Limits

There was no way to tell night from day. Somewhere along the journey, he knew he’d lost track. From the window of the ship, at what he called night, he watched the stars. They spiraled and twisted, roiled and blurred—familiar gleams pushing back the dark as they revolved around rings of some distant planet. Some distant moon.

He spent countless hours watching them dance, but always kept, in the back of his mind, a truth. A truth he sealed, closed tight like the doors of the ship he had welded shut:

The stars didn’t move, only he did.

‘Is the beacon lit?’ he asked often.

‘Yes, Captain,’ the walls responded.

The black mass of a hollow ship careened through the black of a hollow universe. Movement had become home to him—the spinning, bearable. And gravity, for the most part, a just god. Humans can adapt to anything, he’d come to find, and to hope for. Fuel for burst had been burnt weeks before, and only Newton’s law kept this last, desperate speck of a spacecraft hurdling through the void faster and faster, praying that nothing altered its course.

‘Why are you going?’ she had asked.

‘You won’t understand if I tell you.’

‘I’m going too!’

‘I’m sorry, baby,’ he whispered, kissing her hair. ‘Not this time.’

‘You always said you’d choose me. You said between everything, and the world,’ she whimpered, her perfect eyes glassy with tears. ‘You’d choose me.’

‘I am. I promise you I am.’

‘But I’m still here. I’m here. Now you won’t be.’

‘I’ll make this right.’

In the briefest moments of clarity, he wasn’t sure he could make it right, anymore. Not the way she’d want. Hours, days, months—the food meant to last a team, now sparse. His body thinned under the white IVA suit. If he took it off, he avoided the mirror.

He knew, by then, he wouldn’t recognize what he saw.

‘Am I making a mistake, Bev?’

‘You assigned yourself to the mission, Captain.’

‘That’s a yes, then?’

‘If it is a mistake, they will see it as a necessary one.’

‘Maybe they will,’ he gazed at the small, worn picture of his daughter. ‘She won’t.’

Most of his hours were spent at the computer. New data received from the farthest ship ever piloted. He worked to analyze through what he called day, slept by the window through what he called night. He moved the mattress closer to that window and set up a makeshift pallet. It wasn’t as comfortable as the cot, but he felt safer closer to the void than deeper within the walls.

He could’ve slept longer in the deep sleep, but too much could go wrong. If he was awake, alert, he could stop a sudden change—think his way out.

That lie, he kept sealed too, beside the truth.

‘Captain?’

‘Yes, Bev?’

‘Are you afraid?’

‘That’s not a consolatory measure.’

‘You have not answered enough for me to gather accurate psychoanalysis.’

‘That last word is your first mistake. It’s an old idea, Bev. Outdated.’

‘In theory, yes. But not in practice.’

‘I am, Bev.’

The other hours he spent on comms. He echoed the same phrases, the same introduction. Futile as it was, the message would repeat even if he didn’t.

‘This is Captain Gardner of the U.E.S.P. Kassie. Please respond.’

Then, through the static, he would listen to the words he only said once.

‘We had to split up. U.E.S.P. Amber is currently on a bowline trajectory carrying precious cargo back to Earth. I have no fuel except to land, low on food. Bev will carry me down, if it comes to it. We know it’s right—Caden. It’s the one. Boots on the ground, how my body reacts to atmosphere, that’s how we fill in the only blanks left. How you’ll prepare. Hold on, just a little longer. Data transfer upon arrival. Your new home is waiting. I’ll try to keep her warm.’

The lie he only said once.

‘Anyone back home?’ he whispered. ‘Please respond.’

After so many hours and days, the words sounded strange as he spoke them. Repeated and again, they started to lose meaning—each letter piled over the other, rambling an incoherent melody unattached and flailing like the unbound tethers trailing his ship.

‘Why do you ask for a response, Captain?’

‘How many times are you going to ask me that, Bev?’

‘Until you answer.’

‘If I hear them, I know the message got out. I know they know.’

‘I have told you that they know.’

‘Just a human thing, I guess.’

‘It will not change the mission, Captain.’

He gazed at the picture beside the mic again. Sunset. His daughter, barely a silhouette on the shore, cotton candy in her hands, on her cheek, the Ferris wheel behind her.

‘I might hear her,’ he said.

Through the spinning, the new planet, Caden, took its place among the stars. Water, clouds, and earth revolved in blurs of color that grew larger with each passing day. He watched them take shape and drew the first maps of a place no human had ever been. But through the twisted fresco of the spin, somehow the shapes of land and water—they always resembled her too.

‘You said it was a human thing, Captain.’

‘Yes, Bev.’

‘It is a strange phrase. The meaning…duplicitous.’

‘Deceitful, too. That’s why it’s perfect. A catch-all,’ he said. ‘One we cling to.’

‘It is inconsistent, Captain. Ideas overlap, behaviors change. I was tasked with the observation of a crew in deep space, analyzing the psychology of isolation. Yet I am afraid my data has yielded nothing of value.’

‘Afraid, Bev?’

‘Perhaps concerned is more apt.’

‘Why do you think that is, Bev? That you haven’t found the answer.’

‘Permission to speak freely, Captain?’

‘Always, Bev.’

‘Because you feign certainty, and you hide confusion.’

‘Harsh,’ he smiled. ‘Care to elaborate?’

‘It’s the cycles of your history, Captain. The perineal rhyme you spoke of. One voice claims man’s reach exceeds his grasp. The other, grasp, his reach. The limiting factor is either a paradox, or you exist in a state of constant dissonance.’

‘It can’t be both?’

‘I have no access to contradiction, Captain. The greatest truth weighs out.’

‘Contradiction is our only guiding principle, Bev.

‘Indeed. Is this another human thing?’

‘Just something we never resolved,’ he said. ‘Pull back far enough, get far enough way, it’s why we have to leave our first home behind. Why we’re here, Bev. If man’s reach exceeds, we die. But if man’s grasp exceeds, we live, at too much a cost.’

‘There is no middle ground?’

‘Only misunderstanding.’

‘How so?’

‘The fault in mankind wasn’t in our limits, it was in the thought that we had none.’

The Kassie edged slowly into Caden’s atmosphere. Heat poured along the panels.

‘You think you will die now, Captain?’

‘Yes, Bev.’

‘You lied. You said you would wait for them,’ the walls paused. ‘To give them hope?’

‘Yes, Bev,’ he answered, locking his helmet in place. ‘They’ll be okay. Remember what I told you. Right, Bev? Send her what I wrote. Please.’

‘Captain?’

‘It’s okay, Bev,’ he said. A tear he couldn’t wipe, fell. ‘Is the beacon lit?’

‘Yes, Captain. Transponder receiving. They will know when you arrive.’