Caretaker

by Josi Russell

Genres: Colonization; Space Exploration

Synopsis

Ethan Bryant was supposed to fall asleep on a ship leaving Earth and wake up fifty years later with his family on the planet Minea. Instead, after the ship's caretaker-the lone human in charge of monitoring the ship's vital systems-suddenly died, the ship's computer locked Ethan out of his stasis chamber and gave him the job. That was five years ago. Five years of checking to make sure everything runs smoothly on a ship Ethan knows almost nothing about.



Ethan is resigned to his fate, until the ship suddenly wakes up another passenger: a beautiful engineer who, along with Ethan, soon discovers a horrible secret-a navigation room hidden from even the ship's computer. The ship is not bound for Minea but somewhere far more dangerous.



With the ship nearing its sinister destination, Ethan soon learns that he is the only one who holds the key to saving all 4,000 passengers from a highly-advanced, hostile alien race.

Release date: September 2, 2015

Publisher: Future House Publishing

Print pages: 308

Sample

 

He liked to walk among the bodies in stasis. The translucent pinks and mahoganies of their skin in the half-light of the stasis chambers were a relief to his eyes after days spent in the angular, metallic body of the ship.

At first, after the ship had assigned Ethan to be Caretaker, he had sat on the floor of the corridor outside Aria’s chamber and wept. He glanced at his wife now. Her distended belly stretched the fabric of the stasis suit, and he thought of the baby inside, also waiting for awakening. He wondered if it could hear the deep, rhythmic sounds of the ship. Closing his eyes for a moment, he listened to the whoosh of circulating air, the thrum of the stasis system, and, when he listened very closely, the almost imperceptible whir of the SL drive, propelling them farther and farther from home.

Opening his eyes again, he checked Aria’s readouts. Everything still looked fine, and she was the last on his rounds. He didn’t really need to make the rounds—the computer continuously monitored every vital sign on every passenger—but it gave him something to do during the long days of hurtling through space.

Ethan glanced down the row of stasis chambers. Upright silver capsules, each filled with stasis fluid and a human life. Aria’s red hair floated gently in the clear fluid around her, waving with movements of the ship imperceptible to him. He felt the old ache gnawing at him—that need to touch her cheek, to pull her close to him. That had never gone away, even after five years of watching her through the glass. It was still strange to him, having her so close, being aware of everything about her, but still being so far away. He felt that he’d lived a lifetime since she’d closed her eyes. “Computer,” he requested, “what is the status of passenger three nine nine nine?”

“Status normal, Mr. Bryant,” the simulated voice answered. He had known that from the readouts, but he still liked hearing it. Laying his hand on the glass, he began to sing, softly at first, an old Earth lullaby:

“Soft the drowsy hours are creeping,

Hill and dale in slumber sleeping

I my loved ones' watch am keeping,

All through the night

While the weary world is sleeping

All through the night . . .”

 

He had taken up singing after about the third month. At first he just sang to his family as he sat in front of their chamber. As time passed, though, he started singing to all of them during his rounds. And he sang to himself in the Caretaker’s hold or while he puttered around. He knew he wasn’t good, but the sound of a human voice—even if it was his own—was a welcome change from the mechanical voice of the computer and the silence of the ship. Now, as he left Aria, he heard his voice dancing through the cavernous hold.

Ethan left Aria’s passenger hold by way of the Caretaker’s access door. The corridor directly in front of him lit up as the ship anticipated his journey back to the Caretaker’s hold. The passageway was smooth and familiar, with matte silver paneling and black striping that could light up in different colors for help navigating through the ship. He’d once turned the whole ship orange, just to see if it helped alleviate the boredom. It had, for a while.

Despite the familiarity, though, Ethan sensed that something was different. He stopped, glancing around. The panels were the usual silver. The light was pale blue, like a summer sky. Everything in the corridor looked fine. Maybe it was a change in the sound of the ship. He closed his eyes to focus. Suddenly, he realized what it was: the air in the corridor was warm. In all the uninterrupted days on the ship, his living quarters had been maintained at a comfortable sixty-seven degrees Farenheit—the computer’s determined perfect temperature for his body. This was the temperature at which he neither sweated nor shivered. Now, though, he felt slightly too warm, and he took several quick steps with the ever-growing feeling that something was wrong.

He walked cautiously, stepping across the six-inch thresholds and running his eyes up and down the corridor before spinning and instinctively heading back to the passenger holds. “Computer,” he said as his steps quickened, “what is the status of the ship?”

“Status normal, Mr. Bryant,” responded the mechanical voice.

“What is the temperature?”

“Temperature set at seventy-one degrees,” the computer responded.

He stopped mid-stride and looked up, though he was no more likely to see the computer there than at his feet. He found that he usually spoke to the computer as if it were taller than him by about a head and standing somewhere to his right.

“Seventy-one? For five years you hold steady at sixty-seven and now you’ve shifted to seventy-one?”

“Please repeat the question.” The computer’s voice recognition software could understand the inflection of a question but not his meaning. He would need to restate it more directly.

“What’s wrong with the ship?”

“All systems are functioning normally, Mr. Bryant.”

“That can’t be true! Nothing changes here without a reason.” He ran a hand through his hair, pacing the width of the corridor. Changing his tactics, he tried a more specific question: “Computer, what system malfunctions could cause a temperature change?”

The computer rattled off a list of possibilities. It was long.

“Okay. What are the most likely malfunctions in that list?”

“Statistically, there have been far more heating system malfunctions and leaking seals.”

“Computer, check the heating system and the seals. What is their status?”

There was a two-breath pause. “All systems are normal, Mr. Bryant.”

Ethan swore. That couldn’t be true. “I’ll check them myself.”

He headed for the life support room. Inside, he squinted at the system status panel. In all his trips here, he had never touched anything. Leaving his home planet and settling on Minea had promised to be a difficult experience, but nothing about it scared him as much as this ship. He was paralyzed by the knowledge that the equipment in this room made his existence on this ship possible. Back on Earth he had been a linguist, studying an alien language called Xardn. He’d never been skilled at mechanical tasks.

If he had been, he might have been sent to Minea earlier. The Colonization Committee had sent the experts first, of course. Astronauts and surveyors and planetary scientists to determine the feasibility of sending people to actually live there. After years of analysis, the first farmers and engineers had gone. They’d worked for a decade before the civilization had been ready enough to move in the builders and manufacturers.

And now the families were going. They were leaving their brick and lumber homes on Earth for the hundreds of cottages made from Minea's blue clay. The glossy brochures handed out in the malls and at parades on Earth for the last two years showed rows of neat blue houses with yards in front and gardens in back, free for families who were willing to colonize the new world.

Of course, they mostly needed people who could do things to build the fledgling society. Construction workers, cooks, laborers. Nobody needed a linguist whose specialty was a dead alien language. In fact, nobody really needed him on Earth, either. The linguistic community was busy consolidating all of Earth’s languages into a single global language, and though the scraps and specks of Alien languages that had been uncovered in the quest for colonization were mildly intriguing, they weren’t important and no serious academic would dedicate time to them. When he had mentioned at the university that he was applying for a spot in Minea, he had received good-natured but patronizing jibes. It was unlikely that the colonization committee would choose him when he had no real use on the new planet.

If he had stayed on Earth, he would have been forced by the university to abandon Xardn and shift his focus. The letter declining his last research proposal had been particularly stinging:

Dear Mr. Bryant,

Though we enjoyed reading your proposal, your request has been denied. The Xardn language, while important historically, holds little value for contemporary society and does not fit well with the University’s current twin missions to support industry and colonization. We feel your considerable talents would be better utilized in the area of Standardized Earth Linguistics.

It was not the first time he’d run into the disdain his colleagues had for his work, but it was the most blatant dismissal of it. He’d decided to scrap the project, but Aria fought him.

“Ethan,” she had said, “you can’t quit your study. You have a gift for Xardn.”

“You read the letter. You’ve heard the comments at parties. What I do isn’t important, and no matter how much I love it, it will never be valued.”

“Never is a strong word. Trends come and go, and I really believe that there will be a time when your knowledge of Xardn will be vital.” He had looked for a trace of insincerity behind her eyes but found none. She really did believe in his work—in him. It was one of the moments when he had fallen in love with her even more.

Now, here on the ship, running his eyes over the readouts and trying to match them to the documents, he felt his uselessness acutely. His knowledge of Xardn did him no good as he searched. Fear pushed its way into his throat. The workings of this ship were a complete mystery to him, and though he had read about it extensively over the last five years, he still felt baffled and helpless in the face of it.

But then he remembered how Aria’s eyes shone when he told her about his work. He wished he had her voice to tell him that everything would be okay, that he was strong enough to live his life without her and smart enough to solve this puzzle. Her belief in him then had gotten him through a lot of dark moments on the ship. He didn’t know enough about the ship, but he did know a lot about Xardn. How could Xardn help him now?

Pushing his fear aside, he called up the readouts on the heating system. He requested some documentation from the computer about how things in there should look. As he studied them a Xardn symbol came into his mind:



It was the symbol for number. That was something he could do. He took a deep breath and called up the status check directions for the heating system. He began to enter the sequences of numbers that would run the diagnostic checks manually. Though he didn’t know how the ship worked, he had long comforted himself with his grasp of all the numbers that connected to his work as Caretaker. Because his life’s work was language study, numbers made some sense to him. He found himself going over them now as his fingers ran across the entry pad. This was one of 15 ships that departed from Port 22. There were 4,000 passengers aboard the ship, split into 8 stasis groups of 500. Each stasis group had its own hold. Of the 4,000 passengers aboard the ship, nearly all of them were families except for a small contingent of soldiers, engineers, and doctors who were to be awakened in case of emergency.

Emergencies, like everything else, were determined by the ship. Ethan had realized early on that he and the ship differed greatly in their definition of an emergency.

Ethan and Aria were in Stasis Group 8. Because Aria was pregnant, they had been the last scheduled to enter stasis. Once the ship was en route, the passengers had been split into their stasis groups, and the process of preparing 4,000 people for nearly 53 years of hurtling through space had begun. It was an organized, mechanized process and was completed in less than 24 hours. Only Ethan and Aria were personally attended to. Because of Aria’s delicate condition, McNeal, the Caretaker, had determined to put them in stasis personally.

Aria had squeezed Ethan’s hand all the way to the sixth deck, where their stasis chambers awaited. He’d kissed her and stood for a moment with his hand on her abdomen until the baby kicked strong enough for him to feel it. Then he’d helped her into the chamber and stepped aside for McNeal to close the door.

Ethan had stood in front of the chamber as Aria’s eyelids drooped. He made sure to be the last thing she saw before entering stasis. Once she was asleep, he watched the machine coat her hands, feet, and face—all exposed skin—with the waxy substance that would protect it from the stasis fluid for the next fifty-three years. It made her look porcelain, perfect, and as the chamber filled with fluid, he longed to hold her again. He’d been nearly mad to get to sleep himself before his longing for her grew any stronger.

McNeal had directed him to the final stasis chamber. Ethan had stepped into the chamber. He’d immediately turned around to lean back against the soft upright backing of the chamber. As he turned, he’d seen McNeal through the rounded glass door, slumped against the silver wall outside. Ethan had leaped out of the chamber and braced him up.

Three hours later, in the Caretaker’s hold, McNeal had died. The computer assessed that he’d had an aneurysm. By the time his life signs faded completely, the rest of the crew was in stasis. Ethan was the only one left awake, and the computer assigned him to be Caretaker.

He’d had to take McNeal’s body to the airlock himself. He’d had to watch as the last person he’d speak to for almost half a century spiraled out into the blackness of space.

Since then he’d read a couple thousand books, bested the computer at the first hundred levels of Chess, and slept through endless days and nights of sorrow. The days on the ship had passed in colors: pink morning light, pale blue days which faded to red sunsets and then to deep purple nights under the artificial lighting of the ship.

The heating system screen made a chiming noise, and Ethan read the instructions the computer had provided: “When manual diagnostic is complete, the following code should be visible on the screen: XRJT3496021r. If code differs, please check troubleshooting chart B in the Appendix.”

He cross-checked the numbers and found that the code matched. The heating system was fine.

As he left the heating system room, he should have felt relieved. The discomfort continued to gnaw at him, though. “Computer, bring up the holoscreen.” Immediately, it hovered before him, moving with him as he made his way back to the corridor where he had first noticed the temperature shift. “Give me a diagram of all critical seals.”

There were three in this corridor, and he moved to the first, a thin white strip around an oblong window. Beyond it, he saw the broad, black nothingness of space, drawn through with pencil-thin strokes of color: the stars between home and Minea. He put his ear close to the window, closing his eyes and listening for a telltale hiss that would indicate atmosphere venting into the outer hull. Nothing.

He straightened and ran his fingers around the seal. A chill ran through him as he thought of how only these thin panels kept the vast darkness outside the ship at bay. Swiftly, he checked the other two seals in the corridor. He could find nothing wrong. But the air was definitely warmer, and he was desperate to find out why.

“Computer—” he started, and then abruptly stopped as a shadow played across the wall in the corridor in front of him. He stood still, frozen by the impossibility of the unexpected movement.

And then, there she was. A slender woman in a stasis suit, her black hair cropped to her jawline. She stopped, too, at the sight of him.

He would later remember the moment in slow motion, seeing her pause there in the corridor, watching her eyes widen as they found his. The pale blue lighting glanced off her hair and her shoulders, which were silver in the stasis suit.

They stood without moving for a long moment. Finally, she spoke.

“Hello,” she said cautiously. “I’m Kaia.”

Still he stared. He opened his mouth, then took two quick steps toward her. “Where did you come from?”

She smiled then. “I’m—I’m sorry,” she stuttered, “I’ve just awakened. I’m not oriented yet.”

“Awakened?” He was nearing panic now. “Why? Are there others awakening? I’ve got to stop it! We’re still forty-eight years away! We’ll never make it if they awaken now!” He turned his attention to the computer. “Computer? Computer!”

“Proceed, Mr. Bryant.”

“How many have awakened?”

“One, Mr. Bryant.”

“Only one?”

“Yes, Mr. Bryant. Passenger 3692, Kaia Raegan. Awakened on Day 2000 at 0836 as scheduled.”

“What? As scheduled?” He turned back to the girl. “You were scheduled to awaken?”

At this, she looked shaken. “Could I see the Caretaker, please?”

“I am the Caretaker.” His voice was sharp. It had been so long since he’d spoken to another human being. The girl looked scared. “I’m sorry,” he started again. “I became the caretaker. I’m not trained for it. It was . . . an accident.”

Her voice was shaky. “Where’s McNeal?”

“He died. I wasn’t in stasis yet, so the computer assigned me Caretaker. Hey—” He moved forward but couldn’t catch her before she hit the floor. She was unconscious when he reached her.

 

Ethan lifted the girl and took her to his cabin. He knew her now: 3692, Yaa Annan. She’d been in their stasis group and had shared the same hold as Aria, though her chamber was near the front of the hold and Aria’s was near the back. She looked different now that there was nothing coating her skin and no stasis fluid between them. More vibrant, more alive.

Something didn’t add up, though; she’d said her name was Kaia. A nickname, perhaps?

He laid her on the broad white couch and perched himself on the low chest in front of her. “Computer,” he barked, “is she in stasis shock?” He remembered reading about the dangers of stasis in the legal disclaimers before the trip. One of the worst was a reaction to awakening which involved the body trying to compensate for the years of sleep. The heart rate increased, blood pressure skyrocketed, and the patient usually died of a massive coronary.

“No,” the computer responded.

Ethan didn’t wait for the computer to volunteer information like he had when he’d first started to talk to it. One could wait forever and it wouldn’t provide answers to questions you didn’t ask directly.

“What’s wrong with her? Give me her vitals.”

The computer rattled off a list of her vital signs. All were at the low range of normal. “She’s sleeping, then?” Ethan asked.

“Yes.”

“Will she wake up?”

“It appears she is doing so now.”

Ethan glanced down. Indeed, the girl’s eyelids were fluttering and she began to move her head back and forth. It was then that he noticed how bronzed her skin was. It shocked him to realize, very suddenly, that her body believed that the warm rays of Earth’s sun had touched her only hours ago. For years he had shaved in the smooth steel mirror in the hold’s lavatory and seen his skin grow more and more pale in spite of the artificial sun lamps in the hold. They may have stimulated his body to produce Vitamin D, but they didn’t give him a tan.

As he looked at the smooth brown face, he felt in his chest an intense longing for Earth, for its sun and its breezes, for the taste of salt spray from its oceans, and for the sharp, sweet smell of a hot wildflower meadow from its summer mountains. It would be spring there now, he knew, and the last of winter’s grip would be fading from the Western side of the North American continent. He thought of the horses Aria had loved that grazed across the street from their little brick house. This time of year they were shedding their winter coats and they were shaggy and short-legged, making them look more like toys than like the shining, powerful creatures of the summer. And then, in his mind’s eye, he saw the little brick house they’d left behind, saw the rosebush and knew it would be unfurling its green leaves and pushing bright buds towards the crisp yellow spot in the sky.

She spoke and stopped his remembering. “I—I’m sorry,” she said.

He glanced down into intense gray eyes. “Are you all right?”

“I think so.” But she didn’t stir more than to look away from him, up at the smooth, shining ceiling. “You said he . . . McNeal . . . he’s dead?”

“Yes.” He saw her wince at the answer. “You knew him?”

“McNeal and I—” Her voice grew softer. “David and I—” She kept her eyes on the ceiling—“were married the day before departure.”

Ethan felt his eyebrows rise. He had read McNeal’s biography several times. There was no mention of this girl.

She went on without looking at him, almost as if she were speaking to herself. “David and I met at a base party back on Earth. We went out a few times before things started to get serious. My father is General Reagan, head of the military detachment assigned to this ship. He’s in stasis below. Once David was commissioned as a Caretaker, my father put a stop to our relationship. He didn’t want me spending my life in a Caretaker’s hold. As noble as the military makes the post sound, it is pretty much a life sentence.”

She paused, glancing nervously at Ethan as if she had just remembered he was there. “I’ve never—I never thought I’d ever tell anyone this story.” Her eyes were tight with sadness. “David and I didn’t see each other for several months. Then two days before we left Earth I ran into him on base.” She closed her eyes, remembering. “Seeing him then, I remembered that I loved him.” She said it wistfully. “I talked him into this crazy scheme to marry me. The plan was that I’d go into stasis and wake up in time to spend our lives together. We paid off the girl who was supposed to come, the real Passenger 3692.”

“Yaa Annan,” Ethan said. Mystery solved.

Kaia bobbed her head slightly. “She said she’d been debating staying on Earth to get involved with the democracy movement anyway. We sneaked on board that night and used his access to set my awakening time differently from the others—2,000 days. As soon as I could safely break stasis. My father wouldn’t know until we reached Minea, David and I would be together; I didn’t see how it could go wrong. It seemed so romantic at the time.” She lay very still, not looking at him, and then, all at once, she began to cry.

Ethan was shocked for a moment at the shift from her soft, clear voice to the ragged, splitting sobs. He simply looked at her, seeing for a moment his own face reflected in the glass door of Aria’s stasis chamber those first few weeks. He watched, fascinated, as Kaia's eyelids closed and round, shining tears slid out from under them. Her chest heaved and her shoulders pitched as she lay on her back and cried. After a moment, she pulled her hands to her face and her cries were muffled.

It occurred to him that he hadn’t heard another person’s voice, their breathing, their small sounds, for five long years, and hearing it now was wonderful. Something deep in him remembered the response to human emotion, though, and he moved to sit beside her on the couch. He put his left hand clumsily on her shoulder.

She sat up and leaned into him, sobbing into his chest.

He patted her back awkwardly, his right arm still at his side. Her dark hair smelled like violets, and the stasis suit felt smooth and cool under his hand.

After several minutes, the sobs subsided. She drew away from him and wiped her face with the palms of her hands. Ethan drew away from her, moving back to perch on the trunk, looking at her with concern.

“I don’t know your name,” she said quietly.

“Ethan. Ethan Bryant.”

She nodded, a small, stiff movement, and then stood shakily.

“Take it easy.” Ethan stood and moved toward her. She pulled away from his outstretched hand.

“I—I need to be alone.” Without another word, the girl left the hold, a gasping sob ringing in her wake.

Ethan moved to the door and watched her walk away, torn between the impulse to follow her and the desire to respect her wishes.

“Computer,” he said quietly as she disappeared into a side corridor, “monitor Passenger 3692 and report to me if she is in danger.”

The computer agreed and Ethan went back into the hold, shaking his head.

“Kaia?” he said aloud, the strangeness of the name bouncing back to him. He had long known passenger 3692 as Yaa Annan. The computer hadn’t known about the switch, and Ethan only knew what the computer told him. In a way it was unsettling to realize that the computer on which everything depended could be mistaken.

Shifting to this new understanding of this passenger required some thought, too. He also had to think what to do next. She couldn’t be put back in stasis for a minimum of fourteen days, and even then he’d have to be very sure she was ready. Stasis was a shock to the body, and he wasn’t about to gamble with the life of one of his passengers. Not after keeping them alive this long.

At least they had a chamber to put her in. Because of the delicacy of the filters that cleaned the fluid, each stasis chamber could only be used once. Hers would be useless until the ship was refurbished at the spaceport above Minea. For once, Ethan was glad that his desperate attempts to put himself in stasis a few years ago had failed.

In fact, he was, for the first time, glad that all his plans to get out of being Caretaker had failed. He had tried everything: climbing in the chamber and initiating the stasis sequence, refusing to eat until the computer allowed him back into stasis, threatening, cajoling, coercing. None of it had worked. He couldn’t stand the thought of being alone for the rest of his life.

His most selfish moment had come when he finally accepted he wasn’t going back into stasis. He had not yet read about the 2,000-day stasis threshold and had resolved to awaken his wife so they could at least have some semblance of a life together on the ship. As he had held a hand over the key pad to enter the numbers, he had seen the baby move—slowly, sleepily—in her stomach and known that if he did this, that child would live its life in the sterile confines of the stasis ship. It would have its parents, of course, but no other human relationships until the day it reached Minea—middle aged, with all its youth wasted by his weakness. Ethan saw the child, recognized the great cost it would pay, and didn’t care—punched the numbers anyway to welcome his wife back into his arms.

But that day, and every day since, the computer had thwarted his attempt, creating an emergency seal on the chamber that would not be broken until they reached Minea. His desperation to have her near had made her even more distant.

He shook his head to clear the image of his own weakness. “Computer, what is the status of Pass. . .