A BETTER SENSE OF DIRECTION
by Mjke Wood
This story by Mjke Wood wasn’t at all what I expected when I started this contest, but when I read it I was charmed and my mind expanded. It had a similar impact on the judges and there is a good reason why. Mjke Wood was twelve years old when Neil Armstrong first stepped on the moon. He watched every minute of live TV that came back from each mission. He made balsa wood models of the LEM and Command Module, compiled a folder, mission by mission, with diagrams and notes—the hardware, the astronauts, the mission plans. Then, three years later it all ended with Apollo 17. No man on Mars. No journeys to the stars. Space was just too big and we were too slow. In his disappointment, Mjke had a fantasy about finding a shortcut to the stars and wrote down the spaghetti idea in the back of his Apollo folder. Thirty-five years later the folder was long gone, but the idea remained.
WE RAN OUT OF TINNED spaghetti-in-tomato-sauce less than seven years into the voyage. For my daughter, Stella, it was a crisis. Stella had always hated space rations, but she was okay with tinned spaghetti. It was the only thing she ever seemed to eat. Stella was six years old, and anyone who has ever spent time with a six-year-old will know how fussy they can be with food. Stella’s relationship with tinned spaghetti was more a fixation. She didn’t just eat the stuff; she didn’t just play with it; she communed with it.
The spaghetti crisis wasn’t the first trauma to follow Stella’s unplanned arrival on the crew list, but for Jodie and I, it was probably the most unsettling. Accommodation on a starship is cramped, and privacy is a scarce commodity, so a tantrum under these conditions, let me tell you, is a tantrum on steroids.
Stella was the first true child-of-the-stars. She was conceived on the starship and she was born on the starship. Children had always been part of the mission plan, hence the low average age of the crew (Babes in Space, they called us). But it had never been part of the plan to have the first birth take place only nine months out of Earth orbit.
To be fair, a young crew is an impetuous crew. Me and Jodie, being scientists (of a sort), were drawn to experimentation. Our ship, Castor, had been suspended at L2 for the three days that were set aside for crew embarkation and provisioning. Jodie and I were amongst the first to board. We had just three days of weightlessness before the photon engines were due to fire up, hitting us with the point-two gee of thrust that would be our constant companion for the next twenty-odd years; ten years accelerating then ten more to wind it back down.
“Jodie,” I said, “have you ever wondered what it might be like in zero gravity?”
“I don’t need to wonder. This is zero gravity. It sucks. I’ve been puking for four hours.”
“No, Jodie, you misunderstand. I’m talking about what it might be like. You know . . .” I winked. I worked my eyebrows up and down my face in a choreography of suggestiveness.
“Ah.”
She got my drift.
“Did you misunderstand what I just said, Luke . . . about the puking?”
“Space sickness is in the mind. All you need is something that will take your mind off it.”
“And you reckon . . .”
“Undoubtedly.”
“Well, okay then.”
So we had three days—three days in which to explore the boundaries of science. Well, let me assure you, zero-gee nooky is not up to much. It’s tricky, it’s horribly messy, and it is not a cure for space sickness. Also, it is rife with unexpected dangers. I managed torn ligaments as well as a four-day concussion, while Jodie brought the whole, sorry experience to a close by dislocating her thumb. Then the engines powered up. With the return of gravity the space-sickness sufferers perked up . . . but not Jodie. Her space sickness metamorphosed, seamlessly, into morning sickness.
Captain Bligh (her real name’s Catherine Blair) was furious when we told her the results of our adventure. She even threatened to turn the ship around and send us home, but the accountants, God bless them, saved us on that call. What the captain did insist on, though, was that we share a cabin and assume joint responsibility for the baby’s upbringing. This was fine by me; I’d had a thing for Jodie ever since college. Jodie wasn’t quite so pleased, though, and she sulked about the arrangement for months afterwards. I put this down to hormonal changes. I knew she would come round eventually, and I was right. She gave up throwing stuff at me a couple of years ago, and we moved to a mutually stress-free and congenial silence. Our relationship did not blossom into what you’d call love, but at least she stopped trying to trick me into the air lock.
I first noticed Jodie at college. It was her walk. She had the action. Jodie’s walk could stop traffic, usually in a way that involved broken glass, rolling hubcaps and seeping pools of oil and antifreeze. She didn’t seem to realise the effect that she was having on her immediate environment. She would glide through town with those hips all swaying and pulsing to a Caribbean beat, and the traffic accidents would pile up around her. And then I noticed the T-shirts, with slogans printed across her boobs: “Beam me up, Scotty;” “. . . to boldly go”; “Make it so.” She was a Trekkie.
I tracked down the local branch and joined. I went to all the meetings, the screenings . . . I bought the Spock ears. I learned enough Klingon to get by, and I moved into her inner circle.
But we never spoke. I was one of her entourage; the drooling, pathetic onlookers; the pimply male adolescent no-hopers. I seemed destined to be, forever, a voyeur by day and a fantasist by night.
Then I overheard a conversation. She and a small group of her inner-circle friends had signed up for Castor and Pollux. Jodie was hard-core Trekkie, and she was heading for the stars. The very next day I signed up myself. I went through the interviews and the preselection training and the medicals . . . I hung in there. The numbers were pared down. Each evening the TV audiences voted, and more fell by the wayside until, at last, the United States of Europe had their four viewer-selected reps: me, Jodie, Jorge and Chantel. Jodie and Jorge drew Castor, and I drew Pollux, with Chantel. I was supposed to be ecstatic, but I was devastated. The two ships were to fly, side-by-side, for twenty-odd years, and there could be no physical contact between the crews. I never really wanted to even make the trip, I mean, twenty years! I’d faked the psychs; I had motivation but it wasn’t space that drove me.
I wrote the email. I was bailing, and my finger was actually hovering over the send button when the news broke; Jorge had concealed a genetic disorder that came about from his tight-fisted father using a back-street baby-designer during his conception, and he was bumped. The reserve, Henri, was French, like Chantel, so they shunted Jodie over to Castor with me. Two Brits, two French. There were also four Asians—the rest, thirty-two on each ship, were American.
Jodie and I became a team, sort of. And, well, you know the rest.
So, the spaghetti crop failed, and Stella pouted for a couple of weeks. Things were so desperate I even tried replicating spaghetti by extruding homemade pasta through a spare photon diffuser, then mixing in some tomato paste and boiling the lot to hell and back. Everyone, the whole crew, loved it . . . except Stella. It wasn’t the same as tinned. It got me posted in the galley though. I was happier there. My specialty was drive systems, but I’d faked the exams. It made me a bit jumpy when I was poking around in there with my greasy rag when there’re so many lives hanging on my imaginary expertise. The engines were sparkling clean, but I knew jack about fixing them if they ever stopped firing. Brad, the cook, on the other hand was a sous-chef, and very frustrated in a culinary world of concentrates, and he knew more about photon drive systems than I did. So we swapped, and we were both happier for it.
Stella sleeps through the days, and so, therefore, do Jodie and I. So, when I was dragged from bed by the alarm after only four hours of z’s, I felt particularly cheated. I’d only recently reacquainted myself with the luxury of eight straight hours. But it wasn’t Stella, this time; it was Captain Bligh, calling the full crew to the galley, the only room where we could all assemble. Last time we were here was when the weird stuff began with the marker stars, a few years ago.
“Thanks for coming down,” she said, as if we had any choice. “We have a problem.”
“It’s the thrust isn’t it?” Jodie said. There were a number of nodding heads. Quite a few had noticed.
“Pollux has been pulling away from us for a couple of days. Nothing serious to begin with, but in the last few hours it’s become more noticeable.”
“I’ve got greens right across the board,” said Brad. “Can’t be the engines.”
“Unless we’re venting for’ard, it can’t be much else,” said Bligh. “Brad, I want you and Luke to get your heads together and run a full set of diagnostics on the drive. I’ll come and help. Anyone else got any ideas?”
There were blank looks.
“Okay, so we need an end-to-end integrity-check . . . everyone. The instruments aren’t showing any anomalies, but they could be faulty. It’s hands-on, I’m afraid. I want every inch of the hull examined.”
The gathering broke up amid a sotto-voce chorus of grumbles and curses. An end-to-end was a miserable task, involving hours of crawling and wriggling into the most claustrophobic, cold and inhospitable corners of the ship. I was relieved to have drawn the cerebral option.
It took Captain Bligh five hours to find the cause. She called us all back to the galley. I saw what she had found, and suddenly I developed an overwhelming urge to go end-to-ending; to find one of those cold, cramped corners and hide there.
“Here, in my hand, I have a photon diffuser,” she announced. “There are carbon deposits. The resulting hot spots have damaged the machining.” And now she raised her voice to an accusatory level. “I was puzzled about the carbon. How could carbon deposits form in this way? The components were installed in ionised white-room conditions.”
She scratched some of the black carbon off and rubbed it between her fingers.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” she said, “this is pasta.”
And she looked straight at me.
Everybody looked straight at me. They looked at their chapped and blistered fingers, the result of five hours of arctic end-to-ending, then they looked, again, at me.
There are times when one longs for a duvet under which to crawl.
The captain wasn’t finished.
“What is more,” she said, “this is the spare. We had to put the original worn out diffuser back in the engine—the one currently holding us back to just point-eight gee—is in better shape than the spare.”
She looked straight at me again, then looked at each of the thirty-five worried faces.
“Questions?”
“What’s the bottom line?” This was Anjana, the pilot.
“The bottom line is, at our current loss of acceleration, status quo maintained, we’ve added about four years to our journey time. On the other hand, my gut feeling is the diffuser will continue to degrade, then . . . who knows?”
“Don’t we have more than one spare?”
“There’s triple redundancy on all the stressed parts. The diffuser isn’t stressed. We have one spare to cover the minimal risk of build flaws. The planners are at fault, they didn’t anticipate the additional stresses imposed by cookery.”
“How about Pollux? Can we use their spare?” said Jodie.
The captain shook her head. “The unstressed parts, the minimal redundancy items, are shared inventory. We carry some of the spares, Pollux carries others. This is the one spare diffuser for Castor and Pollux. I called Captain Schiffer, just to be sure, and he confirmed—this is the only one.”
“Can’t we repair it?” I asked. My voice was tiny and unwelcome.
The captain looked at me for a long, silent moment, then said,
“No.”
“Daddy, why don’t people like you any more?” It had only taken Stella a couple of days to pick up the bad vibes.
“What makes you think nobody likes me?” I didn’t have a comfortable answer, so I was stalling for time.
“They call you names.”
“They’re just a bit upset.”
“Why?”
“It’s going to take us all a bit longer to get to New World, that’s all.”
“Why?”
“Your daddy made a mistake with the engines, honey. It’s nothing more. They’re all overreacting.” Jodie had leapt to my defence. This was unprecedented. I began to think she was, well, starting to warm towards me a little. Then I realised she was deflecting our daughter away from an associated matter. I had made the pasta to try to appease Stella’s long and apocalyptic temper tantrums. Stella had wanted spaghetti.
“If everyone’s so upset about us taking longer, Daddy, then why don’t we just go straight there?”
“No, honey, we’re going slower. It will take us a few more years because we’re not gaining speed quite so quickly,” said Jodie.
“So why don’t we just go the short way?”
I took over trying to explain. “If I want to go from the front of the ship to the back of the ship it will take longer if I walk slower, see?”
Stella exploded in a frustrated storm of tears.
“I know that. You said. But if you want to get there quicker . . . Why! Not! Go! The short way!” She screamed the words. She threw her beaker of juice across the room. It bounced off the holo’ and sticky, fluorescent orange liquid exploded onto the front screen and dripped down onto the carpet. Jodie and I looked at each other. We’d seen this sort of thing coming before. We knew the signs.
“I’m not sure what you mean, honey. Explain it to me.” I tried to sound patient.
Stella’s bottom lip was quivering with frustration or rage or something, but she gathered some control. Then, with a straight arm, she pointed out to her left.
“New World is there,” she said. Then she pointed straight up above her head, toward the front of the ship.
“We’re going that way. We’re just going down the spaghetti!” she shouted the last word.
I looked over at Jodie and shrugged. I was worried that my daughter was having some kind of a mental crisis. Maybe living in space all her life . . .
Jodie came over and put her hand lightly on my arm.
“Wait,” she said. She didn’t want me saying any more. Her eyes held a strange, almost wondrous expression. “Explain again, darling, for Mummy.”
“We keep going all over the place. Like we’re going down the spaghetti. It’s stupid. Why can’t we just go straight there?”
“What do you mean, honey, down the spaghetti?”
Stella explained. It sounded ridiculous. I smiled to humour her. Jodie smiled, too. But her smile was different. It was almost as if she was taking this nonsense seriously.
We settled Stella down for bed, eventually, and Jodie wanted to talk. We pulled out the sofa bed and relaxed onto it with a glass of wine each. This was great. I’d never felt so close to her, even when we were doing the “science” thing back at L2. I wanted this moment to last. I forced myself to listen; not to rubbish what she was saying to me.
“I think I know what she’s trying to tell us, Luke. I think she might know something. I think there is a quicker way.”
“Jodie, come on. You used to get lost around college when . . .” I bit my lip. I shouldn’t have said it. I’d gone and put my foot in it again. She’d go off in a hissy fit now and storm out.
But she didn’t.
Jodie nodded. “Yes. Back home. I admit. I never knew where I was. I could never find my way around town, even. But out here, for the last . . . three . . . four years, it’s been different. I’ve felt that I’ve known where I am. But . . . it’s felt wrong. We’ve felt wrong. I’ve had this idea that we’ve . . . that we’ve been going the wrong way!”
She was so intense. Her eyes were burning. She held my forearm in a talon-like grip. I was loving this, even though I had no idea what she was talking about; even though the two women in my life appeared to be going off their heads.
“I think we should speak to Catherine. I think Stella should explain this to Catherine.”
“Tell Captain Bligh? She’ll lock us up.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Captain Blair, do you mind if I ask, how was your sense of direction back on Earth?”
It was a strange opening. I cringed. Jodie had unusual ideas about how to break into a topic gently. We were sitting around the captain’s wardroom table, Jodie, myself and Stella.
The captain gave a half laugh. “It’s an odd question, but I suppose it won’t harm anything to say, I was pretty hopeless. I was terrible with a map. Why do you ask?”
Jodie smiled. “I have a theory. Stella has something to tell us. It’s a little weird but I think you’ll understand.
“Stella, tell the captain what you told me and Daddy.”
Stella began to unfold her bizarre theory again. She was hesitant at first—a little scared of the captain—but she soon got into her stride. She started with the spaghetti. She explained how we were at one end of a piece of spaghetti and New World was at the other end. New World shone down the spaghetti and we could see it shining from the ship, so we followed the light. She said how every star was at the end of a different piece of spaghetti, and how it was silly to follow the light round all the curves and loops and knots, when it would be much quicker and shorter to travel in a straight line and go to New World directly.
Then Jodie took over the narrative.
“Is it possible that some of us can see the shape of space; but that on Earth, where gravity gives everything a top and a bottom, we get confused? Even out here we are confused because after spending our lives living on Earth we’re conditioned to straight lines and up and down.”
“Go on.” The captain wasn’t laughing, or shouting, or sneering. In fact she had that same eureka spark in her eye that I had seen in Jodie’s the previous evening.
“I know this is a dodgy bit of gender stereotyping, but isn’t it widely viewed that women have a poorer sense of direction, even though everyone’s scared to say it out loud? But could it be that women have the better sense of direction, that they can see the curves of space-time, but on Earth we are confused because the Earth’s surface makes us think two-and-a-bit-dimensionally?”
“Two-and-a-bit?” The captain and I spoke in unison.
“Yeah. We could move around on the surface of the planet. It’s hard to go up; it’s even harder to go down. If you want to take the quickest way to the shops you don’t usually pick up a shovel.”
The captain nodded, in a spooky, knowing way. I simply held up my hands with an Oh-my-God-they’re-all-nutters kind of expression.
“Stella isn’t conditioned,” Jodie continued. “She’s a child of the stars. She sees what is plain to see, and she believes we are all stupid not to see the obvious.”
“But there’s gravity on the ship,” I said. I had to say something to show that at least I wasn’t a couple of bricks short of a wall.
But the captain waved an impatient hand at me. “That’s thrust,” she said. “Nothing to do with gravity.”
She leaned over the table and pulled a rolled-up platter screen from a drawer. She tapped her fingers on the desk to activate her implants, then, with rapid finger movements, called up a star map on the screen. It showed Earth and New World connected by a straight dotted line. A small pulsating red dot indicated the depressingly short distance along the line that Castor and Pollux had travelled in just under seven years. The captain began to explain the map to Stella, but before she had uttered more than a couple of sentences Stella was up on her knees on the stool and pointing at the chart.
“You see!” she shouted. “It’s wong! You all keep getting it wong! It’s the wong shape. It’s all straightened out.”
Captain Blair reached up into a locker above her head. She brought down an ancient globe of the stars and set it on the table.
“Is this better?” she asked.
Stella stared at it for a long moment. Then she shook her head.
“No. Worse,” she said. “There’s no inning or outing. There’s no . . . through . . . or around. It doesn’t even look like outside.”
Captain Blair clasped her hands together and pressed her index fingers to her lips. She spoke in a quiet voice.
“She’s talking about multidimensions, isn’t she? She’s six years old and she can visualise the universe in multiple dimensions. In one short sentence she has explained the weirdness.”
Blair was right. We stared at the globe. It looked just like the sky seen from Earth, albeit inside out. But a few years ago, a year or so into the voyage, the weirdness had started. The stars had begun to shift out of position. The markers—the pulsars—had moved. We lost track of the galactic equator, completely. We’d all met in the galley and worked the problem. We decided that we were seeing some kind of relativistic effect—an optical illusion—but back then we weren’t doing relativistic speeds . . . not really. We’d dismissed it. New World was still straight ahead. We could follow our noses. We’d be fine so long as we didn’t have to make the return trip. A couple of the crew had decided to do a study of it, but they’d got nowhere. Now, here was a six-year-old girl telling us why. As we’d moved through space our visual perspective had changed. We had moved into a different part of the spaghetti bowl and everything looked wrong to us.
“Stella?” The captain leaned across the table and gently grasped both of Stella’s hands. She peered into Stella’s eyes, and in a quiet but firm voice she asked the question.
“Stella, would you be able to show us the way to New World? Could you show us which way to turn?”
The captain’s tough, but when she announced that she’d been told, by a six-year-old girl, that New World would be much closer if we made an eighty-degree course correction; that it would be the first of many such adjustments; that she couldn’t be precise about it because ever since the weirdness had started we didn’t even know the direction in which the galactic equator lay; so we would now be guided by the six-year-old, who was to show us the way by pointing . . . When she announced this, there was mayhem. She then added that she would ask all the women in the crew for validation of the directions; but only those women who, on Earth, had displayed a serious lack of spatial awareness. Only those who could not read a map would be consulted.
Mutiny was considered, by the men. But Captain Bligh is one scary person, and mutiny did not happen.
She also explained the plan to Captain Schiffer on Pollux. He is a man. His specialty is astral navigation. We only got to hear of his response through gossip and rumour. There was talk of a pirated audio file that started doing the rounds, but it was intercepted and destroyed, so we only had canteen talk as to the range of colourful adjectives that were used. Pollux would not be joining us on our fools’ errand.
Over the following weeks the crew formed into four distinct groups. Those who could read maps back on Earth—most of the men—became known as the mappies. They sulked. The idea that this strange new way of looking at the universe might have some credibility was an affront to them. They were offended by it. There were some women who were also a little mappy, but they tended to keep quiet about it; they felt a little left out. There were a handful of non-mappy males who probably knew what was going on but stayed clear of it, finding the whole thing to be a challenge to their manhood.
Then there were the non-mappy females. The Stella camp. I tended to hang out with this group, for, although I was one hundred percent mappy, I believed them. Stella was my daughter. I believed her and I was proud of her.
For the Stella camp, a new era had dawned. They were excited and moved by the realisation that they had been the true possessors of an innate, accurate sense of direction all along. The scientists among them wanted to explain things, and there developed a small subsect called the Stella Theory Cosmology Group. Catherine Blair, the captain, was a leading light amongst them. It took them a little over three weeks to come up with a credible theory that explained the new universe.
“Dark matter is the key,” Catherine explained at one of their lectures. “The shape of the universe that we see: star clusters, galaxies, expansion . . . these are how the universe used to be, or should have been. We see it this way because we see light as straight lines, whether it is straight or not. But then dark matter got in between and wrinkled everything up. The real universe is being contracted; packed into an ever-smaller can of spaghetti by the gravitational pull of dark matter, even though the individual strands, along which we can see, are getting longer, giving the illusion (to the mappies) that we are in an expanding universe.”
I put my hand up. I’d been attending STCG lectures right from the start, even though this alienated me from most of the other men on the crew.
“I have a question. If there is all this heavy dark matter between the strands, what’s to prevent us plunging into a black hole, or something, as soon as we turn off the star track?”
Blair nodded. “That’s a fair point. I think the key is to always head for a star—any star. So long as we can see a star in front of us we are on a star track and we can freewheel along between the dark matter. We just have to avoid heading towards the parts of the sky that are empty.”
“So, we have to skip from strand to strand, where the spaghetti meets, and we stay out of the sauce.” Stella grabbed my hand and gave it a squeeze. I smiled down at her. I was getting the hang of this non-mappy stuff.
When we made the turn the sky went wild. It was like Guy Fawkes night. There were blueshifts and redshifts, and stars stretched, smeared and splattered all over the sky. The mappies huddled in dark corners of the ship and moaned. Some of them turned to drink, others went to their databases and rediscovered religion.
The women had a party. Five of the non-mappy men came out of the closet and went along. They had a great time. I was with Jodie and Stella, so I had to behave.
It took seven years. We actually did our first flyby of New World after only eighteen months, but we arrived at a fair clip, and had a lot of speed to lose. Stella’s good, but she hadn’t thought of the dynamics of losing relativistic velocities, so we had to wander around our new star system for a while, decelerating like crazy by sitting on our weakened engines. Once we’d lost enough of our velocity we did a few close passes by some of the system’s gas giants, using first their gravity, then later, when we felt we wouldn’t be ripped apart, we used their atmospheres for a bit of pants-on-fire aerobraking.
New World’s a fine place to call home. A warm, orange sun; oceans, mountains, trees and plenty of wildlife that we cannot eat and that does not want to eat us—the genetic and protein differences are too great—so we are safe from one another.
We sent a message to Pollux. Captain Blair told them that we’d put the kettle on for them. They’ll get the message in about eight years, but it won’t help them, they will have started the deceleration phase of their voyage by now, so shortcuts won’t work. They should be with us in about twenty years. They’ll be much younger than us of course.
I’ll tell you what I like about New World the most, though. I know my way around. I’ve drawn a few maps, and it’s become a bit of a hobby. They’re no use to the women, of course. The women haven’t a clue . . . forever getting themselves lost, especially Stella. But nobody says anything about this to them, not to their faces, anyway.
Mjke Wood was the first winner of the Jim Baen Memorial Writing competition in 2007, followed up a year later by winning the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Competition. His science fiction and fantasy short stories have appeared in many print and online venues. He has published two novels, the first in his Sphere of Influence series. He is an active member of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA), the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, as well as the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) and the British Fantasy Society (BFS). Mjke was born on the Isle of Man and now lives in the Wirral, UK. Find out more at his website: mjkewood.com