The Apex Book of World SF 2

Borrowed Time ^{Anabel Enriquez Piñeiro Translated by Daniel W. Koon}

Your hair, a centimetre or two longer, your skin maybe more tanned than the last time. Smooth, yes, like a shiny shell, without a single fold, without a scar. Me, on the other hand, my face could serve as the canvas for an astronavigation map: you could catalogue all my wrinkles by latitude and longitude. And locate all its globular clusters, wormholes, and black holes. There’s room for the entire universe on my face.

You don’t see my face. You have taken up residence on a spot on the terrace where you watch the stars fall—m-e-t-e-o-r-s, you make me repeat, letter by letter, helping me to spell it out with your hands. And even the perfume of the poplars in bloom seems to bother you. Serena-Ceti is a world without a future—you shake your fingers wildly and point at the night sky over the terrace.

Look up above, so many worlds to visit, so many twilights beneath double and triple stars, the chance to use hyperjumps to effectively live forever…an eternity of journeying between the stars. I struggle in vain to understand your words, your passion for those faraway lights in unknown and unreachable houses that inhabit the night; I am only five years old.

I run my fingers through your hands, as I did back then, trying to find some final assignment in them. But they are rigid, muteness, fingers that refuse to surrender the secret behind your need to transcend.

The Persephone docked for the first time on Serena-Ceti a few days after your confession on the terrace. How long ago was that for you? Three months, four…? It doesn’t matter… For you it is time elapsed, time transcended. For me, the indelible image: the hydrogen smell of the aerotransporter that carries you to the spaceport; the shards of glass embedded in the soles of my boots (from the last glass lamp we would ever put in our hallway); the colour of helplessness on my father’s face… You don’t need any superior intelligence to understand what “stomping out of the house” means to a five-year-old girl, even if she’s a deaf-mute. But I didn’t understand then what it meant for you. Father did.

Father spends hours writing up his Academy lectures, the crumpled papers piling up around him and his computer growing mouldy beneath the dust. He never sleeps more than two hours. He never rests. I think that he is afraid of falling asleep and aging at an accelerated pace. Or of falling asleep and dreaming of you. Father accompanies me to the pulse station in the capital to receive a message you sent barely a week after you left on the exploration ship, The Persephone, with that splendid annual contract as back-up exobiologist. I am twelve. You are exactly as I remember you. And your fingers speak with the same fluency as ever: maybe, when you see this message I will be arriving home. Funny how these transmissions keep coming from the Sorceress of Hyperspace. You must be quite grown up, sweetheart. And then, in gestures: I’ll bring you some glass rock earrings from Delta Altair to set off your ears with that short haircut of yours. I am twelve years old, hair down to my waist, my ears marked with scars from the cochlear surgery and the rejected implants that have not cured my deafness. But you don’t know. And in my naïve twelve-year-old eyes, that not knowing makes you innocent; and besides, I already know that you will be back in less than three years for my fifteenth birthday, and I will wear those earrings at a party and my ears will shine with the light from other worlds, from other stars, from the entire universe.

I waited a whole year when I turned fifteen. I watched so many twilights of our little sun and the conjunctions of the moons twice nightly. But not a single star came down from the sky. The Persephone arrived one random afternoon in the summer. I went by myself to pick you up at the spaceport. I’m sorry, Miranda, you said, with a quick hug and the same smile as ever. My calculation was off by a few minutes. You could not have forgotten the way. How far off was it this time…? Two minutes, five? That doesn’t matter to you either. But I’ve turned eighteen and it would have been a miracle for me to still be so naïve. Something has changed dramatically in this lost little world during what has seemed like only three weeks to you. I can forgive you missing a lot of things in your absence: the operating rooms, puberty rudely taking over my body, the angst of my first unrequited love, the listless and frustrating experience of my first non-orgasm. But your absence from my successes was more painful.

Over my father’s objections, I got a scholarship to study astronomy at the Academy for Physical Sciences in the capital. No more nights of tiptoeing through the house, an amateur telescope under my arm, hiding from my dad to get to the terrace to stare at the dawn. At first I naïvely looked for a sign from you in the heavens, but then my loneliness finally latched onto the stars themselves. I stopped necking with the neighbourhood boys, and they began to call me a junior lunatic.

I told you about the scholarship then. You smiled and I think I caught a glimmer of pride in your eyes. You apologised for not knowing about my interest in astronomy and you regretted the many things you could have brought me for my personal collection from the many planets you had visited. I gave you a lukewarm thank you. In the end, we were just two intimate strangers.

Later, after a week of rest, you left on another space mission. I will return for your wedding, no ifs ands or buts! you promised, winking an eye at Iranus, my boyfriend at the time, who accompanied us to the launch. We would be marred when I left the Academy. Back then, I believed in eternal love, and I believed that a mother kept her promises.

It was then, at the beginning of my final course at the Academy, that the first symptoms of papa’s sickness began to show. I was called to his office several times to bring him home. I found him disorientated, physically exhausted and trembling. His formerly dark hair grew greyer and thinner by the day. Papa got old much too soon, while you remained unchanged.

For you time sped by red-hot, while for Papa it froze ice-blue. And he was growing more distant from me by the second.

I had already been working two years in the pulse station when you came back the second time.

It has been barely six months since the birth of Harlan, my third child. Iranus? My God, how do you still remember him? That was an ancient chapter in my life, followed by so many other forgotten versions.

Deverios, Harlan’s father, had just died in an aerial transit accident. I was two years older than you at the time, but I still couldn’t understand what dragged you away from Serena-Ceti, and what I was supposed to understand by your need for transcendence: watching your children grow up? Seeing your own self carried on in their lives? No, Miranda, I’m watching you grow up, at a speed that any parent would envy. And I don’t miss the changes, because for me the world is measured in astronomical units; what you see as abstract units are my reality. What I want is to transcend the time and space that are limiting us as a species. It was a lively lecture, but all I heard was the immature teenager underneath it all. Because now I no longer wonder why you left Serena-Ceti, but why you returned.

You and Papa saw each other for the last time on that trip. He was confined to the sanatorium for patients with retroviral dementia. Hospitalised for over a year with no definitive diagnosis.

A few short lines in his report spoke of a premature aging syndrome. Cause unknown. He confused you with me; he confused me with you. I still hold the memory in my cheek of the heat of his slap. Later, he lapsed into an impenetrable silence until the end, barely a week after The Persephone lifted off again.

Your third trip came at the end of an anguished time on Serena. Torrential rains and unknown epidemics that led to a planet-wide quarantine. The Persephone’s planned return, coming as it did during the spaceport’s closure, was delayed for thirty-two years, and when you appeared again, my grandchildren raced through the entranceway to greet you. For them, like my children before them, you were an almost magical and distant being, like the stars. And one week with you did nothing to change their opinion. It surprised you to see the holograms of so many strange persons in my albums, all of them bearing a trace of your DNA. You had a large family that you never knew and who never knew you either. It surprised you to see my room filled with trophies and awards from social and scientific organisations, some of them off-planet, in recognition of my work. But it was my old age that surprised you most of all. Although you knew that the years would not stop for me, it was still very difficult for you to accept that your daughter, your only remaining link to Serena-Ceti, now embodied everything that you had feared so much. And I learnt then, that now you would never come back again willingly.

Nearly forty years have passed. I have seen so many dreams blossom and die, so many broken promises, and so many loved ones who followed the natural order of life, the one you rebelled against, forcing me to betray it, too. Papa always said that children should not die before their parents; I accepted that as a commandment.

One hundred and six years after your first departure, that message arrived on the hyperjump channel. That The Persephone would arrive in six days. That it would carry your body. Killed in an excavation accident on the fifth planet of Procyon Alpha. How large an error was it this time? One second, two…? Enough to bury all your passion for transcendence in an avalanche of xenophobic stones. I had wanted to cry, but at one hundred and eleven years of age, one’s reflexes grow sluggish and sometimes disappear. I signed for your body in order to process the customary funeral ceremony. It did not surprise me to once again see the mother who had abandoned her home when I was five. Aside from the skin colour or the hair a centimetre or two longer, nothing had changed.

Now I have dressed you with my own hands, something I don’t remember you ever having done for me, and I come back to your ears, as useless as my own have been, to those rock crystal earrings from Delta Altair.

Once more I sense the flames as they consume fat, tendons and bones. But I know that this will be the last time. Now you are returning to the heavens in the form of smoke. You return to the night, but not to the stars, those windows open to an endless parade of strangers’ homes. Now that you will never leave again, now that, for some reason you could not foresee, the natural order of your life has been fulfilled, I can rest. I no longer have to look at the sky and ask which star you are on.