FREE STORIES 2012(38)

This time, I just couldn’t do it. There were other people crying, but what I felt was more than just sadness. It was as if everyone was looking at me. I was the one who had dragged us out here. If I hadn’t suggested catching the comet, Fumi would never have had to make a single spacewalk. I remember nothing of the eulogy, I just remember a rising sensation of smothering and cloying warmth as if my regulator had malfunctioned and I was the one who was asphyxiating.

I fled.

Claire found me in the ready room where the suits were kept between shifts. The casing on Fumi’s suit was open, the faulty regulator exposed. I was staring at it.

“It wasn’t your fault,” Claire said. “These suits were never designed for the kind of punishment we put them through.”

“If we hadn’t landed on the comet, we wouldn’t have needed to use them at all.”

Claire took my hands. With a maternal gesture that I found at once intensely invasive but also reassuring, she smoothed a lock of my hair back behind my ear. The look in her eyes was one of almost beatific kindliness and calm.

“Then his death was as much my fault as it was yours. I pushed for this just as much as you: more even.”

“Don’t you ever worry that it was the wrong thing to do?” I saw in her eyes that she didn’t.

“We’re five years into an eight month trip,” she said. “If we hadn’t landed on Tempel, Fumi would probably have died long ago along with the rest of us.”

She hugged me and her voice was a whisper against my ear.

“Don’t think about one death. Remember his life and the fourteen other lives you saved.”

She said it with such conviction, such assured passion that for a moment I almost believed it.





Personal Log: Lori Rowe - Assistant Astrogator

Date: 7/03/2054 (+17 years, 3 months, 2 days)

Distance From Earth: 3.022AU





Jessica was almost uncontrollable today. The pressure testing of the new habitat wasn't even complete and she already wanted to move in. I tried to reason with her, but the confidence of teenagers, along with the mass of the electron and the speed of light, seems to be as constant out here as it was on the Earth of my youth.

"Oh Mum!" she said. "We don't have to wait. If the ice held the overpressure during mining, then it's bound to hold up under one lousy atmo. Even if there is a pipsqueak leak, we can just find-and-fix after we've moved in!"

A pipsqueak leak! She was talking about a hull breach. It was the kind of thing that would have sent the engineers at Mission Control into paroxysms of activity and my fourteen year old daughter talked about it as if she was discussing the colour of the drapes.

We were one of the last families to move over. The counterweight already held the new aeroponics garden, the pool, sick bay and suites for four families. A warren of chambers had been melted into the muddy ice and lined and clad and lit and pressurised. There was more enclosed volume over there now than there was in old Liberty.

Our ship now resembled a flying barbell of glittering ice. I'm sorry that I haven't chronicled this better, but Tom will have catalogued the changes in exhaustive technical detail. Where once we were an ice-armoured tin can being spun around at the end of a tether from the spinning ball. Years of mining, building and tunnelling, had distributed the mass almost evenly. The tether that once connected us was still there, but its carbon nanotubes were mostly used for data cables now. The structural work was taken up by the shaft, a fifty metre thick column of reinforced ice enclosing the transfer tunnel. At the barycentre a slight thickening held not only the old comms array and sensors, but also the zero-Gym and sort of parish hall-come-nightclub where Aaron Rhodes traded his home-brewed beer and which the youngsters had named the Centrey-Bar.

We didn’t eat together anymore, but we still held union   once a week. Sometimes we premiered new movies beamed straight from Earth. Other weeks were taken up by ship business or celebrations.

We had shed a lot of mass: sloughed off the looser, friable material and sent it back to the main body of the comet where we could pick it up any time. The Liberty was now a sprightly twenty five hundred tonnes, five times her launch mass and more massive even than the orbital shipyard where she had been built.

Now each family had a suite of rooms to itself and the tunnelling was still ongoing. Maria Cosatti, Diana and Frank’s daughter, was nearly sixteen and she had been going steady with one of the Mendenhall twins for nearly two years. This first generation of born spacefarers had grown up quickly. The smart money was on a marriage as soon as the next apartment was ready and a third generation soon after that despite the protestations of Diana, the soon-to-be first grandma in space.