Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 (31 page)

For no reason but time to kill, I decided to surprise Chuck by going blond (with dye—I didn't play with DNA for trivial things). He said he loved it, but a while later I caught him tearing up.
Okay, he really hates it
, I supposed. But he didn't hate the hair, he explained. What he hated was the realization that we would change, that he couldn't hold onto this time together forever. Now I understand how he felt, but then I really didn't. To me, change was something to embrace. I always wanted to move forward.

Still, I went back to black hair. And even though we didn't have Boutros and James for nearly two more years, somehow it feels as if we conceived them that night.

In theory, you could travel to the stars using suspended animation, putting people to sleep for years at a time. In practice, that doesn't work.
Tarried
animation works. Using a combination of drugs and genetic modification, human beings can be recalibrated to as little as one-twentieth speed.

My macro-sonoporation technique was necessary for the extensive gen-mods required. You couldn't just turn a dial on people's DNA and slow them down. There were a hundred alterations to make, in light of the physical and chemical processes outside our control. We could compensate for some things externally—for instance, elevating the ship's temperature to reduce body heat loss and spinning the main cylinder to simulate one-twentieth gravity, so things would appear to fall at the correct acceleration.

But many other factors required genetic tinkering. For example, a slowed person will blink one-twentieth as often, but evaporation from the eyes does not slow, so we countered with denser tears. No adjustments, however, could keep the body functioning at much less than one-twentieth speed. So we calibrated the crew and all the colonists to one-twentieth.

That meant no woman could get pregnant on the six-year (subjective) voyage without going through my lab—the zygote had to be slowed before implantation. And if most of the mothers took my offer to ensure their children's high intelligence, well, that would benefit the whole colony in the long run.

Since we synchronized everyone, you mostly couldn't tell the difference after slowing. Of course, we could not avoid slight variations. Some people moved and talked just a little faster than the rest of us. They tended to stick together. Spending time with them always reminded me of visiting New York.

Marriage. Twins. In hindsight, the first four years of the trip were the happiest I've experienced. But at the time, I felt bored.

Then came new data from Earth. With eighty years' advances, they could gather more precise information about Ararat, our destination. A lot of minor adjustments and one major problem: toxic levels of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere, apparently generated somehow by the same abundant plant life that made this world an attractive destination.

We would need to adjust, if we didn't want to switch to a secondary destination at least four more subjective years away. I had serious doubts our little band would survive the extra four years. Everyone was growing so thin I felt like I had returned to Alexandria. I was sure I wouldn't be able to take much more of the reconstituted food, or of the smell building up in the lab, from the recyclers downstairs and the chemicals the air scrubbers couldn't quite wipe away. And gossip had it the captain and crew were getting loopy. I even overheard one group of colonists assuring each other that the ship was so easy to pilot, if necessary we could mutiny and fly it ourselves.

Genetic modification seemed to me the obvious answer to the carbon monoxide problem. I suddenly had a lot to do.

The next two years passed in a blur. And then, of course, everything became a blur. The difference is, I can still remember certain events and conversations from the two years before we reached Ararat. That's what I've lost, the ability ever to take my finger off the fast-forward button, to experience the world in real time.

We need to talk, Emzara.

Quickly. I have to get back to the lab.

That's what we need to talk about. You're working so hard. You're not getting the exercise you need in this gravity. And we hardly ever see you anymore.

I'm sorry, Chuck, but you know how critical my work is. Do you think I enjoy working eighteen hours every day? I have to do this, for everyone.

But what's the panic? If you're still working when we arrive, we'll just wait in orbit a while.

Three hundred people should each put their life's ambition on hold because I couldn't get my job done?

Em, I know it's important, but we need you here, too. The boys need a mother.

Is that right? Tell me, when your ancestors landed on the beach at Normandy, was anyone saying, "But why aren't they with their children?" I suppose even on an interstellar spaceship, for women the future is still a long way away.

Look, I know I'm not being fair.

Chuck, they're not yet three. They're still babies. They'll be older once we get to Ararat. They'll appreciate the time with me more then.

They aren't babies anymore, Em. You just haven't been here to realize it. Did you see the mural outside our slot? Boutros did that.

You mean you did it, and he helped.

Me? I can't paint.

Well, neither can I, and I didn't try any augmentation of artistic ability. Where does he get it?

Gene modification, the old-fashioned way.

How does he make the paint?

Hey, I had to have some skills too, to get on this boat.

Really, Boutros painted that?

Yes.

All right. All right. I will figure something out, some way to spend more time with all of you.

Thanks, Em. I don't mean for you to feel bad, but we miss you. I miss you…. Boys, you're supposed to knock first.

Mama crying.

Why?

Because Mommy needs a hug.

Mmm, thank you both. Do you know Mama loves you very much?

Hee-hee-hee, Mama silly.

Why?

 
I HAVEN'T DECIDED whether I'll really transmit this recording when I finish, but just in case, here—here are the murals Boutros did. He kept adding to them for over two years. See? They extend beyond the horizon. Of course, the horizon slants up and it's only twenty meters away.

Nobody minded some extra color in the corridor. In fact, Boutros started a trend. Half the ship is painted now, even some of the exterior.

See how it gets even better as you move away from our family's slot? Boutros graduated from simple shapes and animals to complete landscapes. At only four years old. And do you know, it just occurred to me for the first time, he painted this without ever seeing a real landscape. What an artist! No doubt he made a wonderful farmer also, but I wouldn't really know.

I think Chuck knew I wouldn't be able to keep my promise. That night, we made love for the last time before we reached orbit at Ararat. Two years of hardly seeing my family. That was the second time I chose to desert everyone I knew, and the only one I regret.

We managed to design the mods we needed by the time the ship arrived. Once the
Vanguard
reached Ararat and confirmed a habitable surface, we started in with two sets of modification by sonoporation, one to adjust to the Ararat atmosphere, one to reverse the slowdown.

I take great pride that my assistants and I managed both sets of mods on everyone, working at a furious pace, with only two failures. One little girl I had never met went into system shock from cell damage and died. And one colonist proved totally resistant to further modification—the colonist with cell walls outside the preferred tolerance range. Should have seen that coming.

I performed the reversal on Chuck and the boys first. By the time we realized it hadn't worked for me, the second time I ever saw Chuck cry, they were already at double my speed.

I could still talk to Chuck, who spoke as deliberately as possible, but not to Boutros or James. I could barely even track the boys with my eyes, they moved so quickly. And hugging them through all their motion was like trying to hold on to water from a faucet.

Chuck insisted that I slow the boys and him back to my speed. I refused. But when he threatened to have one of my assistants do the sonoporation to slow them again, I relented and said I would do it.

No good doctor would ever force treatment on an unwilling patient. But I wasn't a doctor to them, I was a wife and a mother. So with my last three sonoporation procedures, I acted as a wife and mother should, for the final time. I gave them a splice to forever block any genetic slowdown, making it impossible for them to rejoin me at my speed. I would not permit my family to be trapped, to give up their future for me.

A day later, they were at ten times my speed. I could understand nothing anyone said. Standing right next to each other, Chuck and I communicated by email.

By the next day, everyone but me was fully accelerated. Chuck continued to try to communicate, but how agonizingly long every conversation must have taken for him.

Just trying to kiss him was an exercise in frustration. Doubtless he was holding the kiss as long as he possibly could, but to me it felt like a tiny peck.

I remember I kept lying down to cry, feeling wells of tears pool in my eyes, but someone would always wipe the tears away before they could fall down my cheeks. Did Chuck do that so the boys would not see? Or did it just look uncomfortable to them to have all that water on my face for so long?

 
WHEN CHUCK, Boutros, and James took the last one-way shuttle to the surface, I stayed behind. Everyone begged me to come, even though it would be a challenge to keep me alive in that atmosphere, for it would be many years of scratching out a foothold on the planet before they would be able to return to orbit. But I had no wish to live down there, a statue frozen among the living.

They stripped down the
Vanguard
as they left, but the remaining equipment was still plenty to keep one woman alive. And I could receive and send messages and pictures. At first, it felt like I was traveling, as if I had gone on a voyage and left Chuck and the boys behind, instead of the reverse.

I tried to communicate with them every day, but it was hopeless. If I didn't want to miss a day for them (26 hours on Ararat), I couldn't sleep for more than an hour at a time. In a few weeks, I became irrational with sleep deprivation. That made me tear up a lot, and a good cry would cost a whole day anyway.

So I gave up and went to a normal sleep cycle, waking each time with the awful realization that I had missed an entire week. If I stopped to read my family's messages from that week, another day was lost before I could respond.

I watched my sons mature in a few months, like bean sprouts in a time-lapse film.

Since Chuck died, since Boutros and James became strangers, I have spent more time watching news and entertainment feeds from the planet. I have seen a whole civilization grow from the tiny seed I helped plant.

I have become a legend, a sad story my descendants retell for entertainment. Three times they have made flatfilms of my life. Each time the story becomes more melodramatic, and the actress playing me more absurdly beautiful.

The leaders of the world's young government often consult me. They trust me to consider a proposal's long-term consequences. But then, their long term is so near, for me.

Every time I step away from the screen, when I return it's the future. I suppose in a way life is like that for everyone, forever rushing into the future. But it is different for me. For me, there is only the future. Other people get to inhabit the present, at least for a time, even if they seldom appreciate it.

I sit above the world like an impotent god, watching my grandchildren build a new life, a life with no place for me. In the past year, I've seen both my sons die, then the last surviving original colonists.

They are finally redeveloping spaceflight. If I wait, before long my descendants will arrive here, to marvel at my slow-motion movements and wipe away my tears.

I have been studying the specs, and the
Vanguard
really is quite simple to pilot. Soon I will take the ship back into deep space. The systems will surely start to break down before long, and I will be at a loss to make repairs, but at least my grandchildren will first be able to see the torch in the night sky as I leave.

Back in Alexandria, they were right. I am jabaan. This is a coward's form of suicide, leaving behind all my descendants and the whole world I helped create, but it carries one comfort.

No one will stop my tears from falling.

Since his last appearance in
F&SF,
Chet Arthur has let on a few details about his shadowy past. He says that as a young soldier stationed in a Bavarian cow town, he recalls nothing whatsoever except that the burg had one cathedral and fourteen breweries. During college, he was sitting next to Allen Konigsberg in Metaphysics when the latter was expelled for cheating on the final exam. Later in life, Mr. Arthur got lost in the Pentagon and had to survive for a week on hot dogs and Smoothies from an enlisted men's mess. His eventual rescue by Navy SEALs was not the stuff of which films are made.

In regards to this story, your editor would like to say only that he has nothing but respect and admiration for the Gateway City (the one east of the Mississippi, that is) and its current mayor. Opinions to the contrary in this story do not reflect those of management.

CHARLES ADAMS-MORGAN approached without joy the prospect of dying and going to heaven. That was how he thought about retirement—dying. And everybody down at the Diplomatic Club said Ambrosia was a lot like heaven.

Charles disagreed. He knew the Minister was sending him there for his last tour of duty only because he didn't want to waste anybody with a future on a post where nothing ever happened. Putting old boys out to pasture on the Earth's poshest residential satellite was so well established that Ambrosia was called a "pre-mortem assignment."