But The Stars

by Peter Cawdron

  Cap breaks her train of thought. “Nothing invasive. No drugs. Just a scan, okay?”

  “Sure,” she replies.

  Benson starts pulling off his shoes.

  “It’s fine,” she says.

  As warm as her smile is, both it and her words are calculated. No one ever wants an unscheduled psych evaluation. It’s bad enough coaxing the crew in for their annual review. Benson’s right. Impromptu evals are career ending. They’re generally only administered for severe anxiety or depression, either of which can get an astronaut grounded. ‘Grounded’ on the Acheron would mean relieved of duties and slated for replacement when they next rendezvous with a deep space station, but Dante has a few options open to her.

  “I’m going to log this as a calibration exercise,” she says. “I’ll purge the storage banks and set the metadata to read as self-administered. They’ll think I ran this on myself to calibrate the system. No one will think twice about it, I promise.”

  Benson says, “Thanks, Dante.”

  “What am I looking for?” she asks Cap.

  “Activity in the sensory cortex.”

  That’s unusually specific, but Dante goes with it. She sets a crown of electronics on Benson’s head, carefully positioning it so it sits just above his temples, resting it on his ears. A series of colored LEDs glow softly, indicating connectivity and confirming the measurement of brain wave activity across the spectrum.

  “Am I looking for anything in particular?” she asks.

  Benson swallows a lump in his throat. “Hallucinations.”

  Dante and Cap exchange a knowing glance. He’s worried about something, but to her surprise, it doesn’t seem to be a concern about Benson himself. Cap’s nervous, which is unusual for him. Dante refocuses, picking up her flex computer and reviewing the incoming data stream.

  “I’m seeing gamma-beta dominant. Low alpha. Nothing in the delta or theta range. There’s some infra-low, but nothing outside the bounds. Looks entirely normal.”

  Yet again, she’s trying to put Benson at ease. Cap backs off, making as though he only has a passing interest in what’s happening, even though they all know that’s a lie.

  Benson fidgets, picking at his fingernails.

  Dante says, “I’m going to ask you some questions, okay?”

  He nods.

  Dante starts out with a few control questions, but in the back of her mind she’s unsettled. Neither of them have told her what this is actually about. Hallucinations is too general. Humans are sensory-driven creatures. In the unnatural environment of space, almost ninety light years from home, it’s not uncommon to imagine hearing a friendly voice, or to see something in the shadows or have memories rush by when a familiar smell drifts through the air. None of that means someone’s going insane. On the contrary, the lack of those responses is of more concern as such detachment is unhealthy. But this is something more, something outside the norm. Whatever it is, neither of them want any preconceptions clouding her judgment, so she respects that, putting her own curiosity to one side and focusing on Benson.

  “Where were you born?”

  His answer is robotic.

  “Boston.”

  Benson was expecting that question so his answer isn’t helping him relax. At this point, she’s got to distract him. His conscious mind is blocking her. Like a left tackle protecting the quarterback, he’s putting up fierce resistance to any approach from the flanks.

  “Boston’s beautiful in the springtime,” she says gently. “I used to go there all the time during the holidays.”

  It’s a white lie. Dante only ever went to Boston twice, but he won’t know that. Familiarity is one way to get him to lower his guard.

  “My grandmother lived in Lexington. She had one of those three-story Queen Anne homes. It was a replica, but a damn good one.”

  On the flex, his beta waves begin to subside while the alpha come in short bursts. He’s recalling something, but probably nothing specific. Feelings precede thoughts.

  She continues, “Now, I’m not going to insult you by asking about clam chowder, but you’ve got to be honest with me. Lobster mac ’n cheese?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Benson smiles, unable to suppress a memory Dante has deliberately invoked by drawing on visual clues and his olfactory recollections of taste and smell. The more senses she can include, the easier it is to make him compliant for the eval. She smiles. This time, it’s real, although not because she’s being friendly. She’s smiling because she’s winning in the tug of war for his subconscious mind.

  Dante continues, “I mean, it shouldn’t work, but it does, right? On one level it’s sacrilege, but, hey—Boston.”

  Benson grins. She’s got him. She sees theta waves rippling as pleasant memories fire within his synapses, releasing dopamine and comforting him. There’s some delta activity, suggesting he identifies with what she’s saying. Dante works him a little deeper.

  “My grandma would make cream pie. Well, it was more of a cake than a pie, but she called it pie. Us kids learned not to argue with her if we wanted some. Custard, chocolate and cream layers inside a soft, moist sponge cake—what’s not to love? Damn, we need to get that on the menu out here.”

  “We do,” he says, looking directly into her eyes, but he’s staring through her, not at her. He’s too deep. Something’s wrong. Dante locks her smile in place. She was expecting agreement, but this is something more. He’s like putty. It’s almost as though she’s hypnotized him, but she hasn’t. Things are moving too damn fast. On the flex, theta waves drown out the alpha and beta signals. His higher order gamma waves have flatlined. He should be asleep, but he’s not. His face is pale. His eyes look distant.

  Cap has his arms folded over his chest. He’s quiet, but intensely interested. Dante is focused, determined. She feels as though she’s in control, but Benson looks lost, almost manic.

  “Do you dream?” she asks.

  “We all dream, doc.”

  “But do you remember your dreams?”

  “Always.”

  As far as Dante’s aware, that’s not possible. Dreams occur during REM sleep, when neurons deep within the brain stem fire rapidly, lighting up the thalamus and the cortex like fireworks and setting the eyes darting beneath the eyelids. As that happens five or six times a night and each dream is generally quite vague, it’s simply not possible to remember every one.

  “What do you dream about?” she asks.

  Benson replies, “Home, mostly.”

  Dante looks to Cap, tacitly wanting permission to probe about the hallucinations. He nods.

  “What about when you’re awake? Do you ever see things you can’t explain?”

  “Maybe sometimes.”

  That’s the kind of noncommittal answer someone gives when they don’t want to admit to something that’s potentially compromising. He’s still worried about the impact of this eval on his career and yet he feels compelled to continue.

  “It’s strange. Ya know, doc?”

  The tone of his voice has changed. The pitch has dropped and the S’s are slurred. According to the readouts on Dante’s tablet, he should be fast asleep, but he’s clearly awake.

  “What do you see?”

  “You. Cap. Them.”

  His voice is almost playful, which is confusing.

  “Who are they?” she asks, feeling her heart start to race.

  “They’re really quite beautiful.”

  There’s something unnerving about the way Benson’s looking past her, focusing on something behind her. It’s then she realizes. You. Cap. Them. He’s not recalling a memory. He’s talking about what he sees right now.

  Dante feels the hair on the back of her neck rise. She wants to turn and look behind her, but doesn’t. It takes all her mental energy to stay focused on him and ignore the air brushing against her arms, catching on the tiny raised hairs bristling in alarm.

  “There’s nothing there,” she says.

  That gets Cap’s attention. His brow furrow
s. His eyes dart between Dante and Benson. From where he is, leaning against the bulkhead off to her right, he can see behind her. If anything was there, he’d be able to see it. He’d react. He doesn’t. There’s nothing there, she tells herself.

  Dante fights the irrational desire to turn around, refusing to cower to the fear seizing her mind. Her body, though, isn’t convinced. Her heart pounds in her ribcage. Adrenaline surges through her veins. Sweat breaks out on her brow. Her fingers twitch. She’s got to take back control of the interview, wrestling it away from Benson and turning it in the direction she wants rather than indulging his delusions.

  Again, she asks, “Who are they?” But her voice breaks slightly. A quiver betrays her fear. She projects, raising the volume of her voice, wanting to sound braver than she is. “What are they? What do they want? Why do you see them when no one else does?”

  Peppering Benson with questions without waiting for an answer isn’t smart. During training, her lecturers stressed the importance of silence during evals. Ask a question. Wait for an answer. Whoever speaks first, loses—that was the mantra. Speaking lets the other person off the hook, it gives them an out. She could kick herself.

  Benson’s eyes widen as if in response to something looming over her, but he’s not afraid. His cheeks are flushed. He’s smiling—grinning. He looks insane.

  “What do they look like?” she asks, bringing a fifth unanswered question into the evaluation, but she can’t help herself, she has to know. “Tell me!”

  “Tell you?” he replies, sniggering. “You already know. You’ve seen them. I know you have. We all have. They’re everywhere.”

  At first, Dante’s confused, but deep down, she knows he’s right. She remembers them, but only as an impression, a vague concept, a longing.

  On the flex, Benson’s brain waves are firing like a seismograph during an earthquake. The alpha and beta waves have flatlined, but everything else is going crazy. The spikes are hitting a tempo of dozens of waves per second, which for long, slow brain waves like theta is unheard of. His delta wave graph is blank, which given they’re the deepest waves of all, shocks her, then she sees the line pressing unbroken against the ceiling of that metric—like the engine of a Ferrari screaming as the accelerator is pressed hard against the floor.

  “Benson, he’s,” she stammers, looking to Cap for support. “There’s something wrong—horribly wrong.”

  Dante opens a cabinet at the head of the bed, half-expecting to find it empty, but not sure why. In the haze of her mind, that thought is confusing. She shrugs it off, pulling out a medi-kit and rummaging through the contents.

  Benson giggles like a child. He’s pointing behind her, but Dante’s a professional. Her training tells her he’s likely suffering from an embolism. A clot has probably formed in some other part of his body and crept up into his brain. High gravity. She had run a few deep-vein thrombosis scans on the away crew after the first couple of sorties down to the surface, but everything came back fine. At the time, she thought she was being overprotective. Damn it! If that thing ruptures inside his brain, it’ll kill him.

  “Jeeves,” she says, alerting her AI assistant as she pulls a needle-less injector from the kit. “Prep for surgery. I’m going to need a full body scan, with sub-millimeter granularity of the cranial cavity.”

  She prepares a shot of diazepam, not so much to sedate him for surgery as to break the neural pathways madly firing in his brain and calm him down.

  Cap is standing beside Benson, but he’s not looking at either of them. He’s staring at the back of the medical bay.

  “Cap,” she says, pushing the injector into Benson’s neck and shifting him around, removing the crown and lying him down on the bed. “I’m going to have to run some scans and possibly operate. I need you to—”

  Cap ignores her, tapping her shoulder, wanting her to turn around, but she can’t. Benson needs her. He could die.

  “Cap?” she says. He’s still tapping her shoulder, but the rhythm is slowing.

  A tentacle wraps around her foot, slithering up her leg. Feelers touch at her waist, probing her back, gently pressing against her clothes. A slimy frond brushes against her neck, feeling its way under her collar.

  Dante closes her eyes. She knows. She doesn’t want to, but she does—not as knowledge or facts as such, but she feels the reality of life on the Acheron overwhelm her once more. Every cell in her body aches, longing for hope, but there’s none to be found. Dozens of encounters, each masked in some way. This moment too will fade, she knows that. As much as she wants to remember, she knows she’ll be denied this most basic right.

  Dante wants to go home, to be anywhere other than here. She wants to go back to New York. She longs to stand on the sandy shores of South Beach again, feeling the cool wind against her cheeks. She yearns for the smell of salt spray hanging in the air and the sound of gulls calling on the breeze, but the darkness deprives her of even those memories. She looks around, watching as tentacles wrap around the bed and desk, creeping along the walls. Hope fades. Her heart sinks. Futility overwhelms her, but the stars—the stars speak softly to her, telling her she’s not alone.

  Mom

  “Why you?” a familiar voice asks.

  “Me?”

  Dante blinks, looking around in the darkness. Waves roll in toward the beach, washing softly on the sand, leaving a thin trail of bubbles and foam along the shore. A star twinkles over the ocean, sitting low in the sky. Must be a planet, she reminds herself. Probably Jupiter. Stars are so astonishingly distant, they appear stable. Planets, though, like Venus, Jupiter, Mars and Saturn shimmer as their light passes through the atmosphere.

  Wait.

  Something important has slipped her mind. She was just thinking about the stars. She was looking at them, only they were much clearer. There was no atmospheric haze, no light pollution, just exquisite pinpricks of pure light piercing the eternal darkness. Dante was just talking to someone, but not her mom. Orion has emerged in the East, rising slowly over the Atlantic. Beautiful, she thinks, but that thought leaves her feeling unsettled and she’s not sure why.

  Sand shifts beneath Dante’s bare feet, causing her to stab with her toes to keep her balance. The wind picks up and the thin blades of grass dotted along the dunes bend and sway in unison.

  “You’re ignoring me,” her mom says.

  Dante’s head is swinging. The stars in the sky seem to swirl around her. There’s too much happening at once.

  Her dad says, “How long will Earth Hour last anyway?” Followed quickly by, “Never mind,” when he’s met with an exasperated chorus of, “One hour,” from her brother, her sister and her mother. “Yeah, my bad.” He chugs a beer. Dad never was one for the stars. Her sister, though, has caught the bug.

  “I can’t find the pole star,” she says, turning to Dante for help. Jules fiddles with the mount on her telescope, looking down the sighting port. “Is that where you’re going?”

  “Ah, Polaris is in Ursa Major,” Dante says feeling somewhat distant. Her mind is elsewhere. She feels as though she shouldn’t be here. “I’ll be passing through Ursa Minor. The next constellation over.” Dante points north, out over New York City. “You start at Polaris and follow the curve. We’re using a brown dwarf about eleven light years away from here to conduct a gravity slingshot on to WISE 5571 at a distance of eighty-eight light years. That’s our target.”

  “Does your star have a name?” her sister asks.

  “That is its name.”

  “That’s not a real name,” her sister insists. At sixteen, she’s too old to be a child and yet too young to be an adult. In those frustrating in-between years, everything’s contentious. “What about Draco—the dragon. Are you going anywhere near there?”

  Dante laughs. “Near is a relative term. Everything you see is nearby compared to Andromeda.”

  She crouches, looking at how the telescope has been set up and adjusts the legs, shifting them in the sand so they’re more sturdy. In the lo
w light, Dante can barely see the level on the side of the stand, but she works with the tripod until the base is flat. Using a compass, she ensures the setup is facing true north and sets the latitude, saying, “Okay. Try again.”

  Jules crouches. “Oh, yeah. I see it.”

  Dante’s mother is standing back beside a soft red camp light set on the sand. Her dad is seated in a portable deck chair. Cars pull in and out of the parking lot. Their headlights wash over the dunes, briefly interfering with her night vision. Automated trucks rumble across the nearby bridge, heading over the Narrows to Fort Hamilton.

  Jules has a flex tablet. She works with it, searching for WISE 5571 even though Dante’s already told her it’s too faint to be seen from South Beach on Staten Island with an 11 inch diffraction telescope—even with all the fancy buttons and computerized tracking. Jules doesn’t care. She wants to look anyway. Just seeing the stars in that direction and knowing her sister is going to soar through that region at close to the speed of light is enough. For her, this is a movie brought to life.

  Dante joins her mother, sensing her brooding.

  Mom asks, “You’re sure about this?”

  “Yes.”

  Simple question. Simple answer. Unfortunately, nothing’s simple with Mom.

  “But when you get back—if you ever come back—everyone you’ve ever known will be gone. Dead. The world will be entirely different. Hundreds of years will have passed. Do you really want that?”

  Dante looks up at the stars, mentally tracing an imaginary line from her sister’s telescope into the heavens, admiring the view, wondering what lies in wait for her around WISE 5571.

  Scans have revealed a simple system. There are several rocky inner planets on the fringes of the Goldilocks zone, shepherded by gas giants further out, orbiting a yellow dwarf star that could be a twin of the Sun. Some astronomers have even suggested its slight, regular pulsing might be an illusion, saying it might be a contact binary, two stars orbiting each other so insanely close they’re destined to become one.