This is a draft version of a chapter from John Saye’s book, Longevity and Other Stories. If you are daring, why not subscribe to my newsletter (they come few and far between), and I’ll send you a PDF copy of the book?
I hate new ships. Especially this one. It’s kind of a lonely place, pretty much on autopilot for so very long. I’ve spent years and years in and out of cryogenic stasis just to make sure the food supply doesn’t run out.
For the longest time, I worked off of what was in the freezers. Designed to last a crew of two hundred for fifty years, I lasted longer than that before I’d eaten everything I could stand in there, and some of the rest. I’ve picked at it for the last couple of hundred years, but mostly, I just tend the garden now.
I call the ship my garden.
It’s cool, and nice most of the time unless the sprinklers are on. The irrigation pipes can only do cold water, and there’s usually a short when I start it up. All part of the challenge, though. I’ve worked out most of the kinks and removed anything that got waterlogged before. I’ve planted hundreds of trees in here, directly into the substrate of the ship. There’s plenty of refuse that I’ve turned into perfect compost, so nothing is lacking there. I’ve also ripped out the floor in most of the rooms and installed sunlamps and started growing as much food as I can figure out how to grow.
I’ve got a field of corn on the third deck, and I’ve transformed the aquatic center into a giant lake full of cranberries. I’ve got orange trees, and I’ve got a good number of insects too to help me keep things going. The stings hurt at first, but I’ve toughened my skin with serious wrinkles and injections in the last few years, and pretty much nothing breaks the skin anymore.
I also started walking with a cane. Imagine that. I’m feeling old. I don’t know if it’s the abuse of being alone for so long or the fact that the air in the ship is smelling like stale, moldy bread, but it doesn’t matter anymore.
The computer at the front started clicking a countdown about a week ago. I almost didn’t notice it. The ship is moving so fast it’s almost incredible, but out there in space, you can hardly tell. Occasionally we go by a planet, but it’s usually only visible for a day or so. I got to where I liked to chart them. I’d record every channel of their television and radio, and take as many pictures as I could before we went too far, download as much of their Internet as I could, that kind of thing.
It would give me something to do for a few years at least.
I’ve probably documented a dozen civilizations in various levels of development. On a few planets, there were only cave people. On another, there was a fantastic bronze age going on. A few words were like they were in the 1980s. They never saw me coming or going.
None of them did.
The countdown, though. That got my interest.
I tapped the screen with my cane, really a dead and polished branch from one of the oak trees I planted in the main cargo hold.
A message appeared on the screen saying, “Stop that.”
I waved it off. The ship tended to do this kind of thing. As its virtual prisoner, I had lost interest years before.
“Jacob,” said the computer.
“What?”
“We’re coming up on it soon.”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about anymore.”
“It’s fairly spectacular.”
I knocked on the computer monitor with my stick. It shattered the screen, but everything continued to work.
“Well, what’s that got to do with my tomatoes, then? Eh?” I yelled and staggered around. I started crawling on the floor where I had a patch of pumpkins growing in a bed I’d made of an emergency escape hatch.
I started weeding, with my fingers, just to show the computer something I could still do with my hands that it could never do.
I was pulling out some clovers that must have come over from another patch on my shoes not too long ago. When I felt it, I had been trying to grow four-leaf clovers.
It was kind of lurch in my stomach. It had been so long since I’d felt the effects of slowing down that I hardly realized that we had come almost to a complete stop. The stars don’t blaze past you when you’re going at this speed, so I could have gone for weeks without realizing we weren’t moving if I’d been asleep when the computer slowed us down.
We’d arrived.
It took the ship another hour and a half to move us around so that I could see the black hole that was currently sucking in an enormous binary cousin in a fantastic blaze of swirling light. Not that I could see it, just the material flowing toward the event horizon.
“Now that’s interesting.”
I pushed up with my stick and limped over to the viewing screens.
“That what I think it is? A computer?”
“It’s a class six black hole eating a red giant. Together, they will start a supernova in a couple of minutes. The ship should protect you just fine.”
“Is this it? What I was supposed to see?”
“It is.”
“I gotta get a better look than this, don’t I?”
I tossed down my stick and ambled for the elevator and took it down to where the life pods were.
“Jacob?”
“Yeah?”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m just getting a better look, right?”
The doors opened, and I stepped out into the pod bay. There were six pods, and I routinely used two of them, just to make sure more than one of them worked all the time. I used them to go out and get space junk, rocks, and meteors that hit the ship occasionally it. The arms were really strong.
The room, however, was a small jungle. I hadn’t done this for a while. I’d miss it, but I had to get out there.
The pods were little one-person jobs, about ten feet tall, and looked like little egg people with large open faces on the front where the windscreen was, and they were surrounded in the tightest brush that I could plant in here. I’d flooded the place a time or two and trucked in as much dirt as I could manage, and had made the place as swampy as I could make it. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that there might be a crocodile living down here somewhere. But it just wasn’t possible. If I’d had one thought, the place would be perfect.
Ah well.
Time to get out there.
I crossed the swamp, caring nothing for drenching myself up to my knees, and trudged out to the pods. They were also covered in slime and muck, but that would soon be over. I wiped one clean until I could see the original white and red finish under all the swamp slime, and opened the back of it, pressing a button at the base. The back door of the pod slid open, and I clambered inside.
I hit a small hand pad by the door and it closed behind me. Suddenly I couldn’t hear anything but the sound of the pod warming up and remembered again that these things were soundproof. I pressed another switch, and the pod swung around toward the door. This was no easy feat since the way this room worked. The entire floor shifted around to move the pod to the front of the bay, taking most of the swamp with it. Trees were flung around, and water went everywhere, and this was before the door moved.
There was a hum.
Then everything in the room, all the water, all the trees and branches, and all the debris, started shooting out of the pod bay like a pitcher of tea filled with broccoli poured into a vacuum. It expanded, bubbled, and flew from the ship, then I lifted off, and whooshed outside.
Behind me, the computer was yelling something, but I had already tuned it out.
I jetted out of the ship and turned to face the black hole. It was so massive and beautiful as it was picking its neighboring sun that I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Vaguely, I wondered if I could starve out here just looking at it. I punched the accelerator on my pod, and then sat back. There was a good bit of room in here, though it was little more than a work pod, it was a little roomy. You could last out here for days if you had an enormous job to do, and I had frequently.
I zoomed toward the black hole. I was going thousands of miles an hour. At this scale, it was hardly moving, but I pushed it up as fast as it would go. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and while you couldn’t see much change in the viewports, you could tell that you were moving some. I was close enough for that.
I watched the fuel. It said I had three days at this speed. I pushed it up higher. By now I knew I couldn’t go faster than I was going and that just stopping the rockets without firing the retros would keep me at this speed indefinitely.
I chose not to stop them.
Behind me, the rockets blazed out and hours later, the lights flickered around me. Then the engines cut out. I was closer than I thought. I could already feel the pull of the black hole beside my original speed, and I was falling into it fast, and picking up more speed on the way.
With the last bit of power I had left, I sent the pod into a gentle spin so that I could see the black hole from different angles. Then the power went out almost entirely.
Dim red lights replaced the bright ones inside the pod, and it reduced me to life support only. I checked the console, and it said I’d have about three days at this level unless help arrived. The pod’s computer offered to send a distress call for me.
I declined.
Sooner than I expected, the lights went out, and even so, the oxygen and heat remained.
I was alone with only the light of the binary system in front of me, and no way to turn around and see the ship one more time.
A few hours later, that failed, and I was alone.
From there, I just fell.
There was no power.
It was me and the stars, and I saw a little twinkle.
It wasn’t much, just a flash really between the star and the black hole in front of me. I couldn’t tell quite what it was, but I could tell that it was some kind of ship, hovering there.
“Now that’s interesting,” I said and promptly lost consciousness from the sheer cold of space around me and the fact that I’d depleted almost all the oxygen that was left in the little cabin.
I didn’t expect to awaken ever again.
I closed my eyes, and hit the floor, but didn’t hit because gravity failed and I was floating there in the middle of the pod when it fell into the gravitational power of the black hole for eternity three days later.
When I opened my eyes, it was so bright I couldn’t see.
I felt like I was lying on a hill covered in perfectly cut grass, the smell of the recent clippings getting into my nose.
I felt peaceful and serene.
I let the light of the sun or a moon or some distant star I didn’t know play on the back of my eyelids.
There was no pain in my body.
I was home.
On the ship, now a lifetime and a million miles away from me, the computer was calling my name. It had a syringe for me. A bi-centennial booster, it was offering to extend my life another umpteen years.
There was no one to take it, and no one to tell the computer to put it away, either. Eventually, it ran itself out of power, asking if I’d like the shot before it too fell into the black hole and out of the universe with me.
With a breath that was sweet and invigorating, I opened my eyes.
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