Analog SFF, September 2010 (16 page)

"You're not going to marry me,” she says.

"Of course not,” he snaps—and that's when I know it. Why all four of us don't get letters, why I didn't get a letter, even though I'm two weeks shy from my fiftieth birthday and fully intend to send something to my poor past self.

Lizbet holds her envelope in one hand and a small plastic automatic in the other. An illegal gun, one that no one should be able to get—not a student, not an adult. No one.

"Get down!” I shout as I launch myself toward Lizbet.

She's already firing, but not at me. At J.J., who hasn't gotten down.

But Esteban deliberately drops and Carla—Carla's half a step behind me, launching herself as well.

Together we tackle Lizbet, and I pry the pistol from her hands. Carla and I hold her as people come running from all directions, some adults, some kids holding letters.

Everyone gathers. We have no handcuffs, but someone finds rope. Someone else has contacted emergency services, using the emergency link that we all have, that we all should have used, that I should have used, that I probably had used in another life, in another universe, one in which I didn't write a letter. I probably contacted emergency services and said something placating to Lizbet, and she probably shot all four of us, instead of poor J.J.

J.J., who is motionless on the floor, his blood slowly pooling around him. The football coach is trying to stop the bleeding and someone I don't recognize is helping and there's nothing I can do, not at the moment, they're doing it all while we wait for emergency services.

The security guard ties up Lizbet and sets the gun on the desk and we all stare at it, and Annie Sanderson, the English teacher, says to the guard, “You're supposed to check everyone, today of all days. That's why we hired you."

And the principal admonishes her, tiredly, and she shuts up. Because we know that sometimes Red Letter Day causes this, that's why it's held in school, to stop family annihilations and shootings of best friends and employers. Schools, we're told, can control weaponry and violence, even though they can't, and someone, somewhere, will use this as a reason to repeal Red Letter Day, but all those people who got good letters or letters warning them about their horrible drunken mistake will prevent any change, and everyone—the pundits, the politicians, the parents—will say that's good.

Except J.J.'s parents, who have no idea their son had no future. When did he lose it? The day he met Lizbet? The day he didn't listen to me about how crazy she was? A few moments ago, when he didn't dive for the floor?

I will never know.

But I do something I would never normally do. I grab Lizbet's envelope, and I open it.

The handwriting is spidery, shaky.

Give it up. J.J. doesn't love you. He'll never love you. Just walk away and pretend that he doesn't exist. Live a better life than I have. Throw the gun away
.

Throw the gun away.

She did this before, just like I thought.

And I wonder: Was the letter different this time? And if it was, how different?
Throw the gun away
. Is that line new or old? Has she ignored this sentence before?

My brain hurts. My head hurts.

My heart hurts.

I was angry at J.J. just a few moments ago, and now he's dead.

He's dead and I'm not.

Carla isn't either.

Neither is Esteban.

I touch them both and motion them close. Carla seems calmer, but Esteban is blank—shock, I think. A spray of blood covers the left side of his face and shirt.

I show them the letter, even though I'm not supposed to.

"Maybe this is why we never got our letters,” I say. “Maybe today is different than it was before. We survived, after all."

I don't know if they understand. I'm not sure I care if they understand.

I'm not even sure if I understand.

I sit in my office and watch the emergency services people flow in, declare J.J. dead, take Lizbet away, set the rest of us aside for interrogation. I hand someone—one of the police officers—Lizbet's red envelope, but I don't tell him we looked.

I have a hunch he knows we did.

The events wash past me, and I think that maybe this is my last Red Letter Day at Barack Obama High School, even if I survive the next two weeks and turn fifty.

And I find myself wondering, as I sit on my desk waiting to make my statement, whether I'll write my own red letter after all.

What can I say that I'll listen to? Words are so very easy to misunderstand. Or misread.

I suspect Lizbet only read the first few lines. Her brain shut off long before she got to
Walk away
and
Throw away the gun
.

Maybe she didn't write that the first time. Or maybe she's been writing it, hopelessly, to herself in a continual loop, lifetime after lifetime after lifetime.

I don't know.

I'll never know.

None of us will know.

That's what makes Red Letter Day such a joke. Is it the letter that keeps us on the straight and narrow? Or the lack of a letter that gives us our edge?

Do I write a letter, warning myself to make sure Lizbet gets help when I meet her? Or do I tell myself to go to the draft no matter what? Will that prevent this afternoon?

I don't know.

I'll never know.

Maybe Father Broussard was right; maybe God designed us to be ignorant of the future. Maybe He wants us to move forward in time, unaware of what's ahead, so that we follow our instincts, make our first, best—and only—choice.

Maybe.

Or maybe the letters mean nothing at all. Maybe all this focus on a single day and a single note from a future self is as meaningless as this year's celebration of the Fourth of July. Just a day like any other, only we add a ceremony and call it important.

I don't know.

I'll never know.

Not if I live two more weeks or two more years.

Either way, J.J. will still be dead and Lizbet will be alive, and my future—whatever it is—will be the mystery it always was.

The mystery it should be.

The mystery it will always be.

Copyright © 2010 Kristine Kathryn Rusch

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Desperate times call for . . .

Quin and Zoe had swept away the orbiting debris field and were almost back to the
Mary Shelley
airlock when Jill broadcast her warning over the corporation's open radio band.

"Heads up out there! We've got incoming."

Zoe canceled her momentum right away. Quin slid past her, managing to stop his own progress just three meters from the lock. He spied a streak of light beyond the leading edge of
Mary Shelley,
movement against the matte black of space that could be nothing else but sunlight thrown back from a fast-moving object, and the thirty-meter-long extended-range work vehicle shuddered as if it was a great bone caught up by some invisible Brobdingnagian mutt. Everything was still for one long instant and then vapor and debris spewed into space at the edge of Quin's vision.

It was from the life support and propulsion module.

"We are hit, Cayley Station."

Jill's transmitted voice was dead calm now, and at the sound of it a chill skittered down Quin's spine. He sucked in a deep breath of pure, cool oxygen.

"I repeat,” Jill said. “We are hit but still in one piece. I am evaluating damage."

In the next instant, she switched to the team's private band.

"Zoe, are you all right?"

There was no reply. Jill tried again.

"Zoe?"

Quin thumbed the propulsion joystick and gaseous nitrogen jetted from nozzles along the frame of his independent maneuvering unit. He began to rotate away from
Mary Shelley
and spotted Zoe hanging against the blackness ten meters away. Quin tapped the joystick again and began to glide toward her.

"I see her, Jill,” he said.

Her back was to him and she was turned one hundred eighty degrees off his orienting line. Her figure was contorted, bent at the waist to the limits of the suit, with both hands clasped upon her left thigh. Quin called to her this time.

"Zoe?"

"I'm here,” she replied. Her voice was weak, reedy.

"Zoe, what's wrong?” Jill asked. Her words were hesitant now, worried.

"Something hit me, punched straight through my thigh, I think. I can't make it back inside on my own."

"Damn it, Quin!” Jill said. “Help her."

The measured pace of his progress was maddening, and Jill's goading itched like an old scab. Even so, now was not the time to lose focus and follow his emotions, as he so often did, to rush forward without thought. He drew another deep breath and reached for that calm center the yoga instructor at Sonny Carter Training Center had encouraged.

Breathing is involuntary, an essential part of life. You can't control whether or not you breathe, but you can control the way that you breathe. Inhale on a four-count and exhale on a four-count. Match the rate for both. Control can save your life.

As his respiration slowed, he forced himself to think the situation through. He had to be analytical. It was what Zoe would do if the situation were reversed.

One humid Wednesday at Sonny Carter, Quin had scrawled
faster than a speeding bullet
in his notebook after the instructor had told them an object maintaining orbital velocity at a crossing orbit would travel at multiples of the velocity of sound.

So if Zoe had been hit, and Quin was certain she wouldn't say it if it wasn't so, it had to be debris from
Mary Shelle
y. If it were the object that had hammered the work vehicle or a traveling companion of that object, the systemic shock of the impact alone would have killed her. And whatever hit Zoe had to be tiny, because even debris as small and thin as a potato chip would have blown her leg away.

Quin remembered something else from that Wednesday lecture too.
In the event of a small puncture, your secondary oxygen pack is designed to maintain pressure in your mission suit long enough for you to get inside to safety
. So there had to be time to rescue her. No, that was the wrong way to approach this. There would be time to save her. He would do everything just right. He could do this.

He tapped the joystick and came to rest next to Zoe. Just on the mark.

"I've got you, Zoe,” he said.

"Good,” she said, almost whispering. “I want to go home."

Home had set there, two hundred miles below Quin Torres, forever turning against the deep black curtain of space. He was convinced that Earth was God's masterpiece of performance art played out just for him to the metered sigh of oxygen and framed within the polished plastic faceplate of his helmet in all the sweet colors of life.

"Are you ready, Quin?” Zoe Fraser asked, over the team's band.

Quin flinched. He had been caught gawking again.

He glanced to where Zoe floated, waiting for him. Her white mission suit glistened, as if it were a beacon he could never reach. Quin envied Zoe. She was always focused, always ready and able to handle any situation. She never let passions get in the way of what needed to be done. That was why she wore red chevrons on her mission suit, identifying her as team leader, while Quin wore the green slashes that marked him as a newbie.

He took a slow, cleansing breath. It was time to focus, to get to work.

"I'm moving into place now,
Mary Shelley,”
he said.

"About time, Junior
,
” Jill Papadopoulos said.

Jill was the team's pilot. She was Zoe's opposite, boisterous and profane. Always ready to laugh at the world around her or to poke fun. But in her own way she was just as competent as Zoe, and it seemed to Quin that she delighted in pointing out his low status and his incompetence. Still, every word out of her might be some sort of jape aimed at him, but Zoe's quiet disdain stung even worse.

Quin thumbed the joystick and began to glide toward Zoe, who was already in position a meter ahead of the debris that was today's prize. It had taken hours, riding the slow pulse of
Mary Shelley's
fuel-efficient ion engines, to match orbit with the loose field of aluminum bits.

The field was the size of a misshapen beach ball, and each piece within the field tumbled in its own eccentric way, all moving along an ever-curving path, together in a complicated orbital dance. A file in some distant data bank kept track of what the debris had been. Perhaps a panel from a defunct satellite or a section of discarded solar array.

Quin itched to know its history, but that didn't seem to matter to Jill and Zoe. To them it was just one more thing the corporation paid to have swept up and thrown away. Three days after boarding
Mary Shelley,
during a meal break, Quin had tried to express the excitement he felt working in space for the first time. Jill had laughed.

"Hell,” she said. “We aren't anything but trash haulers, plain and simple."

"Well-paid trash haulers, though,” Zoe added.

Jill laughed again and ran her fingertip across the knuckles of Zoe's hand.

"Amen to that, babe,” Jill said.

Gossip was a game that everybody played at Cayley Station, so Quin knew Jill and Zoe were a couple when he accepted assignment to the
Mary Shelley
team, but he hadn't expected that they would tease him with their coupling. From the first second they met him at the airlock, holding hands, it seemed to him they were saying that he didn't belong and never would.

Zoe tried to help pull them into the airlock, but her movements were feeble and erratic.

For one awful moment, Quin was certain that his efforts wouldn't be good enough, but then Zoe's shoulders popped through the open maw and the next instant they were both within the lock. Quin punched the control sequence, the gauges turned green, and Jill was there, taking Zoe into her arms.

"We've got to get her out of that damned suit!” Jill said.