Helios 1.6

To Alice, it seemed like years went by without count before she was again alone with John, as she was on the day that he had cautioned her against fear. In their next private meeting, which indeed did happen some months later (though not quite the massive span of time Alice had imagined it to be), they did not say a word to each other. But Alice stole looks at him, and John, seeming always self-possessed, looked on her again with his steady gaze. It might have been a disconcerting thing to her if she had not recalled it so powerfully from the day of her appointment. She remembered the surge of terror inside her, and how it met the pressure of his regard, of his hand on her shoulder. He had helped her to transmute that feeling, and to shake off her paralysis.

 

In those months that had passed before this second meeting, she had made him, in her mind, an anchor. They merely crossed each other as strangers on the ship, but as his eyes met hers, lifting, catching a light that might have been construed as affirmation or even respect, she recalled his words. You can’t be afraid. And though she did not speak another word to him--had not, in fact, spoken a word to him on even the day that he first provided her his strict brand of comfort—she felt an intangible communication with him was possible. With her eyes, she thought, she could write to his, as if on a fieldscreen. She told him everything in stolen seconds along corridors, in-between brief, wordless greetings. She told him the terror still lived inside of her, but that she had buckled it down in her soul, just as he had instructed. She told him of her unhappiness, and of the terrible secret of the ship. John, she knew, would never tell, and would never be afraid.

 

After that second wordless meeting, which ended with John taking Alice’s hand in a gesture that was certain, they saw each other each and every day. In mere weeks they were coupled, and it was silently recorded in the Chronbook by one of the senior clerks. No celebration nor questioning was given nor required of them. They simply did as they pleased and the carrying out of the thing, which was admittedly novel for the crew, Alice being the first female captain, and the first one to take post as young (and unattached) as she, was entirely her and John’s affair.

 

She thought of him now, dead. Wasn’t it true that they had had years together, that they had had a child? Alex was as much his father as his mother in shape and character. He was steady but sensitive. Alice found that Alex’s questions bore a tone of certainty. He knew that the inquisition was leading him down a path to something. He arrived at conclusions empirically. Like both his parents, he had sense. She wished that he had more of his father’s stolidity, but his tenderness and the subtlety of his

emotion made her heart leap secretly with a quiet, empathetic sort of pride. Couldn’t she allow herself to experience the thrill of the man who had been hers, her human partner, through this child of theirs?

 

But Alice could not. She closed her eyes to seek him out and only found his corpse, recalled him as a flame whose memory was subsumed, in her mind, by the smoke of having been put out. With John’s presence withdrawn from the world--and hers was truly a small one—Alice felt, acutely, a void. As vital as John had been, his gaze, his unwavering nerve--John, the monolith--had, too, succumbed to death. If John could go, then, someday, every soul on the ship would float out to space to have its final dance with the stars.

 

The first crewmember came in and broke her meditation, which had crept away from nothingness and towards this contemplation of her family and her mourning. She shook off the veil of her mood and greeted them as them came in. She was almost always rather personal with them, easier than she was with anyone else. She knew how lonely it could be at the bridge, not working with the human systems, destined to stand at the helm and meet the universe headon.

__________

Alex came home to a darkened room. It was empty, as it always was in the hour he returned from the training wing. The door was unlocked and pushed open easily. Nearly nothing was ever closed off to anyone. In a small system, all must first be explored, known, and forgotten. It was a special kind of forgiveness that was practiced on the ship. Children who did not perform their assignments were given only a silent reprimand, urged again to their work. Almost all children did as they were told, because there was little else to do on the Helios. It was a ship meant for the survival of the biological being, and the crew of the Helios trailed their humanity behind them. It was a stowaway, something that had to be reinvented as the crew moved through the insular years of the ship’s trek.

 

As in the years of prehistory, before the ability to write and read was widely held, or systems of written communication were simply not in existence, the aspects of life which were, as the Helios’ founders wrote, “extraneous”, were passed along in speech. The Helios had the Chronbook, which was a written account of all of the happenings on the ship. Major exchanges and interactions found their way into the Chronbook through the web of record clerks, who kept it tediously up to date.

 

Everything else, though--the feelings that filled Alex and the other children-- went unsaid. Control systems were tightened after the First Rift and the youngest members of Helios’ population were forced to learn more, and more quickly. The urgings of the heart--whether to sadness, loneliness, and, rarely, joy—only came in little upwellings, expressed as murmured oaths to gods invented by current and previous passengers on the ship.

 

Alex went to the metal desk. Upon it were papers belonging to his mother, a neat, short pile, cleanly kept. Among them was a manual—the captain’s manual--which, though being more than a hundred years old, was still crisp and unworn at the edges. He opened a drawer, revealing a deck of infokeys, all neatly tucked into their tubes. He lifted the first layer, under which another layer had been stored as the first. Alex reached down into this space and into the recesses of the desk, feeling with his fingers for the familiar ledge, careful for the place or two where he’d wounded himself on a sharp end. After a moment, he pulled his hand from the drawer, replaced the first storage deck, and turned to the fieldscreen mounted by the desk.

 

It was three months ago that Alex found the hidden compartment in his mother’s desk. He knew well what he was doing, possessing a strong and instinctive love, as is present in many children, of the secretive--the first seed of a belief in something more.

 

Alex had opened all of his mother’s infokeys. Traditionally, these materials were meant only for the persons assigned to the tasks or positions which the infokey addressed. As captain of the ship, Alice was expected to be, at least in a cursory fashion, familiar with all systems, and so here, in the room, Alex had access to a wealth of information that children elsewhere in the ship (should they have even desired it) would never have. He read, voracious at first, with the kind of eagerness often reserved for only the sweetest kinds of indulgences. Then the banality of the reading material began to seep in around the edges. The thrill of the act was dampened by the subject matter. It was a manual for all the most mundane aspects of life on the ship. Still, Alex had read on.

 

As he held the hidden infokey in his hand, he remembered the day he found it. There was a tiny scar on his finger from where he also first found the sharp edge of the desk’s innards. He remembered the images, and shivered. The thrill of this thing was greater than anything Alex had ever known, and filled him with a sensation foreign to him; a thing without words. Something he had not been taught, or told, in his 12 years of life. It was as if a vestigial organ suddenly shook awake in him, and he opened his eyes a little wider, seeing a little more, possessing now a special vision, and sensing, within himself, a deeper wanting. The video had changed him. The day after he first loaded the secret infokey, he moved through the ship’s corridors like a stranger. The images were now more real, more a part of him than the Helios could ever be. But this idea did not come to Alex in a way that was singular, articulate; instead, he felt a sort of mixed repulsion and fear. Was it the wastes of space that now seemed so terrible to Alex? From the first day of control, the children knew the emptiness that lurked outside the hull of the ship like the wolf huffing at the door. Later, they learned, they would all go out to meet it one day. They watched their parents and grandparents go. They watched more

children come. It was a system. It could never be personal, it only was, and the job of each person on the Helios was to perform their role in it as well as they could, to maintain the ship’s optimal operation.

 

Here was something else about the key, then, which stirred Alex. Afterwards, he knew acutely the littleness of his life. Even in this momentous, singular enterprise (another fact which was impressed upon the children of the Helios—the very extraordinariness of this thing, of which they were born a part), the child of the Captain, he knew he was nothing; an alien seed that, lightyears from the womb of its parent fruit, now bloomed, a happy accident. It was strange that Alex should have thought so darkly. But the infokey had thrown a light in his mind.

 

This life—the Helios as a whole, a single unit of life, comprised of the entire crew, their ancestors

and descendants—was collective. And as Alex felt himself repulsed by the very walls that saved him from certain death, he, too, felt the need to tear himself from the node he occupied in the web of the ship’s existence. Because the video had shown him that something could belong to him, and to him alone—that something could be private. He could experience something that was not meant to be  passed to another, or that he had not merely inherited from his forefathers before him.

 

As the infokey ran the startup sequence on the screen, Alex moved over to the secondary input. This one was older than most, and did not take fieldscreen manipulations as most others did. He did not even have to emulate his mother’s password. A few clicks, and Alex had opened the only thing he ever knew to have been kept secret on the Helios. Maybe, he thought, sometime before, it was not meant to be hidden. It had been for everyone.

 

He went instinctively to a file. He knew most of them now, had memorized the abstract permutations of numbers and shapes, his favorites. The image leapt up before him. The thing on the screen was a tree. And Alex had learned as much from the subfile data, and then loaded the old lexicon infokey so that he could learn more about the image he had discovered. He learned that they had grown in abundance on the earth from which his forebears had come.

 

Alex approached the screen, compelled to it. It hadn’t been meant for the fieldscreen. The video was made in two dimensions and stuck flatly against the wall. But as he came close to the image, now as wondrous to him as it had been three months ago, he reached up to it as if he expected to touch its leaves. He would’ve buried himself in the video, if he could’ve—that was the physical sensation that overcame him, powerful and urgent. Instead he turned off the viewer decisively, knowing the Captain would be home shortly, and that these moments alone, with the phantom things of an earth long behind him, were the only thing that could sustain him, were the only thing in his life that he could not stand to lose.