Open Writing

In the command center, the controlling hub of the ship,
three of Holly’s team members were already busily
conducting pre-shift equipment checks. The fourth, Marc
Taggart, was sharing a bulb of decaf with Ursula LeGrice,
the computer specialist from Mike Sargeson’s team, prior
to her going back into her cubicle for the remainder of the
voyage. They all looked up when Holly entered.

“Hey, Parmentier,” said Taggart, in his usual laid-back
way, “how goes it?”

Holly smiled shyly. “OK, I guess.” Marc waited for
her to say something else, and when she didn’t, he turned
back to LeGrice. “Some conversationalist,” she heard him
say, not loudly, but not quite quietly enough for Holly not
to hear.

Holly felt her cheeks flush. It was always the same, she
thought. I get tongue-tied whenever someone talks to me;
I just can’t help it. She made for her small locker to
retrieve her slate, and passed by the Russian, Volkin. He
looked up from what he was doing, smiled and winked at
her, then rolled his eyes in Taggart’s direction and
mouthed “asshole”. Holly blushed and gave a small
grateful smile before hurrying on.

Collecting her slate, Holly completed the uplink that
put her on-line with the ship’s computer, ready to receive
her first assignment. As usual, the brain of the Asimov
was in fine form, giving her the impression that it really
was glad to see her. Even though she knew it was just a
machine, Holly responded to the artificial intelligence
with warmth and good humor, and she considered the
computer to be her best friend on the ship.

“Good morning, Doctor,” she said, smiling at the
holographic image that appeared beside her. “What do
you have for me today?”

The image winked at her, eyes twinkling
mischievously behind the obsolete horn-rimmed glasses,
and its gray mutton-chop sideburns seemed almost to
bristle as it replied in its thick Brooklyn accent.

“Whaddaya say we skip work for the day, doll?” the
image leered. “Grab a couple of steaks at the grill, score
some thirty-year-old scotch, and have ourselves a private
little party, know what I mean?”

The ship’s brain had been programmed with as much
information as was known of the great writer and
scientist’s personality, in order to make the crew feel
more comfortable dealing with an AI. As always, the
computer put Holly at ease, and she found it easier to talk
to it than anyone on board. She glanced at the image
standing beside her, and found herself wishing, yet again,
that she had been alive in the twentieth century, and had
had the opportunity to know the real Isaac Asimov.
Always a voracious reader, she had read many of his
books, and wished she had the time for more.

One of the great minds of his time, of all time, the
prolific author had had an opinion on just about
everything, a trait not universally appreciated when he
was alive. As well as his famous fiction, he had written
non-fiction books on an enormous variety of subjects
ranging from Shakespeare to the Bible. “ The Good
Doctor”, as the crew referred to the computer, was as
faithful a reproduction of the man himself as was possible
for the programmers to achieve. Not for the first time,
Holly silently thanked the ship’s designers who, partly at
her urging, had programmed the computer in this way.
Smiling, she addressed the image.

“Now, Doctor, you know we’ve got a lot of work to
get through. I can’t just run off with every good
looking…”

She trailed off as Mike Sargeson and the rest
of his shift entered the locker room. Last through the door
was the EVA specialist, Jase Kerr, and Holly tried not to
let him catch her staring. She blushed and looked away,
then back, and was in time to see him glance across the
room, catch her eye and beckon. Curious, she drifted
across to the group, and was in time to hear him
explaining to Volkin about the probe.

“Must have been a stray pebble or something, Serge,”
he said. The two men were good friends, and were easy in
each other’s company. They turned as Holly floated up to
them, and the Russian smiled at her.

“Well, here is lucky lady who gets to go out and
replace,” said Volkin, then added, explaining, “Comm.
probe.”

Kerr elaborated. “Three hundred meters aft of SC-3,
Holly. About one o’clock. The Doctor has the exact
position.” For the purposes of hull exploration and
maintenance, the centuries-old pilot’s system of visually
identifying an approximate position was used.

Holly nodded, then turned to Volkin. “You want me to
do it now?”

Volkin shrugged teasingly with pretended
nonchalance, and winked at Kerr. “Oh, I don’t know. Is
not urgent priority, and I guess can wait. If maybe you got
something more important to do?”

Kerr covered a smile; Holly’s love of EVA excursions
was well known, and she blushed as she punched Volkin
on the arm in mock anger. The shift leader threw up his
hands in surrender. “Okay, okay, I give up. Go get suited
up. I guess all other urgent duties can wait.”

Holly smiled, and pushed herself in the direction of the
door. It sighed open at her approach, and she headed for
the suit room. Kerr watched her go; one day, he thought,
some lucky guy is going to unlock something in that lady,
and she’ll bloom like a rose.

Then, he and the rest of Sargeson’s shift moved away
to their respective sleep centers. Following S.O.P., Volkin
would wait until they were all in their cells and under
cryosleep before he gave Holly the go-ahead for her EVA.
This was one of the many safety measures designed to
protect the integrity of the ship in the event of a mishap.
Not that anybody expected any problems; they had been
in space for almost two hundred years without a hiccup,
and would continue to go on that way, Holly was sure, for
the one month that they had left.

Humming a tune that was two centuries old, she drifted
towards the suit locker, eagerly anticipating her excursion
outside the ship.

* * *

The airlock cycled, the massive door swung slowly
open, and Holly stood looking out at the silent, sparkling
vista before her, heart thumping in anticipation. The stars,
belying their white-(or yellow, red or blue) -hot
actuality, appeared instead to be ice-cold pinpoints, so
close that they could almost, just by reaching out, be
touched.

Once again, the absolute absence of any sensation of
atmosphere against her suit took her by surprise, and she
marveled at the ethereality of the caress of the cosmos.
Outside her suit, she knew, existed conditions that would
kill her in a second, an environment so hostile that she
wondered, even now, whether humans were ever meant to
venture into its deadly yet enthralling embrace.

She hung suspended, tethered by her lifeline, for
several minutes after the lock had cycled shut, alone and
at one with the void. Then she brought herself out of her
muse, and oriented herself to face Sleep Center Three.
Touching the control of her CO2 jet, she began to move
slowly towards the probe’s position, about three hundred
meters from the airlock. As she drifted along the massive
expanse of the hull, she let her thoughts wander back to
her homeworld, and the time before the departure.

To her, that time was just over two months ago, and
although she knew that almost two hundred years had
passed on earth, she still had trouble accepting that fact as
reality. The idea that everyone she had ever known or
even heard of, every friend and relative, every Net and
movie and pop and rock 'n roll star that she had fantasized
over in a succession of lonely rooms had been dead for
more than a hundred years was difficult to accept, but she
continued to attempt to come to terms with it.

* * *

Holly Louise Parmentier had been born on the
Mississippi Delta, in a town so small it did not appear on
any map. Crawdad Flats was not even a town, merely a
collection of shacks that time appeared to have passed by.
It looked, at the time Holly was born in 2096, the same as
it had for the previous three hundred years; run-down,
decrepit and old. Only the materials from which the
shacks were built had changed; in three centuries, they
had gone from tarpaper to various types of plastic, with
little or no improvement in their occupants’ living
conditions. Her father, an itinerant Cajun fisherman with a
taste for women and whiskey, but not for work, left for
less encumbered pastures when Holly was three years old,
leaving her mother to raise the child as best she could.

Life on the Delta was a curious mixture of laid back
and hard in those days. Elsa Parmentier turned her hand to
anything that would enable her daughter to enjoy the
basic necessities of life. Luxuries were the stuff of which
dreams were made, and not to be seriously entertained.
“Poor white trash” didn’t begin to describe them; they fit
the stereotype of destitute southern Americans of the
time, but in the early part of the twenty-second century,
things began to improve. The new beginning promised by
the new century offered new hope, and in 2101 Holly’s
mother found permanent employment at a small hospital
in Gretna, just outside New Orleans.

They moved out of the shack and into one of the high-
rise blocks that had proved so successful in isolating
ethnic and economic groups more than a century before,
in Great Britain. The housing estates might have seemed
like a good idea at the time, but were ultimately the
infamous and lasting legacy of the Prime Minister of that
time. It had seemed, to Holly and her mother, like a great
improvement at first, but in reality it was just another
shack; outwardly more substantial, but ultimately just as
segregating. Holly and her mother lived there, getting by
amid the squalor and the crime, until the girl was ten
years old, when her exceptional brain won her a full
scholarship to an elite boarding school in Baton Rouge.

For a young girl from the shacks of Crawdad Flats via
the housing estates of south New Orleans, Lacroix School
for Girls was like journeying to another world. Although
not totally ignorant of worldly affairs (she had, after all,
won a scholarship to get there in the first place), Holly
was nevertheless a little overawed by her surroundings,
and the company in which she found herself. The other
girls were, for the most part, friendly, if a little aloof,
especially towards someone they saw as being not quite
of their ‘class’. However, if a few chose to take advantage
of a ‘hick from the sticks’, they soon found out that Holly
Parmenter, for all her shyness, was no fool.

Bullying did not work with young Holly, for the
simple reason that she did not perceive it as such. She
shrugged off the few attempts by one or two of the
rougher girls to dominate her, and simply ignored them.
As a result, she was soon left alone, written off as
unresponsive and not worth the trouble.

Left to herself, young Holly devoted her energies to
her studies, correctly seeing an education as the only way
of escaping the poverty trap that she and her mother had
become ensnared in. Even before graduation, Holly had
decided on a career in teaching; she had already found
that she related better to children younger than herself,
and it was only around people her own age or older that
she felt awkward and uncomfortable.

Graduating from the University of Louisiana in New
Orleans in 2118 with a teaching diploma and a degree in
English literature, Holly accepted a position at a private
school in Houston, a little over five hundred kilometers as
the crow flies from Crawdad Flats, but several light-years
distant in culture and gentility. The job paid well, teachers
having finally been recognized as being vital to the
betterment of the human race, and Holly moved into the
unprecedented luxury of a new apartment in Belleaire in
West Houston, only a few kilometers from the school.
She quickly settled into the routine of her new life, and
knew immediately that she had found her niche among
the cloistered halls.

And there she might have stayed for the rest of her
working life, living her quiet, spinsterish existence and
spreading the gospel according to Shakespeare and Milton
to a succession of adolescent schoolgirls. But once again,
as with the scholarship, fate intervened in the life of Holly
Parmentier, in the form of two occurrences: one tragic,
the other, although she did not realize it at the time, a
Godsend.

In the winter of 2121, Holly’s mother died. After a
relatively short but hard life, Elsa Parmentier was
hospitalized for a recurring bout of bronchitis, contracted
pneumonia (hospitals still being the best breeding ground
for the disease) and succumbed. The harsh conditions of
her early life had left her weak, and the course of her
illness was short.

Holly, even though she had only seen her mother
occasionally since her move to Texas, was devastated.
Now, she felt, she really was alone in the world. Then,
when she thought she had no one to turn to, a chance
meeting with a Texas cattle baron (whose ilk had come
back into vogue since the oil had begun to run out) had
led to her being hired as tutor to his three children. They
were originally students at the school, but their father,
having heard so much about the wonderful Miss
Parmentier from his children, and distrusting the school
system anyway, decided to have them tutored at home, a
five hundred thousand acre spread situated up the
Colorado river from Austin, near Lake Buchanan.

The two boys and one girl of Maynard Glendenning
the Third were aged seven, ten and fourteen respectively,
and to say Holly was kept busy organizing curricula for
them would be to greatly understate the case. It was like
teaching three classes simultaneously, and the
Glendenning offspring kept her on her toes, both mentally
and physically.

Again, that might have been the pattern of her life,
teaching school or tutoring privately, but fate was not yet
finished with Holly Louise. In the spring of 2124, she
met, through her rancher employer, someone who was to
change her life completely.