Stranded

Space: the final cold tomb.

Or am I being needlessly fatalistic?

I check the gage out more time, just to see if there’s a chance I might have misread it those other twenty or thirty times. Nope, still out of fuel. And where, really, was the doubt? I’ve been playing this cat-and-mouse game, this desperate dance, with the fuel tanks and the distance to the next system, or the next cloud. I’ve been playing it for – wait – three earth days, nine hours, six minutes and ten seconds. Make that eleven seconds.

The conclusion has been foregone for a while now.

Twenty-thousand miles to that nearest cloud, twelve-thousand miles worth of fuel.

Yes, I will keep drifting, pointing in the right direction, and the energy plating is going to absorb that cloud in a deep inhalation, but the life-support will be gone by then, and the oxygen supply in the both the suits.

That is the maths, folk.

And nothing to eat, for a final meal, except crackers.

#

He did this to himself.

That’s going to be a very unfair thing to write on my memorial plaque – a headstone, maybe eventually, if they still have such things by then – but I do see the point.

I went out here, plunging off into the void, of my own free will.

I want to be a star-mapper, Daddy, When I grow up.

Sure, son, you should follow your dreams.

My dreams have led me deep into space, on the trail of those images provided by telescopes, shoring up facts, looking beneath the surface. This has been beautiful.

But the maths always screws you in the end.

Twenty-thousand – Twelve-thousand. There’s no getting around that.

#

It’s not silent out here. It is supposed to be. But it’s not.

There is something out there that hums very quietly. Not the engines on the ship, not life-support steadily pumping heat and air; this is something at a higher pitch, something behind those other noises. And it comes from outside. I know this is literally impossible – the sound has no means by which to travel, nothing to float on, nothing to vibrate through with which to reach me. And so:

I figure that this must be in my mind. The isolation and condemnation slowly getting to me. This is a slow and all-encompassing way to die. That my mind plays with me thus: I should expect nothing else.

I should only expect too, on my second-to-last hour, that at some stage this piercing, quiet noise should learn words and call my name.

#

A LETTER. IT MAY NOT BE FOUND IN HER LIFETIME.

BUT A LETTER TO ANGELA:

My Dear,

I have at last travelled too far. I have worn out my luck and find myself adrift in space without the resources to save myself, and too ridiculously far from any other life to hold out hope it could – even by chance – save me.

Time is short. But I want you to know this: I have no regrets. I came out here to find the universe, and I found it. It was as beautiful and vast as I ever could have dreamed it would be. I got to bask in its glory. I flew over planets that were only numbers and blurry disks on a telescope. I seeded those planets, and their suns and moons, with probes to record more data. I will be speaking to civilisation through those probes for centuries to come.

Maybe you will never live to receive this. If you do, I am grateful for this chance – to say the words: I have loved you. I have loved you like I have never loved anybody else. You were my fire and earth, you grounded me and you lifted me up.

Forgive me. Be happy for me.

Your husband.

#

This faint sound that swirls around in my mind. It has a music to it. It reminds me of the beat that played in that nightclub when I first took Angela out. The way her body moved in such remarkable unison with it, the undulating sexiness of her white t-shirt beneath that disco blacklight.

Or this other sound, our wedding song. A dress just as white, all flowing satin, white roses in her hair. We danced together.

Proof: this comes from my head. Since it knows those musics; and the only thing out in this part of the universe that does that now is me.

I take a sad, useless glance at the instruments.

Ten-thousand miles – six thousand miles.

Wait. What? The numbers don’t add up.

#

A LETTER TO ZAC. MAY HE ONE DAY – EVEN AN OLD MAN – GET TO READ THIS:

Dearest Zac,

There are so many things I wish I could have had time to say to you, and to be with you, to live with you.

I know what I have done: when I set off on this expedition, I knew I was going to miss a chunk of your childhood. A huge chunk. What does it say of me that I was willing to do it, that I traded so much of your young life for the universe?

And now it seems that I have traded the rest of it as well. I don’t know if you can understand how much it means for me to have come out here, or if you can forgive me for how much it means. My father once said to me: follow your dreams. So, in spite of all this I say the same thing to you.

You are the dearest thing in all my heart, you and your mother. But I had to be complete. I hope you can understand.

Live well, son.

Your loving father.

#

Nine-thousand miles – four-thousand miles.

It’s closing. And I don’t understand.

And I don’t need this. Hope. Hope will kill me. Not in the physical sense of my already-doom, but in the moral and emotional one, in which I made a kind of peace and don’t have the strength to lose that and have to find it again.

I’m checking all the instruments; I’m not speeding up – acceleration has been sacrificed for life support.

So what if…? The calculations spin in my mind. Sacrifice life-support for thrust. Two suits. Tiny oxygen supplies. And the cold to contend with. And that’s if it really is…

I would never let you die.

“What?!”

I will not let you die.

“Huh?”

I will come for you. Do you love me?

And since I’m talking to myself, I give this answer: “Yes.”  What other, answer, at this final time? What other answer to die with?

You do not believe in me.

I-

You do not know I am real.

“No offence. There’s nothing else out here. You kinda have to be me.”

Then why am I coming closer?

I mustn’t… and yet I am: “Who are you?”

I have no name.

“What are you?”

Purity. Energy. Love.

“You’re me, and I’m full of it!” Why can’t I even let myself die in some sort of peace?

The screen lights up. I stare. There is nothing else left for me to do.

The words are there: Why am I coming closer?

An imagination could do that. One that was flinching away from the inevitable. One that would rather imagine a possible rescue than imagine the dark emptiness of a new, lonelier, longer void. I shouldn’t blame myself…

I am coming.

Do not give up hope.

Do you love me?

I don’t know why I do this: I step over to the keyboard and I type: YES.

#

I’m entering this cloud. Life support is gone. Surfaces frost. I have these two suits and two tanks, and then…

Except….

The energy-plating breathes. It feels the mix of hydrogen-helium and it inhales deeply, it absorbs this glory of energy into its skin, through its veins and into the ship’s systems. Life support whirs into re-existence. The engines charge.

These patterns all around me. Sandstorms frozen in time. The richness of colour. The hull is porous to these sparkling particles, these patterns that slide through the plastic-titanium mix. There is something in them that’s almost like faces. Not our faces. Something else. A layering of patterns, only beginning as soft, rounded cloud, becoming sharper, more linear, more regular, as they stream through the interior of this little ship. I can feel the heat, I can feel the tingling as the fabric of the suit begins to burn away. Cracks form on the ceiling above me.

We are one now.

But-

Do you love me?

The ship breaks apart. Golden fissures, smudges of ash and dust. Chunks of glowing metal and twisted plastic sucked away into the density of the pattern.

Will you marry me?

Yes.

 

Picture credit/discredit: author's own work.