©1995 D. A. Houdek

No reproduction or distribution without consent of the author

1756 Words

 "Those We Left Behind" is a prequel to "Gandharvas". The story is science fiction.

Originally published in Millennium Science Fiction and Fantasy, September 1998. Reprinted in The Best of Millennium Science Fiction & Fantasy Magazine, Vol. 1 Issue 3, Winter 1998.

"Those We Left Behind" is currently published on-line at the ezine Private Galaxy

Those We Left Behind

by

D. A. Houdek

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Through a throat threatening to close up on her, she finally managed to answer, “Yes.”  Pushing down and away on the handholds, Diana moved out of zero gee zone and back into range of the graviton generators.  The somewhat inconsistent artificial gravity pulled her down to the deck.

“This is your first time out, isn’t it?” the voice said, this time coming from above her. 

Diana looked up to see a man sitting at a small table on what, from her perspective, was the ceiling. 

“Come and join me,” the man said. 

Shaking her head, disoriented, she searched for a way to reach the man.  The Escher was something she’d stumbled on in a strange, unmapped corner of Terra Two.  The bar was at the junction point of six distinctly different sections of the tangled jumble that made up the station.  One wall clearly showed an old NASA marking (she suspected it was fake), and it was rumored that somewhere, buried in the maze, was the old Mir space station. 

Stumbling over the gravity anomaly as the stairs changed their orientation, Diana found herself much heavier.  This portion of the Escher was picking up gravitation from a newer part of the station.  She closed her eyes for a moment against the nausea of the freefall and varying gravities, then made her way to the man’s table. 

He was a good enough looking man, she decided, not dazzlingly handsome, but with a roguish glint to his eyes that appealed to her.  His grin as she sat down was infectious.  She smiled back. 

“How could you tell?”

“That it’s your first time out?”  He shrugged.  “Lots of things.  Partly the way you hold yourself in the freefall niche, like a cross between loving it and wanting nothing more than to get out of it and throw up.”

A chuckle seemed appropriate, but Diana didn’t think she could manage that.  Instead she said dryly, “The artificial gravity is worse.”

Catching his drink as it tried to bob up off the table, he nodded.  “The field variations take some getting used to.”  Diana clutched the edge of the table until the gravitation stabilized. 

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“You’ve managed to find the spacer bar,” the man told her.  The intent way he studied her was starting to make her uneasy.  “Only the hard-core spacers come here.  Oh, not the Corp, or the Service, it’s too…” he waved his hand around meaningfully, “unstructured for their tastes.  And it’s not on the maps or in the guides.  The earthpiggies don’t know it’s here.” 

“I found it,” she said quietly.  “And I’m not a spacer.”

“You’re also not a tourist.  What are you doing here?”

Diana stared off toward the window again.  Earth was upside-down now, North America at the bottom.  The North Pole as “up” was an arbitrary bias, she knew intellectually.  It still looked wrong this way.  She thought about what lay beneath that frosting of swirling clouds, of who and what she’d left behind. 

In a whisper, she answered, “Suddenly I was suffocating down there.”

The man nodded.  “I know what you mean.  I think that’s why we all keep coming out here, even if it’s not why we went out in the first place.”

The table presented Diana with a fresh drink.  She sipped, thinking they could say what they liked but vacuum distilled rum from hydroponically grown cane just didn’t taste like the real thing. 

As if reading her mind again, the man smiled at her.  “Different isn’t necessarily worse,” he commented, raising his own drink in salute. 

Diana set the glass down on the table.  “It is in this case,” she said with a wry grin.  She sighed and looked around again, avoiding the view of Earth.  After a long time she again turned to the man seated opposite her.  “You haven’t asked my name.”

“Nor you mine.”  He paused.  “Does it matter?”

The glistening planet beckoned her, a siren’s song sounding in her mind despite the silent gulf of night.  Earth had slid fractionally off to the side of window.  The Escher was in a slowly rotating part of the station that further out provided centrifugal gravitation.

She shrugged.  “I guess not.” 

“I haven’t been down there for ten years,” he said.  “Longer in Earth years.”  She glanced sharply at him.  “The relativistic thing, you know.”

“Oh.  You’ve made Long Jumps.”  She wondered how old he really was, what year he’d been born, that is.  To all appearances he was in his early forties.  What would it be like to stay young while one’s brothers, sisters and friends grew older?  Perhaps she’d feel grand, as smug as if she’d won a prize, a very real fountain of youth, while they deteriorated and turned to aged dust.  Perhaps not.  Maybe she’d feel even more out of sync than she already did, an anachronism returning to a world that had gone on without her. 

“One short jump, maybe two,” the man said in a quiet, distant voice, “don’t really matter.  Then they start to add up and pretty soon you can’t go back there at all.”  He focused on her, staring harshly into her eyes.  “If you’re going back, go now.”

Diana dropped her eyes and swallowed hard.  “My return is today.”  Out the window the planet had moved half out of view.

He nodded slowly.  “The Service and the Corp turned you down, huh?”

She swallowed the bitter taste of his scorn.  Her mouth twitched in a slight smile.  It didn’t taste quite right.  “I turned them down.”

“Hmmph.  What about the Scouters?”

Diana snorted, shook her head, then forced down a gulp of the pseudo-rum.  “Not for me.”

“Why not?  Because they’re not ‘official’.  You that much of a government lover?”  Now he snorted.  “Most spacers I know are closet anarchists.”  He scrutinized her.  “Or is it because they’re the misfits?  The ones who can’t take orders, won’t wear uniforms, never get the glory or recognition no matter how much they deserve it?” 

Glancing toward the human bat cluster, Diana swallowed hard.  He was describing her.  She’d never fit in, no matter how her family tried to squeeze and nudge her into that round hole.  Be something nice, something normal, get these foolish notions out of your head, Diana, they’d always said.  You’ll never be anything special, never be anything extraordinary.  Her mother just sighed in disgust when she said she was going out to space.  Mother didn’t try to talk her out of it.  She knew Diana would be back, tail tucked between her legs. 

Diana had been so excited when she took the Corp and the Colonial Service exams.  The recruiters had smiled so encouragingly when they told her the results, and offered her positions as dull and un-extraordinary as any she could get on Earth.  In fact there was a good chance she’d end up posted on Earth, the bland, smiling faces said as if offering her a prize.  She just wasn’t suited to the space-faring positions, they told her. 

Tears wanted to squeeze out of her eyes but she wasn’t the crying type.  Sometimes she wished she could cry.  Maybe it was because she just couldn’t tell them exactly what it was that she did want.  She had stumbled over the words trying to tell them she just wanted out.  She wanted to get away, to be different from the dull herd down below.  She wanted to leave behind the sheep contented to plod along and soar higher up, above the atmosphere…

“Most of these folks are Scouters,” the man said quietly.  His eyes were still fixed on her, measuring her in a different way.  It wasn’t just a tumble in freefall he was after, she realized.  She looked around at the people scattered through the Escher again.  There was a quality about them that she couldn’t define, a brazen sense of defiance, a freedom, certainly a looseness the Corp and Service lacked.  But there was also an edge to them, an urgency, perhaps, a wish that they weren’t the misfits of space.  A lot who went out never came back.  They never earned medals or parades.  None of their mothers bragged about what they did.

“When a Scouter goes out, he never knows how long it will be.  They hunt for worlds that may not be there, hope for the day they hit the glory find — a prime world — or hit the Big One, first contact with an alien civilization.  They leave behind their families until they lose them entirely to time.  They leave behind the world the knew, until they’re strangers everywhere except among other Scouters.”

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“Just thought you ought to hear it.”

“You’re a Scouter recruiter, aren’t you?  You followed me here.”

He smiled.  “I didn’t follow you.  I didn’t have to.  I suspected you’d find your way here.”  He stood.  “Well, I’ll be going.  I know you’ve got to be going too.”  He walked up a ramp that curved up and over her head until he walked away on her ‘ceiling’.  Diana stared morosely out the window.  She could be home by tomorrow, in her mother’s kitchen, accepting the jobs offered her, perhaps finding a husband, having children… adding to the complacent herd content to suffocate below the atmosphere.

“Wait,” Diana called, craning her neck to look up at him. Diana pointed to the window where now showed only stars sprinkled throughout the black depths of space.  “That’s where I want to go.”

The End

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