Coyote Read online

  There were no natural day or night cycles aboard the ship. He slept when he was tired, and got out of bed when he felt like it. After a while, he found that he was spending countless hours lying in his bunk, doing nothing more than staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing. That wasn’t good, so he made a regular schedule for himself.

  He reset the ship’s internal lighting so that it turned on and off at twelve-hour intervals, giving him a semblance of sunrise and sunset. He started his mornings by jogging around the ring corridor, keeping it up until his legs ached and his breath came in ragged gasps, then sprinting the final lap.

  Next he would take a shower, then attend to himself. When his beard began to grow back, he made a point of shaving every day, and when his hair started to get a little too long he trimmed it with a pair of surgical scissors he found in the med deck; the result was a chopped, butch-cut look, but so long as he managed to keep the hair out of his eyes and off his neck he was satisfied. Otherwise, he tried to avoid looking closely at himself in the mirror.

  Once he was dressed, he would visit the galley to make breakfast: cold cereal, rehydrated vegetable juice, a couple of fruit squares, a mug of hot coffee. He liked to open a porthole and look out at the stars while he ate.

  Then he would go below to the wardroom and activate the wallscreens. He was able to access countless hours of datafiche through the AI’s library subroutine, yet precious little of it was intended for entertainment. Instead, what he found were mainly tutorials: service manuals for the Alabama’s major operating systems, texts on agriculture, astrobiology, land management, academic studies of historical colonies on Earth, so forth and so on. Nonetheless, he devoted himself to studying everything he could find, pretending he was once again a first-year plebe at the Academy of the Republic, memorizing everything and silently quizzing himself to make sure he got it right. Perhaps it was pointless—there was no reason for him to learn about organic methods of soybean cultivation—yet it helped to keep his mind occupied.

  Although he learned much about the Alabama’s biostasis systems he hadn’t known before, he never found anything to help him return to hibernation. For a while, he tried entering words from the AI’s dictionary program, in an effort to find the right password, until he became frustrated and gave up. He eventually returned to Deck C2B, closed the hatch of his former cell, and returned it to its niche. After that, he tried not to go there again; like the EVA airlock on Deck H5, it was a place that made him uncomfortable.

  When he was tired of studying, he would play chess for hours upon end, matching his wits against the game system. The outcome was always inevitable, for the computer could never be defeated, but he gradually learned how to anticipate its next move and forestall another loss for at least a little while longer.

  The food was bland, preprocessed stuff, artificial substitutes for meat, fruit, and vegetables meant to remain edible after years of long-term freezer storage, but he did the best to make dinner more tolerable. Once he learned how to interpret the labels, he selected a variety of different rations and moved them to the galley. He spent considerable time and effort making each meal a little better than, or at least different from, the last one; often the results were dismal, but now and then he managed to concoct something he wouldn’t mind eating again—stir-fried chicken and pineapple over linguine, for instance, wasn’t as strange as he thought it might be—and he could type the recipe into the galley computer for future reference.

  While wandering through the ship in search of something else to divert his attention, he found a canvas duffel bag. It belonged to Jorge Montero, one of the D.I.s who had helped the Alabama escape from Earth; apparently he had managed to bring a small supply of books with him. Most were wilderness-survival manuals of one sort of another, yet among them were a few twentieth-century classics: J. Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, Kenneth Brower’s The Starship and the Canoe, Frank Herbert’s Dune. Gillis took them back to his berth and put them aside as bedtime reading.

  On occasion, he would visit the command deck. The third time he did this, the nav table showed him that the Alabama had crossed the heliopause; the ship was now traveling through interstellar space, the dark between the stars. Because the ramscoop blocked the view, there were no windows that faced directly ahead, yet he learned how to manipulate the cameras located on the fuel tank until they displayed a real-time image forward of the ship’s bow. It appeared as if the stars directly ahead had clustered together, the Doppler effect causing them to form short cometlike tails tinged with blue. Yet when he rotated the camera to look back the way he had come, he saw that an irregular black hole had opened behind the Alabama; the Sun and all its planets, including Earth, had become invisible.

  This was one more thing that disturbed him, so he seldom activated the external cameras.

  So he slept, and he jogged, and he ate, and he studied, and he played long and futile chess games, and otherwise did everything possible to pass the time as best he could. Every now and then he caught himself murmuring to himself, carrying on conversations with only his own mind as a companion; when that happened, he would consciously shut up. Yet no matter how far he managed to escape from himself, he always had to return to the silence of the ship’s corridors, the emptiness of its compartments.

  He didn’t know it then, but he was beginning to go insane.

  His jumpsuit began to get worn-out. It was the only thing he had to wear, though, besides his robe, so he checked the cargo manifest and found that clothing was stowed in Deck C5C, and it was while searching for them that he discovered the liquor supply.

  There wasn’t supposed to be any booze aboard the Alabama, nonetheless someone had managed to smuggle two cases of scotch, two cases of vodka, and one case of champagne onto the ship. They had obviously been put there to help the crew celebrate their safe arrival at 47 Ursae Majoris; Gillis found them stashed among the spare clothing.

  He tried to ignore the liquor for as long as possible; he had never been much of a drinker, and he didn’t want to start. But several days later, after another attempt at making beef Stroganoff resulted in a tasteless mess of half-cooked noodles and beef substitute, he found himself wandering back to C5C and pulling out a bottle of scotch. He brought it back to the wardroom, poured a couple of fingers in a glass and stirred in some tap water, then sat down to play another game of chess. After his second drink, he found himself feeling more at ease than he had since his untimely awakening; the next evening, he did the same thing again.

  That was the beginning of his dark times.

  “Cocktail hour” soon became the highlight of his day; after a while, he found no reason to wait until after dinner, and instead had his first drink during his afternoon chess game. One morning he decided that a glass of champagne would be the perfect thing to top off his daily run, so he opened a bottle after he showered and shaved, and continued to indulge himself for the rest of the day. He discovered that powdered citrus juice was an adequate mixer for vodka, so he added a little of that to his morning breakfast, and it wasn’t long before he took to carrying around a glass of vodka wherever he went. He tried to ration the liquor supply as much as he could, yet he found himself depressed whenever he finished a bottle and relieved to discover that there always seemed to be one more to replace it. At first he told himself that he had to leave some for the others—after all, it was meant for their eventual celebration—but in time that notion faded to the back of his mind and was finally forgotten altogether.

  He went to sleep drunk, often in the wardroom, and awoke to nasty hangovers that only a hair of the dog could help dispel. His clothes began to smell of stale booze; he soon got tired of washing them and simply found another jumpsuit to wear. Unwashed plates and cookware piled up in the galley sink, and it always seemed as if there were empty or half-empty glasses scattered throughout the ship. He stopped jogging after a while, but he didn’t gain much weight because he had lost his appetite and was eating less than before. And every day, he foun
d a new source of irritation: the inconvenient times when the lights turned on and off, or how the compartments always seemed too hot or too cold, or why he could never find something that he needed.

  One night, frustrated at having lost at chess yet again, he picked up his chair and slammed it through the game table’s glass panel. He was still staring at the wrecked table when one of the ’bots arrived to investigate; deciding that its companionship was better than none at all, he sat down on the floor and tried to get it to come closer, cooing to it in the same way he had summoned his puppy back when he was a boy. The ’bot ignored him completely, and that enraged him even further, so he found an empty champagne bottle and used it to demolish the machine. Remarkably, the bottle remained intact even after the ’bot had become a broken, useless thing in the middle of the wardroom floor; even more remarkably, it didn’t shatter the porthole when Gillis hurled it against the window.

  He didn’t remember what happened after that; he simply blacked out. The next thing he knew, he was sprawled across the floor of the airlock.

  The harsh clang of an alarm threatened to split his skull in half. Dully surprised to find where he was, he clumsily raised himself up on his elbows and regarded his surroundings through swollen eyes. He was naked; his jumpsuit lay in a heap just within the inner hatch, which was shut. There was a large pool of vomit nearby, but he couldn’t recall having thrown up any more than he could remember getting there from the wardroom.

  Lights strobed within the tiny compartment. Rolling over on his side, he peered at the control panel next to the outer hatch. The orange button in its center was lit, and the red one beneath it flashed on and off. The airlock was ready to be opened without prior decompression; that was what had triggered the alarm.

  Gillis had no idea how he got there, but it was obvious what he had almost done. He crawled across the airlock floor and slapped his hand against the green button, stopping the alarm. Then he opened the inner hatch and, without bothering to pick up his discarded jumpsuit, staggered out of the airlock. He couldn’t keep his balance, though, so he fell to his hands and knees and threw up again.

  Then he rolled over on his side, curled in upon himself, and wept hysterically until sleep mercifully came to him. Naked and miserable, he passed out on the floor of the EVA deck.

  The following day, Gillis methodically went through the entire ship, gathering the few remaining bottles and returning them to the locker where he had found them. Although he was tempted to jettison them into space, he was scared to return to Deck H5. Besides, there wasn’t much booze left; during his long binge, he had managed to put away all but two bottles of scotch, one bottle of vodka, and four bottles of champagne.

  The face that stared back at him from the mirror was unshaven and haggard, its eyes rimmed with dark circles. He was too tired to get rid of the beard, though, so he clipped it short with his scissors and let his hair remain at shoulder length. It was a new look for him, and he couldn’t decide whether he liked it or not. Not that he cared much anymore.

  It took a couple of days for him to want to eat again, and even longer before he had a good night’s sleep. More than a few times he was tempted to have another drink, but the memory of that terrifying moment in the airlock was enough to keep him away from the bottle.

  Yet he never returned to the daily schedule he had previously set for himself. He lost interest in his studies, and he watched the few movies stored in the library until he found himself able to recite the characters’ lines from memory. The game table couldn’t be repaired, so he never played chess again. He went jogging now and then, but only when there was nothing else to do, and not for very long.

  He spent long hours lying on his bunk, staring into the deepest recesses of his memory. He replayed events from his childhood—small incidents with his mother and father, the funny and stupid things he had done when he was a kid—and thought long and hard about the mistakes he had made during his journey to adulthood. He thought about the girls he had known, refought old quarrels with ancient enemies, remembered good times with old friends, yet in the end he always came back to where he was.

  Sometimes he went down to the command deck. He had long since given up on trying to have meaningful conversation with the AI; it only responded to direct questions, and even then in a perfunctory way. Instead, he opened the porthole shutters and slumped in Captain Lee’s chair while he stared at the distant and motionless stars.

  One day, on impulse, he got up from the chair and walked to the nearest console. He hesitated for a moment, then he reached down and gently peeled back the strip of black tape he had fastened across the chronometer. It read:

  P:/ 4.17.71 / 18.32.06 GMT

  April 17, 2071. A little more than six months had gone by since his awakening.

  He could have sworn it had been six years.

  That evening, Gillis prepared dinner with special care. He selected the best cut of processed beef he could find in the storage locker and marinated it in a pepper sauce he had learned to make, and carefully sautéed the dried garlic before he added it to the mashed potatoes; while the asparagus steamed in lemon juice, he grilled the beef to medium-rare perfection. Earlier in the afternoon he had chosen a bottle of champagne from the liquor supply, which he put aside until everything else was ready. He cleaned up the wardroom and laid a single setting for himself at a table facing the porthole, and just before dinner he dimmed the ceiling lights.

  He ate slowly, savoring every bite, closing his eyes from time to time as he allowed his mind’s eye to revisit some of the fine restaurants in which he had once dined: a steak house in downtown Kansas City, a five-star Italian restaurant in Boston’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, a seafood place on St. Simon’s Island where the lobster came straight from the wharf. When he gazed out the porthole he didn’t attempt to pick out constellations, but simply enjoyed the silent majesty of the stars; when he was through with dinner, he carefully laid his knife and fork together on his plate, refilled his glass with champagne, and walked over to the couch, where he had earlier placed one last thing to round off a perfect evening.

  Gillis had deliberately refrained from opening the box he kept in his locker; even during his worst moments, the lowest depths of his long binge, he had deliberately stayed away from it. Now the time had come for him to open the box, see what was inside.

  He pulled out the photographs one at a time, studying them closely as he remembered the places where they had been taken; the years of his life they represented. Here was his father; here was his mother, here he was at age seven, standing in the backyard of his childhood home in North Carolina, proudly holding aloft a toy spaceship he had been given for his birthday. Here was a snapshot of the first girl he had ever loved; here were several photos he had taken of her during a camping trip to the Smoky Mountains. Here he was in his dress uniform during graduation exercises at the Academy; here he was during flight training in Texas. These images, and many more like them, were all he had brought with him from Earth: pictures from his past, small reminders of the places he had gone, the people whom he had known and loved.

  Looking through them, he tried not to think about what he was about to do. He had reset the thermostat to lower the ship’s internal temperature to fifty degrees at midnight, and he had instructed the AI to ignore the artificial day-night cycle he had previously programmed. He had left a note in Captain Lee’s quarters, informing him that Eric Gunther was a saboteur and apologizing for having deprived the rest of the crew of rations and liquor. He would finish this bottle of champagne, though; no sense in letting it go to waste, and perhaps it would be easier to push the red button if he was drunk.

  His life was over. There was nothing left for him. A few moments of agony would be a fair exchange for countless days of lonesome misery.

  Gillis was still leafing through the photographs when he happened to glance up at the porthole, and it was at that moment he noticed something peculiar: one of the stars was moving.

  At fir
st, he thought the champagne was getting to him. That, or it was a refraction of starlight caused by the tears clinging to the corners of his eyes. He returned his attention to a picture he had taken of his father shortly before he died. Then, almost reluctantly, he raised his head once more.

  The window was filled with stars, all of them stationary…save for one.

  A bright point of light, so brilliant that it could have been a planet, perhaps even a comet. Yet the Alabama was now far beyond the Earth’s solar system, and the stars were too distant to be moving relative to the ship’s velocity. Yet this one seemed to be following a course parallel to his own.

  His curiosity aroused, Gillis watched the faraway light as it moved across the starscape. The longer he looked at it, the more it appeared as if it had a faint blue-white tail; it might be a comet, but if it was, it was headed in the wrong direction. Indeed, as he continued to study it, the light became a little brighter and seemed to make a subtle shift in direction, almost as if…

  The photos fell to the floor as he rushed toward the ladder.

  By the time he reached the command deck, though, the object had vanished.

  Gillis spent the next several hours searching the sky, using the navigational telescope in an attempt to catch another glimpse of the anomaly. When optical methods failed, he went to his com station and ran the broadband selector up and down across the radio spectrum in an effort to locate a repeating signal against the warbling background noise of space. He barely noticed that the deck had become colder, that the ceiling lights had shut off; his previous intentions forgotten, he had neglected to tell the AI that he had changed his mind.

  The object had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared, yet he was absolutely certain of what he had seen. It wasn’t a hallucination, of that he was positive, and the more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that what he had spotted wasn’t a natural object but a spacecraft, briefly glimpsed from some inestimable distance—a thousand kilometers? ten thousand? a million?—as it passed the Alabama.