What to do, what to do? He wiped his hand across his forehead, trying to calm his breathing. He wouldn’t last long without water. Though he had come out here for solitude and escape from the teeming billions back in-system, he wasn’t suicidal. In the back of his mind, he’d always known he would die sometime, but he tried not to dwell on it. He called up the schematics for the unit and a troubleshooting guide, and despaired at the highly technical scroll and the replacement parts required. Apparently, the manufacturer assumed that the ship owner would have access to a port and a mechanic.
As Max wiggled and wedged his body down farther into the cavity around the wastewater tank, pushing aside silicone tubes and pressing against cold pipes sweating condensation in the new humidity, it suddenly occurred to him that he envied the Kingfisher. He didn’t want to die. He wanted to be that voice from the void that went on and on like a sense of permanence while everyone else came and went. A second later, it occurred to him that he couldn’t be the Kingfisher because he never spoke to anyone and had no stories to tell. In that instant, his self-imposed isolation struck him—the uncrossable gulf between himself and everyone else. He cried for the first time since his wife’s funeral, and violent, jerking sobs tore through his body. He pressed his fist hard against his mouth and bit down, unable to stop the tidal force of tears.
When the fit abated enough so he could control himself, he blinked wet eyes against the diamond-bright glare of a hundred teardrops floating in front of the pit-lamps. He started to laugh. With the water reclamation unit on the blink, he’d have a hell of a time cleaning this up.
He pulled himself weakly from the aftermath and back into his little home. He didn’t want to be alone anymore.
Strapping himself into his chair, he pulled the comm deck close to his body. He took one of the long, trailing vines of the Swedish ivy gently between his fingers and ran his thumb across a glossy leaf. He had made a promise to his wife at her grave that he’d never speak to anyone again, but maybe she would understand.
“This is Max Getty,” he said with a voice he had hardly used in twenty-one years. “Ship Odysseus. You don’t know me, but I need help. My water reclamation unit’s failing and I can’t fix it.”
He sat waiting, scared, his wife’s ivy plant in his hand, imagining the message streaming across the void. What would they think? He had never spoken to them, so would they even answer him?
Within minutes, and then over the following hour, he was extremely grateful as messages of welcome poured in from hundreds of fishers scattered hither and yon. He knew so many of them from thousands of hours of silent lurking, but now they wanted to know him too. He understood that he was a curiosity in their static world, but was surprised to find he didn’t mind. He liked being the center of attention for a little while. He answered as many people as he could, though he was vague on his personal life from so long ago back in-system.
Hours sped by—there were so many hellos and helpful suggestions for his water unit that he didn’t notice the time lag between individual incoming messages. But he grew tired, tired of smiling and tired of talking. His epiphany faded as his voice grew hoarse, and he craved a little of his isolation again.
“I gotta go, folks,” he said. His cheeks had cramped from his fixed grin. “Not to be rude, but it’s been a while, and this has been like jumping into icy water. Give me time to ease into civilization.”
He unstrapped and pushed himself across the command module to his bunk/hydroponics room. He was still hibernation-sick and needed some normal sleep before tackling the repairs. The communications array unit continued to ping over and over, flickering from one face to the next as well-wishers said goodbye, ignoring the irony of overwhelming the overwhelmed.
Max squirmed under the webbing on his bed and closed his eyes, tracing the intricacies of the spreading ivy plant in his mind like a fractal. The messages would arrive for a while. His sign-off message hadn’t even reached the more distant ships yet.
He must have dozed. He awoke to a woman speaking in the next room. She was using technical terms and a wide variety of cusses.
Untangling himself from the webbing, Max pushed back to the command module. There was an attractive forty-something woman on his screen; thick, curly, red hair was pulled back in a zero-G braid, bright green eyes focused on the camera. She had a bag of parts floating next to her head and a magnetic wrench in her hand. Max hit replay and her face appeared on screen from the beginning.
“Max Getty,” she barked too loudly, “welcome to the dance. Maureen O’Shea here, maybe five years farther out than you. I didn’t join the happy-happy pile-on because I figured that was the surefired way of scaring you back into your shell. But just between you and me, all the advice everyone gave you about your water unit is crap. Ignore it. I’ve put together a video of what you have to do, step by step, so slap on your virtual-goggles and I’ll walk you through it. Of course, if I screw this up and butcher my own water unit, I’ll be damned pissed at you and I’ll probably be sending out a suicide-announcement inside of forty-eight hours. Got your goggles on? Good, because here we go. And stop looking at my ass!”
Goggles on, seemingly standing inside her tiny ship, Max couldn’t help but stare at her backside while she disassembled her water unit to an unending stream of profanity. That was his formal introduction to Maureen O’Shea.
Max found that he enjoyed her virtual company so much that he had trouble following her instructions. He had to replay the recording three times and pause it frequently because she moved so fast. Together, they disassembled the entire filtration and reclamation unit and rebuilt it from the ground up using replacement parts he didn’t know he had, or parts that were clearly not intended for the purpose.
Finishing up, surrounded by a haze of sweat and hot air, with old tears clinging to the walls, Max fired up the unit. It thrummed to life, rattled a bit, found its equilibrium and settled into a purr as sweet as the day he’d bought it.
Laughing with delight, he turned the air cyclers on high and watched as sweat and tears were sucked into the intakes. He did a happy dance in the middle of the cabin until he bashed his knuckles on the edge of a storage box.
He had fixed the water unit and was no longer about to die; he had introduced himself to the community, for good or ill; he had met Maureen with the curvy backside; he had wrapped his knuckles in surgical tape to keep droplets of blood from floating through the cabin after the tears.
He had to respond to her. She was five years farther out? That was quite a distance.
He called up the constellation of fishers and located her ship from the Ident codes embedded in her message. A point of light brightened well beyond his own. He zoomed out. She was only a few years from the radius-of-no-return. But that point was subjective. Depending on her age, she could go several years beyond that radius before the return trip would be long enough for a death sentence.
Max paused her image on his screen and stared at it. She really did look like she was in her low forties.
But if she’d been flying for twenty-five or so years, she would have left home as a teenager. That was illegal. She had to be at least fifty. She looked good.
He washed up and shaved as he composed a response to her in his head. Resettling into his chair, he activated the single-point video feed. He hadn’t ever used the virtual feeds and wasn’t sure if the thirty-two surround cameras were working.
“Max Getty here, pleased to make your acquain-tance.” He stopped and hit delete. That was awful. She certainly wasn’t so formal as that. He started the recording again and tried to put enthusiasm into his voice. “Max Getty here. Maureen, thanks so much! Worked like a charm. Who woulda thought to use a sock smeared in grease as a gasket? I’m babbling, but I’m out of practice with talking. I used to be pretty good at it. Um . . . just thanks.”
He hit send and sat staring at the blank screen, hop
ing she’d respond and kicking himself for not sending a message that she might have wanted to respond to.
Determined not to hover, he set to wiping down all the walls where condensation had accumulated while the water unit was off. The receiver pinged in just under half an hour and he stared at it in a panic with his damp rag clutched in his hand. What would she say? What would she think of him?
“Max,” Maureen’s voice boomed out into the cabin. “Pleased ta meetcha. But you didn’t have to shave on my account. Really. I didn’t shave for you.” She lifted a foot and tugged up her pant leg a few inches. “See? Oh, wait, I was trying not to scare you back into your shell, wasn’t I? Damn. Flee, flee before me.” She waggled her foot at the camera.
She sighed and leaned back in her worn chair, hands behind her head. “So you going to talk or what? You going to join us a little bit, or are you pretty much done? You don’t look like a hermit, you know. You don’t look like one of the crazies moldering away in their ships. So call me back. Let me know.”
Max smiled and hit the reply button.
They quickly became friends, gossiping about this fisher or that, talking about their lives. Max stopped visiting the public channels as much in favor of communicating with Maureen. He’d often seen it happen to fishers, but it hadn’t occurred to him that he might be one.
He and Maureen tried to carry on normal conversations with their sixteen-minute time lag, but that quickly became frustrating while they waited for each other’s answers. So they began to write longer and longer replies, letters almost. They told stories to each other, made up or true, and went on 3-D tours of their ships to show each other items that were precious to them. They watched new vids from Earth and argued about them afterwards. They retold their favorite Kingfisher stories to each other.
Then the moment came that Max knew must come eventually—Maureen told him how she became a fisherwoman. The story came after she went on nostalgically for the inner system.
“Are you kidding?” Max fired back a bit too abruptly. “Don’t you remember how crowded Earth is? And the Moon, and Mars, and Phobos and Deimos? You can see the ring around Earth in broad daylight now from all the asteroids towed in from the main belt. All those orbital mansions dug into old, mined-out rocks. Good riddance!”
“Let me tell you why I came out this way,” she responded. “I got a good education at University College Dublin. They had this program where if you gave ten years of your life to Ireland after you graduated, they’d let you attend for free. I really wanted to get married and have my one kid allowed, but it didn’t happen. Since I passed the exams, I figured what the hell, might as well go to school while I waited for Mr. Right. So there I was at thirty years old after my ten years, just starting out in the job market, no money, no status and no husband. I wanted my baby more than anything, but I couldn’t afford the taxes.”
Max was surprised by this hint at her age. She had probably spent a couple of years after she turned thirty trying to get money together. And yet, she couldn’t be much older than fifty. She just didn’t look it, and there were no rejuvenation surgeries out here on the sail-ships.
She smiled wistfully. “You know, I imagined my baby so often that she became real to me. Like she existed somewhere just waiting for me to get pregnant. And then when I couldn’t, I felt like I’d failed her. Like maybe I killed her. I got suicidal.”
Max couldn’t see where she was going with this, except maybe the suicidal part. How did going out to fish and hopefully coming back a successful old lady help with breeding? Not that he condoned breeding. The draconian measures enacted by most of Earth’s governments were necessary. They were starting to have an effect, but there were still so many immigrants from the Moon and Mars that there was a net gain year to year.
“So I came out here,” she continued. “Earth didn’t have anything to offer me. I figured if I could score a black hole, I could go back, buy an apartment with a bit of a view and use the rest of the money to help other women qualify for their kid. If I couldn’t be a mom, maybe I could be an aunt many times over.” She shrugged. “Now I’m close to the radius-of-no-return. Not much time left for my dream. But you know what? That happens to ninety percent of us out here, so I’m not too down. I tried.
“But you. What happened to you back there? Your ship is bigger than all of ours and you didn’t speak to any of us for over two decades. What do you want with the money if you catch a black hole, huh? You hate the inner system. You gonna buy an orbital mansion tucked into an asteroid? Hide for your few remaining years and then die alone above the teeming masses on the planet underneath you? What’s your real story, Max?”
“I told my wife at her funeral that I wouldn’t talk to anyone, ever again,” he said. “After I bought the ship and made my arrangements to go, of course.”
He couldn’t use that old excuse of the promise to his wife anymore, because he’d broken the promise a thousand times over in the past few weeks. He still didn’t want to talk about the past.
“I used to be someone famous,” he said. “It doesn’t matter who. I don’t use that name anymore. I traveled everywhere, performed for millions every day. I loved it, the attention and the money and all that.” He looked up at the sprawling net of ivy branches across the ceiling. The plant thrived after all these years.
“My wife was murdered by my fans. It was some splinter-fan group where everyone was mad I wasn’t single and on the eligible lists. That’s a simplification, but there it is. I suffered through the murder trial—six young women pleading with me to forgive them and then marry them because they were my true soul mates. That’s when I realized humans are just animals, and I was a performing monkey. I thrived on fame, and they killed her because of it. I killed her.
“I have no interest in going back. I don’t check my old fan groups because I’m afraid they’re still hunting me.” He shivered. “People weren’t meant to live so crammed together. It does something to their heads.”
“I guess,” she responded quietly, “we’re both out here grieving someone we didn’t really kill, huh? Hell of a long way to go just to run away.”
“I suppose,” he said. “Maybe not far enough. It tore the heart out of me.” He stopped and gripped his hands together to keep them from shaking. “You want to know a secret? I fantasize sometimes about catching a black hole and feeding my ship to it. Wouldn’t be much of a meal for the little feller, though, would it? And I used to think I was so big.”
“I know what you mean,” was all she said, and then her transmission ended.
He didn’t feel much like responding again himself. He felt like crap for saying any of those words aloud.
They didn’t speak about it again, but the moment brought them close together. In between hibernation spells, they talked constantly. She worked hard to draw him out of his shell, usually against his will. She forced him to participate in community chats and random social events. There were games of logic and games of luck, built around the necessary time lag in communication. There were costume balls where you had to make a costume out of whatever you had available on your ship, the more inventive the better. There were recipe competitions to see who could make the best-tasting muck from the food recyclers (herbs and vegetables from the hydroponics were not allowed).
All the while time marched on and Maureen’s ship crept ever closer to the radius-of-no-return. Max tried to ignore it until the day he came out of hibernation to learn the Kingfisher was gone.
The radio waves were alive with chatter about it. People were upset at the passing of the only permanent fixture in deep space. Not just the Kingfisher, but his ship had gone silent as well. No known location, no response to pings. The popular theory was that his generator had finally failed. The immortal and indestructible Kingfisher had outlived his ship, if only by a few minutes. It was a stunning victory after seventy-eight years of failure, because
he alone had never killed himself.
“Do you want to join ships?” Max asked Maureen abruptly, not long after. “Stay together on the ride out?”
“What, be another Kwon-Solange death coffin? I love you, hon, but like you always say, people weren’t meant to live on top of each other like that. Besides, I don’t want to live until my late 90s out here, telling the same stories over and over again to new fishers who are just going to die like their predecessors.”
“I could catch you and we could join for a little while. Could we do that?” The Kingfisher was silent; Max couldn’t bear to think of Maureen going silent too.
She took a long while in answering. “It’d be nice to see you in the flesh just once. Really nice. But I’m five years ahead of you. Even if I threw my sails out and used the galactic wind as a brake, it’d take you ten years or more to catch me. I don’t have another ten years in me. I don’t.”
“Don’t kill yourself.”
“Not yet, hon. I’m still here, still talking.”
They smiled at each other and went on as before, ignoring the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in the sail-
ship.
Then, just about a year later, his computer woke him from hibernation with alarms. All momentous events seemed to happen during hibernation, when he was sick unto death. He was approaching sixty years old and his body wasn’t so young as it once was. Soon he’d be at his own radius-of-no-return, when the journey back in would take longer than the years he had left.
He sat on the lip of the hibernation box and shook his left arm, which was always the side that went numb. Then he pushed over to the alarm console to see what calamity he’d be facing today. Say what you want about free corporate sail-ships, they were robust. Max had made more repairs on his boat than any other fisher he knew.