Authors: Wade Andrew Butcher
Chapter 30
Eva witnessed death for the first time in the middle of that betanight. It had always been an intangible concept until the moment when she looked in the face of a dead person.
They were sleeping in the shadows of Taurus where it was darker than most could see. The light of the evening star did not shine all the way under the expansive surface of the lander. When she awoke to sit up on her cot, she noticed a rare situation - everyone was asleep. Looking around slowly in hopes of finding somebody awake, she saw nothing but motionless bodies. She scanned all around and detected that there was one awake lying still. Fedora had her eyes open about twenty meters away. Even at her young age, Eva knew Fedora was troubled and had a lot on her mind. She didn’t understand the burden of leadership, but she understood her expressions and her body language over the time they had been there. Fedora was under a blanket with only her head exposed, and Eva could see her face in the darkness.
She approached. Always seeking someone to talk to and learn from, Eva knew Fedora would welcome her. The admired Wardmaster, who commanded respect from all former pupils, would surely rise out of bed to greet her. As she got closer, the blank stare was unchanging. There was no blinking, no movement, and no acknowledgement of her presence. She got closer until she was near enough to touch the old woman.
She kneeled to look at Fedora’s face. Eva was overcome with a sudden chill and a racing heart. The expression she saw was one of fright as if for a split second Fedora knew her time had come without fair warning. Death had frozen the look on her face, gazing right through anyone who would come to see. Eva jumped back with a scream, scared of the Wardmaster whom she once cared for so deeply.
She yelled for Quasar, who was already upon her a second after the first sounds. The older embraced the younger from behind and stepped away with the girl her arms. Eva knew Quasar could also see the unresponsive face through the darkness. Quasar turned Eva away and made no effort to speak with Fedora. There were no physicians left in the band of survivors, but two of the others ran with flashlights toward them and tried to revive the leader to no avail.
Eva did not cry, at least not immediately, nor did anyone else that she could detect. There was very little talking, as if it was expected and unsurprising. Eva could hear the first responders behind her saying Fedora was gone as she was looking into the glowing night sky in the distance. Someone approached from the outside.
It was Nikolaj. He had broken into a run, but his grace made it seem like he was gliding across the sand and rock. He slowed to walk over to Fedora to pick her up, kept her wrapped in the blanket, and carried her out from under the lander. All were awake, but only about half followed him to the shore, where they all stood in silence waiting to see what he was going to do.
There was a moderate temperature in the middle of the betanight. The evening star was bright with its reflection lying still in the smooth surface of the lake. The air was calm, the sky was clear, and the only noise was made by what sounded like a lone insect at the outskirts of the forest. Nikolaj stood holding Fedora’s dead body in his arms.
“Who would like to say some words?” he said as he turned to face the group. It was as if he was in a hurry and wanted to accelerate a funeral with very little pageantry.
Eva stood with Quasar at her back. She was briefly tempted to ask for a shoulder ride, but even she knew it would be inappropriate on that occasion. Eva was feeling uncomfortable not knowing the correct protocol for a funeral, so she kept quiet and stayed by the side of her older clone sister. She had resigned to acknowledge Quasar as a sister. Everyone else did, and there was something that felt good about having family.
Webster fixed his gaze into the distance across the sea toward the evening star, the binary sun in the system. He did not react when Eva looked up at him standing beside Quasar. A couple people from the gathering said a few things, but Eva tuned out and did not remember what was said
.
The small matter of burying the body was next. The entire group did not follow, but Eva did, because she was curious and didn’t understand the need for what was being done. They had adopted the directional descriptors from Earth. East was the direction where the sun rose, and after that night, to Eva it was more impactful to think of it as the direction of the new graveyard.
Nikolaj asked her to lead the way. Eva could see in the dim evening light well enough to easily spot the occasional insect among the sparse vines that covered the ground in that direction. It was the first time the higher ups had ever asked her to do anything important. They could have asked Quasar, so it wasn’t an exclusive honor, but Eva felt really proud at the legitimate request for assistance. They walked for what seemed like a great distance to her at the time, even though the massive landing vessel Taurus still blocked the view of the mountains to the north.
They were unprepared to bury the first body on Beta. Eva didn’t know the tools required. Somebody mentioned needing a shovel, a tool used in the greenhouse section of the former spaceship home. They tested the hardness of the ground with their hands before deciding to leave Fedora lying on the vines. They said they would return later.
The small group returned from the new graveyard with Eva in the lead as before. It was a location she would not have imagined being designated as special. Over time she would see it had a strange effect on people. It was where they would go to talk to their lost friends, hoping in vain they would be heard. Eva wondered if such a thing was possible.
With Fedora gone, there was nobody in charge. In truth, there had never been any recognized authority since the landing, but with Fedora as a parental figure, there was a calming effect over all those who knew her from early childhood. In her absence, there was initially no throttle on any misbehavior previously checked by her watchful eye. Had it not been for Nikolaj to squelch any conflicts, complete anarchy might have ensued. The physically dominant among them became the de facto leader, the enforcer, and the judge. The role was not contested, and the secret objections of one of the survivors were not evident at first.
Chapter 31
Late in the betanight while they were inside Taurus avoiding the cold, Eva awoke to the sound of her own scream. Quasar was shaking her shoulder. Eva sat up and was reminded from the confined surroundings that they were sleeping in Taurus. She was relieved but could not rid herself of the memory from the specter that had come to her.
“Bad dream?” asked Quasar.
“I was here in this room,” Eva cried. “There was a skeleton right where you are now, kneeling and talking to me. He pleaded with me to give him life and he reached his hand out to touch my arm. He began to grow flesh while my arm started rotting. The growth was unfinished when I yanked my arm away, and he stood up looking angry. I rolled over to the other side in an attempt to escape. When he pursued me, I was screaming and woke up.”
“Well, that’s new,” Quasar replied as if she anticipated what Eva was dreaming about. When she seemed unconsoling, Eva cried louder. Quasar hugged her and mentioned she had dreams also.
“What are your dreams about?” Eva asked.
Quasar sat down by her bed before she said softly, “You may already know.”
Eva was confused and a little bit worried at her serious tone. She asked, “What do you mean? How could I know your dreams?”
“You remember those times when you used to swim in the ocean?”
“Yeah, but I know it was a dream because that’s impossible.”
“Not a dream. It’s a latent memory, dormant and inherited from our original. I have the same ones. Our original lived on Earth, and she did swim in the ocean,” Quasar tried to clarify.
Nobody had ever explained that to Eva before, and she wasn’t sure she believed it. Living in the seclusion of a spaceship, having never seen a sky, she thought pictures and movies created the visions that triggered her dreams. She always anticipated the arrival. The sky over Beta was darker than the one in her fantasies where light blue painted the air instead of a hazy orange. She had a hard time thinking her unconscious experiences consisted of sights from a planet she had never seen.
“They don’t seem real,” Eva argued.
“Just like distant memories, ones you can barely remember, they do not differentiate themselves from dreams. It’s an epigenetic process that we don’t fully understand about clones. I even remember Isla’s dreams. That was her name.”
“Were her dreams like the one I just had?”
“There was one that has become a legend among her clones. There was a skeleton in the dream, but it was different than the one you just had. It was in the dream she had right before she boarded Gambler from Earth. The visage in her dream was supposedly her grandfather and it was urging her to go into space as if he was speaking to her from the grave, a messenger sent by the spirits. She believed at that point it was her destiny to go, but she never figured out why.”
Sent by the spirits. What spirits?
Eva wondered.
She was haunted by the thought that her memories were not her own. She wanted to ask more but preferred to forget the imagery she had seen in her sleep, and talking about it was not helping. Eva suddenly wanted to get off the lander even though it was gigantic, like the ship where she grew up. Wanting to get outside, she walked out of her room. Quasar did not follow. The temperature had not yet warmed with the primary star still below the horizon, so Eva would not be able to go outside for a few hours more.
She decided to walk the ship. She really wanted to explore more of the outside, her new home where she would grow old, the land promised and coveted by generations. Wandering the ship was a small consolation, somewhat dissatisfying, but it would have to do. They had only been on Taurus for a short time, less than a day before the landing. She was unfamiliar with it, but for that matter, she was not that familiar with Gambler either even though she had lived there her whole life. There were similarities. They were structured in a radial lattice around a middle core, which on the lander was equipped with a water tank similar but much smaller than the one in the middle of Gambler.
In the lander, the core wrapped around to form a ring that Eva heard others call a torus and wondered if that had anything to do with the name of the ship. Only the bottom portion of the lander was usable under the influence of Beta’s gravity – the top half was designed with rooms oriented for the artificial gravity of the ship when it was rotating around the central engine. Being curious, she wanted to get as high as she could for a view to the outside, so she walked the main corridor in search of the nearest ladder tube. Eva climbed and traversed until she was in a room up high on the perimeter.
The window in the room overlooked the lake and faced the forest with the secondary star low on the horizon. The large body of water looked no smaller from that elevated position than it did on the ground. Its other borders were lined with cliffs of varying sizes, with the ones in the distance barely visible.
At the edge of the forest in the partial darkness of the betanight, Eva could see the tree where Webster had been marking the days. She had not heard a single person other than Webster talk about tracking their days, so it occurred to her that maybe they were losing track of time. She pondered how old she was and tried to figure out the number of days to her birthday, but she didn’t know what day it was. The cycle of the primary star had thrown off their timekeeping. The daytime was about the length of five earth days, but that was not an exact figure. She refused to accept the thought that she was not going to know her exact birthday for sure ever again, but she postponed the calculation until later.
Eva left that room to continue around the slow curve of a perimeter passageway. When she started to get a little bit bored of the windowless corridor, she decided to have another look outside.
The pane of glass she found in another room overlooked the vine-covered plain to the east. Eva wondered how long it would take for the primary star to return and warm the air so she could go back outside. She stared to the place where she anticipated it would appear, but she had no idea how long that would take, and she certainly did not have the patience to wait.
Right before she was about to leave to continue on the walk, she saw a second body on the ground in the plain next to Fedora’s body. She did not know when they had lost another. A second death gave her chills. The possibility of her own death crept into her thoughts. The finality of that hypothetical event bothered her and she couldn’t get her mind around it.
Eva pressed her hands against the cold windows. The bodies were not cold as dead bodies should have been. Areas of fluctuating heat stimulated her retinas. Eva could see the infrared radiation through the dim night. Her first thought was that they were still alive, but then she realized the error. The bodies were covered in bugs. The alien insects that usually appeared one at a time had swarmed to cover the dead people in the field. Eva started to run back and tell someone, but she stopped herself from bringing menacing news that would surely be unwanted. Besides, she didn’t know who to tell.
Instead, Eva left that room to continue her exploration of the Taurus chambers. She arrived at one that faced north to the mountains. In the range that faced her, the peaks were not enough to obstruct the view of the Gambler wreckage. The ship blended with the mountains as if one itself. She recalled the days there when she learned all about how to live on the ship, but nobody ever said how they were going to live there on Beta. Eva felt cold. The ominous remains of the spaceship in the distance demonstrated how small they were.
When she tired of the sight of the mountains, Eva continued around Taurus until she faced west and made one more stop. The main waterfall that fed the giant lake from the mountains was barely visible, a spec in the distant starlight. She had not been there, but she wanted to go. That was where the passage into the mountains allowed entry into the valley where Gambler rested, a venture yet to be undertaken by anyone in the group.
Eva was growing hungry and decided to make her way back to the others. She thought the sunrise must have been coming soon. The dull hum of the reactor was the only sound as she was returning around the arc to where everyone had been sleeping. She liked being alone, but the eerie quiet compelled her to run the final length of her nearly hour-long walk. She approached the gathering where people were stirring in preparation to go outside.