by James Welsh
Rather, he was afraid of what was going to happen after the moment the drill launched. No matter what happened, that drill would carve a path that he could not see yet. And this terrified him, since the drill was his legacy, just like he was Professor Reynolds’ legacy. Reynolds had taught Chroma everything he knew about engineering, and there he was, throwing the risk like dice, just like Reynolds did every day of his life. Reynolds caught a lot of flak for his belief that the mechanical was actually biological, that engineering wasn’t a dry world of numbers but an ecosystem soaked with evolution. Reynolds’ revolution won him admirers but even more opponents, which meant Chroma had years ahead of proving his mentor’s naysayers wrong. The lasting success of the drills would only cement the shade of Professor Reynolds’ legacy.
Chroma would never quite realize it, but he was actually more defensive of Reynolds than his old professor would have been. As Reynolds decayed and his world closed in around him, he did not grow afraid of time as many elderly do. Rather, he celebrated the road of time for being wide enough for every soul and long enough for eternity. To Reynolds, the walk into the future was more important than he could ever be. If that meant him being forgotten, then so be it.
***
2170 AD
The young Chroma had not learned until later in the day that he had won his thesis defense and finally earned his doctorate in engineering. Some would have said that he paid for his doctorate with the best years of his life. But where others saw his defense as being a funeral for his twenties missed, Chroma saw the start of something more precious: his calling as creator. He had learned all that he could about engineering, and he was now deemed ready to fill the world with his creation.
But he would have begun as a humbled god if he had opened the cover and looked into the machinery behind the thesis defense. Throughout his hour-long presentation, Chroma could feel the resistance in the room against his ideas. As it turned out, though, the professors had taken his argument even harder than anticipated. The band of unbelievers – Savile, Outram, Arnodin, and Chenoweth – was disgusted by the central argument, although they were impressed by the style in which it was delivered. To them, the brilliance of inducing an allergic reaction in materials was mistaken for stupidity. It was a revolution destined to fail.
If it was not for Reynolds’ faith, the thesis defense would have been lost. It was Reynolds who was always willing to take the next step, although he needed his walking cane to do so. It was that forward-thinking that earned Professor Reynolds the nickname of “Next-Minute Reynolds” as an undergraduate. The prevailing wisdom was that Reynolds lived just a minute into the future, just long enough to be the wisest in the room. It was this reputation that Reynolds threw like hammers to get his fellow scholars in line. And so, while Chroma thought his thesis defense was successful, it was actually the most unlikely defense in the history of the science.
And so, it was fortunate for Chroma that his soul’s worth was not measured by that day. Rather, his soul aged with him – in just a few years, he was already considered the most brilliant scientist in the charter. A few years later, when a groundbreaking chemist in what was once the Philippines passed away, Chroma was then left as the last of the giants of the mind. By that time, Chroma stopped growing up and instead grew out, his hands growing larger and larger until he held the world in his palm. No matter how far someone lived away, whether it was in the hourglass of the desert or in the gasp of the mountains, every worker used an invention that was created or recreated by Chroma.
But, in the end of blinding success, Chroma still remembered the promise behind his thesis. It may have been years before when he defended his thesis, but he remembered it well. His dreams refused to let him forget. And that was when he read about the mining operation light-years away. Using a technique formulated by one of his colleagues, the miners on the distant colony of Volans were using mirrors to capture a star’s energy. Hungry for a chance to outdo his colleague, Chroma submitted his idea to the charter’s board members, and they accepted his proposal before they even saw the plans. Just two years after that, his proposed drills were ready for deployment and so was Chroma. The only condition the charter’s board gave was that Chroma had to accompany the drills to Volans and oversee their installation. If the drills were successful, Chroma was free to return to his home on Earth.
But Chroma had no intention of coming back home. The month before his spaceship launched, Chroma had found out his old professor, Dr. Reynolds, had passed away, his heart squeezed by cancer’s hand. With his past gone on Earth and his future waiting for him in outer space, Chroma left without looking back. But Chroma was not alone in his future – instead, he shared it with Reynolds. The elderly engineer may have died, but he could not be forgotten. While the other professors on that thesis defense committee had long since died and become lost in spite of their genius, Reynolds had outlived his shell. He would die only when his living legacy, Wesley Chroma, died and not a second sooner.
This was possible because the other professors had misfired in forming their legends, the only way one could live forever. They thought that if they climbed the ivory tower of their craft, until they reached the spire of engineering and could climb no further, their voices would echo across the world. But they did not know what Reynolds knew, and what Reynolds had passed on to his brightest student in Chroma: the only way your voice could be heard was by stepping out of the ivory tower and into the muddy world.
***
2195 AD
Chroma watched as the fused launches disconnected and the drill drifted into its orbit. He had spent the last few years of his life obsessed with every inch of the quantum drills, each of which were eighty feet in length, and it was surreal seeing them so tiny on the projection. Feeling an oppression behind him, Chroma turned and saw all of the miners in the room were looking away from their screens and at the map in the center of the bridge. Chroma tried to forget that all eyes were on him by turning back to the projection and zooming in on the quantum drill.
He watched as the solar sail was unfurled and the drill floated through the vacuum. Ten minutes later, the drill was rooted in its final orbit and the sail was disconnected. Chroma held his breath as the drill began to turn towards a particularly bright patch in Carina’s corona. The drill began to pirouette, and Chroma watched as a thick snake of plasma coiled around the drill bit. The dance was so hypnotic that, for a few moments, nothing else mattered.
Wales’ uncharacteristic yelp was what brought Chroma back into the waking world. Looking over his shoulder, Chroma saw that Wales was looking at a computer that was monitoring the drill’s numbers. With athleticism not expected of an engineer, Chroma twisted and rushed over to the computer, his hungry eyes scanning the screen for any sign of success. The scramble of numbers on the screen would not have made sense to many people, but Chroma was one of the few.
All of the calculations were perfect, and that was the least Chroma demanded. Even a single misplaced decimal would have been enough to cause the drill to spin out of control. He could imagine it now, with one level spinning faster than another, causing the drill to break into pieces and plummet into Carina. He wouldn’t have felt that fear in the coffin of his office back home in the university, but it was a coffin. While a mistake there could have been easily hidden by simply erasing the blackboard, there was no bravery to hide. He had to step outside in order to test his courage, his invention, Reynolds’ philosophy, his necessity in the universe.
But it was not an end – it was a start. The miners were applauding as if the play was over, but Chroma knew there was work to do. Now that he knew the drill could work, he had to install the other drills and oversee their maintenance. Chroma’s road was now paved, and he had no other choice but to walk it into tomorrow, just the way that Reynolds would have wanted it.
Sagitta
2185 AD
Even from miles away, the mountain was hulking enough that a passing traveler could not grasp it with their hand. The mountain wa
s once queen of her range, the landscape around her telling time by the shadows she threw like champagne glasses. And, like an oil painting hung on the wall as a window, the mountain showed her cracks and wrinkles. Just a few years before, she was able to hide her age well behind a foundation of snow and ice.
She was in the summer of her life now, and she was just beginning to feel beautiful in being naked. The crackling music of forest fires over the years had charmed a desert out of the twisted valleys, until the hills were silent of trees. It was a fistful of ink thrown at the painting, yet another ruin at human hands. The mountain was just beginning to learn to live with herself as being queen of the chimney sweeps.
As the traveler lost their way through the maze of cracks chiseled in the burnt earth, they had to survive the trials of fire as the sun baked the world around them into gold they could never touch. They had to survive the trials of water as flash floods suddenly stormed through the canyons like a clock spinning itself dizzy in an asylum. And what was the traveler’s reward: a crisp mountain that grew hazier behind a cataract of clouds with every step. By the time the traveler reached the foot of the mountain, it became obvious that the queen had robes of silk clouds spun in shackles around her curves.
It took a day’s climb up the mountain before the traveler could inhale sunlight again. At that height, the mountaintop was little more than an island in a sea of foam, where the water polished the rocky shores. It was there where a family was castaway, living in a hunting lodge that was being taken back by the elements. A rockslide years before had collapsed part of the frame, and the constant rush of wind had dug up many of the shingles, but still the lodge stood, and the family stood with it – although not for much longer.
Most nights, the cold air trickling down the face of the mountain whistled through the nooks, screaming a terrible symphony. But then came a night where the screams felt just human enough to hollow out the audience’s bones. Deep in the lodge, two little girls huddled over the memorial to a dead fire, the embers just barely breathing. The girls shook at each scream, and they could not stop shaking.
“Why won’t mommy stop crying?” The little girl, Brava, asked.
“I don’t know,” her sister, Tondra, said, shaking her head. “I just wished she stopped. The wolves will hear her.” This lesson she learned just a few weeks before, when she fell and skinned her knees on the rock and her mother punished her for crying. A starvation of wolves ran corkscrew around the mountain, and they could hear weakness from miles away.
Just then, another scream splashed over them, causing them to shudder. They should have been ready for it – but no one ever could be.
Finally, Tondra could not take the rolling hills of crying anymore. As she stood up, her younger sister reached out for her, hissing, “Don’t go!” But Tondra didn’t pay attention. Instead, she crept through the hallway, although she didn’t know why she was sneaking, her feet sneaking on a floor hushed with dirt. The hallway started out wide but became skinny quickly, with the walls buckling from years of nature squeezing her fist around the lodge. By the time she reached the room at the end of the corridor, it was barely wide enough for a single soul to step through. The doorframe had long-since splintered, the wood bowed like a cracked ribcage. The door still stood in its frame, but it was little more than a formality – it couldn’t even be closed anymore. Tondra planted her ear to the crack in the door and waited for her garden to grow.
She could hear her father’s voice, low and kneeling, and at first she mistook his whispers for prayer. But then she remembered that it was her mother who was the praying one, not him. And so she listened, so close that she was more thinking of the words than hearing them.
“Fleur, why couldn’t you?” Father mumbled, his words strangling themselves. “I gave you food and a home and peace. Do you know how hard it is to find that today? And all I wanted – all I ever wanted – was for you to give me a son. Why couldn’t you love me as much as I’ve loved you? Why?”
“Koralo!” Mother’s voice suddenly gasped. Tondra clasped her hand to her mouth – her mother’s sweet voice now sounded like a plate thrown against the wall. “Koralo, find me a doctor. Please…”
“Why should I save you if you don’t want to save me?” Father demanded. “I’m going to die before you get the chance to. A son is how the world is going to remember us, and do you want to be remembered like this? Do you?”
“Take him.”
“No, no I won’t, Fleur.”
“You’ve wanted him all this time. You’ve…you’ve lived for this moment. Take him – you deserve him…”
Fleur’s words became fragmented, the vowels dissolving into gasps. Just a few moments later, there was a rattle’s shake and then silence. The rage of quiet flooded the room and seeped out through the broken door. Tondra took a few steps back, her hands cupped to her mouth, as she began to understand. She stepped away from the door just in time, as it abruptly swung open, the door handle thudding against the crumbling wall. The sudden light from the room blinded Tondra’s eyes, and at first all she saw was a silhouette burned into the door frame, like a portrait of night herself.
But as the shadow trudged through the hallway and grew larger, Tondra’s eyes adjusted and she found herself staring at her own father. She pressed herself against the wall, feeling a chill as he brushed past her, not even recognizing that she was there. As he passed, she noticed that he was holding something swaddled in a blanket between his arms. There was something writhing in the blanket, like a thieves’ den of snakes, and she thought she heard a little growl.
Tondra watched her father walk down the dim hallway and turn the corner before she remembered what was behind her. She turned, hesitant, and stepped into the room. Once a parlor where the hunters congregated after a long day of shooting, it had since been transformed into a bedroom by virtue of the dusty mattress on the floor. It was on that bed where Tondra found what was left of her mother. With her muddy hair spread out like a folding fan and her earthy eyes crying out for a god to love her, she was no longer her mother but a nightmare instead, worse than death. Tondra was so horrified by the sight, she did not see the lake of blood between the shores of her mother’s legs, the life staining the mattress. Mother’s womb was deflated, squeezed dry like fresh lungs.
And already a hundred yards from the crumbling lodge, a father pushed through the curtains of darkness with his mangled son. He knew there was a cliff just ahead, and he was waiting for the moment where he stepped on the cushion of air and walked with angels.
***
2196 AD
As Mystery Joyce walked the curve of Harbor’s hall, she left behind footprints that echoed through the hollow floor. The cables and pipes that decorated the walls reminded her of pictures from a world long ago, where snakes choked their prey, thirsty for the air they could squeeze out of the rats. As she pushed through the hallway and her claustrophobia, she suddenly wondered if this was what being born was like. She looked up at the glass ceiling above, at the rain of sunshine that wormed through the glass and stained her skin. She blinked and looked away from the sick of light and down at the dark cool of the floor, which was sweeter than the rare chocolate rations. Yes, she thought, this is exactly like being born again.
She was startled when she heard a voice rumble from the floor just a few steps behind her. “What are you off to, Mystery?”
Captain Joyce turned her head so fast her long coffee hair spun like a carousel. She glanced down and saw one of her pilots, Akilina Blue, her head poking out from a trapdoor tucked into the floor. Blue had a tangle of coal hair in front of her eyes, and she lazily pushed it aside with the back of her hand. Then, resting her arms crisscrossed on the edge of the trapdoor, Blue continued, her voice muffled slightly from a fresh stick of gum, “You’re not leaving already, are you? You just docked here earlier.”
Joyce frowned. “You’re thinking of Pilot Winter. I’ve been here for two days now. Maybe if you learned how to read the schedu
le, you’d know that – and also that you were supposed to fly a pack of miners back to the colony an hour ago.”
“Oh. Oh!” Blue yelped, suddenly remembering.
“I have to go pick up a downed buoy,” Joyce said, her eyes trickling with fire. “I’ll be back in exactly eight hours. You better not be here still when I get back, Pilot Blue. And stop sleeping in those bunks – they’re for the miners, not you.”
“Will do,” Blue said glumly, her hand halfway between a salute and a wave goodbye. Joyce turned and continued walking down the curved hallway. Blue watched Joyce walk away and she sighed to herself. Then, a voice beneath her demanded, “Come back to bed. Don’t make me tell you twice.”
Blue looked down into the bunk and smiled. “You don’t even have to tell me once.” She spat out her wad of chewing gum, the gum disappearing into the wall of pipes. Blue sank down into the bunk, closing the trapdoor above her and locking it.
Meanwhile, Joyce was already boarding her launch – the Ship Nu – and latching the airlock behind her. She walked through the cabin and sat down at her seat, from where she was the tip of the arrow. She sighed in relief as she sat down, and not because she had been up and walking for the past few hours. It was because, as she was walking through the hallway towards her ship, she had to squeeze past Pilot Winter. The silence between the two had been overwhelming, and Joyce found the tension was still clinging to her clothes, dragging her down, drowning her. But here, she found her moment of peace. She could almost hear the stress dripping off her and falling into a puddle on the floor.
Her eyes closed, she sank her fingers into the watery control pads in front of her, feeling the engine rumble beneath her feet. Then, she slowly ran her pointer fingers down the control pads, as gently as a finger down a lover’s spine. The ship glided out of the dock, and already Joyce was in the womb of her own world. She opened her eyes with a smile. Only a few feet of space separated the ship from the dock, but that footstep of vacuum went a long way. Joyce muted the radio as she always did on her solo missions and twisted her hands in the control pads. Immediately, the launch leaned away from Harbor and turned towards her destination.
