By Wes Parish

All space flight is cutting loose from the time and place of one planet and moving towards the time and place of another planet. All space flight exists between the here and now of one place and the here and now of another place. In between the two places, you exist in a vacuum... 

So it was, on a December the 23rd of Earth’s year CE 2205, I left for the (most likely) Day 12 of Year 195 Since Arrival of Proxima Centauri’s Outermost.

Duration of voyage: 76 years. 76 years during which I would be dead to the world. Most of that travel would be spent in suspended animation. 76 years, during which my daughters, Roseanne and Alison, and my son, Alexander, would grow old and die, and the news of my grandchildren and their grandchildren, would be old news by the time I was woken, decanted from the bottle, at Proxima Centauri’s Outermost.

So why was I going? Overspecialisation. There is now no market for gravitational engineers inside Mercury’s orbit, and no tenure for lecturers in anything so specialised outside that orbit. Give the big corps another twenty years, and they’ll be begging for subsidies to train new gravitational engineers, but for the time being, they’d rather have me rot.

My ex-partner, Anette, heard through the grapevine and rang me up to curse my luck and offer some condolences.

***

The long and short of it was I was invited to one final meal with my children. “They’ll miss you terribly,” she said. “You owe it to them to see them before you leave.”

I admit I didn’t expect much of that evening. I managed to get along with Jang Lao, Anette’s new partner, but that was because we were both geeks, and found geeking out on the topics of computer-enhanced perception — me on gravitonics, him on neurosurgery — irresistible, with Anette getting frustrated and finally calling us down to earth...Jang Lao on one previous occasion brought his sister along with him, with it seems, the intention of matchmaking, but that was not a pleasant evening. Xiexie was pleasant, and made the effort to keep up with us, but Anette got jealous and was cold and distant, and made her displeasure plain to Jang Lao, poor chap.

We had then gone for six months without talking, the longest we’ve ever been like that, until the kids complained and drove her to call me up and apologise. (Later I found out that Xiexie had accepted a job at the Developmental Psychology section of Sydney Hospital, way out of the way, and so Anette had probably felt she was safe. Ex-wives aren’t supposed to be jealous of other women taking an interest in their ex-husbands, but clearly I didn’t know much. Poor poor pitiful me.)

Roseanne was now a diffident twelve-year-old going on eighteen but showing signs of developing loveliness all the same, while Alison was an argumentative ten. Nine year old Alex insisted on sitting on my knee for most of the time before and after the meal in the lounge of the Yacht Club. Hence the arguments with Alison, and, I suspect, Roseanne’s diffidence — she it seemed, also wanted to sit on my knee, while proclaiming loudly that all that was kid’s stuff, and she was much too old for that. One of the waitresses started giggling when she heard that, and said something privately in Roseanne’s ear: Roseanne blushed.

“This is going to be like those three occasions you were on Mercury: nerve-wracking for us,” Anette said. “Still, there’s not a lot you could do, is there?”

“I would not advise going into storage here,” Jang Lao said. “Rates could hike quite easily, and then you’d be decanted, out on the street, out of pocket, and still out of work. If I wasn’t married, I’d consider it myself.”

“That’ll be enough of that talk!” Anette said, rather sharply. “You’ve got responsibilities now!”

He laughed. “I’m not likely to forget, dear.”

Turning to me, he then asked, “How did you get this job?”

“Gravitational engineers aren’t exactly common. One day a few years ago, checking out the jobs, and there it was: ‘Gravitational Engineer wanted. Enthusiastic gravitational engineer needed on Proxima Centauri’s Outermost to maintain the gravitational energy accumulator on the Innermost.’ I sent away for more information and it came back eight years later: with my qualifications and experience I was automatically accepted. Three others also applied, and I knew all three — we’d worked on the current Mercury power station, and we’d been cross-referenced, so they were accepted as well. Fortunately there was a starship going to the Alpha Centauri system, so it’s dropping us off when we get to within cooee of Proxima.”

“I wish you weren’t going, Daddy.” Alison had come up after playing — and losing — a game with Roseanne, and tried to push Alex off my knee.

“Hey, wait on,” I said. “There’s room for you both. You just need to ask nicely, sweetie.”

Just then the maitre d’ came to inform us that the first course was being served and would we now take our places...holding on to two children while a third stuck close behind me, I managed to get to the table. Anette looked on with pride.

The only other thing noteworthy about that meal, was that Xiexie came in slightly later, and took her seat next to me, dislodging a much-disgruntled Roseanne and earning a fierce glare from Anette. “I’ve been working late,” she said by way of explanation. “One of the children’s suffering a badly diagnosed neurological disease and I only remembered this farewell dinner at the last moment. It’s heartbreaking. By the way, Anette, congratulations on your next child!”

I haven’t seen Anette discomforted often. This was a rare occasion.

“She hasn’t told you? Now I’m going to be a real aunt, not just an adopted one!” Xiexie said proudly. “Three cheers all around — and I wish you were staying on Earth. You’d make life so much more interesting for...us.”

***

Saying goodbye to my other relatives and friends was not so fraught with unspoken expectations and...everything. I went to the space elevator terminal in Kenya and made my way skywards with little fuss.

Then into the shuttle taking us to the Proxima Starcraft that would link to the Rigil Kent Starcraft that was taking extra settlers to the Alpha Centauri colony. Along the way I got back in touch with the other gravitational engineers and we no doubt mystified some of the other passengers with exotic jargon.

Then the injections to slow down the body functions and test our capability to endure the medication. Hibernation platforms are big business for interstellar travel companies. The funding for their research would’ve paid for a good-sized continent-wide war in previous centuries. It’s why most of the richer countries — China, South Africa, Brazil, Iran, India and Singapore — have such longevity. It gets fed back into their health systems.

Then we docked. Off the shuttle and floating into the Proxima Starcraft.

Then further injections to slow us right down, the various biochemical antifreeze defenses against freezing to death, finding arteries while our blood was still flowing fast enough to make veins and arteries stand out, then fitting us up to the blood oxygenators and blood scrubbers, and then, the final injections and down the lids came on our hibernators.

You are not supposed to dream when you are asleep at about two or three degrees Centigrade.

It is supposed to be impossible.

So they say. So they say.

***

I have no way of knowing when the first thought intruded into my unconscious mind. But I remember distinctly feeling as though Anette’s arms were around me and she was comforting me — somehow. And it wasn’t the time Roseanne had broken her arm climbing gum trees in the Blue Mountains. This wasn’t that holiday, I was absolutely sure of that. Though how I could be sure with practically zero brain function, I do not know.

But Anette was broken-hearted. It was as if she was calling out my name, and saying that Jang Lao was dying. Several malignant cancers competing at eating him alive. And so she had turned to me for comfort.

I reached out to her, somehow, as if I was giving her a hug, and...I felt that giving and receiving comfort for a long, long time.

It faded into blankness, as it should’ve been for the duration of the voyage.

Again, I don’t know when or how, but I felt a surge of joy. Roseanne was overflowing with joy.

And then a deeper flow of joy from Anette. How I differentiated between the two of them I’ll never know. But I could tell between the effervescent joy of my daughter and the happiness of my former wife. I knew when I woke up, that my oldest daughter had married.

Again, with next to zero brain function. I don’t know how that happened.

Later, and I’m not sure how much later, I felt words forming in my mind. Slowly, as if the person thinking those words was in great pain and found concentration hard.

“I love you, and I’ve loved you forever, it seems. Even our quarrels...I had to leave you, you know. Our kids...I loved you for accepting it without hatred. I wish I had told you earlier. I’m dying, and I love you...”

If I had been able to, I would’ve wept. But then the blankness came down and nothing happened...then a stab of delight and fear, and then a long dying scream of pain...from Alex.

You are not supposed to dream when you are asleep at about two or three degrees Centigrade.

You are supposed to be like the dead. But Morpheus is also the god of delusions, delirium, nightmare...

What had happened to Alex? I knew he had died, but how?

You are not supposed to dream when you are asleep at about two or three degrees Centigrade.

***

A much greater time later — much, much later as people measure time while in cryo-hybernation — I heard some distant noises. Very, very faint at first, like something being shouted at you from across the Waikato or the Murray. Then increasingly louder.

Tick, tick, tick, tick...whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh... 

My toes and fingers tingled. My arms and legs ached. I think my head ached. Then again, it might not have. But my lungs hurt, both from the cold and the fact that they were now gasping for breath, though the air was chilly that was being pumped into them. My nose itched. I sneezed.

Tihei mauri ora, as an ancient Maori expression had it: a sneeze, there is life!

It is superfluous to add that my gut was sore, and I desperately needed to go to the loo. My nostrils were assailed by a stench that informed my hardly working brain that I had pissed myself.

Great. Just great. A spacecraft that can cross four light-years without breaking down, and we humans still are prone to slack bladders when we wake from cryo-hybernation! What bloody use are we?!?

The noises — did I tell you about the noises? — grew louder, but at the same time, less invasive. I opened my aching eyes, and blinked away 76 years of sleep. No sleeping beauty I! If Cinderella or whoever it was, had had to kiss a sleeping beast like me, she would’ve run in terror screaming all the way. Anette never had to face such a monster as I surely was!

Anette?!? My god, had she rung to tell me she was dead? No, she couldn’t have. Then how the hell did I know she was dead? Roseanne would be a grandmother by now, and how did I know that? Alex!!?! What had happened to Alex!?!?

It was fortunate that some of the crew came through together with some others who I didn’t recognise, to unlock the hybernator lids and help me out. Though the wheelchairs they were pushing along the velcro-lined corridor did not inspire confidence in my recovery.

But soon I was relieving my bowels of the hybernation plug that had slowly but surely built up over 76 years of a metabolism running at next to zero...

Then into the bath and the exercises, while my muscles screamed at the very idea of shifting their own weight...

Anette? Alex?!? I didn’t have time to think. But tears came to my eyes when their names came to mind. One of the newer medical people, from the spaceship that the Outermost had sent to meet us while we were decelerating, laughed when tears came. “They’re a sign of life, caro,” she said. “You’re luckier than your young friend. His heart had stopped. What a tragic waste. Still, you won’t have time to do much mourning. Your crew aren’t the only lot to suffer.”

But she never added anything to that, and when I tried to ask for further details, she shut up, as did the rest of the Outermost’s medical crew.

The rest of the time, we exercised ourselves back into some image of health, then they brought us into the high-grav exercise regime. Outermost has a gravity a third greater than Earth’s.

It took us six months before our spacecraft swam into orbit around Outermost. Six months of watching a tiny grey dot on the screens slowly grow to a crescent, then a gibbous phase then a full world below us. All grey, water ice and dry ice and methane ice on the landscape that greeted our eyes.

“I suppose it’s a bit late to want to go home?” I asked.

***

My “guesses” — I suppose you could call them that — were accurate. Anette had died — of cancer, as it turned out. Roseanne was now a great-grandmother. Alex...Alex, it turned out, had won a surfing competition at Surfers Paradise to surf from Near Earth Orbit into the atmosphere. But his surfboard had been faulty and he had burned up. Both his girlfriend in Surfers and his girlfriend in Honolulu had been traumatised by his death, globally viewed by millions, but as it also happened, both discovered they were in the early stages of pregnancy...and Roseanne had “adopted” both of them as “sisters”. So I was now a great-great-grandfather. Several times over.

And Alison had never married. She had become a musician, much to everyone’s surprise, and the stories of her lovers had been staple news media footage for most of her life. Mostly her lesbian ones. Her male lovers had been few and far between.

News several decades old is by definition old news. But when you’re hearing it for the first time, it’s very new news.

Did I travel 76 years into my personal future just to learn that?

I had come here to do a job. It was high time I started getting my mind prepared for that.

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