Anticopernicus by Adam Roberts

Author:Adam Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Ancaster Books

4. Second contact

She was alone again, and that was alright; although being alone in her house, with its beautifully manicured garden, was a different thing to operating a basket-case spaceship with a crew of two corpses. There was a further leak, and this threw the ship into a shimmy-shake and slow toptail rotation. Ange tweaked and toyed and adjusted her attitudinals to cancel this new irregular trajectory, but doing this shook free further jinks in the system. Breathing air flooded into the void in a swarm of crystals. For one heart-bumping moment Ange thought she wasn’t going to be able to seal off the delinquent pipe from the main supply, and she entertained crazy ideas of having to suit up, go out and stuff rags or something in the hole. But then she was able to seal the vent, and only a few days breathable air lost.

She wondered if she ought to keep a tally of unlucks; but that felt like itself an unlucky thing to do. The tossed coin may keep coming up tails, but the coin itself doesn’t know that. It goes into every tumble and spin with the beautiful clarity of 50:50 as its outcome.

She did not talk to herself. Only people disinclined to solitude, or people who only mistakenly believe that they enjoy solitude, talk to themselves when they are alone. She was perfectly at ease by herself, and went about her business. Besides what was there to say?

There was a fire in one of the forward compartments, and the automatic dampeners failed (because she had—to make assurance doubly sure—sealed off all tubules with anything less than 100% structural integrity). By the time she had gotten the pipes open the dampener head had melted and fused in the heat. She was forced into uncomfortable passivity as the fire burnt through to the shielding supplies of ice and finally burnt itself out. But this weakened the whole forward portion of the craft. For the first time she began to weigh the chances that she would never make it back to Earth. Rescue was still weeks away, and her entire tech-system was now precariously balanced. It would take only a few more malfunctions to finish her off.

Still, she lived another day. And then another day after that.

She suited up and, despite the discomfort, stayed that way; sleeping with the helmet hooked beside her. The air started smelling bad, and she discovered—after a long, wearisome search—that mould was growing inside the recycle pipes. She cleared as much of this out as she could, although there wasn’t a way to get at the most deeply located colonies of the stuff short of physically dismantling the entire system. She ate. She drank water. She slept. She lived another day. She thought about all the things in her life that would be rendered forever unfinished by her death. But then she thought to herself: after all, anticlimax is the currency of mortality. If I live, she decided, and get home again I

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