Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  There’s a last short shot of Destiny in a suspended animation tank. When it’s down at the cellular level, as it is with radiation poisoning, precancer, advanced musculoatrophy, agravitic osteolysis, and who knows what else, it takes a lot more time than it did with the mere wounds and broken bones that Fwuffy or F.B. had; the voice says something about six months.

  “F.B.,” I say, “I think we’re probably at a point in our orbit, relative to Earth and Mars, where they’ll have to wait until we come back around into the lower part of the solar system, lined up with Earth, which is more than twenty months from now. There’s just no physically possible orbit for any ship out of Earth or Mars to intercept us much before our perihelion. It’s not that they don’t want to, but—”

  F.B. nods. “Sometimes life stinks,” he says. “At least I’m with friends.”

  October 4 through December 5, 2129. On board Virgo, upbound from periareon to aphelion (point in orbit farthest from the sun). During these two months, Virgo climbs upward from 257 to 299 million kilometers from the sun. The distance from Mars widens from 42 million to 110 million kilometers, and the distance to Earth from 143 million to 280 million kilometers, as both planets, having passed Virgo in orbit, continue away from it, swinging back down toward the sun. Virgo, however, still has a long way to go till aphelion.

  The news about Destiny, and its implication that the good guys are working for us even if we cannot see or hear it, bless us with about a week of morale boost. Our next few meeds of Life on Virgo are upbeat, fun, and lively.

  Weeks go by, and Marioschke and Fwuffy’s work on the farm pays off in fresh salad every day, and new vegetables for Wychee to work with. The healthy diet, all the airswimming, and working in the farm takes flab off Marioschke and puts muscle on F.B. Wychee slowly makes competent cooks out of us all; Glisters and I keep pushing people through tutorials until one day, he glances at me and says, “You know, probably everybody on board except Fwuffy and Fleeta could pass the science and math PotEvals now.”

  The whole crew spends a few days taking practice math and science PotEvals, more for fun than anything else. That’s what life in space is like once things are working: every day like every other, everything routine, so dull that doing math seems like a reasonable use of time.

  We all ace our practice PotEvals, except for Fleeta, who goes to the Forest to play. There’s really no other word for airswimming about haplessly and humming to herself. She can no longer be safely left alone; Fwuffy watches her. He says he doesn’t mind—“I was bwed to be a babysitta”—but we can all tell it depresses him, and Marioschke spends some extra time reading to him. Now and then he asks what Marioschke calls big-kid questions, like why rotten people like Derlock get away with things, why nice people like Fleeta have to die, and why the world is just so unfair so much of the time. Once, after a long time batting philosophy around with Glisters, his adult “help text” voice kicks in to warn that we may be making him too grown-up and independent for his intended purpose. Glisters says it’s deliberate, and we don’t hear the adult voice on that subject again; Fwuffy is pathetically grateful, and asks if he can begin studying for the PotEvals.

  That seems to motivate everyone. Now that we know we can all do the math and science, we plunge into preparing all the other subjects, with everyone taking turns at coaching Fwuffy. I find it slightly disturbing that he’s better at math than F.B. and Marioschke, and that when he and Glisters study the more people-based subjects like literature, art, and history together, sometimes Fwuffy has to do the explaining.

  For most of November, preparing for PotEvals keeps us going. There’s always something to do every day, it lets some of us enjoy our newfound feeling that we really aren’t dumb, and it’s a good way to remind ourselves that we’ll be going home eventually.

  I find it a little hard to imagine that I used to think about which boys I wanted to be recorded making out with on which dance floor.

  Glisters’s homebuilt antenna only has about a fiftieth as many detectors as the real, regulation one we lost. Down close to Mars and Earth, where we started, we didn’t even need that many to get clear signal. But as we rise away from the inhabited planets, the energy in a signal is inversely proportionate to the square root of the distance from the source; that’s the fancy way of saying that if you’re twice as far away you only get a quarter as much energy in the signal, and if you’re 10 times as far away, you only have 1%. So where we needed only 20 detectors or so to pick up one face, down by Mars, we need more than 200 out here—and that’s all we have, and as we go farther, we don’t have enough. People back on Earth and Mars who are interested can buy more antenna space to compensate; they can still hear us, but we can no longer hear them.

  Channels drop away, taking a thousand faces at a time with them, and there is less and less to see and hear outside the ship every day. Briefly, in the last week in November, there are a few seconds from Life on Virgo—not even in a story about us, but in a music meed for some song called “Everybody Shut Up and Agree.” Just the same, “The pink flying elephant in it is unmistakably Fwuffy, and not some other pink flying elephant,” Glisters says. “And that’s a profile shot of Susan’s butt. I’ve recorded pictures of it more than enough times to recognize it anywhere.”

  Every time things like that pop up on the pirate faces, we have a little celebration, and Glisters, Wychee, and I point out how clearly it means that someplace, somebody is fighting on our side. But each time the mood lift is smaller and briefer.

  Meanwhile, the channels keep dropping, and we keep losing a thousand faces at a time, despite all the fussing and sweating Glisters does. The sun gets smaller, we drift farther away, and the better we become at living on Virgo, the less interesting Life on Virgo becomes. There’s nothing duller than watching people do their jobs perfectly while nothing unexpected happens.

  So day after day we record things growing in the farm, people learning new stuff, and little talks about how a spaceship works and navigates. “I see why there was never a legit ‘life on a spaceship’ show,” Glisters says, looking at the latest Life on Virgo before sending it out. “If it weren’t a PermaPaxPerity felony to watch, record, or circulate this, I don’t think anyone would; all the excitement about Life on Virgo must be in risking arrest for having a copy of it.”

  Meanwhile the red star of Mars is dimming; the blue-green with white Earth-moon double star is now close to Mars in the sky, at about seven o’clock if the ship’s nose is twelve. The little triple diadem of worlds with people creeps closer to going around behind the sun, which is now almost on our tail, as we continue up and away.

  We’re down to our last channel, a failed commercial venture mounted on a satellite in a wide-separation orbit from Mars that someone has left up and running. It only has about forty receiving faces—only six of news, and only two pirate. Well before the New Year, we’ll have none.

  Fleeta deteriorates. Now that she has no Fendrisol, the happistuf population explodes in her brain. Glisters documents it all: the strange, whooping, giggly orgasms that make it impossible for her to breathe, leaving her blue yet still ecstatic; the rapid loss of vocabulary as the prions invade her language center; the way Fleeta drifts out of talking at all for hours at a time, rocking, singing, shouting joyfully about “Mommy.” Virgo’s onboard encyclopedia’s long article about happistuf deaths says that that’s a common behavior in the last few months. The leading hypothesis among neuroscientists is that the relatively normal dwindling remainder of the brain knows it is dying and wants its mommy, but its cries for help are all infused with the happistuf replacing it.

  As November crawls into December, the sun has dwindled to half its width from Earth. The Earth-moon system, having whizzed on beyond us on its inside track, heads around the back of the sun, in retrograde relative to us, farther away from us than the sun itself. We see it only as a difficult morning star in our every-two-minutes morning, a momentary glimpse of a dim double star in the last second out of eve
ry 90, just before the sun flashes onto the window. Mars, though farther from the sun in the sky, is distant, dim, hard to pick out at all. On the inner, downward side, except the shrunken sun, it’s all stars now.

  On the outer, upward side, at about two o’clock, Jupiter blazes like a beacon. Though Virgo never approaches it closely enough for it to be a naked-eye disk, it’s so big, so reflective, and so close to opposition that it’s as breathtakingly brilliant as twenty Venuses, escorted by the little dim lights of its satellites, casting shadows through the windows in the floor of the Forest.

  Of course, striking as the pictures of the Forest by jovelight are, it’s still just some trees, grass, and pools—not that different from any park on Earth—and a hundred different research probes send out public-access pictures of Jupiter and its satellites from up close every day.

  The farm is producing almost all our food now. We rely on the cargo section only for coffee, chocolate, tea, some spices, and the occasional meat dish whenever we are tired of fish. Theoretically we could take some dwarf pigs and rabbits out of hibernation, but at the suggestion that they raise animals and kill them so we can eat them, Marioschke, Wychee, and Fwuffy give us such a disgusted look that Glisters and I vow to each other that when we get home we will share a steak tartare the size of Nebraska.

  December 5, 2129. On board Virgo, upbound from periareon to aphelion. 299 million kilometers from the sun, 110 million kilometers from Mars, and 280 million kilometers from Earth.

  We lose our last channel. Glisters estimates that we will not pick up another one till about October of the coming year—eleven months of no new meeds.

  Everyone seems so dejected that I ask for ideas about lifting the mood. Marioschke points out that it’s only twenty days till Christmas, and there’s a young conifer in the Forest, only four meters high, that we could decorate.

  We all spend some days in the shop making all the things we can think of to hang on the tree, and Glisters shoots all sorts of great ultra-hookworthy ultra-splycterables of that, and of all of us decorating. Each of us takes a turn on camera at putting the star on the tree, including Fwuffy. “Think of it as an audition,” Glisters says. “Star-putter that works best for the final cut becomes the person that finished it all off. You’re going out with a star but you’re coming back as the star.”

  After the decorating, we set about making and doing everything else Christmasy we can think of: rehearsing music, making special food, making and wrapping gifts, all the holiday botflog, which is just what we want it to be—if a hundred thousand hooks are splyctered out of this and end up in three million people’s Christmas message, that will be perfect.

  We’re all second-generation celeb-eenies, so nobody wants any of that Jesus stuff that some of the miney kids used to insist on at Excellence Shop. That was always a mystery to me; to be a celeb-eenie you can’t have any strong religion because anything you believed would make you unsplycterable to some part of the miney audience; the mineys at Excellence Shop were in the place where they’d have their best chance ever to jump up to celeb-eenie; why would they stick to Jesus and Buddha and all that sheeyeffinit?

  So we have to look a lot of it up, but we just do plain old Christmas. The most fun turns out to be working in the shop, making things for each other—everything from decorated ship’s supplies like coveralls with titles lettered on them, to the individual milligravity cups that F.B. fires out of engine-nozzle repair ceramic. (They aren’t nearly as easy to use as squeezebulbs but they have a simple, elegant shape and our names on them, and, well, I have a cup handmade from rocket-nozzle ceramic—do you?)

  On Christmas Eve day, we do a whole-morning-long Life on Virgo. We read all the stock Christmas botflog—the Grinch, Dickens, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Yoshi Matamuro’s First Christmas on the Moon, and Prelude to a Divine Invasion. In between we eat our feast (which does not include roast beast), open packages, sing all the songs we’ve been rehearsing, and put a big happy holiday wrap on it all, very traditional Las Vegas/London/Tokyo, and even drop in a little hint of Bethlehem because there’s a niche miney audience that gets all happy, warm, and runny when they feel remembered and tolerated.

  At the very end, we wave and say individual things to our families. I take the commander’s privilege of going last and saying, “Pop, I miss you, and you don’t have to worry about whether I know you’re trying to get me rescued, because I know you’ve found out the truth by now, and I know you’re working on it, and no one could do it better. So I’m just going to say Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year, and we’ll see you at Earthpass, and I love you.” We sign off singing “Santa’s Night” over a slowly faded image of the glowing tree.

  “I think we styled that perfectly,” I say to Glisters.

  He nods. “Well, you’re the only critic within 150 million kilometers, and if you like it, I’m satisfied.”

  F.B. has taken the conn—that no longer makes me nervous, but it’s still a big deal for him—and the rest of us are moving the leftovers back to the kitchen. We’ve just figured out how to get everything in so that it’s possible to close the door on the main freezer when Marioschke says, “Wait, where’s Fleeta?”

  She was there for the whole Christmas celebration, though sometimes we had to work around things so it wouldn’t be too obvious that she didn’t know what was going on, and Glisters mostly used her for reaction shots, but she didn’t have any of her Mommy-rocking attacks, she was genuinely excited at her gifts, and she even sang along with the rest of us a few times (and smiled while she was doing it, which is more than F.B. did).

  “Fwuffy?” I ask. “Did you happen to notice—?”

  “Oh, gowwy, she was wight behind me most of the way heah,” he says, looking stricken; for the last few weeks, as she grew more confused and helpless, being her caretaker has become his default assignment.

  “Not your fault,” Marioschke says. “You were moving the big table and chairs box. I had her with me for a minute, but I stopped off to put the poinsettias back into the garden section—”

  “And I had to check a couple of crate hooks on my way here, in the Pressurized Cargo Section,” Glisters says, “and tell her not to follow me in there, but I don’t know if she went back to the group. All right, we were all busy and excited, she wasn’t officially anyone’s job, and she slipped between us. No blame, but we better find her.” He pulls out his phone and says, “F.B., do we have a position on Fleeta? She’s not with us.”

  “She was following me and I sent her to the kitchen,” F.B. says, over the speakers, “let’s see if—her phone’s in the bunk room, but she drops it there all the time.”

  I start to say, “Marioschke, could—”

  “I’ll check the bunk room, bathrooms, all of that,” she says, and is gone.

  “Thanks,” I say to the air where she was. “F.B., thanks, that helps. Stay on line in case you have an idea, too. Okay, people, I’m guessing everyone was extra busy, and you know how Fleeta hates to feel she’s being trouble, but if there’s anything she can’t do it’s go off and sulk. So she’ll have gone somewhere she really likes. Think of all the places we know are happy for her, everywhere between the Forest and here, look for any doors that might have been left open and would have had anything attractive through them.” Weeks ago, we locked all the dangerous stuff so that Fleeta couldn’t get into it, and my crew is way too good to go leaving doors open, but things happen.

  Wychee says, “Gliss, let’s you and me fly straight to the Forest. Probably she’s just messing around there, she loves that Christmas tree, and the Forest has always been her favorite place. If she’s not there we’ll work our way forward.”

  “Good plan,” I say. “Okay, Fwuffy, we’re going to the Forest, slow and alert, taking our time, and we’ll meet Glisters and Wychee wherever we do.”

  Fwuffy knows the usual way Fleeta goes to the Forest whenever he doesn’t fly her down the coretube, holding her in his trunk. “She wikes that so much but sometimes, sh
e wants to go awong Fahm Wevel Thwee, because the pea pwants awe bwossoming.”

  We descend to Farm Level 3 and split up to look along the two main parallel corridors between the beds. There’s no sign of her there. “Any luck, Fwuff?” I call, figuring we should go to the next place he can think of.

  “Nothing. I’m wowwied, I can’t think of any pwace it makes sense faw huh to go. I was bwed to be able to undastand a wittle kid’s mind, which is what Fweeta is, and she—”

  My phone zizzes. It’s Glisters. “Commander,” he says, much too crisply.

  “Oh, damn, Glisters.” I know the whole story from his tone, and my heart sinks like a brick. “Where?”

  “Right by the Christmas tree. I think she came back to just sit beside it; she had so much fun at the Christmas celebration, and Fwuffy used to have to drag her to bed if she was sitting looking at the tree.” I can hear him fighting the muscles in his throat. “I’ll get everyone here ASAP; I’ve already had F.B. slave the cockpit over to to his wristcomp.”

  “Right. Perfect. We all need to be there. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  “Thanks, Commander.”

  I wish he’d called me Susan, but I guess it was easier to deal with the commander, for something like this. It’s a substitute, but not a perfect one, that Fwuffy’s trunk coils around my shoulders, the sensitive tip stroking my tears away. “You go ahead and be weady, Commanda,” he says. “I’ll go up to the cawtube and meet Mawioschke and F.B.—they aw going to need some comfutting.”

  I brush my face quickly and affectionately against his forehead, turn noseward, and airswim fast and hard, planting feet and kicking off every chance I get so that it’s mostly a ballistic flight between the garden beds. At the first big downchute, I drop down to a big processing space against the hull, where I can bound and fly in a few more seconds to the Forest. Just before the entrance, I stop myself hard with my feet, and paddle gently in.