stars ahead were obscured, for obvious reasons, behind the gamma and tachyon shielding - and pulled myself inside.
There was no airlock to cycle this time: the pod bay was kept depressurised. Inside, our human cargo was arranged like concentric layers of corn-on-the-cob, all oriented with their heads pointing inwards towards the axis. Eve lay at one end of that axis, and pods travelled to and from the airlock there via guide rails. I had entered at the far end, immediately behind the shield cap, and used my magnetic boots to 'stand' on the interior surface of the hull.
Row after row of dark, bulbous shapes gleamed around and above me in the light from the suit lamps, like monstrous larvae caught in a spider-web of magnesium struts. Most displayed a pale green square on their status panel, but here and there were single pods, patches and groups of pods even, whose panels blinked red. It was Eve writ large - or rather the other way around: Eve was built to match the physical arrangement in here, so that any localised failure would be apparent at a glance.
"I'm inside. No visible damage or disturbance."
"Ok. The nearest malfunction to you is pod forty-eight by five by three: that's two from the end, fifth and outermost layer, third pod clockwise."
"Got it." I clanked around the inside of the hull, each boot resisting for a moment to be sure I meant to lift it, and to check that the other foot was secure before the magnets would let go. I moved slowly, trying not to touch anything.
I pointed my wrist-torch at the side of the pod John had indicated. The serial number matched: 48/5/3. There were no signs of damage; nothing frozen on the exterior surface or surrounding structures as there inevitably would be if a pressurized pod opened to vacuum.
"It's empty," I said. I think the tranquillisers I was on must have been regulating my mood, because I didn't really feel anything saying the words. The pod was empty. Thirty years ago a man or woman or child had kissed their family goodnight, climbed inside, and now they were gone.
"What about its neighbours?"
I shone my torch into an adjacent, functional pod. Its occupant was a man, pale and drawn, securely wired to the equipment that held him dangling over death's precipice. His eyes were closed.
"They're fine."
"Any sign of the missing occupants?"
"No. We've been in free-fall since the event: no reason for them to have moved or collected anywhere. There's no... debris. They aren't here."
A long pause. Then the radio crackled back to life.
"Ok, Jamie. From where you are, is there anything else you think we should investigate?"
I looked around.
"Can't think of anything."
"Let's have you back inside, then."
"Right. I'm coming via the outside; it'll be quicker and I don't want to knock anything in here by mistake."
"Understood. See you at the airlock."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 01 : 02 . 13
Emily heard Robin and John's voices approach and grow clearer, then fade again. They had left the bridge, no doubt to welcome Jamie back inside - especially Robin; the woman was shameless. Emily uncurled from her foetal position and pushed out into the tow-bar. She had found the little niche not long after launch, and in the months before sleep had often used it as a quiet place to meditate and pray, away from the others' veiled condescension. They were so sober and understanding about her faith, as if it were a disfigurement they prided themselves on being able to ignore. And even now, before the bare face of the impossible, they still turned to machines to answer their questions.
Well, let them try. After all, was she any better? She was about to use a machine to give her reassurance, because she was weak.
"Forgive me, Lord," she whispered.
She slipped onto the flight deck, to Steve Baxter's console. The Interferometer Array was still in place, but inactive; John must have shut the data feeds down for some reason. Working quickly, she highlighted all of the satellites and slaved them together. Individually they were barely equivalent to the great-granddaddy of them all: the Hubble space telescope, but operating as a unit their resolving power was almost inconceivable. She entered the relevant coordinates, and clicked to reactivate the feeds.
DAVIS PULSE: T - 00 : 59 . 42
"Still with us, Jamie?" said Robin into the comms unit beside the airlock.
"Still here," came the reply. "You know, when they designed these boots, they must have tried all kinds of ideas. And then one of them must have got stuck knee-deep in a muddy field and thought: "Yes! That's it! That's exactly what it should feel like."
Robin could picture him grinning at their laughter, and knew all over again why it was she loved him.
"You could always switch them off," said John.
"Oh, sure," said Jamie, "and then I..." The radio went quiet.
"Jamie?" Robin tapped the panel. "Jamie? What's the matter? Jamie?"
DAVIS PULSE: T - 00 : 59 . 08
There you are, thought Emily. She pulled herself as close to the screen as she could, drinking in the image, relief washing over her. At such a vast range even the VLIA could produce nothing more than a tiny blue crescent - but it was still there. Earth, as it had been thirty-five years before she left.
She wondered whether that particular night had been clear, whether her father had trained his own modest telescope upon the star they were now racing towards, lifted her up to see as he often did, and whispered:
"That's where we're going, one day."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 00 : 59 . 00
I could hear Robin's voice, ever more frantic, but I just couldn't speak. I couldn't move - couldn't think, for that matter. All I could do was stare upwards in dumb animal terror.
"Jamie!" The scream distorted to almost pure white noise in the suit's headphones.
"Robin..."
"What is it? What's happening?"
"Robin... oh Jesus, Robin; the stars are going out."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 00 : 58 . 51
Emily jolted back from the console as Robin's scream echoed through the ship. She flailed for but missed the strapping, and had to wait, slowly tumbling, until she fetched up against the opposite bulkhead. John appeared in the hatchway. He looked at the screen and the precious scrap of blue it showed. Then he looked at her, and her heart shrank.
"What?" she demanded. "I didn't do anything! I just wanted to see..."
John turned away.
"Don't you ignore me like that!" shouted Emily, launching herself after him. "Don't you dare!"
She managed to catch him in the tow-bar. She grappled with his legs; he kicked free with a grunt and hauled himself through the hatchway into Eve's chamber. Emily scrambled after him. What she found there blew all thought out of her head.
"Oh, my God."
It was like a slaughterhouse. Eve's once emerald trunk was now crimson, veined with green; the walls lit in the colour of dried blood.
"I didn't do anything..."
"That hardly matters now." John had his back to her.
"Please, you have to believe me: I didn't do anything."
"I believe you." He turned, and Emily saw he was crying. "Truly I do - about everything . I always did demand proof..." He wiped his eyes. "Come with me; please. We have a very important message to send."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 00 : 41 . 02
Robin floated, Jamie wrapped in her arms, and felt at peace. He had cried at first, shaking uncontrollably as she peeled the suit off him, but now he was quiet. She stroked his back. At last he lifted his head.
"Where are the others?" he asked.
"I saw John and Emily go back to the flight deck," she said, "but I haven't heard them for a while."
"We should go and look," said Jamie. Robin nodded. They moved together; holding hands made manoeuvring awkward but neither suggested letting go.
Coombs's pod was empty. They studied Steve's sleeping form for a while, and then left the pod bay in silence.
The flight deck too was empty. They held each other, watching the gleaming, unimaginably distant blue crescent and reading John's message as it was broadcast, over and over, with all the power the reactor could muster.
"Do you think they'll understand?"
Jamie shrugged.
"I'm not sure I understand."
"Are you afraid?"
"Yes. A bit."
"Me too. Come here."
DAVIS PULSE: T - 00 : 38 . 02
We floated, at first just holding each other. Then, despite my fear of her frailty, we gave and took what pleasure we could from each other's bodies, and for a time there was only us, together. I cried again afterwards, and she held my head against her breast until I stopped.
"Is it like dying, do you think?" I asked her.
"I don't know. Wait and see."
I closed my eyes for a while, and when I opened them she was gone.
I looked in on Eve, all alone now in her crimson cave, and closed the hatch behind me when I left. On the flight deck I read John's message again, and decided to leave one of my own, or as much as I had time for.
It seems that lunatic third guest on the nameless chat show was right after all, though our proof will surely arrive too late to vindicate him. That God exists, or at least something worthy of the name, is now beyond doubt. He holds and keeps us all, and strives - out of love, Emily would insist - to satisfy our curiosity about the infinite and infinitesimal. Yet we have exceeded Him: struck out, in our eagerness and cleverness, for a mirage He never meant us to reach.
Perhaps He does love us, or at least knows we exist. Surely an uncaring Universe would not have known to preserve the ship, without which all of us would have died; preserve it long enough for us to understand and send our warning home. I hope and - yes, I pray - that Emily was right. Will you thank us for this knowledge, back on Earth, or curse us? Will you learn? Will you even believe? I wonder...
DAVIS PULSE: T - 00 : 00 . 01
DAVIS PULSE INITIATED.
