In the Blackness of Space

by Robert Kuntz

  Thinking about it, I realize the kestrels could exercise in the corridors. If I placed seven or eight perches in the long hallway, they’d have places to rest. Then the farm bots could be programmed to clean under the perches.

  I haven’t set foot in the Beta Ring. At first, I didn’t realize SINDAS’s list of emergencies and repairs was limited to Rings One and Two. Then I passed the first door from Two to Beta. It was emergency sealed. That didn’t register with me until I passed the second door to Beta, also emergency sealed, and I wondered why the crew would do that. They had to pass back and forth from Two to Beta. Emergency seal meant one way traffic: you could go from Two into Beta, but not from Beta into Two.

  Before they died, the nauts must have shut Beta down and unplugged SINDAS’s connections. Without monitoring and care, Beta no longer supports life. Now when I pass the sealed doors, I flinch. I’ve no desire to enter a ring of dead plants and rotting carcasses.

  Houston knows the nauts are dead, but not that Beta’s joined them.

  I need to contact Houston. I don’t know what to say.

  ****

  14:12 GMT.

  I stop the track-bot and hoist the ladder toward the ceiling. They put catwalks in the rainforest, marsh, and ag biome, so you could walk around in the heights and change the solar floods. But not here in the savannah. With the low ceiling, it wasn’t necessary.

  The bot sits on a patch of thick grass not far from the smaller pond. A yellow-footed tortoise ambles across the gravel path. Crickets sing near my feet, the same cheerful chirping that accompanied me from Charleston to Houston. A brown tree lizard dashes into a thick swatch of grass, hunting crickets for supper. Ginger and Mouser give chase, barking and scrabbling after the speedy reptile. To my left, the grass rustles in the wind. I listen for a moment but can’t hear any hum from the wind machines. Repairs in the savannah are easier during low-wind hours. Every biome has light-up and light-off hours of high wind. Tree branches grow stronger in response to high winds. During high-wind, you get hit in the face with grains of sand, your eyes tear up, and you end up chasing errant bandanas and check lists into the scrub trees.

  I don’t like the savannah. The low ceiling seems to squash you against the ground. In the ag biome and the rainforest, you’ve got space over your head. There’s enough air that you don’t worry about breathing it all up.

  I take a long bulb from the track-bot’s storage bin, climb the ladder, and wrestle the old bulb out and the new bulb in. Grass needs full spectrum light; goats need healthy fodder; I need high-test milk.

  Climbing down the ladder, I remember my seventh day at Uncle Ralph and Aunt Clara’s. We were sitting down to dinner and I asked Uncle Ralph why he got up so early in the morning. When I’d lived with my mother and father, there was no morning, not with their alcohol and drug addiction. Uncle Ralph got a surprised look on his face. Aunt Clara said, “Remember, hon, Grant’s never done this before.”

  Uncle Ralph nodded. His face softened. He looked at me, as if he was considering something gravely. “If you take care of the farm, the farm takes care of you.”

  He might as well have been speaking a foreign language. I didn’t know a thing about preparing the soil, planting, and harvesting. Now, I take care of the farm because the farm keeps me alive.

  When I was in the storeroom, I counted the bulbs: five hundred packages of twenty-five bulbs. Was that their estimate for the twenty-five-year journey? I wouldn’t be surprised if more bulbs are stashed somewhere. On the Galileo, you live and die by functional redundancy.

  ****

  22:46 GMT.

  I’ve finished building a small lean-to in the ag biome. The dogs and I can’t possibly eat all the food they planted for eight nauts, so I cleared out a lablab bean patch for my new home. It’s between the berry bushes and the animal pens, surrounded by artichokes, carrots, and corn plots. Tomorrow, I’ll hook up power and data lines.

  I’m lying in the hammock I took from the hab, watching the bats swoop above me in the dim twilight, thinking how Marsha would have delighted in seeing them and feeling glum 89s weigh down my chest because I never got to say goodbye to her. Ginger and Mouser are sniffing around the remaining lablab beans. A farm bot trundles by, its electric engine making a warm humming sound.

  “Captain Chapman, level-one emergency. SPPT-A offline, suspected ECM malfunction.” SINDAS’s voice shatters the quiet.

  “SINDAS, I have no idea what you’re talking about. Brief me.”

  “The rotation of the Galileo provides gravity for the ship.” SINDAS’s voice takes on a pedantic sound, as if she’s lecturing a moron. “This rotation is achieved and controlled through four spin plasma pulse thrusters (SPPT’s), lettered A through D. Developed by Franklin Chang-Diaz in Costa Rica, these SPPT’s are gas propellant, side-fed systems, mounted on four pylons equidistant around Ring One. To minimize surface contamination from pulse exhaust and protect the integrity of antennas, electronic instruments, and systems, each pylon extends eight feet above the surface of the Galileo.”

  I remember the four stubby sticks on the schematic diagrams of the Galileo. My first thought is the SPPT couldn’t handle the trauma of space and it blacked out.

  “Data?”

  “Plasma thruster efficiency curve unchanged before present unresponsiveness, suggesting problem is not mechanical or electrical within the thruster.” SINDAS’s voice sounds bored this time. “Pressure in gas feed lines remains constant, suggesting propellant supply unaffected. ECM, electronic control module, was a weak-point in the system during developmental testing.”

  “Can the remaining thrusters maintain spin?”

  “Capacity of three SPPT is in excess of requirements. Safety regulations require system block for offline SPPT to prevent difficulties from unexpected resumption of function. Once system block is in place, ECM must be physically reinstalled before SPPT can be brought back online.”

  I’m not sure why this problem qualifies as a level-one emergency, but I let that go. “Activate system block for offline SPPT.”

  “Activated and confirmed.”

  We have three fully functioning spin thrusters. That’s plenty of functional redundancy. But I have an unsettled feeling that I missed something—that SINDAS was telling me something I didn’t understand.

  6

  April 30, 2052 (Launch plus 101 days), 16:14 GMT.

  The waterfall thunders beside me, thousands of gallons of water crashing to the rainforest pool before beginning its journey through the savannah and mangrove swamp to the ocean. It’s humid, sticky, low-wind here in Ring Two. I’m sopping wet, not from the spray of the waterfall, but because I’m sweating like a pig. The ceiling, at 120 feet, towers above the canopy. In ten years, the trees will be brushing the ceiling. Now, the biome is filled with light and mist swirling from the waterfall.

  I pull yards of vine from the trees at the edge of the waterfall. The vines grow like crazy here, not only clogging the water aeration system, but threatening to pull the immature trees to the ground. I stuff the vines into three bot-barrows, and they wheel off to dump their load where the organic material will be recycled into soil. You take care of the farm…

  A blue-tongued skink saunters down the path and then darts into the ground cover. To my left, orchids bloom from their niches in an exotic hardwood. I replace a sensor in the humidity monitoring system and SINDAS commends me for bringing it back online.

  I know I should call Houston; SINDAS reminds me with regularity that they are demanding information. I don’t want to deal with it.

  Before leaving the rainforest, I walk down the graveled path under a stand of coffee trees. In the corner farthest from the waterfall, I reach the tropical garden. I hear a myriad of insects squeaking and calling. I keep a lookout for one of my favorite exotics, a tropical leptodactylid frog with one-of-a-kind toes. The little gems are too timid for me to catch a glimpse of one.

  I reach the tropical gardens and enjoy the fragrance of the citrus trees.
Immature limes, lemons, tangerines, and oranges dangle on the branches. There’s a pair of dwarf complete protein breadfruit trees laden with fruit. I scowl at them. I’ll eat the fruit, which that ruthless swamp spawn Jepler provided, but I don’t have to like it.

  The air steams with humidity, and my skin soaks up the rays from the solar floods. I know it’s not real sunlight, but I can almost feel my skin churning out Vitamin D. I make a mental note to ask SINDAS if I need sunscreen. Wouldn’t that be a bright spot, to get skin cancer on the Galileo?

  Biosphere 2 didn’t include honey bees. Its glass panels filtered out the UV light that bees need to navigate. Beta Ring experiments developed a way to keep bees alive. Now all the rings have special solar-floods that shine in UV wavelengths. The UV’s light up in progression, mimicking the sun’s travel across the sky so the bees can find their way from hive to flower and back. The rings also include progressions of flowering plants so the bees always have a source of pollen. Here in the rainforest, they do their bit, pollinating the citrus trees, figs, papaya, oranges, star fruit, and tropical apple.

  I sit on a resin bench. The pups come bouncing over, jump up in my lap, slather me with licks, and curl up beside me on the bench.

  “You two would have been great company when I walked from Charleston to Houston. The sky was so wide overhead. Wind blew. I watched clouds forming. You could smell rain coming.” Here in the rings, even when the sprinklers are watering from above, there’s no smell of rain.

  “On my first day out of Charleston, I passed a grove of dogwood trees huddled at the edge of a forest. Brilliant scarlet seeds hung from the branches, glistening in the afternoon sunlight, ripe with life. Something drew me to those seeds, like an invisible hand pointing me toward them. I slipped my pack from my shoulder and propped it up against a road sign. Then I walked back to the grove and picked twenty-seven seeds. It felt good, picking those seeds, like I was part of the earth. I’d planted crops, tended gardens, grafted trees, but this was different. All that day, as I hiked under the vast blue sky, a vibrancy, a quickening presence more vast than the living earth walked with me.

  “At the end of the day, I scattered the seeds at the edge of a woods and along a grassy meadow. As I watched them fall to the ground, I felt like I was a partner in the fertile, throbbing life of creation. I felt the warmth of the sun and took in the rich scent of the air. Something in me changed because I was leaving seeds behind. I was marking a trail.

  “From South Carolina across Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and into Texas, I gathered and scattered seeds: pecans, hickory nuts, dogwood, maple, beech, sassafras, oak, hard seeds and round seeds, misshapen seeds and smooth seeds, all of them packed with life.

  “In my neighborhood in Houston, a few oaks and pines braved the yards outside homes. The fruit seeds I’d collected kept me connected to the trip, to that incomprehensible presence and vigor of life that accompanied me on the road. Every seed I held was a little miracle storehouse, expectant, waiting. Two or three times a year, I would take a weekend hike out to the empty land around the city. One time, I found a place to plant cherry pits. Another day, I found a south-facing hillside that was perfect for peaches. So I dug thirty-eight holes with my trowel and planted them.

  “Marsha loved to come with me on those weekend hikes. She has that great smile. When she talks, her hands dance like graceful 6s. She has a soft voice, but when she’s speaking about something she cares about, her voice gets passionate. She cares about growing things. She sees the mystery, the wonder of life. Even when I’m quiet, she’s listening to me, as if she tunes into a part of me that doesn’t have words. We had a connection, an understanding that I’d never had with another person.”

  I shove thoughts of her away. They remind me I’m the only human here.

  ****

  May 1, 2052 (Launch plus 102 days), 03:49 GMT.

  I’m walking to Houston, four days out of Charleston, hiking past cotton fields with brown, withered plants. The sun blazes in the expanse of blue sky. It’s so far overhead that it stretches you; it pulls your mind saying, “Chase me, reach up and touch me.” I stop for a moment, watching jet contrails fade to distant smears across the sky. I turn, studying the brown fields, the flat landscape, the heat rising from the road up into the far sky.

  When I look to the road to resume my journey, I don’t know which way is north. My heart races. I start to sweat. North is gone; there’s no direction. I want to run, but I don’t know which way. I try to lift my foot, but it feels stuck, as if the pavement has melted and grabbed it. I can’t tell which is the road before me and which is the road I’ve already traveled.

  All my life I’ve known which way is north. Now there’s no north, no way to know where I am or where I’m going. I turn and turn and turn, looking, waiting to see if this feels like north. It’s gone: like a fly dodging the swatter, like a fox slipping into the underbrush. The ground shudders. It shakes me and I fall to the hard pavement. Overhead, the sky is shrinking, closing in, collapsing on me. I don’t know which way to go to Houston. If I don’t hurry, the sky will shrink and pin me to the pavement. I struggle to my feet. I’m thirsty. I think about the seeds in my pocket and pull them out. They crumble into dust. I cry out in my sleep.

  I wake, cold and trembling.

  I stumble from my hammock and out of the lean-to. Ginger and Mouser scramble along with me, barking, yipping, waking the goats for a middle-of-the-night party. I look at the curve in the distance, right, then left. Nothing. I face the near wall, the far wall. Nothing. I look overhead to the lights and lattice, then down at the dirt and gravel-covered ground. Nothing. There is no north. There’s no way home.

  ****

  06:17 GMT.

  I come to on the ground. Ginger’s licking my face. I pull myself up to a sitting position. Ginger dances around me and then curls up in my lap. Mouser bounces over and licks my hand as if I’m addictive. Then he rolls over, arching his belly at me, and I stroke him.

  For crying out loud. Whoever’s inside me, flipping that relay, why don’t you go somewhere else and play? There’s really no sense in having me black. It’s not going to change things.

  I have to call Houston. They have no idea what’s happening. But what is happening? I’ve learned to enter the ocean biome and keep my eyes on the sand, never looking at the curving walls of water. I hate it, but I can go in and do the work that needs to be done. I’ve regulated ocean pH, caught crabs, checked the health of the coral. In the mangrove biome, I’ve counted terrapins to determine the health of the swamp, knowing with every splosh of my foot in the muck that I’m in FarSpace Ship Galileo, traveling at .93 Planck speed, moving farther away from Earth, with nothing under me, nothing holding me up.

  No one has ever done this before. How can I figure out what’s happening?

  I take a deep breath and look around me. From their shed, goats gaze at me curiously. I see a goldfinch swooping above the orchard. At the mint patch across the path, bees buzz around the tiny purple flowers. A fat toad hops out of the peanut patch, crosses the gravel, and wriggles into the strawberry bed.

  I look down at the pups. “I wish they’d made her voice more mechanical and less human. I hear her, and I look for a person. But there’s no person, just that voice coming out of the speakers. After the jolt of looking for a person, I remember there’s no one else here, and I find myself thinking about people on Earth, what their voices were like: that confounded Jepler’s musical sales pitch; Dr. H’s calm, steady tenor, Marsha’s bubbling laughter. I remember what it was like to shake hands and feel a man’s sturdy grip. Jepler had rough skin on his hands, chapped and red. Dr. H had tanned leathery hands, as if he mended pasture fences for a hobby. Marsha had smooth hands. They were warm with life, the life I feel when I feel my pulse.

  “You do that for me, pups. Ginger, when you sit in my lap, Mouser, when I stroke you, it drives the cold wind away; it brings me down out of the tree and back onto the ground.”

  ****<
br />
  13:30 GMT.

  I’m in the Tri-Comm, sitting before the empty holo-vid screen and the three bank instrument panels of the ship-to-Earth communication board. I flip the switches for transmission. I leave the holo-vid switch off. I don’t want to see anyone from Earth. Maybe I don’t want them to see me. Most of all, I don’t want to see Earth. I don’t know what it would do to me. Ginger nuzzles my hand and then curls up beside Mouser on the cushioned seat next to mine.

  The circuit lights blink orange, then flare green. I lean toward the microphone. “Houston, this is Grant Chapman.”

  “Dr. Chapman, thank goodness! This is Tyler Ferris. We’ve got to tell Dr. Hudson right away. He’s been hounding us about you.”

  Behind me, the network operations comm fills twelve banks of instrument panels. Lights glow, wink, dim, and flash, like a demented Christmas tree.

  Lines from the NOC manual buzz through my mind: “The Galileo life support systems are fully integrated. Yet each ring has the capacity for autonomous operation if required. All control, maintenance, data, environmental regulation, safety, inter-ship communication and sensor systems are unified on the same structured cabling networks and ship-wide fiber optic backbone, arranged in loop and radial configuration to allow redundancy in network connections.”

  “How are you doing, Dr. Chapman?” Ferris’s voice jars me.

  “Ask me something I know how to answer.”

  His voice becomes business-like. “Status report.”

  “Ferris, I didn’t mean to snap at you. Status report: no level-one emergencies.” I’m weary and numbers desert me. I give Ferris the bottom line. “Everything else will come out in the wash.”