Chasing Stars: Chapter 17

  It took three days for any further response from New Horizon.  Markus spent the time idly doing his best to keep himself entertained.  At first he strained at stressing over what their decision would be, but he couldn’t keep up that level of anxiety over days.  As he relaxed more, he caught up on the shows he’d been meaning to catch up on, gently flirted with the flight attendant to no avail, chatted with people back on Earth from time to time, was even reduced to bouncing a ball against a wall for a while.   He had a lot of time to reflect, to question the wisdom of what he was doing, to question the wisdom of a lot of things.

  He often wondered about alternate versions of himself.  He had a perpetual sense of himself as a failure in so many ways, he sensed a great many things he could have been but never would be.  He never learned to play an instrument, but believed he would have been a great musician.  He never read or wrote much but believed he could have been a great author.   He was bad at math but believed he could have been a great scientist.  He had time to reflect on these things now.  So much time.

  He thought about how different his life might have turned out if his parents hadn’t have died.  Maybe he wouldn’t have been so damaged.  Maybe he would’ve been much more.  But at the same time maybe he just would have sucked.  Maybe his sense of his own innate capacity was woefully inflated.  Maybe he always would’ve felt in Lukas’ shadow.   Maybe he never could have measured up.   Maybe if his parents hadn’t died Brakus wouldn’t have been so motivated, and they would have been more evenly matched.

  Most of all he wished he’d tried.  He wished that instead of being frustrated not knowing what to do he had just picked anything and really gone for it.  But that just wasn’t him.  He had too active a dissatisfaction.  He too readily questioned things.  It made it so hard to commit to anything, to see anything through when he only ever saw the futility of it, the emptiness of everything.  Here they were in a utopia, yet he felt empty.  He could have been or done anything, yet he chose to be and do nothing.  Maybe on some level it was the only way he could rebel.

  On the second day Lucas died.  Markus had continued to speak to him as he got weaker, and when he got word that he had finally succumbed, he was surprised at how much relief he felt.  He felt about as good as he figured he could about their last conversation being their last.  He felt that he had really made Lucas understand in the end.  On the third day he reached out to Donna and the kids, but it was hard.  There was nothing to say.

  “I didn’t believe you when you said you donated all of your shares to the mission,” a familiar voice said through the comm system.  Markus raised his head from the scroll he’d been reading.  “You know we really have no use for it now.”  It was Sadhika.

  “I did.   I do. I suppose it was… symbolic.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Your brother died yesterday.”

  “Yes.  I heard the same about Sasha.”  Markus answered.

  “You could have been there.” Sadhika observed.  “You really should have been there with him.”

  “Maybe.   We had our chance to say goodbye.   I did with all of them.  I spoke with him right before the end, I think he understood.  His wife… not so much.  All things considered I think I feel okay with how everything has been left.”  He hadn’t considered this before and it boosted his spirits a bit to have realized it. 

  “When you told me you were planning to stay, but more than that, stay to be with his wife, to take over his life…”

  “I know…” he interrupted.  “I know.   And then you said some pretty horrible things to me.” he pointed out.

  “All deserved,” she said with unamused confidence.

  “I concede that.” Markus offered without reservation.  “But you got through to me.”

  “Apparently.” she said.

  A long pause held the silence.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Sadhika.”  He continued before she could protest.  “You had this preternatural potential, and you capitalized on it.  You became something amazing, something… world moving.   But me I’m just a fuck up fail son.   I certainly didn’t have the same potential you did, but I certainly had a lot, and I squandered all of it.  I became nothing.  I wasn’t as resilient as you.  You bent and rebounded.  I just broke.   At the time, in that moment… I saw a shortcut.  I saw a way to be everything I’d failed to be without any of the work.  I saw a way to not be me anymore and instead be something I could never have otherwise been.  I was intoxicated, and it was an intoxicating proposition…”

  He wasn’t sure if she would protest, but she didn’t.

  “And now?” she asked after another long pause.

  “Now…” he sighed.

  “Now I’m forty something, got no prospects, no career, no lover, no money, nothing but this shuttle for two more days and what’s in these duffle bags.”  He paused to reflect.  “But now I have the will to power.  Now whatever happens I have the will to try.  Obviously it took way too damn long, but it’s never too late to stop playing the victim.  I don’t want to hide behind excuses anymore.  I want to build something, even if all I can build is a new life for myself.   I’m not looking to disappear anymore, I want to live.  I want to be.   I’d certainly rather do it on that ship with you, but if not I’ll do it down there.”

  Sadhika didn’t say anything for what seemed like quite a while.

  “I still like you Markus.  I still see something in you.  I want to believe you.  But I didn’t get where I am by believing in losers.”

  “I understand that.  I didn’t come here expecting to win.  I just came because I had to.”

  Markus jumped when he heard the airlock on the shuttle’s ceiling open and saw Sadhika float to the opening with stoic eyes.  “I’ll only ever insist you try.”

  “I promise I will.”

  They embraced each other, slowly tumbling around in the air as they hugged.

  Markus pulled back.  “How do the others feel about me?  About all this?”

  “Well, I didn’t tell them about our conversation the other night.  I didn’t tell them much at all actually.  They just know you won the spot, and after your brother sacrificed himself for our mission, they all certainly feel you deserve to be here.”

  “They must have been pretty confused when I wanted to come aboard and you refused.”

  “They were,” she bobbed her head to the side, “but they trust my judgement.  You know Markus, I sacrificed a lot to be ‘The Great Sadhika Manjula Sengupta’.  I think about other versions of myself too.  My career, the business, they always came first, I sacrificed a lot along the way, a lot of relationships that went nowhere because I was too busy, children I never found the time to have…”

  He took her hand.  “There’s time now.  For everything you missed, there’s time now.”

  “Don’t make me regret this Markus.”

  “I won’t.   I promise.”

   

  The ship’s departure was scheduled in less than 24 hours.  Markus learned that since Sadhika had struck him from the mission, they had contacted and begun training a last-minute replacement.  He was unfortunate enough to cross paths with him as he was being escorted off of the ship.  Markus recognized the look of a man who’d had his dreams handed to him and then ripped away.  

  He spent a lot of time in his quarters staring out the large window on the floor of his living room as the world slowly came in and out of view.  He’d be shown a slow winding swath of it, then back out to space again.  He found it so hard to wrap his head around the idea that he was really leaving it.   He was being eternally separated from everything that originated him.  He spent a lot of time trying to really understand what that meant, and grappling with the reality that he would die in deep space, far away from here.  He would not die without purpose though.  He would not die for nothing, nor would he die alone.   He would raise and be part of a family and serve purposes greater than himself.  

  He had some last conversations with Molly.  They’d be able to keep in contact, but once he left they’d only be able to exchange messages back and forth as real time conversations became impossible.  She seemed to be doing well at least.  As she had suggested, she had indeed begun serving at the Space Outback, which Markus found very amusing to imagine.  Having spent his whole life in restaurants, it was hard to imagine the pop star sex pot working tables.  But he imagined she was right and that it would be good for her.  She’d have the chance to learn what a normal human life is like to live, and to earn her way legitimately.  She got frustrated sometimes sure, but she seemed to be enjoying the novelty of the experience, and seemed to appreciate the amount of time it allowed her to spend with her new sim boyfriend.  He couldn’t help but imagine what might be in store for her.   Time wasn’t the same kind of limiting factor for her as it was for him.  She had all the time in the world to be and do everything she could want to be and do.

  He also tried having conversations with Donna and the kids, but found they had little to say to each other.  He found out that Hui Yin was in fact named the interim head of the company after he suggested her and this made him happy.  It seemed like she had good prospects of becoming the permanent head once the board convened to decide on a permanent replacement.  He was happy to feel like the company was in good hands.

  He didn’t contact anyone from the Cheshire Cat, and never really expected to.  He didn’t really want to either if he was honest.   He was amused by the very real possibility that they believed he was just working at another bar in town.  It drove home how illusory and shallow his relationships with them were.  It’s just how things were in that world; work friends tended to only be friends while you worked with them.

  He hoped that those of them who had more in them found it.  He thought more about the experiences he’d never had on Earth and now never could.  He’d never climbed a mountain, never parasailed, never scuba dove, never seen the outer moons.  He found it hard to believe that he’d really ever have wound up doing these things if he stayed, but now it oddly stung that he’d never be able to if he wanted to.

  He made love with Sadhika for the first time, and it felt like something special.  It was his first time with someone he really cared about, someone he respected.  It made him vulnerable in a way he wasn’t expecting, leading to an intimacy he had never really experienced before.  They laid in bed playing with each other’s fingers, telling each other the myths of their past, the hardships they’d suffered, the dreams they’d fruitlessly dreamed, their sacred victories and their crushing defeats.  He soon realized he loved her, and immediately realized he’d never really loved anyone before her.

   

  When the time came, Markus sat on the bridge at a station off to the side as they prepared to engage the main engines and boost out of orbit.  The ship began to vibrate, subtly and barely perceptible at first.  Gradually over time they would boost their orbit around Earth until they were effectively free of its gravitational field, at which point the ship would have close encounters with all of the outer gas giants to gain some extra speed on their way out of the system.  Then they were on their way, a one-way trip out of the Solar System into deep space.   

  He watched as the usually unflappably stoic Captain Tynes got misty eyed as he felt the ship lift up, and had his final exchanges with Orbital One control.  

  Sadhika reached over and took Markus’ hand.  “We’ve done it, we’ve really done it.  We’re finally on our way.”  Her eyes sparkled with excitement.

  For the briefest of moments, Markus wondered if he’d just made the biggest mistake of his life.