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There were doubtless other things that Engineer Without-Limit and Doctor Constant-Amazement would one day be known for, but they got a bit of a thrill out of being the first mated pair to fuck in space.
They’d been less than two days out of Erid’s atmosphere, still marvelling over little things. I’m repairing a minor potassium hydroxide leak in space! I’m taking baseline haemolymph samples in space!
It was intoxicating.
Constant-Amazement was humming to itself when Without-Limit came to check on it, singing one of the little songs that it had made up itself about haemocyanin. It was always humming something. “Northern-Song, can you handle things here?” Constant-Amazement asked. “I have some things I need to check on for a minute.”
Northern-Song was a cell biologist who had written four monographs on star-eater metabolism, and shared bench space with Constant-Amazement. It was from the same relatively small subclan as Without-Limit, which statistically meant they were maybe sixth or seventh cousins. Whenever Northern-Song and Without-Limit were on opposing sides of an argument, like which team should have won that year’s Kadraf Cup, Northern-Song would mournfully declare how sad it was that space madness had made Without-Limit turn on its own family.
“Go ahead,” it said, indulgent. “If I get some kind of horrendous space disease, I’ll wait until you and your mate are done ‘checking on things’ before I report it.”
“Let’s get out of Northern-Song’s hearing, come on…”
Without-Limit’s workshop was relatively soundproof. Constant-Amazement steered it out of the infirmary and towards the opposite end of the ship, pushed it against its workstation and spoke in a tone only its mate could hear. “Want to contribute to medical science?”
It turned out it was possible to orgasm on a spaceship, but Without-Limit and Constant-Amazement checked an extra three or four times, just to be sure.
Science means nothing without reproducible results.
After, Without-Limit lay curled in Constant-Amazement’s limbs, reproductive cilia extruded and covered in serous fluid, and tapped out on Constant-Amazement’s carapace: I love you. I love you. I love you. I wouldn’t want to be saving Erid with anyone but you.
It began as a mild fever, three weeks in. People were waking up hot, aching, disoriented. Nausea spread its way through the crew. Bemused-by-Plants had said, half-joking, that the last time it had felt like this, it had unexpectedly laid an egg, at four hundred and thirty years old. “Well, there’s definitely nothing in your oviduct,” Constant-Amazement said, and patted Bemused-by-Plants briskly on the carapace.
“If I had to guess, I think it might be the effects of acceleration on the digestive system. There’s probably a paper worth writing here; you lot can do all the fiddly stuff with the star-eaters, and I’ll revolutionise gastrointestinal medicine once we get home.”
Constant-Amazement had said most of this out loud as it checked Bemused-by-Plants’ FHLC count and population of intestinal commensals. It had also sworn quite a lot at the fuckshit wankstain of a blood sample before it remembered Bemused-by-Plants was still in the room.
“Sorry, sorry! I’m a pathologist back home, not a GP- I’m much better at dead tissue than live people. Come back when you’re dead, and you’ll be amazed at how much my nestside manner improves.”
Without-Limit overheard all of this while it two rooms over checking the environmental controls. Constant-Amazement was making recordings whenever it dealt with the space-sickness, in the hopes that when it played them back, it would notice something it had overlooked before. The fuzzy sounds of the magnetape echoed slightly through the ceilings. So much for medical privacy. But then, nearly everyone seemed to be sick with the same thing. It would be foolish to pretend as though everything was fine.
“You’re not ill, are you?” Constant-Amazement asked abruptly, as it barged into Without-Limit’s workshop later that day.
“Nnnooooo,” said Without-Limit, who was checking a coolant loop for faults. People had been complaining about being oddly warm when they woke, but it didn’t seem to be a flaw in the design of the sleeping quarters. “Are Perfect-Moment and Bemused-by-Plants still under the weather?”
“They have something gastrointestinal, definitely, but I can’t for the life of me tell what it is,” Constant-Amazement confirmed. “I prescribed antiemetics, but neither of them have any appetite. I’m a bit off my food myself, actually… So obviously I thought it was food poisoning, but I’ve tested everything we’ve been eating and it all seems fine. No fungus, no deleterious bacteria, no parasites. You’re sure you’re alright?” Constant-Amazement was tapping three sets of claws against the floor, fast and jittery.
“I’ve been better,” Without-Limit admitted, wincing a little. It was… fraught, going to the mess to get the awful identical preserved meals from the private eating cubicles and wondering if these were the thing that was making everyone sick, if today would be the day Without-Limit would finally succumb.
It had heard Perfect-Moment lose the contents of its stomach earlier when trying to eat. It then spent the next several hours in desperately cheerful tones insisting that everything was fine.
There were droplets of haemolymph on the floor by the navigation complex, where Perfect-Moment worked.
But then, they could be anyone’s.
“I want another haemolymph sample from you, when you get a moment.” It wasn’t a request. A month ago, Constant-Amazement would have joked about this; said it had an insatiable craving for Without-Limit’s bodily fluids. It didn’t now. “Everyone that I’ve tested so far is making enormous amounts of immature neutrophils. I want to see if that’s the same for you. Maybe… maybe it’s some kind of pathogen that attacks the haematopoietic organ that’s causing the left shift? Bemused-by-Plants’ haematopoietic organ is showing marked hyperplasia, so clearly the whatever-it-is is concentrated in the haemolymph somehow…” Constant-Amazement was swaying on its limbs as it spoke.
“When did you last sleep? Or eat?” Without-Limit asked, ignoring the doctor’s own questions. “You look half-dead. Come in here, love. I’ll watch you- you’ll do yourself an injury.” Without-Limit had been sleeping in its workshop, out of a vague and unevidenced feeling that something was wrong with the sleeping quarters. In its youth it had, unfortunately, been one of those people who go on rather about someone else watching you sleep being completely unnecessary superstition- while it was no longer militant about this, it didn’t feel the instinctive unease most Eridians did at sleeping alone.
After all, who, or what, would actually attack you as you slept in the modern day?
“I had a wee kip earlier,” Constant-Amazement said vaguely. “Right in the middle of an immunohistochemistry assay, actually, just- bump! Down! Northern-Song was there when I woke up, said I must have been asleep at least an hour before it found me. I don’t know if it was embarrassing, or just a little bit sad.”
“You know, saying things like that doesn’t actually make me less concerned for you,” and Without-Limit nudged a tray of iridium-flavoured nutrient at Constant-Amazement. According to Decisive-Victory, iridium helped with the nausea. Then it turned away and pointedly fiddled with some needle-nosed pliers, so Constant-Amazement could eat without too much embarrassment.
Constant-Amazement managed nearly half of the tray before pushing it away, and curling up into a ball for sleep. “I don’t… know why I’m so tired all the time,” it said with a slur. A faint rattle came from its ventilator; something was growing deep within.
When it slept it was as still as a corpse.
Four days later, Bemused-by-Plants was confirmed dead.
—-
“It doesn’t make any sense,” Constant-Amazement told the rest of the crew in frustration. They were gathered around the autopsy table, each trying not to sense Bemused-by-Plants. Everyone was spaced out, trying not to touch each other. The click and hiss of Constant-Amazement’s recording equipment was almost permanent now, in the background of the medical bay. “If I had to pick a cause of death, I’d say it died of leukaemia, but people don’t die of leukaemia, they die with it. At best, it’s a comorbidity! And the immunohistochemistry panels don’t make sense, either. Elevated Flt3l in something attacking the haematopoietic organ, sure, that’s logical- but why the elevated serum amylase A? What, did it catch diabetes? From space?” It made an angry little clicking sound, tktktktktk.
“That, and the VEGF- we all have that,” Northern-Song said quietly.
“The- what, sorry?” Perfect-Moment was drawing air across its ventilator constantly in a rattle. It was clearly struggling to concentrate on the conversation.
“We all currently have elevated levels of vascular exoskeletal growth factor. It’s a protein you see expressed in eggs, mainly- it means cells proliferate and migrate in the right direction to make a person. It should be very low in an adult, but that plus the increased mitotic rate in the undifferentiated tumours… well, it’s almost as if Bemused-by-Plants’ body was trying to grow an infant inside of itself.”
“That can’t actually happen, can it?” Decisive-Victory asked, a little too quickly. “We can’t start turning into mammals, or something?”
‘Mammals’ were a concept almost exclusively found in xenophilia pornography about aliens with fur who bore live young and desperately needed to have sex with Eridians for vague reasons. Without-Limit felt it should really know less about Decisive-Victory.
“Not outside of a horror audio, no,” Constant-Amazement assured it.
Tktktktktk went the tape.
“There’s something else,” Perfect-Moment said. It sounded as if it had wanted to bring this up for a while. “We’re moving too fast, and I don’t know why. We’re far closer to Tau Ceti than any of our projected estimates said we’d be. I don’t know if it’s related, but-,” it let out an G-major chord, “can time move… wrong, inside the body? Backwards? Because it’s definitely moving wrong out there,” and it gestured to the endless, soundless void.
“I don’t know,” Constant-Amazement confessed. “Time is time. You can’t change it, and you definitely can’t make it move backwards. I just don’t- there are too many variables. I want to give you all genetic therapy. I think it might help if I upregulated GADD45 and DDB2 to stop the propagation of cancer cells, but it’s like slapping a plaster over a stab wound. I’m doing my best, I swear,” and later, when they held Bemused-by-Plants’ funeral next to the airlock and sent it into the endless night, Constant-Amazement apologised over and over and over again.
They were all given chimeric antigen receptor therapy. Mournful-Refrain and Joyful-Noise died of internal bleeding the day after it was administered, and there were rumblings from the surviving crew. Did Constant-Amazement even know what it was doing? Why was it humming to itself when it performed autopsies, was it happy to be surrounded by death?
Constant-Amazement developed a stutter, and tended to only go to the mess when it was pretty sure nobody else was there.
The iridium flavoured trays were running low. Decisive-Victory and Northern-Song came to blows over hoarding them. Everyone knew they were good for the space sickness.
People stopped listening to Constant-Amazement. What did it know, after all. Only four people took the second round of genetic therapy, upregulating p53 and CDKN1A. It didn’t make any kind of difference.
It and Without-Limit made quiet, gentle love on the workshop floor. Constant-Amazement had to stop halfway through to be sick, the soft underbelly of its carapace ripping thin enough from the friction for its warm blood to ooze out onto the floor. Without-Limit stroked its carapace and promised things would get better, people would be back to normal in no time.
Without-Limit had never been a good liar.
Everyone was irritable, tired and short of stamina. Carapaces grew brittle and crumbling, like decaying shells. It was not unusual to find someone passed out in a corridor and not be entirely sure if they were asleep or dead, needing to be dragged away to the infirmary in case of the latter. There was a permanent tremor in Constant-Amazement’s claws, and Without-Limit, the coward, hid in the workshop away from everyone else. Things were getting ugly in the rest of the ship.
Fights broke out. Some even for a good reason.
Perfect-Moment had been found dead over its navigation charts, curled in a sleep position. Nobody could say if it was murder or self-inflicted.
At this point, it didn’t even matter.
The unspoken thought in all their minds was ‘none of us will survive the trip.’ Nobody wanted to be the first to say it. They weren’t going to work out why Tau Ceti wasn’t dimming. The suns would fail. They had volunteered to die for nothing.
Funerals got less and less elaborate. By the time Observes-Caterpillars died (cerebral oedema), it was shoved out of the ship at the first opportunity they could muster with a few mumbled words.
Nobody wanted to be around the dead body for any time longer than necessary.
Without-Limit still wasn’t sick. At this point, people were treating it with suspicion. Decisive-Victory thought that it was causing the sickness somehow, or maybe that Constant-Amazement had the cure and had only given it to Without-Limit, because they were mates.
As if Constant-Amazement wasn’t just as sick as the others.
Even Northern-Song had asked what Constant-Amazement was hiding from them, between wheezes.
Why it was making them sick.
In the end, Without-Limit had barricaded itself and Constant-Amazement in its workshop.
“You have to let me out! You have to- I’m a doctor, it’s my job to help people-“ and it tried to haul the scrap metal away from the door. It was not strong, and had to stop to gather its strength.
“They’ll kill you!” said Without-Limit. “You have to know that they’ll end up killing you. People always want someone to blame.”
“Yeah,” said Constant-Amazement tiredly, “I know. But what am I supposed to do? Hide in here with you forever?” Spots of haemolymph were dripping from its ventral plate. It was dragging air over its ventilators constantly.
“Not forever. Just- a couple of days. Just until things die dow-”
“-Until the rest of the crew dies, you mean.”
Without-Limit did not answer.
The star-eater collection device was malfunctioning.
“Without-Limit?” asked Constant-Amazement, after a while.
“I’m here. I’m right here.” Northern-Song was bashing on the door, but had to take long pauses to get its strength back again.
“I don’t… are we going home soon?” and Constant-Amazement’s ventral plate opened and closed involuntarily.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck the both of you, you fucking cowards!” yelled Northern-Song, from outside. It was in a high, uncontrolled register, like a just-hatched pebble who couldn’t control its own voiceboxes yet.
“Of course,” Without-Limit lied. “We’re nearly there.” Northern-Song was wrong. The only coward in the workshop was Without-Limit.
It kept trying to repair the star-eater collection device, because some childish part of it thought Constant-Amazement would get better when Without-Limit wasn’t paying attention.
“Please let me go home. Please. I don’t like it here, you can’t keep me here, I’m scared, I want my parents-!” Constant-Amazement pleaded.
It didn’t seem to recognise Without-Limit, and twitched in fright whenever Northern-Song took up banging against the door again. Without-Limit roared at Northern-Song to shut up, just shut the fuck up, do the decent thing and fucking die like the rest of the crew.
Constant-Amazement was asleep by the time Without-Limit had finished shouting, and Without-Limit settled in to watch until it woke again.
It had been a stupid child to ever think this was unnecessary. Watching someone sleep was the only necessary thing.
Eventually, there was only silence from the rest of the ship.
After, Constant-Amazement called Without-Limit a mouthfisting wankstain freak, a murderer, willing to let the rest of the crew die to save its own pathetic carapace. It wished it had never mated Without-Limit.
Without-Limit understood. It brought Constant-Amazement food, stepping over the bodies of the crew.
They cleaned up the bodies of the rest of the crew together, and gave a proper mass funeral. Constant-Amazement was better at gravitas than Without-Limit.
It refused to speak directly to Without-Limit.
It was disgusted by Without-Limit, which made sense because Without-Limit was disgusted by itself too.
It suggested Without-Limit jump out the airlock. It reminded Without-Limit that it had promised Constant-Amazement they were going home.
Eventually, Constant-Amazement didn’t actively hate Without-Limit. It had moved to a sort of disdainful indifference, although the tktktktk of frustration always underlaid its words. A détente had been reached. They were cordial to each other. Constant-Amazement worked in the infirmary and even hummed to itself sometimes, like it used to, absorbed in its work.
It explained that because it and Without-Limit had shared genetic fluid, they were both immune to the mysterious space sickness that had killed the rest of the crew.
Without-Limit was not a doctor, but thought that probably made sense.
They reached Tau Ceti and the gravity went away. Constant-Amazement was still weak, and still had to be helped around the place. Without-Limit cradled its carapace so gently.
Without-Limit tried and failed to mend the star-eater collection device and only ate when Constant-Amazement reminded it to. If it hadn’t been for Constant-Amazement, Without-Limit would have died a long time ago.
One of the hull robots was lost forever to the void.
The replacement star-eater collection device didn’t work, and neither did the replacement for the replacement. Ramming the ship in the direction of the star-eaters and trying to scrape some off the hull also didn’t work. It felt as though they were walking a tightrope over a pit full of monsters, pretending that if they sang cheerfully enough the monsters would get bored and leave.
Without-Limit went into several long periods of deep depression, and all Constant-Amazement did was laugh at it. Constant-Amazement was very good at picking at Without-Limit’s insecurities.
But they had good times too, reminiscing about the time they first met and laughing, or playing long, lazy games of what the first thing they’d do when they went home would be.
Constant-Amazement was hoping lekra music would finally be out of fashion, by the time they went home to Erid.
“And your papers on the star-sickness, you’ll get to publish those,” Without-Limit reminded it.
Oh, yes, said Constant-Amazement. That too. But the lekra music is the main thing.
They played Stability and Total Possession together, in the endless roiling nothing.
Constant-Amazement had teased Without-Limit for enjoying board games when they had first met, but it had gotten good at Stability by now. Constant-Amazement was so clever. It won almost every time.
Just hearing it in the background of the ship was very calming, even on the days they weren’t talking. Without-Limit sang along with all the silly made-up songs, under its breath. It was almost like before. Without-Limit could pretend, if it really wanted to.
A ship came. Eventually.
An alien.
Proof that there was someone else in the universe who was neither Without-Limit nor Constant-Amazement. It had been forty-six years since they had spoken to another person.
Without-Limit was almost certain it was hallucinating - it had before- but Constant-Amazement heard it too. You should send it something, it said. It’s only polite to welcome new neighbours. After some deliberation, they sent a map. And then-
The thing sent something back of its own to Constant-Amazement and Without-Limit.
Even Constant-Amazement was excited, theorising endlessly about what the alien craft was like, what their biology would be like, whether the presumably-a-robot they’d heard on its hull before resembled its inhabitants at all. Nobody could have chosen that design for its tonal resonance. It was so ungainly, it moved along its ship as though it had only just hatched.
The creature was bizarrely soft, mostly deaf, and stood awkward and bipedal at Without-Limit. Without-Limit had the urge to reach out through the xenonite barrier and stabilise it, it was so certain the being would fall. It was used to holding Constant-Amazement upright.
Again and again Without-Limit had to leave the Grace-alien to care for Constant-Amazement, and in exasperation the Grace-alien asked if Constant-Amazement couldn’t stay in the tunnel alongside Without-Limit.
“It’s Eridian culture,” Without-Limit lied. “Constant-Amazement is a doctor, so it must stay in the medical bay.”
The hideous bellows in the Grace-alien’s torso expanded and contracted. Its heart pumped strong and true. How useful, to have a constant reminder you were alive. Without-Limit had often doubted that it was truly alive, in the long empty years drifting in space. It seemed much more likely that it had died years ago and was too stupid to notice.
But then, Constant-Amazement had taught Without-Limit how to feel for a pulse decades ago. You had to use your foreclaws and not your dewclaw to do it, as the dewclaw had its own pulse. If you weren’t careful, you could use the dewclaw to fool yourself into thinking someone was still alive.
“I [unknown word] Constant-Amazement should/must here enter,” Grace insisted in its breathy, moaning voice. Without-Limit thought absurdly of Decisive-Victory’s hidden stash of alien-themed pornography.
“Constant-Amazement cannot come,” Without-Limit repeated, in slow clear tones. “Constant-Amazement has to stay in the infirmary.”
“Constant-Amazement very fast hydrogen atoms, did understand? There is no [unknown word]?” There was a new tone in Grace’s voice as it spoke.
“I don’t know that last word,” Without-Limit said, frustrated. And what did hydrogen have to do with anything?
The Grace-alien ran its hands through the soft collagen on its head. Possibly this was a self-soothing motion for a human.
“Feeling bad because of sick. Evidence Of Sick,” it came up with after a moment.
“Symptom. Yes, it had symptoms.” Grace entered the word ‘symptom’ into its thinking machine.
And then Grace explained radiation poisoning. Without-Limit stood very, very still.
It had designed the plating for the Ship itself.
“I have to tell Constant-Amazement,” it said, and without waiting to hear Grace’s response left the tunnel and headed straightaway for the infirmary.
In the infirmary, it could hear Constant-Amazement humming to itself.
“If I had to guess, I think it might be the effects of acceleration on the digestive system. There’s probably a paper worth writing; you can do all-“ came Constant-Amazement’s voice, before Without-Limit shut off the recording. Arranged Constant-Amazement’s limbs gently for the final time, as though it really was only sleeping.
The trouble with having an eidetic memory is knowing how everything ends.