Launch: Chapter 34

  After dinner Markus left his brother’s home, claiming that he simply needed to go for a walk.  It was fully night time now, and it had started to rain.  It was only a light rain at the moment, but it was the kind which seemed as though it would get heavier as the night went on and persist until morning.  Everyone who grew up in the Pacific north-west was something of an expert on the rain.

  Given the weather, instead of going for a walk Markus got into one of the waiting roadpods which were lined up around the interior of the building’s ground floor.  With a silent command once he’d gotten inside the nearest one, the vehicle exited its dock at the base of the tall apartment building, and headed down the street.  He had asked it to take him to a relatively quiet place on the waterfront and to just park there.

  It didn’t take long for the vehicle to get to the waterfront, and park facing the Burrard inlet.  It came to a complete stop in the dark, overlooking the water which was lighted a soft deep blue by the lights of the city.   Markus sat in silence for some time, listening intently to the sounds of the night.  The rain had eased off and he’d opened the windows, but only about a quarter of the way down.  As his ears attuned to the quieter sounds around him and failed to find any, he instead heard a soft and familiar ringing in his ears as his auditory system picked up its own internal background noise.  Eventually though, as his ears filtered even this noise out, he began to hear some quiet and muffled sounds from the city around him, like the sounds of the water moving by, and whatever was moving in or on it.

  After about half an hour of being lost in silent thought and reflection, a ringing came through the speakers and screens of the roadpod.  The text on the screens revealed that it was Kirsten up on the New Horizon, and he took a moment to compose himself as best he could.  He took a deep breath and steadied himself, and then thought his acceptance of the call to the vehicle’s computer.

  “Hello Markus, how are you?” Kirsten asked after her face had appeared on all the screens inside the pod.

  “It goes Kirsten, it goes…   What’s up?”

  “How’s your mother?” she softly asked.

  “Still dying…” Markus replied belligerently and with obvious irritation.  Kirsten looked down.

  “I’m… I’m sorry,” she offered, now clearly uncomfortable.

  “No, no…” Markus answered, gradually getting over himself.  “I’m sorry, I’m… I’m obviously in kind of in a weird place right now…”  He looked up at the ceiling of the roadpod for a moment and took a deep mental breath, trying again to compose himself and focus on the conversation at hand.  When he was ready, he looked back at Kirsten on the screens.

  “Well, I must wanted to let you know that there’s been a change in your travel plans.  I’ve booked you on a regular commuter orb-up early tomorrow afternoon.  There’s a joint New Commonwealth and United Nations launch ceremony on Orbital One and all senior staff have been invited to attend… that includes you now.  I know you’re travelling with your friend, so I’ve reserved a pair of tickets for the both of you.”

  Markus was staring off into space and didn’t answer.  After a few moments Kirsten asked: “Hello?  Markus?  Are you receiving?”

  “Kirsten… here on Earth, I’ve always been the kind of person who has only a small and select group of friends with whom I share deep and well… sincere relationships.”

  “Okay…” Kirsten uttered, not sure where he was going with this.

  “I really don’t know anyone at all on New Horizon yet, but I…” he paused and bit his lip, then continued, “I sense in you, the possibility for such a friendship to occur.”

  Voluntary vulnerability was very hard for Markus, that moment when one has to put their hand out to another in friendship, and being totally unable to altogether avoid the risk of having it slapped away.  To Markus it always felt more like putting his head in the guillotine than putting his hand out in friendship.

  “I need someone to talk to, someone… someone removed from all of this who has nothing to do with any of it, someone who can be… objective.  I’m incredibly vulnerable right now though Kirsten, and if you don’t sense the same potential for … friendship, well then please tell me now so I don’t ramble on and put us both in an awkward position, okay?”  Kirsten was obviously a little taken aback by the avalanche of intimacy being offered, and was no doubt more than just a little confused at this point.   She nonetheless simply nodded her head and told him to go ahead.

  “My mother is dying… she probably only has a month or two to live depending on her treatment.  My brother’s family means so much to me, not just my brother but his kids, and how much I’ve enjoyed watching them grow up and, and being a meaningful part of their lives, I’ll… I’ll never see them again, any of them.   The thought of that breaks my heart.   Hugh wants me to go more than anyone else does, but I’ll still miss the fuck out of him as well.  And now this…”

  “What?” Kirsten asked.

  “A long-time friend of mine told me earlier today that she’s pregnant, and that I’m the father.”

  “I see,” Kirsten said.  She appeared uncomfortable for some reason, and at a loss for how to appropriately respond.

  “Oh there’s more to it than that, believe me!” he chortled.  “Actually it’s not what you think at all!  I signed up for the voluntarily sterilization program a long time ago…  No, no she took some of my skin cells to a lab.  They turned them back into stem cells and then into sperm cells, which she… fertilized herself with.”  Kirsten was speechless and clearly at a complete loss for words, so he continued.

  “But it’s still not what you think though,” he stated dryly.  “Until today she wasn’t sure she was ever going to tell me about it at all…   Apparently she only told me because I told her my mother asked me to sincerely reconsider my trip one last time, and she offered herself in her situation as some sort of… ready-made family I guess.  You know, if I was really going to do a serious reconsidering about staying behind.   I know it sounds crazy, but-”

  “It is crazy Markus, at least… at least it’s fucking strange…”

  The rain was picking up again, and he thought the windows fully closed again.  “Anyway…” he continued as though he hadn’t heard her, “between that and spending time with my family today I just, well… I guess I’m just reconsidering, like I told my mother I would.”

  “Look Markus, since we’ve decided that we’re going to be um… close friends and all, well then I guess I ought to confide in you as well,” Kirsten offered softly.  “My husband called me last night… he heard on the news that the big launch was only a few days away, and he wanted to talk to me again before it happened.  It wasn’t long before he was asking me to reconsider as well; after all we only split up over my choice to join the New Horizon mission.  He told me again that if I changed my mind and stayed behind then we could get back together, that we could start a family together, and that maybe we could move somewhere new and start over…”  It appeared to Markus from looking in her eyes, that she was clearly somewhere else at this point, but she ultimately shook her focus and regarded him again.

  “I um, I told him I’d think about it just to get him off of the line.”  She looked at Markus, who was now looking away.  “It’s so hard isn’t it?” she continued, “being pulled so strongly in different directions like that….” Markus nodded in agreement.  “I think that to one degree or another, it is something that every member of the New Horizon crew is going through right now,” she reflected.  “We’re all in the final hours now, my friend.

  “You know Markus, it may be that you and I are only seriously reconsidering because of the prospect of starting a family and having children.  Isn’t that a lot of the allure for you and your offer, I mean isn’t it more that element than the actual staying part?  I think it is for me anyways…  But you and I-” there was a pause after she cut herself off, and the free floating idea of them as a pair hung in the silence, “should remember,” she continued, “and keep in mind, that we’re expected to start a family on the ship at some point once we’re underway anyways, so that opportunity is… well, certainly available to you either way, to both of us in either case.”

  Markus looked out the window.   He wasn’t focusing on what was beyond it, but on the water beading down on the outside of the window as he reflected on her words.  There was a silence between them for only a few moments, but it felt like much, much longer.

  “Do you want to stay Markus?” Kirsten finally asked, looking off to the side of the screen, as though she were afraid of the answer.

  “Yes… more than I ever thought I would before I came back,” he answered. “But I can’t, Kirsten.  I just can’t!”   Markus snapped to a new focus and attention, he had apparently made up his mind.  “Once upon a time, my friend Hugh said that he’d never be able to forgive me if I passed up the opportunity to go.  He’s since taken back the threat but,” he took a moment to chuckle at the childishness of it in retrospect now, “but now I think that in the end I would grow to resent absolutely everybody who contributed to my staying, and I don’t think that I’d ever be able to forgive myself if I didn’t take this extraordinary opportunity to be a part of something so special.”

  “I think it’s a very ancient choice that every human being has to make every day…” Kirsten offered, “about which of two motivations they’re going to obey, the one that compels them forward and out towards the stars, or the other which compels them back into the safety of the jungle.  We have to decide every day what kind of creature we’re going to be,” she stated with a certain degree of intensity and severity.  “It’s a choice that every person has to make in life, and that humanity continually has to answer.  The New Horizon is a physical manifestation of one answer to that question, Markus; the choice between life and death, between growth and decay, between light and dark even… between fear and love.”

  Markus started tearing up.   He understood precisely what she was talking about.  It was that indescribable something he felt while aboard the New Horizon and meeting the people who inhabited it.  It was the way he could feel around him a concentration of that enduring human spirit of inspiration and growth, woven into every aspect of life on that ship and its people.  He had fallen in love with it completely once he had felt it and fully appreciated how special it was.  “I want to launch,” he stated softly but clearly.

  After a few moments of silence Kirsten added, “you know Markus, the New Horizon isn’t just about… exploration and everything.  Look, I’m really sorry to hear about your mother and your problems with your family and your um … your friend there, but that’s your old family now.”  Markus asked what she meant and she managed to simultaneously look surprised and just a little hurt.

  “Markus, you’re one of us now, and we take care of our own.  You joined the New Horizon.  You’re not just crew or, or a passenger here Markus …you’re family.  I think you’ll soon find a new appreciation of what that word can really mean.”

  Markus said that he understood her, and he felt that he really did.  She verbally informed him of the specifics of his travel plans the next day, but also sent a data burst to his PAN.  The two then said good night, even though it was late in the morning to Kirsten.

  After the monitor went dark, the whole cabin of the pod fell into pitch blackness while his eyes readjusted to the scarce light now available from the nighttime outside.  Markus found himself in complete darkness for the first time in a long time.  He started rocking back and forth ever so slightly, shaking his head from side to side as he did, and gradually losing the war of containing his emotions within himself.  He cried out into the bitter darkness, vocalizing all of the conflict and darkness within him.  He violently erupted and burst out in screaming and roaring fits as he started punching at the inside of the pod, violently jerking himself back and forth against the back of his seat, as his eyes filled with tears, breaking the dam of his eyelids and streaming down his cheeks.  When his breath and strength finally gave out, so too did his roar along with every single ounce of energy that he had left.

  He was mourning, suddenly and succinctly, everything he had been burdened with, and everything that he was leaving behind.  If his mother’s accident had been avoided, if Amber had not done what she had or had kept quiet about it, those relationships could have avoided all this, they could have simply continued by laser, painlessly growing more and more distant over time, like some merciful kind of slow social euthanasia.

  But now he was more dramatically ripping himself away, having to face the immensity of all that he was losing all at once, like a comically oversized weight falling on his head out of a clear blue sky.  “It’s not FAIR!” he screamed as he punched the ceiling of the pod as hard as he could to emphasize his agony.  He then slumped, became quiet and simply sobbed and shuddered to himself in the deafening silence of the night until he eventually lost consciousness out of simple exhaustion.  

  It was in that moment, that he understood that there was no way to win.  There was no right answer.  He was beaten, and he’d lost either way.  All that was left was choice, and no external force was going to make the decision for him.  Whatever he chose, he was going to have to let go of something important to him.   There was no choice he was supposed to make, no default position.  It was at once the most important choice of his life, and yet somehow it didn’t even matter which choice he made.  What mattered was that there was no way to avoid choosing.

  He came to understand that there could be no divine revelation of his correct path, because there was none.   All his life he had been searching for something which could fulfill his deep hunger for meaning in life, as though there were some cosmic secret which he might discover, some codec which would make everything make sense, and finally make him happy and satisfied with life.   Now he understood that this was impossible.  He understood the absurdity of searching or hoping for it.  He finally came to accept the fundamental benign indifference of the universe.

  He woke up again about half an hour later, and ordered the pod back to his brother’s house where he spent the night.