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"Why do you care? Why do you have to keep doing this to me?"
"Your parents aren't here. And you'd do this for me. I can't tell you how many times my heart was broken, and my mom and sister comforted me. Heartbreak and solitude don't mix. I'm in your face---and I'm here to stay.
Zara flashed a wan smile. "Should I thank you or kill you?"
Kitty lifted an index finger and placed it on her chin, thinking it over with mock seriousness. Then she brightened. "You can buy me lunch on Tammuz. Now. Tell me what you hated about Caleb."
Frowning, Zara looked away. "Hatred? Why?"
Kitty tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "The idea here is that I ask you to do something, and you do it----for your own good. You keep questioning the process instead of riding the wave. All that does is get me frustrated and you pissed off because I'm not supplying answers to questions about the process." Kitty huffed. "All right?"
"He's got a temper. He's got some nervous habits, I guess----don't we all---like when he hasn't shaved for a day or two, he'll constantly rub at his beard."
"Good. What else?"
"He drifts off a lot....you'll be talking to him and he's gone, not even listening. I used to tell him that he was already on Tammuz."
"Does he smell perspiration?"
Zara felt her lips curl into a full grin. "Kitty!"
"Really. I dated an Arab guy once----phew! Got him right the hell outta my bed."
Zara cringed.
"Well?"
"No. He does not smell perspiration. I can't believe we're talking about this. We're on a colonial cutter bound for an alien world and the topic of conversation is body odor."
"You think you guys would've married?"
That one hit Zara in the back. "I thought we were talking about...."
"Process again."
She let her mind drift into a place that she had, for the past 6 weeks, forbidden it to go. It was the vision she had of her life on Tammuz with Caleb, of their home, their kibbutz, of when she carried their first child and they stayed up on cool, dry nights smelling the cinnamon in the air and watching her belly twitch with life. They would be a family and teach their children about Earth and create a world that was even better. And all of it would come to pass because they believed in one another.
"This one you can leave alone if you want to," Kitty said. "The answer's obvious."
"Then why did you ask?"
"It's what you say around the answer that's helpful."
"So I couldn't have said yes or no."
"Not that you couldn't have.....you wouldn't have."
The link speaker crackled a moment, then the ship's captain spoke. "ETA to wormhole: five minutes. All personnel to assigned stations." He repeated the message as Kitty rose.
Zara scooted out of the bunk, moved to her friend and embraced her. "Thanks," she whispered.
"I don't know if we got him all out of there. But just think about what I said. New life ahead. Old life here."
"I will."
"Coming with you?"
"Go on ahead. I'll catch up."
Kitty left, shutting the hatch behind her.
Zara went to her bunk and slid out the paper Caleb had given her. She still had not read it. She would wait, as he had asked her. Kitty would want her to read the paper now, then toss it. Instead, she folded the paper once more, making it smaller, and decided she would take it---take him----with her.
I'm sorry, Kitty.
She left the cabin, and within 2 minutes was suited up and sitting next to her friend, strapped to her seat in the colonist compartment. She kept Caleb's note tucked under her hip, hidden from Kitty's view.
A panel in the ceiling flipped down, and a three-by-five meter video screen descended and locked into place. After a buzz, multicolored snow filled the screen, then an image rolled and stabilized: a forward view into space.
In the middle of the viewer was the wormhole. It made space look as if a plug had been pulled and the universe was being sucked down a cosmic drain. Unlike a black hole, which drew the light and life out of everything around it, wormholes occasionally spat back glowing particles from the other side. Zara was uninterested in the physics of the whole thing, just the beauty of it. The swirling. The blue and white and yellowish light.
"It sure is pretty," Kitty said. "But I can't help thinking of it as an orifice."
"You mean like a mouth?" Zara asked.
"I was thinking of....."
"Oh......"
Kitty nodded. "Yeah. And we're headed right up it."
"ETA to wormhole 45 seconds...."
A forked tongue of blue light rose up out of the wormhole and then dissipated.
Kitty gasped. "My God, the thing's hungry."
"20 seconds...."
Zara put her hand on Kitty's wrist. "I know what we're going to talk about over lunch."
"What?"
"Some of your heartbreaks."
"Oh, no. That's level-seven info. Priority."
"10 seconds...."
"Oh, shit," Kitty said. "Here we go."
Together, they counted off the remaining seconds. Before they got to one, it felt as if a giant hand vised itself around the middle, a hand that was, in fact, the gravitational pull of the wormhole. Zara thought she heard the hull groan in protest.
Strange, elongated shapes made of light or darkness, depending upon which caught your eye, shot at them and rolled past the screen. Then the cutter shook violently. the time-matter effect that her instructors had warned her about took hold. Zara looked down at her hand, and when she moved her fingers, it seemed the action was delayed. She thought about moving her thumb. What felt like one second passed. Then the thumb moved very slowly. She glanced at Kitty, who lifted her arm up and down in the odd slow motion produced by the wormhole effect.
"Seeing it on the discs is one thing. Experiencing it is another," said Kitty. Her words were as altered as her movements. Indeed, Zara could discern them, but they were much lower in pitch than normal and bore the slur of a drunkard.
A small circle of normal-looking space expanded from a point of nothingness in the middle of the viewer, surrounded by the rushing walls of the wormhole. The diameter of the circle increased steadily until it swallowed all four corners of the screen. For a brief moment, a fuzzy, multi-colored ringlet, a ghost image of the wormhole, appeared against the starfield, then it came at the screen and vanished.
"Wormhole exited. Switching to aft view," the captain said.
As the colonists broke into a round of applause, the wormhole was displayed on the viewer. The abyss looked just as it had when they had entered it, just now, to Zara's relief, it shrank as they moved away from it.
"I believe forward view contains something you might want to take a look at," Briskin said coolly, trying to suppress what Zara knew was a wellspring of joy.
And there it was. The magnificent blue-green planet of Tammuz. Two of its nine moons, one full, one a waning gibbous, glistened in the distance. The planet's atmosphere created a hazy halo that was more than a little fitting. Had she arms, they would have been outstretched, welcoming the colonial cutter.
"Proximity beacons located. Signals are good. Retro rockets engaged."
For a moment, being in the cutter was not unlike being in the full inertia of an abruptly slowing ground vehicle. Zara's harness tightened automatically, then slackened.
Studying the planet, reveling in its beauty and feeling her heart thumping faster and faster, Zara didn't realize what she was doing until it was too late.
I'm excited? Yes, I want to be here. This is it. It's what.....we......dreamed of.
Suddenly, it was a rainy day at Jaffa Beach, and feeling good about anything was an act of betrayal. He wasn't with her to share in it.
"Trans-Tammuz injection finished.....all hands prepare for atmospheric entry."
The colonists around Zara slapped shoulders, blew kisses, and waved fists in the air. Kitty was no exception. She threw off her strap and tried to give Zara a hug, though her flight suit and helmet were in the way.
"We're here!"
"Yes, we are," Zara said, hearing the lack of emotion in her own voice.
As Kitty buckled herself to her seat, Zara furtively withdrew Caleb's note from beneath her thigh.
I'm not on the planet yet, but this is close enough, Caleb, and I can't wait anymore......
She started reading the note, hearing Caleb's voice in her head:
5 billion years from now, maybe to the day, the sun burns 90% of its hydrogen. A balance is destroyed. More energy is created than released. Quickly, in a few million years, the sun radiates all of its potential power.
The star swells. Mercury, Venus, Earth. Disappear. Swallowed. The sun truly, finally, touches the sky. Life vanishes.
Eventually, the sun shrinks, decreasing to the size of the Earth, which reappears from the Red Dwarf's grasp. With no gravity to hold it, the Earth slowly floats away.
She looked up from the page to the viewer. They were streaking towards the dark side of the planet. A large continent, mottled green and brown, was half-draped in darkness at the screen's bottom. She tossed a quick look to Kitty, saw that her friend was deeply involved in a conversation with the doctor, Katz, then turned back to the note.
Elsewhere....stars are born. Other star systems, older, larger----go on breathing. The Solar System dies of crib death. If that's what it takes....
An explosion rocked the craft. Zara slammed back into her seat, the note falling from her grasp. The ceiling above the viewer caved in, dropping the screen in a shower of wires, deck, fire, smoke, and sparks. Cabin lights went out. Amber-colored backup lights winked on in their place.
"Kitty," what the hell was that?"
And even before she could get the question out of her mouth, Zara had turned to look at her friend and saw that the young lady's visor had been shattered by a knife-like shard of flying deck plate. A mist of blood dotted the inside of the visor, obscuring Kitty's face.
"Kitty!" Zara shook her friend who wasn't moving. Kitty didn't react. "You can't......no.....omygod!"
Another explosion, and everyone was thrown to the right, as if tossed by an 8-foot breaker.
"We've got damage......level ten....level five...what the hell are...."
Internal power died. Darkness. Screams of horror and terror bounced off the shattering, spark-spitting hull of the compartment.
Zara thumbed off her restrained. She climbed out of her seat, adjusted the oxygen flow knob on her helmet, then rushed to the nearest porthole.
Her jaw dropped as she watched 3 trios of spacecraft strafe the cutter with weapons' fire. The many eruptions, some distant, some inside the compartment, nearly sent her to the floor. She kept a strained grip on the sill of the porthole and studied the crescent-shaped fighters. Their wings were stylized to look like that of a bird, curving downward and making their tips the lowest point of the vessel. The metallic condors wheeled sharply around for another run. She backed away from the porthole as they zeroed in on the cutter.
A direct hit sent her crashing to the floor. Her visor smashed against the deck but didn't crack. Her right thigh shuddered as a small shock ran through it, and suddenly, her airflow was gone. She undid the latches on her helmet, then twisted it off. Smelling the frayed wires and smoke, she resisted the temptation to pull in a long breath. She chanced some air, then coughed and choked. Through tearing eyes, she saw that nearly every control panel in the compartment billowed gray smoke illumined by the random flashes of overloads. She crawled forward, reached and found Caleb's note, even as the ship vibrated with a force that threatened to rip it to pieces. She felt the cutter sink into the planet's atmosphere like a sinking ocean liner. With the air growing thin, and salvos of alien fire still blasting off pieces of the craft, she pressed Caleb's note to her lips and closed her eyes.
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