When I got the alert that your engines had failed and your craft was falling towards the event horizon, I came as fast as I could. I diverted everything to the main drive, syphoning power from the front shields and life-support systems, and threw my ship towards you across a sea of stars. The slightest impact, a collision with so much as a chip of interstellar rock or ice, would have turned the ship into confetti.
I made it to you. But I wasn’t fast enough.
My deceleration brought me too close to the Gorge, and alarms started flaring in unison around the ship. There it was—a gap in the starscape. A C-Class supermassive black hole. The autopilot took control, holding our position overhead. The burners had circled to face forward—down, into the Gorge—and were consuming fuel at a frightening pace to keep the ship from falling farther.
I had to find you. We orbited the Gorge at a safe enough distance before the scanners spotted your craft, pinpointing the faintest signal straining its way up and out of the well.
The End of Time. I’d always laughed at you, called it a stupid name for a ship. Dramatic, just like you. I wish I’d told you that I always thought it was kinda cool. Maybe you knew.
More readings from the scanners came up on my monitor, and I stared at them, confused. Your engines weren’t firing. For all intents and purposes your ship was dead weight; a lifeless lump of metal and glass, drifting in space. And yet, you had stopped. Against all the gravitational might of the black hole, you weren’t falling any further. You were frozen right above the surface of the Gorge, unreachable, unmoving.
Somehow, you had come to a stop. Maybe that meant I could save you. Some part of me knew there was no hope, but I had to try. I attempted to cut all power to the ship so we could freefall down towards you. Nothing. I tried to deactivate the gravitational sensors to make the ship forget we were on the verge of falling into a black hole. Nothing. Despite my best efforts, the Hummingbird was stopping me from reaching you. An act of service and self-preservation.
I fell back in my seat, defeated. The starscape to port and starboard was stretched and distorted, the Gorge warping the passage of light around its borders. It was over. I’m sorry that I wasn’t fast enough to save you, Rose. But there was nothing I could do to reach you.
I stayed for a while. I couldn’t leave you, not yet. The End of Time was still visible; a speck of light far, far below the point of no return for my ship. Even if I’d managed to reach you, the Hummingbird wouldn’t have had the power to pull itself back up.
I waited for as long as I could. I couldn’t bring myself to say goodbye to you until I had to. Just before the Hummingbird‘s fuel reserves ran too low for us to hold our position against the gravity well any longer, I turned myself around and fired out into the space between the stars. The alarms stopped shrieking one by one, the ship falling silent. You were gone.
News travels faster than ships, so by the time I made it to your parents on Callisto, they had known for a month. They were past the sobbing stage of grief for you, and were calm, solemn, and broken. They invited me in and made me tea.
Your father’s hair was greyer now; your mother’s thinner, wispier. I hadn’t seen either of them since Ganymede, so I didn’t know if it had been a gradual transition or a recent development.
Arthur poured me a cup of real Earth tea. I knew how much that meant, and thanked him. I didn’t think it tasted as good as the normal stuff, but didn’t say anything.
“You were one of the last to speak to Penrose before she…” he trailed off. Your parents still called you by your full name. “Did she seem strange to you at all?”
“No, sir,” I said. “Rose seemed normal. We spoke a few weeks earlier, and she seemed happy. We spoke a bit about the past. When I served for her on The End of Time. She said she’d always been sorry to see me go. Then she laughed and said she wished she could’ve matched the offer I took instead. There were no hard feelings.”
Your mother clutched her tea close to her. She hadn’t taken a sip of it yet. “Arthur says you were there when it happened.” Your father glanced over at her. “He says you tried to go in after her, to save her. You nearly went in yourself.”
“I tried,” I said. “I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”
“No,” she said, “no, no. Don’t be sorry. Thank you. It must have meant everything to Penrose. She must have seen you at the end and knew you were trying to save her. I think she would have liked knowing someone that mattered so much to her was close by.” She finally sipped her tea, stopping her voice from wavering.
I hadn’t thought of that. Your craft had been facing out as gravity dragged you backwards into the Gorge. You had probably been frantically trying to restart your engines or mend whatever had gone wrong, ready to fire your way up and out of the well if you managed to get it fixed in time. Maybe you had been too busy to look out and see the Hummingbird hovering above you, and then turning and fleeing. Or maybe you had seen. Had you thought I’d given up on you? Or would you have been relieved I was safe and hadn’t been able to throw myself in after you?
I cried, and your mother cried. Your father held us both, and then awkwardly went to make us more tea. They insisted I stay the night. Your funeral wasn’t until late the next morning, and there were a few safe hotels nearby, but I gratefully accepted.
Your parents had converted your bedroom into a spare room when you got your first ship and moved out, bland and minimal to serve as a blank canvas for any guest. It looked barely used, but I could still see little echoes of the teenage you. Ghost-indentations in the floor where your old furniture used to be. Scuff marks in the wood where the sofas had been, facing the window. Endless nights that we had all wasted together, shooting the shit. The middle of the windowsill was still worn from all the nights you had sat there, staring out past the houses and the edge of the dome to Jupiter towering amongst the stars. I had always sat back on the sofas with the rest of them, pretending to be looking out at the Great Red Spot or the other moons as well, but really watching you. The way you always tucked your hair behind one ear, but not the other. The little patterns you tapped with your fingers on your knees when you were lost in thought. The way you got excited and tripped over your words when you talked about the first system you’d fly to when you got your license. It seemed to change every week.
Callisto had been my whole world, but you’d always dreamed bigger. You’d said you were going to see it all, and I’d believed you.
Your bookshelf was still there and your folks hadn’t changed any of the books. They must have thought it added a certain air of culture to the room. Not that they would have understood half of what was in there. I leafed through the shelves. A Brief History of Time—one of the classics. Zhu Xing’s Trajectories in Spacetime. A manual for a KW2 starcraft, bulging with bookmarks and annotations. A battered copy of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, 14th Ed, this one with only one bookmark. The last one almost made me smile, despite everything. Classic dramatic Rose.
It took me a while to get to sleep. Through the open window, Jupiter cast a muddy orange light into the room. Of the four dimensions, I realized, only one was different from when we had all sat here together, passing round an e-blunt and talking about the future , the ships we’d buy, the star systems we’d fly off to. And it was the only one that mattered.
Your funeral was nice. I think you would have liked it.
All of the old gang made it. Sal, Simon, Preeti, Big Ali and Little Ali, only Little Ali was taller than Big Ali now. Your parents, of course—your mother clutching your father’s hand. Cousins of yours I hadn’t seen since your graduation. Teachers. Family friends. A old man looking half-dead on his feet that I think had been your professor at Callisto U.
Simon said a few words about you. Don’t worry—they were mostly nice. He said you were the smartest person he ever knew, and he wasn’t surprised that you were the first one of us to get off this rock. What surprised him was when you came back, in your own ship, for the rest of us. That got a few laughs. The rest, he said, was history. We raised our glasses to you, and The End of Time. Your father got up and spoke, then the old man. He had definitely been a professor of something. I didn’t understand half of what he was saying, but I bet you would have.
Afterwards, we all gravitated towards each other. The old crew of The End of Time, alumni of a nameless Callisto backwater, sitting back and shooting the shit. One by one, the other guests started to leave.
“She always pushed me out of my comfort zone,” Preeti said. “And I don’t mean that as a bad thing. Remember our first contract, on Titan? We would never have gotten away with that if it wasn’t for her.”
Simon nodded, and stared down into the dregs in his glass. “You know, what I don’t get is how it happened. Rose was smart. If her autopilot had failed, she wouldn’t have made a move that put her where she ended up. And she wouldn’t have made a move that would have put her in danger had her engines failed. ‘Always have more than one security measure,’ she always said. So how did she end up where she did?”
I hadn’t thought of that. I’d tried to fall down into the Gorge, to save you, and my ship had blocked my every attempt. How could you have done it by accident?
“Wait,” Little Ali said. “You can’t be suggesting she did this on purpose.”
“Suicide by black hole?”
“I don’t know, man,” Simon said. “I just can’t see her making a mistake this big.”
“She called me, a few days before it happened,” Preeti said. “Just catching up, she said. And it had been a while. But we talked a lot about the past. She seemed happy. But strange. Well, stranger than normal.”
You had called Simon too, it turns out, and Sal, and both Alis. You had called all of us. And your parents. Probably a lot of the other people who were here, too. Was it your send-off? Or a routine check-in with your friends and family that we were reading too much into?
When the crew had said their goodbyes and left for their ships, the hall was all but silent. Your parents were still there, one or two other mourners, and the old man, sat alone by the empty casket. I went over to him.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“Hello?” he said, turning from your picture to face me. “Who might you be?”
I told him my name, and asked his. I was right—he was your old professor.
He shook his head. “You know, this is the first funeral I’ve been to where the deceased is still alive. But nobody listens to me. Most of all those two,” he said, gesturing vaguely towards your parents.
“Sorry?” I said.
“Well, in a loose sense, none of us really die. The co-ordinates you occupy in time and space will always be occupied by you, for eternity, although of course that requires a different understanding of time.”
“Right,” I said, understanding enough to know that I didn’t understand.
“But no,” he continued, “I mean, Miss Penrose is alive. Right now.”
Something clicked then. One of the times you tried to teach me astrophysics, orbital mechanics, spacetime, and relativity on the long passages between the stars… it had mostly gone over my head. But some of it hadn’t.
“Professor Shao,” I said, my throat tightening. “When I found Rose falling into the Gorge, her ship had stopped. It was dead, but it wasn’t falling any more.”
Shao nodded. “Quite right—it wouldn’t have been. Gravitational mass warps time just as well as space, both of them being aspects of the same thing, of course. A C-Class hole like the Gorge would have a significant effect on something small like a starcraft. To an outside observer like yourself, she would fall into the hole slower and slower, almost forever, until she seemed to stop. You’d never live to see her actually cross the event horizon. But to her, time would pass as normal, and it will be the rest of us that speed up, faster and faster, until her time is up.” He pushed his glasses up and peered through them at me. “Your friend Miss Penrose will outlive all of us, by quite a considerable margin,” he said.
“Professor,” I said, feeling a chill. “If she were looking back when she fell down into the Gorge, what would she see?”
He told me what you were seeing right now.
I didn’t tell your parents. They hadn’t believed what Professor Shao had tried to tell them—or hadn’t wanted to believe, or maybe didn’t even understand—so I doubt I would have made any difference. But when they asked me to stay another night, I said yes. The Hummingbird had been refueled and I would be leaving in the morning, out into the emptiness between us and the Gorge. On my way back to visit you.
Back in your room, after your parents and I had eaten together for the last time, I stared out at Jupiter for a little while, watching orange and yellow storm systems curdle together. As the dome slowly started to turn dark and opaque to simulate dusk, I put my phones in and listened back to the last conversation we’d had.
“Hey,” you said.
“Hey, Cap,” I heard myself say.
“You know I hate it when you call me that,” you laughed. “I’ve been a captain without a crew for a long time now.”
I heard my recording laugh. “Rose, you’re loaded. You could hire any crew in any system if you wanted.”
“It wouldn’t be my crew,” you said, smiling. I hadn’t heard it the first time, but now I thought I heard something in your voice. Not regret—maybe nostalgia. A happy nostalgia.
I asked you what you were up to, what your plans were for the next cycle. You said you weren’t sure. I told you about the big job I had out near Proxima. You told me about how Sal had had some big break in his law firm on Earth. I accused you of trying to one-up me on his behalf, and you laughed. We talked about old times for a long while, and you said you’d always been sorry to see me go. I’d been the best engineer you’d ever had. I brushed it off, and I wish I’d said something in return. Something came up—I can’t even remember what it was, now—and I made an excuse to go. You told me to hold on for a minute.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” you said. “I’ll catch you later, Sam.”
“On the flipside,” I heard myself say, and the transmission ended.
I thought again of what the Professor had said, what was happening to you right now, and I nearly understood. I went over to the bookshelf to pick up A Brief History of Time. But something about The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows drew my attention instead—the way its spine was warped and cracked, almost illegible from countless readings and re-readings. I picked it up and it fell open on the page where the single bookmark had been holding vigil. Surrounded by rough, scribbled circles on the page was ellipsism: sadness that one shall never know how history will turn out.
Shao was right, and Simon was right, too. This was no accident. And I see it all now.
I see you sitting in The End of Time, tools in hand; disabling the autopilot, the engines, and all the safety mechanisms that will hinder your task. No easy feat, even for a trained engineer. You circumvent safety protocols and anti-tampering measures, cutting out the ship’s eyes before it can see what you are doing, silencing systems and subordinate programs before they can scream for help. Job done, you turn around and position the ship just so. You take in the rest of the cockpit, the empty seats, and just for a moment think of us. Then you let yourself fall backwards into the Gorge. As the ship realizes it is in trouble and does not have the means to escape, it sends out its desperate distress call—the same one I will hear just too late across a sea of stars.
You always dreamed much bigger than anyone else. But this is insane, even for you.
As you fall, everything else speeds up around you. Not noticeably, at first, not on a cosmic scale. Maybe you see the Hummingbird, watching and waiting for a while before retreating in fast-forward. Part of me hopes you do. And then time speeds up faster and faster; stars picking up speed as they follow their paths across the sky, whole galaxies skimming by overhead, supernovas bursting and new stars erupting into life at machine-gun pace. For a moment the universe is alive with dazzling, frenzied light, and then, one by one, the cacophony slows, and the lights grow tired and start to fade. Soon the last stars sputter like little red candles at the end of their wicks, and the universe goes dark. Breathless, and not just because of the Gorge’s pull, you think of everything you have seen in the last moment before you fall beneath the event horizon. I think—no, I know—you’ll be happy. You’ll get to see how it all turns out, with your own eyes.
Classic, dramatic Rose. Solo captain of The End of Time, going down with her ship in the final moments of the universe.
I miss you. And I’m on my way to visit you, Cap, I promise. But I won’t stay for too long. I wouldn’t want to spoil your view.
| Dan Peacock is a sci-fi and fantasy writer from the UK. His short stories have been published in F&SF, Cast of Wonders, and Little Blue Marble, among others. You can find links to all his published stories at danpeacockwriter.com. He lives with his long-suffering partner and daughter, along with a second-hand cat that hoots like an owl. |  |