Asymptote
I wrote this while substitute-teaching a math class. When lacking ideas, just look about for any damn thing. This story was modestly published in the British zine Jupiter.
Asymptote
By Jens Rushing
Our course describes a diminishing gyre. The great bowl of the first curve swoops two hundred thousand miles wide – the next, one hundred fifty-seven thousand, give or take, and so doing, we spiral inward. The epicenter of this spiral is RUBY 34-2012, a dwarf planet suspected of titanium deposits. We will never touch the center. We chart an asymptote; our final course will hold us in orbit, each lap of the planet shaving a few millimeters from our orbit. A course approaching zero but never becoming zero – asymptote.
We’re the first to survey this little rock, and we need only photograph it. We come only to behold the thing, not to know the thing. Our craft isn’t even capable of landing. We’ll orbit for a few months, map the surface, and return home.
I use future tense when I should use the conditional: would, could, should. The condition in this exercise is that I, Terrence, am a colossal fuck-up, a mental abortion, a blind tongueless parasite unable to even push the right fucking buttons at the right fucking time, and in my utter incompetence I have graduated from dipshit to murderer.
Our crew is small: me, my brother Mike, and his wife Sara. This job was really a favor to me. I know jackshit about piloting, less about surveying, but they took me along. I needed the money, the direction, the company, et cetera, and they dropped this gig in my lap at just the right time. When I protested on grounds of ignorance, inexperience, and plain terror of spaceflight, Mike just slapped my back and said, “No worries, Terr. Piece of cake, if this monkey can do it,” jerking a thumb at Sara, who laughed and made monkey faces. That’s the kind of guy Mike is – kind, generous even if it kills him.
And Sara, the only soul that means half as much to me as Mike. After Mom died, Mike and I quit talking for a while. We just didn’t want to see each other, and we went our ways. He got into the private spaceflight sector, got so busy we couldn’t have seen each other even if we’d wanted to, and I figured it was all a lost cause. I was ready to drift off, disappear, maybe take everything in my stash at once and float off on a candy-colored cloud, when Mike called. He was in town and wanted to see me. We did Thai. He observed that I looked like hell, glossed over his work, and jabbed a chopstick through a piece of peanut chicken (cold).
Finally: “I’ve been seeing this girl.” And, on this subject, he started talking, really talking, and I knew that the only reason I was seeing Mike at all was because of this girl – that she loved him enough to learn all about him, including the dissipated little brother, the estrangement from whom was a constant source of regret, and that she loved him enough to kick his ass until he did something about it. Ergo: lunch.
Mike loved her, I could tell, more than he realized, and if I wanted to love Mike, I had to love her, too. I met her soon after, and my appreciation for her increased through the meeting. The reality lived up to the expectation. I don’t usually get along with women, or men, really, but Sara was exceptional. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, naturally, and (I can say this with a straight face) a fount of joy to all around her. She had a soothing presence. If flowers did not literally spring in her footsteps, if the lions and the lambs did not lie down together at her feet, it was only for a want of actual sorcery in the world, which I have always lamented anyway.
From the very first, she was determined to love and improve me, though I made it hard for her. But I was Mike’s brother, so I was her brother. She got me a job at their plant (which I lost) and introduced me to her attractive friends (whom I repelled), and she never gave up. And now I’ve killed her, glory be.
Things were good, even pastoral. Most weekends, we went to the garbage-strewn beach, had barbeques on their patio, drank Shiner and swatted mosquitoes and cursed the humidity. Mike unfroze. It was just like Mom had never died.
Through the glass I can see them exhale in slow-motion. The cryo cycle is deep, and the revivification process is damned complex. Their fault. Should’ve known better than to trust it to an unregenerate retard like me.
“Just follow the directions,” Mike said. “We practiced this a million times. You can’t screw this up, Terr. You’d have to be a genius to screw this up.”
When I worked at their avionics plant, I drove a forklift in the warehouse. Day two, still pretty stoned from the post-day one celebration, I ran the forklift into a stack of plastic drums filled with hydraulics fluid. The forks speared the drums, the fluid gushed out, the barrels up top tumbled down and broke with their great weight, and the warehouse was awash in the red-brown liquid. Everything happened so quick; the boss was screaming, someone hit an alarm, so I hid out in the bathroom for a while, then snuck out and never returned. How about that? I can’t even work a fucking forklift, and Mike thinks a hundred hours of training and a certificate will make a tech out of me, just because I’m clean these days. I kept telling him – it wasn’t the drugs that made me such a fuck-up.
So I was horrified, devastated, but not surprised when the klaxon shrieked during the warm-up stage, the crucial stage three that must not be interrupted, and the seals split and spewed ammonia-stinking cryo gasses everywhere. The EKGs went berserk – beepbeepbeepbeep – and I slapped at buttons. More alarms chimed in, and I did what I did in the warehouse: I freaked. I tore at my hair and curled up in the corner while my brother and sister-in-law suffered.
Christ, how they suffered. The cryo gasses dull your senses. In training, Mike numbed my hand with the gasses and ran a needle through my palm – no pain. Yet this agony cut through the drowsy numbness. Torment transformed their faces as a lightning bolt transforms a tree. They moaned, they bit their tongues until blood ran from the corners of their mouths. They choked, they gasped, but they did not wake. I could only watch.
In stage three, the level of oxygen in the mix is slowly increased and higher brain functions are coaxed awake. The mixture must be monitored carefully at this stage, as the autosensors are incapable of the precision required. But I missed something, had to have missed something, the mix swung too far the one way, too fast, and the adreno cocktail was injected before they were ready. They were caught at the brink of consciousness in half-thawed bodies, neurons dry-firing like corroded spark plugs. No wonder, their pain.
When the cryo booth malfunctioned, and I wildly slapped at the controls, hoping for something, a gasket popped, and adreno fluid sprayed across the chamber. We lost most of our supply before I got it under control. The fluid is essential to the reviv process. We have no additional doses.
They’re not dead yet, but it’s not a far trip.
We’re two years away from Earth, so returning is impossible. I don’t have the training. We’ve been taking turns running the ship all this time. Most of the time, it was all autopilot, so I only had to run on the treadmill and read book after book. The only remotely challenging part of my job was the reviv process, which I did a thousand thousand times in training, with great success.
Goddamn you, Mike. Goddamn you for doing this to me. Goddamn you, too, Sara, for trying to make something of me. Consider your lesson learned.
I tear through the tiny ship. I just need to run, to get away from them. Even in half-death, they’re saying, “You can fix it, Terr. We believe in you.” I kick the pilot’s chair and pound on the wall. I attack it, I just go nuts, kicking, screaming, pounding my forehead on it, hard, relishing the good pain. I strike my head again, too hard, and out I go.
When I wake, I’m staring through the port at RUBY. We’ve completed another lap of the planet. We’re a fraction closer to the goal we’ll never reach. I hear a new alarm from the cryo room.
The computer wants to know whether I want to continue revivification, which is strange, as the fluid levels are too low. Hope squeezes my gut, and, hands shaking, I check the fluids again, then fall back in my chair with a bitter laugh.
One. I can save one of them. The other will endure the reviv process without the aid of stimulants. In simulations, this is one hundred percent fatal.
I can’t deal with this right now. I refuse to. My veins itch ferociously: my brain swells and strains against my skull. I need a hit like I’ve never needed one before. I’ve been clean five years now. I owe that to Sara, too. She kicked my ass just like she’d kicked Mike’s. One day when they came over to my place, she surprised me in my room with a trash bag full of hoses, used hypos, spoons caked with dried blood. She dumped them in a heap on my bed. “What the fuck, Terr? What the fuck?” And I didn’t tell her to piss off, didn’t tell her to mind her own business, thank you, didn’t tell her off for snooping. I was only bitterly aware that I’d disappointed her.
Shame is a great tonic. Shame has a bad rap. It drove me through rehab, kept me clean, because I could not stand to disappoint that source of unreasoning and profound love that terrorized me so. Again – it was like having Mom back.
She healed me. I owe her my life.
And Mike – is my brother.
Their lives are in my hands. They put them there.
I watch RUBY for a while. Then I have an idea. A great idea. The substances for reviv are shot, yeah, but what about for cryo? I check. Mike and Sara can stay cold indefinitely. No ship will ever come this way, of course. We’re in the true anus galaxi out here, and this trip is a private venture, so no one is going to come looking for us.
After divorce, something like sixty percent of the newly created singles remarry within two years. They acquire stepchildren, and get to work procreating with their new spouses ASAP, when all logic dictates caution before re-entering the same snare.
If an elephant falls to poachers, the surviving herd will raise its young.
The cuckoo lays its egg in the nest of other birds, and they raise it as their own. My point is, every living creature instinctively seeks to rebuild its family.
So, orphaned, I rebuilt mine. We rebuilt it, with Sara the foundation, Mike the walls, and me – the curtains. Curtains you can do without, but a house without floor or walls is just stupid. Abomination.
I take off my shoes and socks. I set the timer for the freeze cycle. I climb into the cryo chamber between my brother and sister-mother and take their hands in mine. The lid clicks shut and the chamber floods with cryo gasses.
Through the glass, and through the porthole beyond that, I watch RUBY disappear as the gasses strangle my mind. We will sleep indefinitely. We will approach death in a descending curve, running almost but not quite parallel. A course drawing fractionally nearer and nearer to death but never reaching it – beholding the thing but never knowing it. Asymptote.
The End
Now I am sad. So are you. See you next time.