The Pedestal (22 page)

I gulp, hoping my consternation isn’t plainly visible on my face.

“One other thing,” Grogan adds with a tight smile. “Maybe it goes without saying, but if anyone asks where you came from, I recruited you through our USS Moon mining operations liaison. I don’t know what you got yourself into back there, but I don’t need my crew getting caught up in it. I was in a pinch, you were in a pinch; don’t make me regret taking a gamble on you. Got me?”

I do. I wasn’t feeling great earlier, but adding this conversation into the mix has me feeling a bit ill. Grogan senses my unease—or notices my greening pallor—and fetches me a bottle of water, along with a small pill. I look at him with weak amusement—a pill, for crying out loud? He’s got to be joking. I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid.

“If you want to feel better, take it,” he says. “Your implant won’t do you any good out here, in case you haven’t already figured that out.”

Nodding dumbly, I swallow the blue tablet with difficulty, grimacing as it snails bitterly down my throat. “I guess these things take some practice,” I remark around a garbled cough.

Armed with Grogan’s meticulous directions, I eagerly set out to find the dorms. It doesn’t take long, though I get the feeling one might easily become lost here. It’s only been a few minutes, but already a heavy shroud of drowsiness has settled over me. It’s a sensation completely unlike anything my NanoPrint has ever triggered, and not necessarily in a bad way.

When I locate the dorms—a long hall of quaint, spartan rooms lined with steel-framed bunkbeds—I fall into the first bunk I encounter. One moment I’m sulking against a bare mattress, remembering with stinging eyes and an aching heart the smell of Adrian’s skin, the feel of her lips against mine—the next? Well, somehow I’m waking up. Time is a tangle of incongruities on this ship—no clocks, no nexus to keep me in synch. I have no idea how long I’ve been out, though the rumble in my stomach hints that it’s been a long time.

Rising groggily to leaden feet, I’m drawn to the window. Peering through the thick resin portal, I notice that the tiny pinpoints of light outside have begun to grow tails. Soon, they’ll be stretched taut like ribbons through space. We must be traveling hundreds of thousands of miles per hour by now.

I’m suddenly terrified by our velocity: what if we collide with a piece of passing debris? At this speed, it would surely punch right through us like a bullet through a foil balloon. I wonder: would the ship explode on impact, or would it implode from the rapid loss of pressure?

I take a leisurely half-hour tour of the vessel, noting countless unmarked doors and hatches throughout the maze, wondering what mysteries lie beyond them. It’s a large ship—equipped for a sizeable crew, if needed—yet Grogan and I haunt it alone. At some point during my outing, I realize that I no longer have any idea where I am. I continue to poke along through endless corridors—each seemingly identical to the last—because there’s really nothing else I can do, but I’m getting a little freaked out. When I find Grogan sitting in a small cafeteria, I take great pains to appear blithe, but I’m actually trembling with relief.

“Ah,” he exclaims. “Sleeping Beauty awakens at last.” He cocks his head curiously, appraising me with a raised eyebrow. Suddenly, his mouth forms a ridiculous smirk. “Got lost, huh?”

I can’t help but blush, my sheepish smile slipping into a thin line of mortification. “How long was I out?”

“Oh, the better part of a day, I guess.”
Good grief—I gotta get some of those pills.
“You want another pill?” he offers with a wry grin. A bona fide mind-reader, this guy.

“No, thanks,” I laugh. A few more of those, and I might never wake again.

“You sure? Gets pretty boring out here—no shame in sleeping through it.”

“I’m all right. I feel like I’ve been asleep for a week, anyway. I’ll be lucky to sleep at all tonight.” I stifle a yawn. At once, a terrible thought cuts through the billowy veil of grogginess. “Now that I think about it,” I say with a halfhearted—and completely disingenuous—chuckle, “I guess I’d rather be asleep if there’s any danger of us crashing into something out here.”

Grogan laughs, a youthful cackle, full of zeal and the sort of abandon that I’ve never committed to in the best of circumstances. “I know, it’s hard to get used to. But eventually you learn to trust the ship, and you stop worrying about stuff like that. It’d take a rock the size of a couch to make it past the magnetic repulsion systems, and anything that large is easy enough to circumvent.”

I smile, though inside I’m terrified. Weighed down by doubts, I realize there’s really nothing I can do to protect myself; like it or not, I’m at Grogan’s mercy. My worries—however plentiful—are worthless out here. Regardless of how many I manage to accrue, they have no power over fate.

Or do they?

It’s been two days, and I’m starting to see what Grogan meant about boredom on this trip. Who knew that a spaceship could travel at near light speed with so little noise or vibration? It’s so quiet I can’t even think straight. I never realized just how vital the white noise of my implant was to my sanity until it was stripped away. I find myself humming to fill the void, sometimes talking quietly to myself—full conversations, I mean, that go nowhere.

What’re we gonna do now, buddy boy?

Dunno; what’s there to do on a Monday?

Monday? Wait a second, now; today’s Tuesday, isn’t it?

Actually, now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure it’s Wednesday.

Okie-dokie. So what’re we gonna do today? Not much to do on a Monday, is there?

Grogan may be a space veteran, but he’s no more immune than I am. At first, I worried about wearing out my welcome with him, so I gave him wide berth to do his thing without me underfoot. Since then, it has become clear that he’s as starved for conversation as I am. We’re the only living things on this ship, after all, and if serendipity hadn’t chosen to cross our paths, he’d be here all alone.

Speaking of my host, you’d think Grogan has spent his entire life in space, for he seems almost childishly uncultured about life on Earth. You mention something like digital flavors or the new cinema add-on and he’s completely lost. His implant has been idle for so many years that he literally can’t remember what it feels like anymore. Hearing this, I’m both terrified and lustful of that possibility for me. Mine is still oscillating under my skin, sending out tiny bursts of signal to the nexus, waiting for a reply that isn’t likely to come. I wonder how long it’ll continue before it finally gives up. I ask Grogan when his eventually shut off, but he can’t remember.

That evening, we’ve just sat down to eat something when Grogan drops a bombshell onto the table, something I’ve never seen outside a museum—something that would get him a stiff fine and a week of community service back on Earth. It’s a book—I mean an actual, printed book. He tosses it next to his plate like it’s the most normal thing in the world, like paper is a plentiful commodity. It’s black-bound and thick. It isn’t until he opens it and begins reading that I realize it isn’t constructed of paper, as I first thought. The text is imprinted on some sort of synthetic material that resembles paper, but has a slightly translucent quality which differentiates it from the real thing.

Grogan looks up at me, as if he can feel my eyes bugging. “Pretty cool, huh?” he says. “My brother got this for me last year.”

“I didn’t even know they printed books anymore.” For that matter, who knew there was even a market for them? “Where’d your brother even find that thing?”

Grogan shrugs with a faraway smile and scratches the scruff on his neck. “Beats me. Apparently, they can have just about anything printed and bound. I have seven more.”

My disbelief must’ve been palpable just then, because later, when we’ve finished eating, Grogan retrieves all seven in a haphazard tower, supported by his hands at the bottom and his torso at the top.

I’m speechless. On Earth, I could access any published work in a split second via the nexus. But I’ve never been much for reading—I’m far too lazy. Why read a story when you can just watch the movie? I’ve never been ashamed by this; at least, not directly. I’m no different than most in this respect, really. But under the circumstances, I’ll take any form of entertainment I can get my hands on.

My never-ending hankering for movies—especially old ones—is certainly more significant than is probably healthy. I’ve inadvertently soaked up tidbits of the antiquated film vernacular and made them my own. With my NanoPrint out of commission, I realize I may never watch another movie again.

First my coffee, and now my movies? Jeez, what’s left to satisfy my addictive proclivities? I guess I’ll have to get used to using my imagination on Mars.

“Try this one out, if you want,” Grogan offers, nodding toward a slab on the top of his pile. The book looks as if it might slide off if I demur, so I pluck it off the stack and admire its heft. “It’s one of my favorites,” he confesses, watching me flip curiously through the fine pages.

Fahrenheit 451
.

I glance at Grogan for more encouragement. “What’s it about?”

He sniggers and shakes his head. “I don’t want to spoil it for you, but I can promise you’ll never take reading for granted when you’re done.”

It would be rude not to accept it, and I certainly have nothing better to do. So I acquiesce, retiring to my dorm to read a printed book for the very first time.

The ship is slowing now. The sensation is subtle, but I feel as though I’m perched on the edge of my axis, leaning slightly to compensate for the disturbance in gravity. Grogan pops his head into my dorm to inform me that we’ll be landing in a matter of hours. I feel a quickening pass through me as I imagine dry ground beneath my feet. Bolting from the bed, I abandon the novel to peer through the window. I’m expecting to see something telltale of the end of our journey, but all I see are white threads of light, which shorten almost imperceptibly as I track them. I feel the now-familiar symptoms of motion sickness creeping in, but I’m reluctant to take another of Grogan’s magic pills—I don’t want to experience my first glimpse of the Red Planet from its surface after waking from an eight-hour coma.

I leave the dorms behind and move to the flight deck, where Grogan is busy pushing all sorts of buttons and checking gauges. For the first time since we embarked on this journey, it dawns on me that this entire ship—which is easily the size of my entire condo building—rests under the exclusive control of Grogan; through this lens, the man looks strikingly different. I don’t know why he should impress me more now, but he does. As he goes about the cabin, making adjustments here and there, I’m a little awestruck that he seems to know what every little control—of which there are many hundreds, if not thousands—is for, and how it should be managed.

Out the front portal, I can see Mars ahead. It’s a surreal moment, catching my first view of the planet; it’s a rare experience that I proudly share with few men. And just like Earth, Mars’s strangeness is unbelievably beautiful from space.

I’m so caught up in the view that it almost doesn’t register with my consciousness that my NanoPrint has just gone quiet. When it finally dawns on me, I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry; I want to do both. My fingertips travel tentatively to my wrist, as if to confirm or deny what I already know to be true: that my last link to the only world I’ve ever known has just been severed.