Across the Void

by S. K. Vaughn

  “We have to do something,” May whimpered.

  “We’re going to let gravity do its magic. Think, Maryam: What is going to happen the lower we descend in altitude?”

  “I don’t know, I—”

  “Stop blubbering and pull yourself together!” Eve yelled. “This is a life-and-death situation. I’m not always going to be here to save you, so save yourself.”

  May gritted her teeth and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Eve’s outburst had disrupted her fear response and put her into survival mode. She felt her wits returning.

  “The lower we go,” she said assertively, “the warmer the air temperature. So the ice will melt and we can regain control.”

  “That is correct. See what happens when you clear your head?”

  “But what if we’re a hundred feet off the ground by the time it melts? We’ll never recover.”

  “Then we’ll be dead,” her mother said evenly. “But at least we have a chance, versus doing something rash that could eliminate our chances. Now, instead of whining about what-ifs, you have another problem you need to solve. Do you know what it is?”

  May looked at her instruments and held up the navigation map with shaking hands. “At this airspeed, we’re going to overshoot Glasgow airfield. And there’s nothing we can do to slow down.”

  “Right. Solution?”

  She scrutinized the map and smiled, popping her finger on it.

  “There’s another airfield just north of the city. We might fall a little short, but it’s our best bet.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  As they dipped to a nail-biting 3,200 feet, the sun broke through the clouds and the temperature warmed up to well above freezing. The ice on the wings melted quickly, and they landed with minimal damage. On the ground, Eve was beaming with pride—so much so that she told the story, with a few colorful embellishments, to the entire ground crew. Then she did something that she’d done so infrequently in the past that May could count the times on one hand. She gave her daughter a hug.

  “Congratulations, Maryam. Now you’re a pilot.”

  From that point on, May had looked at piloting differently. And her mom. All those years cursing her for being too cold and emotionally distant; May realized that she had not understood how being a pilot with heavy combat experience had made it necessary for Eve to abandon her emotional self. It had been essential for her own survival.

  Sister, I can relate, May thought as she raised the flask.

  23

  “Time for a little R&R,” May whispered to herself.

  It felt good to get a little buzzed, to take a break from the constant anxiety and brushes with death. She drank a little more whiskey and fished a cigarette out of her pocket. She’d been ecstatic to find the pack she’d smuggled aboard, along with her flask, stashed under her berth. It made her feel as if she were a teenager again. She lit the cigarette and took a long drag. The nicotine rush nearly spun her head off her body, but the whiskey tethered it down.

  “May, there’s a fire in the galley,” Eve called out with urgency. “Are you in the vicinity, and can you please extinguish it?”

  May laughed. “It’s me, Eve. I’m the one on fire. I’m having a fag—um, a cigarette.”

  “Smoking on all NASA vessels is strictly prohibited. There are highly flammable—”

  “Yes, I know. But I don’t care. If I’m going to have to live with death lurking around every corner, I’m going to have to break a few rules to get through it.” She took a long drink and indulged in a tremendous belch. “Scotch. Horrible stuff. But it does warm the cockles.”

  “May I ask you a personal question, May?” Eve said quietly.

  “By all means. Knock yourself out.”

  “If it’s true you feel that death is, as you say, lurking around every corner, why do you consume things proven to be damaging to your body—like alcohol and cigarettes?”

  May laughed so hard that she nearly swallowed her cigarette. “Excellent question. The reason is because even though these things are destructive to our bodies in the long term, they make us feel pleasure in the short term. It’s a bit of a conundrum.”

  “It is definitely difficult to understand logically,” Eve said.

  “That’s the thing: we humans like to believe we’re logical, but the way we live our lives says the opposite. We’re more driven by emotions, which have a logic all their own, but probably not one that makes a lot of sense. Does that make sense?” May laughed.

  “When you were striking your mirror and hurting yourself, emotions were telling you that was the right thing to do?”

  “Not so much telling. It just occurred to me to do so in the moment, and I did. Normally I would never do that, but fatigue and stress can make emotions more intense.”

  “What about happiness? Does it work the same way?”

  “Absolutely. Like the first time I kissed my husband, Stephen.”

  May recalled the night Stephen had taken her to the Mexican dive bar near the Rice University campus after she’d showed up at his lecture. She could smell the burning candle wax in the fried ice cream he’d bought her to make up for ruining her birthday the first day they met. When she’d leaned across the table to kiss him, nearly setting her top on fire, she remembered the taste of tequila and lime and the grains of salt on her tongue.

  “I just did it,” she reminisced. “I didn’t really have a chance to think. Sort of like being a pilot. Often you have to go with instinct, with your gut. I believe it’s one human trait that’s rooted in an older and wiser part of us.”

  “I don’t know if instinct could ever be coded into my systems.”

  “You already have it, Eve. The way you anticipate problems based on what you know. That’s a form of instinct too.”

  “Excellent. I feel included.”

  “You’d better watch out,” May laughed, “or you might become one of us. On that note, how about a little music?”

  “What would you like to hear?” Eve asked. “I have an extensive library.”

  “How about a funeral march?” May said sarcastically.

  “Which composer?”

  “I’m joking. Play me something I can dance to. I don’t care what it is.”

  Eve played some techno music. May groaned in disapproval.

  “Drum machines have no soul. Real music with real people, please.”

  “My programmers were very fond of Ludwig van Beethoven. Are you familiar with his work?”

  “Are you taking the piss?”

  “Is that another figure of speech?”

  “Yes, it means are you joking, asking me if I’m aware of one of the most important composers in the history of music.”

  “My sense-of-humor programming is robust, but it doesn’t include mockery. That might be very off-putting to humans.”

  “To hell with humans,” she laughed. “They can get stuffed.”

  “May, you sound different. Your speech patterns—”

  “It’s called being drunk.”

  “Being inebriated could be very dangerous in this environment. Especially if you’re handling fire.”

  May burst into uncontrollable giggling. “I can handle my liquor. And my fire. Now play me something I can dance to.”

  “Cross-referencing dance music, I have extensive ethnic dance libraries, such as polka and Native American ceremonial dance,” Eve said.

  “Wow,” May said, trying to stifle her laughter. “Let’s try something else. How about rock ’n’ roll? That could be considered an ethnic dance.”

  “Perhaps you would like to hear British rock ’n’ roll? That is one of my largest libraries.”

  “I’m not surprised. And yes, British rock, please.”

  “Okay. Here is the music of the Rolling Stones.” Eve played “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.”

  “Oh yeah. Time to shake it,” May said. “This one goes out to NASA.”

  She danced around the galley, cigarette dangling from her mouth. An hour o
r so went by with Eve playing DJ and May dancing like a maniac, blowing off steam. When she’d had enough, she plopped down in a chair and drank some water to chase away the headache gathering behind her eyes. “Ah, Eve, that was fun. Thanks. What should we do next? Pillow fight?”

  “I would like to hear more about your relationship with Stephen, if you don’t mind. I know his work, but I’ve never had the opportunity to meet him.”

  “A little girl talk, eh? I like it. What would you like to know? As long as it’s not too risqué . . .” May joked.

  “Tell me how you met.”

  “You can do better than that, Eve. Ask me something saucy.”

  “All right, but please let me know if I am getting too personal,” Eve said.

  “Come on, it’s just us girls,” May replied.

  “Was Stephen the first person you ever loved?”

  “Whoa. That’s a good one, sister. Unfortunately, he was not. And you’re never going to guess who was.”

  “Guessing is not one of my strengths.”

  “Just give it a try.”

  “All right. Was it Ian Albright?”

  May flinched in shock. “How the hell did you know that?”

  “I deduced it based on the data in your personnel file. You were in the RAF as a young officer when he was a senior officer. He was one of the men in charge of your unit. The two of you were both separately reprimanded by your commanders for fraternization with another officer. The names were redacted from the report, but there were no other officers or enlisted personnel reprimanded for the same offense at the same point in time. And occasionally I hear you say his name when you’re sleeping.”

  May was momentarily lost in a memory. She and Ian were driving through the countryside, way too fast. He was at the wheel of some fancy sports car his parents had given him, trying to impress her. She was laughing and shouting with her head hanging out the window. They stopped on a bluff and walked out to look at the sea hundreds of feet below. Ireland. They’d taken a trip there, to one of his family homes. He held her in the bracing wind and kissed her. Then the memory switched, and they were in the hall of a manor house, lying next to a fireplace as big as a garage. Flames roared into the flue. Clothes were strewn about.

  “He swept me off my feet, I daresay,” May mused.

  “You loved him?”

  “I tried,” she said. Her eyes darkened, and she shook the memory away. Ashes to ashes.

  “By the way, knowing all that . . . A bit on the scary-stalker side of surveillance, Eve.”

  “I am sorry if I offended you. I was simply recounting unclassified information.”

  “I know. And I commend you for your deductions. I know it’s not your thing to speculate or predict, but you did a bang-up job with that.”

  “Thank you. Maybe we shouldn’t have this conversation, as I am not well versed in the nuances of girl talk, as you call it.”

  “Oh, stop it, Eve. You’re doing great. What else do you want to know?”

  “You speak quite fondly of Stephen and your marriage, but your personnel records state that the two of you filed for divorce just prior to your departure.”

  “What?” May asked, reeling from the impact of Eve’s words. “I wasn’t . . .” She choked on her reply, feeling a surge of dread.

  “I’m so sorry, May. I’ve asked something too personal. I knew this was a bad—”

  “Stop apologizing!” May shouted.

  Her sudden rage scared her. Maybe the whiskey wasn’t such a good idea after all. She stubbed out her cigarette and collected herself.

  “Eve, I’m . . . What I meant to say was there’s no reason to apologize. It wasn’t what you said. The truth is, I didn’t remember that we did that. Divorce. Probably because it happened so close to my being sick. What with the whole amnesia thing and . . . Jesus, this just keeps getting better and better.”

  May took another healthy swig of the Scotch. Instead of enjoying its warmth, she wanted it to burn out the sick feeling she had in her belly. Divorce. Every time she thought about Stephen, divorce made no sense.

  24

  Rice University, Houston, Texas

  March 10, 2066

  “So you’re saying it’s possible there are people, or life-forms, similar to us out there somewhere in the universe?”

  Stephen was giving a guest lecture on evolutionary biology at Rice University’s Physics and Astronomy Department. Demand for the event had been high, so the university had put him in one of its largest auditoriums. Roughly eight hundred people were jammed into the stadium seating, with many standing in the back and some in the aisles. For the most part, the people sitting down appeared to be either students or supporters of his work. The majority of those standing looked to be lower-class or working-class people, much older than the seated crowd. They were angry and loud, and many of them held crudely made signs lettered with Bible verses and things like “Burn in Hell.”

  “What I’m saying,” Stephen replied, “is that there’s a strong body of evidence supporting the theory that the basic elements of life on Earth, including genetic building blocks for plants and animals, exist all over the universe. Meteorites found as early as the 1960s contained uracil and xanthine, nucleobases that are precursors to molecules that make up DNA and RNA. Additionally, there is a strong body of evidence that there are Earth-like planets, known as exoplanets, in other solar systems in the universe. Knowing that, what do you think?”

  “I think—”

  “I think you’re a crackpot and somebody oughta lock you up!” one of the protesters yelled from the back of the room.

  The other protesters cheered. Some of the students stood up and yelled back, telling them to get out and stop issuing threats. Stephen stood calmly and waited for security to remove the man who yelled. Clearly he was used to taking such abuse, and did nothing to stoke the fires of dissent. A university official stepped up to the podium.

  “We would like to ask that all attendees please behave respectfully and refrain from such behavior, or we will be forced to cut this lecture short.”

  The crowd murmured but settled down. Stephen continued as if nothing had happened.

  “Thank you. I would like to add to that, if I may. As I’ve said, I welcome all people to these lectures, which I give on a fully voluntary basis, and I encourage discussion. Trust me: if I just sat up here lecturing, you’d all be asleep in no time.”

  The crowd laughed, loosening the tension.

  “For those of you who disagree with what is being discussed, I welcome your opinions. However, I’m a scientist, not a politician or an uninformed celebrity activist.”

  More laughter, even from some of the dissenters.

  “The point is, the only discussions I’m qualified to have with you are those relating to science. In case you haven’t noticed from my incredible fashion sense, I’m a total geek. I live and breathe facts and figures and empirical data, and I dream in calculus. Everything I do in my profession is for all of you. Not just some—all. I’ve never cared about being published or collecting accolades. Since I was a kid, when discussions about overpopulation, climate change, and the zombie apocalypse were in the zeitgeist—I’ve always loved that word—I’ve thought of nothing else but this question: What’s next for the human race? Are we destined to die out, to simply go extinct like other animals either unable or unwilling to adapt, or can we be the architects of our own evolution?”

  When the lecture was over and Stephen had finished shaking hands and signing things like a rock star or a political candidate, he sat down to do some more work before leaving.

  “Boo,” May said from behind him.

  He jumped out of his chair and sent his worktable and bag scattering across the floor. When he turned, she was standing there, stifling laughter.

  “You shouldn’t,” he said, sitting down to catch his breath.

  She could see that he was shaken. “Shit, I’m sorry. That was so stupid. With all those maniacs who came to your l
ecture, you probably thought someone was here to whack you.”

  “You came to my lecture?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Yeah,” she said, taken off guard. “I was in the neighborhood and—”

  “—you were having trouble sleeping . . .”

  “Stop, I thought the lecture was great. Not boring at all. I mean, we can talk about those shoes later, but I really enjoyed what you said. Oh, and there was that element of danger too. All in all, pretty dramatic.”

  “You should read my hate mail.”

  May scowled. “Hillbilly trash. Some things will never change.”

  “If they knew their ticket money went straight to all the liberal causes they hate, they’d really be pissed.”

  “You’re a dangerous man, Stephen.”

  “Takes one to know one—a dangerous woman, that is. Not a man, obviously.”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  May had worn her favorite jeans and a sheer white blouse. Her inner voice had asked her why she was trying to look hot if she was just going to check out Stephen’s lecture “for research” and then sneak out unnoticed. She had told her inner voice to fuck off.

  “I need to lock up, Dr. Knox,” a maintenance man yelled from the back of the room, causing Stephen to jump again.

  “Okay, thank you,” he called back.

  “Someone could use a drink,” May said.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Know any places around here?”

  “Only if you like cheap booze and obnoxious college students.”

  “What’s not to like?” May replied, mostly referring to herself.

  They walked to a dive bar near campus called Gringos, wedged between a Subway and a twenty-four-hour laundromat. From the outside, the place looked as though it had been plucked from Zona Norte in Tijuana, its windows plastered with handbills and laminated food and beer signs. The inside was dimly lit, with kitsch cantina tables and chairs and framed Mexican wrestler posters.