IGMS Issue 11 Page 5

  "Yes," Jansen said. "Matter of fact."

  Arl drew a long breath. "But when I saw you . . ." Her voice caught, and she started again. "I realized right there, I am not ready to have you gone, I'm not. Not you too, it's too damn much, do you understand me? Don't you dare die on me, not now. Not now."

  Jansen found her hand on the bed, and put his hand over it. She did not respond, but she did not pull the hand away. "You look like me," he said. "Gracie's all Elly, but you've got my chin, and my nose, and my cheekbones. Must have really hated that, huh?"

  The smile was thin and elusive, but it was a smile. "I hated my whole face. Most girls do, but I had reasons." She looked down at their hands together. "I even hated my hands, because they're too much like yours. I'm okay with them now, though, more or less."

  Jansen said, "You're like me. That's what you hate." Her eyes widened in outrage, and she jerked away, but he held tightly to her hand. "What I mean, you're like the good me. The best of me. The me I was supposed to be, before things . . . just happened. You understand what I'm saying?"

  Arl was beginning to frown in an odd way, staring at him. "You sure you haven't had a stroke? I wish the doctor'd get here. You talked while you were out, I couldn't make anything out of it, except it was really weird. Like you were havinga weird dream."

  "Not a stroke," Jansen said. "Not a dream." He did not try to sit up again, but kept his eyes fixed on her. He said, "Just someplace I needed to be. Don't ask me about it right now, and I won't ask you about stuff you don't want to tell me, okay?" She did not reply, but her hand turned slightly under his, and a couple of fingers more or less intertwined. "And I promise I won't die until you're finished yelling at me. Fair?"

  Arl nodded. "But this doesn't mean I actually like you. Just so you know that."

  "Fair," Jansen said again. He did withdraw his hand from hers now.

  Dr. Chaudhry came in, a brisk young Bengali with a smile that was not brisk, but thoughtful, almost dreamy. He sat down on the opposite side of the bed from Arl and said, "Well, I hear that you have been frightening your good daughter quite badly. Not very considerate, Mr. Jansen."

  "I'm not a very considerate person," Jansen said. "My family could tell you."

  "This is something you must change right away," Dr. Chaudhry said, trying to look severe and not succeeding. "You are going to be a grandfather, you know. You will have responsibilities."

  "Yeah. Been thinking about that," Jansen said. He looked up at the lights on the ceiling then, and let Dr. Chaudhry count his pulse.

  The Absence of Stars

  by Greg Siewert

  Artwork by Anselmo Alliegro

  * * *

  Part Two (Part one is in issue 10.)

  The Destiny laboratory was silent except for the background noise of the machinery. The shuttle crew and ISS crew together numbered 10 people and all of them quietly read their copies of Edward's e-mail and tried to absorb its contents. Astronomers had named the object ISBH-147. The acronym stood for Inter Solar Black Hole. Gretchen gasped when she looked at the number that followed it and wondered if it could really mean what it seemed to mean -- that this was the one-hundred and forty-seventh black hole they'd found tearing through the Earth's solar system. Gretchen knew that if they'd cataloged hundreds of them then there could be hundreds more.

  The e-mail explained that impact with Earth was a possibility in the range of about fifty percent. The accuracy of this estimate would increase as ISBH-147 drew nearer. After Trevor's conversation with Edward, Nikolai and Gretchen had called a meeting and told everyone about the approaching object. So rather than being a surprise to the emotionally devastated crew, this information was a horrifying confirmation of what they already knew. The rest of the e-mail however, was not what they were expecting. Edward went on to explain that the reason they were being held on the space station was so that NASA could evaluate the feasibility of evacuating them. To Mars.

  Several other countries including Russia and China were also working on evacuation plans. Unlike the US, these countries enjoyed the advantage of having functional landers. The Chinese lander was designed for a moon mission, but they still thought a landing on Mars might be feasible. Deceleration in the stronger gravity of Mars would require a great deal more thrust, but unlike the mission for which it was designed, this one would be a one-way trip. It was conceivable that the extra thrust could be attained by jettisoning the lower stage after fuel exhaustion in re-entry. The lander could then fire its own engine and continue its deceleration using the booster that was designed to carry it back into orbit.

  Russia was in slightly better shape with a lander designed specifically for Mars, though there were differing reports on whether the craft was finished.

  The US had no lander. All of America's resources had been spent on the shuttle program and the space station. The plan, according to Edward's e-mail, was to re-fuel the Phoenix from a tank in a Russian-made Progress cargo rocket that was being launched from Kazakhstan. They could then burn half of the fuel in the main engine of the shuttle and push it into a five-month trajectory toward Mars. Approaching Mars' orbit, the shuttle was to burn the other half of its fuel to decelerate, enter Martian atmosphere, and land "conventionally."

  It was this last part that caused the crew -- one by one -- to stop reading and look up at Trevor. Myrtle, whose normally ruddy face was close to white, broke the silence. "Trevor . . . you can't land a shuttle on Mars can you?"

  Trevor struggled with what to tell the crew. Eventually, he decided that they deserved nothing less than honesty. "There's about a hundred reasons why this won't work," he said.

  Trevor, wearing his headset, waited patiently while he listened to a series of clicks at the other end of the line. A burst of loud static made him yank the ear-piece away from his ear, but he replaced it when he heard Edward's voice coming from the black foam padding.

  "So it's working?" asked Trevor.

  "If you can hear me, then it's working," replied Edward. He'd tasked his engineers to set up an encoding system so that their conversations wouldn't be monitored the world over.

  "Edward, you're an engineer. Why'd you send me this?"

  "Look Trevor, I know it's a little radical, but under the circumstances I think it makes sense."

  "Which part makes sense? The shuttle is not an interplanetary craft. There's not enough fuel, there's not enough food, there's not enough water, there's not enough radiation shielding. And those are just the problems getting there, never mind the landing."

  "We're sending up a Soyuz capsule filled with fuel. It should be enough. We don't have the trajectory yet, but we'll get it. It's just going to be a very slow ride. Maybe more like six months."

  "Which is why there isn't enough food and water."

  "You can clean out the ISS. Take everything with you. All the vegetation experiments, everything."

  "And water?"

  "Drink your piss."

  Edward's voice was starting to contain a metallic edge, but Trevor was too involved with his own thought process to be warned off by it. "Fine, I'll drink my piss. Now let's talk about landing and re-entry. I've done the math Edward. In Mars' atmosphere I'm looking at a stall speed of roughly six hundred miles per hour, which means I'll have to put my wheels down at about the speed of sound and do it in rocky terrain. After that I suppose I can just step out and re-invent agriculture on another planet."

  "Shut up, Trevor! Just shut up!" yelled Edward. The sound of his voice was like a bucket of ice water in Trevor's face. "How dare you talk to me about logistics? You're not the only one floating in space anymore. Our whole planet is floating in space and in three days, me, my family, my friends, and the rest of mankind are going to be crushed into a particle. Do I think you're going to make it? No! Of course not! But damn it, you're going to wave to the cameras, get in that shuttle, hit the engines and pretend like you are. Because otherwise, a lot of us might start to feel like the last five billion years were just a big waste of ti
me."

  The words rocked Trevor. "I'm sorry," he said.

  He wasn't just talking to Edward. He was ashamed because it suddenly occurred to him how little he'd thought of his family. Tears, born from genuine sorrow and the onset of a hateful sense of guilt, began to form in the corner of his eyes. "Look, Edward, I've got to talk to my wife."

  There was no answer for a moment. "I know Trevor. Your family is on their way here. So are the families of some of the other astronauts. For the rest, we'll try to arrange a private phone link."

  "Thanks, Edward. Really. Hey, there's still a fifty/fifty chance it won't hit us right?"

  "No, actually it's down to about 1 in 5 that it misses."

  "Oh."

  "Trevor, will you do it? The evacuation I mean."

  "Of course."

  Melissa Kimberly was eight years old. Her hair was bleached a very light blonde from the Southern Florida sun and her face, appearing in high-resolution detail on her father's laptop, was a mask of confusion and fatigue. Contemplating this look of exhaustion, Trevor thought he knew its origin. She was tired from being lied to. In a world that was quite obviously falling apart, the best that Melissa (and most other eight-year-olds) could extract from their elders was thin reassurances and meaningless platitudes. She was too young to properly articulate her frustration, but if she were older, she might have explained that on a planet about to be ripped in half, there was very little purpose in sheltering people from the truth.

  Trevor sensed her frustration as he told her how much he loved her and missed her. He asked her questions about life back at their house in Tallahassee. They talked about her friends at school and "Foo," the lop-eared bunny; mascot of the Kimberly family and Melissa's faithful companion. He could tell by her conversation -- distant and hollow -- that his daughter expected from him what she got from everybody else: a condescending evasion of reality.

  "Daddy, are we gonna die?"

  "Yes sweetheart."

  "Everyone?"

  "Yes."

  "Even you?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Pretty sure."

  Rather than saddening her, she found the information somewhat thrilling, and even reassuring. Thrilling because she felt included as an equal in the cardinal event that was about to unfold, and reassuring because she now understood that she wouldn't have to suffer it alone.

  "What happens after we die?"

  "I don't know sweetheart. Nobody does. Some people think we'll all go to heaven. I don't know for sure, but I know that it'll be a great journey and me and your mom will be right there with you."

  "I love you Dad."

  "I love you too."

  "Mom wants to talk now."

  "Goodbye, love."

  "Bye."

  His wife's hair had been cropped short. He found this startling and then found it startling that -- under the circumstances -- he would find this startling. "You cut your hair!" he said, then, some moments later; "It looks good!"

  Her face was deadpan. "Yes . . ." she said, "I cut my hair. Did you just tell Melissa that she was going to die?"

  "She is going to die, Peggy. We all are."

  "She's eight years old!"

  "What difference does it make?"

  "I can't believe you told her that."

  "Peggy, she's one of us now. She's not a kid anymore, she's just one more human staring at the sky."

  Peggy looked off-screen and Trevor knew she was examining her daughter. When she returned her gaze to the camera, her face had softened. "Maybe you're right," she said. "Anyway, now's not really a good time for a fight. Trevor, can you come down? I mean, is there any way?"

  "No, Peggy, I'm sorry."

  "But don't they have a Soyuz up there you could come down on?"

  "Yeah, but they want me to go to Mars."

  She put her hand involuntarily over her mouth. "Are you really going to go through with that?"

  "For the good of all mankind."

  "I thought Edward was putting me on. Do you think you can make it?"

  "No."

  "What? No? Damn it, Trevor, stop being so practical! We already know you're tough. Can't you just lie to me -- to us -- for a few days?"

  "I'm not being practical. And believe me, I don't feel that tough. I just want you and Melissa to know that I'm going to the same place you are."

  "Baby, I don't think we want you to come with us this time."

  "Peggy, you don't know how badly it hurts being away from you and Melissa right now. I swear to God this wouldn't be so bad if I could just be with you. If the three of us could sit together on a hillside somewhere and watch the sky turn black, I really don't think I'd mind. If this is what the universe has planned, who am I to argue? But being up here, away from my family . . . it's a lot to take. It helps me to think we'll all be together after it's over."

  "Okay, Trevor, I'll let you think that. But only if you let me think that you might just make it. That's what helps me."

  "Fair enough."

  "I love you, Trevor. I don't think I've ever loved you more than I do right now." She began to cry.

  "I love you too, Peg. I miss you."

  The two of them stared into their respective monitors, thousands of miles away from each other and looked into each other's eyes for the last time.

  The best vantage point on Space Station Alpha from which to view ISBH-147 was the windowed cupola that connected the Destiny module to the control module. Gretchen and Nikolai huddled in it together. The black hole was not a terribly impressive sight. It wasn't really a sight at all. It was observable only by noticing that the star Adhara was missing from the constellation Canis Major, leaving Orion's faithful companion without a conspicuous point of his hindquarters.

  "Maybe a galaxy exploded," said Nikolai.

  Gretchen's mouth twisted into a pout, a mannerism she used when thinking deeply. She'd figured these black holes were some sort of debris thrown from the mother black hole that anchored the middle of Earth's own galaxy, the Milky Way. However, she couldn't explain why the objects were traveling in the wrong direction. The unthinkably dense mass at the center of the Milky Way rotated along with everything else and if it emitted a jet of black holes she would expect them to sneak up behind the planets they destroyed, rather than hitting them in the face. Nikolai's suggestion made sense. If an entire galaxy of rotating matter compressed itself into a hyper-massive sphere of energy, then blasted itself into particles, the black holes that had showered through Earth's solar system might be nothing more than minute shrapnel from an explosion that took place billions of years before the Earth had even formed. If these objects entered the wrong side of the Milky Way and were captured by its gravity, they would be the interstellar equivalent of a fleet of trucks headed the wrong way down a freeway.

  "Does it matter?" asked Gretchen.

  Nikolai shook his head slowly. "Did you talk to your husband?"

  "Yeah," she answered. "It was weird. It was kind of awful actually. He just kept apologizing because he couldn't have kids. As if it mattered anymore. I was trying to tell him how much I missed him, but he was so pre-occupied that I don't feel like I really got the chance. What about you, did you speak with Ada?"

  "Yes," Nikolai said and made a dismissive gesture, not because the conversation had been unimportant to him (his expression proved otherwise) but because in the face of so much personal tragedy, the Russian felt shy in discussing his own. Gretchen thought perhaps he wanted to avoid crying. She remembered the press event in Cape Canaveral where she'd met Ada and had been impressed by the casual way that she and her husband loved each other. They made it seem so easy and natural -- a simple question of feeling. As she saw the pain inside of Nikolai, it seemed to reflect back into her, and the feelings she had for her own husband became much sharper. Nikolai looked away and she was overtaken by a wave of sorrow that was much more intense than she'd felt when actually speaking with her husband. Water began to form at the corners of he
r eyes.

  Trevor moved up behind them and looked over their shoulders. He said nothing.

  Nikolai looked as if he were going to say something, then stopped.

  "What?" asked Trevor.

  "Nothing, it's just, well, there is one thing I've been thinking about." Gretchen looked over at Nikolai as she wiped at the tears in her eyes. "If we are all agreed that the shuttle mission offers no chance of survival . . . we are all agreed, right?" Gretchen and Trevor nodded. "Then, there is one other approach we could take to spread our seed -- so to speak -- across the galaxy. We wouldn't survive, but if we sent our DNA across the galaxy then maybe, somehow, remnants of humanity and of the planet Earth could begin anew somewhere else."

  "You mean just jet ourselves off into the void?" asked Trevor.

  "Exactly."

  "What good would that do? We'd be dead."

  "Yes, but some people think that the seeds of life on Earth were of similarly extraterrestrial origin; primitive microbiology that hitchhiked on asteroids and comets. We might not live to have human children, but who knows what information is encoded into our DNA and the DNA of the plants we'll bring with us. Perhaps the genetic material that makes up our bodies could someday, another trillion years from now, grow itself a new Earth."

  Trevor thought for a moment, then said: "I have to admit, I think I've gotten used to the idea of crashing into Mars. Starving to death on the shuttle doesn't sound quite as appealing."

  "I don't think we'll live long enough to starve to death."

  "Sure we will, with the little bit of fuel in the shuttle, we'll be long dead before we leave the solar system."

  Nikolai paused, then said,"I was thinking we could travel in a different way. Much faster."

  "How?"

  "Use the black hole."

  Gretchen spoke up. "Anything that goes into a black hole is going to be destroyed. Whether or not something like 'wormholes' really exists is irrelevant. We'd be annihilated at the sub-atomic level before we found out."