The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  Which meant—she was sure of it—that the south pole airlock was just that, an airlock, and that she could get it open. She could escape, if she could just get to it.

  There was only one problem—there was nothing between her and that airlock but a couple of hundred meters of highly acidic slime.

  She cried out in despair and frustration.

  She was so close to getting out—to die here, after so much—

  Eventually she recovered herself enough to start thinking again. There had to be something, something she could use to climb to the airlock. She swung her light around in big, desperate arcs, looking for anything.

  And then she found it. She saw what looked like stones sticking out from the walls of the cone, boulders the size of houses, broken and weathered and shaped like—like—

  Like teeth. She had found 2I’s teeth. And she realized that once again she’d tried to impose human concepts and scales on 2I, tried to imagine it working like a spaceship when it was an animal, an organism. A creature with teeth. And the south pole airlock wasn’t an airlock at all. It was 2I’s mouth.

  There was only motion.

  Planets, stars, galaxies—always they turned, they rotated, revolved. Rocks tumbled between worlds, comets’ tails twisted and braided in the stellar wind. The flow of charged particles swept through infinity. The endless howling cry of stars, the cold and ever-falling shafts of cosmic rays. There were eddies, vortices, currents, and that was all. Things changed over time, mutation and metamorphosis swirling across seconds hours centuries millennia, even on the scale of billions of years nothing stood still, nothing ever would.

  Jansen had once, as a girl, lain down on her back at the top of a grassy hill, the sun red and veiny through the membranes of her closed eyes, and tried to feel the Earth turn and—though her father had told her it was impossible—yes yes yes she had felt it, she had felt the powerful sweeping avalanche of it, felt the hills and towns and cities and roads, people and cars and the great basins of the ocean falling away from her, Earth forever crashing over onto its back again and again forever forever—

  In the quiet cold places between stars, 2I had felt the fabric of space-time itself stretch and groan. She’d felt the universe expand.

  How could Jansen’s ego compete? How could she hold on to herself in the shadow of this creature so much larger and older? She felt as if she’d climbed up the shoulder of a giantess and was exploring her ear canal like a lightless cave.

  Yet Foster had been here before her, and Foster had found a way—a way to hold on to himself. To lift a voice recorder to his mouth and whisper what he’d seen, glimpses of something so large you could never take it all in at once. His ego had stretched that far. Had he thought 2I was going to make him rich? Had he thought it would earn him a promotion at KSpace if he managed to save Earth from its fate?

  Earth—she had to remember what was at stake. She had to fight for the planet below.

  If you go there you’ll die! she screamed, and felt her lips tremble just a little, her throat shape the contours of words she couldn’t hear.

  Death?

  Death was change. And everything changed.

  But the people down there—everyone Jansen had ever known, the ones she liked, the ones she hated, the ones she loved: Roy McAllister and Chuy and Esmee and Hector, and Mary with her sympathetic eyes and Parminder Rao… if 2I didn’t turn away from Earth all of them would be lost, everything they were, everything they might do would be thrown away—

  Jansen was lifted by a great wind and carried backward in time, tossed between stars. She saw what 2I had seen. She saw the cold, quiet time. She saw a place where even space-time flattened out, the void itself. A place/time (what a meaningless distinction) with no gravity, nothing at all pulling on her. No heat, no light, just grains of dust, a handful of them in every cubic kilometer.

  She lived through the long, slow, quiet time. Felt her heart beat just once in a thousand years, pushing fluids as sluggish as pitch through the remains of old and tattered veins. She felt the friction of time, felt it grind and grind until it had to scrape to a stop, it had to, and yet it never did. She felt the struggle that 2I had endured, the great, vast work of light-years, the effort of holding on, of being as patient as the wind that howled and beat against the canyon wall, and carved, in time, a graceful arch of stone.

  Did the brief sparks of human lives compare? Could they?

  These were not arguments. 2I wasn’t trying to reason with her. It was showing her reality stripped bare. Reality in the way no human mind with its busy concerns and complexes and neuroses and aspirations could ever really see. These were the rules. You can’t break the rules. You can’t break the rules of thermodynamics, and you can’t stop the worms from growing, from devouring you from the inside out. What folly to think otherwise!

  2I was too big, and Jansen was too small.

  She felt herself slipping away. Knew she couldn’t win, that she was a raindrop falling toward the surface of the ocean. A moment wobbling in the air and then—and then—collision, the slightest ripple, and then she would be lost.

  She let out one last howling scream.

  And then she was gone.

  It wasn’t going to be easy.

  The teeth were almost a hundred meters away. Between Rao and the teeth was a lot of black slime, and she was certain if she fell into it the stuff would burn right through her suit before she could climb out. That was assuming that when she hit the ground she didn’t break both legs, or her neck, or fracture her skull. Sometimes being a doctor wasn’t helpful, knowing just how fragile human bodies are.

  It would have been an impossible jump in Earth gravity. Here it might, just might, be possible. If she launched herself through the axis, she thought that might increase her hang time.

  Maybe.

  It wasn’t as if she had a lot of time to work out the math. The last of the platforms had crumbled away, splitting into pieces as if it had been perforated, as if it had been designed to collapse when the worms attacked. Which maybe it had. Rao knew that 2I had no intention of surviving its collision with Earth, that it was designed to fail at the end, so maybe a breakaway skull was part of the whole scheme.

  She realized she was stalling. Procrastinating. It was now or never.

  The ring of bone under her feet was already starting to crack. She got as much of a run-up as she could and threw herself into empty space.

  And flipped ass over head, right away, as she screamed her way through the dark air. She was spinning, and she could feel the blood rushing out of her head as her feet swung crazily around her. If she wasn’t careful she could pass out, she knew, and it would be hard to grab the teeth if she was unconscious.

  She pushed her arms out as straight as she could, like an ice skater trying to slow down from a tight spin. It helped, she thought. A little, maybe. Her light flashed around the dark walls of the cone so fast it looked like a strobe.

  Then she passed through the axis.

  For a moment, a very, very short moment, she weighed nothing at all. At least her stomach didn’t. Her head and her feet were still under the influence of gravity (not much, but still) and the tidal difference between her center of mass and her distal appendages was… was…

  Stomach acid rushed up her throat. She clamped her mouth shut, forced herself to swallow. To open her eyes and look. To see if she was going to make it.

  Or if she was about to die.

  She saw the teeth looming up in front of her, huge and round. Getting bigger all the time. Her vision swirled as her brain tried to process whether she was falling toward them or flying up to them. It wasn’t capable of knowing there was no difference—her brain wanted answers, damn it.

  You’re falling toward the slime, she told it. Because she was certain that was what was going to happen, that she was going to miss the jump.

  Not by much. Maybe by meters, maybe less. She’d gotten the jump almost right. What a cruel joke. She fired her suit jets
in a desperate attempt to push herself farther, but inside of 2I they weren’t even strong enough to fight back against air resistance. She pushed her arms out in front of her, straining, trying to will them to grow longer. Desperately wishing that there were some rough spot on the nearest tooth, some projecting ledge that she might manage to catch at the last second.

  But there was nothing that she could see. Her jittery light lit up just one tiny spot on one of the teeth now, and it looked as smooth and featureless as a stone wall.

  You’re going to miss it, she thought. You’re going to miss it.

  You’re going to die here, after all this.

  And the worst part was that she was moving so slowly now, falling so gracefully, that she had long seconds ahead of her to contemplate how it was going to end. To imagine the worst possible death.

  I’m sorry, Commander Jansen, she thought. I’m sorry I wasted this chance you gave me. I’m sorry, Mr. McAllister. You believed in me enough to make me an astronaut, and at the last second I let you down. I’m sorry, Sunny. I’m sorry I had to let you go. I’m sorry, Mom. I’m so sorry, Nani. I love you all.

  Her hand snatched at the tooth, her fingers curling, her arm stretching out as far as it possibly could, clamping down like a claw—

  —on nothing but dark air.

  Sally Jansen’s body convulsed, deep in the sea of hands. Tendrils snaked across her face and her chest, dragged at her arms and her legs. She was encased in alien flesh, held in place and paralyzed.

  Her lips still moved, but they couldn’t form words. The tendrils burrowed through the tissues of her lungs and her larynx and her voice was gone. Her eyes were open but they saw nothing, there was no light and nothing to see. And yet—

  It wasn’t seeing. The images erupting in her head weren’t pictures, instead they were mathematical equations, diagrams of particle interactions. Except even that wasn’t right, because this was math without numbers. Math by instinct. She struggled but failed to find the right name for this new sense. There wasn’t one. Call it a kind of sight, then, sight by metaphor. She saw through eyes that were not eyes. She saw—

  the sun, not as light and heat, but a web of emanations. a trillion charged spears radiating out in every direction, particles that filled her wings and let her soar.

  She saw—

  the world below, not a ball of rock but a song of elements in composition, chromium, radium, nickel, iridium, so much carbon and nitrogen, water and free oxygen. an oasis in a desert light-years wide.

  a perfect nursery for the children.

  So close now, she could feel its gravity tugging at her, pulling her down. She had floated for so long and now she was falling, spiraling inward toward a final meeting.

  Her life was almost over, and that was a thing to be wished for. The final operation in an equation: death as equal sign, quod erat demonstrandum. A conclusion.

  Sally Jansen had had a dream once. A dream that had never come true. She could understand, oh yes, she understood so very well what it was like to want to reach the end, to want a thing to be done.

  But that had been denied her, and it had warped her life. She’d tried, just like 2I, to make a journey to another world. She’d gotten so very, very close. And then it had been taken away from her.

  She carried that bitterness inside her still. She always would. She had learned to pile life atop it, like a comforter on a lumpy bed. But still she slept in that bed every night.

  That sorrow, that loss, was the only part of her now that still stuck out from the generalized consciousness, the smoothed-over combination of two minds. It was all that was left of her that she could call her own.

  There was a kind of strength in that inability to fit in. A power in her difference. She did not choose to extend that power. She was not awake, as a human would measure such a thing. She was not expressing herself. That had been Foster’s mistake, to think the pressure of human will might accomplish something here. Sally Jansen was no longer a rational actor. To focus on the rough spot on her being was not a decision. It was simply something that could not be ignored.

  The grain of sand the oyster cannot spit out. So instead it grows a pearl around it, because it has no choice.

  Her lips moved. She did not form full words, she could not. But still, her lips moved, just as Stevens’s had.

  Her lips pressed together in the middle. If she’d had breath in her body she would have pushed it outward in a dull, droning sound.

  She—the larger she, of which Sally Jansen was just one small, irritating part—raged with frustration and thwarted desire. It had taken so long, so much, to come this far. Just because one tiny crumb of her vast soul rebelled, why should she change the great plan now? The microscopic part of her called Sally Jansen shouldn’t be allowed to overpower the mind that had crossed space, the mind that had lived for eons, that had suffered in the cold and the empty to reach this place—

  No. She couldn’t allow this insignificant part to veto the will of the whole.

  But Sally Jansen’s lips kept moving.

  No voice recorder, no matter how sensitive, could have picked up the sound she made. It existed only in her own head.

  Where it echoed louder than cracking thunder.

  Muh. Muh. Muh.

  Rao fell.

  With terrible slowness.

  She closed her eyes. Why not? After all she’d seen, all the horrors she’d witnessed, why would she deny herself now the tiny comfort of not seeing her own death rush toward her?

  She tried not to think about what it would feel like. She tried not to think at all. To clear her mind.

  Then something touched her arm, and she shrieked in fresh terror. She bounced off a hard surface and the breath went out of her and she was silent. She swung wildly, like the bob on the end of a pendulum.

  Inhuman fingers wrapped around her wrist and grasped her tight.

  She opened her eyes slowly, so confused she could focus only on how fast her heart was beating. She looked up.

  A white, shiny hand was holding her arm. Two other hands exactly like it clutched at the tooth, easily supporting her weight.

  It was ARCS, the robot. It had caught her and kept her from falling.

  She let out a noise that was half laugh, half gasp of utter surprise.

  “Dr. Rao? Do you need assistance?” the robot asked.

  She reached up and grabbed one of its three arms. In the minuscule gravity she was easily able to haul herself up onto the cracked top surface of the tooth.

  “Thank you,” she said, breath rushing back into her lungs. “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome.”

  The robot had been sent down 2I’s axis, where there was no gravity, so it could map the interior. Eventually it had crashed and stopped reporting. They’d thought it must have been destroyed.

  Apparently not.

  “Come on,” she said. She held out one arm, and ARCS scampered up onto her shoulder like a monkey. She moved her light so it showed her the way forward. There were three rows of teeth—just as the worms had—nestled in concentric rows. She was light enough she could simply jump up to the second row, then the third.

  And there, in the middle of the third row, was the south pole airlock. It looked much like the one at the north pole, the one they’d used to enter 2I, except smaller. The dome was no more than twenty meters across.

  She remembered what Jansen had told her about how to operate these locks. Any pressure on the dome would cause it to rotate inward. She slapped the dome with her hand, felt it rotating under her palm. It started to turn almost immediately. Soon a rough, irregular opening appeared, sliding toward her. It came to face directly inward and then stopped. She climbed inside, her light splashing across the perfectly spherical interior.

  She was suddenly spinning very fast. No. She’d been spinning, the whole time she was in the drum. She’d absorbed the angular momentum of that rotation. The airlock, on the other hand, wasn’t spinning at all. She reach
ed out for the walls and let friction slow her rotation, cancel it out.

  Behind her she heard a series of loud cracks. She knew that had to be the sound of the buttresses snapping, the pillars that held up the cage of bone that was 2I’s skull. She moved to the aperture and peered out, trying to see if the cage had finally fallen, if the worms had finally brought it down. Before she could see anything, however, the airlock rotated again, and she was cut off entirely from the interior of 2I.

  Her breath sounded very loud inside her helmet. She felt a bizarre claustrophobia, even in that large, empty space.

  “Dr. Rao,” the robot said, “I’m a little concerned about your vital signs. Your heart rate and respiration suggest an extreme level of stress.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “No shit.”

  The airlock stopped rotating. The aperture showed her not open space but a face of blank rock, stained dark red by cosmic rays. A ten-meter-wide seam ran across the rock—she remembered seeing it from the outside.

  She pushed on it. Slapped at it with her hands. It was sealed tightly shut. How long ago had 2I closed its mouth? How many thousands of years ago?

  She had no tools. No way to force it open. She chewed desperately on her lower lip. She could feel her eyes widening as she studied this new problem, this new thing that was going to kill her. If she couldn’t get that seam open—

  She heard rock crack and part, heard air sigh around her, ruffling the fabric of her suit. The noise rose to a terrible whistling roar and then gave way to stillness. The mouth opened, and she looked out and saw stars.

  They looked exactly like the flashes of hallucinatory light she’d seen when she turned her suit lights off inside 2I. She couldn’t trust them, those distant fires. She looked down at her suit’s instruments and saw that she was in a near vacuum. She reached for the keypad on her sleeve and fired her suit’s jets. Without air resistance to stop her, they were strong enough to push her out, through the opened mouth, out into space.

  Almost instantly the stars went out, disappearing from the sky until she saw nothing but black emptiness before her. She started to weep because she’d known, she had been certain this was too easy, that she couldn’t possibly have escaped.