Destination Unknown (6 page)

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Authors: Katherine Applegate

Tags: #Fantasy & Magic, #Science Fiction, #End of the world, #Juvenile Fiction, #Science Fiction; Fantasy; Magic, #Space travelers, #General, #Space flight

BOOK: Destination Unknown
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Violet had felt wrong growing up, wrong deep down in her soul. And she’d gone on feeling wrong till she found other girls like herself, girls who wanted to be
girls
. The frilly dresses and carefully piled hair were just the outward signs of a much deeper sense that the world had conspired to deprive girls of a unique
girlness
, and to deprive everyone of privacy, peace, contemplation.
It wasn’t about playacting. Miss Blake knew she was not living in early-nineteenth-century England. Unlike some Janes, she did not attempt to copy the speech patterns of Austen characters. And it was not about being passive or witless. On the contrary, Austen’s heroines were strong, determined, unafraid to make judgments or to express opinions.
Violet loved art. She enjoyed simple rituals. She enjoyed conversation. She enjoyed silence. And none of that found a place in the world of 2011.
Her father had understood immediately. Her mother had laughed at her, first in disbelief, then with outright contempt.
“Well, congratulations, Dallas,” her mother told her once, “you’ve finally found the way to take a
shot at me. I guess every teenager has to go through a phase like this.”
“Mom, I am just trying to live my own life,” Violet had responded. “And I would consider it a kindness if you would call me by my chosen name: Miss Blake.”
“Miss Blake? Good lord. What’s that? First name ‘Miss’?”
“Dallas is not a name that pleases me. And the one great advantage of this day and age is that everyone feels free to change their name. I’ve chosen Violet as my first name. Violet Blake. You can call me Violet, but I’d prefer Miss Blake.”
“Violet? Your name is Dallas. It has meaning. It’s the city where you were born.”
“And with each use of that name I am reminded of an event that I don’t even remember!”
“That’s not the point. I remember, and it’s an important memory. You’re my only daughter. Don’t you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yes, Mother, I do. I
always
do,” she’d answered, but of course the insult was lost on her mother.
Her father had comforted her. He had called her Violet.
Once she declared herself as a Jane her vague interest in art became a true avocation. Let others delve deeply into the cold minds of machines, let
others unravel the secrets of the double helix; she would learn the timeless truths to be found in art. It was a perfectly useless thing to learn, according to her mother. It would never earn her a dime, never get her a place in a competitive university. It would never make her rich.
And yet, now, as Miss Violet Blake gazed out over the landscape below the shuttle, she alone understood what it represented.
The young man named Mo’Steel was descending, hand over hand, one powerful leg wrapped around the thin cable. He landed on the back wall of the shuttle’s cargo bay. Then, still holding the wire, he tightrope-walked out along the declining edge of the tail and finally hopped to the ground.
He stood almost directly on the impossible dividing line between the gray canyon and the brilliant meadow.
The canyon was unmistakable to Violet. It was an Ansel Adams. A photograph, not a painting.
The meadow, with the frenetic river cutting through it, was more difficult. Not a Cézanne, the colors were too bold. Van Gogh? Perhaps. Monet? Yes, possibly. But, if she’d had to pick one answer on a multiple-choice test she’d have said Bonnard. Pierre Bonnard.
Mo’Steel was kicking his way through impossible plants that seemed to have been assembled out of swatches of lavender and emerald, apricot and gold.
“Careful, Miss Blake, don’t lean out too far,” Jobs said. He was at her elbow.
Violet drew back. “I suppose you’re right.” She glanced over her shoulder. She kept expecting her mother to come striding up, ready to take charge and begin rapping out orders. But Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake was only in the earliest stages of revival. Two others had assumed complete consciousness, their awakening perhaps accelerated by the horrific event that had resulted in the doctor’s death. In any case, all three had been in berths close to that tragedy.
Mo’Steel walked a little distance out into the colorful meadow. He looked up and waved, his face a broad, slightly deranged grin. “Come on down. It is deeply weird down here.”
The girl 2Face yelled down, “Okay, Mo, stay close, okay?” Then, in an aside to Jobs and Errol, said, “Weird doesn’t begin to describe it. One or the other, maybe, but two totally different environments divided so sharply?”
It occurred to Violet that there was irony here. 2Face, a girl whose own face encompassed two
entirely opposed concepts, the lovely and the hideous, found this bifurcation disturbing.
“It has to be artificial,” Errol said, not for the first time. “You’d almost think it was man-made.”
“If I may . . .” Violet Blake began.
Olga Gonzalez came up the stairs and an-nounced, “We found some water!”
She carried a translucent plastic gallon jug, three-quarters full. “We were able to bleed it off the hibernation machinery.” She was in one of her more manic moods. Violet had seen these moods turn to despair within a moment’s time.
“You think it’s safe to drink?” 2Face asked.
Olga shrugged. “We have the equipment from the storage lockers. The chemical testing strips are all long gone, of course. But the microscope still works and at least I don’t see any obvious microorganisms. It’s as clean as distilled water. Which is not to say there aren’t other contaminants. I gave it a taste. No alkali taste. Nothing obvious. I won’t bore you with a list of colorless, tasteless, odorless pathogens that might be present in fatal concentrations.”
2Face took the bottle and raised it to her lips. She had to use a finger to keep the liquid from dribbling out the disfigured side of her mouth.
She handed the jug to Errol. The water made its rounds, everyone desperately thirsty. Only Yago drank too deeply, swallowing more than his share.
“Maybe that water in the river is drinkable,” Shy Hwang suggested. “And there may be edible fruit around.”
“If I may . . .” Violet began again.
“None of the food on board survived,” Olga said. “Not in any edible form, anyway. There’s some powdery residue in some of the freeze-dried packs, but I doubt there’s any nutritive value.”
“Great, so we starve?” Yago said.
“Let’s get down to the ground, then we can see what’s what,” Jobs said. “Who’s next?”
“I’ll stay,” Errol said. “So we can see about belaying this cable in such a way as we can use it to run a bosun’s chair up and down to ferry the weak and the wounded.” He glanced at Billy Weir, who had been propped into a sitting position. His undead eyes stared out across the landscape below.
“And the dead folks,” Jobs said. “Sooner or later I guess we’ll have to get all these people down and bury them.” Jobs continued, “I’ll stay here with you, Errol. I can work on the bosun’s chair. We have some tools now, from the chest. I can strip panels from the bulkheads and make a frame from decking.”
He actually seemed mildly excited by the project.
A true techie,
Violet thought with distaste.
One of
those
people.
“I wish I knew what was down there,” Shy Hwang said. “It’s so . . . there could be anything. Wild animals, deadly snakes, things we haven’t even thought of.”
“If I may . . .” Violet said a third time.
“What? You want to say something, Jane?” 2Face snapped at her.
“If I may, I was going to offer some reassurance. I doubt you’d find wild beasts in early-twentieth-century France.”
2Face stared at her. “Uh-huh. Well, thanks for the update on France.” She shot a look to Jobs, a look suggesting the possibility that Violet was crazy, possibly dangerously so.
“I believe this landscape was derived from a painting. Monet or Bonnard, I think.”
“What are you talking about?” Olga demanded.
“The gray-shade is derived from an Ansel Adams photograph. Or at least from someone mimicking Adams’s style. The detail can only be photographic. But this sky, this meadow, that river are all clearly derived from a painting. Pierre Bonnard was a —”
“She’s right!” Yago cried. “It’s a painting. It’s not even real. We’ve been worrying about a painting.”
“Mo’s walking around down there,” Jobs pointed out. “It’s not flat. It’s not a painting.”
“I suggested it was derived from a painting, not that it
is
a painting,” Miss Blake said patiently. “I think it’s likely that whoever created this place used an Adams photo and an Impressionist painting to . . . to imagine . . . these environments.”
“Who are you talking about?” Shy Hwang asked.
Violet was feeling a bit put out. They were staring at her accusingly. She was flustered and couldn’t think of a ready answer.
“Aliens?” Jobs whispered.
“Well,
someone
,” Miss Blake said. “Surely you see that this meadow and this gray-shade canyon, not to mention that sky, did not occur naturally.”
“Aliens,” Jobs said more confidently now. “That’s how the ship came to be standing upright. That’s what happened. We didn’t land. We were captured.”
“Captured by art lovers?” 2Face demanded, incredulous.
“Most likely that this was done for our benefit,” Violet suggested. “Perhaps the aliens are merely trying to be polite.”
Jobs said, “We found a rack of DD’s—data disks — in the lockers, along with the tools and the decayed food.”
“Presumably an effort on NASA’s part to keep alive some portion of the human cultural legacy,” Shy Hwang suggested.
“Including art?” 2Face wondered. “Fine, but you’re saying someone created this environment for us? Using the DD’s? How? The data was in the locker. It wasn’t loaded into any accessible system.”
“They were on the ship,” Jobs said. “Whoever did all this, whoever created this environment? They had to have been aboard this ship.”
CHAPTER TEN
“THE BABY . . . SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT.”
 
Jobs was one of the last to set foot on the planet’s surface. He had stayed behind to fashion a bosun’s chair that was used to ferry some of the less-agile Wakers, as they were now called. Now he was ready to go down himself.
He was reluctant. It wasn’t that the surface frightened him — it fascinated him. The poet within him found it stirring. But the poet was a subset, a mere file within the hard-core techie. This ship was Earth. This ship was human technology. He could unscrew panels and look inside and understand what he was seeing. He could follow fiber-optic pathways and know why they went where they went.
It was like a museum, of course. The shuttle and the
Mayflower
capsule within it were a strange
mixture of cutting-edge toys and antique systems. Old and new.
Somehow, it had actually worked. It had carried them for five centuries and more through space. Jobs felt intense admiration for that, for what it represented in terms of human ingenuity.
Their numbers had grown. Jobs’s little brother, Edward, had awakened, and by a stroke of luck Jobs had been able to keep him from seeing their parents. Or what was left of them.
Miss Blake’s mother was awake now, as well as three other kids, a ten-year-old who called himself Roger Dodger, a fourteen-year-old girl named Tate, and a sixteen-year-old guy named Anamull.
And D-Caf had awakened.
That made seventeen people in all. Seventeen thirsty, hungry people.
Emotional breakdowns were common. Grief was a virus that spread from one to another, was suppressed only to mutate, take on some new aspect, and attack again.
Jobs and Errol had worked out a pulley system to allow them to reascend to the
Mayflower
. That way people could serve watches aboard, waiting for others to revive.
But now it was time, at last, for Jobs to leave the ship.
Jobs slid down the main cable. He would have liked to use the bosun’s chair, but he was unwilling to look like one of the lame. Not with Mo’Steel grinning up at him.
“So. What do you think, Duck?” Mo’Steel asked, indicating the landscape.
Down at ground level the weirdness of it was infinitely more pronounced. Jobs straddled the line between environments. One foot was planted in gray dust. The other crunched thick, irregular grass.
To the left a vast canyon yawned, impossibly deep, impossibly steep. Silent, immeasurably huge. Perfectly detailed until you looked too closely, and then you could see quite clearly that the dust was not dust but identical round pebbles. And everything, the rocks, the few gray cacti, were all made up of those same gray-shade pebbles.
“Pixels,” Jobs said. “The original photo was predigital. This is the max resolution, I guess.”

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