City Without Suns (20 page)

Chapter 43

Eva read for hours and lost track of time.  They were brought meals.  The Dawdlers did not linger, but rather just deposited trays of exquisite food for them and left.  There was fruit that was familiar, oranges and pears.  Eva savored the juices and felt revived from their nourishment.  There was meat that she did not recognize, seasoned with spices she had never tasted.  Had she not been hungry, she might have refused to eat, but the realization that the creatures could kill them any of a hundred ways overshadowed the fear of being poisoned with an unknown food, and it did not make sense for them to bring something dangerous alongside the delicious fruit.

Water seemed abundant there, much more so than inside Taurus and Gambler.  In addition to the fountain in the lounge there was other water running unchecked by any valves.

“The water is sourced and filtered from the lake,” Elisa explained as Eva peered around the lounge.

“How do you even know that?” Eva asked. 

Quasar was lying on her back and appeared as if not paying attention, but as always, she was very attentive to her surroundings and anything that was said.  Without turning her head, she looked to Elisa anticipating an answer.

“They explain lots of things.  You will see.” Elisa returned.  She put her hand on her stomach and turned to her side.  Her expression was distant and she did not answer Eva any further.

…

About three nights passed before the vibration started without warning when they were asleep.  They awoke to the dull pounding around them.  Books were rattling on the shelves.  There was a sensation of being lifted by the floor.

They stood at the window of the room as the structure surrounding them emerged from the waters of Tar Lake.  The view was unclear at first.  The coat of water shed down to make the surrounding area more and more visible.  The familiar shore of the lake materialized in front of them. 

A humming noise increased in volume and pitch as the giant ship shattering the icy coating of the lake.  Waves created by the displacement travelled toward the shore.  The twilight of the end of the betaday lit the surroundings with a pinkish hue as they rose higher out of the lake.

The noise increased in pitch until they could no longer hear it.  Soon thereafter they shot away from the old landing site and it was gone in seconds.  In minutes, Eva could see only the black of outer space in front of her, but she felt no force other than her own weight holding her to the floor.  Their straight-line trajectory carried them away as Beta rotated and curled around its primary sun.  Without warning, before Eva had much time to look down on the grounds that she considered her new-found home, they were surrounded by the same familiar backdrop she used to see from Gambler. 

Just like that, they were down to three survivors of the forty-eight who landed on Beta.  If Webster was to be counted somewhere on that ship, then it was four. 

…

Webster entered their new home, or prison, which contained unsolicited gifts of strange short-lived luxuries. He stumbled inside as if coming out of sedation.  He approached the fountain seeking a drink but collapsed on the floor before he reached it.  Quasar and Elisa helped him up, each on one arm, and he drank the replenished water.  He smelled so bad the women had to step away.  The fountain had stopped, and the bath just sat there within the short stone barriers.  After dipping his head over the edge to drink, he fell to the floor with his back against the stone.  He conveyed what had happened to him over the course of the previous days.

“After I was taken from Eva, they pushed me down a hall.  I thought maybe I was being led to my execution.  I wondered what else they could possibly want from me.  When I refused to go any further and sat on the floor, Relay lifted me.  I was helpless to his strength.  He wormed his way through the hall for minutes that seemed like years.  My struggles did not deter his forward progress.  We arrived at a solid door with no knobs and no perceivable way to open it.  Somehow, it opened.

“We crossed into a giant control room.  It was only then that I realized we were in a ship and not an underwater city.  There were many of them.  The Dawdlers stopped moving around when I entered, and I felt like I was being watched.  I’m sure I was.  I was the new object of attention.  I felt the interest and enthusiasm in the air although their bodies had no means of expression.

“Relay nudged me in the direction of a control panel of some kind.  I was frustrated with being pushed around like an animal being herded against its will, so I protested once more and stubbornly refused to move.  He wrapped one of his arms around my waist as I held up the translator suggestively.  He was not interested in the translator.  I was lifted no higher than necessary to render my resistance useless.  My feet dangled inches above the floor.  All four of my limbs waved in protest as I was shuttled in front of the control panel.  Then I saw why he didn’t take the translator.

“Words appeared.  I stood in disbelief at the statement that was on the screen.  I pondered how such a thing could be there, in my language no less.  It was broken and strange, but it was definitely our language.  Had he learned it already from my teachings? Impossible.  The directive said
: please sit
.  I sat.

“There was a parabolic display at eye level surrounding my field of vision from the chair. 
The chair.
  Only after sitting did I question why these creatures would need a chair designed for a human.  Then another statement appeared.  Like the first, it was very direct and to the point.  Simultaneously, I remembered the skeleton by the cliff edge.  Was this his chair?  The screen read:
We are from Earth.

“If it did not make sense, I would have not believed.  It was then clear.  I was aboard Neptune, the ship that was to be launched in the years following the Gambler departure.  It had landed on Beta close to the beacon.  It was developed under the Bishop Islands back on Earth.  It explained why Relay was so quickly able to learn to communicate.  I was not the first human to sit in that chair.

“I saw the keyboard that had at first eluded me as my attention was focused on the displays.  At first, I did not touch it, but rather spoke my question:
Where are the humans
?  The screen issued a statement asking me to repeat.  The voice recognition could not decipher my aged dialect.  I typed the question, and the answer appeared. 
Deceased.

“I thought immediately, if they were dead, then what would become of me? Quasar? Eva?

“I was not given time to think.  The choppy and direct statements on the screen were followed with a series of detailed instructions. 
We have a narrow window for launch.  The planet orbit has reached the ideal point to slingshot us toward the next destination.  Planet Gamma.  You will not be returning to Taurus.
(No kidding, I thought sarcastically.)
Your place is with us now.  Follow the instructions and live, or refuse them and die.  The fate of the females is in your hands.  First, turn the key.

“Surely there must have been a better way to convince me to turn the key than to threaten my life, and yours.  They did not seem to realize that flying to the next destination would have been a challenge I would willingly accept.  But their demands made me want to refuse.  Would my refusal be out of stubbornness?  What was in our best interest?  I relented.

“A small opening in the control surface by the keyboard was flashing with conspicuous blue lights.  I peered down inside, and there was a small key embedded down into the hole.  Then it occurred to me.  The Dawdlers could not pilot the ship alone.  The controls were built with safeguards that required human participation to activate the engines.  They did not have the dexterity to reach the unlocking mechanisms.  Very clever.  This ship was designed by humans, but that was no consolation to me.  I was a prisoner.  But I wanted to live. I wanted
us
to live.”

“I reached my arm into the narrow opening and turned the key.  Lights illuminated the expansive space, the Neptune Bridge.  Activity resumed.  Dawdlers scampered back and forth in a frenzy of actions that I did not understand.  Their massive arms busied themselves with tasks on controls I could not recognize.

“Two Dawdlers stood behind me.  For the entire time that we have been here, I have been sitting in that chair.  They would not let me get up.  A tube appeared from somewhere in front of my mouth through which I could suck water, but I had no food.  I drifted into a light sleep several times but was prodded awake.  My attempts to get up were denied.  I soiled myself, but was still denied.  I sat in my own filth for hours until finally I saw light appear.  The light was there for only moments and was replaced by the star-littered blackness of space.

“So here we are again traveling to a destination that is probably light-years away.”

Their heads all dropped even though they knew it was the truth.  Then Webster said something else.

“Taurus is too.  But they won’t make it far.  There was a transmission.  This ship received it.”

His breathed shallow gulps of air as he relayed what the reception said.

“It was not a cry for help.  It was a eulogy.  It said something like this -
For anyone who can hear.  This is the spaceship landing vessel Taurus.  We will all soon be dead.  We are the last survivors of the spaceship Gambler from Earth.  We inhabited the planet Beta for a short time.  We took off by accident and cannot get back.  Our water tanks are empty.  My name is Enric.  There is nothing left to say.  Signing off.”

Gambler was reduced to rubble, never to be found again.  Taurus was a great technological achievement requiring the effort and perseverance of many generations to build and send through space and time, and now it was a man-made asteroid made of materials no longer any more useful than rock, inhabited by soon-to-be corpses drifting further away from their origin with each passing moment for all time.

Webster ended his story and collapsed on the floor asleep and exhausted.  Assuming he had fallen into a deep sleep, they all left him alone.  When they slept and awoke once more, he was still motionless on the floor.  Quasar shoved him with her foot with no results.  She rolled him onto his back.  His mouth was agape.  She held her hand to it and felt no air moving.

“Webster!” she shouted and shook him.

Eva knew that look.  She had seen it before. 

They started toward him, but quickly regressed at the sight of a Dawdler entering the room.  The creature wrapped one of its limbs around Webster’s midsection and lifted him from the floor.  He was carried out facing upward with his back arched under the weight of his legs on one side and his torso on the other.  He would not move ever again.  No explanation was offered for his demise.  No opportunity to say goodbye was afforded.  The creature left as quickly as it appeared.  Eva hid her face in Quasar’s arms and cried.  Only three human survivors remained.

Chapter 44

A decade later…

Eva felt her stomach tightening as the inevitable time had arrived.  The anticipation was over.  The occasion could not be postponed.  The tensing escalated into a spasm of pain, and she wished for some way out of the task before her. 

The baby had stopped moving a week prior, and she had not told anyone.  She feared it would be stillborn, much to the dismay of all who were watching.  She cried as she was wheeled into the birthing room.  But soon there would be no way to hide her dead child.  Nor was there a way to join it in the afterlife, which she would gladly have chosen on that occasion if devising a method of suicide were possible.

It was not possible.  No tools were accessible and no escape was feasible from the small bed.  She was completely naked except for a meager gown over her body to hide her breasts.  Her modesty would have been more curtailed if she had hope for a successful birth, but as the circumstances stood, she felt like the object of an experiment, under observation by many prying eyes, including those closest to her among the onlookers.

Her eyes moved back and forth between the ceiling and the walls in front of her and to the sides.  They were all white, unlike any other walls and ceilings she had seen on the dimly lit spaceship full of gray and black metallic colors.  She wanted to be able to snap her fingers and have the job be done, but there was no way to accelerate the time she would have to spend in labor.

Quasar stood by her side holding her right hand.  Eva squeezed it tightly with the next passing contraction.  Elisa held her left hand.  Both had successfully given birth before her on the ship, so Eva knew it could be done.  She did not want to be a failure in their eyes, but she was also worried about who was behind the observation glass.  The three women were alone inside the room, but they all knew the others would be watching, and there was no false sense of privacy for the only three females on the ship.  They were kept under tight watch. 

When Eva looked up at her sister’s face, it was almost like a reflection. The pupils centered in Quasar’s green eyes were contracted down to tiny dots. Eva could read empathy from behind her gaze.  Their dark vision was of no use there, and their beauty would not win any prizes in that room.  No genetic gift invented centuries ago on Earth would help them in that moment.  They stroked the sweat from Eva’s brow nonetheless and freed the long brown hair that was sticking to her forehead.

The consoling attempts to provide emotional comfort were not enough.  Eva prayed.  She prayed that somehow the baby might live.  She prayed that the pain would stop.  She prayed to let the burden end.  She prayed that she might see real ground again.  She prayed knowing that the requests might not be answered.  It was a habit she picked up on her own and did not know from where it came.  It was a habit that was uniquely hers and not shared by any of the others.

Elisa released her hand and stood in front of Eva to judge the progress.  Eva could tell by the look on her face that they had a long way to go.  The night was young and it was going to be excruciating.  Eva looked at her older companion, whose features used to be envied by the other girls on their former ship.  Her athletic body was evident even when covered, and the head that was home to a beautiful crop of light blonde hair had been shaved nearly to the skin, no longer a source of pride or vanity.  Their eyes met briefly.  She stroked Eva’s lower legs, massaging her slender calves lightly.  The gestures did nothing for the discomfort, but the sentiment was appreciated.

Another contraction intensified.  Eva griped the side of the bed with one hand and squeezed her sister with the other.  She clenched her jaw and gritted her teeth wondering how many more of these she would have to endure.  Through all the advances that made their journey possible, nobody had figured out a better way to have babies.  She was no better off than a cavewoman in the ancient ages of Earth.

Eva stared at the ceiling as tears rolled down her cheeks. She scoured her memories for happy thoughts, but they were hard to find.  During the first ten years of her life in space, she was blissfully ignorant and naïve.  During the last several years on this ship, she was numb to the helpless captivity of being on a spaceship once again.  She remembered the times on the planet, even though their survival there was ultimately in question.

Life is full of dualities, she thought.  There is pain and comfort, safety and danger, cooperation and conflict, honor and shame, and success and failure. She could think only of situations in which the dark side of every dyad overshadows and punctuated the light.  It was not always that way. 

Her mind raced, recounting many days, weeks, and months at an accelerated pace as if in a dream.  Time seemed to slow in between the contractions while she reflected on how she got there.  The memories started involuntarily, but Eva discovered she could distract herself with them.  Since she feared her life might soon be over, she wanted to remember the interesting parts, if she could.

Events replayed themselves in her mind for an hour.  She remembered her parents.  She remembered times when lost friends were still alive.  She remembered the feeling of hope and excitement when she first thought they had found a new home, the temporary interlude of her journey in space.  Each passing moment seemed to pass by slowly, but when the time arrived an hour later, the labor of the birth was almost nearly forgotten.

Eva pushed in agony one final time.  The new baby came out, and she was overcome with relief.  It was finished, and she was still there, alive.  Elisa held up the infant, and he was moving despite his earlier dormancy.  Quasar took the crying baby and placed it in Eva’s arms, and with it, new inspiration was found.

Most of her life, Eva believed instinctively that life was supposed to be happy and death was supposed to be tragic.  That belief was fundamental, and everyone she knew thought in that manner.  An hour earlier, before her new son was born, she believed the converse.  Life was not happy and was filled with horrible events.  The thought of ending something unhappy seemed like it would not be a tragic end, but a potential welcome relief.

So went the dichotomy of life and death, where the preferable of the two should depend on perspective.  Regardless of her outlook on life, whether she perceived it happy or sad, tragic or victorious, she could now only perceive death as an enemy.  It was an invincible villain to whom there appeared to be no answer, yet she was still there to ponder it.  Although temporary, she had achieved a victory over that villain through the new life.

She had spent just as much time on Neptune as on the previous spaceship Gambler.  The time on Beta was a flicker of light in the long darkness of her life.  The discovery of the new planetary home was like a mirage, a dream.

She wondered how she would have fared back on Beta.  Which was better: to become a prisoner and a pawn in the endeavor to find new homes or to die starving and alone, secluded on a planet never to be found again. Yet, on Beta she had free will to make the best of the circumstances.

Eva looked her new son in the eyes.  She was destined to spend the rest of her life where it started, without a true home, a space nomad in between planets.  Maybe, she thought, her life was a small step in a grand sequence of events intelligently designed to reach a final destination.  There was something comforting in that thought.  Despite her angst, she felt new purpose.  It was not one of her choosing, but it was a noble cause nonetheless.

Words illuminated the glass. 
Congratulations Eva.

There was little doubt that the message was from the same ones that sedated and inseminated her.  She was so psychologically damaged that she didn’t know how to feel about them, but she knew how she felt about the one in her arms.  No doubt there.