Apex Book Company

Short Fiction: To Know How to See

June 2008

Something was wrong with Lee’s face. A small comet passed the Ambrosia’s cockpit window, and Sean Corbett saw its streaking tail reflect off the man’s skin, shimmering across his cheek and forehead, across the bridge of his nose, as if they were the sculpted features of a wax mask instead of true flesh.

Lee’s glassy eyes lifted from the electronic book he’d been reading for the past hour. “What’s the matter?”

The comet vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving the cramped chamber dimly lit by the soft glow of monitors and LEDs that littered its consoles. Sean rubbed his eyes, convincing himself it had been a trick of the light. “Nothing, sorry.”

Lee shook his head, muttering something under his breath as he resumed his studies.

Sean continued work on the instrumentation checklist, making notes with a pen clutched in metallic fingers. While drilling on Titan six years ago, a rock slide crushed his right arm. At first, he’d been unable to pick up a glass without shattering it, or use the bathroom without crying out in pain, but after six months of physical therapy, and years of experience, he could now perform even the most delicate of tasks. There was no feeling in the prosthesis itself, but this morning, he awoke to find his shoulder throbbing—a dull, deep pain, like a toothache. He chalked it up to a pulled muscle, downed a few painkillers, and went on about his duties.

Though it was now his shift in the pilot’s seat, there was very little for Sean to do. Ambrosia took the reins as soon as they cleared the asteroid belt. She would need a human touch when they approached Nautilus station, but for now, their ten-member crew simply took turns babysitting her systems.

After a few minutes, Sean’s attention returned cautiously to the man sitting next to him, examining his skin once more, finding it pale…shiny, without a single hair or blemish. It just didn’t look real.

“You okay?” Lee asked. The skin above his left eye tore as he spoke, split like rubber stretched thin.

Sean’s eyes widened. His mouth fell open in stunned silence.

“What’s wrong?” Lee turned his head toward the cockpit window, as if expecting to see some stellar phenomenon occurring behind him. Finding nothing of interest, he turned back to Sean, the rip in his forehead now larger—a gaping, bloodless wound that ran from his hairline to his eyebrow.

Something moved in that darkness.

Sean squinted, trying to see what it was. Peering into Lee’s torn forehead was like looking through a crack in a raven’s egg. He saw shifting, flapping bits of strange anatomy that were far from human.

Panic flooded Sean’s brain as he realized he was being watched. The thing beneath Lee’s façade had trained its hidden eyes upon him. Did it know that its disguise had been compromised? Was it looking for signs that Sean was aware of its existence?

He turned, focused on the instrument panel for a moment. The tiny space suddenly felt even more confined. His galloping heart demanded more oxygen, but there seemed to be none left in the control room. He had to get out of there.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Sean said aloud, and it was the truth. He glanced at the hatch behind them. It seemed so far away. “I have to…I gotta go see the doc.”

The Lee-thing nodded. “Okay, man. Need me to walk you down there?”

“No!” Sean said too quickly. He felt a blast of air from an overhead vent. His skin was now slick with sweat. “I can make it.”

With deliberate calm, he rose, managed to squeeze between the seats without touching the imposter, then took a backward step toward the exit. His left hand shook, but his prosthesis was cool and steady. He pressed a green-lit button to open the hatch and ducked as he stepped quickly into the narrow corridor beyond.

The Lee-thing stared at him.

“I’ll see you later,” it said.

Sean punched the button, closed the hatch, sealed the alien in. There was a fire alarm next to the door. For a moment, he considered breaking the glass, bringing the rest of his shipmates to his aid. Instead, he ran for the Medlab, for Carla.

#

“Do you actually love me?” she asked.

The voice came across Sean’s headset, each word punching a hole through the steady rattle of his own respiration. He twisted around, his heavy boots leaving marks in the obsidian dust. “What?”

Blue-white lights rimmed Carla’s faceplate, making her pale, freckled features glow like a beacon in the darkness. She wasn’t looking at him. Instead, she used the small keyboard sewn into the wrist of her environment suit, typing survey notes about the asteroid into her log. “I said—”

“I heard what you said. I just can’t believe you’d even question it. Of course I love you.”

Her brown eyes met his through the glass. “The computer could have picked another woman to be your partner on this trip, then you would’ve fallen for her instead of me.”

“Not a chance.”

A smile, but her voice remained serious, “You sound pretty sure about that.”

“Carla…out of all the hundreds of women the company could have paired me with for these last two years, you were the most compatible. Computers don’t lie.”

Exhaust vapor erupted silently from the back of her helmet, crystallizing. “So this is love because a machine says it should be?”

“No, the machine said it would be because it is.” He studied her, becoming mildly annoyed. Where was she going with this? “Look at the rest of the crew. Not every pairing turned into romance.”

“So the computer was wrong about them, but it’s right about us?”

“Yes.” Now frustrated, he glanced at the monitors on the robot drilling rig and saw that it had shattered a bit boring into the heavily cratered, rocky terrain. Shit. Sean quickly changed frequencies on his intercom. “Orpheus…stop.”

The machine withdrew its smoking auger, the metal glowing bright red, and its cameras stared back at them as if to question why they had not noticed sooner.

Sean flipped back to Carla’s channel, then scaled the side of the rig. “I’ve got to change that.”

“Need any help?”

He rotated the housing. In the cargo hold, he could hear it click when it moved into position, but out here, in this vacuum, he had to rely on feel. “I think I got it.”

Carla nodded at his right shoulder. “Do you miss your real arm, the one you were born with?”

“When it first happened, yeah, sure I did.” He climbed down to one of the seven support struts that extended from the sides and front of the rig, then hopped onto the surface, clouds of obsidian particulates billowing around his boots.

She took the decapitated bit from his hands and handed him a replacement. “If they could have given it back to you, would you have taken it?”

The memory of that day flashed in Sean’s brain: coming to, being told that his arm had been ground to a pulp. He swallowed, trying to push it all back down. “That wasn’t an option.”

“But if it had been,” she prodded, “would you have opted for reattachment, or for the mechanism?”

He snickered humorlessly. “At the time, I guess I would’ve been happy to get my real arm back.”

“And now?”

“I’m sure there’s a point to all this?”

Carla shrugged. “I was just thinking about how much we’ve given up for the sake of our respective careers, wondering if it’s all been worth it. You lost your arm.” She put the ruined drill bit into the tool chest at the back of the rig. “And I gave up my womb.”

He paused for a moment, wondering if he should say something, not knowing any fitting words. Sterilization was mandatory for deep space travel. Simple mathematics. Air, food, water, and supplies had to be rationed, carefully calculated for a set number of people. Adding a baby into the equation, perhaps a year or two away from the nearest outpost or settlement, could put everyone’s lives in jeopardy.

Carla asked, “Have you ever seen artificial gestation, been to one of the nurseries?”

Sean grunted, twisting the new part into place. “Can’t say I have.”

Her gloved hand raked the chest of her suit, her frustrated fingers unable to fiddle with the silver Saint Albert medallion and chain buried beneath the insulated fabric. Albertus Magnus, she’d told him, was the patron saint of scientists, her protector, and she never took it off, not even when she showered. “Picture row after row of glass tubes filled with oxygenated liquid, each one home to an embryo at a different stage of development. I saw parents smiling in on their unborn children, showing the still-forming fetuses off to friends and family. There was this adorable, curly-haired little girl. She tapped on the glass, the way kids used to do with aquariums.” Carla raised her fist and acted it out. “Her father tried to get her to quit, but she just kept tapping and waving, trying to get that baby inside to open its eyes and look at her. Everyone was so happy, so proud, but it just left me feeling really sad and…cold, like something beautiful had been taken away in the name of progress.”

Sean tightened a few bolts with his wrench. “That sounds odd, coming from a scientist.”

Carla was silent for a moment, and he glanced down to see her searching for words, her lips parted, her eyes off to the side, then downcast, her hand still on her chest, trying to play with the hidden medallion and chain.

Finally, she said, “The scientist in me sees the gain, but the woman in me feels the loss. Our flesh and blood bodies have become disposable, obsolete. We give them up piece by piece without so much as a second thought. As soon as we discover a way to download our consciousness into a mainframe, everyone will opt to do it. True immortality.”

“That wouldn’t be you,” he told her, “it’d be a copy.”

“But it would be everything I know, which is everything that makes me me.”

He slid his wrench back into his tool belt, then nodded at her wrist. “You can type everything you know into that log, and it wouldn’t make it alive, just…thorough.”

“Well, alive or not, people will do it in droves, just give it all up and stop being human altogether.”

He climbed down from the rig to stand in front of her, rubbing his shoulder through the fabric of his suit. “Would you do it?”

Carla shrugged. “Probably not.” Her eyes locked with his through the glass of their sealed faceplates. “I don’t think I want to sacrifice anything else.”

Sean took a step toward her. “What’s going on?”

“The mission’s almost over,” she said, “and we’ll have some tough decisions once we reach Nautilus, whether or not to renew our contracts, what we’ll do if we don’t sign up for another tour, where we’ll—”

“You’re thinking about leaving Nova Mining?”

Her face grew somber, and her eyes rose to the countless moons that drifted across the horizon. “It’s certainly an option.”

#

Medlab was free of the clutter that appeared throughout much of the ship. Doctor Edwards had music playing, relaxing orchestral tones. Four beds lined the far wall. They were empty now, but if there had been patients, Sean thought the music would have put them to sleep.

Carla was in a small corner she’d appropriated from the doctor, hunched over an ocular probe. Auburn curls spilled across the shoulders of her tan flight jacket, and her delicate fingers adjusted the controls, increasing magnification. The core samples Orpheus had mined were grouped on her glass tabletop. She analyzed each in turn, looking for a rich vein of ore.

Sean reached over and touched her arm, giving her a start.

“Jesus.” Her jacket was unzipped, and she clutched at the white blouse beneath, pulling it tight across her breasts. “I thought you were on Bridge duty this morning?”

“I am…I was.” His mind was still racing, incredible visions of concealed aliens being chased by rational, logical concerns about his own sanity.

“Come to take me to lunch?”

No, I’ve come to see if I’m losing my mind.

He studied her eyes, her skin, the beauty mark just above her glossy red lips. He touched her cheek with his trembling left hand, felt its warmth, and knew she was very human.

She frowned. “Sean…Did something happen up there?”

“Have you seen Lee since we’ve been back on the ship?”

Carla shook her head and continued to look him over. “I don’t think I’ve seen anyone but you and Doctor Edwards since we went through decon last night. Wasn’t he up in the cockpit with you?”

“Yes, but…” Sean paused, deciding to be cautious until he knew more. He extended his arm, took her soft hand in his metal fingers, and his shoulder flared with pain, igniting sparks within his eyes.

“It’s still bothering you.” She studied his prosthesis with concern.

“I’m fine.”

“Liar. Look, while you’re here, you should at least let Edwards take a look at it.”

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