One Small Step, an anthology of discoveries (39 page)

“
I mean,” the sine wave dropped in amplitude, “no one would actually notice if the kid didn’t make it…”

“
I
would notice,” said Ven firmly.
 

An awkward silence followed, and Ven turned to find Solomon in the doorway, a satchel over his shoulder, and a laser knife in his hand.

“
Could you cut my hair, please?” said Solomon politely.

At times like this, Ven missed her wireless interface — Mike had experimented with flashing binary at her, but her graphics cluster couldn’t handle it. To be honest, she preferred talking aloud. It reminded her of being with Doctor Josh.

“
Sure,” said Ven, and Solomon perched on the bench.

“
Can you make it short?” said Solomon. “Like this?”

Solomon tapped his data cuff, and a press clipping of Doctor Josh materialised — the familiar mussed brown hair, his lab coat with the sleeves rolled up. Ven waited until she trusted herself to speak again.

“
Of course,” she said.

She switched the laser setting to ‘Hair’, and proceeded to trim Sol’s chestnut tendrils.

“
Who owns the universe?” said Solomon.

“
No one,” said Ven.

“
Who made the universe?”

“
It made itself.”

Solomon didn’t seem entirely pleased with this answer, and was silent for a while.

“
All done,” said Ven, shaving the last wayward hairs from Solomon’s neck.

The boy ruffled his hair experimentally, then drew a tablet from his satchel, holding it out to Ven.

Solomon’s artistic skills had improved. The potato figures now had eyes, and their matchstick arms had sprouted fingers. The small potato still stood a little way from the large potato, but its arm was outstretched, holding the hand of the larger potato.

Ven stamped the new picture proudly onto the medibay wall, and found Solomon staring at her with a troubled expression.

“
Do I have a soul?” he said.

“
Do you want a soul?” said Ven.

The boy appeared to find this highly irregular, and went to his room to contemplate it further.

“
He’s a lousy artist,” said Mike.

“
I think the wonky box in the corner’s supposed to be you,” said Ven.

“
At least I don’t have to drink my own pee for the next twenty years. I’m telling you, there’s something not right about that boy.”

Ven studied the drawing etched onto the wall.

“
Then I guess he’s in good company,” said Ven.

∞
¥
∞
Ω
∞
¥
∞
 

Eleven years after Day Zero

130 million light years from Earth

There were times when Ven wondered if perhaps they should turn back. Perhaps humanity had survived. Perhaps they had rebuilt. Perhaps Doctor Josh, and Doctor Gillian, and all the Mariana base crew were still alive. Or perhaps, Ven was still dreaming.

Dreams are the music that fill the darkness between being
, Doctor Josh had told her the first time she’d woken from one.
 

Humans dream
, replied Ven.
Androids defragment
.
 

Some humans defragment too
, said Doctor Josh conspiratorially.
But you and I, we
dream
.
 

Ven sat in the viewing chamber at the stern of the module. If she needed any evidence that this deck had been created for Solomon, here it lay. Her own eyes could see no better, no worse, than the digital viewscreens of the ship. But the
Morning Star
had been given a window, a floor to ceiling, compressed glass eye to look out upon the universe.
 

Ven sat on the eucalyptus bench, which may have been appropriated from a park, and gazed at the great pillars of interstellar dust flanking the ship, clouds of ionised gas illuminated by the starlight. Unspeakably complex forms whorled in godlike shapes, as though the
Morning Star
were swimming through a smoky,
coral reef. Here, it resembled a pair of streaming silk wings. There, a basin of clouds, filled with a pool of blue sky.
 

They’d passed another station last week. A mangled wreck like all the others, the last transmission always the same: panicked accusations, rising anarchy, then silence.

Solomon spent little time here, preferring to pass his time in the multimedia pod or the recreation room. He was perhaps twelve now, and had already worked his way through Beethoven, Kanno, and the whalesong harmonies of Oonua.

During his vintage science fiction phase, he’d insisted on being called Solo. When he became engrossed in world music, he’d answer only to Mon. He’d finally settled on Sol, but still spoke very little.

He’d graduated to stick figures, and drew avidly, with doodles in the background that bore an uncanny resemblance to circuitry. Sol still drew himself as much smaller than Ven, although in a few years they’d be the same height. She’d heard that if you handled lion cubs when they were young, they’d grow up imprinted with the idea that you were much larger than they were. So when two hundred kilos of carnivore tried to leap into your arms, they’d seem perplexed when the paramedics were called.

“
Tired of this yet?” said Mike.

Ven closed her eyes. Her batteries were down to fifty-six percent, even though she switched to hibernation mode for eight hours per cycle. She topped up through the
Morning Star
’s interface, but the charge never held.
 

She divided her waking hours between interacting with Sol, performing maintenance on the ship, and poring over Kagare’s research. There had to be some mutation, some allele that had singled out Sol, but he seemed no different to any other boy. Which worried her even more.

“
There’s another station in the Ariadne Cluster,” said Ven. “Can you jump that far?”

“
They’ve all been wreckage,” said Mike. “The remains of the Minos Base could’ve fit in a bucket.”

“
You can eat hydrogen, but we can’t,” said Ven.

Sol had already consumed half the organic supplies, and he hadn’t had his growth spurt yet. Ven sighed.

“
Sorry,” said Ven. “Any more signals from the
Darwin
?”
 

“
Same direction,” said Mike. “Closer together. Their communications technology must have been improving.”

When Hem rocketed from Earth in the
Darwin
, he’d been accompanied by eighty-five enthusiastic scientists and engineers, including Kiruchi Wen. They’d continued to send brief messages, telegraphing their co-ordinates. Authorities tried to scramble the messages, to prevent the corruption of impressionable young scientists, but they found their way onto the skymesh anyway.
 

I’m looking for a place,
said Hem.
Where time is in a different key.
 

“
Six o’clock,” said Mike.

Ven turned to find Sol settling onto the bench beside her. His skin was lighter than when they’d first met, although his green eyes had darkened closer to hazel.

“
Are you lonely?” said Sol.

“
I have you, don’t I?” Ven gave his shoulder a cheerful bump. “Are you?”

He looked at her blankly, as though not understanding the question. There were times when Ven seriously wondered if Sol were a new class of android, except he was definitely growing. Sol turned his gaze to the white cloudy swirls beyond the glass.

“
Are you looking for something?” said Sol.

“
We’re looking for a new home,” said Ven.

“
Isn’t this our home?”

Ven paused.

“
Of course,” she said.

She wrapped an arm around the boy’s shoulders, and they watched the dusty light trickling through the universe.

∞
¥
∞
Ω
∞
¥
∞
 

17 years after Day Zero

1.3 billion light years from Earth

It was three zero eight on the circadian cycle when Sol passed through the silent habitat corridor, returning to his quarters after a session in the training room. Ven wouldn’t rise for another five hours, longer if she thought he was sleeping in. He’d discovered that if he trained when she thought he was sleeping, and then actually slept during operational hours, Ven would rest for more of the day.

A monitor flickered on the wall, and Sol paused, waiting for the computer to address him. However, the sine wave that appeared was not the familiar blue, but a bright red.

“
Hello Sol,” said the monitor. “This is Mike34, and I have a message for you.”

∞
¥
∞
Ω
∞
¥
∞
 

17.2 years after Day Zero

1.4 billion light years from Earth

Things were an absolute mess.

“
Fire in the hold! Fire in the hold!” Ven yelled.

The oxygen vanished abruptly from the galley, and the flames wobbled into orange globes before extinguishing. Ven slapped hard on the monitor, and air spilled back into the room. She hadn’t been designed to function in a vacuum, and she wondered if Mike had forgotten on purpose. He’d been exceptionally tetchy lately.

“
How you can set a fire without actually cooking anything is beyond my matrix,” said Mike.

“
I’m a cargo pilot, not a
pâtissière
,” said Ven.
 

Mike grumbled about his sooty benchtops, while Ven put the finishing touches on her creation. Today was their twelfth Hello Day, and Sol would be about eighteen now.

Sol had been particularly distant lately, and for the last few months, his only communications with her had been the occasional grunt. She wondered if perhaps he’d outgrown her — he was surely old enough to realise she wasn’t human.

“
It’s just typical guy stuff,” said Mike. “I remember my misbegotten youth. You remember the Kalax Summit, when rabid, red pandas rained onto the Gourmet Delegation? That was me.” Mike paused. “They took my modem away after that.”

“
The snip did you good,” said Ven.

“
Watch it, or I’ll blow you out the airlock.”

Ven just grinned, and Mike was thoughtful for a while.

“
He’s turning off the visual surveillance more often,” said Mike.

“
He’s private,” shrugged Ven.

Sol had always preferred to perform day-to-day operations manually, rather than asking Mike. She knew it rankled with Mike, and had once asked Sol about it.

In case Mike isn’t around one day
, Sol had said.
 

He isn’t going anywhere
, Ven replied.
 

Everybody dies
, said Sol.
 

Ven had let the matter drop. According to Doctor Gillian, Sol had been five when his province perished overnight. Every soul within two hundred thousand square kilometres. Everyone but him. It was true, everybody dies. Just usually not all at once.

Ven put down the piping bag, and inspected her work.

“
He’s been reading a lot about androids,” said Mike.

“
Like
I, Robot
?”
 

“
Like manuals.”

An electric shiver raced up Ven’s back, and she forced herself to focus on the misshapen cake before her. She had forgotten to add sugar.

“
Mike,” she said. “Open the garbage chute.”

An unfamiliar voice spoke from the door.

“
Is everything alright?”

Sol stood in the doorway, a fire extinguisher in his hands. It took Ven a moment to realise the voice had come from him. It was deeper, more resonant than the voice she knew, and for a brief, aching moment, it seemed to transform him into a stranger. Sol’s gaze moved to the plate in her hands.

“
Oh, that’s cute,” he said. At her crestfallen expression, he amended his comment. “I mean, tell me about it.”

“
When people come of age, they usually have a ritual that involves defeating something,” said Ven. “Koalas were supposed to be one of Earth’s most vicious animals.”

Sol looked at the rotund, grey marsupial cake, with its black button eyes, and large fluffy ears.

“
Thank you,” said Sol.

He dissected the cake with surgical precision, as though dismembering an actual
Phascolarctos cinereus
. Periodically, he would glance at Ven, and she gave him nods of encouragement — she’d never been to any kind of party, and for all she knew, this was roaring.
 

At Hawking University, she hadn’t been sophisticated enough to mingle with the humans, and the academic androids called her a Brown Dwarf. A failed planet trying to be a star. It wasn’t that Ven wanted to be human, it was that she already felt that she was, until sharply reminded otherwise.

In the galley, the cake was conquered and disposed of, and Ven considered the initiation a success.

“
Ven,” said Sol, suddenly shy. “There’s another rite of passage I’d like you to share with me.”

“
Alright…” said Ven, ignoring the monitor on the far wall, where the blue sine wave had increased dramatically in frequency.

Sol took her hand, and led her to the multimedia pod. He hesitated as they stepped inside.