The Pull of Gravity
by Daniel G. Keohane
Jin woke, then waited, but no one came. Eventually he slid himself free of the cradle. Everyone else around him slept on, including his parents. Jin’s steps were heavy. Gravity was working; the Han Fei’s two-K ring still spinning enough for near-full g.
At his age he could have cared less about something as mundane as gravity. Later, it would become an obsession. The twelve-year-old walked from the room with the slight, forward-leaning gait everyone had in rings. The wide hallways of the Han Fei allowed people to breathe, at least emotionally, with large windows on one side. The shutter closest to him was currently raised, implying proximity to a planet or some other large body. Otherwise…. No, he thought, they wouldn’t be that stupid.
His waking hadn’t been detected yet by the crew, bridged on the opposite side of the ring. Perhaps they were too busy staring at all the mentally-stabilizing images of Filo’s Planet, their destination, while they monitored navigation and internal systems. No one noticed the boy who’d woken off-schedule and was now stepping into the viewing hall outside the sleep center.
As Jin walked to the window, automated systems sensed someone approaching and dimmed lights. The universe beyond was vast but not empty. White stars and yellow points of distant planets, red-tinged swatches of nebulas, fuzzy-edged galaxies. The black surrounding it all emerged as faint clusters of more stars. Too many to be possible; too many to comprehend as his frantic mind invented details of its own beyond the glass. Above, swirling without motion like a celestial carnival ride, the shining colors of spiral galaxy NGC 5668.
Jin did not belong there. None of them did. The pull of the ring’s outer floor was a false pretense of being on-world. His feet should be on terra, held down by it. Nothing born under gravity belonged out here. They needed to leave before the angels lurking beyond these reinforced walls turned their annihilating eyes his way. Even now they cried for him to leave, scolded without words. Jin splayed his hands against the glass and begged God for forgiveness, for stepping too far over the line He’d drawn against humanity. The boy cried his whispered penance against the glass.
His body lifted from the floor. As soon as gentle hands pulled him from the window, the heavy shutter closed. A man’s voice spoke comfort. He was safe. This was never true, however, not while they were out here.
Sixteen years later, Jin K’anei tumbled into wakefulness with his usual gasping for air. The ship’s AI dinged once. It would ding again if he didn’t respond, so he muttered into the mattress, “I’m OK. I’d think you’d be used to how I wake up by now.”
Another ding, softer. System going away, or pretending to. It never truly went away.
He couldn’t remember what he’d dreamt, but most likely it was the same as always, the moment on the Han Fei when he was a kid, based on how he’d come to the surface struggling to breathe, as if that moment in time still tried to suck the life from him while he slept, a succubus borne on memory.
He lay on his stomach, the mattress pad damp with a line of his drool, and let his arm drop onto the discarded pillow. Still gravity, then, that was good. Over a week on this cramped, two-person rental and he still didn’t trust it to do what it was supposed to.
This ship’s wheel was big enough for point-six gee but too cramped for walking. Even if he could, it would make him nauseous. At least when he lay horizontally, his limbs and organs were mostly the same distance from the curved floor under the bunk. It kept him from throwing up and satisfied ISO’s health requirement of eight hours a day in minimum half-gee, both to maintain bone density and keep him from going mad this far out from true gravity.
Jin crawled into the hub, breathing through the nausea as he transitioned to zero gee. No one else he knew ever complained about the sensation. He simply wasn’t cut out for this kind of travel.
Yet, after circumventing the second jump Hole outside of the 2JA2 system, he was well beyond any planetary orbit. Accelerating farther every minute into unmapped territory. Eventually the fuel cells would wear out. This rental was too small to bother with its own recharge sails. Not that it mattered. He wasn’t turning back.
Jin hadn’t left his wife for this jaunt into the outer system only to return home as if nothing had changed. He didn’t completely understand why he was here, but the certainties he could identify were too deeply entrenched in his mind to question.
He would accelerate in this direction, towards nothing but three galaxies looking like paint spills in the distance but never reaching them because such a span in the forbidden realm of angels was too large for the human mind to consider. His mind, at least.
Secondly, as he approached the no-return point based on fuel, he would do nothing but continue in this direction until he died of starvation or more likely went mad and did something stupid like step out of the airlock. There was a third option, one increasingly prevalent in his brain these past few months. This was what pushed him beyond his self-imposed banishment on Filo’s Planet and gave him a destination, vague as it might still be.
Seven months ago, while Tanitha and her coworker Keers were returning from supposed business on Empathy (even for spouses, Jin’s no-space rule had been firm enough that he had refused her half-hearted requests to come along), the urge to leave her – leave them, as it was time to stop fooling himself about Keers’ place in their lives – to come out here grew from frustrated ember to obsession. He wondered if everything that happened to him as a boy had been leading to this moment – a specific time in that moment’s future.
An invitation.
It was possible that he’d never fully recovered, either.
He pulled himself into the control room at the ship’s fore. The reinforced front-facing view was shuttered. Beyond would lie the three unreachable galaxies and, to starboard, looking close enough to reach out and touch, the Willow Nebula. That was something he looked forward to seeing soon.
Still, one unshakable truth held him back: nobody was supposed to be out here. When the Han Fei’s System had woken him from sleep sixteen years ago then coincidentally left the observatory shutter open, he’d flipped out for a couple of weeks, mind bent under the universe’s vastness. Everyone’s did, without the right precaution.
Humanity had finally acknowledged the importance of gravity beyond a force attracting one body to another. It held the human mind in check, like a parent embracing her child after a nightmare. The larger the gap between gravitational bodies, the more likely humans would be mentally unprepared for such a massive, empty void surrounding them.
In low orbit, or with another object such as a moon in sight, these gravitas sine effects were minimized. Most long-distance journeys required the use of cryo-sleep, even in large-ringed vessels with decent false gravity. The rules were simple and never broken. Keep to the most direct routes between worlds. Viewports must be shuttered until the destination was in sight.
Everything, a bandage to a larger disease. Humankind was terrestrial, meant to flourish on solid ground.
It didn’t belong out here with the angels.
Jin strapped himself into the pilot’s chair and eyed the icon displayed just out of reach of his seat. The switch, along with a verbal override, would raise the shutter. He would then take in the outside universe and allow the knowledge to slowly dawn that he wasn’t observing from the safety of Filo’s surface. His mind would comprehend the hyper-reality before him less and less until, slowly, it burst.
If it didn’t, the ship’s trajectory would eventually take him out of this system. This might happen during his lifetime, assuming said lifetime was not interrupted, or that all of this wasn’t an excuse his subconscious invented to die alone.
Could his motives be that basic?
Keers kept up a minimal pretense that nothing was happening between him and Tanitha. The man still enjoyed emotionally poking Jin, as if needing to become the Alpha in their secret little triangle. Tanitha, with her silent smirks, encouraged the game.
Maybe it took Jin’s unspoken decision to leave them for this insane, celestial whim to acknowledge what was going on at home. Maybe all of this was his stressed mind justifying an elaborate suicide attempt, though Jin didn’t think he loved his wife, or hated her lover, enough to die over.
This, here, was something else. He would follow it to the end of the universe, even if that meant only his own, personal one.
He poked the pasty protein lump with his fork then raised it to his mouth. Jin ate reflexively while staring at the map, an electronic rendering of the region he was accelerating through. Though his speed was nearing fifteen thousand KPS, the relative position of any object never changed. The flashing red fuel gauge (its alarm was muted; too shrill would the sound be in this small room) dropped to fifty percent. He was too far beyond the Hole.
Almost too far.
Forty-nine.
Too far, now.
Stepping off a ledge, passing a point of no return. He was going to die. Belated fear, now. There was nothing out here to save him. No gravitational body, not even the oblivion of a black hole.
It was time, he supposed, to see with his own eyes.
A hopeful part of him wondered, as he unclipped his harness and reached for the icon on the rightmost display, if outside these shutters would be a hangar on Filo’s Planet filled with scientists, that all of this was a simulation.
He whispered, “System, open the shutter,” and tapped the icon. When the shutters silently lifted, the view outside was not a safe, gravity-bound hangar. Only the vast depth of too-bright stars and galaxies and worlds forever out of reach.
Jin closed his eyes and used the armrest to work himself back into his seat and clip on the harness. The sensation of being held was comforting. Would the universe he’d understood for so long end as soon as he opened his eyes? If not now, maybe tonight. Tomorrow. Whenever his mind became too unhinged by the otherness outside.
He opened his eyes.
“Dim the lights.”
The universe was deep and vast and beautiful, not at all frightening. None of it was alien, either, after years staring at images from probes and long-range scopes, all from the safety of home. Jin relaxed in the harness, let his arms drift, stared, calm, unable to accept that what he saw could ever cause madness.
We will not send you away as we have the others.
Jin slowly pulled his arms closer to his chest. “System,” he said, trying to sound casual, “did you just hear a voice other than mine?”
“No, I did not,” replied the sultry voice of his wife. Tanitha’s personal setting, carried with his protocol whenever he traveled. It was meant as a joke, but he never wanted to give the wrong impression by changing it.
“Did you detect anything abnormal in the past couple of minutes, a transmission of some sort?”
His wife answered, “There was a sudden spike in low level gamma radiation against the hull exactly thirty-nine seconds ago.”
“Nothing happening now?”
“All external readings are normal.”
“Let me know if that happens again. And change your voice to installation-default female.” He wasn’t going home, anyway.
“Change confirmed,” said a less judgmental voice.
He took in a breath, let it out. That other voice, the one in his head, had only been a result of the drama of opening the shutter. The universe outside filled with more light as his eyes adjusted. Stars, stains of color from bodies never quite sharpening into focus. So far away, all of them.
You are apart from all else in this moment.
“External gamma levels have risen again.”
You are not alone. We are here.
“External gamma levels maintaining.”
“Thanks, System. Quiet now.” He cleared his throat. “Who…” if this was happening, the expected breakdown, he might as well play along. “Who are ‘we’?”
System said, “I do not understand the question.”
“System, thank you. Levels the same?”
“Yes.”
“Do no reply going forward unless I prefix it with ‘System,’ except to inform me if anything changes.” He didn’t know what gamma levels did, but assumed they were connected somehow to what was happening.
The AI beeped softly in acknowledgment.
Silence for a time. Then, We are here.
“Where?”
Here. Beyond the array of passages.
“The wormholes?”
His scalp tingled. That happened a lot in space travel, even in the big ships. Jin had always assumed the cause was environmental, like stray static. Now, it implied something else, especially when the non-voice said, Yes.
“You … did you just read my mind?”
It is a simplistic way of putting it, but it will suffice.
And they’d been doing it for a long time. To him, at least.
He remained silent. Let them talk if they wanted. None of this was real.
“Gamma levels increasing point-two percent. Leveling.”
His scalp tingled again, more pronounced than before, like insects crawling over his skin. Jin was suddenly very tired.
“No,” he whispered. Wanted to scream for help, beg System to put out an alert.
… maybe it would anyway … he fell …
… and opened his eyes. The heavy assurance of the bedroom comforter Tanitha insisted they use regardless of the room’s temperature. It lay over him, doubled in spots where Keers had kicked off his side towards the middle. The man was sleeping beside him, facing away to the right, snoring softly. Somehow, this fact didn’t ellicit any feelings in Jin except a mild curiosity. Tanitha lay on her back to Jin’s left, mouth slightly parted. She might be asleep, might be pretending; he could never tell. In this moment he was alone in spirit, entombed by the comforter and staring at a ceiling full of stars. The actual ceiling should have been solid, lit solely in predawn gray. Tanitha had been overruled in her desire for a video display above them. With too much connection to the outside world everywhere else, Jin (in a rare moment of assertiveness) stood his ground against bringing more visuals in here.
Now he lay marveling at the deep universe unfolding above and around them. The illusion, or madness, spread halfway down the walls, never completely swallowing them.
This felt different than a dream. He reached over and gave Keers’ shoulder a gentle slap. No response. He gripped tighter, shook him.
Rumbling in response, “Wha, sleep, leave me.”
Not bothering to whisper Jin said, “Don’t you want to see the terrifying grandeur of deep space spilling across my bedroom?” With a start, Jin realized that wherever he might be in this moment, back home Keers was likely here, in his old bed.
“No.” Keers curled tighter under his sheet, turned more onto his belly. “You left… your call. Don’t drop your shit on my head.”
In the moments they’d actually conversed more than a few words, Keers had many such impromptu slang terms. Jin rolled his head along the pillow to the left, lost in a blackness filled with light and swirling kaleidoscope galaxies he did not recognize. He was dizzy by the time he stared at his wife’s possibly-sleeping form.
Eyes still closed, she whispered, “Whatever he said.”
Jin said, “I don’t understand where things went wrong. Feels like you fell out of love with me a long time ago.”
Tanitha smirked in her false sleep. “You really did love me, didn’t you? And I love Keers more than I ever would you. Sorry if that hurts.” She didn’t look sorry.
Her words should have torn into his heart, but under the expanse of the universe rolling above he merely accepted them, and that patronizing smile. “You want me to leave you two to live however you want to?”
“You already have. So, yes, we are.”
“You’re moving back to Empathy with him, I suppose.”
She nodded; eyes still closed. “We’d been planning it since the last trip, knowing you wouldn’t come.”
He sighed, rolled his head away from her and into eternity. “I wish you were this candid in real life.”
She laughed beside him. “You mean this isn’t real?”
On his right Keers mumbled something like, “Seep… kayett….”
“Goodbye, Tanitha.”
“I prefer Tanny, you know.”
He did not know that. Not once in the six years they’d been together. Jin rose up, feeling the dragging weight of the comforter fall away like the last vestige of a broken marriage holding him down. He understood that everything, including the need for gravity, had been a lie.
He dove upward, still choosing to think of down as where he’d come from.
He’d been out for thirty-four minutes according to the chronometer. Jin was still harnessed into his chair. Beyond the viewscreen outer space remained unchanged, nowhere near as wondrous and dramatic as the dream.
Then he remembered. They’d forced him into it.
“System, have you been monitoring my vitals?”
“Yes.”
“Anything weird happen in the last half hour?”
“You slept; ship’s acceleration continued as expected; gamma levels have not yet changed but remain nominal.”
“Nominal as in…?”
“Safe.”
“You never heard any strange voices, maybe some weird alien humming while it waited for me to wake up?”
“No.” After a pause, it added, “Have you?”
The medical-evaluation system must have kicked in. Jin answered, “No.”
Three soft beeps in reply.
“You’re still here?”
Yes.
“What do you want?”
We are ready for you to meet us.
“There are a lot of you?”
We are all of us.
Yea, that had been a stupid question. “How long have you been lurking out here?”
We have been here before you and your kind found your way to us, long before the pathway appeared from your planetary system.
He let that settle in his brain until it made sense. “Why hide like this?”
Jin was beginning to recognize the ensuing pause as the non-voice considering, or interpreting what he’d said. Finally, You were intruding. We were protecting. We watched and waited.
“To see if we’re worthy of your company?”
To measure your threat. We will no longer prevent you from travel, and from seeing.
“What do you – ” Then he remembered the end of the dream, the understanding they had put into him while taking away … something else.
We have removed the fallacy.
Gravity had always held them to the ground, kept objects connected to each other but had never protected anyone from going mad in deep space.
No.
These “people” had planted a celestial vertigo into every traveler’s mind as they moved between worlds. A mental fence to keep them from wandering too far off the path laid out by these beings.
A path, or leash.
Yes.
“To make sure we didn’t bite,” he said aloud.
Pause. Then, Yes.
No one had ever questioned that this dependance on gravity never existed before discovering the Hole leading to Filo’s Planet and beyond.
“Where are you right now?”
A loud beep filled the cabin. Outside something massive blocked out the stars, etched and jagged with details Jin could not completely take in. Too much was suddenly there.
System said, “Proximity alert. Object unsafe distance to hull.”
“How far?”
Beep.
“System, how far?”
“Approximately thirty thousand kilometers. Per protocol I am scanning the object and transmitting all information and communication, including our current coordinates to ISO Command.”
Outside his window was a city, angled and jagged and hurtling towards him. Directly ahead, a square of light caught his eye and grew larger, still too slowly for the speed he was moving. They were probably matching his speed; waiting inside to shake his hand. Or eat him. Maybe he was the appetizer before moving on to the buffet he’d just run away from.
He’d find out soon enough. Jin suddenly hoped, as the square of light engulfed the viewport, that the owners of the non-voice didn’t look like him. There were enough humans hanging around. They needed to be one of many, pushed down the evolutionary scale a little. Get away from themselves and discover what’s been out here waiting.
Waiting, or apathetic to their existence.
Even if Jin was snatched away and devoured, he’d be no worse off than before. Everything everyone had known was about to change. That was good, wasn’t it?
The light swallowed his ship. System beeped and yelled something he couldn’t make out, too focused on the strangeness outside his windows.
All of this, even now, might very well be an illusion, the final snippets of madness before he did something insane like open the hatch. Promises of a future unlike any his species could imagine might only be the final flickers of a dying mind or the first glimpse of heaven. But he would hold on as long as he could, and ride the experience to the end.
_______________
Dan Keohane‘s short fiction has appeared in such venues as On Spec, Cemetery Dance Magazine, Apex Digest, Borderlands 6, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, and dozens more. A founding member of the New England Horror Writers, he co-edited their “Wicked” series of anthologies, and he is an occasional film reviewer.