The Voyage of the White Cloud

by M. Darusha Wehm

  Janey recognized a look in her friend’s eyes, the desperately serious look of the utterly convinced. The drank in silence for a moment, and Janey wondered what this was all about. Tamar did work in the astrophysics lab. If anyone was going to find alien communications out there, it might as well be her. Still, this seemed so… improbable. She wished Lila were there. The newest member of the faculty was a mathematician, just out of the Academy. She could have calculated the odds. Janey eyed her half-empty drink. Or was it half-full?

  “I dunno,” she said, more to herself, but Tamar grabbed her arm making her jump.

  “Come on,” the other woman said, carefully standing up from their table at the bar. “Let’s go to the lab. I’ll show you.”

  “I don’t think this is such a good idea.”

  “Sure it is,” Tamar said, “we can’t hurt anything. And I have to show someone, it’s driving me crazy not talking about it.”

  “Wait a minute.” Janey stopped walking down the quiet corridor and grabbed Tamar’s hand. “Is this supposed to be a secret? Are you going to get in trouble for this?”

  Tamar shrugged. “Secret is going too far. But they don’t want to tell everyone about it for… well, you’ll see.” She turned to walk toward the lift but Janey stopped her.

  “Are you going to get in trouble for showing me this?” Janey asked again, forcing Tamar to look at her. She expected her friend to brush her off, but Tamar paused as if thinking her answer through.

  “It’s not impossible,” she conceded. “But it’s worth it. Come on.” She turned and, this time, Janey followed.

  “I don’t understand what I’m looking at.” It was pretty enough, the brightly coloured squiggles on the dark background of the screen, but she couldn’t find any meaning in the patterns.

  “Neither did we, at first,” Tamar said, sliding a control pad out of a slot in the console. “But look at this.” Her fingers flew across the keys and the waveforms resolved into words on the screen.

  Along the reef beyond our shores lies the first way station to the stars. The passage is dangerous but the reward is great.

  Janey gasped. “What is this?”

  Tamar grinned, the reflected light from the screen illuminating her face. “It’s a story,” she said, “hidden among the stars, from long ago and far away.”

  “And you’re sure this isn’t just from Earth?” Janey asked, her eyes wide as they tracked across the screen.

  “Definitely. It’s old, like way before humanity old. Plus it’s from the wrong direction.” Tamar leaned back, her smug grin illuminated by the patterns on the screen.

  “Okay, smartass,” Janey said, “so, how old is this?”

  Tamar’s smile melted. “These stories are hundreds of millions of years old. The people who’ve sent them are gone; their entire civilization is long dead.”

  “But didn’t you say they only appeared a few generations ago?”

  “Sure,” Tamar said, “but that’s the sad reality of the nature of spacetime. These signals are coming from a long way off. A really long way off. They maybe took an eon to reach us, that’s just the way of the universe. These are voices from history, but not our history. For us, the stories they tell are like visions of the future.”

  “So, what’s going to happen now?”

  Tamar shrugged. “The rest of the team will fight for a while. Some of them are afraid that making this public will cause a panic—things didn’t really work out for our friends beyond the stars, and you know how some people are convinced that anything that reminds us of our mortality will make people riot.”

  Janey nodded. “As if they are the only people competent to understand reality.” She sighed. “It will get out anyway, no matter what they decide.”

  Tamar nodded. “And the folks who want to hide it are in the minority anyway. I’m guessing that by the next generation these stories will be taught in your literature classes. Not to mention what we can do with the technology for decoding them. It was so clever, so elegant: hiding their messages among the stars, in the radiation of starlight. Of course, we assume it wasn’t meant to be a cypher, but the data just happens to be invisible to the human eye. To them, we guess, it would have been like watching theatre in the night sky.”

  “That must have been incredible.”

  “And it could be again,” Tamar said. “That’s why I wanted to show you this.”

  Janey took a deep breath. “It’s a big responsibility, Tamar. I don’t know if I’m up for it. I’m just a teacher, not even the best literature teacher. Who am I to judge—“

  Tamar laughed. “You’re getting sober,” she said and gestured at the screen. “If not you, who else? You know stories, hell, you love stories. And that’s what this is all about—sharing our stories with the universe.”

  “But it’s so…” Janey shook her head, trying to visualize creatures—no, people on some far away planet some hundred of thousands of years in the future, watching the tales of humanity play out before them. “It’s so big.”

  Tamar shrugged and gestured at the screen. “You’re right—this is the single most important discovery humanity has made since we’ve been on this voyage, maybe even in the thousand years before that. And what is it? A glorified pilot chart. Even I can tell that as a narrative it’s nothing special. But it was important to them. Important enough that they felt compelled to share it. And now we get a glimpse into another world, another life, if only one part of it. Never forget that what’s mundane to one person is exotic to another. Come on, we’ve got work to do. You’ve got to pick your favourite stories and I have to figure out this encoding scheme. It’s time to put our own messages in the stars.”

  Chapter 3

  The Day After My Birthday

  She stared into the darkness. She could see the light of distant stars, their winking glow a glimpse into millennia past. Thermonuclear reactions long dead, the light reaching across the gulf of space and time to reach her eyes now. No wonder no one ever comes here, she thought. Who wants to look at death?

  Lauren Ibarra stood at the porthole in the observation room, the palms of her hands pressed to the clear glass. It wasn’t really glass, she knew that, glass could never withstand the crushing vacuum outside, or the stress of the initial thrust all those centuries ago. She didn’t know what it was made of, some engineered construct deemed sufficiently space age once upon a time. Doubtlessly, there was a better material available now. Something that didn’t warp the view so much, something that didn’t hold her fingerprints so well, something not so cold.

  It didn’t matter, though. It wasn’t as if this was the kind of thing which would be replaced. If this window developed a problem, it would simply be welded over, she was sure. In all the years she had been coming to the observation room, she had never seen another person in the place. The glass held years worth of her fingerprints alone.

  Lauren had turned sixty-seven the previous day. Not yet an old woman, but no longer young either. In between. Neither here nor there. Just like everyone on this godforsaken ship.

  She walked out of the observation room, down the corridor back toward her quarters. She dreaded returning—her son Rich and his partner Dianne would be there, along with Katie. Oh, Katie. Lauren had loved her once, she was sure she really had. But now…

  She reached the door of their quarters and could hear the sound of voices from inside. She took a breath, stalling. She knew she would be fine once she got in there, but the gulf between solitude and the company of others was so great. Zero to one is the hardest step, she reminded herself. She moved to stand in the beam of the scanner and felt a moment of panic well up in her as she heard the click of the door beginning to open. Every molecule in her body wanted to turn and walk away. Every muscle tensed, ready to flee.

  “Look who’s here,” a jovial voice called as the door opened and Lauren’s fear reached its crescendo. Then, as it always did, the wave receded and she felt a smile—almost genuine—spread across her face.


  “Ritchie,” she said, stepping into the room and walking into his embrace. “It’s good to see you.” They hugged briefly and Lauren saw Dianne over her son’s shoulder. “And you, how have you been, Di?”

  “Really great, Lauren,” she said, waiting as mother and son disentangled, then stepping forward for a one-armed hug. “Happy birthday.”

  “Well, thank you,” Lauren said. “Having you both here is the best gift I could ask for. Come on, now, tell me all about the excitement over in Orange Sector. What’s the weather like over there?”

  The younger couple laughed dutifully at Lauren’s poor joke, then began to talk about their lives. “My mentor at the school, Harald Watanabe, just retired,” Dianne said, shaking her head. “He’s such a force of nature, so dedicated, it’s hard to imagine the place without him.”

  “Hmm,” Lauren nodded, wondering what that would be like—retirement. No longer even pretending that you were useful. She kept the thought to herself, letting the kids get on with their news. Work, plans, children. The same things Lauren herself talked about her whole life, the same things everyone she’d ever met talked about. She smiled and nodded and asked the appropriate questions, waiting patiently for the visit to end.

  Lauren knew that she wasn’t fooling Katie. Her partner knew she was just putting on a show for the kids. She’d confronted her once, back when they cared enough to fight. “You’re lucky that Rich loves you so much,” she’d said after one of the annual visits, “that he’s blind to your act. But it’s disgraceful, Lo, how little of a damn you give about those two.”

  “I do love them,” she’d said, defending herself.

  “I know,” Katie had said, “but you don’t care about them.” She’d walked off then, Lauren never knew where. Another thing she didn’t care about, she guessed. She knew that Katie’s accusation should hurt, that her son’s goals and his partner’s career should mean something to her. But knowing how things ought to be and making them be that way were two separate things. She’d let Katie go, found a mindless story to watch, and killed another evening on nothing.

  By now, Katie didn’t bother to reprimand Lauren any more. Lauren sometimes found it funny that Katie had been afflicted by the same apathy that she’d so despised in Lauren. Not the kind of funny that made her laugh.

  Lauren knew that she hadn’t always been this way. She had been a regular person, just like Rich, once. She’d had hopes and dreams and loves and plans, like anyone else. And she knew that the saddest thing of all was that her dreams hadn’t died because they remained unfulfilled. This feeling of emptiness wasn’t because of everything she hadn’t done. It was because there was nothing left to do.

  The next day she sat at her desk, computing soil densities. It was important work and she was very good at it. She’d even enjoyed it once. I feed the ship, she used to say. Not bad for someone who can’t even boil water. She’d laughed at her own jokes then, full of a sense that it all mattered, even if she could never have articulated that. Now, it was just activity to pass the time. She knew intellectually that it was still vital work. It just didn’t mean anything to her. She could have been doing anything. Digging ditches and then filling them in again. Painting the hull. It was just something to do.

  Had she lived generations ago, some well-meaning soul might have tried to convince her to allow her personality and memories to be recorded. She would have refused, of course, but had it happened anyway, someone accessing the construct might imagine that there was some terrible secret which ate at Lauren. Some item of personal history which after lengthy conversation, some building of rapport, would be finally revealed.

  But the truth was that there was no one moment, no great tragedy or torment which caused Lauren to lose connection. It just happened. She pictured her emotional life as some kind of gas in a container, a container with a pinhole leak. As the years passed, the pressure difference sucked infinitesimal amounts from the container, so little at a time that it wasn’t even noticeable. But the reduction was constant and one day the container that once held her love and admiration, her goals and aspirations, was nothing more that an empty flask with a hole in it.

  Does this happen to everyone, she wondered. She looked around the task room at the other senior technicians. There were a half dozen people around her age, the silver badge of authority and experience on their collars. It was a tableau right out of an Academy recruiting holo, people working hard to ensure the successful delivery of a future generation of humanity to a future planetary home. Serious work.

  Were they all faking it, too? Had their containers run out of gas, just as hers had? Was it an inevitable result of having outlived one’s dreams?

  “That’s such wonderful news, Pete.” Lauren heard Maureen’s voice from the break room and the strident tones brought her out of her thoughts. Maureen had always been loud, Lauren thought, but she’d not found her colleague’s voice so distracting until recently. Lauren shook her head. Everything annoyed her lately, if she noticed it at all. Still, Maureen’s voice had now caused her to notice the time and her own rumbling stomach.

  She pushed away from her desk and stood. Something twinged in her right hip and her left knee was stiff. She sighed. She worked the kinks out then walked into the break room. “Lauren,” Peter said as she entered, his smile reaching all the way up his face. “Have you heard?”

  Lauren shook her head but didn’t pause on her way to the cooler. “Danica is pregnant,” he said to her turned back.

  Danica, Lauren thought. Who is that again? “That’s great, Pete,” she said, still not placing the name. “You must be thrilled.”

  “Absolutely,” he said, “from what I can tell, the only thing better than being a dad is being a granddad.” That’s right, she was his daughter. Lauren pulled a salad from the cooler, checking that her name was on the container’s lid. She plastered a smile on her face and turned.

  “You’re going to make a great doting grandfather, I’m sure,” she said and patted him on his shoulder. He smiled and touched her hand briefly. Lauren felt something like shame creep up from her stomach, but it dissipated.

  “You must be getting anxious yourself,” Maureen said. “It’s about time for Richard and—what’s his partner’s name again?”

  “Dianne.”

  “That’s right,” Maureen said, her voice making Lauren’s ears hurt, “Dianne. She must be preparing for pregnancy about now.”

  Lauren shrugged. “I try not to meddle,” she said, raising an eyebrow slightly.

  “You’re such a good mother,” Maureen said, with no trace of irony. “Me, I can’t stop sticking my nose in every few days. Of course, I had a boy, so it’s no guarantee for me.” She sighed. “Still, I can’t help but hope he’ll end up like Pete, here.”

  Peter shrugged. “Everyone makes their own choices,” he said, “but I couldn’t imagine my life without Dan and Beryl. I like my work, don’t get me wrong, but when the kids were small I’d have never left home if I could have gotten away with it. You know what I’m talking about, right Lauren?”

  He smiled and Lauren felt ice in her stomach. She managed a return smile then stepped to the door of the break room. “I’d better get back,” she said and fled to her desk.

  She ate her lunch sitting at her desk, the picture of the dedicated scientist. However, she merely preferred the solitude of mathematics and reports to the calculated lies she told whenever she had to interact with other people. How did it get this bad? She knew she had once been capable of relating to others honestly. She was sure.

  She remembered the dream she’d had the previous night. She was in the quarters she’d shared with her mother as a child, the room seeming spacious as it had when she was small. In her dream, she sat on the bed in her corner of the room, a tablet on her lap. Its screen was covered with an image of space, not the scene she had viewed from the observation room, but something out of a picture story or art magazine—stars twinkling in clusters, nebulae bursting with colour, co
mets with icy hot tails. She reached out with a child’s hand to touch the screen, but it was not solid as she expected. Her fingers disappeared into the void left by the ersatz screen’s portal, but she was not afraid. Her fingertips tingled and her dream mind knew that it was the touch of the future, the feeling of destiny being revealed.

  She pulled her hand away from the tablet and stared at her fingers. They looked no different, but she could feel something remaining, a shadow of a memory of a powerful sense of home. She looked around her at the familiar room—her mother’s medical lab uniform hanging on a peg next to the washroom door, her rag doll Pippa lying next to her pillow, her bowl with its tiny but thriving geranium. She was filled with a sense of contentment, of belonging and of hope.

  Lauren’s stomach clenched at the memory. She’d awoken this morning, the tips of her fingers tingling ever so slightly and the emotions of the dream still alive in her mind. It had come over her in a wave, the homesickness, the crushing grief over the fact that it had been merely a dream. A dream that had been murdered by her own act of awakening.

  She felt her breath catch in her throat and fought to banish the memory. She was too old to wallow in nostalgia. Everyone wants to recapture their youth, it is the mortification of the old. She knew that and had always told herself that she would age with dignity. No desperate attempts to remain youthful for her. But she couldn’t help but remember the dream, so vivid, of her own younger self. So open to life. So eager to play her part in the great journey. So ignorant of the banality of life.

  Lauren pushed away from her desk, her empty lunch container in one hand. She looked over her shoulder and saw that the break room was empty, so she stood and walked over to the sink. She rinsed her container, watching the swirl of oil mixed in water as it sluiced down the recycler intake, tiny specks of green and red following the flow. It reminded her of those nebulae she had never seen. How very much there was that she had never seen. She had been born on the ship, would die on the ship, never having left the ship. It seemed such a small life.