Helios 1.4
Alex’s eyes were careful. They chased the arrow with
frightening precision.
But he had let the narrative slip. He was only following its
direction as it danced and skipped and struck through the letters on the
screen. In the static of the alphanumeric field, the arrow’s form seemed to
shift, grow soft, like a body falling through space against a curtain of stars.
How many members of the Helios crew had been jettisoned in
much that same way? Alex worked at the math in his head: the hundreds of crew,
those that had fallen ill or grown old. Nothing was kept. His mother had
explained to him once that they could not afford to burn the bodies, for the
sake of conserving fuel. The Helios could not be a graveyard, either—the
founders made it clear that the dead were just that, empty vessels, to be left
like breadcrumbs in the trail of the Helios’ progress.
He remembered the old woman who whispered to him at his
father’s ceremony. She was wrinkled and seemed to rustle when she moved, like
she was dressed in paper instead of cloth. He was seven when she bent down to
his ear, the port gaping and then shuttering behind the airlock as his father
was sucked out into space. “—planets, all of them.” That was all he heard. He
didn’t understand until years later when one of his classmates described his deceased
grandparents as two planets, like twin earths to which the children of the
Helios, its human descendants, millions of years from now, might return. It was
a strange story, one that the children sometimes spoke of. It was another
language to Alex. His mother never spoke of these ghost planets.
Could they ever be real? In the hall of history, there were
old cut-out newspaper headlines that marked the progress of the Helios and its
makers. Alex’s teachers taught the story of the Helios when they were still
small children, never mentioning the secret planets or the deaths of the creators
(two of which, Alex had heard, had happened before the Helios broke through
Earth’s atmosphere). The small sphere of the Helios, nodding silently through
space, was all that was left of human life.
But there was something else. It began when Alex was 9; his
mother woke him from his sleep. From above, he heard her voice, barely shaping
the words, a string of sounds. She repeated them again and again, until they
were clear. They were old words—ones that Alex had never heard before, names
that no one on the Helios had ever been given. Alex listened, night after
night, to his mother’s sleeptalk, working at each syllable, wrapping his
attention carefully around its sound. Eventually, they became clear, and Alex’s
eyes traced their letters in the alphanumeric field: P-y-r-o-i-s-A-e-o-s-A-e-t-h-o-n-P-h-l-e-g-o-n
He then glanced warily to his side. His teacher had been
occupied on the other end of the room by two smaller children, and he was
certain that no one had seen him move the arrow. Alex closed his eyes and
pressed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. It had been
three months now that Alex had passed to the next stage of Control, but he was
afraid--terrified, in fact--of what would come next.
