Clarkesworld: Year Five (Clarkesworld Anthology), page 8
Konstantinova curses under her breath, until the roar of the atmosphere swallows the words.
After it’s over, Konstantinova pulls Marika out of the hatch.
“My hand hurts,” Marika says, absently.
Konstantinova says, “We broke your fingers.”
(This is the second; it is nearly the eclipse.)
Marika doesn’t remember anything until they play the recording.
Then she listens as Zeke orders her more and more sharply to let go of the handhold and strap in for re-entry, where are you going, the decision’s been made, this is an order, don’t touch the hatch, have you lost your mind, that’s an order, answer me goddammit, move back now or I’ll make you move.
“Why didn’t you answer?” they ask her.
She says, “I did.”
(Not then—when Zeke blocked the hatch and broke her fingers, it was Konstantinova who yelped.
But on the recorder, as soon as the Director said “It’s possible to make it,” she said “Go.”)
They put Marika back at the computer bank, and she gauges wind resistance and plots angles and tells the telescope where it should be pointing.
(She’s still good at it; she just doesn’t look behind her any more where the map is, where the ghosts of the stars flicker and shine.)
It’s a week before anyone talks to her.
The first person who does is Konstantinova.
“Can you move your fingers?”
Marika says, “Yes.”
A week later, Konstantinova hands her a screwdriver, says, “Prove it.”
Konstantinova makes her do mechanic drills at night, after the others are asleep.
So Marika drills: into her suit in two minutes, alone; flicking switches to a full-speed metronome; screwing and unscrewing panels until the pads of her fingers have no skin left.
She doesn’t understand why, until she hears rumors that the techs are making modifications and repairs; that it will be going back up as Alkonost II, with three chairs up for grabs.
“They’ll never crew me again,” she says.
Konstantinova says, “You have fifteen seconds. Go.”
It takes a year for Alkonost II to take off.
Zeke gets water-fever and dies. No one offers to replace him.
Walters gets drafted out of the pilot pool. He’s surly to the techs; he can suit up in two minutes; he cries in his bunk.
Konstantinova wishes for one, just one, to be the sort of person you want beside you when you stand on a new planet.
But no one else comes, and that morning on the launch pad, it’s Marika standing on her other side.
(This is the third; it’s almost over.)
The launch succeeds. The pods register nominal. The life support system holds.
They make it through the asteroid belt with only one bump (a fragment of meteorite, so small that when it strikes the hull it makes a soprano ping they can hear inside).
Decision point comes after that, with the inner planets behind them and Jupiter filling the viewscreen. Along the top edge, a shadow is passing; a moon in transit.
“We are go,” says Konstantinova; her feet go numb just saying it.
“Godspeed,” says Mission Control.
On the ground, they’ve already started to leave notes, to write things down and lock them up safely in case the war gets worse while they’re gone. They’re making a covenant of things for their children to do when they’re grown and staring at the dusty computer banks, greeting three far-away strangers.
“When we wake up,” says Konstantinova, “we won’t know a soul. Imagine that.”
She glances behind her, but Marika’s looking out at Jupiter with a crestfallen face; a moment later, Marika closes her pod like she’s glad to go.
(Walters went into his right after launch, even before the asteroid field. He’d better be as good at landings as they swear he is. She doesn’t put much faith in people who are surly to techs.)
Konstantinova stays up long enough to watch the ship accelerate to full speed, just in case.
Jupiter drops away, and Uranus and Neptune roll past in the distance like blue marbles, and there’s a brief bright string of stones along the Kuiper belt (Haumea whirling by), and then they’re in deep space and it’s nothing but her star map, as far as she can see.
It’s so familiar, suddenly, that she has to calculate the luminosity of Vega from memory before she can breathe again.
(Some thirsts you never get over.)
They wake up three days shy of Gliese 581.
Konstantinova wakes a day before the others to check out the comm. The Captain should be first, she feels. Zeke would have agreed.
When Dee comes into sight, cloudy and blue and welcome, Konstantinova holds her breath, runs some numbers.
(It’s an afterthought. By now the numbers are practically shapes, and she knows what home looks like.)
Walters wakes next. He looks out at the planet, sighs, and starts to dress.
Marika wakes last. As her pod cracks open she knocks it away with outstretched arms, leans out the edge and takes a few gasping breaths.
“I dreamed we hit the water,” she says.
Konstantinova doesn’t answer. People’s dreams are their own business.
The navigation system is working and the life support is as expected (enough air to get home, and Konstantinova tries not to shout with relief).
There’s a message from Mission Control, only twenty years old, which catches up to them on the second day. A few of the old voices from Mission Control send good wishes, and introduce some new voices.
“We’ve been monitoring your trip, Alkonost,” says one of the strangers. “Everything looks good; watch fuel usage on your way in, so you can make it back up all right if the gravity’s stronger than estimated. Let us know when you wake up. Good morning, and Godspeed.”
Konstantinova sends a message back. Beside her, Marika looks grimly through the viewscreen, where Gliese 581-d is spinning in the glow of their new home star.
They suit up and take positions for landing; it’s so instinctive now that Konstantinova smiles.
(She spent forty years dreaming of setting down on Dee, and after all that practice the comm switches feel like her own fingertips.
She never got to the part where they step out on a new world; not enough imagination left over.)
The checklist goes well until the very last moment, until Dee’s gravity has already caught them and they’ve begun the slow, inevitable fall.
“The third shock absorber isn’t running,” says Konstantinova. The words sound distant; disbelieving.
“We can land with two,” Marika says.
Walters says, “Not on water; if we’re off by more than a few degrees the surface tension will knock us over before we even touch down. We’ll slam into the water and be pulverized by impact.” He’s not disbelieving; he sounds like that’s just what he’s expected all along.
“Then you’d better do your job, I guess,” Konstantinova snaps.
“What’s wrong with it?” asks Marika. “It froze?”
Konstantinova frowns at the diagnostic. “Doesn’t look like it. The mechanism still registers. Something must have broken loose while we were sleeping. Maybe we can open the nav panel in the back and -”
“In the asteroid belt,” says Marika. “Something hit the hull.”
“After last time, there better not be a fucking thing wrong with that hull,” says Konstantinova.
“But it sang,” Marika says quietly.
All at once Konstantinova has a vision like a reel of film, as a sliver of rock careens into the hull, as a few grains slice through the hull and nick the fuel line, as forty years of a microscopic accident converge on them at once when there’s not enough pressure in a valve.
She tries for words, and for a moment fails.
“We can’t access that now,” Walters says. “We’re heading into the atmosphere, we’ll burn up if we go out there. Let’s pull out, we’ll look at it from a steady orbit.”
“If we pull out now,” says Konstantinova, “we’ll burn the fuel we need to launch from the surface of Dee and go home. So we take our chances in the water, or we take our chances on the ground.”
This shouldn’t be such an agony; this isn’t the first time she’s been here. It should get easier. This should have an answer, by now.
“All right,” she manages, “pull out and circle back on a one-way trip. This is the go/no go. Vote.”
She waits without turning for them to weigh in. She has a new respect for Mission Control, forty-one years ago; this is a silence that’s hard to allow.
At last, Walters says, “No go. We’ll take our chances in the water.”
Marika doesn’t say anything. Konstantinova frowns at the comm, wonders if she missed it; if Marika answered while Konstantinova was still talking.
(Marika has that habit, and her answer is always Go.)
But she waits for an answer a long time, until there is the sound of something sealing; Konstantinova sees the warning light go red under her fingers before she registers that Marika is opening the outer hatch.
Click.
(The transit is over; they are parting.)
The hairline crack is in the hydraulics panel. As Marika approaches it, moving hand over hand along the side rails, one bead of gasoline pushes through it and away.
“You won’t get home,” she says into her mic. “You’ve lost too much already.”
She doesn’t know if the connection is still live; she forgets if she turned it on or not, and her heart is pounding too loudly for her to hear a thing.
She grips the screwdriver in her free hand and gets to work. It’s familiar by now, and the screws come apart one by one, cling gently to the magnets in the fingertips of her glove.
The suit warms up with her work; her visor fogs. She tries not to panic. There’s not enough air to panic. (She disconnected—there wasn’t time for anything else.)
If she lets go of the handrail, she’ll vanish.
She imagines a darkness like the darkness of the boat on calm water, imagines stretching out a hand as she falls.
The screwdriver shakes; she clamps down with numb fingers to keep it from escaping, drags off another screw.
But it’s useless. Her helmet is fogging up from the inside now—she can’t see, she can’t see, and there’s not enough time left to hold her breath and wait for equalization, not enough oxygen left to hyperventilate and turn it into droplets big enough to see around.
She shoves the pick in at an angle, to avoid her eyes.
Three stabs before the visor cracks; another three before she can wedge the pick inside and wrench it out.
The shield winks once and spins gently out of sight, knocks away a scattering of gold where the coating has flaked off under the chisel.
She exhales, so her lungs don’t explode from the decompression, and turns to the bulkhead with shaking hands. She has to work fast—she forgets how long you can last before the darkness swallows you.
(You have fifteen seconds. Go.)
The last screw opens; the panel opens.
She slices the fuel line where it’s torn, shoves the healthy end of the hose back into the joint, throws the clamp shut. Stray gasoline floats past her in black pearls.
(She’s freezing; her lips are numb; when she blinks her eyelids crack, snap off, go flying.)
The panel begins to vibrate as the system kicks in.
(Seven seconds.)
She slams the bulkhead shut, fumbles three of the screws back into place. It’s all she manages before her fingers freeze.
Far away, Konstantinova is saying something about re-entry, about being out of time, she’s panicked, she’s screaming—but the last of the air escapes the suit, and then there’s silence.
(Marika breathes in; her lungs collapse.)
The ship is accelerating now, dragging her.
She pulls free.
The motion spins her slightly, away from the planet towards the sky. For a moment, the full view stuns her.
She thinks, It’s beautiful.
It’s the first time in her life she’s ever thought it.
(This is why: there is no seeing.
Now there is only the sky; she’s looking, for an instant, straight to the stars. This is the true geography.)
The Milky Way rips through the black at a different angle; this sky is a stranger, a ceaseless riot, sharp and steady-bright.
It’s a lovely war.
(Two seconds.
One second.)
After it’s over, Konstantinova will emerge from the sea.
She will stand on the deck of the Alkonost; pull off her helmet; breathe.
The night will be deep. When she turns her face to the sky, to search for a place to begin with her numbers, the ghosts of the stars will flicker and shine.
Salvaging Gods
Jacques Barcia
Gorette found her second godhead buried under piles of plastic bottles, holy symbols, used toilet paper and the severed face of an avatar. No matter how much the scavengers asked, the people from Theodora just wouldn’t separate organic from non-biodegradable, from divine garbage. They threw out their used-up gods along with what was left of their meals, their burnt lamps, broken refrigerators, tires, stillborn babies and books of prayer in the trash can. And when the convoys carrying society’s leftovers passed through the town’s gates, some lazy bureaucrat would mark in a spreadsheet that another mountain was raised in that municipal sanitary landfill, the Valley of the Nephilim. And to hell with the consequences.
Her father says no dead god is dead enough that it can’t be remade on our own image. The old man can spend hours rambling about over-consumption, the gnostic crisis, the impact of all those mystical residues poisoning the soil and the underground streams, how children are born malformed and prone to mediunity, and how unfair it is that only the rich have access to miracles. People will do what’s more comfortable, not what’s best for everyone, he’d finally say. It’s far easier to buy new deities than try to reuse them. So he taught her how to recycle old gods and turn them into new ones, mostly, she believed, because he wanted to make a difference. Or maybe because he was the one true atheist left in the world.
It was a small one, that godhead, and not in a very good shape. Pale silver, dusty, scratched surface and glowing only slightly underneath the junk. At best, thought Gorette, it’d have only a few hundred lines of code she’d be able to salvage. Combined with some fine statues and pieces of altars she’d found early that morning, perhaps she’d be able to assemble one or two more deities to the community’s public temple at Saint Martin. The neighborhood she was raised in had only recently been urbanized, so that meant the place was not officially a slum anymore. But still, miracles were quite a phenomenon down in the suburbs.
“Hey, daddy. Found another one,” Gorette said, covering her eyes from the burning light of midday. “Can we go home now, please?”
The egg-shaped thing had the pulse of a dying heart, and fitted almost perfectly in her adolescent hand. So she arranged a place for it amongst the relics in her backpack, inside the folds of a ragged piece of loincloth, and into a beaten up thurible where it’d be safe enough to survive the hour-long ride back to the city.
Her father stood next to a marble totem, sweeping the field with a kirlian detector. The pillar was part of a discarded surround-sound system with speakers the size of his chest, and served as a landmark to the many scavengers exploring the waste dump. When he heard his daughter calling him, he took his gas mask off and said “That depends,” his low-toned voice coming like a sigh, tired. “Do you think this will do? We’re running out of code and there are many open projects in the lab.”
A plastic bag some ten yards away from her smelled of rotting flesh. Animal sacrifice, she knew, and the vultures seemed to have noticed that too. “Yeah,” she lied, “It’s a bit wasted, but I think it has a lot of good code in it. Never seen one of these, so I suppose it’s a quite new model.” She desperately needed to take that stink out of her body and today she hoped was water day. “Is it water day today, daddy?”
The old man picked up one last relic, a fang or something, and examined it close to his thick glasses. He nodded to the object and put it in a sac he carried tied to his waist. “No, it’s not. The Palace said three days ago that they’d reinforce the water gods cluster, so the suburb’s rationing would drop to two days. But of course that didn’t happen.” He finally walked to Gorette and scratched her dreadlocks, trying to smile. “Maybe you can build a water god with the godhead you found, huh?”
Gorette made her first wish that evening, after incubating some of the new godhead’s code in an altar of her own design. It was built out of the remains of a semi-defaced idol, a one-eyed marble bust wearing a tall orange hat, adorned with shattered crystals, split dragon horns, praying cords and barbed wire. That last bit just to make sure everything would stand in place. The godhead rested inside the same thurible Gorette used to cradle it safely back from the Valley of the Nephilim. But now the metal egg had dozens of acupuncture needles trespassing its shell, and every single one was linked to hair-thin optical fiber threads, shining with divine code, feeding with data a green phosphorus monitor.
Without warning. It just woke up.
When the loading bar hit one hundred per cent, the stone bust opened its one eye, fluidly, staring directly at her. She fell back from the chair, startled, and stared back at the thing’s physiognomy from where she stood. From the floor up.
It was her first attempt at a new design model, one that toyed with disharmony instead of symmetry. Profanity instead of divinity. Good hardware, her dad says, is as important as good code. But harmony. Harmony is the key. The problem is that new gods are coming with even more complex, specialized godheads, their kernels incompatible with older or malfunctioning holy paraphernalia. She decided to try out the new approach and, for her surprise, it worked.
“I want a fucking bath,” Gorette said, pointing a finger to the bust. “A warm bath. Now.”
The stone in the god’s crippled face moved like if it was made out of clay. Smooth. No, it moved like that stop-motion movie, what’s its name, the one that always airs on holidays and Friday evenings. The one dad just loves to watch when he’s back from the Valley.
