Caretaker Page 2

  He would later remember the moment in slow motion, seeing her pause there in the corridor, watching her eyes widen as they found his. The pale blue lighting glanced off her hair and her shoulders, which were silver in the stasis suit.

  They stood without moving for a long moment. Finally, she spoke.

  “Hello,” she said cautiously. “I’m Kaia.”

  Still he stared. He opened his mouth, then took two quick steps toward her. “Where did you come from?”

  She smiled then. “I’m—I’m sorry,” she stuttered, “I’ve just awakened. I’m not oriented yet.”

  “Awakened?” He was nearing panic now. “Why? Are there others awakening? I’ve got to stop it! We’re still forty-eight years away! We’ll never make it if they awaken now!” He turned his attention to the computer. “Computer? Computer!”

  “Proceed, Mr. Bryant.”

  “How many have awakened?”

  “One, Mr. Bryant.”

  “Only one?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bryant. Passenger 3692, Kaia Raegan. Awakened on Day 2000 at 0836 as scheduled.”

  “What? As scheduled?” He turned back to the girl. “You were scheduled to awaken?”

  At this, she looked shaken. “Could I see the Caretaker, please?”

  “I am the Caretaker.” His voice was sharp. It had been so long since he’d spoken to another human being. The girl looked scared. “I’m sorry,” he started again. “I became the caretaker. I’m not trained for it. It was . . . an accident.”

  Her voice was shaky. “Where’s McNeal?”

  “He died. I wasn’t in stasis yet, so the computer assigned me Caretaker. Hey—” he moved forward but couldn’t catch her before she hit the floor. She was unconscious when he reached her.

  Chapter 2

  Ethan lifted the girl and took her to his cabin. He knew her now: 3692, Yaa Annan. She’d been in their stasis group and had shared the same hold as Aria, though her chamber was near the front of the hold and Aria’s was near the back. She looked different now that there was nothing coating her skin and no stasis fluid between them. More vibrant, more alive.

  Something didn’t add up, though; she’d said her name was Kaia. A nickname, perhaps?

  He laid her on the broad white couch and perched himself on the low chest in front of her. “Computer,” he barked, “is she in stasis shock?” He remembered reading about the dangers of stasis in the legal disclaimers before the trip. One of the worst was a reaction to awakening which involved the body trying to compensate for the years of sleep. The heart rate increased, blood pressure skyrocketed, and the patient usually died of a massive coronary.

  “No,” the computer responded.

  Ethan didn’t wait for the computer to volunteer information like he had when he’d first started to talk to it. One could wait forever and it wouldn’t provide answers to questions you didn’t ask directly.

  “What’s wrong with her? Give me her vitals.”

  The computer rattled off a list of her vital signs. All were at the low range of normal. “She’s sleeping, then?” Ethan asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will she wake up?”

  “It appears she is doing so now.”

  Ethan glanced down. Indeed, the girl’s eyelids were fluttering and she began to move her head back and forth. It was then that he noticed how bronzed her skin was. It shocked him to realize, very suddenly, that her body believed that the warm rays of Earth’s sun had touched her only hours ago. For years he had shaved in the smooth steel mirror in the hold’s lavatory and seen his skin grow more and more pale in spite of the artificial sun lamps in the hold. They may have stimulated his body to produce Vitamin D, but they didn’t give him a tan.

  As he looked at the smooth brown face, he felt in his chest an intense longing for Earth, for its sun and its breezes, for the taste of salt spray from its oceans, and for the sharp, sweet smell of a hot wildflower meadow from its summer mountains. It would be spring there now, he knew, and the last of winter’s grip would be fading from the Western side of the North American continent. He thought of the horses Aria had loved that grazed across the street from their little brick house. This time of year they were shedding their winter coats and they were shaggy and short-legged, making them look more like toys than like the shining, powerful creatures of the summer. And then, in his mind’s eye, he saw the little brick house they’d left behind, saw the rosebush and knew it would be unfurling its green leaves and pushing bright buds towards the crisp yellow spot in the sky.

  She spoke and stopped his remembering. “I—I’m sorry,” she said.

  He glanced down into intense gray eyes. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so.” But she didn’t stir more than to look away from him, up at the smooth, shining ceiling. “You said he . . . McNeal . . . he’s dead?”

  “Yes.” He saw her wince at the answer. “You knew him?”

  “McNeal and I—” her voice grew softer. “David and I—” she kept her eyes on the ceiling, “were married the day before departure.”

  Ethan felt his eyebrows rise. He had read McNeal’s biography several times. There was no mention of this girl.

  She went on without looking at him, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “David and I met at a base party back on Earth. We went out a few times before things started to get serious. My father is General Reagan, head of the military detachment assigned to this ship. He’s in stasis below. Once David was commissioned as a Caretaker, my father put a stop to our relationship. He didn’t want me spending my life in a Caretaker’s hold. As noble as the military makes the post sound, it is pretty much a life sentence.”

  She paused, glancing nervously at Ethan as if she had just remembered he was there. “I’ve never—I never thought I’d ever tell anyone this story.” Her eyes were tight with sadness. “David and I didn’t see each other for several months. Then two days before we left Earth I ran into him on base.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “Seeing him then, I remembered that I loved him.” She said it wistfully. “I talked him into this crazy scheme to marry me. The plan was that I’d go into stasis and wake up in time to spend our lives together. We paid off the girl who was supposed to come, the real Passenger 3692.”

  “Yaa Annan,” Ethan said. Mystery solved.

  Kaia bobbed her head slightly. “She said she’d been debating staying on Earth to get involved with the democracy movement anyway. We sneaked on board that night and used his access to set my awakening time differently from the others—2,000 days. As soon as I could safely break stasis. My father wouldn’t know until we reached Minea, David and I would be together; I didn’t see how it could go wrong. It seemed so romantic at the time.” She lay very still, not looking at him, and then, all at once, she began to cry.

  Ethan was shocked for a moment at the shift from her soft, clear voice to the ragged, splitting sobs. He simply looked at her, seeing for a moment his own face reflected in the glass door of Aria’s stasis chamber those first few weeks. He watched, fascinated, as Kaia's eyelids closed and round, shining tears slid out from under them. Her chest heaved and her shoulders pitched as she lay on her back and cried. After a moment, she pulled her hands to her face and her cries were muffled.

  It occurred to him that he hadn’t heard another person’s voice, their breathing, their small sounds, for five long years, and hearing it now was wonderful. Something deep in him remembered the response to human emotion, though, and he moved to sit beside her on the couch. He put his left hand clumsily on her shoulder.

  She sat up and leaned into him, sobbing into his chest.

  He patted her back awkwardly, his right arm still at his side. Her dark hair smelled like violets, and the stasis suit felt smooth and cool under his hand.

  After several minutes, the sobs subsided. She drew away from him and wiped her face with the palms of her hands. Ethan drew away from her, moving back to perch on the trunk, looking at her with concern.

  “I don’t know
your name,” she said quietly.

  “Ethan. Ethan Bryant.”

  She nodded, a small, stiff movement, and then stood shakily.

  “Take it easy.” Ethan stood and moved toward her. She pulled away from his outstretched hand.

  “I—I need to be alone.” Without another word, the girl left the hold, a gasping sob ringing in her wake.

  Ethan moved to the door and watched her walk away, torn between the impulse to follow her and the desire to respect her wishes.

  “Computer,” he said quietly as she disappeared into a side corridor, “monitor Passenger 3692 and report to me if she is in danger.”

  The computer agreed and Ethan went back into the hold, shaking his head.

  “Kaia?” he said aloud, the strangeness of the name bouncing back to him. He had long known passenger 3692 as Yaa Annan. The computer hadn’t known about the switch, and Ethan only knew what the computer told him. In a way it was unsettling to realize that the computer on which everything depended could be mistaken.

  Shifting to this new understanding of this passenger required some thought, too. He also had to think what to do next. She couldn’t be put back in stasis for a minimum of fourteen days, and even then he’d have to be very sure she was ready. Stasis was a shock to the body, and he wasn’t about to gamble with the life of one of his passengers. Not after keeping them alive this long.

  At least they had a chamber to put her in. Because of the delicacy of the filters that cleaned the fluid, each stasis chamber could only be used once. Hers would be useless until the ship was refurbished at the spaceport above Minea. For once, Ethan was glad that his desperate attempts to put himself in stasis a few years ago had failed.

  In fact, he was, for the first time, glad that all his plans to get out of being Caretaker had failed. He had tried everything: climbing in the chamber and initiating the stasis sequence, refusing to eat until the computer allowed him back into stasis, threatening, cajoling, coercing. None of it had worked. He couldn’t stand the thought of being alone for the rest of his life.

  His most selfish moment had come when he finally accepted he wasn’t going back into stasis. He had not yet read about the 2,000-day stasis threshold and had resolved to awaken his wife so they could at least have some semblance of a life together on the ship. As he had held a hand over the key pad to enter the numbers, he had seen the baby move—slowly, sleepily—in her stomach and known that if he did this, that child would live its life in the sterile confines of the stasis ship. It would have its parents, of course, but no other human relationships until the day it reached Minea—middle aged, with all its youth wasted by his weakness. Ethan saw the child, recognized the great cost it would pay, and didn’t care—punched the numbers anyway to welcome his wife back into his arms.

  But that day, and every day since, the computer had thwarted his attempt, creating an emergency seal on the chamber that would not be broken until they reached Minea. His desperation to have her near had made her even more distant.

  He shook his head to clear the image of his own weakness. “Computer, what is the status of Passenger 3692?”

  “Status normal, Mr. Bryant.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Passenger 3692 is travelling Corridor C.”

  Ethan tried to imagine her grief, tried to envision how it would feel to wake up to find that the person you loved was lost to you. A stab of regret, old and familiar, shot through him: Aria would feel that when she awoke. She would awake to find him changed, their future spent.

  He paced, trying to think what to do next. Though he had a hundred questions for her, she needed time alone. He couldn’t go after her, and he couldn’t stay here doing nothing until she returned. The change had created too much turmoil for him to return to his usual routine.

  He crossed the Caretaker’s hold and stepped out into the corridor, heading for the passenger holds, where he had always found comfort.When he reached the access doors, Ethan found himself drawn to her stasis chamber. He entered the eighth hold and started down the long aisle. The closer he got, though, the slower he walked. He had so long seen the passengers in their chambers, so long comforted himself with their insulation and peacefulness, that the thought of an empty chamber disquieted him more than he’d expected.

  As he neared the end of the row, he could see it. The curved glass front shone transparent where its neighbors shone pink. He stepped closer to it, placing his fingers on the handle.

  He was surprised at how industrial it looked, how sterile. He raised a hand to the glass and traced the Xardn symbol for the adjective “empty”:

  Next to him, chamber 3693 had a warm organic glow, holding the life inside it. The girl’s was stark and barren and cold. It chilled him to think of the delicate threshold between sealed and open, between sleeping and waking, between life and death.

  It was a threshold he’d often considered over the last five years. Space was so cold, so unforgiving, and the thin walls of the ship were all that kept its vastness at bay. Sometimes, when he felt most acutely its indifferentness, when he was most missing the warm rays of the sun, he let himself remember when he’d met Aria.

  He saw her first in a tawny field of ripe wheat. It stood shoulder-height, and Aria’s red hair blowing in the wind above it drew his attention like a flag. He remembered stopping, watching her from the edge of the field. Deftly, she broke off the six-inch head of a wheat stalk. She rolled it between her hands quickly, and Ethan saw the chaff of it falling away. He was walking toward her before he knew what he was doing.

  She turned a warm gaze to him as he approached. “Hi there,” she said, “Thanks for being so careful walking through the stalks.”

  He nodded. “Could you tell me where the nearest hovercab stop is? I’m on my way to the university, but think I got off the train at the wrong station.”

  Her eyebrows drew together in concern. “You’ve come from the train station? That’s miles back!”

  “I know. I kept thinking I’d stumble onto a cab stop or a—a town, or something.”

  She laughed a little. “Instead you found a lot of nothing.”

  “I wouldn’t say nothing.” He’d started boldly but now he backpedaled. “I mean, these fields are amazing.”

  She brightened. “Thanks!” She said. “They’re mine.”

  “Yours?”

  “Yep. These are the field trials of a new strain of wheat I’ve been developing. You may not be able to tell, but this wheat has a third more protein than its parent crop.”

  “You’re a crop geneticist?”

  She nodded.

  “Wow.” Ethan knew too little about farming to say anything else.

  She didn’t seem to mind explaining. “I’ve isolated a molecular marker that has the potential to make wheat even more nutritionally complete! Do you know how many people could benefit from more protein in their diet?”

  Ethan shook his head.

  “Millions,” she said, grinning. She turned her attention back to the wheat in her hands. Ethan looked and saw huge, round wheat kernels. She cupped her hand and held them carefully. Then she plucked a few up and popped them in her mouth. She offered some to him as she chewed.

  Ethan took a few and chewed them.

  “Feel how they’re a little soft still?” she asked, swallowing.

  Ethan nodded.

  “That means they’re not quite ready to harvest. You want them to crack when you bite them.”

  “They’re delicious, though,” Ethan said sincerely. Their rich, nutty flavor reminded him of the sweet dinner rolls his grandmother always baked.

  “And because I’ve crossed them with a hardy strain, this high-protein variety will grow even in substandard soil.”

  Aria could make anything grow.

  Chapter 3

  When Ethan found his way back to the hold, he expected Kaia to be there. She wasn’t. But something about the air had changed, and he suspected that she had been recently. “Computer, has Passenger 3692
been in the Caretaker’s hold since I’ve been gone?”

  “Yes, Mr. Bryant.”

  “Play the footage.”

  The holoscreen jumped to life and showed the girl entering cautiously and checking throughout the main room and in the bathroom to see if he was there. Then she crossed to the food-producing materializer and summoned a meal. She perched on the couch and wolfed it down hungrily before dropping the tableware into the recycler and beginning to search the room.

  Ethan knew what she was looking for. Though she had been here hours ago, he found himself wanting to call out and direct her to it.

  She found it, though, in one of the shelves behind the smooth silver wall panels. He was glad, after all, that he had kept it, though at the time he’d wondered if he was crossing a line taking it from a dead man.

  He watched the recording until she left the caretaker’s hold and then checked in on her location again. She seemed to have gravitated to a spot near the bow of the ship. He wanted to call up the holoscreen and make sure she was alright, but that seemed to be too much invasion of her privacy.

  He waited for hours for her to come back. Ethan was used to the silence of the Caretaker’s hold, but he felt it more acutely now that he’d heard another voice . He felt a loneliness and a fierce craving for her company that stood in stark contrast against the solitude of the last five years. He didn’t know what he would say to her in her grief, but he wanted to see her again.

  But she didn’t come back. Not that day and not the next. He saw that she had activated materializers in various parts of the ship, so she at least had something to eat, but she didn’t return to the Caretaker’s hold.

  * * *

  Three days after her awakening, Ethan convinced himself that he should check on her. He called up the holoscreen and learned her location. He walked down the corridor and found her in an observation alcove: a small recessed part of the corridor that jutted out the side of the ship and offered a stunning view of the stars through its encompassing windows.