A Planet Too Far: Beyond the Stars, #1

by Nick Webb

  But Gertie worries and worries, and pesters Philae to recheck again to make sure everything goes just right. She’s been a nervous wreck ever since I beat the crap out of Max. I mean, Max is fine. He’s as happy as ever. We still play games every night before bed. I switched my bedroom up to the observatory‌—‌I sleep there every night now, just staring at the stars, watching Hope 92 through the Newtonian. I always go to bed later than Willow, so I just stare at her paintings.

  Day 3302

  Tomorrow is the Big Turn. Philae is confident we’ll do it perfectly. Most of the systems are automated, of course, but he’s agreed to let me help perform the actual maneuvers. We’ve been practicing in the VR, running through the steps over and over again.

  Of course, if I do anything wrong, the autopilot will take over. But it’ll be fun to actually get to fly the ship, even if for only a few minutes.

  Willow’s ship is doing the Big Turn at exactly the same time. She’s not flying her ship, just watching. She’s gotten really good with her art the past year. Like, she’s taken it to a whole new level. I look at pictures from artists back on Earth, and I can’t see that they’re any better.

  She’s also a kick-ass … medical … person, ha ha. Not a doctor yet, of course, and she hates the word nurse. She fell off a ladder the other day and landed on one of her easels, and cut her arm open pretty bad. And she sewed it up herself, without help from her droids. Let me repeat myself. SHE SEWED HERSELF UP. That girl is bad-ass. And I love her.

  Day 3303

  The Big Turn happened today. I messed up. I can’t talk about it yet. I can’t believe what I did. It’s all over. It’s all over.

  Fuck me, it’s all over.

  Day 3310

  I don’t leave the observatory. I can’t. All I can do is search the stars behind us for Hope 92. It’s back there, somewhere. During the Big Turn, I did something stupid. I accidentally pushed too hard on the accelerator, which means that for about an hour, without me knowing it, we decelerated much faster than Hope 92. By the time we figured it out, it was too late. For some reason we don’t understand, the autopilot didn’t kick in for me. I fear I accidentally shut it off.

  Our nose is pointed towards Earth, our rear towards Sephardia, and somewhere back there is Willow, in the shadow of our own hull.

  I’ve lost her.

  I’ve directed the autopilot to decrease our deceleration so that we eventually catch up with her, but Philae says it could be a year before I see her again.

  Day 3425

  Still no sign of Hope 92 and Willow.

  I’ve started studying physics with Philae in the mornings instead of time with Gertie. Things are a lot different here than they were a few years ago. After my episode with Max, I think the droids all decided it was time to let me have more autonomy. Since then, it’s basically been an Alexocracy. My word goes. So, last month, I decided Gertie’s lessons were out, and Philae’s physics lessons were in.

  I just want to understand what my dad was up against as he tried to move that brown dwarf out of the way and stop The Disruption. I want to understand what my mom was trying to figure out‌—‌I learned she was a scientist too. She worked for Nasa in the decade before The Disruption, but I don’t know what she was working on.

  And I just want to understand what went wrong with my part in the Big Turn, and maybe figure out how to reach out to Willow again. I don’t know how, or if it’s even possible. But I’ve got to try.

  Day 3499

  Why didn’t anyone ever tell me physics is hard? Seriously. This stuff is crazy. I’ve learned all about Newton, gravity, inverse square laws, Poynting vectors, flux and Green’s theorem, and the Schrodinger equation, and wave-particle duality, and all kinds of stuff that I had no idea ever existed.

  Still nothing on the Willow front. I look every day down there towards Sephardia, but no ship, no Hope 92.

  I’ve kept up my drawings. I’m trying to get her face just right. I don’t want to forget her.

  Day 3700

  I think I’m starting to forget her face. Some days I don’t think it’s possible, but others I have to go look at the pictures I’ve drawn to remind myself what she looks like. My secret fear is that I’ll lose her, just like I lost mom, just like I lost Earth.

  It’s been over a year since the Big Turn, and still no sign of Hope 92. And now I’m seventeen. Seven years to go.

  Physics is going great. I’m moving on to relativity soon. Just special relativity‌—‌Philae says that general relativity will be beyond my reach for a few years yet, so we’ll stick to the basics. I already got the gist of it‌—‌I mean, I am aboard a spaceship flying at relativistic speeds compared to Earth, you’d think I’d have picked a few things up.

  Day 3755

  Everything is a lie. Mom lied to me. The people on Earth lied to me. Dammit, even the droids have been lying to me. I can’t even trust Philae anymore.

  I haven’t been seeing real stars. I don’t even know if I’ve been seeing Willow. Turns out, physics has consequences. I’ve been studying relativity with Philae, and combining it with my earlier studies of electromagnetism I figured out something pretty troubling.

  We’re traveling at a pretty large fraction of the speed of light. Something like 99.999%. There’s this pesky little thing called redshift. If you’re traveling away from something, its light gets redder. Traveling towards something, the light gets bluer. But we’re moving so fast that the stars in the direction of Earth should be shifted far into at least microwaves, and the stars in front of us should be shifted well into the x-rays. All of them invisible. Instead, all I should see is a huge globe of light in front of us, the color depending on our exact speed. That globe would be the blue-shifted light from the microwave background of the universe. I should only be able to see the light from the universe’s birth. That’s all I should see. Nothing else.

  These windows aren’t windows. They’re holographic projectors.

  I’ve been looking through my telescope at a lie.

  Please. Please let Willow not be a lie, too.

  Day 3802

  I finally confronted Philae about the holographic projectors. He said he was wondering when I’d figure it out. He said the people who designed the ship thought it would feel a lot better for me to be able to see stars. To see the outside of the ship. Otherwise, living for eighteen years closed up inside a box with no walls might make me go crazy.

  Crazy or not, it was all a lie.

  Philae swears Willow wasn’t a lie. But how do I trust a droid that’s already proven he has no problem lying whenever it suits him? Gertie tells me to trust them. Even Max got serious for the past few days and tried to convince me they were only doing what they’re doing to help me.

  I don’t believe them.

  Mom lied. Dad lied. The droids lied. Let me guess, is the Earth still there? Did they just send me away because they were tired of me? Or am I a guinea pig? To test out one of these spaceships, to make sure they work?

  Day 3855

  Philae convinced me to look through the telescope again. I don’t know why I agreed to, but I did. There it was, Hope 92, finally caught up with us. Or us caught up with her. All I can see is the top of their shield. No windows yet.

  I just don’t know if I can believe them.

  I mean, I see why they did it now. If all I had were actual windows, the x-rays would have fried me within a few days of leaving Earth. Behind the holographic projectors is a meter of lead and water shielding, with the water serving double duty as heat suppression. I’m literally in a lead box.

  I think I liked my life better during the blissful lie. It was more beautiful, even if it wasn’t real.

  Day 3856

  I’ve forgiven Philae. The more I look at the holographic setup, the more I realize how necessary it was. It protected me from radiation. It saved my life, most likely. And really, the projector shows me what’s out there‌—‌it just takes the light that it sees, and converts it to a wavelength t
hat my eyes can actually detect. Those stars are real. Hope 92 was real.

  In a sense, it’s like the truth was too horrible, too painful to accept, so the holographic projectors had to lie to protect me. They needed to give my eyes a version of the truth that wouldn’t kill me.

  It was all real.

  It better have been real.

  Willow better be real.

  I hope she is. Hope is all I have at this point.

  Day 3931

  Yesterday was my birthday, and for my eighteenth birthday Gertie gave me The Letter. From mom. I’m still too numb to even talk about it.

  And Hope 92’s windows are finally visible. But no sign of Willow. I can see her picture of the sunlit valley which is still taped up to the window, but she never appears next to it. There’s another piece of paper taped up, but the ship is still at too steep of an angle for me to be able to read it.

  I’ll talk about The Letter tomorrow.

  Day 3932

  The Letter. I’ve read it about a billion times, just to be sure. Just to wrap my head around it. She goes into a lot of detail‌—‌lots of things I’d already figured out for myself. She talks about the brown dwarf, and how all of humanity mobilized against it, sending out mission after failed mission. She talks about preparations for The Disruption, and something she calls The Long Night. I guess, in addition to sending out a few thousand ships to Sephardia, each with a single person and a few droid companions, humanity also started up something called The Ground Initiative. The details were fuzzy, but they tried to dig a huge underground living space underneath North America, and another under France, and set up to keep the human civilization alive indefinitely underground. At least until technology would develop to get everyone off the planet, or steer the Earth back into orbit.

  It failed.

  But that wasn’t the important part of The Letter. The real reason for The Letter was to admit to me that she lied. She said she just couldn’t bear the thought of seeing me one last time on the launch pad, that she couldn’t bear the thought of sending me off into space with me knowing that she sent me away. She thought it would be easier for me if there was a clean break. If she was already dead.

  And she apologized for it. She realized she was wrong, after seeing me blast off and accelerate away.

  She sent The Letter just before The Disruption. It was received by our computer after I woke up from my hibernation, when I was ten. Knowing that she realized she made a mistake, and wanted to go back and change things, well, I’m not sure if that makes me feel better or worse.

  Anyway, I can’t think about it anymore. All I can think about is Willow. I still can’t read what she wrote. Maybe in a few weeks it’ll come into view.

  Day 3946

  The note says: Very sick. Have space sickness. In hibernation. I love you.

  I’m not sure what to think. Is she real? I want to think yes. I desperately want to think yes. But other times I think this is another lie that Philae has contrived, or a game that Max has invented, or some scheme by Gertie to keep me focused on something other than myself. If they can lie about everything else, why not invent a fake girlfriend for me? One I’ll never meet, one I’ll never touch. One I’ll never get to have sex with. One I’ll never really get to share my life with. Just a story to believe in. Something to get me to wake up in the morning and forge onward, thinking I’m not alone.

  I have to believe I’m not alone. She really was there. We shared something. We shared our lives together. We grew up together.

  I gave up on the idea of my mom a long time ago. And, years later, learning that she’d lied to me, I gave her up again.

  But I can’t give up on Willow. Even if she is a lie.

  Day 5000

  I’m almost 21. I’ve built telescopes. I’ve piloted a spaceship faster than any human in history. I’ve lived my entire life as a single, solitary pioneer. I’m a physicist. I’ve learned it all, from general relativity, to quantum mechanics, and even finally figured out how our engines work, how they scoop up energy from the virtual particle background. I’ve even learned how to draw properly, though I’m still but a shadow of an artist compared to Willow.

  I’ve come so far. And now I’m sick. Came down with the same space sickness that Willow did. I’m no doctor, I don’t really understand medicine and how the body works‌—‌that was my one area of academic deficiency. But something about the constant radiation combined with the lower gravity and the food I’m eating every day. I’m weak, shaky, have bad diarrhea every day, I’m lightheaded, I pass out a lot. The only solution is to go into hibernation early.

  I’m still two years out from when I was supposed to enter hibernation for the Big Stop. That period of extreme deceleration is supposed to last two years. But I can’t live like this. Philae says that going into hibernation will cure me.

  Before I go, I’m drawing one last piece. I know I’ll never, ever be even a thousandth as good as Willow, but I tried to get it right. I painted a picture of her, and me, holding each other. Just like that one stupid little stick figure drawing I drew all those years ago. But this time it’s a masterpiece. At least, for my skills it is. I’m taping it to the window. If she’s real, if she’s still alive, and if she ever wakes up, and if she survives the Big Stop, then maybe, just maybe, she’ll see it.

  And remember me.

  Day 6421

  I’m awake.

  More on this later. Damn, my head hurts.

  Day 6422

  Yesterday was awful. Today’s still bad‌—‌I have to dictate this instead of type. Gertie finally got me the right combo of pills, and now I can actually think. I can move without screaming. Still so tired. I kept asking Philae how much time passed. If we made it. If Willow made it. He wouldn’t say. He said it’s best to discover these things by ourselves. He said something strange‌—‌he said the most devastating lies are the ones we tell ourselves, but the most liberating truths are the ones we discover on our own.

  Sleep now. Hopefully tomorrow I can get out of bed.

  Day 6425

  I spent three more days in bed, down with a high fever. Something about the space sickness lingered, and triggered an immune response. But I’m better now. Much better. I’m out of bed, but there’s no way I can climb that ladder. And no windows down here in the equipment room where they kept me near the hibernation chamber, so I hope I have strength to climb tomorrow.

  Last Day.

  6426

  I climbed up the ladder. All the way to the seventh floor, to my observatory. When I looked out the window, I noticed something strange. The stars were there, just as it appeared they always were, but these looked different, somehow. And the observatory was lit with a strange glow. When I looked out the window, I saw the source of the light. It was so bright that it hurt my eyes‌—‌I saw a terrible black circle, an afterimage, for ten minutes afterward.

  That meant one thing, and only one thing.

  The holographic projectors were off. I noticed the edges of the window‌—‌the lead shielding had been folded away. I was really looking out the window. At real stars. At a real sun. When I pointed my Newtonian at a particularly bright star, it wasn’t a star.

  It was a planet. Finally, after all those years of studying astronomy, building telescopes, trying to find things to point my refractor at, and then my Cassegrain, and then my Newtonian, finally I found something different.

  But I’d always had something worth looking at.

  I turned my scope down, to where she was. To Hope 92. And there it was‌—‌it was so close, closer than it ever had been before, so close that I almost didn’t need my Newtonian to look at it.

  But I looked anyway. There was the picture of the valley glowing in the late afternoon sun. Behind it, taped to the wall, was the old stick figure picture I’d drawn. The one that made Willow feel loved. And near that was her refractor, assembled from the plans I’d made her.

  She wasn’t there.

  But taped next to the va
lley painting, written in beautiful script, was a note.

  Alex. I’ve been waiting for you for so long.

  I’m real, I’m alive. And I love you.

  You’ll be a farmer. I’ll be a doctor.

  You’ll be an astronomer. I’ll be a painter.

  You’ll be glad to see me again. And I’ve waited so long to see you.

  Welcome home.

  Q&A with Nick Webb

  Every once in a while an author comes across as story and says, “Darn it... why didn’t I think of that?” Hope 91 is one of those stories for me. I’m thrilled to be able to include it in this anthology. Was there a specific incident or person that suggested the set-up to you?

  I’m so relieved someone liked it! Honestly, it was a bit of a “left field” story for me. My standard fare, for novels at least, is shoot-em-up pew-pew military space romps. It’s nice to take a break from that and do something completely different.

  Several movies, books, and stories got me in the mood for Hope 91. I love the story devices of time dilation and cryo-sleep that are used to great emotional effect in both the movie Interstellar, and The Dark Age, one of my favorite short stories by Jason Gurley. The idea of separation from your loved ones in not only space, but time, for me evokes one of those gut-punch feelings‌—imagining missing not only the physical presence of a parent or a child, but missing out on large chunks of their lives because of a universal speed limit and the nature of space-time itself is something both terrible and poignant to think about, since it makes me appreciate and take more care for the time together we do enjoy. Another recent influence is Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves, where the Earth is soon to be rendered uninhabitable by an exploding moon, and humanity’s only hope is to send as many people as possible to live in orbit. I took that one step further and focused not on the apocalyptic event itself, but on the perspective of the lone, solitary journey of a kid who grows up in space, longing at first for his now-long-dead parents but eventually just hoping for human contact of any kind, and once finding it, then losing it, telling the story of what he will do to get it back.