Coyote - A Novel of Interstellar Exploration Part 8

Gillis returned to the ring corridor and walked to the hatch leading to the hub access shaft. As he opened the hatch, though, he hesitated before grasping the top rung of the shaft's recessed ladder. He had climbed down the shaft once before already, yet he had been so determined to reach the command deck that he had failed to recognize it for what it was, a narrow well almost a hundred feet deep. While the Alabama was moored at Highgate and in zero gee, everyone aboard had treated it as a tunnel, yet what had once been horizontal was now vertical.

He looked down. Far below, five levels beneath him, lay the hard metal floor of Deck H5. If his hands ever slipped on the ladder, if his feet failed to rest safely upon one of its rungs, then he could fall all the way to the bottom. He would have to be careful every time he climbed the shaft, for if he ever had an accident...

The trick was never looking down. He purposely watched his hands as he made his way down the ladder.

Gillis meant to stop on H2 and H3 to check the engineering and life- support decks, yet somehow he found himself not stopping until he reached H5.

The EVA deck held three airlocks. To his right and left were the hatches leading to the Alabama's twin shuttles, the Wallace and the Helms. Gillis gazed through porthole at the Helms; the s.p.a.ceplane was nestled within its docking cradle, delta wings folded beneath its broad fuselage, bubble canopy covered by shutters. For a moment he had an insane urge to steal the Helms and fly it back home, yet that was clearly impossible; the shuttles only had sufficient fuel and oxygen reserves for orbital sorties. He wouldn't even get as far as Neptune, let alone Earth. And besides, he had never been trained to pilot a shuttle.

Turning away from the porthole, he caught sight of another airlock located on the opposite side of the deck. This one didn't lead to a shuttle docking collar; it was the airlock that led outside the s.h.i.+p.

Reluctantly, almost against his own will, Gillis found himself walking toward it. He twisted the lockwheel to undog the inner hatch, then pulled it open and stepped inside. The airlock was a small white compartment barely large enough to hold two men wearing hardsuits. On the opposite side was thetiger-striped outer hatch, with a small control panel mounted on the bulkhead next to it. The panel had only three major b.u.t.tons-pres., purge, and open-and above them were three lights: green, orange, and red. The green light was lit, showing that the inner hatch was open and the airlock was safely pressurized.

The airlock was cold. The rest of the s.h.i.+p had warmed up, but in the lock Gillis could feel the arctic chill creeping through his jumpsuit, see every exhalation as ghostly wisps rising past his face. He didn't know how long he remained there, yet he regarded the three b.u.t.tons for a very long time.

After a while, he realized his stomach was beginning to rumble, so he backed out of the compartment. He carefully closed the inner hatch and lingered outside the airlock for another minute or so before deciding that it was one part of the s.h.i.+p he didn't want to visit often.

Then he made the long climb back up the access shaft.

There were chronometers everywhere, displaying both Greenwich Mean Time and relativistic s.h.i.+ptime.

On the second day after revival, Gillis decided that he'd rather not know what the date was, so he found a roll of black electrical tape and went through the entire s.h.i.+p, masking every clock he could find.

There were no natural day or night cycles aboard the s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p'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 wall- screens. 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, astro- biology, 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 pa.s.sword, 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 himuncomfortable.

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 antic.i.p.ate its next move and forestall another loss for at least a little while longer.

The food was bland, preprocessed stuff, artificial subst.i.tutes 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 s.h.i.+p 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 cla.s.sics: J. Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, Kenneth Brower's The Stars.h.i.+p and the Canoe, Frank Herbert's Dune. Gillisook 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 helio- pause; the s.h.i.+p was now traveling through interstellar s.p.a.ce, 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 realtime image forward of the s.h.i.+p's bow. It appeared as if the stars directly ahead had cl.u.s.tered 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 pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+p'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 iiiorn-out. It mas 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 subst.i.tute, 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 gla.s.sand 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.

"c.o.c.ktail 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 gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 gla.s.ses scattered throughout the s.h.i.+p. He stopped jogging after a while, but he didn't gain much weight because he had lost his appet.i.te and was eating less than before. And every day, he found 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 gla.s.s panel. He was still staring at the wrecked table when one of the 'bots arrived to investigate; deciding that its companions.h.i.+p 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 'got 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 'got 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 b.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.ton, 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 pa.s.sed out on the floor of the EVA deck.

The following day, Gillis methodically went through the entire s.h.i.+p, gathering the few remaining bottles and returning them to the locker where he had found them. Although he was tempted to jettison them into s.p.a.ce, 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 sauteed 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 hedimmed 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 ut 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 gla.s.s 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 s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p 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 s.h.i.+p'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 b.u.t.ton 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 first, 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 s.h.i.+p'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 brighterand seemed to make a subtle s.h.i.+ft 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 s.p.a.ce. 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 s.p.a.cecraft, briefly glimpsed from some inestimable distance-a thousand kilometers? ten thousand? a million?-as it pa.s.sed the Alabama.

Yet where had it come from? Not from Earth, of that he could be certain. Who was aboard, and where was it going? His mind conjured countless possibilities as he washed his dinner dishes, then went about preparing an early breakfast he had never expected to eat. Why hadn't it come closer? He considered this as he lay on his bunk, his hands propped behind his head. Perhaps it hadn't seen the Alabama. Might he ever see it again? Not likely, he eventually decided... yet if there was one, wasn't there always a possibility that there might be others? flllen M. Steele He realized that he had to record the incident, so that the rest of the crew would know what he had observed. Yet when he returned to the command deck and began to type a report into the s.h.i.+p's log, he discovered that words failed him. Confronted by a blank flatscreen, everything he wrote seemed hollow and lifeless, nothing evoking the mysterious wonder of what he had observed. It was then that he realized that, during the six long months he had been living within the stars.h.i.+p, never once had he ever attempted to write a journal.

Not that there had been much worth recording for posterity: he woke up, he ate, he jogged, he studied, he got drunk, he considered suicide. Yet it seemed as if everything had suddenly changed. Only the day before he had been ready to walk into the airlock, close his eyes, and jettison himself into the void.

Now, he felt as if he had been given a new reason to live... but that reason only made sense if he left something behind besides an unmade bunk and a half-empty champagne bottle.

He couldn't write on a screen, though, so he searched through the cargo lockers until he found what he needed: a supply of blank ledger books, intended for use by the quartermaster to keep track of expedition supplies, along with a box of pens. Much to his surprise, he also discovered a couple of sketchbooks, some charcoal pencils, and a set of acrylic paints and brushes; someone back on Earth apparently had the foresight to splurge a few kilos on art supplies.

Gillis carried a ledger and a couple of pens back to the wardroom. Although the game table was ruined, it made a perfect desk once its top was shut. He rearranged the furniture so that the table faced the porthole. For some reason, writing in longhand felt more comfortable; after a couple of false starts, which he impatiently scratched out, he was finally able to put down a more or less descriptive account of what he had seen the night before, followed by a couple of pages of informal conjecture of what it might have been.

When he was done, his back hurt from having bent over the table for so long, and there was a sore spot between the index and middle fingers of his right hand where he had gripped his pen. Although he hadnothing more to say, nonetheless he had the need to say more; putting words to paper had been a release unlike any he had felt before, an experience that had transported him, however temporarily, from this place to somewhere else. His body was tired but his mind was alive; despite his physical exhaustion, he felt a longing for something else to write.

He didn't know it then, but he was beginning to go sane. fls Gillis gradually resumed the daily schedule he had established for himself before the darkness had set in, he struggled to find something to write about.

He tried to start a journal, but that was futile and depressing. He squandered a few pages on an autobiography before he realized that writing about his life made him self-conscious; in the end he ripped those pages from the ledger and threw them away. His poetry was ridiculous; he almost reconsidered a trip to the airlock when he reread the tiresome doggerel he had contrived. In desperation he jotted down a list of things that he missed, only to realize that it was not only trivial but even more embarra.s.sing than his autobiography. That, too, ended in the wastebin.

For long hours he sat at his makes.h.i.+ft desk, staring through the porthole as he aimlessly doodled, making pictures of the bright star he had seen that eventful night. He was tempted to find a bottle of scotch and get drunk, yet the,,recollection of what he had nearly done to himself kept him away from the liquor.

More than anything else, he wanted to write something meaningful, at least to himself if not for anyone else, yet it seemed as if his mind had become a featureless plain. Inspiration eluded him.

Then, early one morning before the lights came on, he abruptly awoke with the fleeting memory of a particularly vivid dream. Most of his dreams tended to be about Earth-memories of places he had been, people whom he had known-yet this one was different; he wasn't in it, nor did it take place anywhere he had ever been.

He couldn't recall any specific details, yet he was left with one clear vision: a young man standing on an alien landscape, gazing up at an azure sky dominated by a large, ringed planet, watching helplessly as a bright light-Gillis recognized it as the stars.h.i.+p he had seen-raced away from him, heading into deep s.p.a.ce.

Gillis almost rolled over and went back to sleep, yet he found himself sitting up and reaching for his robe.

He took a shower, and as he stood beneath the lukewarm spray his imagination began to fill in the missing pieces. The young man was a prince, a n.o.bleman from some world far from Earth; indeed, Earth's history didn't even belong to the story. His father's kingdom had fallen to a tyrant, and he had been forced to flee for his life, taking refuge in a stars.h.i.+p bound for another inhabited IDS planet. Yet its crew, fearing the tyrant's wrath, had cast him out, leaving him marooned him upon a habitable moon of an uncharted planet, without any supplies or companions.h.i.+p...

Still absorbed by the story in his mind, Gillis got dressed, then went to the wardroom. He turned on a couple of lights, sat down at his desk, and picked up his pen. There was no hesitation as he opened the ledger and turned to a fresh page; almost as if in a trance, he began to write. find he never stopped.

To be sure, there were many times when Gillis laid down his pen. His body had its limitations, and he couldn't remain at his desk indefinitely before hunger or exhaustion overcame him. And there were occasions when he didn't know what to do next; in frustration he would impatiently pace the floor, groping for the next scene, perhaps even the next word.

Yet after a time it seemed as if the prince knew what to do even before he did. As he explored his new world he encountered many creatures- some of whom became friends, some of whom were implacable enemies -and journeyed to places that tested the limits of Gillis's ever- expanding imagination. As he did, Gillis-and Prince Rupurt, who subtly became his alter ego-found himself embarked on an adventure moregrand than anything he had ever believed possible.

Gillis changed his routine, fitting everything around the hours he spent at his desk. He rose early and went straight to work; his mind felt sharpest just after he got out of bed, and all he needed was a cup of coffee to help him wake up a little more. Around midday he would prepare a modest lunch, then walk around the ring corridor for exercise; two or three times a week he would patrol the entire s.h.i.+p, making sure that everything was functioning normally.

By early afternoon he was back at his desk, picking up where he had left off, impatient to find out what would happen next.

He filled a ledger before he reached the end of his protagonist's first adventure; without hesitation, he opened a fresh book and continued without interruption, and when he wore out his first pen, he discarded it without a second thought. A thick callus developed between the second and third knuckles of his right middle finger, yet he barely noticed. When the second ledger was filled, he placed it on top of the first one at the edge of his desk. He seldom read what he had written except when he needed to recheck the name of a character or the location of a certain place; after a while he learned to keep notes in a separate book so that he wouldn't have to look back at what he had already done.

When evening came he would make dinner, read a little, spend some time gazing out the window. Every now and then he would go down to the command deck to check the nav table. Eventually the Alabama's distance from Earth could be measured in pa.r.s.ecs rather than single light-years, yet even this fact had become incidental at best, and in time it became utterly irrelevant.

Gillis kept the chronometers covered; never again did he want to know how much time had pa.s.sed. He stopped wearing shorts and a s.h.i.+rt and settled for merely wearing his robe; sometimes he went through the entire day naked, sitting at his desk without a st.i.tch of clothing. He kept his fingernails and toenails trimmed, and he always paid careful attention to his teeth, yet he gave up cutting his hair and beard. He showered once or twice a week, if that.

When he wasn't writing, he was sketching pictures of the characters he had created, the strange cities and landscapes they visited. By the time he had filled four ledgers with the adventures of his prince, words alone weren't sufficient to bring life to his imagination. The next time he returned to the cargo module for a new ledger and a handful of pens, he found the acrylics he had noticed earlier and brought them back to the wardroom.

That evening, he began to paint the walls.

One morning, he rose at his usual time. He took a shower, then put on his robe-which was frayed at the cuffs and worn through at the elbows-and made his long journey to the wardroom. Lately it had become more difficult for him to climb up and down ladders; his joints always seemed to ache, and ibuprofen relieved the pain only temporarily. There had been other changes as well; while making up his bunk a couple of days earlier, he had been mildly surprised to find a long grey hair upon his pillow.

As he pa.s.sed through the ring corridor, he couldn't help but admire his work. The forest mural he had started sometime ago was almost complete; it extended halfway from Module Cl to Module C3, and it was quite lovely to gaze upon, although he needed to add a little more detail to the leaves. That might take some doing; he had recently exhausted the acrylics, and since then had resorted to soaking the dyes out of his old clothes.

He had a light breakfast, then he carefully climbed down the ladder to his studio; he had long since ceased to think of it as the wardroom. His ledger lay open his desk, his pen next to the place where he had left off the night before. Rupurt was about to fight a duel with the lord of the southern kingdom, andhe was looking forward to seeing how it all would work out.

He farted loudly as he sat down, giving him reason to smile with faint amus.e.m.e.nt, then he picked up his pen. He read the last paragraph he had composed, crossed out a few words that seemed unnecessary, then raised his eyes to the porthole, giving himself a few moments to compose his thoughts.

A bright star moved against s.p.a.ce, one more brilliant than any he had seen in a very long time.

He stared at it for a while. Then, very slowly, he rose from his desk, his legs trembling beneath his robe.

His gaze never left the star as he backed away from the window, taking one small step after another as he moved toward the ladder behind him.