Helianthus, Page 2

picked two well-named guys and sent them up here—out here.

  Hell, they even gave me hope we’d be coming back.

  I was a wreck when I put all the pieces together. Zeph was great, though. He abandoned several of his shifts just to hold me. I don’t know, maybe the test was more accurate than I give it credit for.

  Come on! How stupid do you think I am?! You could collect solar wind anywhere in the whole solar system. The heliopause goes far beyond Pluto. Aren’t they collecting the stuff at the South Pole anyway? I mean, aren’t they? Or haven’t you figured out how to keep your collection craft from getting shot down?

  I get it. Okay? There are more particles to collect the closer you get to the sun. I get it. But why a manned craft? I’ve had nearly twenty years to think about this. Why didn’t you send an un-manned module? A robot could do what I’m doing. The craft could sling-shot around Mercury. If it gets out of range because of solar flares, the robot is there to deploy the sails and you could collect your precious solar wind without any human.

  This mission. It was beat at first. Now. It’s just silly.

  For years—years!—I thought I loved him. We burned a good portion of Texas. The first month. Don’t judge. We were in love. And no one was out here to tell us no. We had no company to be decent for; no formal affairs to dress for; no family gatherings to embarrass us. It was only us—which is why I realize I had those feelings in the first place. I couldn’t truly be in love because I didn’t have any other options. I wasn’t experiencing an emotion. I was experiencing a chemical reaction. What else was supposed to happen? We are the only two living organisms in the entire universe.

  They used to say—I wonder if they still do—that the universe has an edge, a boundary. And though our universe was expanding, it had a limit. It was finite. And it was only one universe in a great multiverse. We were living on a single membrane.

  I can tell you for a fact, they got it wrong. There is only one universe and I’ve seen its boundary. The entire universe, it fits inside the Helianthus. And there is nothing—nothing!—outside these walls. There is no “out there” for me. There is no “back there” for me. Everything is here, what we brought with us. The entire universe floats between me and Zeph.

  It was only a matter of time before I loved him. There was nothing magical about it. Nothing special. I responded like sodium to water. Great party trick, but it’s not magic. It’s reliable. You can count on it. It’ll happen every time you put the two together.

  Stick two people in a closed vessel for forty years and eventually they’ll fall in love. Or wage war.

  (He laughs.)

  How could I have been so foolish? How could I have believed it would take twenty years to get close enough to deploy the sails, when it only took Messenger three months to get even closer? Extra weight you said. Life support systems you said. Bull! We’re not out here to get helium. We’re here to buy you time!

  (There is silence lasting approximately ninety seconds.)

  Okay. I’m back. I thought I heard the velcro coming loose. Where was I? Um. There is a single porthole on Helianthus. I can get to it only by going past the workspace, through the sleeping quarters, and squeezing into the electrical room. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you rather see where you are than stare at a blinking dot on a screen?

  (He sighs.)

  Doesn’t matter. Nothing’s out there.

  Even when we passed Venus, the porthole was facing away. I saw nothing but cosmic latte. I had waited seven years to see something other than stars. Anything! And it wasn’t like Venus was on the other side of the solar system. It was right next to us. And I couldn’t even see it because our back was turned to it. It’s a little embarrassing, but I almost broke the glass with how hard I was pounding on it and rocking trying to twist the whole vessel around. Nothing but stars.

  My father taught me the constellations. He was a storyteller. And if the history books are true, he got that from grandpa. He’d take me camping out beyond city lights in someone’s cornfield. Even now I can smell the fertilizer. And crickets! I hear them! LAMB’s simulator has nothing on my memory. Dad showed me Orion raising his shield, and Cassiopeia who for half the year sits on her head. He showed me Andromeda, chained, and guarded by Cetus until Perseus rescues her. He showed me the Twins and he showed me the Great River.

  Out here, there are no constellations. Or at least no one’s named them yet. I’ve documented some on LAMB. I named them after whatever I was reading and the like. By the way, the list of books you guys loaded sucks. I know all the good books got banned because they would make us homesick and negatively impact our mental-homeostasis, but still. They suck.

  It kept me occupied for a long time making my way from the porthole to LAMB’s console in the workspace to document what I saw and back and forth again to make sure I got it just right, so that if another Naut ever took this route, they’d be able to see ‘Moses and the Burning Bush,’ and ‘Broken Heart.’

  I only tell you this so that you know how I kept busy for twenty years. I documented the stars instead of my thoughts. As soon as I figured out what you were really after, I decided not to give you my thoughts. Since you knew we weren’t coming back and you were making the devil’s deal with the Chinese for their “little red helium,” you were using us out here as a great big experiment and you wanted data. Raw data. The longest experiments in isolation have lasted what, five years? Even the Martian Colonists weren’t really in isolation. There were what, twenty of them? There has been no precedent to the Helianthus, except for maybe the crew bound for Ganymede, but no one’s heard from them.

  What do two men in isolation for half their lives really think? Feel? How do they interact? And you encouraged us to document it all in these videos. And I knew it. I knew what you wanted and I refused to give it to you.

  You have no clue what’s it’s like to be out here. And the nerve of Basil telling us we were going to experience minor lapses in reality.

  (He laughs, crudely and long.)

  Or did I make up that memory, the memory of being told my memory wouldn’t be reliable out here, so that I could believe the other memories my mind was making up? How do I know? How do I know?!

  Did I even come from Earth? Is there really such a planet? My mind says there is and my mind wants to survive. So there is. There must be!

  I’ve resisted this long, but now, now things are different. So, I guess you get your prize.

  I’ve seen God. I’ve gazed into Apollo’s eyes and seen more than a god.

  While the Helianthus was rounding Mercury, I swam down into the electrical room to peek at the sun. We were so near, only a fraction of his grandeur was visible. He was seething with desire and rage. His jealousy was rocking the vessel.

  “What are you doing down there?” Zeph called down. “Your shift is over.”

  He had just woken up and I think was eager to burn off some of Texas.

  “He’s beautiful, you have to come look.”

  “There’s no room for us both,” he said.

  “Well, give me a minute, then you can look,” I said.

  “You’re gonna go blind from staring.”

  “Doofus,” I said, because we both knew it was special glass.

  “Well, if not blind, at the very least you’ll freeze your nose off pressed up there.”

  “That’s what the thermal suit’s for.”

  “Still it’s not good for you.”

  “Am I keeping you from your duties?”

  “You need sleep. Standards.”

  “Right. Standards.” Because, I wanted to add, the rules some engineer dreamed up back on earth about how to live out here when he knew nothing about what it was like should really apply in this situation.

  “You’ve stopped doing your isometrics,” he said.

  I put my forehead to the glass. I didn’t give a flying you-know-what about isometrics. Why in the world were they part of Standards? I didn’t care if I lost muscle mass,
not when this mission was futile.

  “They’ll make you feel better,” he said. “Better than caffeine packs and Z-pills.”

  “Good enough not to need them?”

  “Why do you think I haven’t minded you taking mine?”

  When the engineers stocked the Helianthus for a forty-three year voyage, one of you with half a brain might have noticed that one caffeine pack a working shift and one Z-pill a sleeping shift just won’t cut it. And there’s no corner drug store I can run to for more.

  “I’ll do the isometrics with you if you want,” he said.

  “I thought you did them at the end of your shift.”

  “I’ll do ‘em again.”

  “You’ll waste too many calories. We can’t afford it.”

  “I’d do it for you.”

  I could feel the sun calling to me. To end our journey. To save myself from being stuck in this coffin for another twenty years.

  “What would we do with the surplus pills?”

  “Get some sleep,” he said. “I’ll see you around.”

  He swam off to his shift.

  Is it possible to cheat on a man when he’s the only other living organism in the entire universe? I’ll let you be Judge because my conscience is telling me something that cannot possibly be true. And yet, if I cannot trust my senses, what can I trust? If I feel it, if I experience it, it must be true. There, that’s the truth. I’ve cheated on Zeph.

  It feels unreal to say it. I’ve cheated—no, I am cheating—not with any man, but with a god, with Apollo himself. I fear what