Pictures from Home (a short story first published in Aboriginal Science Fiction magazine)

Twelve left.
Twelve out of 968, homeward bound.
Eleven, really, because Lt. Brye isn’t going to last much longer.
About a hundred beds failed outright when the system crashed. Those in stasis slipped into death; not too far to fall from minimally alive—and no pain. Those were the lucky ones. Other beds partly revived us survivors.
Obviously nobody made it to normtemp or he’d have done an M.O. on the program and thawed the rest of us: eleven trapped in sub-wake; Brye fading so fast now I don’t count her.
“Bingo. Got an open channel on a recon-sat above the Florida Keys.” The lieutenant is whispering hoarsely into her com, slurring her words. Her voice is weakening, though her jaw muscles and tongue are probably long past the stage of searing pain.
“Magnificent,” she says. “The Keys are shimmering white like a string of pearls against the blue Atlantic. Hold for zoom. Ah… I see a boat… yes, locked on a dive boat; she’s heading out to a coral reef. Looks like seven, make that eight divers aboard. What a day. Golden sun, water so clear I can make out a school of barracudas. I dove this reef myself, many years ago. Got a sunken hydrofoil lying on its side, home to a nurse shark named Mighty Mom.”
She’s talking about Sugar Reef, where she made her first open-water dive. I’ve heard this story. I’m amazed she was able to find the very reef. Mighty Mom. How her buddies laughed their butts off when she scrambled back on deck. Ow, it really burns when I smile. Tough it out, limber up—I’m next on the intercom.
Brye is good. For a few moments I had forgotten the constant, bottomless cold. What the oldspacers call white pain. Like my brain is floating in a bucket of CryoGen and my spinal cord is a branching tree of ice. Can’t move a stiff finger without feeling the scorching lava of a thousand cell walls bursting. But as soon as the burning subsides, the infinite chill swallows the site where the fire flared, and all is uniformly frigid again, a polar ocean.
Sub-wake under normal conditions is no joy drug. I hated it when it lasted, what?—all of ten minutes? A freezing zone to be endured while dropping to the blank night of stasis, and suffered again on the rise back to normtemp.
“A controlled cooling to near-death,” instructor Barnes had said. Right. More like the science of turning blood to slush. “The ache is minimized by remaining perfectly motionless,” he said in my earpiece on that first drop. “Fight it, and it will injure or even kill you. You must lie absolutely still and let the freeze take you—in which case, deaths are rare.” Bastard loved to scare us.
We’d learned in lectures that the early crews used anesthesia to skip the agony phase of cryostasis. But the failure-to-wake ratio was around eight percent then; more for long trips, New Beijing and farther. They found out when you bypass the pain of freezing, the body and brain don’t adjust as efficiently to stasis as when you consciously penguin down through the stages. Full penguin knocks the deadsleeps to less than one-tenth of one percent.
Cold or old, they say. Wish now I had chosen to age. Some manage okay on shorter treks. Mostly married crew who want to have the same number of wrinkles as their mates when they get home. Or brainiacs who spend the trek studying—three or four Ph.D.’s and counting. But a seven-year roundtrip is definitely pushing it; I’ve never heard of anyone who could live in a tin can that long and not start clawing at the air locks.
We all chose stasis. Colonists dropped in the first week. Crew two weeks later. System crashed almost immediately, less than a month out-trek. Eighteen initial survivors of the 32-person crew, but not one of the more than 900 colonists. Twelve—minus one—crewmembers now remaining, damned to icy purgatory. Not the hot bliss of hell where red coals bake your bones, but this blue-black arctic winter without a sun. And you can’t just pass out and sleep through it; sub-wake stims the brain so that sleep is physiologically impossible. Great gimmick for a horror sensum, right? But the holo-theaters would have to carry medical insurance, like for xenoporn; only in this case, the audience would get psychosomatic frostbite, not cardiac arrest from climaxing with a nerve-orchid.
Five weeks since Capt. Ochiba sub-woke and died the same day, a mayfly. But she lived long enough to get a fix on our position and lock the navcom on Earth base. The ship immediately began decelerating, but it took a couple weeks to reverse course without pulling too many G’s or expending too much fuel. Now we’re accelerating toward home and of course we’ll have to brake again when we get there.
The captain announced she had opened an omni-channel link and the bright blue curve of Earth filled her screen. The captain is a hero. No question. She had to have struggled in excruciating pain; just moving her fingers over the armrest keys must have felt like napalm bubbling her flesh. If she hadn’t laid in a course for home, I’m sure I’d be dead by now in my freezing coffin. She transferred the satellite link to Rudd’s screen and said something in Japanese—I caught “Sayonara”—before the tissue damage finished her.
My guess is Christian terrorists planted a timed virus in our A.I. mainframe. Whatever crashed the system screwed the com network—the satellite omni-link can display on only one computer at a time. So everybody has to wait in line to view home from his own screen. The obvious way to take turns is by rank, since we’re all in about the same state medically: stuck in our glacial beds, envisioning in our mind’s eye the scenes the person with the active screen describes.
Cmdr. Rudd didn’t last a week. I’d never say it aloud, but I was glad in a selfish way, because his reports were lackluster. Probably knew he wasn’t going to make it, so the sat-views of Earth didn’t inspire any hope in him.
For me, the only thing that makes the white pain bearable is the certainty that I’m heading home. Got to hang on a few more days. They’ll spot us approaching earth orbit, wonder why we don’t answer trafcon, and when they dock to investigate, they’ll find eleven popsicles. Or whoever’s left. And they’ll bring us up to normtemp and I swear I’ll kiss the tech, I’ll kiss the trafcop, I’ll kiss the warmth. I’ll make love to it.
After Cmdr. Rudd, came Lt. Vidyananda’s turn to see Earth. He just groaned a lot. Too sick to work the optics. He passed the viewer on to Abdullah, and the old imam was wonderful. A real poet. I loved his stories of history and literature from peoples of different lands as he aimed the telescopes down from high above. He got to be a master at it, zooming in on details, even describing the architecture: Stonehenge, Angkor Wat, New Los Angeles. It really helped—I never thought religion and mythology could be so moving. My eyes froze shut with tears and I had to blink to break the ice—sizzling skewer blinks.
Next up was Clewiston, who surprised me. Always thought the guy was about as interesting as a meteoroid drill, but he Q-leaped as he described the wildlife he surveyed on magniview. I learned that a giraffe and a rizora don’t just vaguely look alike; except for brain size, their internal structures are nearly congruent, an example of convergent evolution.
“It is not entirely incorrect to think of rizorae as distant genetic cousins to Terran giraffes, but of course, with an intelligence approaching that of Homo sapiens,” he said. Then he launched into an explanation of natural selection on Proxima A that would account for a population of intelligent giraffe-analogs. That led into his DNA-as-God metaphysics, and for the first time the Cult of the Cosmic Seed made sense to me. “And the Code became flesh…the Instructions lie within…A-T-G-C spells LIFE,” and the rest. If you ignored his pompous diction—who but a prof says “not entirely incorrect”?—Clewiston was inspiring. Guess he felt energized knowing his audience was captive.
Next was Bosch, the geologist. Land masses and planetary forces and the runaway greenhouse effect. Told about Manhattan sinking and the destruction of L.A., but his vocal cords were frost damaged and I couldn’t make out most of it.
 And now, Brye. Was hoping she’d make it home, get to know her. I’ve enjoyed her vivid descriptions of sea life that she’s managed to track on sonar-view. Learned more in a week listening to her than on two short treks studying oceanography on my own. Homeworld, I’ll take up diving, like we talked about—but scuba, no artificial gills. Sorry, but I think it makes her throat a bit creepy.
My turn coming soon. My “show.” Don’t want to let the other 10 down. Seeing Earth through each pair of eyes has kept us going. Thing is, I’m no scholar or scientist or philosopher. I’m a techie. Photovoltaic super-conductive paints—hell, half the time the data bores me. I’ll go with what I decided when I listened to the imam. The way he made me feel each scene.
I’ll talk about sonic ball. Not profound, I know, but when the televiewer pops up on my screen I’ll tap TV satellites until I find a game in action. I want to tell the others exactly how it feels to play sonic ball on a glowing summer afternoon, on the warm, green Earth. How my dad was second hover-man for the Nukes, twice MVP in the Central American League, Dome-of-Fame nominee. I’ll share my joy from 86 years ago, long forgotten.
“And that, friends…” Brye is barely audible. “…is why I call her Planet Ocean…mother of all the loves of my life.”
She’s wheezing. Get set. I’m next.
“My time is up… entering the water for one last dive… Godspeed to you all. Transferring viewer to techmaster Ortega.”  ______________________________________________________
Absolute shock.
That was first. Then terror and rage erupted in a scream that scorched my lungs. Finally, helplessness swallowed me, snuffed my grief under a blanket of snow.
Not till then did I begin to understand the beauty of it, the artistry of human kindness.
I worked my jaw. Shooting flames. But now I can talk clearly enough to be understood with a molten tongue, and the flames die as I die, but the images remain vivid and whole.
“I can see the sweat dripping off Manny O’s cheekbones. He’s brandishing the sonic as if he’s challenging the sun that glares so hot and bright on this perfect Panamanian afternoon. Left turbo fires the ball—BLAM!—Ortega knocks it high over the second buoy. It’s up, up—a hoverman streaks up to intercept—no, folks, it’s outathere! Ortega is rounding buoy three, taking his time now, gliding down to home, wearing that famous solar smile. Keep your eye on him, watch for—Ho!—his victory roll.”
The pictures from home are lit up like noon in the tropics, even with my eyelids frozen shut. I can see the veins bulging on the backs of my dad’s big hands, the gnats he sweeps away from his green eyes.

Navcom data shows we’re still out-trekking, away from Earth; nothing on the view screen but the clear black void of space. Yet the memories are flowing. I can see fine.


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