The Final Frontier: Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

RESCUE MISSION ^{JACK SKILLINGSTEAD}

^{Jack Skillingstead is the author of more than forty short stories, a collection, and two novels, with a third scheduled for early 2019. He has been a finalist for both the Theodore Sturgeon Award and Philip K. Dick Award. He lives in Seattle with his wife, writer Nancy Kress.}

Michael Pennington floated in Mona’s amniotic chamber, fully immersed, naked and erect, zened out. The cortical cable looped lazily around him. Womb Hole traveling. His gills palpitated; Mona’s quantum consciousness saturated the environment with a billion Qubits, and Michael’s Anima combined with Mona’s super animus and drove the starship along a dodgy vector through the Pleiades.

Until a distraction occurred.

Like a Siren call, it pierced to the center of Michael’s consciousness. His body twisted, eyes opening in heavy fluid. At the same instant Mona, cued to Michael’s every impulse, veered in space. Somewhere, alarms rang.

Mona interrupted the navigation cycle, retracted Michael’s cortical cable, and gently expelled him into the delivery chamber. Vacuums activated, sucking at him. He pushed past them, into the larger chamber beyond, still swooning on the borderland of Ship State. A blurry figure floated toward him: Natalie. She caught him and held him.

“What happened?” he asked.

“Mona spat you out. And we’re on a new course.” She touched his face. “Your eyes are all pupil. I’m going to give you something.”

“Hmm,” Michael said.

He felt the sting in his left arm. After a moment his head cleared.

“Let’s get you properly cleaned up,” Natalie said.

He was weak, post Ship State, and he let her touch him, but said: “The Proxy can help me.”

“You want it to?”

“It’s capable.”

“You have a thing for the Proxy?”

The Proxy, a rudimentary biomech, was an extension of Mona, though lacking in gender-specific characteristics.

“Not exactly.”

“We have a thing.”

“Nat, our ‘thing’ was a mistake. If we’d known we were going to team on this mission we would never have thinged.”

“Wouldn’t we have?”

“No.”

She released him and they drifted apart. Michael scratched his head. Tiny cerulean spheres of amniotic residue swarmed about him. “You can be kind of a bastard, you know.”

“I know.”

“I’ll send the Proxy.”

Mona transitioned into orbit around the wrong planet. It rolled beneath them, a world mostly green, a little blue, brushed with cloud white.

“That’s not Meropa IV,” Natalie said, floating onto the bridge with a bulb of coffee.

“No,” Michael said, not looking away from the monitor.

“So what is it?”

“A planet.”

“Gosh. So that’s a planet.” Natalie propelled herself up to the monitor. “And what are we doing here, when we have vital cargo for the Meropa IV colony?”

“There’s time,” Michael said, the Siren call still sounding deep in his mind. “This is important.”

“This is important? What about Meropa IV?”

Michael pushed away from the console.

“I’m going down,” he said.

Once he was strapped securely into the Drop Ship, Natalie said:

“You shouldn’t go.”

“Why not?”

“You’re acting strange. I mean stranger than usual.”

“That’s it?” Michael said, going through his pre-flight routine.

“Also, I have a feeling,” Natalie said.

“You’re always having those.”

“It’s human,” Natalie said.

“So I understand.”

“Even you had feelings once upon a time. Does New San Francisco ring any bells?”

“Steeples full. I’m losing my window, by the way. Can we drop now?”

“Why do I think you and Mona have a secret?”

“I have no idea why you think that.”

Natalie looked pained. “Why are you so mean to me?”

Michael couldn’t look at her.

“Do you have a secret?” Natalie said.

He fingered a nav display hanging like a ghostly vapor in front of his face. “I’m going to miss my damn window.”

She dropped him.

The Drop Ship jolted through entry fire and became an air vehicle. The planet rushed up. Cloud swirls blew past. Michael descended toward a dense continent-wide jungle.

Mona said: “I’m still unable to acquire the signal.”

“I told you: The signal’s in my head.”

“I’m beginning to agree with Natalie.”

“Don’t go human on me,” Michael said. “Taking over manual control now.”

He touched the proper sequence but Mona did not relinquish the helm.

“Let go,” Michael said.

“Perhaps you should reconsider. Further observation from orbit could yield—”

He hit the emergency override, which keyed to his genetic code. Mona fell silent, and Michael guided the Ship down to a clearing in the jungle.

Or what looked like a clearing.

A sensor indicated touchdown, but the ship’s feet sank into muck. Michael stared at his instrument displays. The ship rocked back, canted over, stopped.

Mona said: “You’re still over-riding me. I can’t lift off.”

“We just landed.”

“We’re sinking, not landing.”

“What’s going on,” Natalie said on a different channel.

“Nothing,” Michael said.

Mona cut across channels: “We’ve touched down in a bog! We—”

Michael switched off the audio for both Mona and Natalie. He released his safety restraints and popped the hatch, compelled, almost as if he were in the grip of a biological urge.

His helmet stifled him. He didn’t really need it, did he? Michael screwed it to the left and lifted it off. The air was humid, sickly fragrant. He clambered out of his seat, wiped the sweat off his forehead, then slipped over the side and into the sucking mire and began groping for shore. The more he struggled forward the deeper he sank. Fear and adrenaline momentarily flushed the fog from his mind.

“Mona, help!”

But his helmet was off and Mona could not reply.

Then, strangely, he stopped sinking. The mire buoyed him up and carried him forward toward the shore as several figures emerged from the jungle. His feet found purchase and he walked on solid ground, his flight suit heavy and streaming. The figures weren’t from the jungle; they were part of the jungle—trees that looked like women, or perhaps women who looked like trees. One stepped creakingly forward, a green mossy tangle swinging between its knobby tree trunk legs. It extended a limb with three twig fingers. Irregular plugs of amber resin gleamed like pale eyes in what passed for a face. Michael’s thoughts groped in the drugged fragrance of the jungle. He reached out and felt human flesh, smooth and cool and living, and a girl’s hand closed on his and drew him forth.

They opened his mind and shook it until the needed thing fell out. Mona was there but wrong. They shook harder and found Natalie:

New San Francisco, Mars, a scoured-sky day under the Great Equatorial Dome. Down time between Outbounds. The sidewalk table had a view towards Tharsis. Olympus Mons wore a diaphanous veil of cloud, but Michael looked away to watch Natalie approach in her little round glasses, the black lenses blanking her eyes.

“Of all the gin joints in all the worlds you had to pick mine,” he said; Michael was obsessed with ancient movies.

She removed her glasses and squinted at him.

“What?”

“Old movie reference. Two people with a past meet unexpectedly in a foreign city.”

“But we don’t have a past. And this was planned, though I guess you could call it unexpected.”

“I have a feeling we’re about to.”

“About to what?”

“Make a past out of this present.”

She sat down.

“You’re a strange man, and I don’t mean the gills. Also, this isn’t a foreign city. What are you drinking?”

“Red Rust Ale.”

“Philistine. Order me a chardonnay.”

He did, and the waiter brought it in a large stem glass.

“I bet this is the part you like best,” she said.

“Yes?”

“The flirting, the newness, the excitement. Especially because we aren’t supposed to fraternize.”

“There are good reasons for that non-fraternization rule,” he said, smiling.

She sipped her wine. He watched her, thinking: she’s right. And also thinking, less honestly: it doesn’t mean anything to her, not really. And hating himself a little, but still wanting her even though he knew in a while he wouldn’t be able to tolerate her closeness. That’s how it always worked with him. Automatic protective instinct; caring was just another word for grieving. But Natalie was a peer, not his usual adventure. An instinct he couldn’t identify informed him he was in a very dangerous place. He ignored it and had another beer while Natalie finished her glass of wine.

“Did you say you had a room around here someplace?” she said.

He put his bottle down. “I may have said that, yes.”

The narcotic jungle exhaled. Michael, sprawled on the moss-covered, softly decaying corpse of a fallen tree, drifted in and out of awareness. He saw things that weren’t there, or perhaps were there but other than what they appeared to be. Insects like animated beans trundled over his face, his neck, the backs of his hands. He was sweating inside his flight suit. Something spoke in wooden gutturals, incomprehensible. The sounds gradually resolved into understandable English.

“Kiss me?”

Michael blinked. He sat up. The steaming jungle was gone. He was sitting in an upholstered hotel chair and a woman was kneeling beside him. He recognized the room. The woman looked at him with large shiny amber eyes. The planes of her cheeks were too angular, too smooth.

Michael worked his mouth. His tongue felt dry and dead as a piece of cracked leather.

“I don’t know you,” he said.

Her mouth turned down stiffly and she rocked back and seemed to blend into the wall, which was patterned to resemble a dense green tangle of vine.

Michael closed his eyes.

Time passed like a muddy dream, and there were others.

They all called themselves Natalie. One liked to take walks with him in the rain, like that girl he had known in college. Michael, watching from his bedroom window, wasn’t surprised to see it out there with it’s umbrella. His breath fogged the faux leaded glass, and the tricky molecular structure of the pane, dialed wide to semi-permeable, seemed to breathe back into his face. Internal realities overlapped. This wasn’t New San Francisco or even old San Francisco on Earth. It was his lost home in upstate New York (as a child Michael used to play with the window, throwing snowballs from the front yard, delighting in how they strained through onto the sill inside his room. His mother had been something other than delighted, though).

Michael, staring at the thing waiting for him down there, pulled at his bottom lip. He clenched his right fist until it shook, resisting. But eventually he surrendered and turned away from the window. On the stairs reality lost focus. The walls became spongy and mottled, like the skin of a mushroom. The stairs were made of the same stuff. His boots sank into them and he stumbled downward and out into the light of the foyer. That was wrong, he thought, and looking back he saw an organic orifice, like a soft wound, and then it was simply a stairwell climbing upwards, with framed photographs of his family hung at staggered intervals. Dead people.

He opened the front door to the sound of rain rattling through maple leaves. College days, the street outside his dorm, and his first girl. Only this wasn’t a girl, the thing that called itself Natalie.

Michael stood a minute on the porch. The wrong porch. Inside had been the familiar rooms of his boyhood home (mushroom skin notwithstanding), long gone to fire and sorrow. This porch belonged to his dorm at the University of Washington. After a while he stepped down to the sidewalk and the Natalie-thing smiled.

“Would you like to take a walk with me?” it asked.

“Not really.”

He held the umbrella over both of them. Rain pattered on the taut fabric. The Natalie-thing slipped its arm under his. It was wearing a sweater and a wool skirt and black shoes that clocked on the sidewalk. Its hair was very dark red and its cheeks were rosy with the cold. When it glanced up at him it presented eyes as black and lusterless as a shark’s. Still wrong. And anyway, nothing like Natalie or his college girl.

“Want to see a movie?” it asked.

“All right.”

They held hands in the dark. He felt comfortable. The theater smelled of hot popcorn and the damp wool of the Natalie-thing’s skirt. He used to escape to the movies, where he could turn his mind off and be lost in the Deep Enhancement Cinema. Movies provided an imperfect respite from the memories ceaselessly rising out of the ashy ruin of his home.

The screen dimmed and brightened and incomprehensible sounds, like crowd noises muffled in cotton, issued from unseen speakers that seemed to communicate directly into his head. They—the ones like this Natalie beside him—hadn’t fully comprehended the idea of a movie.

It squeezed his hand.

“This is good,” it said.

“Pretty good,” he replied.

The theater was empty except for them. Empty of human forms, anyway. Irregular shadows cropped up randomly, like shapes in a night jungle. Then one of the shapes two rows in front of Michael turned around and leaned over the back of the seat, and Michael saw it was a woman, a real woman, dressed as he was, in a flight suit. She was wearing a breathing mask.

The woman began to speak but he couldn’t understand her. He leaned forward.

“What, what did you say?”

The thing beside him tightened its grip, so tight the fingers of his right hand ached in its grasp, the small bones grinding in their sleeves of flesh. He tried to stand but it held him down and squeezed harder and harder until his entire awareness was occupied by the pain.

Several of the jungle shapes interposed themselves between Michael and the woman who had spoken to him. The air became clogged, humid, stifling. Rain began to fall inside the theater. He struggled to pull free. The numbing pain traveled up his arm. The theater seat held him, shifted around him. Knobby protuberances poked and dug into him, like sitting in a tangle of roots. He couldn’t breath.

Then it stopped.

He sat in a movie theater with a young mahogany-haired woman, who held his hand sweetly in the dark. She leaned over and whispered, “You fell asleep!” Her warm breath touched his ear.

“I did?” He sat up, groggy.

“Yes, darling.”

He blinked at the screen, where dim pulses of light moved in meaningless patterns. That was so wrong.

The one that liked to make love pulled him to his feet in the hotel room and kissed him roughly. He tried to push it away but it was too strong. After a while it held him at arm’s length and said something he couldn’t understand. The jungle effluvium infiltrated his brain, and he saw a woman he used to know, or a rudimentary version of her. The eyes were still wrong—plugs of dull amber. Michael staggered back, caught his heel on the carpet, and fell. His lips were bruised, sticky and sweet with sap.

It stalked over and stood above him.

“Mike, we have to get out of here.”

This new voice didn’t belong to the thing straddling his legs.

Michael craned his head around. A women stood in a flight suit similar to his own. She was there and then she wasn’t there, as the scenery shifted around him, from his old bedroom on Earth to the hotel room on Mars.

“Natalie—?” he said.

The one that liked to make love lowered itself on top of him. Michael tried to roll away but couldn’t. It mounted him and he screamed.

That time in New San Francisco, in the mock Victorian hotel room, in the bed of clean linen sheets, the following morning, when Natalie woke early and started to get out of bed, he had reached out and touched her naked hip and said, “Stay.” A costly word.

He was alone again, half asleep in and out of dream. Then something was shaking him.

“Mike, come on. There isn’t time. They’ll be back.”

He struggled against this new assault. Something wrestling with him, pinning him down on the bed with its knobby knees. Then a mask fitted over his mouth and nose, and a clean wind blew into his lungs, filling him, clearing his head. He opened his eyes, closed them, opened them wide.

“Hello, Nat,” he said, his voice muffled through the breathing mask

She flipped the little mahogany curl of hair out of her eye.

“Hello yourself, you idiot,” Natalie said.

“How’d you get here?” he asked, meaning how did she get into his hotel room. But even as he asked the question the last vestiges of the illusion blew away in the fresh revivifying oxygen.

A pink puzzle piece sky shone above the jungle canopy.

Twisted trees crowded them, shaggy with moss, hung with thick vines braided like chains.

“I dropped in, just like you,” Natalie said.

Michael looked around “I have a feeling we’re not on Mars, Dorothy.”

“Who’s Dorothy?”

Something hulking, hunched and redolent of mold and jungle rot came shambling towards them.

“Nat, look out!”

She turned swiftly, yanking a blaster from her utility belt. Reality stuttered. As if in a fading memory he saw the tree-thing knock the weapon from Natalie’s hand. At the same moment, superimposed, he saw her fire. A bright red flash of plasma energy seared into the thing. It lurched back, yowling, punky smoke flowing from the fresh wound.

Nat grabbed Michael’s hand and pulled him up. He felt dizzy and weak, still drugged.

“What are you doing?” he said.

“Rescuing your ass.” She gave him a little push. “That way to the ship.”

“No,” he said, pointing, “it’s that way.”

“My ship is this way. Your ship sank.”

He scrambled drunkenly ahead of her, stumbling over roots, getting hung up in vines. Though the illusions were displaced he could still hear the Siren wail in his mind and had to fight an impulse to rip the mask from his face. There was movement all around them. More of the things shambled out of the shadows. Natalie blasted away with her weapon, clearing a path.

They broke into the open. The ship gleamed in weak sunlight.

“Get in! I’ll hold them off.”

Michael clambered up the ladder to the cockpit. At the top of the ladder he turned and saw Natalie about to be overwhelmed.

“Nat, come on!”

She dropped her depleted blaster, swung onto the ladder—but it was too late. They had her.

Michael slumped in his theater seat, withdrawn from the Deep Enhancement movie experience he had created. Warm rain fell out of the darkness. The One Who Liked Rain sat beside him with a bowl of soggy popcorn.

It turned to him.

“That was so good, Mike.”

Its lips glistened with butter. Its eyes were dull amber wads. A breathing mask with a torn strap dangled from it’s fingers.

Michael groaned.

Like an insect buzz in his ear: Michael wake up, for God’s sake.

Michael closed his eyes.

On Mars Natalie had said, “I think I’m falling in love with you,” and his defenses had rattled down like iron gates.

“Mike?”

“Not a good idea. In the first place we’ll both soon be Outbound. It might be years before we see each other again. In the second place, my modifications inhibit my ability to achieve human intimacy. I’m a lost cause, Nat.”

Natalie shook her head. “You don’t have to drag out your excuses. I know you. I’m just saying how I feel, not asking for anything. And by the way, your mods have nothing to do with intimacy. I’ve known plenty of Womb Hole pilots and I don’t buy the myth that you’re all emotional cripples.”

Michael smiled. He hadn’t been thinking about the mods he’d volunteered to undergo, the ones necessary for Ship State, the ones that at least allowed him a semblance of intimacy, even if it was with a machine consciousness. He had meant the more visceral mods of his psyche, where blackened timbers had risen like pickets in Hell to form the first rudimentary fence around his heart.

“You don’t really know me,” he said.

“Not at this rate, I don’t.

Then the biological crisis on Meropa IV occurred. Vital vaccines needed. Michael’s Ship Tender came up with Kobory Fever, and Natalie, loose on Mars, got the duty. Like some kind of Fate. Michael experienced a burst of pure joy—which he quickly stomped on.

“I don’t see why I had to die,” Natalie said. Was she the real Natalie?

He was back in the hotel, lying flat on the bed. Natalie, having fitted another breathing mask to his face, sat in a chair near the window. Except it appeared she wasn’t sitting in a chair at all, but on a tangle of thick roots growing out of the floor. He had just told her about the movie.

“You were saving me,” he said.

“I’m saving you now,” she said. “Or trying to. You’ve got to get off your ass and participate.”

Michael felt heavy.

“And in this version I don’t die,” Natalie said.

She led him out of the hotel room, which quickly became something other than an hotel room. As his head cleared the vine-tangle wallpaper popped out in three dimensions, the floor became soft, spongy. The light shifted to heavily screened pink/green. Flying insects buzzed his sweaty face. A locus of pain began rhythmically stabbing behind his right eye.

“The atmosphere is drugged with hallucinogenic vapors from the plants,” Natalie said. “They want you here, but they don’t want you to know where ‘here’ is.”

“Who wants me?”

“They. The jungle. The sentient life on this planet. It’s gynoecious, by the way, and it’s been sweeping open space, seeking first contact. They detected you and Mona and evidently became entranced by the possibilities of companion male energy. Frankly, they have a point.”

“Where the hell do you get all that?”

“I asked. Or Mona did, actually. She’s been frantically investigating language possibilities since you disappeared. They communicate telepathically.”

Natalie led him through a sort of tunnel made from over-arching branches. They had to duck their heads.

“Wait.” He grabbed her arm. She turned, a curl of dark red hair flipping over her eye. “Did you bring a weapon?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Well, where is it?”

“They sort of disarmed me.”

“I see.”

“Don’t worry. We’re getting out of here. As long as you’re not breathing the air they can’t mess you up too much. I think they’ll let us leave. I have a theory. Now let’s keep moving. It isn’t far to the ship.”

They emerged from the tunnel. The ship was there, but they were cut off from it by a wall of the tree-things, the crooked things with hungry amber eyes. They encircled the ship, knobby limbs entwined to form a barrier.

“You were saying?” Michael said, straightening his back. “Anyway, have Mona fly the ship over.”

“I can’t. Mona was hinky about landing after your Drop Ship sank. Also, I think they got into her head and spooked her. I had to engage the emergency override, same as you did.”

“Wonderful.”

“At least the security repulsion field is keeping them away from the ship.”

“At least.”

Hands on her hips, Natalie appraised the situation. After a minute she touched the com button on her wrist and spoke into it.

“Mona, we need help. Send the Proxy to clear a path.”

The aft hatch swung up and the Proxy appeared. It climbed down and disappeared behind the tree-things. A moment later the circle tightened. There was a the flash and pop of a blaster discharge. One of the tree things erupted in flame. It stumped out of the ring and stood apart, burning. The others closed in. A violent disturbance occurred. There were no further blasts. The Proxy’s torso arced high over the line, dull metal skin shining. It clanked once when it hit the ground. The line resumed it’s stillness.

“It’s a female jungle, all right,” Michael said. “Care to reveal your famous theory?”

Natalie held his hand. “We’re walking through,” she said.

“Just like that.”

“Yes. If we’re together they’ll let us. I mean really together.”

“That’s your theory?”

“Basically. Mike, trust me.”

They started walking. When they came to the Proxy’s torso, Michael held her back.

“I’ll go through alone,” he said. “If I make it to the ship I’ll lift off and pick you up in the clear.”

He tried to pull his hand free but she wouldn’t let go.

“No,” she said.

“Nat—”

“No. Don’t you see? If you go alone they’ll take you again. If I go alone they’ll rip me apart like the Proxy.”

“And if we go together?”

“If we go together they… will see.”

“See what?”

“That you aren’t solo, that somebody else is already claiming your male companion energy, another of your own species. Unlike Mona, whom they felt justified in severing you from. They know I’m imprinted in your psyche. You said yourself they always used my name. You just have to stop fighting us.”

Michael scratched his cheek, which was whiskered after a few days in the sentient jungle. Natalie squeezed his hand.

“Mike?”

“No.”

“We have to move.”

“It’s too risky.”

“Come on. It’s now or never.”

He felt himself collapsing inside, and then the old detachment. The cold, necessary detachment. She saw it in his eyes and let go of his hand.

“I’ll go through myself, then,” she said, and started walking forward.

He grabbed her arm.

“You just said they’d tear you apart.”

“I’m already torn apart,” she said.

“Don’t, Nat. Let’s think about this.”

“Just let me go, okay? You don’t want me. I get it.”

He held on. “There has to be another way to the ship.”

She pulled loose.

“I might get through. Wish me luck.”

“Nat—”

A cringing, huddled piece of him behind the cold wall stood up, trembling.

Natalie again started for the picket line of tree-things, walking quickly, leaving Michael standing where he was.

The tree-things reacted, reaching for her.

Michael got to her first and pulled her back into his arms. “Damn it,” he said. “Damn it, damn it, damn it.”

They lifted out of the jungle, accelerating until they achieved orbit. He sat tandem behind Natalie in the narrow cockpit of the Drop Ship.

“You really like to force the issue,” he said.

“Do I?”

“I’m not saying it’s a bad idea.”

“No.”

“I mean, a little push doesn’t hurt.”

“Hmm.”

A few minutes later they acquired the starship and Natalie resumed manual operation and began docking maneuvers. She worked the controls very competently. Michael watched over her shoulder. But his gaze returned again and again to rest upon the nape of her neck, where a few silken hairs escaped and lay sweetly over her skin.

“The Dorothy thing,” he said, “that was another old movie reference. A child is swept away from family and friends and finds herself estranged in a hostile world.”

“How does she get back home?”

“She discovers a way to trust companions who initially frighten her.”

“I like that one.”

“It works for me.”

Natalie tucked them neatly into Mona’s docking bay.