Noumenon Read online

  Big Brother was watching, though. With the help of I.C.C., he made sure we ate our vegetables and washed behind our ears. He knew, better than the rest of us, that no Mother and no Father shouldn’t mean a lack of order.

  So that’s where we were—but was I going to tell Earth all that? That they’d sent a wannabe frat house into space? And that their one hope for stability—after all the effort they’d put into that very concept—rested on a single man?

  Hell no.

  And, after all, it had only been five days. Surely it was just a phase.

  I was conscious of the dangers of the dynamic while wanting to be a part of it. I had no desire to follow the strict regimen that had been set up for us, but I also didn’t want to see the mission flounder and fail. It was a strange dichotomy of concepts that somehow lived harmoniously within me. I simultaneously supported and denied our collective rebelliousness.

  But I pushed all that from my mind as I tucked my holoflex-sheets under my arm and headed for my closet. I was to report the facts, just the facts, nothing more.

  The space was as cramped as I remembered it from our two years of isolation. We’d simulated everything during that time. I’d done this job before. It was nothing new, and yet . . . everything had changed.

  We’d left Earth behind. We were on our own. Truly.

  I wanted to leave the door open, as I’d always felt a little claustrophobic in the communications room, but the two nearest security guards kept peeking through the door—very distracting. So I shut myself in. And once again, I wished the room had a window. Luckily, it wouldn’t take me long to send the report.

  I connected the thin, plastic holoflex-sheets to the server and organized the message into SD packets. It shouldn’t have taken me more than ten minutes to get everything squared away.

  However, halfway through my upload the server connected automatically to my implants.

  [Message received. Sender: Earth Com Center 23, operator Saul Biterman]

  I was supposed to send the first message. Was something wrong? I scanned my instruments: there was no emergency indicator. Had we miscalculated the time dilation? Was I late?

  I was a little annoyed. I’d trained for this my entire life, how could I have messed it up already?

  The message downloaded in the next moment, and I transferred it to a blank holoflex-sheet I pulled from a desk drawer. I wanted to see it all at once, be able to manipulate it. Sure, there was no need to translate it holographically—I could translate it in my head while reading it—but I wanted to have a physical record in case it was something I needed to take to the captain.

  Turns out, it wasn’t something Mahler needed to see.

  It was short, and a bit confusing.

  It read simply, How are you?

  That was a strange thing for him to ask. I was about to tell him how we were—no need to be preemptive.

  But maybe he wanted an impression of our well-being, something besides a record of events and functions. So I whipped up one extra packet and uploaded it with the rest.

  We’re fine, thank you.

  I finished my upload, gathered my notes, and went about the rest of my day attending to my journalistic duties. But, benign as the question seemed, I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  How are you?

  Saul and I had worked closely, but never gotten personal. Like a grade schooler never really gets to know her teacher, I never learned much about Saul as an individual.

  Age wasn’t a barrier, neither was language. But there were other extenuating factors.

  For one thing, I didn’t meet him until the summer of my twentieth year. Everyone else had already met their specialists, and since I was one of the last to get my official training, I was both nervous and excited to receive him in the drawing room of my group home.

  Buttoned up tight in a pressed suit, I sat in one of the high-backed chairs trying to focus on my posture. I wanted to make a clean, professional impression when he was shown in. With one look at me I wanted him to think I was the right person for the job, that I could handle the responsibility.

  It wasn’t just paranoia or an eagerness to please—Nika’s mentor had gone to Mother to ask if she had the right student. If that had happened to me I would have been mortified.

  Father came in first and held the door open for Mr. Biterman. I leapt to my feet—before he even had time to glimpse my well-planned pose—and my hand shot forward of its own accord.

  It wasn’t until we’d finished our initial shake that my mind registered anything about him. The first thing I noticed was his sticky palm, and my first impression swiftly snowballed from there.

  His dress shirt was stained at the bottom—as though he’d dropped food in his lap at some point—and wasn’t tucked in. Despite the smile, his face held a sour expression, one I feared permanent. And his eyes didn’t meet mine. Saul was only ten years older than me, but he’d gone prematurely bald, and to make up for it he’d grown a thick, unkempt beard.

  I resisted the urge to ask Father who this man was. I knew he was my tutor, despite my desire to believe otherwise.

  We were formally introduced, then Father indicated for us both to sit before he left. I’d hoped he’d stay and help break the ice, but he rushed out of the room muttering that he was late for another appointment. I wondered if that was really the reason, or if Mr. Biterman’s company was as off-putting as his appearance.

  I smiled, crossed and uncrossed my legs, and literally twiddled my thumbs waiting for my specialist to outline a plan, or start a lecture, or whip out some comm equipment.

  Saul might have been alone in the room for all he acknowledged me.

  “So . . .” I began. Slowly. I’d hoped he’d interrupt me. When he didn’t, I pressed on. “Do I get a syllabus, or a prospectus, or . . . Do I need to ask Fath— Dr. Matheson for certain books?”

  He reached into his trouser pocket and dug around for a moment. His mining produced a crumpled scrap of yellow paper. Without a word he handed it to me by means of an unenthusiastic flip of his wrist.

  Hesitant, I leaned over and took it. The scrap was clean, at least—no food stains. Glancing sidelong at this strange man I’d been saddled with, I smoothed it out in my lap.

  It was a scribbled schedule for the next week, with dates, times, and places, but no indication of what was supposed to happen during the appointments.

  Once I’d read it over, I looked up to ask him a question, and was startled by the silly smile that had replaced his indifference. “Well, see you tomorrow, Ms. Pavon,” he said, as though we’d just finished with a delightful visit.

  That was the first of many awkward times with him. It took me months to get used to his strange mannerisms, sudden disconnects with now, long silences, and a plethora of other quirks.

  I was baffled, at first. And also a little insulted. Here was a man whose expertise in communications had landed him one of the most important tutoring positions in the world—he was training ambassadors to space (myself along with seven others—three on different convoys), and would be his students’ main connection to Earth once they left the ground—yet he couldn’t hold a normal conversation.

  If anyone other than Mother or Father had brought Saul into my life I would have thought it a colossal joke.

  But, like a good little soldier, I held in my doubts and accepted the training. As it turned out, Saul was a capable teacher. He taught mostly through illustration and hyperbole rather than pontification, which I appreciated. And when it came to his work he was quick and accurate, but it wasn’t until I advanced to decoding on my own that I realized why he had the job.

  While the man couldn’t smoothly string five words together in person, he was a whiz when it came to communicating long-distance. Without all of the physical cues to get in the way, with the words stripped bare, he was the most articulate man I’d ever met.

  The difference was so apparent that when he came to grade my first solo decoding work, I asked him who had wri
tten the message.

  “Me,” he said, looking up from the many red marks he’d already placed on my paper. His brows didn’t knit together, he didn’t frown or squint sideways at me like a normal person would when trying to decipher the implications of what had been said. But by that time I could recognize his special brand of confusion.

  “I know you coded it.” I walked around the large warehouse space with my hands in my coat pockets. We’d been allotted one corner for training, and for housing the server and other equipment. Other machines I had no name for—utilized by other convoy departments—took up the three remaining corners. “But who composed it?”

  “Me. I did it all.” He went back to marking the page, each stroke of the pen more vehement than before.

  I’d insulted him, and I tried to make up for it by inviting him to drinks with my friends and me after our session, but I should have known better. He declined with a lame excuse, but I’m sure his reasons for turning me down were twofold. His anger was a part of it, but how exactly was a man who couldn’t relax and behave naturally one-on-one going to get by in a group? If I made him nervous, what would a whole gaggle of girls in a crowded bar do to him?

  But I kept trying. From there on out, every time I had a group activity planned after our lessons, I invited him. I hoped at some point he’d say yes. I thought maybe if he spent time with more people he would get better at communicating in person, but it wasn’t to be. Saul was who he was, and I couldn’t change that.

  So, perhaps his first message to me on Mira shouldn’t have surprised me so much. The man I worked with closely on Earth, but never really knew, waited to reach out to me until I was stretching the distance between us to never-before-achieved proportions.

  His reply to my first set of data packages was mostly what I expected: acknowledgment of the incidents I’d recorded, other Earth specialists’ professional advice related to my report, and questions about the crew’s health and productivity. But tacked on at the end was a full letter, clearly meant for me personally.

  A portion was general-interest based. Saul thought we might want to know what Earth was up to. We’d been gone two weeks travel time, around four months their time, so not much had happened. Not enough to take note of, anyway, but I transferred the information to a file and sent it to Nika’s implants. She’d know what to do with it.

  Throughout the second half of the letter, though, Saul told me about his work week, how he was feeling, and so on. Things friends talk about. Close friends.

  I wasn’t sure what to think, let alone how to respond.

  In all that time I’d been trying to get Saul to open up I’d thought him disinterested. I thought perhaps he didn’t want to come with me after lessons because he just didn’t care to get to know me. That maybe he didn’t like people, just words.

  Could he have been holding out for this? For when he’d be most comfortable?

  It seemed ridiculous, but as acquainted with his awkwardness as I was . . .

  Before he’d signed off, he asked me the same question again, but made sure to come to the point:

  How are you, Margarita? The convoy is fine, but are you?

  The question bothered me. Other people would see these messages once he’d decoded them. They were public record. I didn’t really feel comfortable laying out personal information. He wasn’t asking how are you in the sense that you ask when meeting up with someone, when an obligatory “Fine” can mean anything from fantastic to I feel like crud.

  He was asking me to confront my mental state. As though he knew I had not stopped to assess my own adjustment.

  How was I? Did it matter?

  I decided it didn’t. I gave him the same fine response, and sent the packets on their way.

  Over the next few months, his messages were similar, and the differences in the way we were each traveling through time’s dimensions became more distinctive. While I was contacting him every week, he was only speaking to me once every couple of months. And his life was moving at speeds I could hardly comprehend.

  A few of my days after launch, he’d gushed about a colleague. A woman, who apparently wouldn’t give him the time of day. After three weeks of my time, they were dating.

  That in itself was a shock. Saul Biterman with a girlfriend? Highly improbable.

  Two months into my journey, he was engaged. I couldn’t believe it. Who was this woman who had fallen in love with my quirky, socially-stunted tutor? Had he grown so much since I’d last seen him, or did the old saying about odd ducks hold true?

  I blinked my eyes and he was married. Another blink and there was a baby on the way. I blinked a third time and the baby had been born—a boy.

  I hadn’t been on board six months yet.

  But four and a half years had passed for Saul and his family.

  After his son came into the picture, things changed faster than ever. I hadn’t realized how quickly babies progress, and it was breathtaking to witness a child’s life on fast-forward.

  Sometimes Saul even sent pictures. It was hard for me to accept that they were all of the same child.

  And every time, Saul asked me how I was. Or pushed for more personal information. I always answered with fine. I didn’t see the point in giving him more.

  Things that hadn’t bothered me during the test run—those two years we’d been quarantined aboard—began to pick at my nerves. I couldn’t stand to look at the cleaning robots when I’d hardly noticed them before. I even chased a wall-climber out of my cabin when it accidently knocked an old paper book off one of my shelves.

  The walls felt closer than they had before, the hallways narrower, the rooms darker.

  Living aboard for real was not that dissimilar from our test years—not physically, anyway. But psychologically I was in a completely different place.

  It took me a while to realize it, but most of my free time was spent in front of my window, or on Eden when I could get permission.

  Eden is the animal ship. It feels more like Noah’s Ark than anything. There aren’t pairs of every kind, but there is a small breeding stock of food and comfort animals.

  Back on Earth I’d never been particularly fond of animals. I wasn’t one of those girly-girls who loved kittens and horses and wondered if maybe I’d rather be a veterinary expert than head communications officer. And it wasn’t the puppies or the cows that attracted me to Eden.

  It was the special lighting and atmosphere. Eden looked like a light bulb from the outside: nearly spherical, but with one long protuberance. The protuberance held the docking bay and offices.

  The bulb itself was split into two halves, each with its own gravitational direction; the ship’s center was down for both sections. Instead of decks segmented into cabins, each domed half was again halved by a giant see-through wall, and consisted of wide open spaces. Four zones for four climates: temperate and subarctic shared one half, arid and tropical the other. The temperate zone was filled with grazing pastures and spiraling terraces. The tropical supported a lush rainforest—though rain fern-garden might have been more appropriate, as there were only a handful of trees and numerous kinds of knee-height foliage. Arid was a red desert, spotted through with hardy plants and several oases. And subarctic was more tundra-like, really, with its short grasses and twiggy bushes.

  The biodomes were themselves impressive, but the real wonder of engineering on Eden was the sun.

  In testing, it had been proven that without exposure to the sun fewer animals were conceived, fewer came to term, and fewer of the live births survived to adulthood. Lamps didn’t work with the animals like they worked with the plants. With plants, as long as the chlorophyll got fed, they were happy. The animals needed more. They had to think they were outside, under the sky.

  And that’s why I visited Eden. Just like the comfort animals, I would wither without it. I chose the temperate quarter, found a cow-pie-free spot in the pasture—next to the base of one of the terrace ramps—sat back and closed my eyes.

&n
bsp; It was the little touches that made it feel real. A light breeze brushed my cheeks. The smell of fresh grass filled my nose. Bird song—piped in through hidden speakers—flitted through the air, accompanied by other background noises. Those, added to the warmth of the artificial sun, all blended together to complete the illusion. After drinking it in with my other senses, I let my sight back into the game. The sky held amazing depth. Though I knew where the domed ceiling physically lay, it felt like it went on and on for miles.

  The bright orb of the artificial sun was just as difficult to look at as the real thing. It appeared to travel across the dome, even receding slightly as it made its way toward the horizon, implying a greater vastness than the ceiling actually possessed.

  A curious calf came over to check me out. It made a silly, high-pitched version of an adult moo, and let me pat its nose.

  That was when I realized I missed Earth.

  When I’d been cooped up during the test years, I’d always known I’d go home again. That I would run in the fields again, stand on the rocky Icelandic shore, and stroll down the village parkway.

  These nine ships were the whole of my reality from now on. Not only in terms of the area I had to explore, or the atmosphere, or the company, but also in terms of flow.

  Children aren’t born and off to school in less than a year. That’s not right, it’s not real. If I ever chose to raise a child, he would not magically transform before my eyes as Saul’s son had.

  We were separate—severed—from Earth in every possible way. It was a memory, and I found myself missing things I had been eager to leave. Father, Mother, all those who watched over us. I hadn’t been ready to receive my independence. Had anyone?

  I cried then, with the baby cow nuzzling me and the pseudo-sun shining down on both of us. Homesickness was not something I’d ever had to contend with before. And it was something I simply had to learn to get over, because home was lost to me forever.

  On my way back to my cabin I tripped over a vacuuming robot. I cursed and kicked it, though it only buzzed and beeped an error message in return. “Stupid machine.”