At the start of the trip between two stars, as we speed through the infinite vastness of space, I find myself wandering through the halls of the starship looking for a portal.
There are none, it’s just some romantic expectation of mine. I’d expected I could perch by a portal of some kind and gaze out into the starry heavens scattered outside the half-mile long dart thrown toward another world.
Instead I stop next to a status readout screen and ask it to show me the world outside the ship.
There’s nothing I could see outside this wall looking out, anyway. Not even scattered stars. The faster the ship moves the more light gets distorted. That’s what the screen shows: blue light compressed into a great circle near the front of the ship. Red light behind us.
Relativistic effects make the light show hard for me to understand.
Seeing it on a screen isn’t the dramatic moment I’d hoped for. I go back to my cabin and put it up as a screensaver.
Three months until we make it to Proxima. We’re two weeks into the journey.
Seems like forever. I’ve explored all the guts of the ship. I’m met everyone aboard, all three hundred of us going to Proxima to explore an all new, never-before seen system, and ripped through hours of shows and games to keep myself occupied. It’s going to be a long three months.
I think I may have already made some life-long friends.
“You make it sound like a dorm floor,” Carolina says with a smile.
“It is.” I reach out and touch the screen.
“You seem happy,” she says. “I just… can’t imagine being in a tiny little ship on your way to another *entire* world.”
She’s sad. I can see it in the crinkle at the corner of her eyes.
I broke her heart.
I think, maybe, sometimes when I’m wandering around the corridors, I’m half looking for her.
“I’m sorry.” Carolina pushes her hair aside in a nervous, self-conscious gesture. “I should have gotten over it all sooner and sent you a message. I was just so hurt. Angry. Scared. But I understand why you did it. Who gets a chance to go to another world? You had to take it. We’d barely been together long enough for me to ask you what I did.”
It’s a technological miracle this message even reaches us. I don’t get much mail, there’s always a festive party on the ship when mail call alarms go off.
“But I guess, it’s easier for me to take the time I needed. For you it’ll appear I got over things quickly.”
She laughs. I look at the date stamp. Six months.
Wow.
She’d stewed that long before trying to talk to me again?
I laughed and smiled. Carolina, passionate and strong-willed.
***
The twin paradox: if you have one twin sitting on Earth and another accelerating away from Earth on a starship time passes at different rates for them.
The closer you get to the speed of light, the faster time passes differently. At ninety percent the speed of light time passes half as fast for a person traveling as the one at rest.
The closer you get to the speed of light the more the ratio grows.
“I keep plugging the Lorentz equation in to figure out far apart we’ll be in time,” I send back to Carolina. “It only took me a week to get your first message, but for you it was six months. It feels so fresh still. My guilt. The separation. It all feels raw and recent still. By the time you get this, I’ll be so deep in ex territory maybe it’ll be funnier to you.”
I wish her an amazing life.
I wish her good friends.
And, I hoped she would still send me messages, even as she moved on.
“I… don’t want to loose my connection to the world I am leaving behind. It hurt to sever myself from it.”
I wonder if people on oceanic voyages in the ancient days suddenly felt panic as the land slid away behind the horizon and they realized they couldn’t go back until the journey was done.
Because that’s what I feel now.
***
I always wanted to see another world. Wanted to see space. I was the weird kid with the space posters even as I lived in an orbital wheel whipping around Mars.
Dad worked as an asteroid jockey, away from home months on end. Mom was a structural engineer for the whole ring.
It felt like destiny when I’d been selected for the advance Proxima team.
We’d scavenged ancient alien technology out of the Swing-By Artifact, strapped it into a prototype Martian ramscoop ship designed to go out as far as the Oort cloud, and then aimed the whole thing at our nearest star. I *had* to be on that thing. It was everything I’d built my life toward.
And then I’d met Carolina. A software engineer working on the layer between Artifact technology and the ramscoop that would suck fuel up out of the near-vacuum to run our engines.
But she wasn’t on the final manifest.
“I’m just a contractor,” she’d said. “I’m looking forward to going back to McMurdo. I’m an Antarctica girl, through and through. You should come see it.”
I look at a lot of pictures of Antarctica in the second week of the voyage.
***
A strange face is on the screen. Another woman. I can’t breathe. I know I shouldn’t be jealous, I’m the one who left. But there Carolina is with someone smiling in that way only she can provoke.
“It’s been a while, I sort of kept it from you,” she says in the message. “But, we got engaged!”
Engaged.
Just like that.
But it isn’t. It’s been three weeks for me. For Carolina there have been dates, loves, fights, breakups, and adventures all over the old stomping grounds of Earth.
I’ve seen a barrage of pictures of her from all over the world.
Her face looks slightly more weathered, and wise.
I have no claim on her life. This shouldn’t matter.
But it leaves me in a funk for several days.
Until I get a picture of their son. A tiny little thing, precious tiny hands gripping an exhausted Carolina’s.
***
“A lot of people are having trouble seeing family age, now that we’re in the second month,” I tell Carolina. I keep sending messages. She updates me about her life.
And there’s a conversation still happening. A strange relationship that has grown out of the unequal aging speeds, and the truncated nature of what we can communicate.
“The doctor started a support group. A lot of us have lost parents.”
Mom and dad’s messages are hard. They’re so proud, following the details of our adventure. But they’re aging, and fast.
And out here, it’s not so much adventure as tedium. We’re just passengers right now. Nothing brave. We’re just watching the world we knew slowly age past us.
Some of the others have said people have stopped contacting them. They’ve grown apart, even though it’s hardly been any time for us.
I suddenly realize that, at some point, Carolina is going to die and I’m going to see it happen over the next month.
My God. What have I done to myself?
***
Carolina’s baby walks, talks, then becomes a boy who is suspicious of me when she brings him over to the screen to say hi.
She’s a middle aged mother with kind eyes, though sometimes it’s late at night when she sends her messages. Sometimes there’s a hint of exhaustion as she talks to me while cleaning up.
Yet always, always, she sends her messages.
***
“Maybe I shouldn’t have done it,” I tell her, when we hit the halfway point to Proxima. “I feel like a shit. I can’t believe I put you through it.”
I’m looking at her life. Her domestic life. And I wonder what life around Proxima will be? Months more of this tin can I’m in. I’m part of a group that was going to stay around Proxima as the ship headed back. We have machines ready to carve a station out of the first asteroid we find with good metal for us to mine. But I realize it’s going to be years and years, and suddenly it seems less exciting.
I gave up a real life for this sardine life.
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Carolina says. “It was, well, for me, a long time ago. I have a good life. You’re having an adventure for all humanity. We’re just lucky we had Mars. And that we have this.”
I wonder if Amira is jealous of me like I am of her.
“You’re the one that got away,” Carolina laughs with the hard-won knowledge of years of life lived. “And, I guess, for you, I’m the one you left behind.”
And then I feel like complete shit when Carolina sobs on the screen hours later, dressed in all black. It came quick for Amira, an aggressive virus. Something endemic to Antarctica these days.
Carolina’s a single mother, raising a hurting teenager.
***
At the halfway point the ship flips. We all hold a subdued party to watch the screens show what we always keep hoping to have seen with our own eyes.
But we need to be in here, safe from radiation behind the shields.
Carolina has a new friend in her life. A good person.
I stop sending her messages for a few days, not wanting to tell her the adventure has faded away for me. I don’t want to tell her I threw us away for something that is no longer seeming so epic, destined, and amazing.
She breaks up with her new friend. Finds another.
Her son, Benjamin, graduates, gets engaged.
And then, four days later, Carolina smiles.
“I have a new contract at Mars!” she says. There’s another mission, they’ve perfected the Artifact tech. She’s going to do the final testing on the integration.
It’s a lucky break for her, she’s told me income has been tight.
“But that’s not all I want to tell you,” Carolina says. “You’ve been telling me you don’t want to stay on Proxima but turn around and come home.”
I’d do that, and, I haven’t told her, visit her grave. I could never see her again, but maybe I’d meet Benjamin.
Maybe I’d meet people who had once known her, who could tell me whan an amazing life she’d lived.
“Don’t come back to Earth,” Carolina tells me. “Stay on Proxima. I have a berth on the next ship.”
She does the math for me.
As we slowed down for Proxima, she’d be launching.
I would be back in normal time around the new sun. She would be slowing down. On her own three month journey.
“Stay at Proxima, and show me your new world,” she says.
All I have to do is stay put.
How old will I be when that stranger arrives?
Could it be possible that we could recapture what we once had?
She’s sent me an article about two war survivors who were pulled apart, and met after decades.
All I have to do is stay.
One month to go, and on all the screens around the ship, Proxima is growing from a tiny dot into a large sun as we burn to slow down.
“I’ll build you an entire world to see,” I promise her, and kiss the screen.