CHAPTER 20 “The 7th Crewmember”
Saturday 14 July 2812
My medical chip reports that I am thoroughly, healthily, and properly pregnant. My nausea concurs, dammit. I’m back to barf bags and being green. I thought of the book I could write, “Spewing Across Space.”
My crewmates are more excited about my pregnancy than I. It’s hard being excited and nauseated at the same time. Xingxing is solicitous in the extreme and anticipated my discomfort by planting pinellia and ginger weeks ago – the traditional Chinese herbs for morning sickness. Thankfully, they seem to be helping but they are not a complete cure.
Xingxing and I sometimes lie together telling stories about our former lives and about our fantasies before we learned of our deep space destinies. Sometimes we fall asleep in the same bed but usually we retreat to our own beds before morning because it’s easier to sleep without bumping or crowding each other. Her smell and touch do nothing to excite me sexually the way the closeness of Caleb and Alexi did. Her physical closeness is nonetheless priceless.
Thursday 26 July 2812
My morning sickness has past and I feel as though I’m glowing with beauty. Already my tummy seems to be rounding out a bit and my breasts likewise.
Friday 27 July 2812
I was comparing the odds of going for three-of-a-kind or instead hoping for two pair when the controller beeped and Arnold Schwarzenegger announced, “Eleven objects vaporized. Estimated total mass 11 point 5 grams. Coolant leaks detected at 166 Lima and 167 Lima. Coolant loss estimated at zero point seven liters and continuing. Strain gauges in vicinity within normal parameters. George en route.”
Hvezda, Danika, Celeste, and Sitara were no longer at the poker table. The view from George showed that he was still skittering along toward the damage. Captain Perry asked Hvezda to go E.V.A. with Danika assisting. Xingxing and I are simply on standby so we went to my console and called up feeds from various cams. George’s cam showed an area of the disk about a meter across that looked as though it was blasted with a Star Trek phaser. A froth of coolant slowly oozed from charred tubes. Apparently, the Death Ray vaporized the chunk of debris but too close to the disk for the vapor to disperse more than a meter. All that hot gas spent its kinetic energy frying this little bit of real estate. We had seen simulations of this in training so there were no surprises. Luckily there were no pumps, valves, or cams in the cratered area but one of the antenna pickups was toast and the photovoltaic coating was history.
The feed from the Tech Module airlock showed Hvezda emerging. The different helmet ears are great for identifying crewmates when they are suited up. It took 10 minutes for her just to reach the fuselage. She worked her way over to the fuselage rail and clipped onto the shuttle. We watched her being pulled up to the disk where she transferred her safety line to a disk cable. She rappelled down our slowly turning disk into slightly higher g loads and traversed toward the site.
Captain Perry directed Hvezda’s descent until she reached the damaged area. Because the pumps in the area had been shut down, the pipe was barely leaking. Hvezda applied tape and sealant, and then waited to see if her ministrations were sufficient.
Celeste’s voice commanded, “Hvezda, return to Tech Module. Looks good. Thank you.”
“That’s OK, Captain. It is nice getting outside for walk now and then.”
Hvezda turned this way and that and her helmet tipped back. “Hey, I think I can see New Sol straight overhead.”
“It had better be straight overhead,” Sitara said, “or I’m going lose my job as navigator.”
“It’s beautiful out here guys. You should …”
The exterior video images over-saturated for an instant, the controller beeped, and Arnold announced, “Two objects vaporized. Estimated total mass 1 point 3 grams. No damage reported.”
“Shit, guys. Maybe I take walk later when skies are clear.”
We watched Hvezda as the tether pulled her back to the fuselage. I noticed that I was chewing on one of my fingernails. At long last she entered the Tech Module airlock and the door shut behind her.
Friday 3 August 2812
We are temporarily at zero thrust and zero rotation with only an occasional puff from a thruster to finesse our rendezvous with the tanks full of uranium, thorium, deuterium, and xenon. We’ve already jettisoned our empty tank assembly with its sharply pointed nose. It can be seen by its blinking beacons as it drifts off to the side. The assembly with the full tanks is up ahead and under power to match our speed by the time we reach it. There is nothing to hint we are moving at 22,600 kilometers per second, which works out to be about 80 million km/hr. That will get you a speeding ticket even in Los Angeles.
Due to the Oberth Effect, the propellants in the tanks we are taking on will seemingly give us a bunch of free kinetic energy. There is no such thing, of course, once you factor in the kinetic energy of the fuel’s mass due to its speed relative to the Earth.
If all goes well, we will be going about twice as fast when this propellant supply runs out six months from now when we rendezvous with our final propellant supply; five times as much mass as this resupply. That future supply required its own resupplies to reach its future rendezvous with Trillium.
“Hey Esty,” Danika called over the intercom. I turned to the monitor labeled, “Tech Module,” and saw Danika floating in the middle of the room. Her catbot was flying around in front of her.
“Oh magawd. Your catbot’s finished. ¿And it’s flying? ¿How on earth?”
“Piwacket, circle,” Danika commanded.
Her catbot started a horizontal circle in the room with its head turning back and forth a bit and its mouth wide open. As it rotated away from me, I saw what she’d done, and I cracked up. There was a swiveling nozzle in its butt that must have been blowing air; air that undoubtedly came from its open mouth! Brilliant! All I could do was point and laugh. It was too silly.
“You’ve got to show the others. Piwacket, the flying farting catbot.”
Sunday 19 August 2812
Xingxing christened our catbot “Tribble,” set it on the floor in its curled-up sleeping position, and I commanded, “Wake up, Tribble.” Its eyes popped open. Telemetry confirmed that it calibrated its gyroscopes and accelerometers. Tribble jerked to its feet and raced full speed into the wall with a sickening crash.
“Sleep, Tribble,” I yelled.
“Drat. Let’s run some diagnostics.”
Twenty minutes later we were reprogramming the sub-routines for the accelerometers. It was apparent that the old code under-valued accelerometer outputs by a factor of ten. Tribble thought it was moving ten times slower than it really was. Its nose was crushed, one of the eye mounts broke, and the head bracket was bent. We were almost pleased that Tribble hadn’t incurred more damage.
Saturday 1 September 2812
Dear Mom,
Danika’s catbot, Piwacket, broke a front leg. It leaped off the top shelf of a storage closet, hit a chair on the way down, and snapped a front limb joint.
Tribble needs some redesign since we are using gyroscopic modules that don’t factor in Trillium’s spinning. Tribble can’t stand up for more than a few seconds at a time. I just sent the school kids and their teacher a summary of the problem, but it will be weeks before I hear back from them. Argh.
Xingxing is a great roommate, as I imagine anyone here would be.
Love you,
Estrella
Again I made copies for the others on my mailing list.
Friday 21 September 2812
The school kids and I solved the problem of Trillium’s spinning and catbot’s balance by developing code that calibrates the rate of spin when catbot ‘wakes up’ by comparing gyroscopic output with visual data. Catbot will periodically hold still and recalibrate. That system has passed our tests and is good to go, I hope.
Life on Trillium goes on, slowly on, irrespective of our considerable velocity. But my life can come to a punctuated end in an instant with a marble-size bit of space debris lolling in our path. Our huge disk also serves as a radar antenna, looking for anything larger than a molecule in our path. The Death Ray sometimes fires nearly continuously for seconds at a time. It is no guarantee of safety, as the previous damage indicated.
Also, receiving data from our huge disk antenna, ISTRI watches us around the clock; watching for aberrant behavior, watching for normal behavior, watching us interact, watching us take time to ourselves, watching us work and play, eat and excrete, smile and frown. They read our mail. They document our poker games. They document our choices of videos. They document our sleep patterns. They document our masturbating. They document our abstinence. They document our touches and hugs. They document with whom we sleep. And if there are sexual relations, they document those too. Maybe they have. It is the job of the Mission Ethicist, the Mission Psychologist, and the Mission Medical Director to watch the flagged videos, analyze the data, and look for any activity that is ‘out of parameters.’
Wednesday 24 October 2812
Tribble is awesome. I love the way it looks at me and way the tail twitches. We apparently underestimated the amount of spring it generates as it leaps. It overshot its first leap from the floor onto the kitchen countertop and skidded into dirty teacups waiting to be washed. By the third or fourth such leap it learned to calibrate its own exertion to perfection. Hours of studying slo-mo videos of real cats paid off with details of balance and counterbalance. To achieve their acrobatic athleticism, a cat’s back legs have their own script to follow with every move and that script often differs remarkably from that of the front legs. Xingxing is brilliant at devising code to capture reality and Tribble is proof of that.
Halloween is only a week away and that’s when Piwacket and Tribble vie for the honor of Best Interstellar Catbot.
Saturday 27 October 2812
Every list of questions for interviews now contains, “How is your pregnancy going,” or something similar. Truthfully, I can say, “Very well, thank you.” The most recent list has the rather impertinent question, “How do you feel about having a child who will be born and will die on Trillium without ever knowing the joy of walking on a world such as Earth or New Earth.” I am tempted to just smile and answer, “Fine, thank you.” Naturally I have misgivings, just as I have misgivings about my own decades in this 3-star-rated tin can. But there is much positive that can be said about her future life here. She is coming into the world of six adoring mothers. A billion people already care deeply about her. She will be home-schooled by some of the most brilliant loving people ever assembled. She will come to understand how important her life is to the future of the entire human species. And in time she will assume the role of Captain with the breadth of responsibility for which she will be well-prepared. That, a flower garden, and a complete collection of “Stargate” episodes, offer a pretty rewarding existence.
One of the advantages of pregnancy on Trillium is carrying a baby in reduced gravity. There are still another 11 or so weeks to go and nobody knows how 0.8 g will affect Kidlet when she decides to exit my womb and enter Trillium’s womb. I’m hoping it will make everything a bit easier and gentler for her.
“Kidlet” is the working name for my daughter. My five crewmates all tell me that she is my baby and I get to choose her name but then they tell me their current favorite choices. Not every mother is offered suggestions in so many languages. Here are a few: Iona, Ester, Kometa, Luna, Cielo, Flora, Huixing, Tianti, Tsvest. The name that makes me smile every time is Starlet O’Hara Ramirez.
Wednesday 31 October 2812
In jodhpurs and pith helmet and carrying a chair in one hand and a whip in the other I tried coaxing Tribble to jump up on the poker table to be judged. “Come on, Tribble. Come on. Jump up here, kitty. Come here.” I put down the chair and tapped a fingernail on the poker table, but Tribble only looked at me as though I was worthy of taxidermy.
I gave up. With some effort I squatted down, laid down the whip, picked Tribble up, and placed it on the table. Tribble looked at my crewmates in the hologram and walked into the wall trying to reach them. It examined the holo screen wall with sniffs and with its whiskers and then did the sensible thing; it sat and washed its face.
“May I introduce Piwacket now,” asked Danika
“Sure. Go ahead.”
Without moving or turning, Danika said, “Piwacket, onto my shoulder.” Piwacket leapt from some location out of our sight and alighted on Danika’s shoulder looking fierce and confident as it surveyed the holographic scene.
“Piwacket, onto the table.” Without hesitation it leaped to the table with grace and ease. Tribble wasted no time in rocketing off the table in the opposite direction, hitting the floor in a run, and disappearing through the doorway into Xingxing’s room.
I found Tribble hiding under Xingxing’s bed, dragged it out, and carried it back cradled in my arms. As I approached the poker table, Tribble twisted, kicked, and clawed its way out of my arms and again dashed through the same doorway. This time, I could not find it even with Xingxing’s help.
Defeated, I returned to the poker table and sat down as Piwacket eyed me with a look that was at once untrusting and unafraid.
Captain Perry in her pirate costume stood up and announced, “I do believe I’ve seen enough to decide this contest. The award for the best catbot on Trillium goes to Piwacket. And … the award for the most realistic catbot on Trillium goes to Tribble, wherever it is.”
Friday 16 November 2812
Today Sitara and I are again combining our birthday parties. George dutifully ferried our gifts and birthday cake between modules. Each module got a third of the cake and with each piece shoved into the corner of the poker table it looked like a single whole cake once more.
I got Trillium earrings with glowing engines from Celeste; a simulated wood 3D brain-teaser puzzle from Danika, herbal tea from Sitara, a Russian peasant blouse from Hvezda, and the expected but much appreciated video collage from Xingxing. I gave Sitara an emerald ring bordered with pearls that I produced in our minifactory and spent hours finishing. The others gave her the same gifts they gave to me, except the puzzle from Danika was made of metal and string and the collage from Xingxing was, of course, with completely different video scenes.
Saturday 17 November 2812
I’m lying in the dark waiting for sleep, waiting for satisfaction, waiting to die a sudden violent death, and waiting for life to resume. Trillium is a vapid procession of poker, birthdays, handicrafts, cooking, housework, online courses, and video programs. As of a few minutes ago I’ve become a year older. I’m nineteen. Nineteen and pregnant, and my future path is immutable. I can evaluate 3rd order differentials in my head but ISTRI wants nothing more from me than a fecund uterus. Well, perhaps I can give them more than that.
I sat up, felt my distended belly, and commanded, “Lights one, entire module.” A soft glow filled the room. I rocked to my feet and resolutely walked across the room and through the doorway into Xingxing’s room. She was snoring lightly. As I pulled back the covers she asked in a low sleepy voice, “¿Esty?”
“¿OK, if I lie here?”
“Sure, birthday girl, climb in.”
“Xingxing, feel my nipples. I want to know if they are OK. You know; they’re changing day to day.”
“Esty, I think you’re horny,” Xingxing said in her quiet voice.
“Please,” I said simply, without emotion.
“Well, lift that t-shirt some.”
I pulled the shirt completely off and lay down beside her. She placed a hand on my bulging belly and ran her hand in circles. Then she lifted her hand off my belly and an electric moment later I felt its warm touch on my right breast.
“Kiss me, Xingxing.”
She shifted her position, kissed me on the lips, and then lifted her head back from mine.
“I mean really kiss me.”
She placed her lips on mine, pushed in her tongue, and met my tongue in a pas de deux. As we kissed, her hand on my left breast moved around and around pushing and gently twisting the nipple this way and that.
I pushed her shoulders up so that our lips parted. I took her hand from my breast and sat up.
“I’m sorry, Xingxing. It wasn’t like I’d hoped.” I turned and picked up my shirt and pulled it back over my head.
Before I could stand, Xingxing said, “Stay here. Birthdays can be a rough, especially in interstellar space.”
I didn’t know what I wanted. My brain felt like it shut down. Xingxing put a hand on my shoulder. “Esty, your muscles are way too tight. Lie back down and let me give your muscles a little massage.”
I did as she asked, and the massaging felt at once painful and relieving. It was as though an electric current moved out from the tight shoulder muscles and carried the tension away with it. In time, the tightness was gone, and exhaustion filled me.
“Much better,” Xingxing said. “Sleep now.” And then, “Lights out.”
Saturday 29 December 2812
Christmas has come and gone, and my spirits have been good. Thanks to Xingxing, massages have been a frequent luxury and a welcome validation that I am loved. As expected, Kidlet garnered the most Christmas presents of anybody. She has booties, caps, mittens, blankets, toys, towels, washcloths, shirts, onesies, diapers, aloe lotion, and every day or two George delivers more. On his most recent delivery, he ambled into my room unexpectedly when I hadn’t a stitch of clothes on. I gave a little yelp and started to cover myself before bursting out in laughter at my reflexive and totally unnecessary modesty. I don’t think George got the joke.
I’m so big now that waddling is my standard means of locomotion. Kidlet responds to poking by kicking back. It is so entirely awesome knowing there is an autonomous being in there, but I can only take so much kicking at a time.
Thursday 31 January 2813
Kidlet is huge. I am so ready for this person to move out of her current digs and live somewhere else for a while. It strains my credulity that she can exit in any natural way. Slice me open first – yes, that will work. ¿What if my tummy explodes from her growing so large? Yes, that will work. ¿Give birth to her through my vagina? No way! Impossible. Can’t be done. ¿Who dreamt up that sadistic idea, anyhow?
Officially and functionally, the surgical robot will be my midwife. However, Celeste will come over and join Xingxing for the birth and that makes me feel a lot better. It’s not that I don’t trust the robot, but its bedside manner is deplorable.
Saturday 2 February 2813
Dear Mom,
Once again we are at zero g. I cannot tell you how much more comfortable it is getting around in zero g as pregnant as I am. It’s too bad we will be spinning up to 80% g again soon. I wonder whether Kidlet can feel the differences.
We didn’t program Tribble to handle zero g so it was careening around and caterwauling. He knocked off the cloth we taped over stuff on the kitchen counter and it took several minutes to capture everything that was floating around. I’ve turned Tribble off for now.
Sitara, Captain Perry, and the controller are busy jettisoning the 9 disposable FECS engines and the empty propellant tanks. Tiny boosters will send them slowly off at right angles to our path. We don’t want them crashing into New Earth, destroying some important shrine, and setting off an interstellar war. The full tanks that went out years ago are up ahead and accelerating to match our speed. It’s five times as much propellant than we’ve had before.
Here’s a coincidence: Trillium’s total mass – with the propellant tanks we are about to catch – will be exactly the mass of the rocket that launched the first people to the moon back in the 20th century.
Trillium is at its maximum speed for the remainder of the journey. Here are the amazing numbers. We are traveling at 15% light speed. This means that according to your observations we are going ‘only’ 14.88% light speed and the difference is due to our clocks ticking 1.15% slower than yours. But contrary-wise, we would conclude that your clocks are ticking 1.15% slower than Trillium’s! Special Relativity is so cool and I’m giddy knowing we are actually traveling at a relativistic velocity compared to Earth.
Every second puts us another 45,000 km farther from you. What won’t change for nearly 300 years is the Doppler effect; both sides are receiving radio data at a frequency 15% lower than transmitted. Fortunately, that doesn’t cause a problem. We just have to buffer audio & video signals and play them back faster.
¿Oh, and how long does it take a radio signal to cross this 555 billion kilometers between us? A whopping 29 days.
We’ve finished eating most of our original food supplies. The greenhouse food and synthmeat were being produced faster than we could eat the stuff, so we’ve slowed production to match our less-less-than-voracious appetites.
We are all healthy and safe as any six people anywhere.
Thank you for the pictures showing your apartment make-over. It’s beautiful and what especially counts for me is that you won’t ever have to put up with drab worn-out furniture again.
Love you,
Estrella
I put the email into the ‘send’ queue and then copied all but the last paragraph to send to Lester, María, Jalal, Nguyen, Dr. Blackwell, and Caleb with a few minor changes for each. I didn’t bother sending one to Alexi; I doubt he cares.
Sunday 3 February 2813
I had nothing better to do so I watched Hvezda as she investigated LPCP 205 Golf. She found a stretched power wire and, using her needle probes, determined that it was electrically open. She patched it with a jumper wire before returning to the Tech Module.
Now with that bit of repair, the disk will be collapsed down to the fuselage to minimize long term wear from rarified dust we are ploughing through at nearly 45,000 kilometers per second. It needed to be open for dissipating heat from the engines, but now Trillium will be coasting for the next few hundred years. We will periodically unfurl the disk for high bandwidth communications on a set schedule, however.
When Hvezda is back in the Tech Module and the disk is folded like a stored umbrella, we will spin back up to stay healthy.
Monday 18 February 2813
The labor contractions are freaking fierce. My b-mod keeps them from being painful, in a sense, but they feel like they are ripping my insides apart and are going to make my head explode; and there’s nothing I can do about it. The exertion is overwhelming. But a funny thing happened with these contractions; I lost all of my modesty. Just this morning I told my crewmates that they would not get to see the birth. Now, no such compunction exists.
Hey world, hey you aliens! ¿Want to stare at my crotch? No problem. Take pictures if you want. Let me spread my legs out wider so you can get a better view. No problem. Move that cam in closer. Too freaking weird. Maybe it’s a function of the exertion; maybe hormones have something to do with it; maybe Kidlet is controlling my brain; maybe all three.
Celeste made the kilometer trip up from the Command Module and descended the kilometer to here. She and Xingxing are taking turns holding my hand during the contractions and listening to me whimper, wail, curse, and scream. This is a fucked way to reproduce.
Tuesday 19 February 2813
She’s here. She’s beautiful and healthy. She’s lying on my chest. Celeste and Xingxing took her from the surgical robot and put her here. I’ve already expelled the placenta. The unbelievably intense labor is a fading memory. The robot is cleaning up the considerable mess between my legs and on the floor. I’m exhausted. It’s almost one hundred hours, ship’s time, on 19 February 2813, birthday of Esperanza María Ramirez, Trillium’s seventh crewmember.
Recovering from the experience, Esperanza knows it is her mother under her as she rests. Her lungs are processing air for the first time. Everything sounds different. Her retinas communicate their experiences via the optic nerves to the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and to the superior colliculus; and the retinohypothalamic tract carries some less data-rich visual information to the pretectum area. The resultant images are far more varied than before.
Esperanza desires to see more. She pushes down with her arms and lifts her head; in some miraculous way, she already knows how this is done. She turns her head to the right and takes in the blurry yet excitingly varied scene. With amazing strength, skill, and confidence, she then turns her head to the left to view yet more variety. Yes, this place is good. She settles back to mother’s breast and rests, unaware of her future role as a Sky Child.