by Robert Kuntz
I bend over gagging. My mind is screaming, my stomach heaving. Bilious water splats out on the floor. “What kind of horrific beast are you?” I shout at the top of my lungs. “They’re my friends.” Ginger and Mouser retreat to the other side of the cage. I can’t stop myself from shouting. “Look at these IV bruises on my arms. They fed me, cared for me, did my therapy for eighty-eight days to keep me alive. I did nothing for them.”
Distant memories surface. I hear an elegant Bach fugue in deep bassoon notes. Carmen practiced here, to keep me company. I remember Bronson saying thanks for the blueprints. I hear Vicente’s chuckle as he moves my arms. Naomi and Dremenev caged their pets here so I would have reassuring animal sounds and company. They were my friends.
I straighten up. “Computer, never suggest that again. That’s an order from the captain.”
“Captain, this level-one emergency requires—”
“I don’t care what it requires. Open program adjustment routine 3371. Immediately.”
“P.A.R. 3371 open.”
“New regulation: disposal of all human bodies shall be the decision of the captain. The computer shall make no suggestions unless requested. Let the bodies be stored in the Ring One auxiliary freezer until Captain determines otherwise. If freezer malfunctions notify Captain immediately as level-one emergency. Close P.A.R. 3371.”
“Closed.”
“Adopt new regulation.”
“Adopted.”
I bend down to the cage. “Sorry I frightened you, pups. Come on, let me make it up to you.” They inch forward and I stroke their short curly hair, then burrow my fingers through their coats to touch their warm skin. It’s comforting, like sunshine through a window in the winter.
Can I let them out? Would they get hurt in the ship? If they mark their territory in the biomes, would that negatively impact the system? The ecosystem is too fragile for their solid waste. I’d have to collect it for the ship’s recycler. And I can’t do that. I can’t leave this room.
I turn, grab a rag from under the sink, and wipe up my vomit. I stuff the rag in the laundry bin and wash my hands. I hold on to the sink and take another drink of water. Then I turn back to the dogs. “I’m sorry, pups. There’s nothing beneath us. It’s all black emptiness. I can’t go out there.”
They look up at me with gentle eyes. I know what they’re thinking: I could go out there. I have to go out there. Someone has to clean the algae scrubbers, catch the goat, release methane-consuming bacteria, repair the drinking water storage tank, corral cockroaches, and rewire light sensors.
Jepler, you spawn of aardvarks, rancid waste in human clothing. Why did you do this to me?
I open the cage door and the two poodles race out. They jump up at my knees and then romp around the room. Their cage has auto-flush so there’s no smell.
The dogs are warm and alive. They squirm to lick my hands and then jump up trying to lick my face. The kestrels look at me with fierce liquid eyes. Something settles in my soul. For a minute, I feel like I’m in the park back at home.
I’m hungry.
I step to the exit door. Beside the door are two posters. The top one I recognize immediately: the familiar silhouette of the Galileo. I remember Billy Jepler, back in Houston, interrupted at lunch by a group of touring school children. His voice had boomed over the cafeteria. “The Galileo? Sure, I can show you what it’s like.” He’d grabbed a retro glass soda bottle from his tray and then shoved three donuts over the bottle so they were squeezed together almost to the bottom of the bottle.
“At the present moment,” Billy had said, “there’s three rings on the Galileo. They don’t taste as good as these donuts.” The school children had laughed and I knew he had them. Billy “the showman” Jepler, wowing another audience, explaining the donuts were the three rings, each with a full life-support ecology. The soda bottle was the framework of the ship. The neck of the Galileo was not solid like the glass, but a framework of girders.
Billy said, “The EVA units and PLC—Planetary Landing Crafts—are tethered inside the bottle. Within the soda bottle are the zero-gravity machine shop, cargo, and storage bays. The soda bottle doesn’t rotate. Therefore, it has no gravity. The donuts rotate; they have gravity. That’s where the nauts will live.”
The poster of the Galileo was just as he’d described it. The base of the bottle was the Trempanni engine. Right above it are the nuclear reactors that provide power to the ship. Above that, in the Galileo’s deepest storage, was failsafe redundancy at its best: enormous tri-ply vats storing spare water, air, and fuel. Their mass shielded the rings above from any radiation emanating from the reactors or engines.
Above the thick base of the ship were the three rings, like donuts jammed on a soda bottle. From the sides of the top donut, four sticks jutted out into space. Equally spaced around the rings, the sticks held the plasma pulse engines that maintained the rotation of the Galileo. At the top of the ship was the framework of girders, the neck of the bottle, that formed the docking port.
I take a deep breath. It’s beginning to sink in. I’m in space.
Hand-printed words on the lower poster catch my eye.
You are here in Ring One, the highest. May the Almighty One bless you.
I recognize Dremenev’s precise lettering.
I’m here, Ihor. And you’re not. Thank you.
The second poster is a schematic of the ring. Ginger and Mouser bark at my feet as if they’re begging me to go outside and play.
The room I’m in is labeled “Animal Treatment Lab.” Out the door, to my left, is the ocean biome. The ocean’s the size of an Olympic swimming pool, just big enough for the coral that recycles CO2 into oxygen. It has a low ceiling because an immense room over the ocean houses the ship’s computer system. Moving left, the next biome is the 18,800-square-foot fog desert. Its air is moist, but there’s no rainfall. Next, on the left, is the 33,500-square-foot ag biome. I remember an early lecture: “Using intensive agriculture, as the Chinese have for centuries, the nauts will grow food for eight for twenty-five years on a plot of ground not much larger than a couple of suburban backyards.”
Somewhere in that ag, there’s a rogue goat that I need to corral. I can’t possibly do that. And while I’m thinking that, I wonder if poodles would be any use in herding goats.
I force my eyes back to the map. Out the door to the right, the corridor leads to the mangrove swamp, the smallest biome. At 6,000 square feet, it’s the size of a baseball infield. Farther down the corridor to the right is the tree-lined savannah of 17,500 square feet, then the 35,000 square foot rainforest, and the hab, short for habitat, with living quarters and labs.
The poodles dance at my feet.
Before I know what I’m doing, I shove open the door. The corridor walls have the same ivory-tile as this room, the same gray-flecked tile floor. Overhead light panels glow dimly, then brighten as the poodles race out, barking and yipping, their feet making rapid clicking sounds on the tile.
I don’t want to go out there. I don’t want to face the emptiness.
The dogs scamper ahead of me down the corridor towards the ocean biome. I force myself to follow them, counting my steps, fingers on my pulse, telling myself that I’m going to see the coral sand beach and waves lapping on the shore. I took beach walks in Charleston. I never blacked on the beach.
We reach the door to the ocean. It’s a light green, double-wide door with a full environmental seal, like a level four quarantine room on Earth. I punch my security code into the keypad, open the seals, and pull open the door.
The soft swish of waves greets me. A muted rasping sound follows. To survive, coral needs moving water that washes food over the polyps of the hungry coral. Just beyond the deep end of the ocean, there’s a pump system that rasps quietly as it draws eighteen thousand gallons of water from the sea and drops them back into the water sending a surge over the coral reef and waves scrambling up the shore.
I breathe in the tangy salt air and step into the
biome to stand beside a small palm tree. I pull the doors shut and seal them behind me. Ginger and Mouser race over the sand, barking and yapping as they chase each other into the water. They jump up and down in the waves like children.
I look out over the water. And stop. The ocean’s curved. It’s not an expanse of flatness like on Earth. It rises ahead of me, curving with the curve of the ring. The ocean rises, a wall of water ready to crash down on me. It’s not safe; I’ll drown.
Breathe in, Grant, five seconds in; five seconds out. The spin of gravity will keep the water in place. It only looks like it’s going to swamp you. Don’t black out. Just back up. Go easy.
I turn my eyes from the water. I feel dizzy. The sand underfoot shifts as if it might open into a huge pit. My mouth is dry. My mind is doing loops. I feel stretched thin, like I’m no longer solid, but filmy and wavering. Things are coming apart. I have to get out of here.
I back up against the door, turn, and unseal it. I yank it open and stumble through. My voice barely works. The dogs come racing back. They scamper back into the passageway, and I slam the doors shut. The poodles shake the water from their coats.
I don’t want to go near the ocean again. It’s not safe, not how an ocean should be. The ceiling’s too low. There’s no room to breathe. Walls of water loom as though they’re going to surge and fall on me. How could anyone work there? It’s like being locked in a closet to drown.
I lean against the corridor wall and catch my breath. The corridor light is dim, soft, and gentle. The poodles nudge my hands, then engage in a fury of licking that tickles my palms. I stoop to the floor and pet them. They bounce and jump, vivid, indefatigable dynamos of life that are strangely comforting.
“Ginger, Mouser, let’s find some grass. There has to be someplace in here that’s real, that feels right.” The dogs race ahead as if we’re going to invent dog biscuits. If I can feel grass, if I can only touch something growing…
The next biome is the fog desert. But the poodles have charged ahead down the gray-tiled corridor. It seems endless, curving up and out of sight, like I’m always headed up a tunnel to someplace higher. At the door to the ag biome, Ginger and Mouser sit calmly, looking at me with cocked heads and bright eyes. I reach down and ruffle their fur. Then I stoop and stroke them. They nudge me and lick my hands as if the most important thing in life is to delight in me. I can’t get enough of them; their warmth soaks into my skin.
I take a deep breath, open the seals, and yank open the door. Humid air rushes out with heady scents of grasses, crops, and animal manure. It smells like my aunt and uncle’s farm. I can almost see Aunt Clara’s hollyhocks beside their stone back porch.
A gentle breeze brushes my face. I see one of Ushamla’s rose bushes, with thick brown mulch around the base. The buds are forming; it’s spring for this bush.
Ginger and Mouser race past me to a resin bench and proceed to mark their territory. Go in, I tell myself. You can do it. The biome won’t bite you.
I force myself to step over the threshold. Gravel crunches underneath my feet. I pass by a plot of wheat and then a bed with peas, lettuce, and spinach. The biome stretches ahead. It’s spacious, like you’ve arrived somewhere; you’re not wedged in a narrow room. Above, the white structural grids reach upwards over a hundred feet to long banks of fluoro-solar lights. The sheer height makes the room seem vast and open. The curve of the room doesn’t bother me; there’s nothing about to come crashing down.
In front of me, I see the wooden walls of the storage and goat shed and hear bleating. Everything is green and growing: raised beds thick with oats, short, neat rows of blueberry bushes, and a plot of kale. The air smells rich, moist, and alive. I walk past two raised beds crammed with onions, carrots, two thick rhubarb plants, and a row of raspberry canes. Beside them is a long plot of asparagus, the pencil-thin stalks vibrant green.
I snap off nine stalks, slip them into my pocket, and walk down the path to the goat shed. I pass plots of Swiss chard and strawberries. A lizard scurries across the path ahead of me. Ginger and Mouser bark wildly and race after it.
Behind the goat shed, I see the twelve-foot-tall wire fence that encloses the goat pen. Inside are sturdy resin boxes for the African pygmy goats to climb on. They smell like the goats at Uncle Ralph’s farm. I feel myself relaxing.
I hear the buzz of a hummingbird and see it flitting among the flowers on the blueberry bushes. It looks like a whirring number 5, sharp, pointed, and fast. Beyond the goat pen is the chicken pen. I count about a dozen fluffy Japanese silky bantams pecking about in the rich dirt, feasting on pill bugs. Clucking and strutting like a gang in a corner of the pen are another dozen gallus gallus, a tough fowl from the jungles of India. Roosting and wandering around the pen are the jungle silkies, a cross between the other two birds. Overhead roosting perches cross the width of the pen. Against the back wall are the laying and hatching boxes, lined with straw. The silkies are good moms; they hatch and raise their chicks without help.
I hear loud crowing protests from another wire mesh pen on the far side of the goat shed. The sounds are like jagged yellow 7s. One of the crew locked up the roosters. I’ll need to let them out.
I hear something behind me and turn around. A billy goat ambles up to me as if he’s lost his way and is glad to find human contact. I remember the first time I heard Uncle Ralph talking to goats on the farm. It seemed so strange. But then I got over my fear of the shaggy critters and helped Uncle Ralph in the barn. “Well, Buck,” I tell this errant goat, “your freedom’s about ended.” I grab his horns and pull him toward the goat pen.
He puts up little protest, as if he’s tired of being out on his own. When I open the pen door, he trots in beside me. I take a scoop from the grain bin and toss a couple of scoops of grain into his feed trough. He saunters over and munches while I fix the hole in the fence.
I hear sounds from the goat shed, does protesting that their udders are too full. I latch the pen door behind the buck, enter the shed, and herd the first doe onto the milking box. I find the bucket and begin milking. The warm feel of the goat’s teat, the swish of the milk into the bucket, the fragrance of the milk wafting up to me, all take me back to South Carolina and Aunt Clara’s and Uncle Ralph’s farm.
I finish milking her and, one by one, milk the rest. It’s as if my hands have taken charge, leading me. When the last doe is milked, I see a cup by the water spigot. I dip it in the bucket and drink the warm, fresh milk. The taste reminds me of summer on the farm. I can smell newly mown hills and clover.
When I’ve had my fill, I call the pups over and let them lap milk from the cup.
There’s another bench opposite the goat shed. I sit on it and feel the light on my face. It’s not the sun. My skin knows that. But it’s warm, and there’s life in it. It will do. I eat the asparagus.
Mint is growing alongside the path, and the sweet potato and sorghum gardens need weeding. There’s a viny tomato patch and a large plot of green beans. The hummingbird dashes past and stops at a feeder hanging on the corner of the goat shed. Its throat is a vibrant scarlet; its wings a blur of neon green.
For a moment, something like joy burbles up in me. I’m on a FarSpace ship, sitting on a bench near the goat shed watching a hummingbird. I’m farther away from Earth than any human has ever gone. Ginger and Mouser come rushing back to bark at my feet and nudge my hands with their wet, milky noses.
Is this crazy or is it wonderful? I want to fix up a bed and camp here. It would be like the nights out of doors on my walk from Charleston. Memories from the walk flood over me: the endless blue sky with burgeoning masses of clouds sailing overhead, the dusty scent of the dry, red clay freshly overturned in farm fields, the keening cry of a hawk, and the distant barking of dogs. I remember the vague sense of presence, as if someone, from a great distance, is not just watching me, but accompanying me. I shudder. On the walk from Charleston, that somehow made sense. But here? How could there be a distant presence here? I shrug the thought away
.
A wren sings overhead. I look but can’t see it. High overhead, the ceiling is bright, a mellow golden color that reflects the light from the banks of fluoro-solar floods. I miss the blue vastness of the sky. But it will do.
5
April 25, 2052 (Launch plus 96 days), 09:41 GMT.
I gag again as I strip off the goggles, gloves, and coveralls. I stuff them in the hamper and slam it closed. On the table in front of me, a stainless steel tray holds five quarts of calcium carbonate slime, reeking of rotten fish. I load the tray on the cart and shove it across the room to the calcium closet. The heat of the closet and the continual air flow will dry the slime to sludge, then to brittle dry concrete chalk, ready to be added to the limestone mountain I’m building. I detest cleaning carbon dioxide scrubbers. But if I don’t, CO2 will build up in the air and kill us.
As of this minute, no level-one emergencies exist. I’ve used three miles of duct tape to repair leaks in the savannah’s water line, re-attach dozens of dangling sensors to harvest bots, and plug holes goats kicked in the milking pail.
I haven’t blacked in three days, twenty hours, and twelve minutes.
Ginger and Mouser accompany me all over the ship. They like the goats and the goats are comfortable around them. The dogs race at the chickens and send the birds squawking. I’ve programmed farm bots, with their olfactory sensors, to locate the poodles’ solid waste and deposit it into the recycling system.
I’ve worked throughout Rings One and Two, tracing lines through the endless supply and storage tunnels with their pipe and conduit-covered ceiling, wading in the wastewater lagoons to harvest canna to feed the goats, walking the catwalks to replace solar floodlights in the ag biomes, and repairing farm bots that harvest grasses from the savannah. Some of the grass is fodder for the goats; the rest is stored to regulate carbon dioxide levels.
Motion detectors discovered mice in the ag biome in Ring One, so I released the kestrels. They were excellent hunters. Two days later, I had to cage them again. They were eating lizards and would have decimated the population and damaged the ecosystem. Naomi brought mice to feed her birds. They’re reproducing well, but I don’t dare release any–that would be a level-one emergency.
