Prime Identity

by Robert Schmitt

  “Alright, Houston.” I spoke into my radio and looked out of the hatch again. “I’m at height with the station, but I’m going to need guidance on a direction.”

  “We’re reading your location now.” A voice answered back in my ear a moment later. “Make for heading two-nine. Assuming you can get to orbital speed within the next minute or so, that should put you on an intercept course with the station.”

  Glancing at the GPS on my wrist to orient myself, I twisted the spacetime around the module and pulled it forward at a rate I wouldn’t have dared attempt were I not in hard vacuum. I ignored the pain spreading around my skull, my focus on the readout from the GPS. As the seconds ticked by and my speed steadily climbed higher, I experienced something I hadn’t expected. I could feel the natural lines of spacetime projected from both me and the module lengthen and stretch outward, no longer pointed directly down toward the earth, but rather out along a curved path that slowly descended toward the distant horizon. With a strange lurch of realization, I understood: I was seeing the orbital path the module would follow if I were to release my field around it.

  Closing my eyes to better focus, I kept the field up around the module for a few more seconds, all the while keeping my mind concentrated on the lines of spacetime extending from me and the module. I sensed the moment when those lines finally broke contact with the surface of the earth, and after another few seconds of acceleration, I cut the field over the module entirely.

  Unstrapping myself, I pushed off the seat and floated out toward the outer hatch. For once, I was in freefall without using my powers, and despite how often I had felt my stomach drop out from the sensation of weightlessness over the past month, I now found myself disoriented at the experience. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t generating a field that I felt so off. Then again, my throbbing headache could have been a contributing factor too.

  I gripped a handle just inside the doorway as I hung out of the hatch and took in everything around me. The earth took up half my vision, stretching out in a veil of blackness that blocked out the canvas of stars that otherwise encompassed me. Out near the boundary between the earth and stars, my eyes were drawn to the moon, which was half-illuminated as it steadily crept up above the earth. A shiver ran down my spine at the realization that, for the first time since ending up in my wife’s body and having a grav-sense, the only mass I could sense around me for miles was from myself and the module. The earth’s deformation to the backdrop of spacetime around me was still there, of course, steadily pulling the lines from me and the module inexorably down, but there was nothing—absolutely nothing—else. I hadn’t realized how much I had grown used to the comfort of having mass around me, nor how unnerving it would be to no longer feel it surrounding me. It didn’t help either that they only thing I could hear, other than the steady whine from the circulating fans in my suit, was the soft sound of my breathing and the blood pushing through my eardrums with each heartbeat. I stopped tapping into my grav-sense, not willing to think any more on the cold, dark nothing that was pressing in on me.

  “Houston,” I said, my attention turning to the curve of the horizon beneath me. “I’m at orbital velocity, and at heading two-nine. Please advise.”

  I listened as mission control fed me a few adjustments, and then I waited out the clock. If the measurements I had been given were accurate, then the Space Station should have already been visible over the horizon, though I still hadn’t spotted it. Given it didn’t have any external lights, I didn’t expect to see it until it was much closer, but it was hard to ignore the irrational fear that, somehow, I had missed my rendezvous with it. As the seconds ticked by, I tried to ignore the nervous sweat dripping down my forehead.

  Finally, after another few minutes, I just made out a dark pinprick moving against the backdrop of the silvery bands of the Milky Way. As I squinted to make it out clearer, a thin ribbon of atmosphere out along the horizon began shimmering an iridescent green. Through the strengthening light of the aurora below, I just made out a faint flicker of green reflected from the point that was moving out above the curve of the earth.

  Flaring my power to adjust my course, I pulled myself and the module toward the dot, my relief palpable as it flooded my body. I smiled despite the pain that surged back to life across my head at using my power. Pain was a cost I was willing to pay in exchange for the weight of four lives saved.

  I made small adjustments to my trajectory as the station came closer and closer, growing until it dominated my view. As I drifted closer to it, the solar arrays of the station flashed and shimmered as they caught the light from the expanding swirls of the aurora below.

  I angled the module toward the middle of the station, where I knew there was an airlock I would use to enter the station. With a gentle prod of power and an accompanying stab of nauseous pain, I eased the module up to the airlock and busied myself with extracting a rope that had been tied off to the inside of the module. Holding the rope, I pushed myself off from the module and drifted forward onto the side of the station. Finding an external handhold on the side of the airlock, I worked to tie the rope off. It was an inelegant solution, but it was the best mission control could come up with in the span of an hour to keep the forty-year-old module tethered to the Space Station. I smiled at the thought of it. Billions of dollars and years of investment were hanging by a rope.

  Moving to the airlock, I followed the instructions piped in through my radio to unscrew the locking mechanism and pull open the heavy aluminum hatch. With a grunt of effort, I swung myself around into the airlock. Since virtually all the compartments of the station were now depressurized, there wasn’t really a reason for me to secure the outer hatch, but I swung it shut and swiveled the locking lever through a few rotations anyway. It just didn’t feel right to leave it hanging open.

  Turning my attention to the inside of the airlock, I was a little startled to see the disarray around me. Papers, pens, wires, and cords floated all around me, scattered in apparent urgency. With a thought I could have made a small field of gravity to pull everything down to one of the walls, but the pounding in my head made me reconsider such a casual use of my power.

  I fiddled with the inner seal of the airlock for a minute before sliding it open. As I moved on to the rest of the station, I was met by the four crew members waiting for me past the first claustrophobic bend leading to the center of the station. They clearly had been briefed on my arrival by mission control.

  I was surprised at the relief that swept over me at the sight of them. I had left the jet only forty minutes before, and yet, at finding myself out on the edge of space and hundreds of miles away from any other living soul, it was comforting to not be alone anymore.

  I tried to help as much as I could while the astronauts and cosmonauts moved in and out of the station a dozen times, pulling crates and crates of equipment, supplies, and hard drives from the station and into the already cramped Command Module I had brought up. I couldn’t hide the pain racing through my head for long, though.

  “You okay?” One of the astronauts put his hand on my shoulder to steady me as I bumped into one of the white-paneled walls.

  “Yeah.” I nodded and gave him a quick smile.

  “No.” He paused and knit his eyebrows together as he studied me. “You’re shaking. The flight up here took more out of you than you thought it would, didn’t it?”

  “I’m fine.” I turned away.

  “Hey.” He shook my shoulder in a exaggerated motion to get my attention again through the thick layers of my suit. “Our lives are about to be in your hands. Don’t just try and power through this. All that will do is get us all killed.”

  “Okay.” I blinked after a long pause. “I’m going to go back out to the Command Module then and try to rest up.”

  “We’ll give you as much time as we can. But with the amount of oxygen in our tanks, I’m not sure we’re going to be able to give you more than twenty minutes before we have to push off.”

 
“I should be good by then.” I lied and pushed myself around.

  I watched in silence as the crew slowly arranged the inside of the Command Module, taking the time to try and calm the dull ache drumming a hole into my skull somewhere behind my eyes. Partially to distract myself, but mostly because I couldn’t help it, I twisted around to the underside of the Module and watched the sun blossom up over the edge of the earth. The sun cast the station in an ephemeral flash of red as it spilled up through the miles of air extending from the earth before it could clear the atmosphere. As the sliver of illuminated earth slowly widened out beneath me, I just made out the caramel sands of the Sahara below, which eventually gave way to the lush greens of the Congo river basin as we orbited further and further south.

  “Alright.” The astronaut who had spoken with me inside the station swung the airlock shut behind him, then nodded my way. “We’re all clear. Give us a few minutes to strap ourselves in, and then we’ll be good to go whenever you’re ready.”

  I tried to steel myself for the energy and pain I knew was ahead as I scurried across the Module and pulled myself to the external hatch. One look confirmed what I had suspected. There was barely any room inside, between the four people in their spacesuits and the huge piles of material salvaged from the station.

  I untied the rope from the handhold on the side of the station and then pulled myself along the rope back to the hatch of the Command Module. Sparing myself one last glance at the Space Station, I got confirmation from the astronauts and cosmonauts before I took a steadying breath and closed my eyes.

  The throbbing in my head intensified a hundredfold as I ripped the pale violet lines of spacetime around the Command Module backwards away from the station. I heard a stream of surprised Russian over the radio as, within the span of a second, the Space Station shot nearly out of view and we came to an abrupt halt. As our speed dropped to nothing, I let go of the field around us and watched passively as our lines of spacetime snapped back into the pattern all around us, down toward the deep well of the earth’s mass. I tried to ignore the knife blade of pain still piercing my skull, instead training my vision on the GPS display on my wrist.

  We reached the edge of the atmosphere within four and a half minutes of freefall. As red-hot wisps of air began streaking past the hatch, I snapped another field around the module to bring our speed back down to just over Mach two. I would have gone slower, but that would have prolonged the amount of time I would have to use my power, which would mean even more pain. As it was, I wondered how much longer I could hold out before throwing up. Was my spacesuit even equipped to handle vomiting?

  “How are you doing?” One of the astronauts’ voices broke through the deafening whistle of the wind as it howled through the gaping hole of the main hatch of the Command Module, causing me a moment of disorientation as it crackled over my radio. The module wobbled drunkenly as the field I had been holding around it dissipated.

  “Been better,” I grunted through gritted teeth. I forced my eyes to stay open as I kept them trained on the speed readout on my GPS. With another push of concentration, I stabilized the field around us.

  “We just hit forty-five thousand feet,” the same astronaut said a few seconds later. “We need to open the emergency valves on our suits to let them equalize to the ambient air pressure.”

  “Can one of you...?” I trailed away as I looked down, somewhat surprised to see one of the astronauts already at my side and flipping one of the toggles on the chest of my suit. “Thanks.”

  After only a few more seconds of descent, I pulled myself up and forced my way to the hatch to see how far away we were from the ground. As the countryside swelled upwards to encompass my whole view, I held up a hand and, within a second, brought our speed back down to a standstill. Letting go of the lines around us, we began to fall again, but now at a speed I could track. When we were only a hundred feet from the ground, I twisted spacetime one last time and, with an intense stab of pain across my temple, slowed the module to only a few miles an hour until we hit the ground. It took long—too long—to clear those last hundred feet. With a rough jolt, we slammed down into the earth. I dropped to the floor of the module, too weak to keep on my feet.

  “Are you alright?” An astronaut was at my side a moment later.

  “Helmet,” I barely managed to gasp. I fumbled with the latches around my neck, unable to make much progress with my heavily gloved hands.

  Thankfully, she understood. A few seconds later, I pushed myself to my hands and knees as she lifted my helmet off. Crawling a foot to the exterior hatch of the capsule, I opened my mouth and vomited.

  I barely even registered the zebra that skittered out from behind the nearby brush as a fresh wave of vomit overcame me.

  12

  WE ENDED UP LANDING in the center of South Africa, around three hundred miles southwest of Johannesburg. As it turned out, NASA had already contacted the South African government before our landing. Within twenty minutes of our touch-down, there was a helicopter on its way to pick us up.

  The astronauts and cosmonauts didn’t comment on the fresh puddle of vomit outside the module as they clambered out, though I did notice one of the cosmonauts kept looking back at it with disgust as he took in the scene around us. As his gaze flickered to me, I saw barely disguised hatred there, and I could guess why. Not every nation had reacted to the knowledge of primes in the same way the United States had, but few had been as violent as Russia and China. Figuring my luck, the cosmonaut had probably been a part of the December Revolution, the Soviet Union’s response to the Golden Revolt, when a rebellion in China headed by a particularly powerful prime had nearly overthrown Chairman Mao. Probably fearing something similar would happen behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviets began a state-sponsored program to experiment upon and eradicate primes from all Soviet states back in the early Eighties. Even though most historians now agreed that it was because of the December Revolution and the persecution of primes that the Soviet Union collapsed only a decade and a half later, I imagined most Russians nowadays disagreed with that consensus. Even though I had saved his life, I could see the contempt for me boiling behind his eyes. I turned away and tried to ignore a stab of guilt as I thought about how, two months before, I probably would have thought the cosmonaut was right. A darker, quieter voice I refused to listen to wondered if I still didn’t feel that way.

  We had plenty of time to wait for the helicopter to arrive, so we used it to pull off the various pieces of our spacesuits before unloading the module. Given that we were wearing nothing more than thin white jumpsuits under all the layers of our spacesuits, though, I couldn’t help but wonder if we might have been better off keeping our suits on, despite how much they weighed. As I helped the crew to unload everything from the Command Module, I tried to ignore the cosmonaut that had shown such naked animosity toward me in the first few minutes after our landing. Still, it was hard to ignore the anger and resentment that simmered off him whenever our eyes did meet. I wasn’t scared of him—not exactly. As unpleasant and embarrassing as it had been to throw up, it had relieved some of the pain and nausea in my head. I knew that, if it came down to it, I would be able to call up my powers. Even with that knowledge, though, I couldn’t help but notice that the cosmonaut weighed nearly twice as much as I did. Powers or not, that sort of physical disparity was hard to ignore, especially when it was accompanied by so much vitriolic anger.

  In all, I was more than a little relieved when the helicopter arrived three hours later. After loading all the supplies from the station onto the helicopter, I made sure to sit at the end of the helicopter opposite to where the cosmonaut sat, though that did leave me sitting with the other cosmonaut. Luckily, it seemed he had a different attitude toward me.

  “I wanted to thank you,” he said, speaking in surprisingly fluent English. I opened my eyes and pulled my head forward from resting against the bulkhead behind my seat to find him smiling at me. “What you did up there was incredible, and very b
rave.”

  “Thank you.” I managed a smile, though I couldn’t help but notice that the other cosmonaut scowled as I spoke.

  “Don’t mind him.” The man next to me noted my gaze, but just flicked his hand dismissively. “He doesn’t understand abberants. Fears you.”

  “I’m not sure I can really blame him.” I winced and leaned my head back against the bulwark once again.

  “Ah.” He smiled again and tapped the side of his nose. “But he’s wrong to fear you. He judges you, not on what he knows about you, but on what he doesn’t know about you.”

  My eyes slid shut as I rolled over his maxim in my head. Frankly, I couldn’t see the distinction, but it still sounded right, somehow.

  “I’ll have to remember that one,” I muttered, a smile breaking across my face.

  They got us on a flight out of Johannesburg within the next day, which gave the two astronauts and me the chance to shower, get a change of clothes, and rest for a few hours before beginning our long journey home. A few hours before our flight, and after getting some much-needed sleep, I asked the consulate at the Embassy if I could explore Johannesburg. Apparently, the fact I was Gravita carried some weight, even on the other side of the world, as I found myself perusing some of the local street markets only half an hour later. The representative from the U.S. embassy that had been tasked with accompanying me to the market seemed to be in such awe at finding himself in my company that he offered to buy the Springbok jersey that caught my eye from one of the booths. I didn’t know what to say to that, though he evidently took my indecision to mean yes, as a minute later, I continued my tour of the market with the jersey in hand.