I return the headphones to my ears and listen to the noise of space flying by. Huge blank spaces, hot noise and white noise, all from giant bodies beaming out across time and distance, lonely radio waves that chanced into our ship during their journey across the universe.
Kodiak raises a finger to draw my attention. I can make it out, too. This pulsar fires radio bursts every four or five seconds. It’s a more melancholy pace, almost a complaint.
I watch the numbers fill the screen, figures flooding as the computer refines the period of the pulse. “Four-point-eight-two seconds,” I say, scanning through the table in the tablet. “It’s another famously strong signal pulsar, Centaurus X-3. Makes sense that those are the ones we’d detectfirst. We’ll let it go a few minutes, so the computer has more data points about the frequencies, then we’ll set it to calculate our coordinates.”
Kodiak starts to say something, but then stops himself. He just nods.
“What?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“Something’s on your mind. What is it?”
He shrugs. “I guess I’m just not sure that I want to know whatever we’re going to find out. I mean, I do, of course I do. But also I don’t.”
I laugh, then regret it. I guess I’m surprised at the vulnerability he’s showing and don’t know what to do with it, don’t know when it’s going to be withdrawn. “Well, it’s a little late now.”
He nods his head severely, staring into the screen, as if adding his computing power to the processor’s.
Crisis might have brought us close, but all the same I really don’t know this boy I’m living with.
A box blinks on the screen. The calculations are finished.
“Do you want to reveal the answer, or should I?” I ask.
He flicks the screen. Two points resolve. One is Earth, and the other is us. I change the frame, zooming farther and farther out, so it will start to make sense. Only it doesn’t make sense—we’re near the end of a jumble of stars in abroad swirl. “That’s—”
“The Milky Way,” Kodiak says flatly.
“And we’re . . .”
“Heading to the sparse edge of it.”
He doesn’t speak for a moment, and I look at his face. It’s grim, his skin almost gray. “We’re in a vast empty stretch of dead sea. There’s nothing around for light-years and light-years.”
We were alone before. But now we know that we’re truly, truly alone.
Even if we could go the speed of light—which we can’t, not by a long stretch—we’d never make it anywhere at all in our lifetimes.
Kodiak’s leg is shaking. Otherwise he’s not moving at all. I search his face, my own mind reeling.
“I did everything I was supposed to,” he murmurs.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
His words become barely audible as he sinks to his knees and stares at the floor. “Whatever they asked, I always said yes. I made myself the instrument they wanted me to be.”
“Yeah,” I manage to say. “Me too.”
“I destroyed the dreams of Li Qiang so that I could become the hope of Dimokratía. I’ve devoted my life to... what? To be cast off in, inthis.” He gestures out toward the window, which, it’s increasingly clear to me, isn’t showing us anything real.
“Li Qiang. Is that the one you broke your arm fighting in the pool bash?” My recorded self told me about him.
He nods, hands over his eyes.
I place my palm on top of his head, which feels awkward, so I kneel in front of him, my ass on my heels. So we’re mirror images.
He clears his tears with the back of his forearm, lets out a shuddering breath. “I’m fine. It’s just that I made a promise to my country, a major promise, devoted my life to it. It felt like a contract.”
