Sound asleep when it happened, I only caught the rumbling aftereffects, along with rust flakes raining down from the ceiling. I bolted off my cot in a daze, uncertain if the red flashing lights and deafening klaxon were real or the flourishes of a vivid nightmare.
Then a second explosion hit.
The silo’s airlock shielded us from the worst of the concussive aftershock but did little to dampen the shuddering. A shelf shrugged off its bolts and toppled over. I jumped out of its way, covered my ears, and instinctively called for Baba, then remembered where he was and ran out of the alcove into the silo’s communal hall. Everyone rushed to take cover, as the Caretakers’ emergency protocols dictated, because there’s no safer place to hide when faced with potential fuselage decompression on an airless world than under the furniture.
“Afaf, come here, girl,” Mariam’s mother called, gesticulating wildly for me to join them under a dining table.
I ignored her and tugged on the airlock’s unyielding arm. Until and unless the Caretakers decided to let me out, the airlock would remain sealed, its status light a forbidding red. I banged the thick glass portal, each jarring strike reverberating through my bones from my skull to my toes. “Open the damn door.”
Mariam broke loose from her mother and engulfed me in her arms. I exploded in tears, my fists bloodied and throbbing. “Baba’s working the yeast farm today.”
“Shh. It’s all right,” Mariam cooed in my ear. I clung to her and buried my face in her chest. “It’s all right,” she kept saying while stroking my short locs.
Abruptly, the airlock buzzed and its status light turned green. I pecked Mariam’s cheek and quickly disarmed the door.
“Must you go?” Mariam pleaded, clutching at my arm.
“Let her go,” Mariam’s mother called out from her cowering place. “She won’t rest until she’s lost too.”
“I have to find Baba,” I told Mariam, pleading for her understanding through the thick double-paned portal of the silo-side door as I sealed it behind me before stepping through the portless outer door.
Thick acrid smoke filled the circular corridor connecting the four silos. I tried to cover my mouth and nose with my sleeve but found it useless against the stench of burnt yeast and scorched metal. Disoriented by the press of those searching for their loved ones, I doubled over coughing when a hot calloused hand brushed across my arm and left a viscous trail of fast drying blood smeared on my skin.
“Afaf?” Baba called, his voice hoarse and breaking.
“Baba,” I called back between coughs, peering through the roiling fumes as giant ventilator fans whirred into action, siphoning away the fouled air. I made towards his voice, draped his arm over my shoulders, and helped him back to the silo. While they fussed over his injuries, I collapsed by the airlock to catch my breath.
What if I’d lost Baba as I’d lost Mama before, how could I cope on my own? A chill ran up my spine when the prospect failed to scare me nearly as much as I thought it should. Instead, I glimpsed in the loss the sort of freedom I longed for but dared not acknowledge before. Freedom to live, freedom to die, and, more than anything else, freedom from the Caretakers.
A week later, Baba awoke to find me standing by his cot. “Did you tell the Caretakers I wanted to talk to them?” His unshod feet met the cold metal floor and recoiled from the touch.
Only the four silo captains communicated directly with the Caretakers, sending handwritten requests, and receiving printed responses through the pneumatic tubes connecting the silos to the great machines, somewhere else beyond the habitable stratum of the long-stranded spaceship.
“The Caretakers are busy keeping us safe, they haven’t got time for childish nonsense. Your mother’s dead, Afaf, and that’s that,” he said. “Now cut this out and get on with your chores and I’ll get on with mine.”
“If Mama’s dead, where’s her body?” I stood my ground, for the first time. “Why won’t the Caretakers let us see what’s outside?”
“There’s no outside, you stupid girl,” Baba roared. “We’re stuck on a dead world and it’s taking everything everyone has just to survive, so shut your mouth and do as you’re told.”
One more word would have earned me a smack, I knew, but I couldn’t let fear silence me anymore. “Fine, I’ll find out myself,” I mumbled under my breath.
That night, Baba stood by my cot and berated me again. I wasn’t strong enough, or clever enough, or brave enough to survive without him. It was his way of inoculating me against the moment I decided to leave, like Mama did. I lay still with the covers pulled over my head. I’d gone to bed fully clothed.
As soon as he started snoring on his cot, I tiptoed out of the alcove and went as far as the airlock when a vice gripped my arm and wrenched me around. “Where do you think you’re going?” When I failed to respond, Baba scoffed, his bloodshot eyes triumphant. “Have you no shame? Come quietly, before everyone wakes up to witness your disgrace.”
Suddenly out of breath, heat flashed across my face, but I didn’t lower my eyes. I’d run out of shame, of guilt, of fear. Food ran out all the time, and hope, and joy, why not shame? Besides, you can’t be threatened with what had already occurred.
Bleary-eyed neighbors, awakened by the commotion Baba created, trickled out of their alcoves to surround us. I looked at Mariam, she averted her eyes. The others stood back and gawked. I squared myself against their censure and yanked my arm free from Baba’s grip. “I’m going to find the Caretakers or die trying.”
Some gasped, sucking air through lips twisted with disapproval, when a bell announced a message from the Caretakers. Little Arafa collected the capsule and placed it in Baba’s hand. He read the neatly folded paper inside, and crumbled it onto the floor.
“Fine. Go kill yourself. Must be a disease in our blood. A curse you carry along with my name. You shame me.”
He spat at me but missed, bellowed for the crowd to disperse back to their alcoves, and walked away.
I picked up the crumbled paper. Let Afaf go.
I’d won, but why did I feel cold and unprepared?
I turned my back on the only home I ever knew and cycled out of the silo.
I no longer had a reason to tiptoe.
Four airlocks were all that separated our silos, farm hangars, workrooms, and storerooms, from the unknown parts of the ark. Without the Caretakers’ permission, these gateways might as well have been invisible. The light atop one flickered green on my approach.
One airlock led to another, up ladders, and down chutes. I followed the path of green lights, often the only source of illumination, until I lost all sense of direction. Only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t marked my path. I walked and climbed and descended until I couldn’t move a muscle and slumped onto the floor and slept. Despite my careful rationing, my water ran out before the protein brick I stashed away from my rations. I had no idea which way led back to the silos, even had I been ready to concede defeat. I kept going until I cycled through an airlock and found footprints in the dust. They were mine.
Was that what happened to Mama? Would I find her remains somewhere in this vast maze? Was that the fate meted out by the Caretakers to those who refused to learn their place? Cut off from the herd, denied even the redemption of fertilizing the vats with their remains. I sunk to my knees and cried until I passed out.
Consciousness returned in dribs and drabs, to glimpses of someone fussing over me. Cool hands brushed aside limp and sodden locs off my clammy forehead. I pried open gummy eyelids to a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors that grudgingly focused after a few blinks to a grey-haired woman with clear brown eyes buffeted by crowfeet that bunched up as she smiled at me.
“Mama?” I croaked.
“Shh. Drink this.” She lifted a cup to my mouth. The cool liquid went down like firewater. I coughed and spluttered. “Slowly.”
“Is it really you?”
“Good morning, good morning, good morning to you,” she sang in that whispering lilt I woke up to every day, until the day she left.
“Where were you? Why did you leave me?”
Mama shushed me, raising her voice over my spluttering anguish. “One day, I had to find out, just like you did.”
“I didn’t abandon my child.”
“What about Mariam?”
“I begged and begged but she wouldn’t leave her mother.” What was she accusing me of? I pulled back, dabbed my tears with my sleeves. “You tried to kill me.”
“Kill you? Silly girl, I was testing you. Had you turned back you wouldn’t have been the one to succeed me but I wouldn’t have let you come to any harm. I would’ve arranged for your dad to take you home. I’m glad you didn’t turn back, though. I know you have questions but first, you rest.”
It took me a couple of days to regain enough strength to walk unassisted to the water closet and venture beyond. The hangar outside the small cabin existed in perennial gloom, aside from one corner bathed in the sour glow of a wall of stacked cathode-ray tubes, forever flickering with a ghostly greenish-grey raster. They hummed loudly and clicked every time they switched camera feeds from the habitable stratum. The eerie grid rested on a metal deck packed with gauges, buttons, levers, slots, and keys with Mama busy at the controls.
“So, when do I get to meet the Caretakers?”
Mama turned around sharply, eyes wide and wild. When she saw me, she shook her head. “You startled me. I’m not used to having anyone around. Come, have a seat.”
Suddenly, a capsule whooshed across the maze of pneumatic tubes overhead and arrived at a terminus like an old church organ with a resonant bell toll. Mama retrieved the capsule and extracted the handwritten note within.
Suddenly, I understood. “The Caretakers are a lie.”
“Oh, the ark’s computers were quite real, once,” Mama said, half distracted by the handwritten note. “How do you think the ark flew here from Earth? But without the knowhow of those lost in the Purge, they eventually stopped working.”
When our ancestors fled the specter of looming nuclear annihilation on Earth, they brought seeds and terrestrial microflora to their new home only to find Proxima Centauri B a tidally locked airless rock. Some wanted to build a subterranean city near its polar icecaps, while others sought a return to an Earth they hoped had healed in the intervening centuries, and yet another group wanted to press forward towards the next promising proto-Earth, and the next, all the way to Kepler-452b if need be. Ultimately, they resolved their differences using humanity’s time-honored panacea: violence. In a tiny fraction of the centuries it took to cross four lightyears, the ark’s best and brightest were the first to perish at the hands of those whose oath it was to protect and maintain the peace, and in the process condemning themselves and their progeny to endless penance on a lifeless planet.
Mama flipped a series of switches on the console and high-powered lights overheard flared to life, cascading row by row. “Afaf, meet the Caretakers.”
The cavern the lights revealed was at least as large as the habitable stratum occupied by a neat grid of black airlock-sized cabinets interconnected on top by cable conduits that extended in every direction. I gawked in awe when a jittery abrasive trill startled me.
“It’s just the printer,” Mama said, placing a reassuring hand on my knee and noticed when I shied away from the touch. “Surprisingly reliable little machines and a sight easier than writing by hand.” When the trilling stopped, Mama pulled the piece of paper out of a slot in the desk, tearing it along a perforated edge.
“And helps convince folks in the silos that they’re conversing with machines,” I noted, nodding at the grey-green ghosts on the screens, obliviously going about their lives.
Mama shrugged and slotted the capsulate with the folded printed paper into a vacuum tube’s opening. It vanished from sight with a plop. “How do you think they’d react if they found out the truth? The last time they faced a difficult decision, they nearly wiped themselves out. Now, they believe in a higher power. Selfless, all-seeing, all-knowing machines that guide their every move, and they’re at peace. They live, love, and laugh, instead of fret, fight, and die.
“All I do, all my predecessors did, all I’m hoping you’ll continue to do after I’m gone is to maintain their survival and their faith. Don’t shatter their fragile stability to satisfy your self-righteousness. Help them survive until one of them runs away looking for answers like you and I, and dozens before us, did. Find them, test them, and train them the way I’ll train you, and die knowing you’ve helped your people endure.”
I had no idea how long she’d rehearsed that speech. It rolled off her tongue too smoothly to have been the product of the moment. Without waiting for an answer, she turned back to the control deck and toggled the light switches, killing the overhead lights off in a reverse thudding cascade that returned the hangar to its former darkness.
“And if I refused? Would you eliminate me in the name of that same greater good?”
Mama started, surprised. “No one ever refuses, sweetie. To do so would hurt those you love most. It’s the best deterrent against rebellion, believe me.” She nodded in the direction of one of the screens showing Mariam chatting with her mother in our communal hall, oblivious to the eyes watching their every move. Mama’s fingers danced over a keyboard and something flashed on a different screen. She groaned and opened a hatch below the slot in the desk and pulled out an empty box. “We’re out of paper. I guess it’s as good a time as any to show you where the warehouse is.”
I followed her to the far end of the hall, through an airlock and down several ladders then through another airlock into a dark space that had to be about as large as the computer room with the control console, judging by the hollow echoes of our footsteps. Mama unhesitatingly reached into the darkness and a control board came alive in its own nimbus. She toggled another switch and a ceiling lamp off in the distance lit up to reveal a fragment of what must have been a sprawling warehouse.
“We have to conserve power,” Mama explained and set off towards the lit section. “The paper is in Section G, Row 63, Shelf B. Remember it. Next time, you’re coming on your own.”
I stumbled in her wake. “I can’t see anything.”
“Until you get used to the layout, look at the ceiling and head for the light,” Mama said, her voice echoing differently from section to section and row to row. “To return, look for the control board’s light .”
As we drew closer to the lit area, numbered and labelled, crate-laden shelves unveiled themselves, extending in every direction, into the dimness beyond the cone of light.
“What’s all this?” I rubbed my nose to stop myself sneezing in the dust eddies we stirred.
“Mostly obsolete spare parts and supplies from good old Earth, a whole mess of odds and ends, most of it useless. There’s supposed to be a printed inventory somewhere, but I could never find it. Legend has it there used to be a searchable electronic version, but that went the way of the Computers. Now, you have to remember where things are.”
“What if we need something for the first time?”
Mama stopped by a shelf and pulled a rectangular box labeled Fanfold Continuous Perforated Sheets off a shelf and handed it to me. “Search until you find it, I suppose.”
I struggled to keep pace with Mama’s confident strides, fearful that if I let her get too far ahead, I’d find myself lost and alone in the warrens of the arkship.
As we made our way back to the Computers hall, Mama mused, almost to herself, “You know, every Caretaker pursues a grand impossible project to pass the time. Maybe indexing this warehouse could be yours?”
Once Mama felt she could trust me with the mundane management of the silos, life settled into a routine of overlapping shifts with each of us working alone for eight hours, and together for another eight, during which Mama expanded my training.
Towards the end of a solo shift, I watched as Mariam sat in a corner crying. I wanted more than anything to gather her in my arms.
“No wonder little gets done at night if that’s all you do.”
Startled, my hand instinctively went to the screen’s controls but instead of lowering the luminance, I turned the knob the other way. Something popped loudly inside and the screen went dark. “Why’d you sneak up on me like that?”
“Great, just great.” Mama shook her head. “I guess it’s not entirely your fault. There’s no telling when any of these relics will pack it in. Come with me.”
It was a tight fit in the gap behind the screens and dim, despite the light Mama switched at the console. She located the dead screen, unplugged a coaxial cable from the back and handed it to me, then did the same to another screen, swapping their input cables. “Let’s try it now.”
Back at the console, I increased the gain on the replacement screen and it lit up slowly to show the silo’s interior, but Mariam was no longer there. “I miss her so much.”
Mama sat next to me and sighed. “I know. Leaving you was the hardest thing I ever had to do.”
“Then why did you do it?”
Mama shrugged with her eyes. “Someone has to. Looking after you, your future, meant looking after everyone else’s at the same time. Even if I had to watch you grow up on a screen.”
“What happens when the last screen dies?” I asked.
The question seemed to take Mama by surprise, not so much that she’d never thought of it before, more that I had.
“They built things to last back then. This,” Mama twirled her hand in the air, taking in the whole swallowed by the darkness, “was meant to last not just the centuries it took us to get here from Earth but the time it’d take to bootstrap civilization, build the farms, and mines, and factories. But the ark is dying, one bit at a time, and there’s no fixing it. When the last screen dies, we stop monitoring, when the last vat dies, we stop eating, when the last recycling filter dies, so do we. But until then we cling onto this like it’s the only thing that matters, because it is. Life is its own reward, Afaf, its own higher purpose.”
With a finite number of components it was merely a matter of time. After weeks of squeezing into the narrow gap behind the screens and learning to work mostly by touch, I methodically swapped parts between two defunct screens to see if I can bring one of them back to life. Perhaps getting one defunct screen to work was my impossible task as a Caretaker.
The thought jarred me from my work.
When did I accept being a Caretaker? When did I agree to perpetuate the myth infantilizing an entire community of humanity, who for all I knew were the last of our species anywhere?
Eventually, the endless swapping and testing tedium came to an abrupt end when the defunct screen I carelessly overloaded flickered back to life, though without a camera feed all it showed was energetic, ever-shifting white noise. The change in its status was weeks in the making and yet arrived too suddenly to comprehend. It wasn’t until Mama woke up and joined me that the enormity of what I’d accomplished hit us both.
“When did you learn how to do that?” Mama asked in awe after she’d satisfied herself I hadn’t merely moved the screens themselves around the grid to fool her. “And how did I not notice you working on it all those weeks?”
I showed her the book I’d found in a drawer with a picture of a CRT on the cover and page after page of dense text, lists, and diagrams most of which were beyond my comprehension. I also showed her the dozen burns on my fingers, palms, and wrists, earned while I taught myself to operate a soldering iron.
“It’s a technical manual,” Mama explained and took me to a library with tens of thousands of the ring-bound books covering every system, sub-system, and component across the arkship. “For all the help they’ll be to people who’ve almost forgotten how to read and count.”
I picked one of the manuals at random but couldn’t recognize the object drawn on the cover. “I figured it out once, maybe I can do it again.”
“Knock yourself out.” Mama returned to the console with me in tow. “There’s only so much one person can learn in a lifetime.”
“True. One person can’t learn everything but there are many more eyes and brains in the silos. Together, perhaps, we can learn enough.”
Mama laughed bitterly. “Together? Have you learned nothing? That explosion in the yeast vats that almost ripped the ship apart, do you know what caused it? Grown men fighting over some nonsense and in the process destroying a third of our food production capacity. It’s who we are. Do you know who survived the Purge? People whose main skill is oppression and their sole talent, violence. We come from killers, Afaf. How are we supposed to reinvent science, mathematics, engineering, and the million other breakthroughs of those who built this ark only to perish at the hands of our ancestors?”
I realized then that arguing with Mama was futile. It wasn’t logic she lacked but faith. Faith in us, in humanity, however flawed, or seemingly irredeemable.
Faith I feared I’d lose too, if, like her, I played god for too long.
The third vat came back online a little over a year after the explosion, and though the reduced capacity meant another reshuffling of how many children would be allowed life in our ongoing balancing act between biological imperatives and certain starvation, Mama considered the outcome a rare victory in a long litany of defeats.
“It’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?” I suggested as if it’d just occurred to me. “I’m coming along as a Caretaker and—”
“You’re doing great, sweetie.”
“—I’ve never seen what it looks like outside. Don’t we have any feeds?”
“All died before my time, I’m afraid.” Mama answered distractedly. I’d managed to fix an oscilloscope by replacing a busted condenser and asked her to check it before we put it to use diagnosing other faults. “You clearly have a talent for this sort of work, maybe you’ll fix those cameras too one day.”
That wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for but I didn’t have to wait too long, or, worse, obviously tip my hand by saying it aloud. It had to be her to suggest it.
“Wait, you can see outside from the cockpit, no cameras needed,” Mama said excitedly, “and it’s been ages since I’ve gone all the way up there.” She stood up smiling. “What do you say, feel up to a little hike?”
I jumped up grinning. “Absolutely! But we’ll have to pass through the warehouse for some more printer paper on the way.”
“Get it after, on the way back down.”
“I’d rather not forget it then have to run while they’re waiting for a response in the silos.” I hoped she couldn’t see me shaking with the vibrations of my pounding heart.
Mama seemed genuinely proud. “Look at you, all focused on the job.”
I almost winced.
With the lifts having gone out of commission a century earlier, the only path up involved endless emergency hatches and ladders, kilometers of it, an ordeal made more difficult by the box of paper I picked up from the warehouse to Mama’s continuing amusement. Eventually, Mama ascended a helical staircase and announced, “We’re here. The airlock’s too small for us both to cycle through at the same time. I’ll go first, and leave the paper outside.”
As soon as the light turned green, I followed her into the cramped cockpit. A narrow and cluttered space, with two tandem seats facing away from the airlock. “I’d have thought running this enormous ship would take more than two people.”
“The Computers below controlled the ship’s systems without human intervention,” Mama said. “The cockpit got used twice: at the very beginning when we left Earth’s orbit and at the very end when the Purge survivors eased it onto the surface. Now, if only I can remember which of these switches operated the observation blister.” She toggled switches until a whiny hum brought a panel of gauges flickering to life.
“You better sit down for this,” Mama said, pointing to the seat behind hers. She gave me a few seconds to settle into it then asked, “Ready?” I nodded before realizing she couldn’t see me over the high back of her chair and responded verbally.
Despite a ruckus of clicks and clacks, nothing seemed to happed at first, then a grinding reverberated through the cockpit. Above our heads, a portal irised open and the platform we were sitting on creaked upwards, rising off the floor and coming to a halt inside a thick glass dome above the cockpit.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Close your eyes. It’ll help you acclimate quicker to the darkness.”
I did and waited until the darkness began to unnerve me. “How long do I keep my eyes closed?”
A chortle escaped Mama. “You can open them now.”
For a few heartbeats, I couldn’t tell that I had. It was pitch black around me in every direction, with only faint red hues from the cockpit’s control panels seeping around the edges of the platform.
Then I started to see them. Little pinpricks of light emerging across my field of vision like gems rising through black velvet, undulating in the darkness, and growing brighter the longer I focused on them. “What are these?”
“Stars.”
I’d never seen anything like it before. Never even imagined it. I don’t know what I expected to see in the cockpit since I first learned of its existence in one of the manuals, but I hadn’t expected this.
Mama let me gawk for a few minutes before interrupting. “We can’t spend too long in the blister. The heat’s no longer on this far up-ship. If we stay too long, the platform’s hydraulics could seize and strand us. Stand up and look down, but mind your head. You won’t be able to see the ship itself but you should be able to see the walls and lip of the crater.”
After the mesmerizing winking gems of light, Proxima Centauri B’s perpetual nighttime proved a profound disappointment. For one, I couldn’t see much at all, aside from the curvature of the surface intermittently punctuated near the horizon with crescents of absolute darkness.
“Do you see how desolate and inhospitable our new home turned out to be?” Mama demanded, as if I owed her some blind faith from that point on in penance for prior doubt. As if one truth could offset a lifetime of lies. “This is what we’re protecting our people from,” she added over the grating of the platform making the descent back into the cockpit as the dome shutters rose to reseal it. “We’re stuck here, eking out a survival, doing the best we can to stay sane.”
“Until when?” I asked after the platform settled with a judder. “How long do we spend chasing survival alone? We can’t live in fraying cottonwool forever, afraid to reach for what comes next. It’s not who we are.”
My dissention took Mama by surprise. “The last time our people tried to fashion a destiny, they very nearly annihilated themselves.”
There was no changing her mind however much I’d tried. I rubbed my burns-spotted hands together. “It’s cold here. I’ll cycle out while you switch things off.”
When the airlock’s inside door slid open, I stepped in and spoke to Mama’s back. “Making mistakes is part of who we are, Mama. It’s how we learn. Even should a mistake prove fatal, it’s better to die dreaming than live having nothing to dream of.”
Mama sensed something amiss and abandoned the cockpit shutdown sequence but she jumped out of her seat a fraction too late to stop me. I was through the outer door when I turned to see her standing with her face in the portal, alarm etched on its many lines, waiting to see what I did next.
I yelled, hoping she’d hear me inside. “I’ll come back to get you soon but first there are many, many others I need to release from their confinement.”
Perhaps she couldn’t hear me after all, because when she screamed and gesticulated wildly, she did it silently. I pushed the paper box against the airlock’s outer frame, barring it and began the long descent to the silos, already composing in my head an apology to whisper into Mariam’s ear, right after I’d swept her off her feet and into my arms.
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Born in Egypt, raised in Australia, and now living with his husband in the United States, Ramez Yoakeim writes mostly about Queer and/or BIPOC protagonists finding hope in the most dire of circumstances, including “More Than Trinkets,” selected for Reactor‘s (formerly Tor.com) Must-Read Speculative Short Fiction. You’ll find his stories in Flame Tree Press and Erewhon Books anthologies, podcasts from Metaphorosis and StarShipSofa, and online in Baffling, Heartlines Spec, Translunar Travelers Lounge, UtopiaSF, Sci Phi Journal, among others. Discover more on his website, yoakeim.com. |