The landing was bad, and by all rights they should have died when the two-man scout ship cartwheeled over the surface of the world’s ocean. But they didn’t. The ship suffered massive structural damage and would never fly again, but they were still alive.

The main computer is shut down, Earhart’s implant reported. All systems are inoperative.

Earhart unfastened her safety harness and stood up shakily. The flight cabin’s deck pitched gently underfoot. The view out the forward windows was not encouraging; sea-green waves marched endlessly towards the distant horizon.

“Will this thing still float?” her navigator asked.

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” she said. “Not after that landing.”

Noonan closed the front of his survival suit. “The air’s breathable. I’m going topside.” He reached up for the emergency exit’s release lever. The hatch was set into the ceiling of the flight cabin above their seats. A green-tinted sky showed through its porthole.

Earhart grabbed his arm. “Wait a minute. The emergency exit isn’t an airlock; it’s just a door. If the hull has been breached and we open it up, we may start taking on water.”

She could tell by his expression that he did not believe her. He was badly frightened, more concerned with getting out of the ship than anything else. She kept her grip on his arm. “Remember taking a cup and turning it upside down, and sticking it into a bowl of water? The air stayed inside.”

A rivulet of sweat ran down the side of his nose. “If the hull isn’t breached, it won’t make any difference. We’ll still float.”

Earhart relaxed her grip. He understood. “Well if we’re floating, what’s the hurry?”

He nodded slowly. “You’re right. Let’s check the hull before we open any doors.”

It did not take long. Back in the scout ship’s spartan living quarters, water covered the floor. It was not very deep yet; Earhart stepped into it and scratched a waterline mark on the bulkhead. Noonan splashed by her to get their field gear. She watched the mark. By the time Noonan came back with the gear, it was a centimeter under water.

“I found the raft,” he said.

“Good,” Earhart said. “We’re still taking on water. Not real fast; the rising water might be acting like a piston, compressing the air inside the ship. It could reach equilibrium.”

“Or we could be sinking,” he said.

She nodded. If the upper hull was breached, the air inside would simply leak out under pressure.

“We were only a few kilometers from an island when we crashed,” he said. “The raft has a motor. We could reach it.”

“And then what?” Earhart asked, her eyes steady on his. “We aren’t stocked to start a colony. This was supposed to be a short exploratory mission; we’ve only got food for a few weeks.”

His gaze dropped to the water. “There might be something edible in this ocean, something that will keep us going until a rescue ship comes.”

She stared at him silently. There would not be a rescue ship, at least not for many years. She had sent a light-speed distress call before they headed down into the atmosphere, but it would not reach their home for nearly half a century. A ship could travel faster than light, but it was not yet possible to send a tachyonic message.

“If they followed our departure vector…” Noonan started weakly.

She shook her head. “Once we went tachyonic, all bets were off. So far as they’re concerned, we could be in any of a thousand different star systems.”

A muscle in his jaw twitched. “So what do you suggest? Stay here and die?”

She looked down into the slowly rising water. She didn’t want to die either. But they were going to die, eventually. It was inevitable. She sighed. “Let’s get going.”

They gathered up all of the food they could carry and packed it into a pair of duffel bags. By the time they had finished their preparations, the water had risen to their knees. The small eye-level porthole in the main airlock’s outer door showed a deep green murk, full of air bubbles. The ship was riding low in the water.

“I guess we’ll have to use the topside emergency exit after all,” Earhart said with a grim smile. They hauled the gear forward to the flight cabin. Earhart tried to shut the hatch between the cabin and the rest of the ship, but it would not seal.

“The frame must have twisted,” she said. “We may have to move fast after we open the top hatch.”

“Hand me the raft first,” Noonan said. He pulled the emergency exit’s release lever. The hatch dropped downwards a centimeter and the ship’s air whistled through the narrow opening.

Earhart’s ears popped. She reached up and added her weight to his. The hatch opened reluctantly. The whistle of escaping air turned into a gale and water surged into the flight cabin from the aft compartments.

Noonan hauled himself out through the hatchway. When he had gained his feet on the hull, Earhart handed the deflated raft out to him. The compact package was heavier than she had thought it would be. He pulled a pin on the side of the package and with a hiss of compressed gas it unfolded into an open boat.

The angle of the cabin’s deck increased as the ship began to sink, stern first. Earhart passed the first food bag out to Noonan. The second one rolled off the pile into the rising water. She picked up the gear bag in its place and handed it out. The aft bulkhead was almost entirely under water. She hesitated, and then climbed down from the top of the seat and reached carefully for the errant duffel bag full of food.

The ship shifted again and the movement caught her off-balance. She fell head-first into the cold water. For a terrifying moment she was totally submerged. All she could think was that the ship sinking, carrying her down with it. She broke surface with a gasp, full of panic. Her flailing hands hit one of the seat backs. She seized on it and pulled herself out of the water.

Noonan’s head appeared in the hatch. “Where’s the other bag?” he shouted.

It was still afloat, on the far side of the cabin from her. What had been the floor was nearly the wall. She shook her head. “I can’t get it. I’m coming out.”

Noonan swore. “Amelia, it’s right over there. Just go get it.”

“The water’s over my head!”

“You know how to swim,” he said, blocking her way. She glimpsed a wave over his shoulder and realized that he was kneeling in the raft. The water was almost up to the lip of the hatch.

She caught hold of the edge of the hatch with one hand and shoved Noonan backwards with the other. Then she vaulted through the hatch and into the raft, landing in a tangle on top of him.

“God damn it!” he shouted.

She rolled off him and linked her implant to the raft’s controller. The raft’s motor started with an electric whine and she spun them away from the ship, tumbling Noonan over again.

“What the hell are you doing?” he railed at her as he struggled to his knees. “We need that food!”

She motored away from the ship. Water broke over the edge of the hatch and rushed down into the flight cabin. The ship’s nose rocked upwards until it towered over them. Then it slid straight down into the water. For a few unnerving moments they spun lazily around the whirlpool left in the wake of the sinking ship. Then it was gone, and they were alone under the alien sky.

#

The island rose a few meters above sea level, a semicircular atoll of volcanic rock. It did not take them long to explore it thoroughly; it was only a couple of kilometers long and totally barren. Amelia sat down on the edge of the raft, her back to the relentless sun. The afternoon air was hot and held a vaguely chemical odor.

Ammonia, her implant identified it. This is a young world.

“There’s not much to it, is there?” Noonan said.

Amelia shook her head in weary disgust. “How long will our food last?”

Noonan’s gaze turned inwards as he consulted his implant. “We should be able to stretch it out for a couple months, one meal every other day.”

“What about the ocean?” she asked. “Can we get anything out of it?”

He shook his head. “The green color comes from an algae analog. Very primitive, very toxic. I don’t think we can do much with it. We’re about a million years too early; life here hasn’t come along far enough to support us. We’re lucky to have oxygen.”

Amelia looked out over the ocean. She had been in bad spots before, but there had always been hope. If she kept her head together and did not give up, she had always believed she would come through somehow. And she always had. But now she was not so sure. She wanted to live – her body was desperate to live – but there was nothing she could do, nowhere she could go that would make any difference. Her fate was in the hands of others, and the chance of rescue was so small that she could not take it seriously. It was ironic to have come so far, to have conquered the barriers of space and time, only to fall prey to the oldest of problems: starvation.

She realized Noonan had said something and was waiting for a reply.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was thinking about something else.”

“We can use the raft to make a shelter,” he repeated. “I don’t think we’ll need it for anything else.”

“No, I suppose not.” She sighed and with an effort brought herself back to the task at hand. “We should put it on high ground, though. We’re so close to the water here, if a storm came up…”

He nodded. “Near the top of the ridge, on the leeward side.”

#

The days passed slowly as their hunger mounted. Amelia spent most of her time in the shelter they had cut into the rock with their hand lasers. It was little more than a dugout covered by the raft, but it was better than being out in the open. It was hot under the fabric roof, an unrelenting muggy heat that drained what little energy she had. The accident that had stranded them played through her mind over and over again, the memory mercilessly augmented by her cybernetic implant.

The first jump took them across the light barrier, velocity mirrored into the faster-than-light realm. Unfortunately, Noonan had not tuned the tachyonic drive properly, and the jump consumed far more fuel than they had anticipated. They were heading into unknown territory at several hundred times the speed of light, and they were going to have to activate the drive again just to return to the sub-light side of the universe.

Amelia cut it fine; she came out of the second jump on a vector that slung them around the target world’s moon. The gravity whip killed most of their speed relative to the primary; the rest she burned off in an aerobraking maneuver. The ship’s fusion reactor shut down as they crossed the terminator into daylight; her tanks were empty. But there was still hope. The world had water, more water than land. If she could just bring them down safely, they could refuel for the trip back home.

She had gone through the drill before on other planetary exploration missions. Land on a convenient ocean, extract hydrogen from the seawater, and fill up the tanks that fueled the reactor. They could have been home in a week, bragging about their latest adventure.

She came in on a dead-stick landing, balancing the massive starship on its articulated wings, skimming the wave tops like a seagull. A crosswind caught her just before she touched down. She remembered the thin line of spray as her left wingtip grazed the water and then the sickening lurch as the wingtip caught and they cartwheeled up into the air. They slammed back down into the water going backwards at a hundred meters per second. Metal screamed as the right wing tore off. It felt as if someone had wrenched her own arm from its socket. They looped again and lost the other wing before coming to a rest in the water.

Looking at it with the implant’s cool precision, she could see every move that went wrong, every bad decision that had led them to this dreary end. She turned her head and the sweat that had pooled on her cheeks ran down the side of her neck. Noonan was staring listlessly out through the open end of the shelter.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

His brows drew together, the only indication that he had heard her.

She looked down at the floor and wished she had not said anything.

“Don’t torture yourself,” he said. She looked up again. He was still staring outside.

“It could have happened to anyone,” he said after a moment. “It was a chance we had to take, and it didn’t pan out. If I hadn’t screwed up the drive in the first place, we would have had plenty of fuel when we got here.”

He was silent again. Then he shook his head, looking at the sloping floor. She was surprised to see tears on his cheeks. “I never thought it would end like this.” He laughed, a short bitter sound. “I always thought I’d go out in a blaze of glory, with my boots on and a gun in my hand.”

“You always have,” she said. On Ross 128 Amelia had managed to kill the creature that took him, but she would have lost her own life if she had tried to recover his body. On Wolf 359 there was not enough left for recovery to be an issue. Both times, they had to restore him from a backup they had made before the mission.

Noonan shrugged. “So they say. For me, it’s like I never left the station. I just went to sleep in one room and woke up in another a few months later. Except… it wasn’t really me anymore.”

Amelia looked up questioningly.

“It’s hard to explain,” he said. “The memories I have, I know they aren’t really mine. When this body dies,” he put his hand on his chest, “I will die too. When my backup is put into a new body, it won’t be me. It will look like me and act like me, but it will be something new. Whatever it is that I am will be gone.”

“Maybe if I’d been able to bring your implant back, you wouldn’t feel that way,” she said. “You’d remember what happened in between.”

“I don’t want to remember dying,” he said. “What’s the point?”

“The point,” Amelia said, “is to preserve the thread of experience that constitutes identity. When we lose a piece of our experience, we lose a piece of ourselves.”

“You always could toe the company line,” Noonan observed.

“Just because it’s the company line doesn’t mean it’s a lie,” Amelia said hotly.

“I’ve died before,” Noonan said. “You haven’t. You don’t know what it’s like, looking in the mirror and seeing somebody else.”

There was nothing Amelia could say to that. She listened to the slow sound of her heartbeat, and the waves breaking on the distant shore. It was not the first time they had argued about backups. She wondered if it would be the last.

#

“When I die…” Amelia said.

Noonan looked at her from across the dugout. “If you die, you mean.”

Amelia smiled to herself. Noonan always held on to life until the last possible moment. But she knew when to admit defeat and cut her losses.

“If I die first,” she said, “I want you to do something for me.”

“What,” he asked tiredly.

“I don’t care if you use my body for food,” she began. She held up her hand to stop his protest. “No, really. I don’t. I’ve lost a lot of weight, but there’s still some good protein here.”

He grimaced and shook his head.

“What I want is for you to bury whatever is left,” she continued. “So when they finally receive our distress signal and come looking for us, they’ll find my implant. That way I’ll be more… complete. When I wake up. They’ll put the memories recorded in my implant into my new body.”

“You really want to remember this?” he asked, gesturing at the interior of the dugout.

“More than just this,” she said. “The flight out, and the mistakes I made. Remembering those experiences will help me do better next time.”

“There’s not going to be a next time, Amelia! Don’t you understand? This is all we’ve got, right here, right now. There isn’t going to be anything else.”

“There will be if you bury me,” she said softly.

“Damn it, the way you talk, I might as well kill you now. Then there would be more food left for me.”

It made sense, in the delirium of Amelia’s hunger. There really was not much point in going on. The only thing she would learn is what it felt like to starve to death, and she doubted that would be much help to her in the future. Better to end it now, and let Noonan have what he wanted: every last moment of life, of this life, no matter how grim it was.

“You’re right,” she said.

“Well I can’t,” he said. “I won’t. It’s sick to even talk about it.”

“While I’m asleep,” she said. “With one of the lasers. I’d never feel it. I’d just wake up someplace else, right? That’s what you said.”

“Stop it, Amelia!”

“Will you bury me? Or at least my implant?”

“Yes, I’ll bury you, if you’ll just shut up.”

She turned over on her side. The rocky floor made a hard bed, but she didn’t even notice it any more. She shut her eyes and went to sleep.

#

“I don’t remember anything after that,” Amelia said. She looked down at the skull she held in her hands. It was smaller than she had thought it would be, and oddly delicate. The implant starred its forehead, its ceramic case nearly the same color as the weathered bone.

The reincarnation tech’s eyebrows rose slightly. “I’m pretty sure I got all of your memories out of the implant. Those things are built to last.”

“What about Noonan?” she asked. “Any trace?”

“We found a transponder anchored in the rock beside your cairn.” He glanced at the wall screen and it activated on his unspoken command. The planet it portrayed was almost all ocean. She looked closer and realized with a chill that it was footage taken from her own memory.

“The rescue ship’s meteorologist said the island was located in a storm belt,” the tech continued. “It had probably been washed clean a hundred times in the half-century it took for them to reach you.”

“That’s why I wanted to be buried,” Amelia said softly. She set the skull down on the table between them. “What about this cairn? Was there anything else in it besides…”

“Your skull?” The tech finished with a morbid smile. “Just one thing.”

He opened his bag and removed a badly-corroded laser pistol. She took it reluctantly. Its cold weight in her hand made her throat tighten.

“Does Noonan have to know what happened on the planet?” Amelia asked.

“Actually…” the tech began.

“I’d rather he didn’t,” Amelia interrupted. “I don’t think he’d be comfortable working with me, if he knew.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be an issue,” the tech said.

Something in his voice made Amelia turn away from the screen’s seductive image. “What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “You’re one of the company’s best models, Amelia. You always come through, one way or another. But Noonan had such a high failure rate…”

“If it weren’t for him,” Amelia said flatly, “I wouldn’t be here now. He saved my life twice, once on Ross 128 and again on Wolf 359.”

“I know that,” the tech said. “And he killed you once.”

Amelia glanced involuntarily at the pistol in her hand. “The whole mission would have been a loss if he hadn’t buried me. Both of us would have died and our bodies been washed away.”

“That may be true,” the tech said. “But the company wants the whole team to come back, one way or another. This is the third time we’ve lost his memories.”

“It has been as much my fault as his,” Amelia said. “It isn’t fair that I should live and he should die.”

“The company doesn’t care who is at fault,” the tech said. “The numbers tell the story. You made it. He didn’t.”

“Noonan’s a good man,” Amelia said, desperately trying to stay calm. “He deserves another chance.”

“He has already gotten all he deserves. We aren’t going to purge his backup, but we aren’t going to waste any more money incarnating him, either.”

“But –”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It wasn’t my decision. The company has discontinued his model. You’ll fly with Yeager next time.”

He turned off the wall screen. Its glassy surface became a dark mirror on the room. Amelia caught a glimpse of her reflection and quickly looked away.

“The survivor always experiences some guilt,” the tech said. “That’s normal. Just don’t let it get in the way of your next job. Our business is information, and we need your memories. That’s why we reincarnated you.”

Amelia nodded slowly. There really wasn’t anything she could do about it now. The time had come and passed, and whatever Noonan had been was gone forever. She stood up to go, and after a moment’s thought, reached down and turned her skull so that its empty eyes looked squarely into the darkened screen of her memories.

– Copyright © 1993 Doug Franklin