by Derek Zumsteg
Although Derek Zumsteg’s second story for Asimov’s probably won’t do much for your appetite, it certainly should whet your interest in hard science fiction, black holes, and spaceships.
“Black holes are supposed to be black,” Sigurd told the void of unwinking stars, watching the indistinct Sinca-177. He shook his head and stood, feet latched to the ship keeping him in place. Every breath rebounded paprika, cumin, and oregano back to him. “I’m going to die in a blue hole.”
“Sigurd, are you going to come back in or do I need to come out and get you?”
Sigurd ground his teeth and held his arm out in front of him, lining the thumb up with Sinca. The slightest blue crept around the edge of the white suit fabric. “Like a flambé,” he said.
“It’s not like a flambé,” Rivka said, in her professor’s voice. “Come inside, Sigurd, you’re taking rads and I don’t like the look of your vitals.”
Sigurd patted the replacement sensor pod softly, freed his feet, and swung over the side of the shield into its protective umbra. The support structure was insubstantial, wrapping around the modules like vines, unnervingly thin, long smooth curves of dark metals drawn out and assembled in zero gravity. And within, the all-hexagonal cross-sectioned ship components, ugly blocks welded end-on to the graceful main spindle. He trudged past the shattered husk of Hab 1 and then intact Hab 2, keeping his eyes towards the massive ion engine’s cowling forming the stern.
He didn’t look at Hab 1 as he passed.
“Did the shielding look good?” Rivka asked.
Sigurd took his time walking, shortening the tether as he moved.
“You’re busy. You can tell me when you get back.”
At the airlock, Sigurd clipped to an interior hold, pulled himself into the welcoming orange glow, and cycled the door so he could continue inside.
Sigurd pulled off his helmet to take deep breaths of the familiar, flat ship air in the cavernous locker room. It was designed so two could prep for walks, wrangling hard suits, EVA rigs, and tools in and out of lockers in zero-g without expensive and damaging collisions.
Rivka weaved into the locker room, twisting to catch the holds inside the door with a snake-like ease, her long brown hair a trailing cone bobbing in her wake. “Sinca’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Her smile came thin, under wary brown eyes.
Sigurd opened his locker and stored his helmet. Rivka’s smell reached him, the detergent used on her stock science overalls.
“Wasn’t worth it,” Sigurd muttered.
“Do you want help with the suit?”
“No,” Sigurd said.
Sigurd unhitched and stored his right glove, then his left.
“I don’t want to be a nag,” Rivka said, and hesitated, “but I should check your suit before you go out.” Sigurd stopped to look at her for a second, then began to undo the torso latches. “Even if you’re not talking to me.”
Sigurd pulled the torso off. His silver underlayer with snazzy national trim colors clung to him heavy and dark with sweat. Rivka kept her eyes on his face, and Sigurd blushed.
“Don’t you have a tenure committee you should be blowing or something, Professor?” Sigurd asked, looking down at the suit’s waist.
“We need to talk and it’s time for dinner. What do you want tonight?”
“What do I want? I want the cheese and veggie omelet.”
“Sorry.” Rivka smiled, balled, and kicked herself into the main corridor to alight with a gentle thump of sock to bamboo. “Chicken-fried steak it is.” She pushed off again.
“No! Rivka, no!” Sigurd yelled at the departing ankle. Sigurd sighed. He undid the boot fasteners and reached up to pull his feet out one at a time. They came out in a cloud of steam that smelled of rank astronaut. “Glad she isn’t here for this.”
Sigurd dressed in his science overalls and followed the ship-spine passage. A fine bamboo mat flooring covered all the walls, lit softly from beneath, cool beneath bare feet. Sigurd, through long practice, could consistently get half the length of the ship without touching anything, moving in silence, held in light, serene.
Past Rivka’s Science One, empty Science Two, and Greenhouse One and Three, neither actually greenhouses, as Sigurd argued at great length with Burne, the ship’s medical officer.
He reached out to grasp a hold and brake to a stop outside Galley and Social. Sigurd smelled the gravy and breading as he caught a handhold and brought himself to the opposite flooring. He glared into the kitchen at Rivka, smiling back, next to a humming oven.
“I smell breading and z-grade meat,” Sigurd said. “I said no chicken-fried steak.”
“I must not have heard, sorry,” Rivka said, expression not changing.
The galley cabinets were faced with a light wood, the trim and accents in a deep red, warm, appetite-enhancing to offset the food served there. The kitchen ring laid out its major fixtures across each other in a loop—two sets of cooking stations with appliances, two fold-out tables, each with seating for four. Past the hub of the kitchen, the meeting room, white and blue, benches aligned on a plane, for presentations, meetings, pleasant discussions between colleagues.
Rivka looked at him with concern as he passed inside, her hair forming a trailing parabola as her head turned; then it moved past the knot, colliding, collecting, splaying out again.
He took his place at the table nearest Rivka. She drew a breath and stood a little straighter, as if preparing for the opening of a lecture.
“Sigurd, I’m sorry I bugged you while you were out, but I wasn’t sure that you knew that we’re seeing a lot more radiation at this distance than we expected.”
“Yeah, it’s true, I was just looking at your mission spec and noticed that.”
“That mission spec was peer reviewed, Sigurd,” Rivka said, coming down on his name. “All those people didn’t fund this without reviewing the spec and agreeing with me.”
“I bet they did. I bet they said ‘whether she’s wrong or right, it’ll be years before we have to listen to her again. If we’re really lucky she’ll be killed. Quick, find a crew of suckers and get her out of here!’”
Rivka’s mouth kept open, her head came forward, she blinked, and the bell chimed. She huffed and pulled the trays out one by one with a pair of tongs.
“Mmm, mmm, does that smell good.” She smiled, mouth only, as she set the first tray in front of Sigurd, the magnetic surface snapping it into place, then her own. She sat opposite him, swinging her body around hip-first, perfectly into the seat, her long hair forming a lazy curlicue behind her. She smirked, eyes sparking, and peeled back the cover on her tray, releasing steam and transfats to dissipate in all directions. She waved at it with her free hand and poked at the spongy slab with her fork. “This thing reminds me of when I had to do roofing work one summer,” she said, and tore off a bit of the gravy-laden meat.
“Please tell me the story of the one summer you had a job, you blue collar hero,” Sigurd said.
“It was disaster relief.” Rivka chewed, pointed at the monitor showing a Sinca tracking feed. “You don’t think that’s pretty?”
“It shouldn’t be anything,”
“A photosphere on a black hole, Sigurd. It’s astonishing. At least one fundamental assumption we made about how black holes live and die is wrong.”
“Or that they’re black.”
“Eat that before it cools.” Rivka kept chewing. “As long as we’ve got a photosphere, why not blue?” She swallowed. “Is it me or has the chicken fried steak gotten worse over the years?”
Sigurd took his first bite. “It’s not you. You know what I miss?”
“Cheese and veggie omelets.”
Sigurd nodded, worked his molars on a hunk of meat, sipped at a water bulb, and watched the feed with her. “We should be redshifting that thing severely. For it to be pushing out that much energy at ... I don’t get it.”
“Shower and get some sleep. You’ll feel better.” Rivka smiled, nodded, and cradled her tray as she one-armed into the spindle.
Sigurd took a big bite of the orange-grey meat in lumpy blue-gray sauce. “No I won’t,” he said.
* * * *
Sigurd worked in Science 2 with ship course projections, radiation and survivability overlays, and a deepening frown, reclining in the number two chair, his science overalls the only entirely white object in the productivity-enhancing red. No one had liked working in Science 2, small and designed for analysis over experimentation, where to maximize the workspace of each station the designers had built the desk space head to toe, which meant that whoever arrived third got to work lying down with a set of feet defining the left and right of their peripheral vision.
“It’s your turn to make lunch,” Rivka’s head said. She brought herself to sit in the doorframe, cross-legged, hooking an ankle into a safety catch for stability. A long and intricately braided ponytail snaked into the room on her inertia, carrying the smell of strawberries from the door to Sigurd at the opposite end.
“How do you smell good? My choice is between BO and disinfectant.”
“What are you looking at?”
Sigurd sighed slowly, nose-only, taking his time looking over to her. “The radiation, Rivka, I’m looking at the massive amount of radiation we’re taking.”
Rivka nodded. “Hmmm. Yeah. I’d be concerned about that if I wasn’t worried we’d be blown up. Or crushed horribly. But I’m sure you’ll get to that at your own pace.” She looked at her watch. “You’ve got a physics degree, it should only be another hour before that dawns on you, right?
“Blown up?” Sigurd said. “Or crushed? Or?”
“We could be blown up and crushed,” Rivka said. “Technically, yes, you’re right.” She pursed her lips. “Good catch.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I thought—” Rivka paused, wide-eyed, lashes fluttering, one corner of her mouth twitching upwards. “Oh, I’m sorry, I remember now, your degree was in systems engineering. Where was it? Southeastern North Virginia Technical Junior Community College for Alternative Education?”
“Caltech,” Sigurd said softly, eyes closed. “You know it was Caltech.”
“Oh, don’t be a baby. Let’s eat and I promise to stop making fun of your cut-rate education.”
She unscissored her legs and kicked from the doorway out of the lab, hair forming a spiral in a moment of seeming hesitation, leaving Sigurd in the lab with a spectrograph of a black hole that refused to be black and the scent of berries.
* * * *
Sigurd turned over his container to read the embossed label on the underside. “There’s no way this contains either chicken or dumplings. There’s no way.”
“I got ham slices in brine,” Rivka said.
Sigurd blinked. “I’ll shut up now.”
“Did you put this on top so I’d grab it?”
“Me?” Spoon pointed to his own chest. “Sneaking around, rearranging meals so you’ll get ham slices in brine?”
“That’s not a denial.” She took out her ham slices in brine, carefully set it down on a table, and cartwheeled to a seat, smirking.
“Aren’t you graceful.” Sigurd jammed his spoon into the glop so he could gesture with a free hand. “We need to deal with what we know, and that’s the radiation. We back way, way off, take our resistance doses, go for the long orbit as fast as we can.”
“If we want to get away alive, we need to go in a lot closer and a lot faster,” Rivka said. “We need to be crushing ourselves to get out of here.”
Sigurd stopped eating to sit up straight in his restraint, rolling his shoulders against the seat back. “How familiar are you with the ion engine they built to keep you from annoying the rest of humanity?” he asked.
“I...” Rivka paused, took a bite and chewed thoughtfully. “I understand the physics.”
Sigurd nodded vigorously twice. “The practice is going to be important here. We throw stuff out the back at like two hundred clicks a second, that’s huge, but we’re huge. A chemical launch vehicle, it’s going to put the payload through like ... three Gs.” Three signed with fingers, fork precariously held with thumb and pinky. “That’s a couple million Newtons of force. Newton’s pretty small. The second-stage rocket, that’s a couple thousand Newtons of force. Are you with me?”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
“You don’t see where I’m going.”
“No,” Rivka sighed, eyes rolling, “I do not see where you’re going.”
Sigurd scratched his chin with the fork tines.
“Don’t do that,” Rivka said.
“You were probably thinking that we’d be doing a series of ten-G burns, right, taking a couple hours off to sleep, exercise, eat, then back to the burn.”
“It seems reasonable,” Rivka said, her voice tentative.
“This, this is why it’s good we’re both here. Complementary knowledge. Okay, so—we could put maybe two Gs behind two of us.” He paused. “Just you,” pointing, “me,” self-point, “strapped to the engine.”
Rivka blinked. “What’s the use?”
“No, no, it’s perfect for us, amazingly efficient, almost no reaction mass requirements, you do need power, obviously, but we’ve got ridiculous power, and you get great control over the thrust....”
“What do we do?”
“Nothing,” Sigurd said. “It won’t matter. So we do nothing.”
“No, no, Sigurd, no. I don’t know propulsion but acceleration equals force over mass. We reduce mass. We throw out a lab, uh, the extra bike, supplies, anything that’ll help. Any improvement in our chances is worth taking.”
Sigurd started to speak, stopped, took a deep breath. “If there’s anything I’ve learned from this mission, it would be that that—that is so much bullshit. What’s wrong with keeping our distance? You don’t think we’re going to get enough data for your career to resume its ascent when we return?”
Rivka’s face tightened, and her pigtails twitched in annoyance, rippling out. “Fuck you,” Rivka said, and raised her open tray as if to throw it.
“Don’t waste food,” Sigurd warned.
She threw it anyway, low at his hips, with a flash of a smile. Sigurd sighed, watching the ham slices in brine move from Rivka’s hand to his uniform as if drawn directly on a string, and had another spoonful of his chicken and dumplings.
“I can’t believe you did that. If my coveralls come out of the tumbler smelling like ham slices in brine....”
“Sigurd, your jumper smelled like ham slices in brine a long, long time ago.” Rivka smiled as it hit, misshapen globs stinking of salt striking all over Sigurd. She waved, made a quick flashing obscene gesture, and struck out for the hallway with a stomp that shook the table.
Sigurd reached out with his spoon to dip his chicken and dumpling chunk in passing brine sauce. He popped it into his mouth, winced with disgust as the taste hit him, coughed it out, then rinsed with a bulb of water.
“So be it,” Sigurd said.
* * * *
When Sigurd heard Rivka on the stationary bike in Hab 2, the low thrum of the resistance fans and the steady beat of her workout music, he let himself into the pantry and took all the remaining beef ravioli rations to long-term lab storage, making several trips to get them all before she finished up.
In the long-term lab storage module, the airspace filled with bundled trays he’d brought down, Sigurd laughed softly and smiled. He opened a random locker marked on the manifest as unused. Cheese and veggie omelets filled it entirely; an interlocking stack that required both time and inspiration. He stared at it for a silent minute. With his hand trembling and heart racing, he reached for the next locker. Cheese and veggie omelet, perfectly stacked. Sigurd reached in to take one, holding its cold green-and-yellow foil packaging against his cheek.
“Oh cheese and veggies, I’ve missed you so much,” he said.
“Are you going to cry?” Rivka asked. Sigurd turned too fast, still pressing tray to cheek, and saw her for a moment before rotating again and having to reach a hand out and stop himself. “Because if you do, I’ll throw up so I’ll need to go get the tension bag now.”
Sigurd let off a little half-sob, putting his hands out in front of him, tray held gently in the palm of his left hand. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“I don’t remember,” Rivka said. “It’s been so long.”
* * * *
Sigurd ate his cheese and veggie omelet happily in Science 2, sitting in a chair the wrong way, spine across base, legs crooked over the back, still able to use the belt to stay in. An empty green-and-yellow tray floated absently near a scope panel.
“Would you believe,” he said with a smile that threatened to separate his jaw from his skull, “that a year, maybe two ago, this idea came to me—that you’d spaced the omelets, so I went through all the exterior camera footage looking for small reflective objects—”
“You’re in a good mood.”
“I have my omelets! They’re better than I remembered!”
“I knew you’d look through the proximity logs. It’s why I hid them.”
“Well, I used your reading glasses for reaction mass because I was fairly sure you’d be able to track them otherwise. So enlighten me, Rivka, why do I have very little time left to enjoy this rediscovered pleasure?”
“My models didn’t have a photosphere at all. If we saw one, it should be extremely low on the spectrum, all infrared and lower, which is why we’re even here.”
Sigurd shrugged. “Models are biased. You build them on what you can observe, not what happens. Every time we get a probe back, we have to rebuild planetary accretion theory.”
“Emitted particles are interacting far more than we’ve ever seen. We go from one quark-one anti-quark to many-many interactions.”
“Your models in particular suck.” Sigurd paused, held a hand up, took a bite with a thoughtful expression, chewed it while bobbing his head left and right, and swallowed. “Wouldn’t we be seeing some really strange stuff if quantum interaction was going wrong?”
“Yes, and we’re not seeing it. And we’d have seen some clues in supercollider experiments back home, so no to that.”
“Too bad.” Sigurd shrugged. He looked at one of the monitors showing an external feed of the unchanging star field. “I’ve always held out this hope that they’ve invented faster than light travel and we’ll detect signals off some nearby M-class, and we make a left turn and rejoin civilization.”
Rivka smiled. “Me too.”
“I feel ever more bonded to you these last few days, Rivka.”
“I’m not sure how I feel about that, Sigurd.” She laughed, blushed, rubbed her eyes with one hand. “It’s a higher dimensional black hole.”
“Okay, it’s a higher dimension black hole. I’m a systems engineer and I do have an astronomy degree even if it’s from a public university, I’m good with math, so what now?”
“I spun up the engine but there are two faults I can’t resolve and I need your help on a walk. There’s a blown feeder sensor and no spares. We may need to machine one.”
Sigurd’s eyes narrowed and he studied Rivka, letting the silence settle. “We?”
“Yes, you, I’m sorry I don’t have a metal whittling certification. Sinca’s about four solar masses, it’s boiling off Hawking Radiation at an enormous rate, so much energy it’s glowing, Sigurd, glowing, quark on quark on quark on quark.”
“All I wanted to do was go into space,” he said.
“We need to do a walk and fire up the engines.”
“You were crazy and brilliant and hated and followed, and I was a Ph.D student with an engineering background. I wanted to get into space so badly.” He closed his eyes and laughed softly. “And now I’m going to die of radiation poisoning or I’m going to die plunging into a murderous black hole that refuses even to be black.”
“We,” Rivka said. “We’re going to die.”
Sigurd didn’t seem to move for minutes, eyes closed, breathing slowly, and then he opened his eyes and unbuckled.
“Either way, we’re going to need to spin up the engine,” he said. “Do you know the sensor numbers?”
* * * *
After showering and sleeping on a couch in a darkened command module, Sigurd woke to an exercise alert and grumbled his way to Health for a one-hour spinning session buckled down to a stationary bike bolted to one floor of the dodecahedron. Rivka passed by every ten minutes, glancing in but saying nothing. When Sigurd got off the stationary bicycle, breathing heavily, sweat droplets trailing off his skin as he moved to wobble in the modules’s venting, Rivka entered.
“Sigurd, could you wipe that down before you leave it?” she gestured at the bike handles, wet and sticky with sweat off his palms. Sigurd stopped wiping his head with a towel and flapped it at her.
“Use the other one,” Sigurd said.
“I don’t want to use the other one, I want you to wipe the bike off.”
Sigurd planted to stop his drift, shedding a small shower of sweat droplets to float, and reached across to wipe the seat and handlebars.
“I hope you’re happy.”
“No, but thank you anyway. While I’ve got you improving your hygiene, could you please stop taking such long showers when I’m waiting? It’s really inconvenient for me.”
“I need to take long showers sometimes,” Sigurd said, flushing. “I’m under a lot of stress.”
“I know why you’re taking long showers. Don’t think I don’t.”
“Why do you care? Shower later. It doesn’t matter to you. We have the power, it’s not like we have shift problems any more.”
“It’s gross. It’s bad enough that I have to run a cycle when I get in there because I’m afraid you’ve left some ... some deposit—”
“Have I ever—”
“It’s not a matter of what you do, or whether I detect some gory residue of little Sigurd.”
“I’m sorry my sexual functions creep you out, then. But you’re going to have to live with it.”
“If it makes me uncomfortable, I think you should stop.”
“What am I supposed to do? Here I am, my blood sperm level probably 10 percent, and if we really hustle through the system we’ll be heading back in a year and when we get home everyone will probably be dead or they’ll have evolved past primitive DNA swapping or be into robots and I’ll be turned into a sex robot—”
“Fine! Go! Shower! Do your thing! Knock yourself out!” Rivka waggled a free arm at him, pulling up against the harness to wave him off. “Have fun!”
“I will, thanks.” Sigurd pulled to the doorway.
“It’s a good thing you’re sterile by now.”
“Not funny,” Sigurd said, moving away.
* * * *
“I hate that after all this time, my mouth still waters when I smell bacon,” Rivka said, entering the galley and inhaling deeply the rendered fat-thick air. “I know it’s going to be rubbery and tasteless, but every time I smell it, I think ‘yum, bacon!’”
Sigurd sat at the table eating, an unopened tray in the pocket across from him.
“Your lunch,” Sigurd said, pointing with his fork at Rivka. “I drew bacon biscuits with brown sauce. And you’re right, it’s wretched.”
“Is the engine up?”
“Yeah, I machined another feed sensor and swapped it in. We’re A-okay to go and get killed. Too far, we’re exposed and get microwaved if the radiation increases, or we get blown up. Too close, we’re screwed, caught or we hit something in the accretion ... or we’re blown up. Or the radiation slows the ship, Sinca eats us and who knows what happens then?”
“The Acheron.”
“Maybe they ran into a brown dwarf, stupid things are all over.” Sigurd shrugged, arms out in resignation. “But okay, yeah, then we meet them on the other side and compare notes on what it’s like to be compressed into a particle. I’ll bet it’s great.”
Rivka laughed.
“Sit, sit, have some meatloaf with gravy.”
Rivka huffed. “Why do you keep cooking the gravy and sauce ones?”
“You don’t eat your veggies first? I want to get it over with.”
Rivka worked through a neatly divided quarter of her food in silence.
“The lighter and faster we are, the better we maneuver,” Rivka said.
“I don’t know if it will make any difference. What if we get away and nothing happens, and we’ve tossed them overboard for nothing? Or—or what happens if we do, and still need another ninety kilos?”
“You’re heavier,” Rivka said. She gave him a level look with slightly raised eyebrows.
“I’m younger,” Sigurd said.
“Even beyond strict mass considerations. Let’s consider the science-per-kilo return.”
“The science isn’t going to matter much if we don’t get out at all.”
“I don’t weigh ninety kilos anyway. How dare you.” Rivka shook her head and clicked her tongue at Sigurd. “I’ll make you a deal: if we need another sixty and that’s the difference between weather the ship gets back or not, I’ll do it.” Rivka set her fork to click down on the table surface and leaned back, crossed her arms, and stared.
“Are you sure you’d be able to push all ninety kilos off the ship? That’s a lot of impulse power, and I’ve seen you on the bike, you don’t look like you have it in you.”
“Oh shut up.” She flicked a spoonful of food across the table and over his head.
“I’m not cleaning that.”
“That’s not what the org chart says.”
“You spaced the org chart!”
Rivka shrugged. “It annoyed me. Sigurd, my potential sacrifice aside, you must agree on the weight question. We should be stripping everything.”
“Everything?”
“Everything. I’d pull that stupid chunk of moon rock off the nose if I thought it would help.”
“Volumetrically speaking, it’s pretty light.”
“It’s more than sixty kilos, isn’t it? Let’s think about what we can pull off and come up with a list we can discuss.”
Sigurd looked at her. “No spacewalks before then.”
“Are you worried I’ll throw myself off ?”
“I’m worried you’ll start cutting.”
“Fine, no spacewalks,” Rivka said. She looked at the half-dish remaining. “Meatloaf and gravy. I know you shuffled this to the top.”
Sigurd carefully set his fork down on the table, the contact a soft metal tap, and looked at her.
“Let’s do the food. Sauced and gravied first.”
“It’s not going to make a difference.”
“Do the math, each meal averages 450 grams, so each crew-year is what, 1 percent of our total ship mass? Half a percent? It’s huge.”
“We need to cut modules.”
“No. No modules,” Sigurd said, shaking his head. “We’re going to haul them all back and you’re going to return them to their families or their fucking centipede descendents or I’ll even help you bury them if that’s what it comes to. No. Never.”
Rivka closed her eyes and took a long, slow breath.
“I’m going,” Sigurd said, too loud. He got up, pulled his tray off the table, shoved it in the trash sealer, and looked back.
“Okay,” Rivka said, swallowing. “I’m coming.”
* * * *
“Good riddance,” Rivka said as they drifted, a dispersing cloud of slowly rotating packets, silver foil glittering the blue of Sinca-177 back at them. “I hope some alien civilization doesn’t come across these.”
“I’ve never liked aliens,” Sigurd said. “If they were so great they’d bail us out of this. Let them eat pork in barbeque sauce.”
Rivka turned to face up-ship, looking towards the disk of shielding that blotted the view. “I’m going to go walk up and have a look at it,” Rivka said.
“I’ll going back inside and throwing out your 520 gram beef ravioli.”
“Fine. How’s your rad count?”
“It’s been better,” Sigurd said. “Why?”
“We emptied Supply 3 and 4,” Rivka said. “I know you said no modules, but they’re right there, we’re never going to use them....”
“I’ll go pull the tool racks,” Sigurd said. He unclipped the tether join and started to move back towards the airlock. “Do you know how to run power tools without killing us both?”
“I know I’m supposed to be the book knowledge,” Rivka said, “but I was right there with you through the systems training. We spent years in those stupid tanks.”
Sigurd turned backwards and kept walking while waving apologetically. “Right, right, you had that job doing roofing one summer. Sorry.”
Rivka held up one gloved hand and tried to express a gesture at him.
The supply modules lined up after the ship’s airlock midpoint, still ahead of the nuke and the engine, the same long, trailer-like hexagonal structure. They burned away with cutters off the ship’s power supply, cutting and tearing slabs off in silence, letting carved pieces drift away from the ship.
“What do these stupid modules weigh?” Rivka asked.
“They’re like twenty-three K each,” Sigurd said.
“That’s impressively light, but it’s only what, a hundredth of a percent?”
“It’s progress. If you want to throw out the scrubbers and the tanks, that section’s ridiculously heavy.”
“No.”
“Or the nuke, that thing is way too heavy.”
“Hab one,” Rivka said.
“No.”
“Sigurd—”
“No.”
Rivka let up on the cutter, bringing a forearm to her helmet as if to wipe her forehead of sweat.
“I need a break,” Rivka said. “I’m going to walk up and go take a look at Sinca.”
“You’re going to take a lot of rads if you move from behind the shield.”
“I won’t be long,” Rivka said.
“I’ll be here, desperately working to save our lives,” Sigurd said.
Rivka secured the cutter to the hull, snapped her line to the ship guides, and walked along. When she got to the social room and began to shuffle across the shutters, Sigurd followed.
Rivka hand-overed the struts to the giant hunk of shielding moon rock and found a foothold by one of the field generators. She didn’t look back as Sigurd came up the same way.
“Hey,” he said, stepping over the edge and stopping. “I’m coming up on your left.”
She turned suit and head, craning back to see him. He waved and started forward.
“Is there space here for two?” He looped his rope in around an emitter labeled NOT A STEP.
“I could have pushed you off,” Sigurd said. “Sixty kilos.”
“I’ll go,” Rivka said. “I’m ready.”
“Rivka, if I was going to kill you, I’d have done it a long time ago.”
“No,” she said, her voice almost imperceptible. “You’ve held onto it, nursed it, no matter what I’ve done, and I’m sorry, Sigurd, they’re with me all the time, but it’s not my fault.” She gulped. “I know you think it is, and you hate me, so here.”
She folded forward and unclipped.
“Don’t—” Sigurd started.
“Here.” She stood up, rising on her toes just slightly, arms at her sides. “Here, Sigurd.”
“No.”
The inertia of her standing motion moved her off the shield rim. The stream of blue light reflecting off her helmet made her face invisible, and she said nothing. Sigurd’s breath came louder, each inhale and exhale rougher and shorter, bacon in god damned brown sauce watering his eyes until he lunged across the meter gap between them, grabbing her leg awkwardly with one arm, trying to bring himself around, spinning them both. Sigurd snapped his tether onto her pack.
“Crap,” he said, as he tangled. “Hold on.”
They drifted the remainder of his tether, Sigurd wrapping his arms around her waist, hanging out diagonally, her tether twisted across his armpits as they came to a long, gentle stop.
“How did I manage that?” Sigurd asked, annoyed. He tugged them back toward the ship, slipped out of the bind, and reeled in to put them down on the gray mottled shield.
“Yeah, were you trying to strangle me?” Rivka’s voice came higher, laughing.
“There’s still time.”
He locked his boot down and began to disconnect from her. Rivka clipped in and sat.
Sigurd looked at the blue photosphere of Sinca. “It seems a lot larger than it should,” he said.
“That’s a good observation,” Rivka said, in the voice of the professor calling on a star pupil. “It’s diffuse and radiant, so as we’re closer, what you saw before appears brighter, and the increased visibility of accretion elements further out means the radial size is much larger as well.”
“I would have thought that the accretion would fluoresce more in that much radiation, too, but it’s not. It’s hanging out, masking Sinca. It doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s a blue hole, Sigurd, we could find a quark orchestra playing ‘Peter and the Wolf’ and I wouldn’t be surprised. Still, I worry that if the accretion disk is sufficiently diffuse it’s going to slow us down.” She sighed. “And then we’re dead.”
“We’re dead anyway. We’ve just been arguing about which way to go.” Sigurd paused.
“Maybe.” Rivka sat without speaking for a minute, the only sound for both of them the clicking of the radiation counter. “You really don’t think it’s beautiful?” she said.
“It scares me.”
“What do you see?”
“Drowning,” Sigurd said, and laid out on the shield disk, back against one of the sensors, slumping, defeated.
“Drowning?”
“When I was a kid, I went to Crater Lake on vacation with my parents. On the lake, there’s a tree, a full-grown tree, that’s been in the water forever, almost perfectly preserved, and when you look at it, you see it disappear into this perfect blue darkness, and you feel like you can’t breathe, this weight comes down on your chest, you can’t draw a breath, your heart starts going, you’re shaking on the boat, leaning over staring into nothing. It’s drowning. If I’m going to die, I don’t want to suffocate alone in the dark.” Sigurd waited, breathed. “But I don’t want to die of radiation poisoning or boredom from being stuck on some event horizon for eternity with you either.”
“Thanks.” Rivka waited, reached out, and set her hand on his forearm, barely touching it at all.
“I forget about them, sometimes,” Sigurd said. “Sometimes I realize I haven’t thought about them until I see the crew photo when I go to sleep. I’m lucky when we pull out one of Bruce’s goddamn sauce picks. But every day, I’m after you. And every day, you’re thinking of them.”
Rivka didn’t say anything and didn’t move her hand.
“Let’s go cut Hab 1,” Sigurd said, and they walked back to the spindle of the ship in the shield’s shadow.
Habitation One was designed to sleep three and currently entombed five, the trio caught in the module when something watermelon sized punched its way through during their sleep shift, all of them unable to manage to get to safety gear before passing out and asphyxiating.
“The last time I was here,” Sigurd said, “I was running tetherless, hoping they’d managed to seal the puncture, that I could help.”
“The last time I was out here,” Rivka said, “I was putting Bruce and Stucky inside.”
Bruce died of apparent radiation poisoning and took weeks to do it, while all four of them failed to find a cause.
Stucky did himself hours later, methodically working his way through the medical supplies until he hit LD100. Protocol was to bag and space the corpses. Sigurd refused: as long as they had an unusable module to stash them in, why not do them the favor? But it was Rivka that dressed them both in hardsuits and shoved them in with the others, unmoved since Hab-1’s puncture.
Leaving two crew and food for seven.
“What’s Hab 1 weigh?” Rivka asked.
“Forty thousand kilos easily,” Sigurd answered. “We might be able to just burn around the locks and release it.”
“No, we’ll need the plumbing, too. You want to start, or me?”
“Hang on.” Sigurd exhaled deeply, crackling across the helmet pickups, and then fell silent.
“We are in a hurry.”
“I’m sorry, everyone, but Rivka says this is what you want.”
“Sigurd.”
“I know. Let me start over. I don’t want to do this, but if we don’t, we’re not going to make it for sure, so please forgive me.”
“I’m sorry too,” Rivka said.
“They don’t forgive you,” Sigurd said, and reached across to switch on his cutter.
“That is uncalled for,” Rivka said. “I’ll break bolts three, four, and five. You work counter-clockwise.”
“Fine, fine,” Sigurd said. “I’ll wait to cut the supply lines when I come around.”
Habitation One, including its integral life support systems and personal effects, was the size of a single-wide trailer if they built single-wides with hexagonal cross-sections. Once Sigurd cut the supply lines, the escaping coolant, air, water, and effluent gave it a short boost away in a haze of crystals and particulate that glittered in the work floods.
“That’s creepy,” Sigurd said, watching it turn.
The outermost sliver of the module turned a brilliant sapphire blue coming out from the shielding’s umbra.
“That is bright.” Rivka said.
Flashing across more of two facings, a bright crooked crescent.
“We should get in,” Sigurd said.
“Yeah, a lot of reflected rads here as it comes off shielding.”
“Bye, guys,” Sigurd said, and waved. “See you inside Sinca.”
“Positive attitude, Sigurd,” Rivka said. “Positive attitude.”
* * * *
In the command module, Rivka put Sinca up on the dominant projection, its fluxing blue patterns flooding the interior, and played around with tracking cameras on the other screens—Hab 2, Science 1, the storage pods, the almost entirely useless rear-view “parking” camera, switching between them quickly.
“It totally smells like boy in here,” Rivka said.
“Do you want me to go back to sleeping in Hab 2?”
“I don’t want to smell like boy too,” Rivka said. “It is where your berth is, though, I can’t stop you. What’s our mass now?” she asked.
“Hard to say. We have the impulse readings, foo force applied resulted in bar acceleration, but the error margins....” Sigurd made a face.
“We can’t put it on a scale or something? Dunk it in a water planet maybe?” Rivka sighed heavily and sank back into the acceleration chair. “This is weird, feeling weight at all.”
“It’s not weight, really,” Sigurd said, in his best professor’s voice.
Rivka rolled her eyes. “When does this get exciting?”
“When we go around, keeping the shielding towards Sinca,” Sigurd said. “We’ll cut the engines for the slingshot, doing the facing with attitude thrusters. I’m not looking forward to that.”
Rivka sighed, slouched further in the chair. “Boring.”
“Then the getaway, fire the engine, deploy the sails too, maybe, see how those have fared.”
“Yawn.”
“You’ve been cheering for us to get here for years and years, and now you’re here and threatened with a dozen different spectacular deaths.... And you’re bored.”
“Yet there it is,” Rivka said. “You’ve been right all along, I’m all anticipation and no follow-through. It’s why all my papers have great abstracts and crappy endings.”
“You’re not going to write any papers on this?”
“Of course I will. Start with the facts in ‘Observation of Hawking Radiation in Late-Stage Evaporating Small-Mass Black Hole Sinca-177 parenthesis NDS-2012-M17something-something end parenthesis.’”
“Catchy. You really can’t even remember the full designation for Sinca-177 after all this?”
Rivka made a brush-off gesture with her right hand. “Then I’ll work up a series of controversial papers to release with all the theorizing to run up my publication count and build some momentum.”
“I hope as a species we’ll have advanced past publish-or-perish.”
“Your faith in humanity warms my cold science heart,” Rivka said. “I’ll start doing some straight refutations of existing theoretical constructs with the new data and then move on to build a base of support for my Nobel Prize-winning work on higher-dimensional singularities.”
“It’ll be quark-quark interaction,” Sigurd said absently as he frowned at his monitors. “Because you’re sure it’s not.”
“What are you going to do?”
“My first paper will be ‘Psychological and Moral Effects of Limited-Set Food Choices on an Extended Duration Exploration Mission.’ Or ‘Color Description Objectivity Within a Relativistic Framework.’ That’s tenure right there.”
“It’s blue,” Rivka said. “It’s just blue.”
“It must eat you up to realize I’ll get tenure before you.” He split the forward view to the flickering streak of the ions being fired continuously out the back.
“I never realized what a beautiful turquoise that is,” Rivka said.
“It reminds me of reef diving, that tropical ocean blue,” Sigurd said.
“No, it’s too green.”
“Teal?”
“Definitely not teal. It’s cyan.”
Rivka waited for a minute. “That’s back to your reef diving argument. I thought we’d advanced from there.”
“Do you want me to just poll the RGB values?”
Rivka’s face soured in offense. “No! How barbaric. Let’s discuss this over dinner like civilized people.”
Sigurd nodded. “Beef ravioli.”
“I’ll pull some color swatches.”
“Max burn on new course starts in ... an hour. Shall we?”
He unbuckled and looked out from the ship’s stern, where the ion thruster put out a long, straight plume pointing towards the shed modules, sparking diamonds receding into the black, and forward, to the dim rolling haze of a blue photosphere ahead that they reflected.