Helios 1.7

Reder had been waiting in the same corridor along which the Captain and her child lived. He had been there for an hour at least, arriving at a time that he knew was well before the Captain would take leave of her duties. He pressed himself awkwardly into a small recess along the wall, just broad enough for his narrow frame. It was, Reder figured, a space that an auxiliary pipe might have been put, but never made its way into the ship’s final fitting. Now it housed him.

 

He peered out from the alcove. The room was silent, though the door stood slightly ajar. Beyond it, the corridor stretched on and on. A door burst open in an adjoining corridor, filling this one with the clucky, metallic sound of voices resounding in a near-empty room. Now Reder was sure the crew was free. He had only a short while to wait. But this was a small relief to him. Sweat still blistered at his brow. He pressed himself more insistently against the wall, from the heels of his feet to the small of his back, to the nape of his neck.

 

He was lucky. The two that had come made their way to another set of quarters, and shut their door fast. Again, there was silence. Reder considered now that he should have stayed in his room until he was certain the Captain would be in her quarters. He thought on this: what would someone, some stranger, think, rounding the corner to find him pressing himself into an alcove in the Captain’s corridor, trembling lightly in a mist of his own sweat and breath? He knew he was a wreck, and he saw, in the eyes of others, himself, as they saw him--a thing of misery.

 

It was a fact that no one on the Helios could ever be a stranger to another member of the crew. The truth of Reder’s sorrow had been laid bare for all to see. After his wife’s death, he had refused his physician’s increase on his bioregulators. He had quit them all for weeks. He closed himself up in the room he had shared with his wife. Weeks later, they appeared in his quarters and dragged him out. As Reder struggled against the arms of other men--all of whom he knew, some of whom had even celebrated with him on the very night that he and his wife had affirmed their coupling--the objective horror of the event did not escape him. This was the most violent event that Reder had ever heard of or experienced in all of his life, and he had been its object.

 

That was why Reder could not bear to be in his room. Not with the other men, one of whom was a brother of one of the men who dragged him out of his quarters. Reder knew that he knew--saw it in the man’s movement, in the unambiguous look of pity tinged with disdain. Had he even been there, in the medical quarters, when they sedated him, pumped him full of bioregulators, opened his gullet to feed him? Yes, everyone had been a party to Reder’s agony--and now, he felt, they had been a party to his violation, too. It was his punishment, he reckoned, for not following the rules, for not zipping himself up inside like the laws of the Helios had demanded of him.

And beside Reder’s outrage stood his sorrow, always at work in him, tightening his chest as if with a winding key. He shook down the hot upwelling of tears inside himself and focused his thoughts on the Captain. He had yet to decide what to say--how to say it. He did not want to say it in front of the child. Alice--the Captain--might not agree if she had to do so before her child. It would mean that the boy would have to go to work within the next two years or so, instead of after the next four. The expedition year was coming quickly, and Reder (though he was not well-versed enough in engineering to know the business of the expedition crew) had heard that the harvesting ship was in disrepair, and the transportation tubes in dubious condition. Would they find a planet that had enough materials for the laboratory to render an adequate mixture, something the previous expedition team had failed to do? They had had to alter the chemistry of the feed once already. How had the population changed, or, more specifically, how had this bizarre journey, with its synthesized nourishment, altered it? Reder did not know, but sensed that the bodies of the other crewmembers, to include his own, were narrow and feeble things, anemic looking creatures. He thought now of what he had heard very few other people speak aloud--of the days of earth. What were we, back then, when humanity had for itself a great planet, and all the lands to thrive in?

 

It had been months now that Reder had again stopped taking his bioregulators. If the lab had not been so consumed with the new Nutrition Project, they would have caught him long ago. But the technicians assigned to monitor the population via regular blood draws had been reallocated to the Nutrition Project. Nutrition Project, Reder repeated to himself. As if its goal were to improve upon something, the food sources they already had. But now they had none, and would have to venture out for the first hard harvest in the history of the ship’s flight.

 

There had been many--hundreds, in fact--soft harvests. Reder now suspected that they were stumped. He had never been a scientist--was curious, but had trouble thinking in the abstract. There was nothing to be observed, though, in a closed system. The very last of the Helios’ synthesis supplies had run out. They all knew the food they ate was derived from a compound packed away on the ship over a century ago. Carbon compounds had been rendered, behind the magic screen of Helios’ first chemists and engineers, an everlasting food source. All the spare compound had been consumed. How long before the lab was calling for clothing, furniture, the rags that were themselves perhaps the last physical marker of the crew’s humanity? Or for the crew themselves?

 

It was a horrible thing to think, and Reder’s mind recoiled further. He was like a spring wound tight, and at this, he wound tighter still. No, he thought, shaking his head with unconscious fervor. We are not even humans anymore, we are something else. What was clear to Reder was that, robbed of our context, humans had ceased to be what they once were. No, we could not be people in a universe where the progeny of earth could be jettisoned from an exhaust port and collective memory simultaneously.

 

Reder represented a total failure in the Helios’ bioregulation system. As such, he was dangerous; to imagine that this paradigm could break down completely was deeply unsettling to everyone on the Helios. Some could not place exactly why Reder’s presence sent their guts into orbit. Yet others knew. And how it had manifested was vague hatred and aversion. Reder was left all alone in the mechanical hollows of the Helios, to tune its noisy bell. That this might pose a problem in the long term had not yet occurred to the crew.

 

That Reder had resolved that this emergency should result in heavier programming for children, essentially a more complete bioregulation, might have seemed strange. But Reder knew--and had accepted--that the part of him that moved him most deeply, and which brought him to the captain today, was something that could not exist in the hearts of a successful helios crew. A surviving crew needed to be a machine. It had to run clean. It couldn’t weep for its wives or children. It needed to consume efficiently and reproduce itself only in sustainable measure, and only as much as was necessary to reach its goal. There was a goal, after all. Reder didn’t know for sure what it was, and settled in mind on any place where life could be more than just the narrow corridor of physical survival. But the Captain might know more precisely. She might see things the same way, Reder reasoned. But not in front of the boy.