The Journey Prize Stories 28 (19 page)
Read The Journey Prize Stories 28 Online
Authors: Kate Cayley
They screened us for suicidal tendencies, of course. Even now, despite what you did, I have no intention of hastening the end of my life. I am far too curious about the possible endings to this strange story of mine, and all the moments in between.
But if there were a way to arrange it, if I could be sure I was about to die from say, a massive heart attack within the next 120 seconds, and if I could only have the time to strip naked, then hold my breath long enough to run out the door, lie down, and get into position with the others, I would. From my place in the circle I would open my eyes wide and inhale through my nostrils, sacrificing the few seconds I might have had remaining just to grasp that one last bit of knowledge.
The blue-green planet twinkled a few degrees above the horizon, becoming brighter and more distinct as the sun sank and disappeared. I lifted my hand and waved with my clumsy silver arm. On the way here, if you can believe my naiveté,
I imagined a crop of fashion designers inspired by our expeditionâfor a brief time before our departure we were minor celebritiesâcreating new and improved space suits in a variety of colours and cuts to flatter various body types to be sent along with the next vessel and with each vessel to follow. New trends for every season. Well, it was a pleasant thought for a while.
As I lay in the mandala, imagining the scent of the red planet spring and sleek fuchsia space suits, Earth suddenly shone bigger and brighter than I had ever seen it before. An illusion created by the dust still floating in the meagre atmosphere, I thought, but alluring nonetheless, like a candle in a distant window on a black, pre-electricity night. Then there was a moment when awe and wonder at the loveliness of it switched to horror as I realized what you must have done for that to happen, right before the starburst flash, brief fireball, and complete darkness.
Twenty-three years since I last had news of you, I have no idea what unsolvable political crisis or technological fuck-up could have made blowing up the entire planet inevitable, but I have to tell you, from here it all seems pretty unnecessary. I guess I'm in shock.
I wonder if the moon is still there, and what will happen to it now. Catapulted into the sun, flung into outer space, or left to inherit the blue-green planet's orbit and continue its silent path in peace?
I am going to send this. I waited. I considered. Here it is: even if there is only the most infinitesimal chance someone is still
left to read this, sending these words is the right thing to do. Whether or not anyone receives them is not my concern.
I wish someone would breathe on me the way I breathe on the carrots. / cmb
Send
Red Jacket, Assiniboia East. 12 April 1889
Dear Sister,
My news is sorrowful, and I pray you do not find yourself alone as you read it. Yesterday we buried Lucille. Her heart failed her, the doctor said, though he had no need to tell me. To think she would have had her fiftieth birthday this September. Though I often feared for her when she was bearing our children, always mindful of how you and I lost our own dear Mother, once our last was born I imagined she was safe and we would grow old together. How foolish I was.
Poor little Leo is inconsolable. Being the youngest, he was still accustomed to clinging to his mother's skirts and climbing into her lap, an indulgence for which, I now regret, I often reproached her. Amelia and James have taken him and Sarah into their home, where they will stay until after the harvest or perhaps longer. It gives me some comfort that, though deprived of their Ma, the littlest ones will know at least the care of their gentle sister. The others will remain with me to help ready the
fields and sow the crops, which must be accomplished soon, the land and elements caring nought for our grief.
She is laid to rest in the yard of our new little brick church, I assure you, as good a Christian burial as she might have had in England. My neighbour the Swede built her a coffin from lumber that I believe he had intended to use to repair his barn, and would accept no payment in return. His wife brought us breads and stews made in the style of their country, and was most kind to the children. It grieves me Lucy never sought to befriend her, nor the German ladies who live nearby and who, when they learned of her passing, also came to clean the house and attend to us. Though their English is halting and they do not share our faith, they are of good heart and would have made her fine companions. All of our fellow countrymen regrettably dwell at some distance from our little homestead.
The coffin was plain but well made. It only pained me to think of sweet Lucy lying on its bare wood, and, as there was no finer fabric to be had for a lining, God forgive me, I placed inside one of the Company blankets she so detested. Aside from you, Dear Sister, only Amelia knows, and like me she thought it was the best to be done for her mother under the circumstances.
I am told the Reverend spoke well at the service, though I confess my head was so filled with other thoughts I hardly heard him or recall what he said. The little church was full of our friends, and even our Catholic and Lutheran neighbours came to pay their respects. Two young North-West Mounted Police officers who boarded
with us for a few days when they were caught in a terrible blizzard last winter, on hearing of our loss, rode up from White Bear Post. In their fine scarlet coats they made a handsome addition to the funeral procession. I am certain Lucy would have been pleased.
I fear in some of my letters to you I have written things that may have cast my dear wife in an unfavourable light. I beg you to put those out of your mind as the unkind thoughts of an impatient and obstinate husband. I have had no true cause to judge her so harshly for her unhappiness here. She was raised a merchant's daughter, with many comforts, and had just hope and expectation of living her days as a merchant's wife. She was so until the decision, which was my own, and taken with greatest insistence, to uproot us from our homeland. She bore me fourteen children and was a most devoted mother. Though, as you surely remember, we both grieved deeply the loss of brave Henry at the brink of his manhood, I daresay it was she who comforted me more than I her in that darkest of times, when I could not find rest for the dreams of my beloved son sinking to his death in the Pacific. It is I who am at fault, having brought the sorrows of these recent years that broke her dear heart upon her, and for this I must and shall beg forgiveness to the last of my days.
Dear Sister, I am sorry to write with such melancholy, but I trust you of all people will grant me your pardon, for like our dear Mother you are disposed to see the greatest and most good in all, and possessed of a patience and understanding your wretched brother could never hope to find within himself.
I enclose a letter Lucy wrote only a week ago to her friend Mrs. Anson, and ask that you would deliver it in person along with the tidings of her passing, as I fear the dear lady will be most grieved. Perhaps you would also be so kind as to call upon Lucy's brother Charles and his family. Though I will write to him myself, I would wish you to convey my respects with the kindness and sympathy only you could.
Your devoted brother,   Â
J.M.B.   Â
12.04.2070 station 1
/ I've been practising.
I count to ten, take a deep breath, open the door, and run. So far I've only been able to get about two-thirds of the way to our wheel before I can't help myself and let the air out. I blame it on the suit. Awkward and clunky as it is, it slows me down. Naked, I think I could get there in time, but I need to be sure.
As if this whole plan weren't already complicated enough, I thought of yet another problem after my practice run this morning. Most of the surface is fine dust and quite soft, but there are pebbles and larger rocks, some of them with razor-like edges. The smaller ones are what I worry about, because they're harder to see and shift from place to place with the wind.
My conclusion: I don't think I can pull off complete nudity. I might need my boots. I picture myself almost making it, then puncturing the ball of my foot on a sharp stone, crying outâand you can imagine the rest. The researchers would find the mandala with its one empty wedge and nineteen peaceful bodies almost god-like in their serenity. Nearby would be the
corpse of a naked old woman, awkwardly clutching her foot and her face contorted with some mixture of pain, surprise, and profound disappointment.
No, I don't want to be that woman. I still have some sense of dignity. So in my breath-holding practice I must factor in a few extra seconds to take off my boots and toss them away before I get into position.
I am well aware the odds are close to nil that I will have the just-right notice of my impending death, which will allow me to even attempt carrying out this sequence. But if it happens, I intend to be ready.
After my practice, I repeated all the routine checks. I have been experimenting with changing the order of tasks to get through them more quickly and was pleased I set a record today: four minutes and fifty-three seconds less than the previous one. It's not an obsession with efficiency, only that at seventy-something years of age, I would like to conserve my energy where I can. In any case, no structural damage or systems malfunctions to report. I will say now, conclusively, the transmitter batteries are completely gone. I held out some hope they would recharge at least a little after my last message, but after several days they fail to show the faintest sign of life.
Why am I still writing? One could say I went ahead and sent my last message, even after what you did, out of shock, with my internal processing of what had just happened incomplete. But I'm beyond that stage now.
Perhaps a sense of duty. We were, after all, sent here at considerable expense with the expectation we would notice things
and report them, making our contribution to the collective knowledge of humankind. They screened us for qualities like diligence and responsibility. No social loafers on this mission. Given the slightest possibility someone survived total destruction of the planet and, even more improbably, was still picking up the signal, simple duty demanded I send that message.
But now? Now I no longer even have the means to transmit, yet I continue to write. Could I really still be clinging to some fine thread of hope? If someone survived the explosion of the blue-green planet. And if that someone received my final transmission. And if that someone had a way to travel here. And if, when that someone arrived, I was still around to let them in the door or they had the wherewithal to figure out how to open it themselves. And if they found this room and the systems were still functioning, so my words were still on this screen. Thenâ¦what?
I tug a little on that fine thread and it stubbornly refuses to break. Am I deceiving myself into improbable hope, not wanting to admit I am only clinging to a habit, some vestige of normalcy in the face of a really fucked-up situation? Could it be these words are just a pathetic attempt at sorting out my thoughts, at maintaining sanity with some reasonable measure of comfort? That in the end I write only for myself?
I have no answers to these questions.
I have been lying in my little wedge in the mandala. It may seem morbid to you that I spend so much time with corpses. I, too, might have thought so once. When I left the blue-green planet, in my country it was customary to dispatch the dead to morgues, funeral homes, crematoria, and to leave the
handling of the remains to professionals. Perhaps an afternoon or two might be spent in the company of an open coffin with the loved one's embalmed shell inside. Cosmetics artfully applied to give a semblance of peaceful sleep. More often a closed casket, or not even a whole body, only a small urn of ground bones and ash.
It was not always so. Once, in the not-so-distant past, bodies were laid out on kitchen tables, where they were washed, groomed, dressed, cried over by family members. Homes were small, and all the daily activities of cooking, bathing, nursing infants, mending clothes, conversing must have gone on all around. The men of the family, or perhaps a kind neighbour, would have built the coffin from whatever lumber was available, and loved ones would have laid the body inside and nailed it shut. There might have been an undertaker to dig the grave and cover it over, but even that task was often left to the mourners.
I was forty-one when I boarded the ship that brought us here. My parents had died in a plane crash when I was still in grad school, I was ten years divorced, had no children, no siblings, and had lost touch with any remaining aunts, uncles, cousins. Lack of ties to the blue-green planet.
Headquarters deserves some credit. They did at least put substantial thought and effort into selecting the right combination of people. Not only complementary skill sets, but a balance of gender, personality traits, values, interests. For the most part they succeeded. We were a remarkably harmonious group. A real community. Of course there were some limits. Most importantly, they screened us for fertilityâa test I passed with flying colours, thanks to a hysterectomy two years
earlier. As cold and indifferent as Headquarters could be, even they understood the absolute horror it would be to allow a baby into this living experiment.
So you see, this is my family. When I lie in my little wedge I feel no horror or revulsion toward my dead companions. Rather, I take comfort in their presence, the feelings and memories that resurface, the smiles and tears they bring. I have tapped into that ease and understanding of life and death all my ancestors must have had until a mere century or so before I left our planet. Here, in my part of the mandala, I feel only a sense of belonging, of being in my rightful place. Of being home.
There is one more observation I need to record. When I was looking up today, toward the dusk horizon where the blue-green planet should have been, I saw something. A handful of faint twinkles. I noticed them yesterday evening too, but today they are slightly bigger and I am certain I did not imagine them. They are approaching. Perhaps some of the debris field, a few molten rocks that will collide with this ball of red dust and complete your destruction. Or, dare I hope, perhaps a handful of ships carrying survivors. And bamboo.
