Glow (2 page)

The studio was really a small anteroom outside the Captain’s office, but it was where the Captain preferred to record their webcasts. The room was lined with large windows that looked onto the nebula, which the Empyrean had been traversing for the past year and a half. Below the windows were short couches arranged in a row, where anyone who wanted to could sit and watch Kieran’s show for Earth’s children or the Captain’s longer show that relayed the adult news back to Earth. In front of the couches was a small but very powerful camera, and above them, a row of bright hot lights shone on the desk where Kieran sat to deliver the news.

There were only a few people in the studio today, and Kieran hurried past them and straight to the makeup chair, where Sheryl was waiting with her powder puff.

“You’re cutting it close these days,” she remarked, wiping the sweat off his face. “You’re all sweaty.”

“It never picks up on camera.”

“Your panting does.”

She ran a small fan in his face to dry him, which felt wonderful, then patted him with talcum. “You need to be more mindful.”

“We’re only recording it. We can’t send it until we’re out of the nebula.”

“You know how the Captain likes to keep the archives up-to-date,” she said with a smirk. The Captain could be fussy.

Kieran didn’t know why they bothered with the webcasts anymore—there hadn’t been any communication from Earth for years. The Empyrean was so far from the home world that any radio signal would take years to reach its destination. And when it did, it would be so distorted that it would require extensive correction before it could be understood. He might never know if there was anyone back on Earth listening to his newscasts, which made Kieran feel like a figurehead of precisely nothing.

He examined his reflection in the mirror, still undecided about his looks. He might be kind of handsome, he thought, if his nose weren’t so crooked and his chin weren’t so square. But at least his amber eyes weren’t bad, and he had nice rusty-colored hair that mussed in a thick pile over his forehead. He thought it looked good that way, but Sheryl ran a damp comb through the curls, trying to get them to lie straight.

Captain Jones came to stand behind Sheryl. A tall man with a potbelly and trembling, thick fingers, he walked as if listing from side to side, which on first impression made him seem aimless. In truth, the Captain was the most purposeful man on the ship, quick with his decisions, which were almost always right, and trusted by all the men on the ship, though he was less popular with women, Kieran had noticed.

The Captain frowned disapprovingly at Kieran, who didn’t mind it. He knew the Captain was extremely fond of him.

“Kieran, you spend too much time with Waverly Marshall. I ought to intervene.”

Kieran forced a smile, though he didn’t like it when the Captain talked about Waverly this way, as though he owned her and were only loaning her out.

“I trust you’ve practiced?” the Captain asked, eyebrows smashed down in an attempt at sternness. He let out a puff of air that disturbed the gray hairs of his beard, which he smoothed with his thumb and forefinger.

“I read it all over twice last night.”

“Out loud?” he pressed with a glimmer of humor.

“Yes!”

“Good.” The Captain handed a data-dot to Sammy, the technician, who was readying the teleprompter. “I’ve made a couple small changes at the end, Kieran. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wing it. I’d planned to discuss it with you ahead of time, but you were late.”

“What are the changes?”

“Just a small mention of our new neighbors,” said the Captain with an attempt at nonchalance. When he looked out the porthole, though, he sighed heavily.

“What’s going on?” Kieran asked, trying to sound carefree. But when he met Captain Jones’s eyes, all pretenses sank away. “Why did they slow down?”

The Captain blinked a few times in that strange way he had, bottom lids flitting upward. “They have a new captain, or … leader, and I don’t like the way she talks.”

“How does she talk?” Kieran wanted to know, but the perpetually frantic Sammy jabbed his finger at Kieran.

“Thirty seconds,” he said.

“Later,” said Captain Jones, guiding Kieran to his seat in front of the camera. “Have a good show.”

Uneasy, Kieran placed his palms flat on the oak desk in front of him. Then he assumed the bland smile he wore at the beginning of every webcast and watched the opening montage.

It began with the crew of the Empyrean, two of them Kieran’s parents, young and fresh faced as they helped transplant a tobacco seedling in the occult nursery. Then came a scene of doctors in white surgical caps, leaning over a row of test tubes, carefully dropping samples into them with a long syringe. Finally there was a picture of all two hundred and fifty-two kids on board standing in the family gardens, surrounded by apple and pear trees, grapevines growing up the walls, and baskets of fresh carrots and celery and potatoes. The image was meant to communicate plenty and prosperity so that the hungry people back on Earth could believe in the mission.

The light over the camera winked on, and Kieran began.

“Welcome to the Empyrean. I’m Kieran Alden,” he said. “Today we’re going to give you a special look at our fertility labs. As you might remember, long-term space travel can make it difficult for women to get pregnant with healthy babies. For six years, women aboard the Empyrean tried to get pregnant, and failed. This was a tense time, because if they couldn’t have children to replace the original crew, there would be no surviving colonists to terraform New Earth. So creating the next generation was more important than anything else. We’ve prepared a video for you that looks back at how our team of scientists solved the problem.”

The studio faded to black, and the screen behind Kieran showed the video segment about the fertility labs. Kieran had a few minutes to catch his breath while the video ran.

At the back of the studio there was a sudden flurry of activity. Winona, Captain Jones’s beautiful secretary, came running in and whispered something in his ear. The old man darted up and hurried out of the room.

Kieran watched the video, which showed clips of his own birth. Kieran was naturally shy, so it was uncomfortable to have the entire human species know what he looked like, slimy and screaming after emerging from his mother’s womb. But he was used to it. Kieran was the first successful deep space birth. When he was born there was a great celebration, not only on the Empyrean, but probably back on Earth as well, which was why Kieran had been chosen to host the webvision broadcasts. He never got to decide what was said on his show; he only read the news. His job was very simple: Give the people of Earth a reason to believe that Earth-origin life would not go extinct. Give them hope that even if they themselves could not immigrate to the new home world, maybe their grandchildren could.

The video was drawing to a close, and Kieran straightened in his chair.

“Five, four, three…,” Sammy whispered.

“Unfortunately, things didn’t go as well on our sister ship, the New Horizon. Though their scientists worked very hard, the women aboard the New Horizon never got pregnant.”

Kieran’s heart pounded. He had never heard this before. As far as he and everyone else knew, there were lots of children aboard the New Horizon, just as there were on the Empyrean. Now he realized that communication between the two ships had been minimal for a long time. Had that been intentional?

Sammy, whose face had turned ashen behind his round spectacles, made an urgent gesture for Kieran to keep reading.

“No one knows why the New Horizon kept their fertility problems a secret,” he went on, “but recently they’ve slowed their progress in order to rendezvous with the Empyrean, so we expect to find out soon.”

The theme music began, an upbeat melody with piano and strings, and Kieran tried to match the cheerful tone with his own voice. “This has been webvision broadcast number two hundred forty-seven from the Empyrean. I’m Kieran Alden, signing off.”

When the music faded away, Kieran heard shouting. The Captain, normally calm and self-possessed, was yelling so loudly that Kieran could hear him through the metal walls of his office.

“I don’t care what you
think
you’re going to do! You’re not boarding this ship until I review the situation with my Central Council!”

He was silent for a moment but soon began shouting again, even louder. “I’m not refusing a meeting. Come aboard in a OneMan and we’ll have one.”

Silence.

“I don’t understand why you need to bring an entire crew, ma’am, if all you want is a conversation.”

Silence, an angry one. When the Captain spoke again, it was with intimidating calm: “I’ve given you no reason whatever to distrust
me
. I have never
lied
to you, or deviated from the mission plan without an explanation.… Oh, that’s just paranoid trash! There was no sabotage! I keep telling you!”

Kieran heard the Captain pacing. He felt guilty eavesdropping, but he couldn’t stop himself. Judging from the hush in the room, neither could anybody else.

“If our two vessels cannot work together…”

Suddenly Sammy was in motion again, flicking switches on the studio console until the screen behind Kieran’s desk glowed with a video image from the starboard side of the Empyrean.

Someone in the room gasped.

The New Horizon loomed on the screen, huge and shadowy, close enough for individual portholes to be seen with the naked eye. At first Kieran thought the image must be magnified, but with a tightening in his gut, he knew this wasn’t the case. In the short time it had taken him to do the show, the New Horizon had closed the three hundred kilometers between the two ships and was now cruising alongside the Empyrean at extremely close range.

Why?

A subtle movement caught Kieran’s eye, a tiny dot moving like an insect away from the New Horizon, toward the Empyrean. From its bulletlike shape, he guessed it must be a shuttle craft, the kind of vessel designed to carry the colonists and their equipment from the larger ships on short missions to the surface of New Earth. These shuttles were never intended for deep space travel or for docking from one ship to the other, but that was what this one was doing now. Whoever was aboard was clearly planning to land on the Empyrean.

“Oh, my God.” Sheryl sat in the makeup chair, hands clamped over her pink mouth.

“How many people do those things carry?” asked Sammy, sounding bewildered and frightened.

The Captain burst out of his office and pointed at Sammy. “This is an attack,” he announced. “Sammy, tell the Central Council to meet me in the starboard shuttle bay.”

As an afterthought he added, “Call a security squad, too. Hell, call
all
of them.”

Kieran’s heartbeat tripped crazily. His mother was on a volunteer security squad, working every now and then to settle a dispute between crew members or help out during a community event. The squads never carried weapons.

“What’s happening, Captain?” Kieran asked, his voice cracking.

The Captain put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Honestly, Kieran,” he confessed, “I just don’t know.”

IN THE GARDEN

“Everything we have, they have,” Waverly repeated under her breath as she marched down the corridor toward the living quarters she shared with her mother. Sometimes it seemed the more serious Kieran got about her, the more patronizing his tone. If he thought that she was going to be a passive little wifey with no thoughts of her own, he was in for a nasty surprise.

Still, of all the boys near her age on the ship, he seemed to be the best, and not just because he was tallish and well made. He was kind, and intelligent, and she liked how energetic he was, how lithe his body was, and how well he controlled it. She liked looking at his face, at his long jawline, his pale tawny eyes, the red hairs that grew on his upper lip. And when she talked to him, he bent down and trained his ear on her as though he couldn’t bear to miss a single word. He would make a good husband. She should consider herself lucky.

But there was doubt inside of her. Everyone expected them to marry, including the Captain and their parents, and she wondered if that pressure had made Kieran propose. Did they love each other enough to be happy together? If there weren’t concerns about fertility, would she marry Kieran, or anyone, right now? She wasn’t sure. Few people would have sympathy for her hesitation. There were larger concerns at play than her mere happiness.

She opened the door to her quarters and walked into the living room. Remnants of hemp and cotton covered the dining table, the leavings of a dress Waverly had been trying to sew with little success. She’d had to rip out every seam she’d put in and was considering throwing the whole mess away. Her mother’s loom stood in the corner, strung with wool yarns in a blue stripe—probably a blanket for someone. The walls were covered with family photos: of Waverly as a chubby toddler; of her mother and father rosy cheeked, holding hands in the cold conifer bay; of her grandparents with their melancholy eyes, left behind so long ago on Earth. There were pictures of Earth’s oceans, and mountains, and white clouds in a pale sky. “I wish you could have seen the sky,” her mother often said, which Waverly always thought so strange. She was
in
the sky, wasn’t she? She was surrounded by it. But no, her mother insisted, she had never
seen
it. She wouldn’t see the sky until they landed on New Earth in forty-five years.

Waverly heard pounding in the kitchen. “Mom!” she called.

“In here!” her mother answered.

Regina Marshall was tall and brunette, just like Waverly, though she wasn’t as slim. She was kneading dough for rough peasant’s bread and kept her back to her daughter as she worked. When it was bread-baking day, Waverly had trouble getting her mother’s attention, but she knew today would be different.

“Kieran proposed,” Waverly announced.

Regina whirled around, nuggets of dough flying from her hands, and with two eager steps she had Waverly in her arms. “I knew it! I’m so happy!”