And On

When the Earth imploded, crashed in upon itself in an awesome orgy of destruction, I felt nothing. I stood there, on the platform of the Shell Super-Orbital Self-Service Commercial and Recreational Spacecraft Refueling Station, my hand typing my credit card’s PIN code into the digital air-pad, and watched it happen, just beyond the glass dome of the station, just in front of me. Watched all those swirls of blue and white twist viciously into black, watched the green masses crack and sear red. Watched it, the apocalypse that you and I and everyone we’ve ever known has waited for. And felt nothing. A sudden, violent, endless nothing.

What are you supposed to feel when everything ends? Are we meant to cry? Despair? To shout and throw hands, to plead and beg and bargain? Laugh?

Everyone is answering that differently. There are twelve of us here, stranded at this cosmic gas station. Well, not stranded, really. We all have spacecraft. I have my cargo ship, loaded with crates of Hyperglass windows, the same Hyperglass making up the dome that keeps us here, that bounds our little island beside the collapsed Earth. I was supposed to take that Hyperglass to the Andromeda Colonies, where demand was high, where I would sell the stuff wholesale, in bulk, to retail firms who would then sell it to their customers. I spent years concocting this scheme, gathering the materials, making the arrangements. I remember a certain passion and determination. I remember caring.

But now it seems ridiculous. The Andromeda Colonies are still there, I assume. Indeed the whole interplanetary system must still exist, the Empire of Earth surely stretches now so far that even this loss of the Capitol cannot end it. Humanity, we know, will go on. Pointlessly, unquestioningly, humans will keep making humans, and the sad doomed train will continue, no matter how many passengers are lost, no matter how many never wanted to go anywhere to begin with.

I wish I could muster those feelings I had, not long ago. There was a feeling that today was connected to tomorrow, that an action begat a result, that I could do things and go places and make a life. I reach now for those feelings but it’s like reaching into a cloud. I grasp nothing.

No one can seem to bring themselves to leave this little island, this way-station, this non-place. We play games. We eat microwaved noodles and plastic-wrapped pastries. We put out chairs and blankets and spread ourselves across the platform of the Shell station and watch, with the dull compulsion of the hypnotized, our little old planet burn and bloom in infinite fire, again and again, each day and each night. We sleep in the beds in our various craft. All of us have made love - the singles and the couples, too - their monogamies, like my wholesaling scheme, made ridiculous now. It isn’t good sex. It’s rote, and dreary, and more like habitual masturbation than a real communion. There is no laughter. Except for with Sara. Sara is my favorite, and I think I am hers. But everybody fucks everybody. There are no children in our group, and no elderly folk. There is no sense of the future, and the past is right there dying before us.

I believe we have been here for about one month. But that guess is as useless as the concept of a month itself, and as arbitrary now. I have no idea how long it has been. Our clocks all stopped working when it happened. Everything was based on Earth Time! Even the colonies and outer territories, the cities and the military bases of far off worlds, all mark their days in relation to Earth Time. I imagine the people out there, checking their watches, thinking that any of it means anything.

I am deciding - and I know that I have been deciding since that moment at the fuel console, when I watched the Earth end - whether to kill myself. I believe it is a reasonable question, given the circumstances. I believe everyone else here is thinking it too. Life is long and difficult, made worth it by an accumulation of small miracles, by those strange and unnatural moments of luck, joy, wonder, of improbable beauty bursting through all-too believable reality. Life is worth living because of those moments, however rare, that make it seem so - worth, despite it all, living.

How can we say that now? We, who have watched ten billion lives end, have lost our families and friends and colleagues and secret loves, and acquaintances, and rivals and enemies and favorite baristas, and coveted neighbors, and jealous subordinates and unimpressed mentors and all manner of connections - all connections. How can we say that life will, one day again, be worth living?

I have not been to the Andromeda System before. I do not know anybody there, or anywhere else in the Earth Empire. The only people I knew - all of the people I knew - lived on Earth. I lived on Earth, my whole life until the hour before it happened, when my ship crested through the atmosphere and into the dark beyond, when I set out, finally, for something new.

I wonder, if I hadn’t stopped at this Shell station, what life might be like. I might have continued on, into the Warp-Tunnel, not knowing that behind me were the gasping, dying breaths of my old world. I might have sailed boldly into the black sky and not looked back and not known, until my life in the Andromeda System had began, what had happened. Maybe in that new space and time, with so much distance between myself and my planet, the blast might have seemed an echo, a faint reverberation of wistful memory, a faintly painful twang, like nostalgia, like regret. I might have wondered and wept and grieved, then carried on.

But here, having seen it, caught in the psychic blast radius, as it were, I don’t think I can escape it.

***

“Your arms are different lengths,” Sara says, pulling my wrist with her fingers, raising the limp specimen of my right arm and tucking herself beneath it, into the crook. Her lips play along my bicep, to my elbow. She pulls my left wrist into the air now, climbs over my body and kisses that arm too, and then curls and turns and rests her head on my chest so that her big blue sparkling eyes are right in front of mine. Her red hair tumbles behind her like a tail of fire. I am very tired.

“The right one is longer.”

“My mom always said I was born reaching. My hand, um, came out first.”

Sara smiles and stifles a flash of unfathomable sadness in her eyes, which I know has flashed in mine too, because I have broken an unspoken rule. There are words we don’t say, words too painful because they bring too much memory. Words like mom.

“Jenn says the Warp Tunnel is going to close.”

“How does she know?”

“She saw it flickering. She says it was powered by lasers on Earth and now it’s finally run out of reserve energy. And it’ll just shut down.”

“I’m sure they’ll keep it running. Rescue crews are still looking for stragglers.”

“But how long will they look? No one’s found us.”

“We’re hard to track. This little station is so small, they’ll never see us until one of us takes a ship out of here and flags someone down.”

“Should we? If they’re going to close the Hyper Tunnel, shouldn’t we let them know we’re here? Or just take the Tunnel ourselves, get out of this place?”

“Do you want to?” I ask Sara, with her big flat eyes staring at me. They don’t move.

“No, not really.”

“Me neither.”

Sara rolls off me and onto her back and breathes out. “We’re broken, then. I don’t see any way around it. We’ve lost the will to live.”

“It happens to people all the time. Don’t beat yourself up about it.”

“But I don’t want to die.”

“So there you go. That’s some will.”

“No, I don’t want to live either. I’m just afraid to die.”

“Ten billion people just did.”

“Yeah.”

“So, at least we’ll be in good company.”

Sara laughs. Sara’s laugh is deep and rich and reaches inside you and hooks its fingers right beneath your rib cage and lifts you, somehow, off the ground.

“I guess it doesn’t seem real,” I say. “It seems like if we just stay here, doing nothing, things will just keep going. But eventually, I guess, they won’t. We’ll run out of air. Or food. If the Hyper Tunnel closes, that’s it.”

“Yeah.”

“But I can’t imagine doing something about it. I can’t imagine leaving.”

“Me neither.”

“I can’t imagine anything being worth anything, anymore.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I wish you didn’t.”

***

I run my fingers through our son’s hair, bright red like yours and curled and wiry like mine. I ruffle the folds of springing tissue and feel his warm skin as he pushes my hand away. He grabs my wrist and moves my arm to the side and pins it against the arm rest, then climbs up onto the chair and sits on it, and puts his face in mine.

“What happened next!”

It is not a question but a command. He has heard this story a million times, but he will want to hear it a million more. How we met, but more than that, how we survived, how we escaped the fiery planet, the burning hole in the universe once known as Earth. He loves this story without knowing why, and without knowing the real story at all. To him, it is a tale of heroism, of survival, of great danger boldly overcome. And, surely, after we finally did leave the Shell Super-Orbital Self-Service Commercial and Recreational Spacecraft Refueling Station, there was plenty of this stuff-of-stories. Braving the ruins of the asteroid belt, dodging the pirates of Mars, rescuing a lost astronaut and blasting through the collapsing Hyper-Tunnel to an improbable happy ending, to survival - there was danger, and adventure, and finally life.

But what our son does not know or understand and cannot yet, does not even have the words to wonder yet - is why. Why we ever left that place. Why we lived. He himself is, of course, the answer to that question that he doesn’t think to ask, that most disturbing of questions. I wish there were another answer, a better one, something I understood or could at least attempt to understand. But all there turned out to be, when everything was gone and life stood before us flat and unpromising, was that oldest of things, that inexplicable truth of existence. And we played our parts, as so many have, and we survived, and he survived, and now we are here, far from what was once Earth, far off into our new lives in our new world. We continue because we do, because we always have, not just you and I but everyone. Existence, begetting existence. One foot after another. We live because there is no other choice but to go on.

I tell our son the story again, and he laughs and screams and listens close, and then I put him to bed and kiss his head.