Black With White Pinpricks

It’s morning and the lights cycle on with that humming sound you only notice when it’s just started. I sit up and blink and rub my face with my fingertips. My skin growls over the ridges of my skull as it moves. It’s not unpleasant. Wake up, feel something.

I tell the wife to get up because today’s the day. She gets out of bed and hits the prompt for two Stim drinks. We’re rationed for four a day so we have our first two at the table, blinking at the walls. We then get up and shamble into our clothes.

Today’s our vacation. I put in for it three years ago and it was approved by two. We were very excited and started telling friends, making plans to bring our son, saving money. Just getting approved for this vacation was the happiest day of our lives. Until today. Today should be better still.

We’re ready. I take a breath and ask “Are we still bringing him?” She looks at me with half-lidded eyes and shrugs slowly. “I think,” I say, “I’d like to bring him.”

“All right,” she replies. She thumbs the prompt for our last two stim drinks.

I walk to the stand and pick up our boy. He’s dusty, so I wipe him gently with a cloth. I swear, again, that this display stand wasn’t worth the money we spent. The wife used to respond that it was better than leaving him on the cabinet like a curio. She doesn’t anymore. She hands me my second stim drink and we walk out the door.

The light outside falls in sheets from the luminance panels mounted in the ceiling, slick with condensation. The streets go off in straight shots to our left and our right down tunnels teeming with pedestrians and air traffic, and if your eyes are good enough you can squint and see the lights of Crawney station, three miles away.

It’s a real effort to not start walking immediately to the south terminal. I remind myself that I’m not working in the heat exchangers today, I’m on vacation. It doesn’t feel real at all. We walk to the east terminal and I begin to feel like I’m doing something wrong; I’m a criminal, I’m a deadbeat, I’m in trouble. I’m none of these things, of course, I just work too much. I’ve been working in the engine sector for six years, in the heat exchangers for four. Today will be the second vacation I’ve had in these six years. Why can’t I get excited? Maybe when this anxiety about not going to work passes I’ll be able to relax and enjoy myself.

At the east terminal I look about. It looks just like the south terminal, but some things are reversed. The staircase is on the other wall in the south terminal. I say so to the wife, who looks around and says “Huh. How about that.” It doesn’t mean much to her because she doesn’t go anywhere regularly, I guess. We sit in a tube and wait for the conductor to begin. I keep shaking my head about at how the terminal is so unfamiliar, but I don’t bring it up again.

“Destinations?” a man with a conductor’s hat asks as he comes near.

“The outer hull,” I say. “The Ecktor window.”

“WELL!” the conductor says with a smile. “You’re in for a treat. Ever been there?”

“No,” I say. I look to the wife to add something.

She looks at me, then at the conductor. “No.”

I add “We’ve heard it’s gorgeous. Been planning this for years.”

“It is,” the conductor says as he scans our cards. “I saw it with the wife last year. Dynamite view. All kinds of stars and nebulas and stuff. We’re in a completely different quadrant now, so your view will be different of course, but we loved our trip. It’s a long one though.”

“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Hh, how long is it expected to be today?”

The conductor blows air through his mustache as he thinks. “The commuters will be on and off for the next two hours. Rush time. I should think four forty, five hours tops.”

We settle in and the tube takes off, flying at ceiling-height down the tunnel. The condensation of old breath and other uncirculated moisture runs down the windows. The wife stares at it, through it. The tube makes frequent stops and bustling people get on and off. The tube goes regularly from being entirely crowded to slightly crowded to not crowded to crowded again.

I’m starting to get over not being on a tube to work, and I relax a bit. I take our son out of my pocket and look at him.

Our boy is a one week-old embryo, floating in stasis gel in a plastic cartridge with the word UTERO™ printed at the top in slanted pink letters. We were approved for the embryo when I got my promotion to heat exchangers four years back. We were so excited. we went in and got the Utero stasis deal (with the damned display stand). We gave them the cells and within a week we were told we could come pick up our boy. As they handed us the cartridge, the technician cheerfully told us to be ready for a wait. The government is slow to approve a full-term child, he said, and the average wait time was between four and eleven months. We nodded, yes, we were ready for a wait, we’d heard the stories, yes yes.

We got home and the wife about rearranged the entire house. Kept calling what she was doing “nesting,” said it’s something the books talk about. We used to sleep with him between us and talk about how we were a family, used to take him everywhere and include him in things. That was years ago.

I want to write a letter to the bureau of childrearing about the status of our application, but you know that when they get that they just put it at the bottom of the stack. You never know when approval’s going to come, it could be in your inbox tomorrow. So our boy sits on his display stand. The wife doesn’t look at him much anymore. I do sometimes. If you hold him up to the light, you can see him. A little pinkish bubble person. We’d thought he would be at least two today.

The wife’s fallen asleep. I don’t know how she does it with two stim drinks in her, but she sleeps a lot these days. I couldn’t sleep if my life depended on it. We’re going to see the Ecktor window, the second-largest viewing window on the entire ship. I can’t imagine seeing that much of anything all at once, I live in a world of tubes and tunnels and passageways and sparse, terrible rooms. I’ve spent my entire life in the midship. A panorama might just do me in.

I turn the cartridge over and feel all the familiar bumps and grooves of my son’s packaging.

We arrive at Saingely station four hours later. The tube won’t be moving for ten minutes, so I wake the wife again and we wander out for something to eat. There’s a strange feeling this close to the outer hull- a lack of social density. Being here, you breathe more easily. The people seem to walk with a freer gait. Their accents are different.

We buy some sandwiches and return to our tube. “Can you feel it?” I ask the wife. She stares at me. I add “The hull! We’re almost there.”

She nods and says “Yeah, I feel it. It’s nice.”

We ride the rest of the way and arrive at the last station on the 143rd lateral tunnel. End of the line, the outer hull. We get off with the tide of tourists and our knees are popping from sitting all day.

This terminal is also different, but in another way entirely. It’s crowded with makeshift trade goods stands. From here to the connecting hallway to the main thoroughfare, small tables with colorful crafts and trinkets line the walls. Things like bits of old sheet-scrap, hand-painted with slogans about how “WE LOOKED THROUGH THE ECKTOR WINDOW” and “I SAW THE SKY,” strung with wire so they might hang on a wall. I notice the traders aren’t selling to the people coming from the window, they’re selling to the people getting off the tubes.

I then take notice of the people returning from the window. Their faces are waxy and drawn, their shoulders stooped. They don’t look like they’ve seen a broad view of unexplored space at all, they look like the people I see on the tube to work in the morning. Worse, even. Then it hits me: they’ve been so dumbfounded by the view that they’re in some form of shock, filing quietly back to the tubes, lost in the memory.

“I’m so excited,” I say to the wife. I hold out the cartridge containing our son. We never named him, we’re saving that for when we get approved to bring him to term. “Do you want to hold the boy?” She looks at the cartridge and takes it in her hand.

We continue to walk with the other tourists. The crowd is slow but up ahead, the crowd is rounding a corner and as they do, each person looks up and holds their breath. It’s one long, hushed gasp passing through a crowd, a hundred throats at a time. “This is it,” I say. We pass beneath a sign reading

WELCOME TO THE OUTER HULL

ECKTOR VIEWING WINDOW

FLOOR 12

“Where goes man’s mind, so go all the worlds he’s known.”

We turn the corner and see the window. It’s the largest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s one solid transparent plate stretching from the left corner of my vision to the right. The floor ends in a bannister, a good hundred feet from the window. As we get closer we see that the window stretches far beneath us and far above. As many as two dozen floors full of people are seeing the same sight we’re seeing, and I imagine they’re all stunned. The entire crowd is quiet but for the ripple of thousands of footsteps and whispers.

Beyond the window is space. I’ve never seen it before, and neither has the wife. You tend to hear it described as black with millions of pinpricks of white with pale clouds of every color in the black, and those clouds are so large and distant that they’re actually BEHIND the stars. That’s not what we see. We’re looking at a vast field of brownish-grey with yawning patterns of violet light. Pale maroon falls in from the window and colors the people.

“Isn’t it amazing?” I ask. The wife doesn’t reply. I look at her and don’t see our son. “Where’s the boy?” She pulls him from her pocket and gives him back to me.

I hold him up. Not at eye level or anything, I know he can’t see, but all the same I feel like this is an important moment for the family. I don’t feel foolish doing it.

“Shame about the dust,” someone says. I look to my left and there’s a man in a sweater.

I stare at him. “Sorry?”

“The dust cloud.” He waits for my response, sees I’m baffled, and says “Interstellar dust. We’re passing through an enormous dust cloud right now. It’s a shame, because all these people came to see space.”

I feel like my chest fills with water. “Wait. We’re not seeing space right now?”

“Well yeah, that’s space, but... that’s all right outside the window. You’re not getting the full view. You’re not seeing stars.”

“Stars, right,” I mumble. “Black with white pinpricks.”

“That’s it.” He pauses, looking at me. “Sorry if I ruined your time here, pal. We’ll be through the cloud in a day or two.”

I shrug. “Thanks.” He walks away. My eyes are darting around the dust cloud. Stars are behind it, way back there, somewhere.

The wife is staring straight ahead, but her eyes are unfocused. She’s not even looking at the dust. I guess I can’t blame her. Once you know what it is, it just doesn’t hold the same command.

I let another twenty minutes pass. The window is still the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen, but I’m tired of looking at it. “We should probably get going soon,” I say. “We’ve got five hours on the tube before bed.” The wife nods and turns from the window, making her way back through the crowd.

Now that I’ve decided we should leave, I don’t want to turn away. I keep staring. I hold my son up against the violet light of the window. “Are you in there?” He doesn’t answer and a gap doesn’t open briefly in the cloud to reveal black with white pinpricks. I wait several moments before wilting and lowering my arm to hold him in my pocket.

Turning from the window, I walk back to the terminal. The people around me look like my wife and I do, and the merchants don’t try to sell us anything. We sit on the tube. The light is once more the familiar white sort I’ve always known, and the condensed breath-rain drizzles down the glass at our backs.

I quietly resolve to be more like the wife and to be less affected by the world around me. She’s far less vulnerable to getting excited about things, and I imagine it’s a much more pleasant way to live. Just fervent acceptance, no matter what comes at me. It sounds nice. I grip my son tightly, waiting for some impulse from him to tell me to keep waking up and feeling something. I’m still gripping him when the tube takes off, returning us to midship. Back to the engine sector.

I have work in the morning.