IGMS Issue 4 (9 page)

The blade was greased to keep it from corroding. I wiped it off with one of his socks. I almost took my thumb off when I let my hand stray too close to the edge, so I had to take a half-hour break to administer first aid. Five minutes for the bandaging, twenty-five to work up the courage to look at the blood. We all have our demons.

The sword was amazingly heavy, the steel beaten so dense it felt like an anvil. I cautiously took a few swings the way I'd seen in old martial arts entertainments, and managed to neatly slice the cable to the backup environment monitor, which caused the primary monitor to immediately start whooping like a drunken cowboy. I put the sword away before I put a hole in the hull.

There were some photos in an envelope taped to the lid. I pulled them out and spread them on the floor. There was nothing written on the back of any of them, and they were mostly close-ups, so I couldn't really tell who they were by context. Many may have been of him, but just as easily been his ancestors. I wished I knew something about him, but we'd never really talked about ourselves. We were too busy with the jokes, trying to outdo one other, each trying to capture the audience. I tried to remember one of his jokes, but for the life of me, I couldn't. What's worse, I couldn't even remember any of my own.

Day 1,701

Last locker. Meng Ruixun. Probably the person I knew the best, since I almost married his sister, until it dawned on me that she was a raving lunatic. Meng had tried to warn me, but she had such a cute overbite I couldn't hear him.

He was the world's worst poker player, so I'd spent a lot of time in college playing cards with him. He had the money spare, since his mother built the biggest specialty metals business on the planet.

In return, I helped him learn western literature. I did such a good job that he soon made me feel like a dilettante. He was one of those people that could quote Goethe or Yeats or Kim-Juan off the top of his head. I can do it with commercials, but that doesn't impress people so much.

He was that way about anything he tackled: consumed. He gathered information about a topic like a whale sucks in krill.

When I found out he'd been assigned to the team, I was flabbergasted. I couldn't believe the Service would squander such talent on what would most likely be a wild goose chase.

He was convinced that he deserved a slot in the unit, though. When we received that famous transmission, which confusingly seemed to arrive from five widely dispersed solar systems simultaneously, he didn't sleep for almost a week. It was his wild-ass theory about what it meant that prevailed after all the other wild-ass theories had been discredited. It was his research that found a way to assign probabilities to each of the systems as the true source of the signal. We were lucky that the closest system turned out to also be the most probable, because it was the only one we'd be able to reach.

In his locker, I found a letter from his mother. She'd made sure, before he left, to let him know what a burden he had placed on her heart by asking her to pull the strings necessary to get him assigned to the mission. She put it all down on paper so that he could refer back to it whenever his guilt started to slip.

I wasn't surprised to find poetry. I knew he'd been writing since he was a teenager, but he'd never shown it to anyone. After I read it, I understood why.

It wasn't bad. It wasn't good. It was poetry written by someone who thought too clearly, who always knew the route from point A to point B and never got lost.

It was, however, intensely revealing. With all the scholarship and accomplishments, he'd still found time to stop and doubt the hell out of himself.

The hardest thing was the smell. Meng had a penchant for musky, sandalwoody cologne and it permeated his locker. It reminded me, as nothing else could, of cookouts on his patio, holding his head while he puked Coors in the dorm head, bounce-racing on Mars.

Speak of the devil -- he had a bottle of Coors in the bottom of his locker. He also had a dozen empties, which disappointed me. I'd have shared with him, if I'd thought to bring some. Probably.

I waited until later in the day, after dinner, before I cracked open the beer. I sipped it all evening, toasting Meng, savoring the flavor and the memories.

Day 1,708

20 (Earth) days down. 480 (Earth) hours. 28,800 (Earth) minutes. 5.4% of a (Earth) year.

About 5,475 days left. 131,400 hours. 7,884,000 minutes. 0.36% of the remaining journey in the bag already; only 99.64% to go.

No, wait, we have an update: 7,883,999 minutes. The multiplication took me a minute.

I'm going out of my mind, which is a short walk to begin with.

Day 1,715

Since I have all day, every day, to devote to it, you'd think I could keep a decent journal. But there's something less than satisfying about recording your thoughts and actions, when all you think about is how bored you are, and all you do is eat, evacuate, and count the hours until bedtime.

I tried to figure out how long it would be before I could expect a reply from Earth to my incident report, but the math is still beyond me. The computer knows, but I don't know how to phrase the question. I know it'll be years, not days. Years.

Day 1,718

Maybe you thought things couldn't get much worse. I sure did. But now, I can't sleep. I've been awake for over forty-eight hours. When I'm sitting up, I feel like I'm about to pass out, but as soon as I lay down my eyes pop open like sunny-side eggs.

I've gotten to the point that I can watch entertainments again without intense longing, but I've lost the ability to be amused. I've discovered that the joy of the audience depends on being able to imagine, if only in the most tangential way, sharing the experiences of the characters. I've lost the capacity to pretend.

Day 1,720

Some things you might not know about space travel:

- Despite traveling through mostly vacuum, the window gets dirty.

- It's apparently cheaper to spray the food with an agent that numbs your taste buds than to make it delicious.

- Just because they spend billions and billions to build a ship, that doesn't guarantee the speakers will be worth a shit.

- If I do find an alien civilization, I'm going to ask them for an air freshener.

- Like they say about all the sled dogs except the one in front, the view is always the same.

Day 1,723

Blah, blah, blah, blah.

Day 1,724

It took me hours to screw up my courage, but I went back outside today. I needed to look into the faces of my friends again, to see if they'd died peacefully. As I did, I realized I had nothing to compare it to except my imagination.

Day 1,725

I've run out of things to put in the log. If you have a problem with that, complain to the morale officer.

In fact, if you're reading this, then you probably have corpses to deal with, so why are you screwing around? The Exec Comm is going to tell you to burn the log anyway. Nobody wants to admit they allow juveniles like me into the space service.

Just bury us as a crew and pretend we died together.

If you aren't reading this, then maybe I survived.

Day 1,728

A strange thought popped into my head this morning -- even Jesus only had to spend forty days in the wilderness.

Where that came from, I have no idea; I haven't seen the inside of a church in twenty years, and even out here between the stars, I don't sense any divine presence, just emptiness. If I were a believer, though, I might come to the conclusion that I'd been spared for a good reason: to mourn my friends' deaths. Everybody deserves to be mourned.

I hadn't admitted it to myself yet, but I was finally ready to get in the pod. Afraid my courage would evaporate if I looked at it too carefully, I let my mind go blank as I dressed and prepped the pod. I slid in, and was about to close the lid, but I couldn't shake the notion that I'd left something unfinished.

I got up and wrote these words so that the log has some sort of an ending, in case things don't turn out well. I've always hated books that end "To be continued."

I thought long and hard about these, perhaps my last words. I was looking for something profound, something you could carve on my gravestone if you want to, but couldn't think of anything. Only that I'd rather be floating dead through space with five of my friends than be alive and alone.

See you in six months. Call me Mr. Positive.

The end.

You know what's funny? The cabin? It has a night light.

Jimmy Nesbitt sat in the dark of a new moon on the Lincoln City beach and listened.

No wind.

No obnoxious birds.

No obnoxious lovers strolling.

Just Jimmy and his sound gear, capturing the roll of waves, the susurration of water over sand, the ticking of air bubbles popping as the water retreated back toward the ocean. It was the same sound he'd heard a hundred times before . . . until he detected something more, buried deep in the white noise of waves.

He looked around, irritated, expecting to see someone stomping through the sand with a portable stereo in one hand on their way to a midnight swim.

Nothing.

Even the occasional sweep of headlights had ceased, leaving the darkness unbroken and tranquil.

He was alone.

Jimmy reached quickly for his frequency filter, dialing the luminous knobs to try and isolate the pitch he thought he heard. His heart actually pounded in his chest -- something music hadn't done for him in quite some time.

And it totally surprised him.

The romance -- if it had ever really been there -- had long gone out of this job. Recording the ocean had been the only gig he could get once he quit session work in Los Angeles and Nashville, where musicianship had been replaced by packaging and sex appeal. If the market for
Pacific Ocean Scapes
-- the project that would take him up the entire west coast -- weren't so lucrative, he could never have endured the mindless sound-tracking of splashing water.

He narrowed in on the frequency, methodically muting levels where he could not hear the strange sound through his headphones. The rumble of white caps turning over on themselves fell away, the sizzle of water creeping up wet-packed sand disappeared as well. He kept at it, eager to identify this new tone, something he hadn't heard on any other beach south to San Diego.

After several more adjustments, his parametric equalizer began to spike only in the +10 kilohertz zone.

Jimmy pressed the ear cups of his Sony Pro Studio reference phones tighter against his head, sealing out further noise.

He gave a smile.

No mistake.

A trumpet.

Another sound engineer might not have known what he was hearing. But Jimmy had spent several years mixing studio jazz albums in New Orleans in the years before new age labels started throwing money at French Quarter musicians and recording the always hilarious "light jazz."

He knew from a trumpet.

That wasn't all, though.

If a little fuzzy through the processing he had to impose to create the discreet horn sound, the tone perfectly matched a Gillespie model horn -- something only the men playing on Bourbon Street or swank Manhattan dinner clubs in the early 30's would have used. Still, a badly soldered connection, an errant grain of sand, any number of things could have caused the tone.

But not when it moved in and out of melody.

Jimmy sat, compressing his phones against his ears, tweaking his EQ, recording snippets of what he was coming to think of as a song, then playing them back against the real-time music.

They were different.

The song seemed to live in the very rattle and hum of the ocean itself.

What the hell had he found? And could he sell it?