“Yes,” I say. “It certainly is. Now eat your manicotti. I’ve heard you like it.”
_-* Tasks Remaining: 1801 *-_
I’m able to go about most of my day like there was no transmission from an ancient Ambrose. Kodiak and I repair the ship’s past damages, we prep for asteroid harvesting, we feed our organismal selves, knowing that those same selves might soon be silenced by the ship that hosts us. I make up an insane little song that startsI’m just a little bacterium / living in a gut.
As that “normal” life moves forward, so does another one, in parallel. One where I press my face right up against the ship’s windows, where I sift through OS’s code for suspicious lines, where I examine suits and blankets for old hair, skin, blood. Where I peek under the ship’s skin, waiting for it to hemorrhage out the truth.
I come up with theories for where we’re heading. Another galaxy. Into a black hole. Out of a black hole. To Minerva, after all. Back to Earth, where she’ll be waiting for me.It’s Friday night. Of course your Minnie’s here waiting for you.
Whenever I take one of my half-dozen daily walks through theAurora, I find Kodiak investigating. He’ll be removing a wall panel to see what’s beneath, or picking at the film that coats the inside of the windows (or are they screens?). Rover is almost always in the same room, watching.
Whenever I see Rover, I get the urge to punt its little whirring half-basketball body.If we prove the reels from our former selves were true, we’re disabling you first. And I’ll be the one to execute the code.
One morning, I find Kodiak in the blind room. He’s got the blanket near, and the offline tablet. I raise an eyebrow, and he nods, patting the ground next to him. I sit beside him, thigh against thigh. He tents the blanket over us, then kneads my upper arm. It’s in a sports massage-y kind of way, but after what he said about the other guys during training, it gets my mind wandering to our future, when my hand could reach under the waistband, to smooth skin and more—
Are you ready?Kodiak types.
You could say that.I type, Yes. He waits for me to keep going. I write, I thought you had something to say.
He pauses.I didn’t come up with any solutions.
I try and fail to keep a smile off my lips. Hope of all Dimokratía, huh?
No wisecracks, Cusk.
Lucky for you, I was the top student in my analytic geometry class.
He rolls his eyes at that one. Deservedly. I continue. Our best chance of figuring out where we’re headed is to find out where we are relative to Earth. Then we can continue that ray out into the universe, and see what it hits.
Well, yes. But how do we figure that out?
The radio!
Kodiak taps his lips.How far from Earth I get. The signals we’re receiving through the radio transmitter mention dates. By comparing those with the ship date, we can estimate how far they’ve traveled at the speed of light, and therefore how far we’ve been journeying. But that’s just distance, not direction.
I seize the tablet from him. Yes! We need to know our distance from two other points to get our precise location. Intersection of three spheres. And what gets us precise locations?
Pulsars.I snap my fingers, grinning. He continues writing.Their pulses are regular, but the highest frequencies of the wave move slightly faster, and the difference in the highest and lowest frequencies can be calculated, which should allow us to find out our distance from the pulsar!
I take over. The frequency of the pulse will let me look up which pulsar it is, and we can find its original location.Can you find us two pulsars in all that radio noise?
I’ll try to get us some neutron stars. And this is genius.Kodiak rests the tablet in his lap and pinches my chin between his fingers, gives it a good wag while he stares into my eyes. It seems he’s started to absorb the fact that his previous self was my lover.
I take the tablet and type, mainly to hide the rise in my pants. Let’s get started.
He stands, his own bulge giving him away. “Such minute calculations,” he murmurs, heading to his console and placing the headphones over his ears. “The number of significant figures this will require...” His voice trails off as he gets distracted.
I’m a little distracted, too. But we have more important things to do than hook up. For now.
So I won’t tip OS off to what I’m doing, I start scrolling through the offline tablet, looking at old-school star charts. They’re images of pages from actual books, so it takes forever to find anything. Searching through all the tables does help with the erection problem, though.
Time wheels away from me. Kodiak is as motionless as anything else in the room, his face a mask of concentration. Then he leaps to his feet. The headphones whip off his head, and he dashes to catch them before they hit the floor. He beckons me over, his face bright with joy, and tosses me my own set.
I lean into him as I listen. There’s the pulse of his blood against my shoulder, and then the headphones are on my ears and I hear the radio pulse of a star instead, beating at us from far off in space. It’s eerie and very regular. “So beautiful,” I whisper.
I watch him listen, his eyes closed, tears wetting his long lashes. Then I break out of the reverie and switch my connection to the computer’s, so it can time the pulses. Once I get the readout, I return to the offline books. “It’s PSR B1257 plus 12!” I say. “Commonly known as ‘lich,’ after the undead lord. Astronomers are such nerds.”
Kodiak slowly opens his eyes and returns his hand to the dial. “One more pulsar to go.”
