Lightspeed: Year One

Eight buildings away, she picked up the pack she’d left there. It was heavy, even though it didn’t contain everything she had cached around the city. It was so easy to take things when a base was being hastily withdrawn. Everyone was preoccupied, everyone assumed anything not readily visible was already packed, inventories were neglected and the deebees not cross-checked. No time. Historically, war had always provided great opportunities for profiteers.

Was that what she was? Yes, but not a profit measured in money. Measure it, rather, in lives saved, or restored to dignity, or enhanced. ”Why did you first enter the Corps?” Because I’m a medician, Lolimel. Not an anthropologist.

They would notice, of course, that Mia herself wasn’t aboard the last shuttle. But Kenin, at least, would realize that searching from her would be a waste of valuable resources when Mia didn’t want to be found. And Mia was so old. Surely the old should be allowed to make their own decisions.

Although she would miss them, these Corps members who had been her family since the last assignment shuffle, eighteen months ago and decades ago, depending on whose time you counted by. Especially she would miss Lolimel. But this was the right way to end her life, in service to these colonists’ health. She was a medician.

It went better than Mia could have hoped. When the ship had gone—she’d seen it leave orbit, a fleeting stream of light—Mia went to Esefeb.

“Mia etej efef,” Esefeb said with her rosy smile. Mia come home. Mia walked toward her, hugged the girl, and slapped the tranq patch on her neck.

For the next week, Mia barely slept. After the makeshift surgery, she tended Esefeb through the seizures, vomiting, diarrhea, pain. On the morning the girl woke up, herself again, Esefeb was there to bathe the feeble body, feed it, nurse Esefeb. She recovered very fast; the cure was violent on the body but not as debilitating as everyone had feared. And afterwards Esefeb was quieter, meeker, and surprisingly intelligent as Mia taught her the rudiments of water purification, sanitation, safe food storage, health care. By the time Mia moved on to Esefeb’s mother’s house, Esefeb was free of most parasites, and Mia was working on the rest. Esefeb never mentioned her former hallucinations. It was possible she didn’t remember them.

“Esefeb ekebet,” Mia said as she hefted her pack to leave. Esefeb be well.

Esefeb nodded. She stood quietly as Mia trudged away, and when Mia turned to wave at her, Esefeb waved back.

Mia shifted the pack on her shoulders. It seemed heavier than before. Or maybe Mia was just older. Two weeks older, merely, but two weeks could make a big difference. An enormous difference.

Two weeks could start to save a civilization.

Night fell. Esefeb sat on the stairs to her bed, clutching the blue-green sheet of plastic in both hands. She sobbed and shivered, her clean face contorted. Around her, the unpopulated shadows grew thicker and darker. Eventually, she wailed aloud to the empty night.

“Ej-es! O, Ej-es! Ej-es, Esefeb eket! Ej-es . . . etej efef! O, etej efef!”

IN-FALL Ted Kosmatka

The disc caved a hole in the starshine.

Smooth, graphene skin reflected nothing, blotting out the stars as it swung through the vacuum—black on black, the perfect absence of color.

It was both a ship and not a ship.

The disc lacked a propulsion system. It lacked navigation. Inside, two men awakened, first one and then the other.

In truth, the disc was a projectile—a dark bolus of life-support fired into distant orbit around another, stranger kind of darkness.

This second darkness is almost infinitely larger, massing several hundred thousand sols; and it didn’t blot out the stars behind it, but instead lensed them into a bright, shifting halo, bending light into a ring, deforming the fabric of spacetime itself.

From the perspective of the orbiting disc, the stars seemed to flow around an enormous, circular gap in the star field. It had many different names, this region of space. The astronomers who discovered it centuries earlier had called it Bhat 16. Later physicists would call it “the sink.” And finally, to those who came here, to those who dreamed of it, it was known simply as “the maw.”

A black hole like none ever found before.

By the disc’s third day in orbit, it had already traveled three hundred eighteen million miles, but this is only a tiny fraction of its complete trajectory. At the end of the disc’s seventy-second hour in orbit, a small lead weight, 100 kilograms, was fired toward the heart of the gravity well—connected to the ship by a wire so thin that even mathematicians called it a line.

The line spooled out, thousands of kilometers of unbreakable tetravalent filament stretching toward the darkness until finally pulling taut. The line held fast to its anchor point, sending a musical resonance vibrating through the disc’s carbon hull.

Inexorable gravity, a subtle shift.