Lightspeed: Year One

Don’t plan on it; the wheel habitats are strictly for tourists. They cost ten times as much to build as a micro gee can and once you’re in one you’re pretty much stuck to the rim. And you’re still getting zapped by cosmic rays and solar x-rays and energetic neutrons. If you’re going to risk living in space, you might as well enjoy it. Besides, all the important work gets done by breakaways.

See, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s like Elena used to say. We didn’t conquer space, it conquered us. Break away and you’re giving up forty, maybe fifty years of life, okay? The stats don’t lie. Fifty-six is the average. That means some breakaways die even younger.

You don’t? Well, good for you. Hey, it looks great—better than new. How much?

Does that include the vodka?

Well thanks. Listen, Jane, I’m going to tell you something, a secret they ought to tell everybody before they go up.

No, I’m not. Promise. So anyway, on my breakaway day Elena calls me to her room and tells me that she doesn’t think I should do it, that I won’t be happy living in space. I’m so stunned that I start crying, which is a very backdown thing to do. I try to argue, but she’s been mentoring for years and knows what she’s talking about. Only about a third breakaway—but, of course, you know that. Anyway, it gets strange then. She says to me, “I have something to show you,” and then she starts to strip. See, the time she’d made love to me, she wouldn’t let me do anything to her. And like I said, she’d kept her clothes on; breakaways have this thing about showing themselves to temps. I mean, I’d seen her hands before, her feet. They looked like spiders. And I’d seen her face. Kissed it, even. But now I’m looking at her naked body for the first time. She’s fifty-one years old. I think she must’ve been taller than me once, but it’s hard to be sure because she has the deep micro gee slouch. Her muscles have atrophied so her papery skin looks as if it’s been sprayed onto her bones. She’s had both breasts prophylactically removed. “I’ve got 40% bonerot,” she says, “and I mass thirty-eight kilos.” She shows the scars from the operations to remove her thyroid and ovaries, the tap on her hip where they take the monthly biopsy to test for leukemia. “Look at me,” she says. “What do you see?” I start to tell her that I’ve read the literature and watched all the vids and I’m prepared for what’s going to happen but she shushes me. “Do you think I’m beautiful?” she says. All I can do is stare. “I think I am,” she says. “So do the others. It’s our nature, Cleo. This is how space makes us over. Can you tell me you want this to happen to you?” And I couldn’t. See, she knew me better than I knew myself. What I wanted was to float forever, to feel I was special, to stay with her. Maybe I was in love with her. I don’t know if that’s possible. But loving someone isn’t a reason to break away, especially if the stats say that someone will be dead in five years. So I told her she was right and thanked her for everything she’d done and got on the shuttle that same day and backed down and became just another nobody. And she gave up mentoring and went to Saturn and now that we’ve forgotten all about each other we can start living happily ever after.

No, here’s the secret, honey. The heart is a muscle, okay? That means it shrinks in space. All breakaways know it, now you do too. Anyway, it’s been nice talking to you.

Sure. Good night.

SAYING THE NAMES Maggie Clark

On the shuttle out to our connecting flight, the Bo assigned to my mission fixes the bulge of his eyes unwaveringly upon me. I was told to expect this, the species so alien to death it finds our every parting curious; its sense of privacy so absent, not one of its forty-three languages contains the word.

Though L-drive allows us to return long before our loved ones pass on, just the thought of my journey’s purpose already has me pining for home: of all the ways I’ve imagined meeting my father, as defense council in his murder trial does not rank high on the list. Our shuttle crests the white round of the L-ship’s hull, powering down non-essentials while preparing to dock.

I can bear the Bo’s steady gaze even less in the dark.

In-flight, I dream. Vega III, my home world, holds a species of deep-water squid that can regress at will to any prior phase in its development. When I was small my mother introduced me to this creature as a means of describing the Bo, and with them, my father’s permanent absence. No more was ever said about either the man or the mission, and for years I thought of the Bo as slimy cephalopods forever darting from the light. Not until the Academy did my perception of the species take its proper form, of large, mottled amphibians with forelimbs caught between quadrupedal and bipedal use, who did indeed revert to earlier stages of development when their warts grew too big for them to move.