126: ASTRONAUTS

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Two days later, and after enough failed revivals to convince me that going under chronostasis at such an advanced age did indeed have effects on the crew’s revival chances that the system didn’t pick up, Captain Kae Jin and Asteria are joined by Earl Harriet, a doctor with severe eyes and a gentle voice who immediately declares an intent to take over Captain Kae Jin’s ongoing healthcare as soon as possible. Then there’s Lex Maeryn, a gardener with big ears and a hearty laugh, who doesn’t wake up on his second day post-chronostasis, and Xanthe of Cassius, a psychologist with bright hazel eyes and actual hair (unusual for a professional astronaut), who does. They’re joined two days later by Note Waveskimmer, and… that’s it. Of the two crews who left Earth on this ship, forty two astronauts, we have five survivors.

Sienna Kae Jin. Nae Asteria. Earl Harriet. Xanthe of Cassius. Note Waveskimmer.

And us, a ragtag collection of colonists, most of whom didn’t even decide to be here.

Obviously, we can’t all crowd the medbay for no good reason, so aside from Captain Klees and the doctors, us old crew (or new crew? Surely Kae Jin’s crew are the old crew?) don’t have much of a chance to get to know our new colleagues right away. I’m told that Captain Kae Jin explains the situation to them, and it’s all I can do not to slice my arm open with something just to have an excuse to go in there and see their reactions. (Tinera’s musing about such schemes is worryingly serious, and Captain Klees ends up explicitly ordering her not to injure herself for the purpose of acquiring juicy gossip.)

Asteria and Earl, fortunately, are discharged quickly. Too quickly, possibly, in Earl’s case – Captain Klees hints in low, vague comments that Earl was pretty pushy about getting up and back to work, and the doctors probably acquiesced due to needing extra help and preferring to have Captain Kae Jin’s healthcare handled by her long-term doctor, figuring that as a medical expert, Earl could appropriately notice and handle any of Earl’s own post-chronostasis symptoms without needing to be lying in a bed all day to do it.

So the pair get their old clothes and handful of claimed possessions from a storage crate in SR2 set aside for chronostatic crew’s personal effects and head to Habitation Ring 1. They pause at the sight of the faded flowers on the path between rooms, and Asteria blinks backs tears.

“Arna,” she whispers, bending to brush her fingers across the petals of a painted rose. “He could never put a brush down.”

“Or a spray can,” Earl adds. “Or a knife or a needle.”

“He used to paint space, when we were on Earth in training. Remember that? Starts, planets, ships. I never saw him do plants. I didn’t know he could do them this well.”

“He had over a decade to practice.”

“Right.” Asteria takes a moment to visibly pull themselves together. “My room better not be taken.” She marches off down the road.

Earl casts a sharp eye over the area. “A lot of unclaimed rooms.”

“Only the Friend and Tinera sleep in here,” I explain. “The rest of us… went elsewhere.”

“Something wrong with the rooms?”

“No! I mean, nothing other than forty years of wear and tear. It’s just… well, we used to live in here. And then half of our crew died in here from carbon monoxide poisoning.”

“Ah, that. Of course.”

“It’s all completely safe now; not chance of that happening again. This ring isn’t at any more risk of atmospheric problems than anywhere else. We just… most of us couldn’t fall asleep in here any more. After that.”

Earl nods. “Understandable. Earl is sorry for your loss.”

“And I’m sorry for Earl’s. All those people that you worked and lived with for twenty years, I can’t… I can’t even imagine.”

“Yes. Well.” Earl takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “We all expected to lose one or two astronauts, perhaps, due to accidents or declining health on such a journey. And when we made the decision to extend our shift by ten years, we expected to lose more. Not… not this many.” Earl glances around the ring again. “Reimann’s people die in here?”

“Most of them probably did. They died in this front handful of rings, anyway. Except Reimann himself, of course, and…”

“And Keiko, and Claire, and Mohammed, and poor Ash,” Earl sighs. “Asteria is still trying to make sense of Keiko’s notes. Earl suspects she’s trying to find some reason that everything is wrong, that the notes don’t make sense. That they didn’t do this.”

“You guys were close?”

“We were in training together. Not incredibly close; we weren’t going to be working together until we reached Hylara, but we were learning to look after the same ship on the same mission. And there was a lot of post-Hylara training together.” Earl grimaces. “None of it accounted for an existing colony.”

“Yeah, that seems to be a real whirlpool for everyone. I hope they’re okay down there.”

“We did the extra ten years for Reimann’s crew. When Ovlo found the engine damage, it… some of us felt it was the end of the project, that we’d have to turn back unless we wanted to risk putting the fore engine in use for the journey here. It wasn’t the damage, necessarily, so much as that there was no way to fix it, That was a ridiculous oversight, it made the whole journey feel unsafe. But we’d dedicated our lived to reaching Hylara, and the ship was rated to stay in space that long, so we persisted. The obvious choice was to go under after ten years and let Reimann’s crew handle the last thirty, but we just… couldn’t do that to them. We couldn’t. They didn’t even get to be part of the decision, could we really dump all the consequences on them like that? Make them live up here for so long and reach Hylara twenty years older than they expected? So for them, we took the risk of a late chronostasis. And it didn’t help at all, Earl supposes – they are dead, and so are most of us. If the captain doesn’t pull through…”

“I’m sorry,” I say. What else can I say?

Earl claps a hand on my shoulder. “You have all done well, to keep this ship together through all these difficulties. With so many dead, Earl is gratified to see competent replacements.”

I blush. I can’t help it. An astronaut called me a ‘competent replacement’. The highest honour I can imagine. Earl doesn’t notice; those hard eyes are back on the bedroom doors.

“It should have taken both Habitation Rings to comfortably house the two crews for landing. But here we are, with less than a single crew’s worth of people between us.”

“The dead,” I say. “The bodies. We buried our crewmates in Greenhouse Ring 1. We’re probably too close to the planet to be worth that now, but there’s plenty of space for them, or if you guys prefer we can take them down to Hylara for – ”

“No. Neither of those. They will be given to the stars.”

“The stars?”

“Yes. We will drop them out an airlock. We all discussed this, before we left; what to do if somebody didn’t make it. That is what we agreed. Do you have the dead from Reimann’s crew?”

“Kinoshita Keiko,” I say. “And somebody else, I think maybe Leilea Arc Hess. Reimann was in Chronostasis Ring 1 when it ejected, and the others… I assume their comrades took care of them already.”

Earl nods. “We will bury them in the stars too, as soon as the rest of the crew are able to leave the medbay.”

“Those two… aren’t in great condition.”

“That’s fine.”

With three doctors and only three patients in the medbay, the Friend’s fears about being stretched too thin and risking lives apparently won’t come to pass, at least not until we start waking colonists. I have no idea what the captains’ schedules are for that; neither Klees nor Kae Jin seem too keen in filling the ship up like Sands wanted to, which, in its current condition, is probably a good thing. Asteria heads off with Tal to learn how our cobbled-together systems work, Earl heads to the medbay to look after Captain Kae Jin, and it’s almost like they’re not there at all.

I go looking for some bugs or something for Meringue and Quiche. The chickens, strangely, don’t come to bother me while I’m looking. I find some caterpillars on the okra and track them down; they’re bothering Lina, instead, pecking at something she’s offering them in her hand.

She straightens up quickly when she hears me approach, sticking her hand in her pocket. “They’re so bothersome,” she says.

“It’s Tinera’s fault,” I agree, hiding my own handful of caterpillars in a fold of my wrap. “She’s always spoiling them.”

“We have a rule about giving them treats for a reason. I was just checking and I think Quiche is getting fat.”

“She has to stop giving them treats,” I agree.

Lina awkwardly pats Quiche with the hand she isn’t hiding, and walks off. I wait until she’s gone before giving the chickens my caterpillars. Meringue has trouble accurately grabbing them; I think her eyesight’s getting bad. They’re pretty old, for accelerated chickens. It makes sense to slaughter them soon, before we hit orbit and start worrying about landing. They cluck gently, enjoying their food, and I can’t help but smile.

I wonder if the Hylaran colony has chickens. If not, we’ll surely be able to introduce them soon; we have the canvas and equipment to make space for them quickly, and the array of embryos in storage include many genetically engineered medical birds, designed to lay eggs with various antibiotics and medicines in them. But they won’t be these birds. These stupid birds, that Tinera is so attached to.

Meringue, having run out of caterpillars, bites my thumb instead. I decide that’s enough chicken for today and, standing up, cut my eyebrow open on a dangling branch. Which is totally a good enough reason to go to the medbay. It hasn’t pulled away my new skin, but it might get infected. It might need stitches. Definitely a good enough excuse.

I mean reason.

Captain Kae Jin is reading a book entitled Love Among the Quasars in Lunari, and barely glances up as I enter. Xanthe and Note, who I haven’t really gotten a chance to meet yet, eye me with slightly more interest. Xanthe’s hair has been trimmed close to their head, same as the rest of us when we came out of chronostasis, to get rid of the impossible mats and tangles; they look fine, if a little underweight, although there is a drip in their arm, so they must be suffering from some kind of post-chronostasis condition. It can’t be that serious or we would’ve been informed about it. They look muzzy; I don’t know whether that’s the chronostasis or the drip.

Note looks sharper, and looks fine except for the many scars crisscrossing their arms and body that presumably predate chronostasis. According to the computer, Note is one of the Khemin, although it’s not obvious right now; like most astronauts, their scalp is depilated, doing away with their traditional matted braids, and although their ears are littered with multiple slightly stretched holes for their gather-rings, the rings themselves are absent. (Can’t wear jewellery in a chronostasis tank.) I’ve never seen an adult Khemin without their gather-rings; it feels strangely indecent. Maybe this is how Texans feel about naked people.

Note’s eyes flick over my clothes, and I imagine they’re probably thinking the same thing about this random person wearing an Arborean wrap and looking otherwise decidedly un-Arborean, on a spaceship. “Well met, cousin,” they say.

I give a nod and return the greeting. Without any Arborean crewmates (the Public Universal Friend doesn’t count), it is somewhat of a relief to have somebody at least remotely similar aboard. And Note doesn’t appear to have anything medical attached to them aside from monitoring equipment, which is a good sign, health-wise.

Then the Friend comes in, and I go over to get my face patched up. The cut turns out not to be deep enough to require stitches, which is good. I’ve had enough serious facial injuries to last me a lifetime.

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