Forty-Fourth Time's the Charm

Flash-fiction - by Martin Lochman

The planet below was a golden-brown jewel in the infinite darkness of space—mysterious, mesmerizing, alluring... and, like all of its predecessors, unsuitable.

I saw it written in Kasia’s face the second I entered the control room, my mind filled with hopeful anticipation of the final results of the analysis. The ship’s computer had been crunching the steady stream of data from the usual assortment of ground and atmospheric probes for the past three days—nearly thirty percent longer than in any previous instance—and it was this delay that had given birth to the very enticing notion that, for once, the outcome would be positive.

“What is it this time?” I asked, struggling to mask the disappointment in my voice.

“See for yourself,” Kasia said flatly. Avoiding my eyes, she got up from the chair and walked over to the largest of screens depicting the planet.

I didn’t bother sitting down. Leaning over the console, I pulled up the detailed view of the results and began going through them. I was surprised to see how many of them were in the green, so much so in fact, that it occurred to me that the computer must have made a mistake, but then my gaze landed on one of the lines in the last section.

EXCESSIVE LEVELS OF HEAVY METAL, it read, followed by a precise breakdown, but I couldn’t bear reading any further.

“Goddammit,” I uttered bitterly, then mentally kicked myself.

We cannot afford to lose hope—those were my own words, spoken more or less every time a candidate planet had proven to be unfit for the mission’s purpose. I pressed my lips into a thin line, putting a tight lid on my dismay, straightened up, and joined Kasia in front of the large viewscreen.

“Honey,” I said, and gently put my hand on her slender shoulder. “I know how this feels, trust me. But we shouldn’t let it take away—”

“I can’t do this anymore.”

Her words, albeit barely above whisper, reverberated in the spacious control room. It wasn’t so much their meaning, as the palpable finality with which they had been delivered that stopped me dead in my tracks.

“What are you saying?” I blurted out, my original resolve to provide comfort shaken.

She slowly turned her head to look at me, her beautiful hazelnut eyes finding mine. I was shocked to see them empty of all expression, as empty as the infinite vacuum around the ship.

“I am tired, Radek,” she said, and the way she pronounced my name felt almost like a slap. “No, I am at the end of my rope here. For the past twenty years, we have been moving from system to system, from planet to planet, clinging to this desperate hope that maybe the next one will be the one, and we’ll finally be able to settle down and get started. Twenty years stuck in this endless cycle of false optimism and forced pretense... I just can’t go on like this.”

Twenty years... had it really been that long? Granted, I had noticed the tell-tale signs of aging in both of us throughout our journey—the wrinkles around the eyes that stayed even after a smile or a grin had faded, the first strands of gray in my beard, the increasingly longer time it took me to recover from hibernation—but I guess I had never really quantified them on a conscious level.

“But we have to go on,” I said, unsure how else to reply to her. “We have a responsibility. The mission—”

“The mission,” she repeated—no, spat out would be more precise—and shook off my hand. “The mission was supposed to take four years, six at the most, remember? It was predicated on the belief that terraformable planets are extremely common. They told us that we were statistically guaranteed to come across one within the first ten. And how many has it been?”

“Forty-four,” I answered quietly. I may have been terrible at keeping track of time, but I knew every single one of those planets inside out. Their names. Physical parameters. Orbital paths.

And why they had been designated as unsuitable.

“Exactly. Don’t you see? This isn’t a streak of bad luck or a statistical fluke. They were wrong.”

I shook my head.

“I can’t accept that!”

“Why not? Why do you insist on continuing this fool’s errand?”

I didn’t reply straight away, looking instead at the screen for a long moment. The clouds in the planet’s troposphere slowly churned and twisted, their yellow color, the only thing differentiating them from their counterparts on Earth.

When I finally spoke, I tried to sound calm, collected, measured—exactly the way Kasia had sounded when trying to convince me to undertake this journey all those years ago: “Because if you’re right, then all of this has been for nothing, and we’ll have failed everyone back on Earth. We’ll have failed ourselves. We are supposed to create a new home for humanity, be our own Adam and Eve—we can’t do that unless we find the right planet. That’s why we have to keep going.”

“We’ll have failed, if we die on the way,” she said, matching the gentleness of my voice. “And there’ll be nothing left of us.”

I bit my lip, my head a buzzing hive of conflicting thoughts. On the one hand, she was right. We couldn’t possibly keep this up forever, and the longer we spent hopping from one system to the next, the harder it would be to initiate the main part of the mission—and terraforming was only the beginning; the real work would be developing the embryos, raising them, establishing settlements... Furthermore, her statement concerning our benefactors being wrong about what had been the cornerstone of this entire endeavor also made sense to a large degree, as much as I hated to admit it.

On the other hand, giving up now meant throwing away years of preparations, immeasurable quantities of resources, our entire lives, didn’t it?

“You know, I don’t even dream anymore,” she broke my silent contemplation suddenly. “In hibernation, at night. I used to have these beautiful vivid dreams, but now there’s nothing. I wake up, and all I remember is this big, all-consuming, meaningless nothing.”

She took my hand, her cold thin fingers tenderly squeezing mine.

“I don’t want that to be our future, Radek.”

The anguish underlining her words was heart-breaking. I wrapped my fingers around hers, delicately returning the squeeze.

“We don’t have a choice, Kasiu. If we stop, we lose—that’s a fact. There are no alternatives.”

Just then, an expression I couldn’t quite identify washed over her features.

“What if there was one. A way to fulfill the mission without having to find the right planet first.”

I furrowed my brow.

“What do you mean?”

“We are supposed to create a replica of Earth, right? Adapt the planet to us and our needs?”

I nodded, still unsure where she was going with this.

“What if we were to do the opposite? Adapt ourselves to it,” she said, and for a moment, her voice carried the same strength and conviction, the same unwavering confidence as all those years ago.

She had clearly explored the idea before.

“You are talking about altering our species,” I breathed out. “Changing what makes us human.”

“No,” she shook her head. “I am talking about giving us a chance to survive. Overcoming adversity, learning to thrive in disadvantageous conditions—that’s what makes us human, not our biology. Not how we function in a specific environment.”

I was at a loss for words. What she was proposing went against everything we had been led to believe, possibly against the very nature of our mission, yet at the same time, it resonated with me on a level I didn’t anticipate.

“Maybe this is how mankind is supposed to conquer the universe,” Kasia pressed on. “Not by remaking it in our image, but by becoming one with it. In harmony. In balance... Please, Radek. Think about it.”

She stared at me expectantly, tiny sparks of hope in her eyes. The last thing I wanted was to extinguish them.

So I did think about it. I thought about the never-ending briefings and training pertaining to the ship’s capabilities we had sat through before the launch. The motivational speeches stressing the importance of our mission. The excitement of waking up from the first hibernation, half a dozen light-years away from the Solar system. And the boundless elation I had felt for being given the chance to share all of that with the person who mattered the most to me.

Perhaps they had truly been wrong. Perhaps this wasn’t merely an alternative, but the only way we could succeed. Whatever the truth actually was, there was one thing I knew for certain at that moment—I wanted to find it out together with her. Nothing was more important than that.

“Okay.”

“Okay?” she repeated, sounding incredulous, and those sparks grew into a small fire.

“Yeah, let’s try it. Let’s see if we can make our own Earth.”

As soon as those words had left my mouth, as the decision they conveyed had taken permanent, irreversible hold in my mind, I felt an immense weight lift off my shoulders, and I realized that I too must have been nearing my limits.

Kasia pulled me into a long, deep embrace, and after we released each other, we turned back to the screen.

The planet on it was a golden-brown jewel in the infinite darkness of space—mysterious, mesmerizing, alluring... and unlike all of its predecessors, filled with a promise for the future.

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