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When David Kalb next awoke, his first thought was relief that he had actually done so. His next thought was for his wife. He waited impatiently for the hiberpod equipment to finish its business with him, and then stiffly and groggily staggered to the clothing dispenser to draw on a crisp new jumpsuit, fabricated days before, and then checked the life signs on the remaining crew.
Rebekah was fine, as were Rigo, Dani, Han, Sanna, and Bjern. Haddi Vorsen, Ben Smit, and Petra Venbergen had died at different points in the journey, sending David into a miasma of self-doubt; it was possible that he had done something wrong when bedding them down, and thereby killed them. He checked the times of death again, and after seeing that Petra was the first to die, roughly twenty-three years after their departure from Gamarene, made it only a little bit easier. Only Petra's death would produce lingering grief; Haddi and Ben han been married shortly before their entry into the hiberpods, and consequently were not survived by the one that would miss them the most.
Bjern took the news as well as could be expected.
Decedrius had but three planets: A giant of a gas giant, approximately twice the mass of Jupiter, and two smaller worlds much closer to their humble yellow mother. As the crew spied them through their telescopes, hope leapt: The second planet had a tantalizing bluish tint to its disc.
The disappointment at Gamarene was forgotten, and for the three months spent decelerating towards the inner planets, even Bjern was cheerful most of the time, although the other six knew that he was mourning when he was alone in his compartment. Frustratingly enough, the best course for exploring the system took them by the innermost planet first, which they already knew was uninhabitable; roughly twice the mass of Earth, it was similar to Mercury in all other respects, including mean surface temperature. They passed by it impatiently, with no misgivings, dismissing it from their thoughts as they hurtled towards the beckoning second planet.
Decedrius II, upon the rapidly closing inspection, had blue expanses of surface liquid, ice caps that crept a full twenty degrees from each pole, a ten degree inclination between the axes of rotation and revolution, and a surface temperature that averaged ten degrees cooler than Earth's. The spectrographic readings on the fly-by set the crew into howls of joy: The ocean was water, the atmosphere was one quarter oxygen and three-fourths nitrogen, with trace amounts of noble gases. The orbit was circular. Two small moons coursed through its sky. Decedrius-II was better than they had been willing to settle for.
"If only Petra had lived," sighed Bjern.
The next day they programmed the ship to return and assume orbit, and began preparations for descent. When the medical logs of the one hundred and ninety passengers had been reviewed, and plans adjusted for the dead, David was approached by Han Hansen.
"There are over sixty kilograms of metasupp missing."
"Are you sure?"
"We've been asleep for eight hundred and eighty-five years, altogether. Each person uses one gram per year, so we should have used up about one hundred and seventy-six kilos. However, of the two metric tons we had when we started the trip, we now have only one thousand, seven hundred and sixty kilos on-hand, when we should have eighteen hundred and twenty-some."
"Did you check for a leak?"
"No, but to be sure, we need to take the whole ship apart."
"Well, it probably won't make much difference now. We won't need that metasupp. Decedrius is a keeper."
"We don't know that."
"What do you mean? You blessed the spectrograph yourself. Perfectly breathable air."
"Oh, the planet we're preparing to land on is a beaut. But it's not Decedrius II. And we're not orbiting Decedrius." He jerked a thumb aft. "Decedrius is about forty-seven light years that way. This is Basilon."
"I did the stellar projection, based on a location in Decedrius. It matches what we see outside."
"No it doesn't. You projected based on Basilon. It's just that you didn't know, and the computer was misinformed."
"How do you know?"
"Simple. How far is Gamarene from Sol?"
"Sixty-three light years."
"And how far is it from Gamarene to Decedrius?"
"Ten."
"That's not what the computer says."
David turned and stalked to the bridge. When he arrived, he immediately ordered the other five off, and when they were gone, he queried the navigational charts, which asserted that Decedrius was fifty-seven light-years from Gamarene. "I could have sworn it said ten before we left."
"It did," Han said quietly. "And, by the way, we are also one hundred and twenty light-years from Earth, and not seventy-three, like we also could have sworn we should be. I compared the navigational computer's charts with the emergency hardcopy version. The locations for Decedrius and Basilon are swapped. No other differences."
"So someone has tampered with the navigational computer."
Han nodded. "And that's not all, either. If you will look at the medical logs, you will notice that the time stamps repeat a three hundred and twenty-year stretch, as if someone had reset the ships' clock. The discontinuity appears almost immediately after we bedded down in Gamarene."
"Have you noticed anything else anomalous?"
Han shook his head.
"Now, who did it?"
"That's the part that bugs me. I've accounted for all two hundred of us. We're not all alive, but we are all here. Now this is an assumption, but but I think it's warranted: Whoever did this does not bear us any ill will, at least, not from any motive I can fathom. They could have done anything you can name to us; we were asleep and helpless. They wanted us to find Basilon, and not find Decedrius, and they wanted to think we had done it ourselves."
"We can discount the passengers."
"Oh, sure. Unless they had a confederate among the crew, they couldn't get out of hibernation to do it. I think we can discount the crew as well, because none of us would have any way of knowing that Basilon was a better destination than Decedrius."
"Assuming that we're all what we appear to be."
"Meaning?"
David was quiet for a moment, but looked up at the plaque over his workstation.
"Yes, the Atlanticans," Han said. "They clearly wanted us to get out here. That makes sense, but it still doesn't add up. Why would they inflitrate the crew? You're not the infiltrator, because you could have easily selected Basilon as our destination, and we would have had no reason for arguing with you. None of us woke up during the trip, so that leaves us out."
"Unless..." He leaned back and stared at the ceiling. "Could the computer be programmed to wait until everyone was down, do the two changes that were necessary, and then erase the programming that had done the job?"
"Yes, but in the nav charts only the locations for Basilon and Decedrius were changed; I checked. To change only those would require that they knew we were going to Decedrius, which wasn't decided on until we were orbiting Gamarene. So it still would have to have been one of the crew who did it. Would the Atlanticans risk death in hibernation just to anonymously save two hundred fools like us? That doesn't sound right. I think we're all regular folks here."
"That leaves only one remaining possibility." David got up, told the rest of the crew they were free to use the bridge again, and went aft to the entrance hatchways. After examining them, he found that the seal around one of the hatches had been replaced at some point in the past. "Bingo," he murmured. "Someone has come through this hatchway, at some point since we left Earth."
"And we're not ever going to use these doors again. If it hadn't been for the metasupp shortfall we would have missed this," Han said. "A whole lot of little signs we might have missed, or ignored, putting us at an entirely different world, without suspecting anything amiss." He paused for a moment. "So when do we tell the others?"
The Sower's Hope entered into orbit around Basilon II, and the crew began watching over the revivication of the one hundred and seventy-eight surviving passengers. The couple dozen of them that shared space with the deceased were not at all happy about it—a couple had nightmares from it—and wanted the bodies to be moved, but there was no way to move the dead without removing them from their hiberpods, which David had flatly prohibited. The hiberpods weighed two hundred kilograms each, and were built into their compartments, so there was no moving them.
Shipboard life began to seem crowded to the crew, who were used to being able to find solitude whenever they wished it. David did what he could by filling the hours with drills for the upcoming descent. There was some grumbling, but no real complaints; everyone was smart enough to know that as risky as descent was for an omniscient crew, only a fool would resent more preparation.
As each step towards descent came, David found himself growing more and more reluctant to commit to the landing. Rebeka was sensitive to his mood, and asked him about it one night, when they were turning in. With Haddi having passed on, and the passenger in their compartment now comforting a widow in her compartment at the aft end of the vessel, they had a room to themselves and could be alone when their duties allowed.
"I'm afraid to commit to the landing," he said.
"It is a big decision," she said.
"And a golden opportunity to make a colossal blunder."
"Same thing," she replied, smirking. "Try not to worry, love. It'll make you look like your children's grandfather."
He didn't respond to her joke. "I'm afraid I'll forget something that'll get us killed."
"If we all forget something, it can't hardly be your fault."
"I'm the captain. I can't make that excuse."
She reached over and rolled his head towards her, so that they looked in each other's eyes. "We're going to reach a point where we can't get any more ready, and we'll have done everything but take the ship apart to find anything not working properly. You won't really have a choice, then."
"That's what's bothering me."
The makeshift bedding on the floor of their compartment rustled as she cuddled up against him. "Go to sleep, love."
He solved his problem of confidence by determining that once every checkable system was in as good an order as could be ascertained, and when three drills went by without a fatal error on the part of the passengers or crew, he would order the descent; he announced this to the crew and the passengers, which made a few of them take the drills more seriously. After another week and a half, his conditions had been met. He went into his compartment alone and closed the door.
The hardest part about committing, he found when he thought it over, was that he did not take the view that only those who live have to live with failure. There was something beyond space and stars and planets and ships and people, and it was watching what he was doing. There was no escaping this presence, either; not only did it fill the compartment and the universe that surrounded it, it filled the epochs that preceded life and the eternity that lay beyond life, so that a trifling thing such as death could not place him beyond its power. Here, almost within feeling, every particle of inanimate matter glorified this presence, in a way that was like force and pressure and music; and that he was deaf to that glorying because hearing it would deafen him to everything else. It came from the metal and plastic of the ship, the air he breathed, from the stars and planets outside, even from the vacuum that lay between these things. Only from his own body did he not sense it to arise. That presence, and the host that surrounded both it and him, pressed him on every side without touching him, demanding that he act, and promsing to hold him to account if he erred.
"We will commence landing in three days," he said.
At once, the presence, and the pressure of its accompanying host, vanished.
Before he could change his mind, he threw himself at the door, yanked it open, and announced his decision to Rebeka and Han.
By three days he had meant three days in ship's time; the planet below rotated once every twenty-six hours, twelve minutes and forty point nine seconds. Seventy-two hours were enough for every system to receive one final check, conduct one final drill (which went without a hitch), and make all of the other final preparations. During these preparations, David received so many requests to officiate marriages that he finally announced a mass wedding for everyone who wanted to marry, during the afternoon of the final day before descent. Forty-one couples presented themselves at the appointed hour, and he administered the same short, simple vows he had devised for the crew, when they had been in the Gamarene system centuries before.
That evening there was an excited tension in the air of the ship, which David could almost touch as he went about the ship, doing the final checks. Some of the passengers had immodestly left their compartment doors ajar and could be plainly heard availing themselves of the last opportunity for intimacy, prior to planetfall, and he came across two couples who had sought privacy in places David needed to inspect. He hoped they would show more modesty after the landing.
It was nearing midnight when he went to Rigo on the bridge and talked about a frontal system that was moving over the optimum location for the next day's descent. Rigo was "ninety percent sure" that they would drop through a clear sky, but to David this was neither sufficient nor comforting, and trudging back to his compartment, David knew that he would spend that night tossing sleeplessly.
He gave Rebekah a glance as he went in; she was dressed for bed, wearing a nightrobe, and closed the hatch as soon as he gone through it. He turned his attention to the checklist he was holding.
"You're late," she said.
"I know," he said. "I had to talk to Rigo about that cold front that's going over the landing site. He says that—"
"David," she said sharply. Her tone was so insistent that he turned towards her and looked up.
In the time between her closing the door and now, she had shrugged the robe off of her, so that it lay on the deck around her feet. She had been wearing nothing else. Raising a finger to her lips, she signaled for no more talk. She walked to him. Her eyes did not leave his as she took the clipboard away from him, nor as she drew every piece of clothing off of him, and her lips were formed so that she almost smiled: the look of utmost desire, not shameless, but without shame.
And why, he thought, should a woman feel shame for wanting her husband?
When he was as exposed to her sight as she was to his, and took her into his arms, his body broke its silence; every particle of his flesh sang.
It was not possible that, as some had fatally erred in thinking, this was the tolerated expression of a wrongful desire. It was a good so extreme that each attempt to vary from it was lesser, and so much lesser that in being so it became wrong. This was not something that he did at times; to embrace Rebekah in ecstasy was the reason that his body had been formed from the dust.
And Rebekah had known, where he had not, how badly he had needed this moment.
When the moment was passed, the prospect that by a blunder he might kill himself and everyone he loved could not keep him awake. He slept like a dead man.
The next morning David arose, supervised the securing of every passenger in their compartment and the sealing of each compartment, verified the topography of the touchdown zone, and in his own compartment strapped himself in, next to Rebeka. He took her hand, and with his other hand he activated the landing equipment.
For long moments nothing happened, at least as far as the passengers could perceive, but David and the rest of the crew had displays showing the progress of the automated landing procedures, and he was in constant communication with the crew. As the time for the breakup detonation neared, David punched in the whole ship's intercom, and informed the passengers that they were about to be tossed free of the Sower's Hope, to then fall out of orbit and into the grip of their new home's gravity.
The time came. There was a faint rumble from above their heads, and a partial sensation of weightlessness, as jets in the compartment roof thrust them away from the central core of the Sower's Hope, upon which they would never again walk. They were jostled back and forth, as the thrusters stopped the rotation that each compartment had inherited from the ship, and then the feeling of weightlessness increased until stray objects began to drift about the compartment, carried by the currents of air.
For several minutes they seemed hang without weight, silently falling, until David could finally hear a faint rumbling from outside, which suddenly crescendoed as weight returned to their world, and the faint, wispy air shook the compartment like a merciless creditor. Soon the roaring drowned out all other sounds; he tried shouting some encouragement to Rebeka, encouragement he needed himself, but he couldn't hear his words.
Suddenly, and briefly, their weight doubled, and with it the noise and the shaking subsided to tolerable levels. David watched the velocity meter on the display, watching it drop. He reached out and clicked some controls, seeing how the other compartments were faring. After checking on a few of them, he shut the display off; if the arrestor systems failed on any compartment, its occupants were doomed, and if that was the case, he didn't want to know.
A minute later one final jarring shook the compartment, after which it was completely still. He told himself to get moving, unstrapped himself and got out. He staggered to the door and checked the air quality unit, which declared that everything in it was safe to breathe. There was the chance that the atmosphere contained a poison that had not been anticipated by the unit's designers, or that it had malfunctioned. There was nothing he could do about either case; he whispered a prayer and hit the hatch release.
The door opened, admitting sunlight and slightly chilly air. He pushed the hatch fully open, and looked out at a plain, covered with low-lying vegetation—or what he assumed to be vegetation, since it didn't move and was probably not mineral—and saw, a few dozen yards away, another compartment, apparently intact. He got out and set foot on the ground. He could hear echoes of the other compartments' re-entry, but aside from that Basilon II was quiet.
Rebeka joined him. They embraced.
© 2002, 2007 by John VanSickle. All rights reserved.