After a minute or two, when further contractions of his abdominal muscles produced nothing but painful, empty gagging anymore, Castor ripped a few sheets of toilet paper off the roll that was mounted to the wall in a metal holder, wiped his mouth and spat the last remains of vomit in his mouth into the bowl before he pulled the lever to flush. He sat on the floor, his head propped against his right hand, his elbow resting on the rim of the bowl, his cold sweat making him shiver. From inside the gymnasium he heard the muffled sounds of people speaking on the microphone, the crowd cheering, applauding, celebrating him, Castor, the only person in a radius of fifty miles who had so far encountered the dubious luck of hitting the jackpot in this grotesque, perverted, yet somehow intriguingly glamorous and alluring raffle officially called the Exodus Lottery but sinisterly dubbed the ‘Exitus Lottery’ by some of Castor’s more cynical contemporaries.
Although flattered by people’s response to his impending fate, by all their good wishes and their encouragement, he felt a dead weight resting on his shoulders, a bone-crushing pressure that came with all their hopes and dreams that he would have to carry with him on his journey as the ambassador of a doomed, ill-fated world to a different world, another playground for humankind’s dreams and aspirations. It was the kind of responsibility Castor had shied away from all his life, the kind of thing he had always preferred to leave to his brother without any sign of envy; indeed, even with relief. It had always been an uncomfortable, awkward, yet tantalizingly easy way out, a way that now, for the first time in his life, seemed barred.
Leaning his head back against the cold tiles of the wall, Castor closed his eyes. He was still feeling dizzy, and the relentless noise from the gymnasium reminded him that he would soon have to get back inside and face the crowd yet again and endure their accolades, their congratulations and well wishes, heartfelt and squashing. There was no way to avoid yet another round of handshakes and pats on the back, unless …
A soft, cool breeze soothingly caressed Castor’s sweaty face, and when he opened his eyes, his upward glance fell upon the transom window above his stall, tilted open for ventilation, a small escape hatch, a sight that kindled his flight instinct. He entertained the thought for a moment, intrigued, excited, his heart beating fast, his spirit uplifted, his soul sensing hope where there had been none before. What if he could just crawl out of the window and run? Run where? It didn’t matter, just away from this pandemonic circus in which he was the unwilling main attraction, somewhere quiet, somewhere safe. Home. He could simply go home. It was no more than an hour’s walk or a half hour’s jog away. But what about Pollux? What about his parents? They were waiting for him outside. They’d get worried if he simply disappeared. He looked at the smartwatch on his left wrist. He could send them a message, telling them not to worry, telling them he’d gone home. But he’d have to go now. If he didn’t come out of the restroom soon, Pollux would undoubtedly come in to check on him. He didn’t have much time to lose.
Castor slowly stood, his legs still shaky. He put down the toilet seat and lid and climbed on top of it, one hand propped against the wall to keep his balance. With the other he closed the transom window above his head. He pulled the lever in the right position and swung the window open to the side, allowing a larger stream of fresh evening air to come in and cool his face. Putting both hands on the window frame, Castor carefully stepped on the toilet’s water tank. Without thinking, just driven by his urge to escape, he pulled himself up and pushed his head and torso through the window that was barely big enough for his slender body. Finding no foothold for his legs still inside, he wriggled himself through the small opening until suddenly his center of gravity dropped and he realized that he hadn’t thought his escape plan entirely through. From three meters up he fell, and with a violent thud he landed face first on the narrow strip of clay soil surrounding the gymnasium, a sad and barren remnant of the days long gone when the school was still able to afford decorative greenery.
Moaning in pain, Castor rolled over to lie on his back, his hands clutching at his nose and jaw to look for blood or broken bones, when he heard a voice right next to him.
“Whoa, easy, Hoss! Where do you think you’re going?”
Startled, his body still in fight-or-flight mode, Castor jumped. Trying to gain traction on the waxy soil with his hands and feet, he slipped, fell backwards, and hit the ground with his head, crying out in even more pain. His ordeal was met with a sardonic cackle adding insult to his injury.
“I’m sorry,” the voice said. “Are you all right?”
Castor looked up and saw a girl sitting on the ground, her back leaning against the gymnasium wall, just two meters away from where he had first hit the ground. She was hiding a mischievous grin behind one hand, flicking away the ashes of her cigarette with the other. “No,” he said, sitting up and holding his bruised head. “But thanks for asking.”
“K,” the girl said, dragging on her cigarette.
Castor watched her form the corner of his eye. She was pretty in an unconventional way. Her triangular face was framed by short blue hair. A tattooed spider’s web covered a quarter of her face from her forehead down to her small, pointy nose, across her left eye to her ear. Her jeans were torn at the knees, and under her black leather jacket she wore a T-shirt with the logo of some obscure late twentieth-century band on it. If he didn’t know any better, Castor would have thought the girl was from the twentieth century too. Probably the nineteen-eighties or nineties. On the ground next to her lay a metal flask. When she noticed Castor’s curious look, she picked it up and put in the pocket of her jacket.
“So?” The girl looked at him.
“So what?” he asked.
“So what’s the story? Are you gonna tell me or are you just gonna walk away and leave me forever wondering who that mysterious boy was that fell out of the sky one night?”
“Right,” Castor said. “Sorry. I’m Castor. Castor Pendergast.”
“You’re Castor Castor Pendergast and …?”
“I’m Castor Pendergast and I’m going to Gliese 667 Cc.”
“Oh!” the girl said, her eyes suddenly wide open. “So you’re the pitiful chap they’re staging this deplorable circus for. Bummer.”
“Yup,” Castor said with a sheepish smile, scratching his head. “That’s me, I guess.”
“And you’re so excited about it, you decided to jump head-first out of a toilet window.”
Castor sneered. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”
“Not at all. I probably would have done the same if I were you. Except I never would have participated in that stupid Exitus Lottery in the first place.”
“Yeah well, I didn’t expect to win.”
She laughed. “That’s a poor excuse, Castor Castor Pendergast. Surely you must at least have considered the possibility.”
“I did consider the possibility.”
“Right. And you thought it would be a good idea to take your chance on leaving everyone and everything you’ve ever known behind to spend the rest of your life locked in a steel tube and never see the sun again or swim in the ocean or climb a mountain?”
“Well, no,” Castor said. “Not if you put it like that. The plan isn’t to hop on a spaceship, take off, and then just sit there and wait until you die somewhere in the Kuiper belt. They have a cryonics program I want to apply for. The mission statement clearly denotes the aim to take at least some people who were born on Earth to a different planet alive.”
“Yeah, don’t get your hopes up too high, honey. Cryonics is fringe science. They’ve made some progress in recent years, but it’s still incredibly risky. Some people they’ve frozen and thawed were fine all right, but others woke up as imbeciles with their former IQs cut in half. And that was after only a few weeks or months of cryostasis. And how long is the trip to …?”
“Gliese 667 Cc.”
“How long is the trip to Gliese 667 Cc?”
“I’m not sure,” Castor said. “Probably nine or ten, maybe t
welve … generations.”
The girl laughed. “Ten generations, right. Well, there you go then. It takes a lot of faith in science to get yourself frozen for a couple of hundred years and expect to come out all right at the other end.”
Castor shrugged. “It’s like with air travel, you know? Take off and landing are the tricky bits, not the flying itself. Once they’ve sorted out the problems with the freezing and thawing, it doesn’t make much of a difference if you’re frozen for a year or a hundred years.”
The girl slowly shook her head and smiled. “You’re the perfect victim, aren’t you?”
Castor frowned. “What?”
The girl waved her hand dismissively, flicking the ashes of her cigarette in the process. “Never mind.”
“Always mind,” Castor replied. “What do you mean by ‘the perfect victim’?”
She looked at him almost apologetically. “No offense, but you seem like you’re cherry picking information and deliberately ignoring the risks. It’s like you’re totally buying into the narrative of the Global Administration and the space agency where we have this great big plan to save mankind and we just go up there and colonize the galaxy and everyone will live happily ever after. They’re downplaying the risks in order to garner the support of gullible people. As a book lover you should know that a story with no conflict is a bad story trying to sound good. Too good to be true in fact.”
“First of all,” Castor said. “I just fell from a toilet window running from my fame. I wouldn’t call that no conflict …”
“Fair enough, I guess.”
“… and second, who told you I’m a book lover?”
The girl smiled. “I have eyes, you know? I see you walk around the school with a stack of books under your arm every day. You’re the only person I know who still uses printed books, and I assume you’re not just carrying them around, you’re probably reading them too.”
“You’re going to my school then?”
“Sophomore.”
“Right,” Castor said. “Sorry, I don’t think I’ve ever noticed you before. Despite the blue hair and everything.”
The girl laughed. “Of course you haven’t. You’re walking around with your nose on the floor all day, never looking into anyone’s eyes.”
“Sorry. I’m kind of … shy, I guess.”
“Is that why you haven’t asked my name yet, or are you just not interested?”
“Oh God!” Castor said, feeling painfully embarrassed. “That was very rude of me.”
“It’s all right.”
“So what is your name?”
“Lyra,” the girl said. “Lyra Morgan.”
“That’s a very pretty name, Lyra Lyra Morgan.”
“Why thank you, Castor Castor Pendergast.”
Suddenly, Castor felt a strange, fuzzy feeling inside that he quickly identified as self-confidence. He had never found it easy to meet new people, to make new friends, or even just to ask a stranger’s name. The complexities of human interaction were a mystery to him, and in the past he had mostly relied on his popular, outgoing brother to introduce him to other people. Going it alone was a first for Castor, and after the awkward beginning—falling from a toilet window—he was hoping that the worst was already over by now. He shimmied closer to Lyra until he sat right next to her and he leaned his back against the gymnasium wall.
“So tell me,” he said, “is that Lyra after the musical instrument or after the constellation?”
Lyra flicked away the butt of her cigarette and exhaled one last thick cloud of smoke. “The constellation. My dad is a total space junkie.”
“Oh is he?”
“Yep. Galaxies, black holes, craters of the moon, you name it. He knows them all. He’s even got his own telescope that he carries out into the backyard at night so he can chase comets and take photos of LuCo and whatnot. Anyway, my mom wanted to give me a more traditional name like Hannah or Rebecca, but my dad insisted on a name that was somehow related to something up there. In the end, Lyra was the only common ground they could find. Imagine they’d named me Venus or Cassiopeia or some shit like that. Thank God I dodged that bullet.”
Castor pondered it for a moment. “As names go, they’re both not so bad, I suppose.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
“Perhaps,” Lyra said. “Anyway, I’m happy with Lyra.”
“All right then.”
They sat in silence for a while. It was the kind of silence Castor feared. The sudden lack of things to say when doing small talk was what usually made him shy away from casual social interaction because he found it impossible to gauge the appropriateness of potential topics. He could never tell if any personal questions would be benevolently regarded as acceptable natural curiosity or wrongly perceived as an inappropriate invasion of privacy. However, Lyra seemed laid back enough, so he decided to take a chance.
“So what does your dad do?”
“He’s in construction,” Lyra said.
Castor felt a small sting of disappointment. He had assumed that a man with a sizeable interest in space exploration would have pursued a corresponding career path. With his own father and grandmother in the space agency, it would have made it easier for him to keep the conversation going, too. Instead, Castor feared there would be more awkward silence, but then Lyra said, “Here he comes now.”
Castor leaned forward and gazed past her towards the street. There was no one to be seen.
“Your dad?” he asked. “Where?”
Lyra nudged him with her elbow and pointed towards the sky. “Up there.”
When Castor looked up, he saw a Nephilim rise above the silhouette of the trees on its way across the cloudless night sky. Once again the sight of a giant space dock orbiting the Earth filled him with a sense of pride and wonder—wonder at the technical achievement of assembling and maintaining a two-thousand-meter-wide space station a thousand kilometers above the surface of the planet, pride at the unfathomable ambition and tenacity it took to make that dream a reality. He stood to get a better view, as if a meter at a million meters’ distance made any difference.
“Your dad is on a Nephilim?” he asked without taking his eyes off the fast moving three-pointed star.
“Nephilim 2,” Lyra said. “He’s doing interior fittings and electric installations on the ark-ships.”
“Nephilim 2, that’s where they’re building my ark-ship! I mean, the ark-ship I’ll be on.”
“Is it?”
“Uh-huh,” Castor said, still staring at the sky, slack jawed.
Lyra laughed. “You really are the perfect victim.”
“Stop saying that.”
“In a good way, I mean,” she said. “Your passion and excitement are palpable. You really can’t wait to get out of here, can you?”
Silently, with his hands in his pockets, Castor followed the Nephilim’s course across the sky until it entered the earth’s shadow and its brilliant glow faded and eventually disappeared. When it was gone, he sat down next to Lyra again.
“I hate having to leave it all behind,” he said. “The mere thought of it freaks me out and makes me physically sick.”
“Why do it then? It’s like your body is trying to tell you something and you’re not listening.”
“Because … I can’t help it. Something tells me it’s the right thing to do. I mean, not necessarily me going, but us as a species taking the next logical step in our evolution. Look, I know evolution has no predisposed goal. Nevertheless, it moves in a certain direction, from simplicity towards ever greater complexity and higher intelligence, from its origins in the sea to the land to the air to space. We are not the final product. Evolution doesn’t have a final product. It will go on and on forever and ever if it’s not stopped. I think it’s our purpose—the purpose of all life on Earth, in fact—to make sure that evolution continues, even beyond the scale and scope of our planet. Earth is going to the dogs, if not today then in a thousand years or a million years
or a billion years. In five billion years, the sun will reach the end of its life cycle. It will blow up and destroy the earth, and everything that has ever been and everything we have ever known will be no more. That’s a scientific fact, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. But I find it impossible to believe that any intelligent species would simply take it lying down, That they would just shrug it off and say, ‘Yeah, so we’re all gonna die, whatever’. We can’t fight our survival instinct. We have to take to the stars sooner or later. It’s gonna happen, it was always gonna happen. It’s in our genes. Now it may happen sooner rather than later, but here we are.”
“Your idealism is adorable, Professor Pendergast,” Lyra said with a provoking smile.
“Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not patronizing you,” she said. “Look, I hear what you’re saying, and it makes perfect sense. But honestly, I don’t think we’re ready. How long have modern humans been round? A hundred thousand years? Two hundred thousand?”
Castor nodded. “Something like that.”
“Right. So on an evolutionary scale we’re still babies, and …”
“Toddlers,” Castor interrupted her. “We can communicate, we can move around at our own will. We’re at least toddlers.”
Lyra waved her hand dismissively. “Fine, toddlers then. My point is that throughout our history, our psychological development has been lagging thousands if not tens of thousands of years behind our physical ability to do stuff. Humans are immature and irresponsible. Earth was thriving and flourishing for billions of years until we came along, and after only a few thousand years of us ass-raping nature the planet is a mess.”
“The burst wasn’t our fault, though, and neither is Fat Boy.”
“Please,” Lyra sneered. “Do you really think we’d be in a better shape without the two? You said it yourself, the planet is going to the dogs. We fucked this place up, and I just don’t think we should go out there and impose our particular way of life on other worlds just yet. Not until we’ve sorted ourselves out first.”
Eschaton - Season One Page 14
