Andromeda Expedition

by Carlos Arroyo González

  “It must be a very expensive product,” Edelmann continued. “Especially for someone who doesn't... work.”

  “I found it,” said Fox.

  Edelmann looked at him in silence. Finally he said:

  “Wow, that was lucky.”

  “Yes, it was. Do you need anything?”

  “I was just chatting. To get to know better those who are going to accompany me on such a risky mission. Especially those who appear suddenly and without warning.”

  “Go away, Edelmann, you're drunk.”

  “I'm sorry if I made you uncomfortable, I didn't mean to start off on the wrong foot. So you'll be our bodyguard?”

  “I'll be in charge of ensuring the integrity of the crew.”

  “That's great. I'm sure you'll do wonderfully. You mentioned some... complications, am I right?”

  “That's personal.”

  “Well, I, for one, am quite interested. Not only because it's going to be just the three of us up there with no one else for millions of light years around, but because to do my job I need to know the full history of its members.”

  “To do my job, I need you to get out of my sight right now.”

  Dr. Edelmann nodded, pursing his lips in a gesture of understanding.

  “Anyway,” he shrugged and smiled. “If Mr. Norton wants you with us, then I'm sure it's fine. But just in case, be sure of one thing, for the sake of the mission, I will make sure I have your case under control at all times.”

  And he disappeared within the walls of that demented technology while writing in a notebook he had taken out of the pocket of his coat, walking with short, quick steps, as if it were one of Isaac's gadgets.

  Had he really said “your case”?

  Fox noticed that his fist was a ball of tension and rage. That rush of dark water he had felt when Bruce's episode seemed to awaken, flooding everything, forming an endless, unfathomable ocean in whose depths anything could hide.

  In the huge room (it was unclear whether it was a museum or a workshop) that they had entered from the courtyard, Isaac spoke in a ceremonial tone.

  “Well, gentlemen. The time has come.”

  He had exchanged his bathrobe for a threadbare jacket, and it seemed to Fox that he had combed his hair. He thought he also detected a certain scent of cologne. They walked to the back, where the remnants of forgotten projects were piled in a corner.

  Isaac stopped and looked at his crew, with the preparatory silence of a magician about to begin his final trick.

  “It has been a long road of research and sleeplessness. What better occasion than this to unveil this marvel of engineering. This spacecraft will be remembered for centuries to come as the one that brought the only weapon capable of ending the menace threatening Earth. Meet the Titan.”

  In a dramatic gesture, opening his hands and arms in an abrupt gesture, the back wall opened, with an agonizing creak, letting in the sun that had replaced the storm. As his eyes became accustomed to the brightness, Fox could see the spacecraft. A dilapidated hulk, a sarcasm of good taste, a contraption that seemed impossible that it could stay afloat, let alone travel distances of light years. It seemed intent on breaking down at any moment. It was as if each screw would not fall out only in opposition to another in an equally precarious state of equilibrium. The panels that formed its structure, placed with no apparent order or aesthetic sense, were piled up and crossed one on top of the other to the point that one would not have been surprised to see some piece joined with duct tape. Written on one side, if that aberration could be considered to have sides, was written in dripping white paint: TITAN. Morning flashed over its tail, raised like a dorsal fin.

  When Isaac turned to invite them forward, it seemed to Fox that Isaac was teary-eyed. They ascended a metal ladder of uneven steps, each one steeper or narrower than the last. Their boots emitted an irregular clatter, like the hammering in a madman's forge. Inside the cockpit it smelled like wet pottery. The engineering disaster was only accentuated inside. Walls and doors were made of sheet metal on sheet metal, walls with patches that seemed to have belonged to some vehicle rescued from the scrapyard, loose and sizzling cables that hung like snakes awaiting their prey. The cockpit screens were covered with grease and fingerprints. Next to them were several empty hamburger and soda wrappers. On a small table was a plate with a small mountain of chocolate chip cookies. They looked as if they had been made by a troll.

  “Go ahead, help yourselves, you'll be hungry.”

  Fox looked apprehensively at the mountain.

  “I made them myself. The recipe, like everything else, is a secret.”

  At that moment Fox finally made a decision as to whether or not he should try that delicacy. On the other hand, he was grateful for Isaac's gesture of keeping the recipe of that aberration a secret.

  With his seat belts fastened, as Isaac prepared for takeoff, Fox was about to run away. The only thought that kept him there, glued to that seat that seemed to have been taken out of a dumpster, on which he was about to take an intergalactic trip in a madman's vehicle, was the image of Emily. The one his mind had made sure to fabricate for cases like that in which Fox's sanity threatened to abort that insane plan.

  A buzzing began to grow in the rear of the spacecraft, which rattled as if it were about to fall apart. On the control panel, a dummy representing Isaac himself was shaking his head, as if nodding in agreement with the madness. Dr. Edelmann watched Fox, attentive to every expression and gesture. Fox did his best to keep his face as expressionless as possible under the circumstances.

  The Titan shook in a violent jolt. A crunch ran through its entire structure. Fox knew that would be the end. He would hang in there for a few more moments, just to prove to himself that he had done everything he could to try to make it, before it all came crashing down. But the seconds ticked by, and somehow every piece of that monumental botched job stayed in place. The spacecraft began to separate from the ground, rocked by the wild rattle of the engine. Fox couldn't believe that the thing could have lifted even a few inches, let alone a few feet.

  As they drifted away from the surface, Fox felt like he was dreaming. The towering buildings were left down below, and soon Koi City looked like a model. When they passed through the atmosphere the shudder that shook the spacecraft was as wild as if a child were shaking his toy spacecraft.

  Soon after, they reached outer space. Isaac shut down the engines.

  “Like a glove,” he said. “You can unfasten your seat belts.”

  He unfastened it and flew up from the seat, floating across the cockpit. Fox took his cue. He propelled himself to the window. The bluish glow of the Earth was everywhere, and permeated the interior of the cockpit. It looked like such a different place seen from there.

  Looking out an adjoining window, he was stunned. A fleet of what looked like more than a thousand spacecrafts stopped at the edge of the atmosphere, their noses pointing out into the vastness of space.

  “I don't think they'll be long in coming,” Isaac muttered, his gaze lost in the darkness of the void beyond. We must hurry,” he sat back down and began pressing buttons. Fox got the impression that they were fake. As if everything worked by a much simpler mechanism but Isaac had placed all those buttons there just for the pleasure of pressing them, or perhaps in a surreal attempt to reassure its passengers with the appearance of a system much more complex than it really was. “As you know, the Titan uses an improved version of my original Quantum Leap System. In less than a heartbeat we are scheduled to arrive in the vicinity of Erebus. While the spacecraft has all the comforts of five-star hotel living, the trip will be so short that you won't have time to enjoy them. Yet. We leave in three, two, one....”

  He flipped a switch that seemed about to come off.

  For a moment a dense, heavy darkness enveloped them, as if they were at the bottom of a titanic ocean.

  Erebus

  When it comes to deception, there are only two possibilities. Do you believe me?

/>   Daniel H. Lewinson, Driving the Change

  Ten o'clock in the morning was the closest thing to a quiet hour on Pendant Gun. Even the perpetual haze of smoke seemed to give some quarter, allowing the opposite wall to come into view from either wall. Viper stared at the amber bottom of his bourbon glass. Ten interdollars for that crap seemed like armed robbery to him. It tasted as if it had been left macerating under the sink to take on the delicate aroma of all the cleaning products in that joint.

  On the holovision, the president had been explaining for more than ten minutes how, thanks to the united strength of the citizenry on a firm path of progress, humanity would be saved in that terrible hour. New West would continue its relentless advance along a path of justice, equality and freedom. Then he added that he would “make sure that the poor termens who survived that barbaric and caveman war declared by those bigots who do not accept to give help to those poor intergalactic castaways, and not only that, but who were trying to destroy them at the very doors to which they have knocked with a ray of hope, would be integrated into our citizenship. They would soon adapt to the ways of the New West. Open arms are the best weapon,” he added with eyes moist with emotion. Viper noted that a bead of sweat had traced a furrow in the thick layer of makeup. A rivulet opening a canyon through a mountain range of powder and arrogance.

  Viper drank that swill and ordered another round. Tracy poured it for him without looking away from the holovision. She got close enough to give him a whiff of the sweet, sour strawberry aroma of the gum she was chewing.

  The president went on to enunciate the measures that would make that integration possible. Until they could become useful members of society, they would be kept in shelters, where all their needs and possible traumas caused by the war would be taken care of. He then stressed that this would not involve any cost, since the State would take care of everything. “The money does not belong to anyone, but to those who need it”. Here the tear that was threatening to come off finally rolled down, forming a new canyon, parallel to that of the drop of sweat.

  “That man is a saint,” Tracy said as she wiped the bar, watched the holovision and took a puff of her Old Buckets, all at the same time.

  Viper wondered if it would have been worth it after all to amass that ball of cash he kept in the safe inside his underwear drawer. For all he knew, when those freaks arrived he might as well go back to his apartment and wipe his ass thoroughly with all those bills, or maybe make a papier-mâché sculpture.

  He found his ghostly image in the greasy mirror in front of the bar. On his face battled the ravages of Mevotex and million-dollar solutions to prevent skin cracking, premature wrinkles and sagging. His eyes reddened from the potion he was drinking and from the smoke of the Old Bucket. A tattoo of a leprechaun climbed up his neck to the middle of his face. The leprechaun held a cigar with his half smile and tossed a coin in the air with a white gloved hand.

  “What have you got there?” Tracy said, pointing to a badge that adorned Viper's worn leather jacket. He looked at his lapel as if he didn't know what she meant.

  “A keepsake of a summer love.”

  “Liar!” Tracy said, pointing a trembling, tobacco-yellowed finger at him.

  Viper shrugged and took a sip from his glass. Tracy yanked the phone from its cradle and punched in the police number. Viper swirled the waste that danced in the bottom of his glass.

  “I've got one,” Tracy said triumphantly. “Pendant Gun, Victory Avenue. Good.”

  And he hung up. The reward for ratting out a traitor to freedom was one hundred thousand interdollars, something that would allow Tracy to pay off all the bar's debts caused, Tracy deduced, by the crisis in Old Europa.

  “Can you give me another glass?” Viper said. “This one is full of shit.”

  Tracy gave him a wolfish grin, looking up at him with her eyes so overloaded with blue makeup that they seemed about to close at any moment under their own weight. The wrinkles next to them formed canyons and dunes of synthetic powder. Orange lipstick failed to hide the chapped lips. Her teeth, too far apart, reflected the strobe light. She picked up the glass and exchanged it for another. Viper held it up to the light. It was so full of fingerprints he couldn't see what was on the other side.

  “Do you really think those bugs are here for a cultural exchange?” he said.

  “You're ignorant,” Tracy said. Her laurel-leaf earrings swayed, as if trying to hypnotize Viper. “Don't you know that tolerance is the basis of freedom and citizenship rights? What do you know?”

  With the last sentence, a trail of saliva sprayed Viper's face. He wiped it off with the back of his hand.

  “You are also heartless,” she thought for a second, looking up at the ceiling, and corrected herself. “A soulless dealer,” she smiled, “What does the future hold for those poor creatures who stumble through the universe, waiting for a friendly door to invite them to rest? Not only do we deny them hospitality, but we welcome them with cannon fire.”

  “Are you going to fill this for me?” Viper shook the filthy glass. “What do you know about the Dark Years and the Dam Wars?”

  Tracy focused on him all the anger contained behind her mask of powder and mascara, as she shook her head, rocking the laurel leaves, refusing to believe what she was hearing.

  “I never imagined you were like this, Viper. I always thought that deep down, despite being a junkie and a ruthless drug dealer you were a good guy. But I see what's going on.”

  The sirens of the patrol hovercars came in through the dirty little window under the frieze behind the bar and blended with the swirling lights of the pub.

  In a small Chinatown apartment, Lin Xuen closed the can of red paint. He stepped out onto his balcony into the frigid February night, his hands still stained from the paint, and hung a banner explaining why all this would only lead to disaster. He hoped that at least someone would understand the brainwashing they were being subjected to. He didn't really expect to change things, but at least... well, maybe in a way he did. Maybe if someone would open their eyes, and that someone would enlighten someone else... Something like the butterfly that flapped its wings and unleashed a typhoon on the other side of the world. Then that would be him. He would be the butterfly.

  The banner flapped in the frigid air.

  Marta Sullivan, a reporter for “Forward, country” looked out the window in hopeful anticipation of the wonders those intergalactic visitors would bring. Those were days of intense work, much more so than during the Niobium War. At least it was being for a good cause, and it seemed that the message was penetrating the minds of the citizenry. There was hardly anyone left who did not know the truth. After all, wasn't that what she had become a journalist for?

  She blew on the tea she held in her hands as she watched someone hang a banner on the building across the street. Marta understood some Chinese. It didn't seem to her that the message respected freedom. In fact, it didn't seem that way at all. So, just in case, she dialed the police number.

  The light of that pale winter morning filtered through the windows of the Fiodr Capablanca Library. It was the last one in Koi City that kept books in the old format. Hardly anyone came to read them anymore, and the few remaining readers had been cornered in the only gap left by the holovisors. There, Leopold Aris was going through a volume by Rugersen on the Dam Wars. He was particularly interested in the Dark Years period. He was taking notes in a notebook that the rain had stiffened. At the counter, Myriam Greene was staring in fascination at the new dress worn by Secretary of State Marta Sullivan at Rita Larsen's wedding to a soccer player. Anna didn't know what team he played for, but he was handsome and a millionaire, that much she knew. She scratched with her long fingernails the rash those stockings always gave her. In spite of that she always wore them because they covered her varicose veins perfectly. She especially made sure to wear them on Friday mornings, when Mr. Aris was always at his appointment with those filthy tomes that spread their musty smell throughout the library. Wh
o knows what that man would find so interesting in those pages about to fall apart. Today Leopold had put on a wrinkled shirt, and for his usual style, that was very elegant. He was a bit older, but it was not as if she was in her fifteen-year-old days either. Myriam poured a full dose of the perfume sample that came with that issue of the magazine, and prepared to undertake the final assault.

  Five agents of the NWPD swarmed into the library. They headed for the corner where the old books were. They filled several carts by throwing the books inside, in bulk. They snatched the book from Leopold's hands and added it to the pile. They made sure to leave Leopold with a keepsake whack that sent his glasses flying to the other end of the room.

  “We're taking them in for a review,” said one of the agents to Myriam as they dragged the carts out of the library.

  In the Dough & Smylnov press store, Smylnov himself was nodding over a yellowed old book about the “Golden Triennium” of Eastcountry. For him it was more about the end of the Gilded Age. Before they were treated like idiots, and before they were robbed hand over fist behind a mask of cheap goodwill, and before the name of their country was changed to a euphemism preceded by the name of a bank. But of course, saying the name of the country, the real name, had become an offense. In reality, nothing could be called by its name anymore. Soon even euphemisms had become offensive. Now saying “Eastcountry” could have retrograde overtones for some sectors, who suggested using terms such as “here”, since saying “Eastcountry” implicitly suggested that the territory should have a name.

  In those three years, the first in which the PCFRPAC (Progress, Citizenship, Freedom and Rights of Plants, Animals and Citizens) governed, the first big turn was taken toward that madness of empty terms and linguistic traps that could drag a person to the dungeons of WilkinsBank Eastcountry for a single word.

  Gunshots woke him up. Through the shop window he saw two young men wearing bandanas over their faces, sheltered behind an old electric land van that Smylnov used to run quick errands nearby. These usually consisted of brief escapades to Pendant Gun, where he could not only refuel with that toxic wonder Tracy brewed, but also take the opportunity to hit on her.