More importantly, I don’t want anyone in psych to notice, and suggest that maybe they ought to scrap me and try again.
In the dream I’m back on Midgard, out in the woods that run along the crest of the Ullr Mountains. There’s a trail there, eight hundred kilometers of untouched wilderness filled with waterfalls, hundred-kilometer vistas, and trees that have been growing since the original terraformers seeded the place three hundred years ago. I’ve walked it end-to-end four times. There’s a lot of empty space on Midgard, but those mountains are the emptiest place on a mostly empty planet. In all the time I spent out there, I don’t think I saw more than two or three other human beings.
I’m camped for the night, sitting on a log in front of a little fire, staring into the flames. So far, so good, right? Maybe I’m just homesick. But then I hear a noise, like someone clearing his throat. I look up, and there’s this giant caterpillar sitting across the fire from me.
I know I should be freaking out right now, but I’m not. That’s the part of the whole experience that’s most like an actual dream.
The caterpillar and I talk—or try to, anyway. His mouth moves, and sounds come out that sound like words, but I can’t make any sense of them. I tell him to stop, to slow down, that if he would just speak a little more clearly I could understand what he’s saying. He doesn’t, though. He just keeps going, until the listening makes my head start to ache. I look into the fire. It’s running backward, unburning the pile of sticks it’s feeding on and sucking smoke back out of the air. When I look up again, the caterpillar is fading, becoming less and less substantial, until only the smile remains.
Eventually even the smile disappears, and as it does I slide from this half world into a real dream, one I’ve had on and off for years. I’m Mickey2, out on the hull of the Drakkar again, crawling back toward the forward lock as my skin sloughs away and my blood begins seeping from ruptured vessels, covering me like fever sweat and draining into my mouth, my throat, my lungs. I stop, and reach for the clasps at my neck. My fingers are like sausages now, swelling and splitting, but somehow I manage to fumble one clasp open, then the other. My helmet flies away, and hard vacuum sucks everything out of me.
Air.
Blood.
Shit.
Everything.
I should be dead now, but I’m not, and I can’t understand why.
I open my cracked mouth and pull in a lungful of nothing. Before I can use it to scream, though, I snap awake, wide-eyed and sweating in the coal-black dark.
012
MICKEY2 WAS MY shortest-lived instantiation.
Mickey3 was my longest.
It took me a while to get over what happened to One. You never forget your first kiss, right? Well, you never forget your first death either, and the death that my original body experienced was a pretty traumatic one. Two’s ending shouldn’t have been as scarring, mostly because I didn’t actually remember anything about being him—but just knowing that what he went through was bad enough that explosive decompression seemed like a good idea weighed on me. I spent most of my time those first few weeks as Three moping around, jumping at every loud noise and waiting for something bad to happen.
Time went by, though. Weeks turned to months, months turned to the better part of a year full of nothing, and nothing bad happened. Funny thing. As it turns out, even waiting expectantly for a sudden, violent death gets boring after a while.
It was about that time that my general interest in history morphed into a morbid interest in the histories of failed colonies. You wouldn’t think they’d have that sort of material available in the ship’s library—bad for morale and all—but they did. My teachers didn’t talk about the failures in school. I wouldn’t necessarily call what they fed us propaganda, but in every subject, from biology to history to physics, they made sure to weave in something about the importance and nobility of the Diaspora, and the idea that it’s been an uninterrupted parade of successes as humanity has spread across the spiral arm was pretty strongly implied if never actually stated—so I was surprised to learn that there have been almost as many failed efforts as successes over the past thousand years.
When colonists set out in a ship like the Drakkar, they really have no idea what they’re likely to find at the end of the journey. The physics of antimatter drives dictate that they only work at scale, and antimatter production is insanely difficult and expensive, so a world looking to launch a colony ship can’t just send out probes to a bunch of likely stars to scout things out before they go. So, they make do with what they can observe from their home system. When we left Midgard, for example, we knew we were headed to a G-type main-sequence star. We knew it had at least three smallish, rocky planets, and that one of them was at the outer edge of the star’s Goldilocks zone. We knew that planet—our target—had water vapor and at least some free oxygen in its atmosphere, from which we inferred that it almost certainly supported some form of life.
That was about it, honestly—and because Midgard and Niflheim aren’t actually that far apart as these things go, and also because our powers of observation have improved substantially as time has gone on, we knew more than a lot of colony ships have. One of the shortest records I found was for an expedition launched from Asher’s World a bit more than a hundred years ago. Asher’s World is about as far out toward the rim as we’ve ventured, and the stars are spread thin there. Their target was over twenty lights distant, which is at the outer range of what a colony ship can do, and maybe a little beyond. The adult colonists were old, and tired, and really hungry by the time they finished their deceleration burn, and their ship was practically falling apart.