Open Writing

Holly slowed her forward momentum with gentle puffs
from the chest nozzle of her CO2 jet until she was
positioned directly over the damaged probe. All about her
lay the cosmos, vast and sparkling with a terrible beauty.
She did not know enough astronomy to recognize the
stars by name from out here, not even the larger, brighter
ones, but that did not matter. A rose by any other name,
she thought. They were still stars, and always would be.

Holly checked the integrity of her suit again before
proceeding with the task; all systems showed in the green.
In this way, at least, she was as much a professional
spacer as Jase Kerr, the last person to pass this way. And
like Kerr, she also intended to live to a ripe old age.

Holly descended slowly towards the hull until her
magnetic boots met the surface with a dull clang, felt
rather than heard. She adjusted the level of magnetism in
the soles to simulate a half-gee environment, then
lightened it up a little to compensate for the bulkiness of
the suit. Then she orientated herself until she was facing
the nose of the ship. Their destination was visible as a
bright star about the size of a child’s glass marble held at
arm’s length. The computer told her that it was getting
closer by seven hundred and twenty million kilometers
every day, roughly the distance from the earth to Saturn.

Seeing it now, Holly still found it difficult to believe
that it would take them another four weeks to reach, given
the deceleration required. After a minute, she reluctantly
took her eyes off the spectacular view and brought her
attention back to the job at hand. First she contacted the
control room through her suit radio, and was pleased
when Jude Mboko answered.

It was SOP to always have someone monitoring the
activity and progress of anyone outside the ship, and
Holly was glad it was the tall, coffee-skinned Kenyan
beauty. The shy, bookish girl from Louisiana had struck
up an unlikely friendship with the Masai from Kisumu, on
the eastern shore of Lake Victoria, despite their
fundamental differences.

Jude Mboko made no secret of her bisexuality, and had
made a bold approach to Holly when they had first met,
back at the induction center on earth. Holly had declined;
actually, recoiled would be closer to the mark, more than
a little horrified, and the fact that they were still friends
was a measure of how much the American had changed
since she had joined the mission team. Jude had not
persisted in any serious pursuit, but was still likely, once
or twice each shift, to contrive to pass Holly in an
enclosed space, where their bodies would make brief but
sensuous contact.

The first time it had happened, Holly had not thought
much of it, thinking it merely accidental, but the next two
occasions soon made it obvious that more than just
passing bumps were intended. Jude had made her
intentions quite clear, and had not been in the least put off
by Holly’s refusal.

For her part, Holly knew the African girl was only
flirting, and meant no harm, but all the same, she wished
Jude would direct her amorous advances elsewhere. She
herself had never before had any inclination in that
direction, but each time she found herself alone with Jude,
she felt her resolve weakening. Right now, though, she
would almost have welcomed the contact. As much as she
loved being outside the ship, she knew it would be a very
lonely place without the knowledge that there was
someone on the other end of the radio link.

* * *

Judutho Mboko didn’t fit any of the trite, simplistic
stereotypes that society had always tried to pigeonhole
gay women into. Her father hadn’t been weak; nor, for
that matter, had he been a strong, overbearing bully. Jude
had loved him and her mother, and her upbringing had
been as normal as anyone else she had grown up with, in
the small village on the Kenyan shore of Lake Victoria.
Her home had been a collection of mud huts so small and
insignificant, they had not featured on any map of the
district, and a time-traveler from the twentieth century
would have been hard pressed to find anything different,
anything that would tell him that he was in another time
two centuries ahead of his own.

Men still ruled the village, while the women still
assumed a subservient role, and did all of the drudgework.
As a child, Jude had played with boys and girls together,
not differentiating until she was almost into puberty. Then
she had lost her virginity when she was twelve, to a
sixteen-year-old boy from another village. Some instinct
warned her, even then, not to tell her parents. They would
have ordered her married to the boy, and that would have
been the end of her dreams. And that would never have
done, for Judutho had such dreams!

For as long as she could remember, Jude had been
fascinated by the night sky over her village, and had
stared in wonder at the stars. Questions put to her parents
had been met with amused disinterest, and an admonition
not to concern herself with such things. Even at such an
early age, Jude had recognized that her parents’ dismissal
of her inquisitiveness had been a device concocted, partly,
to conceal their own ignorance. Fetch water, prepare food
and bare children; that was all she had to concern herself
with, they said.

But Jude persisted, and finally won their grudging
permission to attend the Jesuit mission school in the
nearby town of Nlongo, twelve miles away, miles that she
would have to walk every day, they told her, there and
back. Jude didn’t mind; she would have walked twice as
far, and carried a load of firewood on her head, to be able
to get there. The school was a place where she could use
her brain, a place where there were others who also
wished to learn, where she could acquaint herself with the
world outside her village. For that opportunity, she would
do anything.

The missionaries who ran the school were quick to
spot Jude’s intelligence, and her aptitude for learning. She
quickly reached the limits of the classes they taught, but
when her teacher, Father Ruggiero, asked her if she
wanted to go further with her studies, she became
despondent. The Portuguese priest was puzzled by her
reaction.

“I do not understand, Judutho”, he said in his accented
English, the language they all used. “From everything you
have told me, I thought that this was what you wanted.
Yet you are not happy. What is wrong?”

Jude hung her head and shrugged, sitting in the hard-
backed chair before her teacher’s desk. All of the other
children had gone for the day, and the priest had been
looking forward to delivering the good news he had just
received from the diocese in Nairobi to his best student,
that they had agreed to sponsor her to the great university
in the capital. Ruggiero was proud of her, and proud for
her, for what she had achieved, and was excited in
anticipation of what she might yet achieve, given the
opportunity to learn more than he could teach her.

“My father will not allow it,” she said, her head down
and her small hands twisting in her lap.

“Why not?” answered the priest, a puzzled frown
creasing the dark, handsome ruggedness of his features.

Jude shrugged again. “It is not what he thinks I should
do.” She looked wistfully out of the window of the pre-
assembled portable classroom, erected by British
engineers and paid for by the Catholic church. The air
outside the room shimmered in the afternoon heat, its
wavy lines rising from the dusty ground, while the interior
was kept relatively cool by a single solar-powered air
conditioner.

“My father thinks women have their place, and it is not
in the classroom, or in the greater world outside,” she
said, watching a group of small children play in the dust
outside. “Does not the Book tell us to honor our father’s
wishes?”

The priest nodded sympathetically. “Yes it does, my
child. But not at the expense of what is best for you,
especially when your father’s wishes are so obviously
misplaced. If he wished for you to jump off a cliff, would
you do it? The sacrifice of Abraham does not apply in
today’s world, nor is it expected, especially of the young.
You have a gift from God, Judutho, a mind that demands
to be fed like any hungry thing, and both you and I have
an obligation to see that it gets the nourishment it needs.”

The priest stood from his chair behind the desk, and
Jude stood also, clutching her electronic slate against her
small breasts, feeling its hard plastic corners through her
flimsy cotton dress. “I will speak with your father,”
Ruggiero said.

Jude shrugged fatalistically, convinced that the priest
would not be able to sway her father, nor change his
mind. In that, she could not have been more wrong.

Her father surprised her for one of the few times in her
life by agreeing almost immediately to the priest’s
request. Her mother, whom Jude had half-hoped might
argue to keep her in the village, even at the risk of not
attending the college, had said nothing, merely stood in
the background with downcast eyes. Later, Jude began to
suspect that the priest had done some sort of deal with her
father, that money might even have changed hands, but
she never broached the subject with Ruggiero. Whether
her reticence was born out of a fear that she was right or
wrong, she never quite determined.

Whatever the circumstances, Jude found herself
attending Kip Kenyo University in the great city of
Nairobi, two hundred miles away by the ancient steam-
driven railcar. The difficulty of finding somewhere to live
and pay her way was also solved by the efforts of Father
Ruggiero, who persuaded the diocese to take Jude as a
live-in maid at the convent. From there, it was less than a
mile to the university, and she would set off at eight every
morning except Sunday, having been up since five a.m.
attending to her morning chores. When she arrived back
at the convent at three p.m., there would be another four
hour’s work for her to do, and then she would eat her
evening meal in her tiny room, and study late into the
night.

Jude did not find it a hard existence; to have the chance
to gain the knowledge she so desperately sought, she
would have endured far worse conditions and, considering
the alternative of a life back in her village, she never
complained. She worked hard, both at her job and her
studies, and twenty-seven days past her twentieth birthday
she graduated with a first-class degree in biology.

At this point, the Portuguese priest once again came to
her aid. This time, it was easier for him to convince the
church to act as sponsor for the tall, beautiful African
biologist. Her reputation as a first-rate graduate student
had spread, and research centers all over the world had
expressed interest in her. She finally chose to accept an
offer from America, a place she had always wanted to see.
The night before she was to leave, she invited Ruggiero to
have a last dinner with her at the small apartment she had
occupied for the final year of her studies.

The priest arrived at seven o’clock, bearing a bottle of
wine, and she smiled as he presented it.

“Why Father, don’t tell me you’ve been raiding the
cathedral’s cellars. I’m shocked.”

Ruggiero smiled and said, in a mock-whisper, “I won’t
tell the bishop if you don’t. I’ll just say ten Hail Marys for
us both.”

They sat at the table where Jude had prepared a
sumptuous meal, and little was said while they enjoyed it,
and each other’s company. After dessert, they took their
coffee to the small sofa on the other side of the room that
served as dining room, lounge and kitchen, and sat side by
side.

The priest was the first to break the companionable
silence.

“I want to say a couple of things, Judutho,” he said,
placing his cup on the small table before them. “You have
made me more proud than anyone I have ever known.”
Jude blushed, and tried to demur, but Ruggiero went on.
“No, no, it’s true. You have exceeded even my best
expectations, gone further than I ever dared to hope.” He
paused, and looked at her. “And now you are leaving for
America, to follow your dream and find your future. I will
miss you, but I wish you nothing but success and
happiness.” He picked up his glass of wine and raised it.

“To you, Judutho. To all you have done, and will yet
do.”

Jude looked at him, this man of God whom she had
known for ten years or more, and whom she knew she
might never see again. She raised her own glass and
drank, then leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the
lips.

Dominic Ruggiero froze for a moment, then turned
away and put his glass on the table. When he turned back
to Jude, she was waiting, her eyes shining and her breath
coming in short gasps. Ruggiero reached out and took her
by the shoulders gently.

“Judutho, you know we cannot do what you are
thinking. My vows, not to mention my conscience, forbid
it.”

Jude looked at him, her thoughts confused. “But you
must feel it, Father Dominic, as I do. As I have felt it for
years.”

Ruggiero nodded. “Of course. I may be a priest, but I
am not a eunuch. I am a man, and you are a beautiful
woman.” He smiled ironically. “I would have to be very
gay not to feel what you are feeling.”

“Then why…”

“As I said, Judutho. I am a priest. I am already
married. To the church. I have made vows that I cannot
break.” He looked at her shrewdly for a moment, then
said, “And I suspect that you are not as disappointed as
you might have me believe, am I right?”

Jude looked at him, then quickly looked away. “What
do you mean?” she asked, her eyes averted.

Ruggiero smiled. “It’s all right, Judutho,” he said
smiling. “I have watched your progress at the university,
and during that time, a few… shall we say, whispers have
gotten back to me. You have no need to worry. The
church does not regard homosexuality as the abomination
it once did. As you know, there are even gay male and
female priests now, ever since His Holiness John Paul the
fourth gave papal dispensation.” He smiled again. “It’s all
right. I know.”

Jude sagged with relief. She had been torn in her
feelings, and afraid of the priest finding out that she was
gay, so she had done what she had done to find out if her
sexual orientation was a defense against some taboo,
some forbidden love she had for him. Now, she knew that
it was not. With his understanding, Ruggiero had freed
her from guilt, and she knew she would always be
grateful, and would never forget him.

* * *

After traveling to America, Jude worked at a research
facility in Baltimore, where she quickly gained a
reputation as a brilliant mind. She had a few casual
relationships with other women, none of which lasted
long, and was unattached when the opportunity came for
her to join the colonizing mission to Procyon.

Her parents had died in an outbreak of Ebola a few
years before, and the rest of her family were as strange to
her as she was to them. She thought about it for only a
short time, and after a quick phone call to her old mentor
in Nairobi, made her decision.

* * *

“Hi, Jude,” Holly said, in response to the African’s
greeting. “Everything looks fine from out here. How goes
it with you?”

“Just fine, Cajun lady,” came the throaty reply. “Be a
lot better if you was to change your mind about us and
surrender to the inevitable.”

Holly smiled. “I’ll pass on that, Jude. At least, for now.
Maybe some other time.”

“I’ll be waiting.”

They passed their banter back and forth for a few
minutes, and then Jude informed Holly that the other shift
members were heading for the control room for the
customary start-of-shift briefing. Holly assured her that
she would only be a few minutes more; the damaged
antenna was easily removed, and she would replace it
with the one she had taken out of stores. Then she would
return and meet the others in the control room. Jude
signed off with another lascivious remark, and Holly was
left to finish the job in peace.

Holly shook her head in amusement and signed off,
leaving the channel open as per routine. That Jude. Never
gives up. Holly was not really sure if she had been
tempted or not. She had always thought of herself as
straight, but the human contact afforded by such a liaison
would be very welcome.

Personal relationships were at a premium here, and the
only man on her shift who even remotely interested her
showed no interest in return, while the other was on
another shift entirely. Still, she would follow her natural
inclinations, and hold out for a hetero relationship. What
she might do if the holding out went on for too long, she
was not certain, but for now she would be content to have
the African as a friend. Holly smiled again, unaware that
she had spoken to Jude Mboko and the others on her shift
for the last time.

Holly reached the damaged probe and planted her
booted feet on either side of it. Whatever had struck it had
bent the mast at an angle of forty-five degrees, and she
stooped slightly at the waist to grasp its slender length in
her gloved hands. Afterwards, she could never be
absolutely sure that she had felt anything at all; she
thought she detected a faint tremor through her boots
against the hull, but she may have imagined it. But she
didn’t imagine the short, sharp burst of indefinable sound
in her helmet radio, unnaturally loud before the suit’s
regulator cut in and muted it. Almost immediately, the 
sound cut out and disappeared completely, and she found herself alone in the silence.

“Hello?”

Her inquiry was tentative; even as she made it, she was
telling herself that nothing was wrong, just someone
having a joke, that was all, nothing to worry about. She
called again, but the ether remained as silent as the grave.

“Hello, anybody there?” Silence, not even the hiss of
static. Holly tried again, anxious now. “Come on, guys,
this isn’t funny. Jude? Serge? Anyone?” Holly entered her
personal code into her suit keypad, but there was no
response from the ship’s computer. The Good Doctor was
off line. It was this last that finally got her moving. The
computer was never off line, it was always there, ready to
receive their input and answer their questions. For it to be
down meant that something serious had happened. Holly
detached her boots from the hull and began to move, by
bursts from her CO2 jet, towards the airlock from which
she had exited. As she went, she continued attempting to
raise someone on the radio, but it remained obstinately
silent. She began to feel the first stirrings of panic, and
she fought them down. Get inside the ship, she thought;
that was her first priority. With a rising feeling of
desperation, Holly increased the bursts from her CO2 jet
and moved as fast as she dared towards the airlock.

She was almost there when she saw the hole in the
hull, a few meters from the lock. It was about six inches
across, and it was spewing out things; bits of paper, stylus
pens, styro drinking cups and something else, some fluid
that looked horribly like….

Holly felt the panic rising again, and fought for
control, striving to remain calm while she entered the
code into the door’s keypad. Her nervousness caused her
to punch in the wrong numbers, and she closed her eyes
and took a deep breath before trying again, this time
successfully.

The computer was still silent, and while she waited for
the manual entry to cycle, she was conscious of the dread,
of the fear and hysteria welling up inside her, threatening
to take over, to overwhelm her completely.

After an age, the airlock mechanism finally cycled,
and she pulled herself inside. Impatiently, she waited for
the outer door to close and the atmospheric pressure to
equalize, then she opened the inner lock and stepped into
chaos.

Papers, clipboards, someone’s sock; it seemed that
anything that wasn’t nailed down was swirling around the
room. To her relief, Holly saw that what she had taken for
blood was actually a small tin of paint that had been
sucked out of one of the cupboards. The lid had come off,
probably when the tin was dashed against one of the
walls; most of its contents were now outside.

Holly saw the hole in the hull immediately; it was a
ragged tear in the metal, and what had made it had passed
through the multi-layered skin of the ship and exited here.
But if this was all it was, she thought, it might still be
okay. Only about six inches across, maybe a little less,
shouldn’t be too hard to patch.

Pushing herself away from the door, and keeping out
of the slipstream of air rushing out of the hole, she drifted
towards some cupboards set into the bulkhead. There
should be a repair kit in there somewhere, she thought; all
the rooms have them. She reached the other side of the
room and began rummaging, opening doors and going
through their contents, growing more frantic as she
searched. Finally she found what she sought; a packet of
patches about twelve inches square, made of heavy
metallic fabric with a super-adhesive backing.

Holly pushed herself back towards the hole, fumbling
with the packet as she did so, tearing it open and
removing one of the squares. Mumbling to herself,
Ohgodohgodohgod, she stripped the backing film off the
patch and placed it carefully over the hole. The room was
otherwise sealed, and the force of air leaving it was
weakening as the room’s air supply diminished. She
pressed the patch in place and the swirling of air in the
room slowed but did not stop. Then she turned around and
noticed the other hole.

It was in the bulkhead directly opposite, and she
drifted over to it. Air was still being forced through it by
atmospheric pressure, but the flow was slowing as the air
pressure in the room equalized. She was about to patch it
like the other when a horrible thought struck her.
Whatever had made the hole had to have come from
somewhere, and that could only be from outside the ship!
The hole she had patched had been an exit hole, which
still left…

Ohmygod, she thought, there must be another hole
right over the other side of the ship! The hull was multilayered,
and there were several bulkheads across the
width of the ship, but at the speed at which they were
traveling…even she, inexperienced as she was, knew
what a meteor could do if it happened to get through the
magnetic field. Unless it met something really solid, it
would go through the ship like it was made of paper.
While she was worried about the other members of her
shift, she knew that the ship’s integrity had to be her first
priority.

She started towards the door of the room, then checked
herself. The ship was more than three hundred meters
across; to reach the other side, she would have to go
through bulkhead after bulkhead, using up time she
suspected she might not have. Plucking the packet of
patches out of the air where she had left it floating, Holly
re-entered the airlock and cycled it again. When the outer
door opened, she first pulled herself over to the exit hole
and slapped a patch over it. Hopefully, the two patches,
inside and out, would hold until more permanent repairs
could be effected. Holly then used her jet to propel herself
up the side of the ship and over the top, moving as fast as
she dared across the great ship’s scarred surface. When
she reached the other side, the entry hole was not hard to
find; however, what she saw first puzzled her, then set off
alarm bells in her head, and she fought to contain the
panic and terror she felt rising again.

The entry hole was about the size of a football, more
than twice as big as the exit hole, where it should have
been the other way around. Surely, she thought, surely an
exit wound in a… a person would be larger than the
entry? All of her common sense told her this was so, but
she could not deny the evidence of her own eyes. Then
she had another thought: maybe, just maybe this is the
exit, and the other was the entry! That’s it, that must be it!
But that hope died as soon as it was conceived. She had
seen for herself the slight burring on the outside of the
first hole; that meant that whatever had caused it had
passed out that way. There was no doubt; this was the
entry, and it was at least one-third of a meter across.

Working quickly, putting any thoughts or speculation
out of her mind, Holly began stripping the backing off
several squares and sticking them together until she had a
patch large enough to cover the hole in the hull. Then she
applied it, and pressed the edges as hard as she could.
When she was satisfied that the seal was complete, she
tried the radio again, but there was still no reply.

Holly moved along the side of the ship until she
reached the midships airlock on this, the port side of the
ship, and entered her code. When the lock cycled, she
entered and waited until her suit told her that the pressure
had equalized, and the lock had air. As a safety
precaution, she kept her suit on and opened the inner
door, intent on making her way to the control room, the
last known position of the others in her shift. If she could
just find Serge or Jude, they would know what to do.

Panic bubbled just under her surface, spurring her on,
and she pulled herself along by the handholds on the
bulkheads. As she went she saw the occasional hole
caused by the whatever-it-was on its passage through the
ship, and still she heard no sound but her own rapid
breathing in her helmet.

Ohgodohgodohgod please let them be all right.
Please… The pastel colored walls blurred past as she
raced through the ship, the panic only just controlled,
trying the radio constantly, hearing nothing.

OhgodohgodohgodOHGOD! Please let them be all
right, please let it be just a communications failure! Still
the radio gave her no comfort, and she sped on, faster and
faster, flying down corridors and wrenching open doors.

Finally she reached the control center where the others
had last gathered. She paused before it, and stared at the
large hole beside the door, the same size as the entry hole
she had patched on the hull of the ship. As with all of the
other doors through which she has passed, the automatic
entry mechanism did not operate, and she clumsily
entered her code with her gloved hand, keeping her eyes
averted from the hole and the room beyond. After an age,
the door slid aside, and after a moment’s hesitation, Holly
Parmentier stepped into carnage.

At first, Holly did not realize what it was that she was
seeing. The sheer horror of the scene was such that her
mind refused to allow her to comprehend, to see it for
what it was; the result of the release of an enormous
amount of kinetic energy in a small, enclosed space. That
there were people in that space, if what remained could
ever have been people, only served to make what she saw
all the more incomprehensible.

Whatever had penetrated the ship’s defenses in a
billion-to-one shot had struck little resistance at first as it
passed through the hull and the ship’s bulkheads. Then,
by sheer chance, it had struck one of the few objects
capable of resisting its passage; one of the computer’s
CPU’s had been inside the control room, and had been
almost directly in the object’s path.

Constructed, ironically for safety reasons, from one of
the hardest man-made substances, an amalgam of
Titanium and super-hardened steel, the CPU had taken the
full force of the blow, causing the object, whatever it was,
to fragment. Part of the object had continued on, passing
through the rest of the ship and exiting where Holly had
first seen it. But slightly more than half had broken up and
had literally sprayed the room.

Nothing could possibly have survived; drifting into the
center of the room, Holly looked about with a strange
detachment, her mind’s defense against the horror of what
she saw. With an almost disinterested wonder, Holly
traced the path of the object to where it struck the CPU;
this, no doubt, was the reason for the computer being
down. There were back-ups, of course, but they had to be
replaced and brought on-line by human intervention; the
computer could not do it by itself.

If the object, meteor or whatever had passed through
the exact center of the room, the occupants probably
would have been all right. Concussed perhaps, but
probably nothing worse than that, unless one or two had
been unlucky enough to be directly in the object’s path.
But a large section of the CPU, as well as much of the
object itself, had disintegrated under the impact of
something traveling at twenty million kilometers per hour,
and the result was right there before her eyes. Nothing
could have survived; nothing did.

The effect had been as if a dozen fragmentation
grenades had exploded simultaneously in the room,
spraying shrapnel in all directions in a deadly fusillade.
Her shift partners had been shredded by the blast, their
bodies barely recognizable as human, and the walls of the
room were festooned with gore.

Later, the only one of them that Holly would be able
to positively identify would be her former would-be
suitor, Jude Mboko. She at least was defined by the color
of what remained of her skin. As to the others, Holly
could only guess. With her senses teetering on overload,
Holly forced herself to examine the room with as much
clinical detachment as she could muster.

The nature of the object that had done the damage was,
for the moment, also a matter for guesswork, but almost
certainly it was a small meteor that had got through the
ship’s magnetic field. They had been told that this was a
theoretical possibility; enormously unlikely, given the
sheer vastness of space and the infrequency of such
encounters, but still statistically feasible. Like the aircraft
you were flying in crashing, or just death in general, it
was one of those things you never thought about. You put
it out of your mind, since it was something over which
you had no control.

In a journey fraught with so many dangers, so many
possibilities for disaster, such things were not to be
thought of. Now, the extremely unlikely, the highly
improbable, the all but impossible had occurred. Now, the
true horror of what had happened in the room was
beginning to penetrate Holly’s defenses as she stood
staring at what remained of her friends and colleagues.
The shapeless lumps of flesh, torn apart and thrown
against the bulkheads by the force of the detonation were
all that remained of people she had known, had spoken to
only minutes ago. Then, they were alive, vibrant, a group
of thinking, feeling human beings. Now they were
just….things. Meat.

Holly backed out of the room, turning her head away
from the spectacle of blood and butchery that threatened
to overwhelm her senses. Panic building, taking her over
at last, she pulled herself through the doorway and fled
blindly down the corridor, away from the killing ground.

She had no clear idea where she was going, only that she
had to put distance between herself and the charnel-house
that the control room had, in one instant of mindless,
impersonal violence, become.