Thrum

by Meg Smitherman

The crew of the Pioneer has been dead for a long time. I’m the only one left. We made it to our destination, and I’m the only one left.

Space, of course, is bigger than anyone comprehends, bigger than the human mind can handle. We’re able to come to some understanding of it with mathematics, and philosophy, and even art. We can look at pictures, read comparisons, and conduct complex equations to try to make sense of it. But the fact is that the biological makeup of a human brain is too simple, its neurons too few, to understand the true enormity of our universe. It is incalculably and emphatically beyond us.

Finally, I move to the last stasis pod and say a silent farewell to Vasilissa. She and I never got along. She was argumentative, self-righteous, and always said my introversion was going to be a liability on the mission. Well, assholes are liabilities too. But in death, she has faded to a shadow of herself, and a pang catches in my chest. I’d do anything to be at the receiving end of one more of her dagger-sharp glares.

In training, they went over the probability of us finding intelligent life in Sol's neighboring systems. It was as close to zero as a number can get without being utterly zilch, but it was still a high enough number that a few Earth governments joined forces to make this mission happen. That tiny number used to fill me with this vibrating eagerness, an aching hope, the need to see and understand and know what lay so far beyond us. Now, that number is the reason I’m going to die out here. Alone.

I’m drifting half out of the ship, half in, but even then it feels as if the infinite universe is reaching for me with inexorable fingers, with hands made of whorls of starlight, of depthless lightless chasms that hum like monsters of the cosmos. The air in my lungs feels like a dare. I’m challenging the firmament in its horrible power, and it is gazing right back at me, unimpressed.

Our knowledge is so minute, a tiny droplet in a vast sea that never ends, and we had the audacity to think we knew what we were getting into.

“Ami,” he says, my name supplicant on his lips. “I would never hurt you.”

He’s watching me with an almost overwhelming intensity, his unblinking black eyes framed by unnaturally long lashes, head tilted down slightly, as if he’s starving and I’m a meal.

His black gaze holds me, and for a moment I feel that I am a prisoner here, suspended in this endless corridor, a man who is not a man seeing into my soul, my organs, seeing and seeing until I am torn apart, atom by atom.

“The last of my kind.” An evasion. “But what is your kind?” He hooks a finger under my chin, tipping me up to him like an offering, our gazes locked. My chest and heart are loud with flowing blood, as if my pulse is rushing all around me, threatening to drown us in red, red, red. His voice is little more than a whisper. “I’m whatever you want me to be, Ami.”

“You miss Earth,” he says and moves toward me. “I can make other rooms for you, Ami. Other places. Show you things you’ve never seen before.”

“Ami,” he groans. “I’ve waited so long for you.” I don’t know what that means, and I don’t care. Maybe I’ve waited for him too. I came all this way, light-years and light-years, and I found him. Why shouldn’t I surrender to this?

How am I meant to argue against him, against a being who sees something utterly different than what I do? We’re two living things, both made of flesh and blood, but our realities are light-years apart. What does this ship look like to him? Am I even holding a comb and a pencil, or are my hands empty?

But once I’m safely inside Pioneer, the door sealed closed behind me, Dorian’s voice caresses my brain. I hear him as clearly as if he’s standing right next to me, soft lips brushing my cheek. No matter how many times you try to go, you always come back.