People without a future love
People without a past,
On a very narrow band they meet.
The closer they draw to their death,
The bolder, braver, they become.
Distances packed in houses and gardens in front
Of the passing window. When you travel you,
Despite yourself, hear the conversations of others.
You wish to know nothing but clocks
That help forget the time. Despite yourself you hear,
And despite yourself you live. A great rage
That was within you becomes the lulling buzz of a journey.
God is leaving this land, right now of all times,
That I dwell in it.
You can change nothing.
Yehuda Amichai—People Without a Future Love
CHAPTER ONE - ANAXAGORAS
There are times in a man’s life that his own actions seem, in hindsight, foreign to him. Times when the deeds done seem so thoughtless, so reckless, that he can no longer understand what kind of idiot would plan them without seeing their obvious faults.
As soon as I saw the light moving in the darkness, through the skipper’s thick pane, I regretted ever setting out to look for Last Day Town. How could I have boarded a train, riding through the rocky tunnels of Ceres’ interior with a stupid smile on my face, no less; put on a spacesuit, exited the airlock and got in a small skipper, rented in advance; piloted it out of the hangar and almost four hundred kilometers over the surface; savored the view of the asteroid-filled sky and the impossibly large craters on Ceres’ surface in front of my eyes; enjoyed the nostalgia that came with the skipper’s controls in my hands; all without realizing what a horrible idea it had been?
It had seemed so heroic, on the inside, getting the message that the journalist writing under the pseudonym “Bar-Kochva”, real name Arik Rosen, had not only been arrested and flash-tried, but was about to be “exiled to Earth”, a euphemism, according to his own source, meaning he was about to be thrown out into space to die from asphyxiation. According to that same source, people are thrown out about a dozen times a day, so often that if you find the correct airlock, there would always be someone there, or a couple of people, just sitting around and waiting for their last few hours of oxygen to run out and their last day to end. Hence the name.
I didn’t have any hope of saving Bar-Kochva. If he had been thrown out and his records updated accordingly, the airlock’s computer would treat him as it would any other trespasser, by blowing him in a cloud of chunks faster than escape velocity. Sneaking oxygen outside wouldn’t do more than buy him a day, and worse, it would seem extremely suspicious to anyone looking. And you could bet someone was looking. Shadow-man, we called them, whatever person or office whose job it was to look for dissidents, journalists, anyone who spoke against the government and make sure they were found guilty of some crime just severe enough to get them “exiled to Earth”.
What I did hope for, though, was to expose the physical reality of Last Day Town. If the government was executing people in the shadow of Ceres, people needed to know. I wondered if it was some sort of subconscious shame that made them locate their execution site in the ever-dark craters by Ceres’ north pole, of all places. Probably not.
I must have been in a frenzy: booking a rental skipper, paying extra for a suit with a visor camera, planning the approach on the map. I’d been exhilarated at the idea of making an impact. I’d actually get out there, I had thought to myself, take a risk, do something right, for once in my life, something worth remembering. Change something, all that idealistic stuff. Hardly stopping to think about the risks.
Ok, but what were the risks? Worst case, there wasn’t even anyone there, and Bar-Kochva had made everything up. Best case, I’d get the name of Bar-Kochva’s informant—the person who’d let us know that this was going on, and, according to Bar-Kochva’s own words, was about to let us in on a lot more. All I had to do was not leave any evidence that I’d been there, and I was home free. All that’s left is finding him in time.
And yet, coward that I was, I was terrified at the very real option that I had miscalculated. That I will prove once again what an idiot I am, ruin everything again, and I wouldn’t even have my youth to make it seem charmingly tragic.
Only when I saw a light moving in the darkness, when I knew for sure that there was someone there, did I realize that a part of me had hoped there wouldn’t be. That I’d return to home, to my cozy, burrowed space in Ceres’ interior, knowing that I’d tried, but found nothing in that crater but ice-dust and wounded rock. I couldn’t understand how this plan had ever seemed reasonable to me. But nonetheless, I was there, and even though my hands were shaking and my guts were knotting like restless snakes, I couldn’t go back on my word.
The skipper I was in was the kind of vehicle rented to bored, rich clerks who’d lived on the inside all their lives. Not large enough to have an airlock, or even to stretch your arms in, so you’d have to board with a suit on if you wanted to get out to space at some point, which I did. Just the kind of vessel I’d imagined taking Tsur and Ayelet to see outer space in, but had never found the time to do. We don’t have time to think about that, now.
With all its faults, the thick, transparent panes designed for sightseeing made it easy to orient myself. I was in the area called The Ice Trap, the part of Ceres’ exterior that was polar enough and sunken enough never to see any direct sunlight, making it effective at, well, trapping ice. Humanity’s first attempts to colonize the planetoid had taken place right here, before I’d been born, in the safety of this darkness, where the only illumination came from whichever asteroid happened to pass above, reflecting the light from the distant, hidden sun. For eons water molecules solidified here, one at a time, accumulating massive reserves, but it only took humanity a couple of decades to scrub it clean.
To the left of my skipper was a crater wide and deep enough that just glancing at it gave me vertigo, like some giant’s palm that I was a skin mite crawling on the edge of its smallest fingernail. It confronted me with how long I hadn’t been outside, in space; how long I’d confined myself to corridors and rooms dug into the rock. When had I last seen more than a hundred meters into the distance?
The big crater was about two kilometers wide, and a hundred meters deep at its heart. Somewhere out there, in the heart of that darkness, should be a small service airlock, of the kind that could fit one person at a time, throwing out twelve people a day. Assuming Bar-Kochva’s source was to be believed, of course.
To my right was an expanse of dark-gray, mostly flat rock. I turned down the cabin lights and my eyes slowly adjusted, beginning to separate the different shades of dark gray. The surface was covered with craters within craters, colossal evidence of violence that had taken place thousands to millions of years ago, dwarfing the man-made excavations in comparison. The natural, circular forms clashed with the hard lines of the artificial ones; cylindrical bores large enough to fit my skipper into; Sheer walls that had formed when chunks of asteroid had been deemed worthy of chopping off and taking away.
In front of me, not far from the edge of the crater, was a white light. It was small and distant, moving around in half circles, illuminating the dust-covered, pocked face of the rock. I knew from the way it moved that the light was head-mounted. That someone was looking for something on the rocky ground—calmly, purposefully. There’s so much personality in the way a searchlight moves in the darkness.
I slowed down and directed the skipper towards it. Everything sharpened: the dry sounds of my life support pumping oxygen; the layers of suit separating thumb from forefinger. Everything became suddenly very real.
Some instinct guided me to approach this person on foot—perhaps in order to seem less threatening, more human. I piloted the vessel to a halt, patiently neutralizing its momentum with the weak counter-jet, and punched a button to exit. The skipper’s computer quickly confirmed with the suit’s computer that I had at least twenty-four hours of oxygen in my suit. That wasn’t just a mandatory safety measure, but a constitutional law: The computer that ran Ceres’ airlocks wouldn’t open them unless a suit had enough oxygen for twenty-four hours, calculated using the wearer’s body mass and metabolism, and any authorized vessel’s computer would follow the same rule. If that seems extreme to you, you probably haven’t done a lot of work in hard vacuum.
The door opened and I dropped towards the surface, pressing a button at the side of my helmet to turn on the mounted camera mid-descent. I fished out a small remote control from one of my suit pockets, and with the press of a button commanded the skipper to lock itself. I doubted there was anyone else here, and that anyone would have the tools to harm it, even if they were. I put it back in. My boots made a loud crunch as they touched the surface, solid rock covered with dust and powdered ice, and small cloud rose around me, colder than liquid nitrogen. You could almost feel it through the suit. My visor let me know the camera was on and recording, as well as its prediction of how long I have left to breathe.
#
Estimated oxygen time: 24:22:17
A long time had passed since I worked as an ice hauler. The last time I stood on Ceres I was a young man, but the memories slowly surfaced. Stand on the surface of Ceres and drop a stone in front of your face, and it’ll take a full six seconds for the weak pull of gravity to make it hit the rock. Wave an arm too vigorously, and you’ll find your boots have lost contact with the ground. Standing was something you needed to remember how to do.
On shaky legs, I started moving. Each step sent me in a long and glacial arc; But I was no longer the “surface-monkey” I once had been, and almost every kick sent me rolling backwards like it’s my first day all over again.
Fortunately, I had the foresight to rent a light, strap-on jet system along with the suit, the kind that uses cold, compressed gas for low-velocity movement. I’d been expecting to use it only as a last resort, but with every jump I found myself relying on it more and more, correcting rotation and drift. This wasn’t the time to refresh old skills.
When I was close enough to understand what I was looking at, I brought myself to a stop, my jets raising another small cloud of cold dust as they shot forward. A man in a space suit, a small backpack slung over his shoulder, the same lifeless gray color of his suit; an array of lights wired around his helmet, each panel relatively soft on its own, but together strong enough to illuminate his surroundings. He hauled what looked like a bundle of industrial junk; metal and plastic, pieces of machinery and home appliances all held by some sort of rope. It was bigger than him, and even in microgravity things that heavy weren’t easy to move around. Yet he brought it over his head, loaded it onto a primitive looking mechanism: a large metal pole lodged in a crude hole in the rock. At the top of it, metal bars connected to create a sort of basket, and the bundle went into it. Using a complicated arrangement of ropes and levers, he pulled at the pole until it bent slightly. The ground around him was littered with steel fragments, sharp as shattered glass. In the extreme cold of the ever-dark craters, even steel turned brittle.
He let go, and the bundle of trash went floating through space. It moved slowly, but in the almost-zero G it might as well have been flying. I could make out its destination: a sheer, upright wall, two or three hundred meters away. It was hard for me to asses those kind of distances after being inside for so long. At the bottom of the cliff, I thought I could make out similar looking bundles, piled up larger than an interplanetary spacecraft.
The pole oscillated like a tuning fork, but silently. His movements certain and efficient, he loaded a second bundle and launched it; moments later, the first arrived at the cliff, tumbling down slowly in the microgravity.
I didn’t know what to make of this. I’d expected to see dead bodies. I’d expected to see people scared out of their minds over their coming death. I hadn’t expected to see someone working.
If my sources were to be trusted, this man was wasting the last of his oxygen on this. If they weren’t, well, then what was going on here was even weirder. Might as well just ask the guy, I thought as I stood there, not coming up with anything useful to say. Live interviews weren’t usually this challenging.
A group of asteroids rose over the horizon, illuminating the dark rock with a light that seemed warm and bright compared to starlight alone. Say what you will about the hardships of living on a dry, merciless dwarf planet; People who spend their lives on Earth never get a chance to witness a sky so beautiful.
The man had a shadow now, or more accurately, a couple of shadows, moving and shifting around him as the asteroids sailed across the sky. The white light of the illuminators over his head was faint in comparison, and I could finally see him clearly. His suited hands were covered by another layer of material, creating thick gloves that extended up to his elbows. He was an old man, with a bald crown and a white beard. His face was partially hidden behind the violet numerals of his visor, counting down. His expression was perfectly stern. It was only when I saw his face that I truly understood where I was.
The asteroids banished the darkness I had hidden in and he saw me. I expected his posture to change, to be welcoming or confrontational, but instead, he just turned his back to me and returned to work on the levers.
“Peace?” I said, then realized I hadn’t turned on my radio. I flicked a button and the receiver started scanning through different channels, switching from ice hauler banter to commercial advertising to isolationists auctioning for food or oxygen from their tiny Recluse Asteroids, until it finally settled on silence. “Hey, can you hear me? I’m not sure this is working.”
“I can hear you alright.” He sounded older than I expected, tired and disinterested.
I tried to sound calmer than I was. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
He turned his head, his brows furrowed in suspicion. “Is this a test? My name is Anaxagoras. I was told to come out here and deliver metal, so now I’m here, delivering metal.”
The name sounded vaguely familiar, something from history class. The way he’d used it, it didn’t sound like his own name. “No, I mean why are you outside. Were you executed?”
His eyes went up and down, scrutinizing my suit—a higher quality model than the throwaway he’d been given, marking me beyond doubt as a stranger, even before he glanced at the skipper behind me. “Who are you?”
“I’m a journalist. My name is Yossi. I’m looking for a man named Arik Rosen. Have you met him here?”
He chuckled to himself as he turned his back to me, and tended to his work. “And there I thought I’ve seen it all. Sorry, I don’t know any Ariks.” He pulled on the levers, bending the metal bar again.
I hadn’t interviewed anyone in over a decade, and when I had, it was in a much easier environment than this. But I remembered how, usually, telling someone you’re a journalist is enough to get them to open up, spilling whatever they know about the situation and probably their entire life story along the way. Not this guy, though. I continued. “Ok, but…” How should I put it? Are they actually throwing people out of airlocks with oxygen in their suits to slowly choke to death? “Is Last Day Town real?”
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“What do you think?” He said, and just as he did the metal broke halfway, shooting a spray of fragments, luckily away from us. He turned to me with half of the broken bar in his hand, the newly formed sharpness glistening in that bluish hue unique to hyper-cooled steel. I drew my own weapon from my belt—a welding torch I’d prepared exactly for such a situation; even at a distance, it could scorch a suit open. I raised it, holding my arm straight at chest level, finger on the little safety trigger. I didn’t know if he could see the details of the torch, but the gesture was evidently effective—he stopped in place, glaring at me. For a moment we stood there, two apes holding on to their sticks, until he threw the metal rod aside and picked up a new, unbroken one. Then he turned his back to me and placed the new rod in the place of the old one.
“What an amazing waste of time,” he said quietly.
“Can you, please, tell me what’s going on here?”
He replaced the steel ‘basket’ on top of the rod before answering. Even with two layers of suit that must have been painfully cold.
“You know, I never expected to see anyone from the inside. So, you’re a journalist. Are you going to write a piece about this place? Let the people of Ceres know what is actually happening in the dark craters?” The bitterness in his words was unmistakable. Why would anyone stay here? Why not run… I looked around, and saw that there was nothing but darkness all around, nowhere to go. At least he had something to occupy himself with, here.
“I… Yes. People deserve to know what’s going on here, and it could stir some real trouble. Could you tell me anything? Who told you to deliver metal? What for?”
“First.”
“What?”
He grunted. “First told me to deliver metal. Listen, I wish you the best,” His tone was so flat that I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic. “But you’re going to get me in trouble. You should meet First, first.”
“I don’t understand. Is that a person named F-“
He pointed, the movement sudden and sharp, at the cliff at which he had hurled the garbage. “Do you see that rock face over there? She should be rummaging through the merchandise or shelving it in the cave.”
I looked over at the cliff and back at him, making sure this was all caught on camera. “Why should I meet her? Is she going to tell me what’s going on?”
“She’ll certainly tell you more than I will. Might even know where you can find your guy. But she doesn’t have long, so you better take your weekend-cruiser and hurry.”
The asteroids that had lit the sky were far now, leaving darkness behind them, making the white light coming off the head-mounted array significant again, in comparison. Something felt deeply wrong about leaving this dying man alone.
“And what are you gonna do?”
“I’m going to finish up here, if someone is going to stop distracting me, and then I’ll follow. I’ll see you there.”
“That’s not a short distance, on foot.”
“I got old reliable to carry me,” he said, gesturing with his hand to a metal object that leaned against the rock, about as long as a man is tall and thick as a thigh, with a converging tail. “Now go on; I ain’t got all day for you,” he said, and laughed.
I took the remote out and beckoned the skipper, the tiny screen confirming connection had been established. The skipper flew obediently, and I jetted myself into its safety. Even piloted on its slowest setting, it was still faster than I would have managed with the jet, and I felt safer behind the thick panes. Anaxagoras wanted me to talk to a first. That implied that there was some sort of order here, at least in one sense of the word, and that was already a surprise.
I stopped the skipper near the cliff, and jumped out as soon as the door agreed to open. There was a boring hole dug into the wall of rock, wide enough to walk into—a remnant from when we’d taken our first bites into ceres. Near it were piles of bundles: industrial trash bound, just like the bundles I had seen Anaxagoras delivering. Where had all this come from? I was aware of the existence of a dump about twenty kilometers away, but how long would it take someone to get there, without a vehicle? How many hours would it take to pile all of this up? Certainly more than twenty-four hours.
There was no one there, which meant that this ‘first’ had to be in the cave. A stretch of flat, smooth rock led up to the cave’s entrance. When my boots landed on that surface, they didn’t make the same dusty, crunching sound they had before. Even the silence felt cleaner. The rock had been carved into a flat plaza, probably as preparation for the boring long ago, but that didn’t explain the lack of dust.
On each side of it was a row of columns that led toward the entrance. Though they weren’t columns, exactly—just rocks stacked one on top of the other, from large to small. Each stack was made of seven rocks, and was a little taller than I was. They would have fallen in the weakest wind—but there wasn’t any wind here.
This was deliberate work. The rocks lay at specific angles, the lines complementing each other in subtle ways. When I walked alongside them, I saw that the rocks had been ground to create flat planes at the top and bottom, so they could sit stably on top of one another. The lack of dust was also a telling sign—someone had swept the rock clean.
Something moved at the corner of my eye, and I turned just as the bundle Anaxagoras had launched earlier hit the wall, only a dozen meters to the side of the cave opening. It stayed intact upon impact. The mass of metal started to slowly tumble down, far enough away that I didn’t feel in any danger, and landed upon the rest.
I reached the last of the columns and hesitated in front of the perfectly round cave-mouth.
It was dark outside, and darker still inside—though there was a tiny light, far off down the perfectly straight corridor. Why would anyone choose to stay in there? There was no sunlight to hide from on this side of ceres. If people were spending their last hours here, wouldn’t they prefer to spend that time under the stars?
It would be easier to just wait outside, and see if she comes out to get something from the bundles. But Anaxagoras said she didn’t have long, and Arik probably didn’t have long left either, with all of the time it took me to get here. I’ve waited all of my life for things to come to me, and look where that got me. Fuck it.
I punched the commands into the remote, directing the skipper to wait for me a hundred meters above the entrance—too high for anyone to notice, but not so high that it’d lose my signal—and stepped inside. The suit should have been perfectly thermoregulated, but it was somehow hot enough that sweat accumulated at the small of my back. I turned on my helmet light to see what was in front of me, but the place was still dark in an essential way that the light couldn’t penetrate. Dark and full of strangers, people that had nothing to lose. Breathe, I reminded myself, clutching the torch at my belt.
I took one step, then another. Lights lit up around me, not so much illuminating the corridor as signifying where the walls were. Little screens, like the kind you’d have on a helmet’s visor, showing solid white.
The light at the end of the tunnel was obstructed by a moving form—someone floating towards me, kicking quickly from one wall to another. As he drew closer, holding one hand in front of him to block the light coming from my helmet, I saw that he was a young man, with brown hair and a clean-shaven face. He wore the same small backpack and makeshift gloves that Anaxagoras did. I turned off the light.
“Who’s there?” he said, on the same radio channel, his voice just as hostile as Anaxagoras’. Before I could answer, he added a “What the fuck?” as he looked at my suit.
“I met Anaxagoras outside,” I said quickly, “and he told me to come here to meet the first. Who are you?”
He brought himself to a stop, kicking against one wall and then another, and then sighed deeply, rolling his eyes as if to say, ‘do you see what I have to deal with?’. “I’ll take you to see Anaxagoras.”
“Should we go back?”
“Why the hell would we go back?” He kicked at the wall, twisted back around, and went deeper into the cave, bouncing fluidly from impact to impact. I followed, jetting myself straight ahead.
“Could you tell me what’s going on here?” I asked, sounding blunt even to my own ears.
He didn’t turn around. “Why should I tell you? What will you give for the breath it would take explaining it to you?”
“I’m… I’m just trying to understand. I’m a journalist.”
“Why should I tell you anything, if you won’t reciprocate?” There was a hint of disappointment there, as if he expected more of me.
“I don’t know. What could I tell you, in return?”
“You could tell me that you have new suits stashed somewhere nearby, and somewhere to change into them. These bags won’t allow for oxygen replenishment.” He pinched the material of his suit by his thigh, still without looking back at me. It seemed so thin compared to my own reinforced, double-layered space suit. Their ‘bags’ hadn’t been designed to protect anybody. “You could tell me you have a spaceship waiting to pick us all up and drop us off on Mars,” he said, his tone bitter.
I said nothing. My skipper wouldn’t reach Mars, and whatever oxygen I had on me, well, I needed it. He clicked his tongue, point proven.
We kept moving, and the light at the end of the tunnel grew. Finally, he ventured a look back at me, only for an instant, before looking forward again. “One thing I will tell you for free,” he said. “See those bundles on the walls?”
I did, now that he’d mentioned them. Bundles of suit material, about as tall and thick as a person. Is that what they do with their dead?
“Explosives,” he said. “Anyone wants something from us, they better offer something in return.”
I looked around me, at the corridor studded with the bundles. How many like that had I already passed, not understanding the danger? I was trapped inside, then. Best option would probably be to play along, avoid escalating. My fingers left the controls of the jet to make sure the torch was still in place.
He kept moving, not missing a single step. He had managed to realize the trick of it—to move your legs quickly, not forcefully. I could probably have done it as well as he did if I’d had some to time practice, but for the time being I kept to my jet.
The end of the cave was a large, spherical chamber. My chaperone went straight inside, while I slowed down by the entrance. A suited figure sat at the middle of it, surrounded by shelves filled to the brim, likely with the “merchandise” the first Anaxagoras I’d met had mentioned. Metal girders of various quality, heaps upon heaps of electronics, pipes and tubes, even trinkets and toys. Some things, like boxes and wrappers, seemed like literal trash. It could have been the home of a hoarder, if it hadn’t all been so orderly. How could we throw so much useful material into space, after all the effort we’d gone through to create it? My suit’s radiation detector answered the question—The collection was radioactive, probably from proximity to the reactor at Ceres’ core. On this side of the dwarf planet, we threw our hottest, most toxic waste, material and human alike.
I entered the room. The suited figure was a small, middle-aged woman, her movements delicate. Through the glass of her visor, above the violet numbers counting down, I saw a face that seemed tailor-made for soft expressions, like the one she wore now. Her hair was short and silver, and her eyes spoke of wisdom and suffering, even when she smiled. She was playing with a toy car, her hands wrapped in second-layer gloves just like the other two, flicking the wheels to see how well they turned. She looked at us for a moment, raising an eyebrow when she saw me, and hopped up to add the new addition to the shelves. She placed it carefully.
“A visitor from the inside,” the young man announced.
“Why are you here?” she asked, turning to look at me as she moved around the room. Her tone was only a fraction kinder than his. She leaped, moving glacially slow in space towards a hammock, made from old suits stretched on a metal frame.
“I’m looking for someone,” I said. “And I want to let people know what’s going on in here. I’m a journalist,” I added, hoping that might prompt her to share.
“Funny,” she said, glancing at the other man. “Dangerous.”
“I have a welding torch on me, in case anyone tries anything.”
“Take it easy, coldblood,” she chuckled. Slowly, she fell into its depths of the hammock, pulling off her makeshift gloves as she did. Under just one layer of glove, her hands seemed even more fragile.
“I’m not a danger to anyone,” I said. “Can you explain to me what’s going on? Are you the first? The guy I met outside, Anaxagoras, told me to meet someone here, and this guy told me he’s taking me to Anaxagoras, so who’s fi—”
She raised a hand, shushing me. “I am Anaxagoras. Only other Anaxagoras call me by my order. I hate to be rude, but I have about eleven minutes before I’m off. I’ll answer one question, if you make it quick.” She turned to the man. “Second—come. It’s time.”
He floated towards her and landed, kneeling, by her side, then took off the extra glove to hold her outreached hand in his own.
Another man in a spacesuit came through the cave entrance, kicking off from wall to wall in haste. I recognized the white beard and the old, grunting voice, though he didn’t have the lighting array on this helmet anymore. “Third!” she called to him, with genuine joy.
He moved quickly, despite his age, and the metallic device in his hand—the thing he’d called ‘old reliable’. He stopped his momentum with a kick, and placed it carefully by the entrance, beside two nearly identical devices. Leaping into space, he removed his extra gloves and landed by her side, reaching for her free hand. She ignored it, reaching instead for the back of his neck, pulling him close. For a moment, their helmets touched.
“How long, First?” he said, holding on to her forearm.
“Ten minutes. You did fine.”
He sighed. “Oh good. I was worried I’d miss you.”
“That would have been fine, too. Work comes first.”
“I know, I know, but I’m still glad.”
She pulled him closer again, and squeezed her eyes shut for a second before opening them and turning to me. “Your question?”
If what she said was true, and she only had ten minutes, how the hell is she in any state of mind except panic? There will be time to find that out later. I needed to find him first. “Do you know someone named Arik Rosen?”
None of them showed any sign of recognition. “Not out here I don’t, and I can’t tell you about the ones I know inside. Sorry. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to relax.”
She’s insane, I realized. They’re all insane. Though, admittedly, not an unreasonable reaction. “How can you be so calm? What the fuck is going on?” I asked, despite myself.
Second turned to me with a look that was not only angry, not only outright hostile, but threatening. I took a step back, my hand moving closer to the torch holster.
“I did my best to prepare these two,” First said, smiling gently. “The line lives on. The line will fight on, long after my body bag’s been stripped for parts. As long as Last Day Town is here, Line Anaxagoras lives. In the face of zero odds, the line lives. That is our rebellion, our unending act of defiance. Did they tell you that Line Anaxagoras was the first?”
“They didn’t.”
“Without the material we collect, the rest of the town couldn’t operate. It’s important to remember that the work we do here is meaningful.” She turned to the one she called ‘Third’, and it was clear she wasn’t talking to me anymore. “Do you remember when you first came here? You were still shaken by your birth, and the welcoming committee; Second and I just returned from Pythia, and I was just getting used to the idea of being the new First. You didn’t believe Second when he told you that you were going out to deliver metal. Do you remember?”
He nodded solemnly. Of course he remembered—all of that had to have happened only a few hours ago.
“And Second: Do you remember how it was for you, when I first picked you up from the welcoming committee? I was just done being Third myself, and I was afraid you might be panicked, that I wouldn’t be able to calm you down. But you were calmer than I was. It was a pleasure to spend these hours with the two of you.” She laughed—and then her expression hardened. Tears welled in her eyes; the gravity was too weak to pull them down her face. She blinked a couple of times, making drops of water break free and hit her visor. “I hope that when you’re here with your Second and Third, you’ll be as proud as I am.”
I stood frozen. I had been invited to share this moment with them, and the only way I could honor that dying wish was watching, and listening. Under the white lights on the cave’s ceiling, the two suited men knelt beside their mentor. The light reflected off her visor, but her face still showed behind it: oily skin; water droplets floating by her eyes. Her expression was one of courageous, hopeful calm. A façade, but somehow an honest one.
The numbers on her visor changed from violet to a blinking red. “Here we go,” she whispered, tense, her eyes open wide. “It’s time.” She looked at me as she retrieved a knife from her satchel, just a piece of broken steel and a handle made of melted plastic. She turned to look at Second and offered it to him, handle first, the blade pointing at her. His hand shook as it reached, as if his fingers were afraid to close around the weapon. “Can you do it?” she asked.
He nodded and took the weapon.
“Say it.”
“I can do it.” Second let her other hand go and stood up, towering above her sprawled body. Third pulled away, only slightly, and she pulled him back firmly by his neck, making sure he watched. Second shot a daunting glance at Third, who steeled himself. “Are you ready?” Second said, his voice strained. Very slowly, he put the knife to her throat, where the helmet ended and the suit began. His other hand held hers.
Her breathing became faster and faster, her teeth clenched. She said something, but it was too weak to pick up on radio.
“I can’t do it. Not unless you say it clearly,” he said.
“I’m not afraid,” she whispered. “I’m not afraid.” Again and again, five or six or seven times, each utterance rising in intensity. “Do it!” she finally yelled, and broke into a fit of sobbing. He cried out and slashed her suit open from helmet to crotch.
Her mouth opened to scream, but no scream came. Hungry space, impossibly fast, sucked the life out of her, leaching the moisture from her eyes, inflating her skin like a balloon, drawing sprays of blood from her nose and mouth, until her face was hidden behind the streaked visor. She convulsed once. The only movement after that was the slow shrinking and drying of her swelled skin as water evaporated into nothingness and crystallized above her as grains of ice-dust floating, then sinking, in space.
The silence in the cave was suffocating, broken only by the crackling breaths of those who remained. I felt empty, as if something had been taken away from me—no, as if something had been reminded. I’ve never seen someone die, but somehow, it was exactly like I imagined.
Second straightened. “I am now Anaxagoras’s First,” he said, his voice tight, blade still in hand, blinking hard and shaking his head to get the water out of his eyes.
Third pulled his neck free and stood up, unmoving but for the trembling of his white moustache. “I am now Anaxagoras’s Second,” he said after a moment. His voice shook.