We’d run stripped twice before, and didn’t like it any better the third time. Superstitious types in the mess—and there are always superstitious types in the mess, that’s as sure as death and taxes—they said you couldn’t get away lucky three times in a row. All of us were jumpy, and me…it was my last trip before retirement, and I thought sure the fates would cut me down. Passing a watch alone in the control room, I’d say to myself, O’Neil, didn’t you just hear the whine of the engines change? Shouldn’t the pitch of the turbines sound lower? And isn’t there maybe a kind of sour smell in the air, not exactly like something burning, but maybe the tiniest leak in a liquid fuel canister…and I’d stare at all the gauges, tap them sharp in case the needles were stuck, run diagnostics over and over again wondering what I’d do if I actually found something wrong, when all along, I knew the answer was just bend over and kiss my…life good-bye.
So. It was the sixty-fifth day and I was the only one awake on the ship. Well, considering how badly we were all sleeping that’s probably not true, but I was the only crew member on duty, sitting in the control room and fretting over imagined catastrophes. I thought I was so keyed up I’d leap at shadows; but suddenly, it dawned on me I’d been staring at a blip on the proximity screen for over a minute without realizing what that blip meant.
I jerked into action, grabbed a radio headset with shaking hands, and nearly shouted into the mouthpiece, “Attention, nearby vessel, this is merchant freighter Peregrine traveling stripped, repeat stripped, en route to Mars-Wheel. Please yield. Repeat, please yield. Over.” Which meant I wanted the other vessel to do whatever maneuvering was needed to avoid collision, because we intended to keep dead on course.
There was a silence that felt long, but I wasn’t near calm enough to wait more than a heartbeat. I repeated myself three times without getting an answer, all the while watching the blip. It seemed to be growing, a speck that grew like a grain of rice in water and kept growing, to maggot, to beetle, to moth; but faint, ghostly faint, as if it was barely there. Too big for another freighter, but nothing like an asteroid, nothing like any chunk of space debris I’d ever seen. My hand hovered over the klaxon button, ready to send a panic through the ship, but I was too scared and unsure to sound the alarm. I doubted what I saw. I kept saying under my breath, I’m dreaming, I’ve snapped, it can’t be.
It took a long time for the object to show on the visual monitors. When it did, it was a huge egg, bigger than Mars-Wheel itself, but so black I could only see it as a blot lumbering across the starscape. It was the biggest damned ship my eyes ever saw, and I knew it hadn’t been constructed by human hands.
We passed within ten klicks of it, and I did nothing but watch. Never turned on the video recorders. Never called another soul as witness. I don’t know why. After the edge dulled on my terror, I was overall calm. I didn’t want to share this thing. It was something like a miracle, and I saw it as a promise the run would end all right. Ah, my darling, I was the man in the clipper’s crow’s nest catching sight of Leviathan itself in the quiet dark, and taking comfort there are great and strange mysteries in the places between shores. The deeps are unfathomable, which is a pun and a promise and a treasure and a truth. Near ten years have passed, but the wonder’s still in me. And maybe it’ll rub off on you, Colleen, my other wonder. Yes. Yes.
Now we’ll mop off this pretty little mouth and say all gone, get rid of the nice bib that Granddah messed up, and then we’ll see if we can find where your mother hides the diapers. All right? All right.
VARIATION B: NESSIE
(LENTO)
(SLOWLY)
CONTACT: JULY 2038
My Dear Grandchild Ashworth,
The doctors tell me I shall not live to see you born; and although a sensible man puts as much faith in doctors as he does in palm-readers and politicians, I am inclined to believe them in this particular matter. When I lie awake at night, I can feel the loosening of the strings that tie me to life. They unravel quietly; I have yet to decide if death is being gentle or merely stealthy.
But to the business at hand. Have you read those stories where someone puts a message in a bottle and throws it into the sea? As a boy, I loved those tales. We lived a hundred miles from the coast and had no money for traveling; but one autumn day when I was twelve, I tucked an old wine bottle into my knapsack and thumbed a ride with a lorry heading toward the ocean.
Two hours later I was standing on the edge of a deserted beach where a long cement pier stretched over the water. It was overcast and cold—I hadn’t thought to bring a sweater—but my blood was singing with exhilaration. I ran along the sand and danced with the waves, each breaker different, each filled with water from a distant shore. It was one of the two perfect moments in my life.
When I had burned off the hottest fires of my elation, I threw myself down at the end of the pier and watched flotsam nudge against the pylons below me. After a while, I got out my bottle, my pen, and a notepad, and tried to decide what to write for my note. You may laugh at me (I do myself now and then), but I’d given no thought to this aspect of the adventure. The important thing, you see, was just to send some tiny bit of myself off into the unknown…to think that my bottle might be retrieved by a pearl diver off Honshu, or tangle itself in a mackerel net on the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, or founder in a storm rounding the Cape of Good Hope. I could point to any spot on the globe and think, there, right there, a part of me could be there.
Do you know what I finally wrote? HA HA. IT’S ME. HELLO!!!
I didn’t even sign my name. In the back of my mind, I worried someone might find the bottle, track me down, and say, “Well, boy, your bottle got all the way to Brazil, isn’t that splendid?” But it wouldn’t be splendid at all. It would collapse my dream to some tiny reality. I wanted the world, not one paltry patch of sand.
Years later, I found myself owner and master of the good ship Coventry, a merchant freighter plying the silent dark between Earth and Mars with cargoes of tea and silk and spice…not to mention toothpicks, pencils, toilet tissue, and other mundane needs of life. It was a staid and genteel existence: months of slow calm followed by a cheerful arrival at the colony, where everyone was your friend and happy to meet you. The Coventry was always eagerly awaited.
Like most lives, I suppose, my life rolled along uneventfully. Our contracts were unashamedly pedestrian—I left to others the dangerous chemicals, the refined fission tubes, the lucrative perishables. Other ships might save money by gambling that an aging guidance system would last one more run; but the owners of those ships didn’t ride in them. We spent more money on maintenance than we had to, but we never found ourselves stopped in the middle of a million miles of emptiness.
Except once. And that was by my command.
Halfway through an unexceptional run, I was summoned to the bridge by our second mate, a mercurial sort of woman named Rachel who amused the wardroom by taking up a new hobby on every run: oil painting, algebraic topology, playing the oboe…it was something different each time. This particular trip, she’d been dabbling with some of the new long-range sensor equipment that was just then coming onto the market (Lord knows where she got the money to buy it) and she’d detected a large anomaly some three hundred miles off our course. Did she have my permission to investigate? Well, certainly; our schedule was flexibility itself.
I can’t say what we expected to find. Humanity was new enough to spacefaring that we constantly encountered oddities, most of them falling into the category of “yet another oddly pitted rock with a mildly unusual radar profile.” However, when we finally closed on the anomaly, we discovered it was anything but mundane.