OT Contributor Network: Michael Siegel’s Dreams in the Long Dark

This is Part One of the a Three-Part Short Story. Parts Two and Three will be posted in the next few weeks.

“They told me I wouldn’t dream,” thought Tybalt. And yet, in the long dark between the stars, the sea was burnt orange and the sand was blue. Just beyond the waves rolling outward, he could see the slender figure of Madsen, her blonde hair streaming in the breeze.

“Madsen’s not blonde,” he thought. “And her hair isn’t long.”

He stepped down toward the shore, the shells of strange creatures pressing their unfamiliar shapes into the sand as he trod on them. He looked up to see two blue-white stars: one large and bright, the other small and faint.

“Are we there, yet?” he said to her. “Are they here?”

Madsen turned to him. And the dream faded to gray. And he remembered.

The Archimandrite stayed in high orbit, contemplating the signals she had been receiving since arriving at Lalande, pulling them apart, reassembling them, going over them bit by bit. There was little question where they were from – the small spiny satellite orbiting the second planet – precisely the point where the Icarus probe has spotted what they now knew for certain was an alien ship. But her crew wasn’t sure what the signals meant. And she wasn’t going anywhere until they did.

Tybalt was forever feeding data points into Anansi, the ship’s AI, and then sweeping them up as they fell to the floor and putting them back in order. Over and over again. He had the vague impression that the aliens were angry with him and kept demanding that he feed Anansi information he didn’t have.

“This is a dream,” he thought. “We were at Lalande. But I’m not remembering it right.”

Weeks rolled past. The cold steel spar of the Archimandrite circled the hot cloudy maelstrom of Lalande 22185B, which circled the cold red star. Twice, they passed Lalande 22185A, a blazing rocky waste that almost grazed its star as it whirled around. Tybalt had to ignore the dream haze pushing him to count the revolutions and rotations. The astronomers would take care of that.

The signal from the alien craft remained steady and unchanging. The Archimandrite’s shell returned, laden with fuel. It closed around the Archimandrite like a nut, with astronauts briefly appearing to tether the fuel tanks and check them over. A few repairs were made.

Another few weeks passed. And then two things happened: the Archimandrite dispatched a small probe toward Earth that left a wake of ions. And the ship turned almost 90 degrees from Earth and set off on a long spear of fusing hydrogen.

Her hair was red now, short and cropped close. He saw it flame over and over as she passed in front of his capsule, often in the embrace of a shadowy figure.

“Ridiculous,” he thought. “My room is sealed. And her hair isn’t red.”

He watched, disconnected. In the long dark, he couldn’t blame her for any unfaithfulness. It wasn’t as if he had been alone when it was her turn to sleep away a few of the decades between the stars. Had she been seeing him long? She must be for him to see it, with his thoughts slowed to a literal glacier pace. He worried that when he emerged, she would have moved on, their relationship long forgotten.

Now the room was empty and he was standing over his own cryotube. He looked out the window into the central garden, where the active crew buzzed around like insects.

And he remembered.

“So, another three decades,” said Captain Chin, glancing over at Tybalt, settled into the chair of the sleeping Mission Scientist.

Tybalt felt the fine grain of the days, hours and seconds that meant. He saw a trail of days stretching thirty years back to Earth.

“You can sleep through them all if you wish,” he said.

“Someone has to be at the controls. And for a big part of the time, that someone will be me.”

“Just think of the stories when you get back. First contact. First voyage between two stars. And then there’s the decades of back pay. What did we figure? Tens of millions?”

“If we get back,” said Chin pointedly. “A hundred years after we left. At which point all our back pay will probably be worth nothing. Are you sure about where we’re going?”

“The Cthulhu Protocol worked as advertised. I am 100% certain we’re on the right track.”

Tybalt remembered Anansi churning through the days and nights, strangely ominously quiet as it tried to decipher the message being sent out by the alien probe.

In his dream state, he had the urge to rearrange the tones, the feeling that they weren’t quite in the right position. For a moment, he was certain they had misinterpreted and were going in exactly the wrong direction.

Chin looked up and slightly to the right to the bright blue point of Sirius. It didn’t move. But she knew, in 32 years, it would swell up to fill the sky. She would sleep on the journey and wake to find the stars had shifted ever so slightly until their sky was a Sirian sky. With the ship accelerating, it felt like they were going up, rising toward the distant star, a phoenix ascending.

“Dr. Lineus has already laid down for the entire journey,” she said. “He can’t bear the thought of having to wait to see an A-star up close.”

Tybalt shook his head. “I’ll sleep for a lot of it. But I do want to see our journey from time to time. I don’t think I’ll find what I came out here for in cryogen.”

Chin glanced at him.

“And you probably wouldn’t want your friend to be apart from you for that long.”

Tybalt started. “You know?”

“I’m a Captain, Tybalt. It’s my job to know things.”