CAPACITY

“The shuttle!” Justinian whispered. “You could have called for David Schummel and the shuttle. Why didn’t you think of that?”

If you stay on the flier you will die of starvation. I don’t know what to suggest. Do what you think is best. The manual release for the door is just here.

The writing stopped just by a flap that had popped open in the rear wall, just by the hatch. Justinian frowned. Manual release-what did that mean?

Inside the flap there was a handle, a jar of baby food, and a spoon. The baby reached out for the food, crying desperately. Justinian sat down on the floor and balanced his son on his knee. He opened the jar and began to feed the child, wishing he had something to wipe the streams of yellow snot that ran from his nose. The baby ate hungrily.

“There, there, baby boy. Come on. Eat nicely.”

When his son had calmed down a little, he reached out and gave the handle inside the flap a couple of exploratory turns, then glanced back towards the exit hatch. It hadn’t moved. He turned the handle some more and his arm quickly began to ache from the exertion.

This time he wasn’t sure whether the hatch had moved fractionally. Was there now a little shadow where there had not been one before, right at the top of the doorway? He didn’t know. He fed the baby a few more mouthfuls and then continued turning the handle.

After five minutes of exhausting winding, a gap of approximately three centimeters had opened up to the outside world. He could see nothing through that gap but greyness, but even as he looked away, virtual colors seemed to dance and play at the edge of the opening. He looked back to see the greyness, and then away. Again, the memory of colors danced before his eyes. Just what was waiting out there? For a moment he wondered about winding the door shut again, blocking out whatever danger lay beyond, then hiding in the ship, waiting for possible rescue. After all, something that could cause a ship’s TM to commit suicide and a robot to retreat right inside its fractal skin should be more than capable of disposing of a man and his baby.

The baby had finished his food. He pushed the spoon away with one hand, chuckled, then stood up unsteadily.

“What do you want?” Justinian asked.

The baby looked up to his father and laughed again, this time a deep belly laugh. He reached out and took hold of the handle, wanting to join in the game. Bright blue eyes smiled up at him as the baby babbled something and pointed to the gap. Colors dodged from view around the edge of the door. The baby was telling him something. Justinian wished that Leslie was here to translate.

“Berber berber ber!” The baby was gazing earnestly at Justinian, who shivered as his son pointed back to the door. Surely whatever was out there could not be speaking to a fifteen-month-old child? And then he half glanced again at the apparent flickering of the colors around the door frame. There was a pattern to the flickering, he realized. It didn’t seem to be quite random. Maybe he should just close the door and sit and hope for rescue.

He knew there would be none. He resumed his winding.

It took Justinian over an hour of exhausting work to open the door fully. The kaleidoscope effect faded to nothing as the gap between the hatch and the flier widened. Nonetheless, the baby kept grabbing Justinian’s arm and pointing out at the bleak rocky landscape that lay outside. He would regularly look up at Justinian and burble something.

“What is it?” Justinian asked, but the baby just kept tugging and pointing.

Justinian shivered as he looked out at the greyness that led away from the edge of the ramp. It was bitterly cold outside; his breath emerged in misty clouds as he stood at the top of the hatch, feeling the last of the flier’s warmth leaking into the miserable day beyond.

The flier was resting at the bottom of a narrow rocky ravine. High jagged walls rose on either side, dry mounds of scree slipping from their bases. Smaller ravines led off in all directions, sloping up and down to form a crazy maze of stone. The scene was so desolate it froze the heart. The baby tugged at Justinian’s leg and pointed again.

“What is it?” Justinian asked. “Hey, you must be freezing. Come here.”

He picked up the baby and walked back into the flier, looking for a passive suit for his son. Most of them lay beyond the locked door of the forward section, but one lay draped over a chair, left there from last night. He picked it up and dropped his son in, folding the little mittens over his cold little hands. As he pulled the hood over the child’s head, the baby pawed at it for a moment with his little mittens, and then gave up. Justinian gave his son a hug, then, with a heavy heart, carried him back to the door. The baby pointed again. He clearly wanted to go outside. Justinian spoke in a hushed voice: “I know. I can feel it, too.”

He set off down the sloping ramp, the temperature dropping as he did so, and stepped onto the grey stone floor of the ravine. It was hopeless: even if he knew in which direction home lay, there would be no guarantee of finding a path that led there. They would wander around in this waterless maze until they both died of thirst.

His ears were cold, so he placed the baby down on the ramp, and working the hood of his own passive suit out from its collar, he pulled it over his head. The baby meanwhile pulled himself upright using his father’s legs for support and set off on his own, tottering on the uneven ground as he worked his way around to the front of the flier. There he pointed ahead to a crack in the wall of rock that stood facing the ship. The ghosts of colors hung in Justinian’s vision as he withdrew his gaze from the crack. Something was calling to them from inside there. He could now hear the voices at the edge of his consciousness.

“That’s where we’re going,” Justinian said sadly. “I know, baby, I know.”

He picked his son up and gave him a hug. The boy wriggled to be put down again.

“I know. We’ll go in a moment. But I don’t think we can go on like this. We need to finish things up first. You need a name.”

Can’t die without a name. Justinian quickly squashed the treacherous thought. He looked around. What names lay here, at the end of the galaxy?

None. There was nothing here but dry stone and gravel, the unliving evolution of the land, the cracks and fissures that were working their way into the skin of a planet far from the baby’s home. There was no help out there, only pitiless indifference. Even the bright orange of the cabin now seemed an alien place, drained as it was of all warmth as the freezing air of the planet seeped inside.

The baby smiled, and Justinian felt a welling pang of despair that he could seem so happy. His only son, and the child didn’t know how little time he had left to live.

He needed a name.

“Not Leslie,” Justinian said. “Never Leslie. But what shall we call you? What would your mummy have wanted?”

And then a warm feeling came over him as he remembered his dream. Anya had woken up and spoken to him. She had heard the baby crying through his, Justinian’s, sleep. What had she said?

“Isn’t that Jesse?”

Justinian smiled. Jesse. It was an odd name, but he liked it. Jesse.

He held his son at arms’ length and smiled. “Jesse,” he said. “Do you like that name? Jesse?”

Jesse wriggled again, eager to be off to the crack in the rocks and the secondary infection.

“Okay,” Justinian said, “Okay, Jesse, we’re going. Now is there anything else we can take with us?”

He took a last look up the ramp, into the cabin of the flier. Strange how he could already be nostalgic about surroundings that he had hated so much during the time he had spent there.