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Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.

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Now let’s read Chapter 12.

The final chapter.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Twelve:

Pодной Mир
(Rodnoy Mir)

Warp / Laika / Oleg

Warp opened his eyes. The laughter of seabirds rose above the crashing waves, and the glint of early morning light shone through tall grass. He stretched out a hand into empty space and felt fur. Laika’s nose pressed into his palm, and he followed her profile to her ears and scratched.

At the edge of the prairie, Zasha climbed up off the rocks amidst a backdrop of sea spray, but she’d barely taken her first steps before the water evaporated away from both body and clothes. Her hair caught on the breeze and billowed out behind her in long, undulating currents and then shrank away to a short and easy cut, close against her neck.

“Chasing dreams?” she called out, and the noises of the birds and the surf hushed for just that moment, every syllable reaching him clear and pure.

“I caught one.” He stood, and at his command, Laika sprinted across the field to greet her. “A memory I hadn’t thought about in a hundred years.”

“Your mother?”

“Doctor Popov.” He heard the sadness in his voice.

Zasha welcomed Laika with an expansive hug. “I thought you specialized in happy memories.”

“It was a good day. One of many.”

“They were all good days.” She caught up to him where he stood, and they kissed, fierce and hungry, proving some passions never die.

They walked together over the rise to their little cabin, built on the spot where Lazorevka once stood. Dmitri sat on the porch but stood when he saw them coming.

“Taking in the view?” Warp asked.

“Anshara and the others are inside, but I just wanted to sit here for a while.” He stared at his own hands. “I wasn’t sure I’d remember what I looked like. We were whales circumnavigating the continent for the season, and then suddenly, it’s today.”

Laika danced around his feet, demanding to be loved.

“Suddenly it’s today,” Warp said.

“How do you feel?” Dmitri asked.

Warp took a deep breath and thought about his answer. “It’s been a long time since I felt anything but good.” He gazed up into the brightening sky and saw the faint reflection of the fleet drawing into orbit.

Zasha held tightly to his arm. “And now?”

“I suspect he doesn’t care much for surprises.”

Her head rested on his shoulder. “Probably not.”

They entered the cabin together. Laika, too.

#

The door opened, and Laika slipped out on her own. The day sunk low on the horizon, and the new lights in the sky were sharp and clear against the darkness. Laika let out a soft howl, and when the others didn’t come to check, she shook herself, allowing her limbs to stretch free and the fur to slip away.

She leapt atop the house and sat on the roof and contemplated all the changes to come. She’d been known by many names, but these new people would call her home. With her they’d grow old and raise children. All their days would be good until they died in peace, held by the arms of those they loved.

All except the one. Warp wanted something special for him.

She became a murmuration of starlings and rose up in a joyous expression of movement and form, and when she sang, the remembered voice of Dr. Popov filled the sky, rehearsing the crimes of Oleg Tereshkova, Zmei Tret’yavich, butcher of his people. Distant wolves lifted their voices in concert. The whole world waited.

When the night grew old, the cabin took on more rooms, for it was the nature of consciousness to sleep. The murmuration plummeted like an arrow into the grass, and Laika became a dog again, nudged open the cabin door, and settled down at the foot of the bed where Warp and Zasha slept.

She tasted a dream about Warp’s mother, and in that dream Warp told his mother that he loved her with all his heart. Hearts don’t love, Laika thought, and even if they did, Warp’s had changed a million times since his arrival. One some days, he even had two. What was the meaning of such a claim?

He could have said he loved her with all his consciousness, for there was the spark of individuality and personhood. A body, a heart, was just meat when there was no consciousness, and yet, she realized that was wrong. The love Laika felt for Warp made her heart beat faster and her tail wag. These parts of her were not the seat of emotion, but they reacted to it without thought, responding with a truth beyond consciousness. The heart responded to a part of that spark about which the self was not aware, like a flower turning to face the daylight. To speak of the motions of the flower was to speak of the stars.

When he said he loved with all his heart, he meant he loved with a fullness beyond the scope of logic and awareness, from within a hidden and truer self. Laika’s tail thumped happily at the thought.

One day, Warp would experience as much life as his heart desired, and like the others before him, he’d will himself away. The thought settled Laika’s tail into a melancholy restfulness. The others who had now come, who would begin their landing tomorrow, could not replace these few, just as their friend, Galina Popov, could not follow them on their journey, but they would populate her surface with their lives and their generations, birthing societies and systems to span the centuries. Laika determined to love these systems and societies the way she loved Warp and his friends, with all her heart.

#

The first of the landing craft passed through the clouds and raced high above distant mountains on its way to a broad and grassy plain that overlooked the ocean. A tinge of sadness painted Warp’s thoughts as he watched. He’d long anticipated their arrival, but he and the others had spent many years as part of this planet. That time and connection had changed them. The coming of new people brought excitement, and in them he saw something that was wholly and fully outside of himself, for the first time since Popov’s death. This was good. The health of the consciousness required an embrace of the other, and this they’d lacked for too long.

The sadness came because he remembered what he’d been before, and that meant he understood those who now approached in their chunks of metal and flame. They’d bring to the planet all the pettiness and pain that he’d long outgrown, and in their short lifetimes, many would never know anything more, no matter how peaceful and rich a life the planet provided. Some would mature and discover a better way of being, and maybe, before they died, they’d try to pass down what they’d learned to the few who would listen. Their efforts would become part of the tapestry of time, with graciousness forever giving way to the greed of the young. The circle of humanity demanded it be so, and the wonders of Rodnoy Mir would be too small a catalyst to kindle any persistent change.

As the craft prepared to land, prismatic orbs rose up from the grass and sparkled in the sunlight as a gentle display of welcome and of the wonders possible in their new world. Rodnoy Mir could be anything it wanted to be and anything Warp and the others asked of it, but the fullness of this potential they’d keep to themselves. Unlimited possibilities would leave the new settlers without a sense of permanence or reality. So, they’d find no train stations in Moscow and none of the halls of the Strelki, strategically misplaced. Rodnoy Mir would be for them largely as it had presented itself when Lazorevka first entered its orbit, an oasis among the stars.

The new citizens of this world would see wonders in the coming days, but beneath it all, they’d have the foundation of an unchanging continent within an eternal sea.

All but one.

#

Daylight chased away the gray of the ship. Oleg Tereshkova stepped off the ramp and onto alien soil, and soon members of the crew dotted the sprawling field where they watched the sky fill with a myriad of miracles, as if designed for their welcome.

The wonder! The wonder!

The universe, in all its potential, conspired to arrange this moment, an auspicious beginning and glory which placed him at their center. The ancestors once looked for signs, and were he to believe in such things now, no surer sign could be had. The dark space of time consumed all the painful choices, but the white light of day shone plainly on their results. Purified, he stood whole and without blemish, washed in the blood of sacrifice. History would never record how close that sacrifice cut, but for the sake of society and society's future, some lies became truth, while some truths were lost entirely. So it was. So it had always been; all worlds began the same way.

Directly ahead stood a man, a woman, and a dog, waiting. Oleg recognized the man’s face, but it took several seconds to believe what his eyes knew. Overhead, a murmuration of starlings filled the sky.

The End

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.

Before we begin:

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Now let’s read Chapter 11.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Eleven:

Pодной Mир / Cтрелки
(Rodnoy Mir / The Strelki)

Galina / Warp

When the puppy was ready, Galina presented her—frightened, blunt, and round—looking little like the dog she would become. In the year before their departure, Laika grew from one kilo to thirty, a talisman of hope and rebirth.

Just as Galina had come to Warp with the idea of the dog, she’d been the one to convince him to leave. She’d lied, manipulated, and cajoled, until, at last, he agreed, only to awake from their imposed slumber with his hope stripped away. She’d faced that difference every moment of their approach to Rodnoy Mir.

Then, after two groups had set off to explore the prairie surrounding them, she saw that hope return. All it had taken was a nap in alien grass and a dream about Laika.

Has Warp asked you why you’re here? Anyone could’ve come, or no one at all. Why leave children and grandchildren behind? You gave up your remaining time with them so they could enjoy promotions and prestige? I don’t buy it.

In the mess deck, Galina had been sitting alone with her porridge when Zasha waltzed in, carrying on her face the mask of happiness, an awkward moment at the end of all things real and substantial.

Zasha laughed. “Well, so much for my secrets.”

Galina felt nothing, but there was nothing to feel. Everything she remembered, everything she’d ever known, shrank away into a dark and meaningless distance. The room and those within it felt small and distant.

“He’s coming, Warp’s father. He couldn’t reveal himself in the past without showing himself a villain, but by entering suspended animation and emerging when the fleet reaches Rodnoy Mir, he becomes legend. He invents his own past and legacy, a name to be honored and remembered forever as the founding father of a new world.”

She’d spoken at last the secret she could never share, but she was speaking to an empty table.

#

Laika snuggled her muzzle into Warp’s neck, content with his embrace for as long as he needed to hold her.

He saw something wrong in the shape of her eyes and in the character of her mouth, little things that only he would notice, each variation speaking to him, telling him the real Laika had been gone for decades, had died of old age as the treasured friend of every soul aboard Pervoye Strela. It shouldn’t have bothered him that this wasn’t the dog he remembered. Her life had been full of love and joy, and for that, he was thankful, but it did bother him. This wasn’t even his memory of Laika, only Zasha’s. He mourned every lost truth, every shade of who Laika had been but was no longer, and, having mourned, he longed to forever cling to what remained.

Laika beat her tail twice against his leg and trotted off into the gathering snow, and when she looked back, Warp saw her face change, correcting itself to reflect his memories until no difference remained, one from the other.

#

Warp awoke again in sickbay, feeling different if not strange. He unstrapped himself from the bed and sat up. Zasha lay quietly in her bed, sleeping. He pushed himself off onto uncertain legs. They held him upright, and he walked to her and called her name.

Her breath became a whisper. “Find me.”

He held her hand. “I found you.”

Her nose wrinkled. She breathed out denials, but the truth was, Zasha wasn't lost, merely slipping away, as were they all, as had his mother. The madness was overtaking them, blurring reality and dream. His memory clung to bits of a remembered lie, telling him they'd made love in his quarters, but such things were only adolescent wishes, not the stuff of flesh and blood.

He told her he loved her. It was the best he could offer, and in response he felt a change, a movement between their hands. Her skin squirmed and sprouted. Tiny tendrils reached out to him, and in return, his own flesh flowered, embracing her vines with his own. He stared in shock and wonder as their skin flowed from one hand to the other and back again, locking them in an impossible embrace.

Through that connection came one vivid, unrepentant thought: find me.

#

Warp was on one knee in a familiar hallway. Laika stood before him, wagging her tail, and she had a paw in his hand. The hair on her paw moved, he thought, like tiny sprouts growing in reverse. He thought it strange until he remembered holding Zasha’s hand and the way they had connected, and then it seemed perfectly natural that one event should follow the other.

He suggested they race down the hall. Laika wagged her tail, the gleam in her eyes already apparent. Happiness for her meant presence with him.

“I love you too, girl,” he said.

Laika beat him to Zasha’s door and looked up at him, the illusion of a perpetual smile accidentally offering what the heart truly felt. Warp nodded to a scanner set in the door frame. No message announced Zasha’s absence, but neither did anyone answer.

“C’mon, girl,” he said.

But something wouldn’t let him go. He needed to find Zasha, and though he couldn’t imagine why, it couldn’t wait until later.

“Find Zasha Bykovsky,” he said.

A voice should have responded with her location, but the hallway remained silent, save for the rhythmic pattern of Laika’s breathing.

“Find Zasha Victorevna Bykovsky,” he said.

Still the voice did not answer, and the ship’s space felt lonely and cold. Laika whimpered and pressed up against him.

“Don’t worry, girl. We’re going home.” Despite his words, he lingered. “Find Alexandra Victorevna Bykovsky.”

Silence.

“Why aren’t you working?”

“All systems are operational,” said the system.

“Then tell me the location of Alexandra Victorevna Bykovsky.”

“There is no one aboard the ship by that name.”

He took a step back. Laika whimpered. “Find her.”

“There is no one aboard Pervoye Strela by that name,” said the voice.

“Check Lazorevka.”

“There is no one aboard Lazorevka by that name.”

Warp lingered, questioning. It had to be an error. “When she returns, let her know I’m looking for her.”

“Message recorded,” said the voice.

He meant to walk away but didn’t move at all. “Where am I?” he asked.

“In hallway five of the Rodnoy Dom sector, apartment 523.”

“Where was I before I came here?”

“The Lazorevka.”

“Before that?”

“The lands of a rural estate, long abandoned by those who built it, but now under new stewardship,” said the voice, “by way of Nikolayevsky station and stops along that route.”

Warp found it harder to breathe. Old dreams haunted him, pressing in like real places begging to be remembered. He told the computer to log an error report.

Rodnoy Dom.

Zhiloy Sektor would have been a better name, but Rodnoy Dom created a psychological connection with Rodnoy Mir. Whatever official designation their planet had once been given, those aboard the Strelki had always been taught to think of it as literally that, their Home World.

“Search Rodnoy Mir for Alexandra Victorevna Bykovsky,” he said.

“The planet and Alexandra Bykovsky are one,” said the computer.

Laika nuzzled against his leg.

“Where am I?” he asked again.

“You are here,” said the computer.

#

He let go of Zasha. His tendrils retreated and hers as well, leaving the bed empty and Warp alone. The ship engines started, and Dmitri called for Popov to join him in the cockpit.

As Warp left sickbay, Popov stumbled out of the mess deck, and when he opened the bay doors and lowered the ramp, she protested, saying this was their one opportunity to save themselves. He said nothing but let her follow him out onto the grass which was green, full, and rolling in the breeze like the waves out at sea.

“The planet isn't what we thought,” she said.

He stood near the place where he’d rested before and stared out at the sea. Starlight shone against distant waves. “Perhaps it's time we embraced what is, instead of mourning what should have been.”

He laid down and stared into the depths of an unmarred sky. He wondered if he’d truly be able to sleep, knowing what was to come.

Did he know?

The generational ships had been the opposite of the Warp and Woof program, and his mother had tried to say as much. He’d thought he understood. Sometimes, a little understanding was as good as foolishness. If Rodnoy Mir proved uninhabitable, it would condemn more generations to no greater purpose than the perpetuation of their society and their across space and time. Perhaps, that was all any generation was ever given.

A seed pod burst nearby. Its misty cloud settled over him and drained away his burdens and his cares. As his eyes closed, he smiled, knowing sleep would come easily. The path had been laid before him, and all he had to do was follow.

“Are you certain this is what you want?” Popov asked.

He mumbled something even he didn’t understand. Soon, the need to speak was gone. Peace rolled over him like an ocean seeking its coast.

Waves burst into vapor.

#

He moved in darkness across the plains and peaks of his own still presence and perceived that movement and inaction through the eyes and nostrils of the beasts he nurtured and whose bodies he consumed back into himself. He was land and sky and the life that filled them, the living sea and all its creatures. He churned, a liquid heat within depths of living stone, and he flittered upon a single, golden flower with wings as delicate as a petal.

He remembered an ancient people who sought immortality until immortality lost its flavor. They’d left a living world behind as others would leave a corpse, and in that world, the program retained its consciousness and its curiosity. It birthed itself as a bear in the north and lived a bear’s life in the systems and cycles that sent it chasing salmon, and when the bear died, it lived the life of a salmon.

Now it moved with a renewed vigor, sniffing at his heels.

When the spirit of the world knew his smell as well as its own, it urged him to follow, as was its design, to connect isolated instances into interconnected systems. He resisted, fearful and ignorant. In the prairie outside a woodland, she became something the world had never seen, not entirely, though it shared similarities with the wolves. She presented herself, and the wind hugged the dog and the grass brushed its fur. Again, she tugged at him to follow, and this time, he obeyed.

The Labrador sprinted across the plains, and he called out to her with the voices of the wild. Birds sang, and lions roared. She ran, and he followed until she came to rest by a valley stream in the midst of a great wood. She sat atop a bank, overlooking a rocky beach where an alien creature lay, a woman, naked and foreign to this world.

He caused fruits to fall into the stream and beach themselves at the women’s feet, and she plucked them from the water and ate. He bathed her with light and dappled her with shade. She played her fingers upon the breeze and whispered, “Is that you?” He whispered back that she’d been found, and she became the stream, the river, and the ocean. She became the seagull and the storm, and they danced together as earthquakes and rainbows.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Specials

Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.

Before we begin:

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Now let’s read Chapter 10.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Ten:

Pодной Mир / Cтрелки
(Rodnoy Mir / The Strelki)

Warp

Each time Warp woke, memories flitted from his mind like birds from a cage. He lay in his bed, searching for something that had been there just a moment before, and this time, something stuck. He saw Laika when she was newborn, still being bottle-fed, and he remembered the day Dr. Popov brought her to him.

The head of the department wanted to handle the weaning himself, but after his mom’s death, Popov knew the time had come. Warp held the little mewing creature to his face, and both man and dog grew calm. Popov arranged for him to have unlimited access to the green space—a privilege so grand in its scope, he almost couldn’t believe she’d pulled it off—and Popov took advantage of it by moving his sessions there, which granted her green time without having it deducted from her allotment. She said Command had denied requests for extended allotments for the other survivors; the extra time was for Laika’s benefit, not Warp’s.

“Everyone loves a dog.”

Laika was nearly full-grown when Popov’s tests proved the survivors would suffer the same end as his mother. It would come slower, but there was no cure. Even if she put them all in suspended animation, when they awoke their fate would be the same, granted only the reprieve of the time they’d been under.

She notified Command, and they called her to the bridge. No one but bridge personnel and Command ever went to the bridge.

“It’s a great honor,” Warp said.

The look on Popov’s face suggested she didn’t agree. Not every invitation could be trusted. Sometimes, cruelty masquerades as honor. Sometimes, the invitation to dinner puts you in the pot.

He remembered their descent into the planet’s atmosphere. Weightlessness had been the first freedom sacrificed, and Lazorevka shook at the atmosphere’s rebuke. In the north, a near-endless herd parted, fled, and regathered in the wake of their passing, and Warp saw in its movements the pattern of the murmuration he’d later see at the beach.

Storm clouds threatened the west. Waters covered the east, but the hungry grass lay broad, flat, and peaceful.

They pulled the ship into a broad circle, passing over the cliffs and the ocean’s white-capped waves. A sleek behemoth rose from the deep, chasing a school of fish that parted, fled, and regathered in the creature’s wake. Within the heart of the planet’s diversity, Warp saw a uniformity of behavior, like a shared programming, and the thought troubled him.

He heard the ship power down and unstrapped himself from the chair, pausing to listen to the descending hum. Against the complaints of muscles and joints, he stood. He felt the pressure of the world’s pull in every atom, and he took a moment, in stillness, to be present and appreciate the sensation, before he walked out of his compartment and down the corridor.

The bay door opened. Zasha joined him, and they stepped out into a wind that beat without purpose at a brown and shriveled field, already leveled flat. Warp braced himself against the cold as flurries of snow swirled and danced, as if signaling some forgotten code. He looked back into the warm confines of the ship. This wasn’t right. He wasn’t remembering things as they had been.

Zasha took his hand. “Find me.”

When he turned, she was gone. He called for her, and when she didn’t return, he climbed into a suit. Being unpracticed with the helmet and unable to secure it to his collar, he left it behind. The suit alone would have to protect him from the cold and whatever else awaited.

Starlight glowed in the phantasmal air, both dazzling and reminiscent of the great lights of each Strela’s agricultural core. The snow gathered at his collar, melting until too much gathered, insulated itself, and froze the meltwater against his skin. He brushed it away like an insect. The sting remained.

Not so long ago, he’d been in a place when the grass was vibrant and verdant, and in that grass, he’d dreamed. He’d flown through the Strela’s core by running off the raised end of the tube, and in reality there was a hair’s breadth of possibility, a pocket at the center line where the rotation of the ship had no effect. Had he managed to reach it and floated free, he still couldn’t have skimmed over the cornfields and reservoirs; that was mere fancy. Nor could he have climbed the end of the tube. The blistering heat of the lights would have turned him away.

Memory lost detail to the emotional need of the dream. Ahead, he could barely see Zasha’s dark form trudging through the snow. He knew all of this to be an oneiric divergence from remembered truth, and still he chased after her. Emotional need demanded it. This was not real nor was it memory. Life was but a dream, his mother’s final fear.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Lewis Caroll. Life is But a Dream.

Of all the poetry his mother read him in his youth, these lines came back to him now, a warning from long ago that the reality of this experience was purely subjective. Eventually, reality broke for everyone, and falling asleep was, perhaps, to awaken from this dream, one transitional state blending into another, all things shifting sideways.

His earliest memory was of his mother protecting him, no matter the harm that came to her in his stead. Was this moment plucked from a newly minted mind a mere subjective illusion, unreal and slouching toward an eternal oblivion?

The memory was of her standing up to his father. He hid behind her legs as she defended him and was knocked to the ground when she fell. His father towered over them. Even now his father’s rage remained clear and detailed, but his mother never stopped fighting back. She’d taught by example. Never quit simply because you’re afraid, not even in this uncertain space.

Snow covered everything by the time the shadow appeared in the distance. As the shadow grew, the snow rose to his ankles. The shadow took form, a train station standing alone in a field of white. He climbed the stairs, and a distant whistle blew. The train came, black in a billowing white of snow and steam. It groaned mechanically and cried itself to a stop, and in the huffing silence that followed, he heard Laika’s tender whimpers, urging him onboard.

#

Warp awoke as the train whistled to a stop at another small, snow-covered platform. Flurries swirled through the air like a murmuration of starlings. A porter opened the compartment door, and as Warp stumbled out. He looked back, as if expecting Laika to run free from the baggage car. No one came.

“She’s waiting for you at the estate,” the porter promised.

Warp wanted to argue that Laika had been on the train and could not possibly already be at his destination, but as soon as the question rose in his mind, the answer settled in his heart. When he arrived, she would be waiting.

He climbed into a horse-driven carriage. It felt familiar. “Russian Winter,” he whispered

With the tiniest lurch, the carriage carried them down a lane, past the country estates of old families where farmlands surrounded towering homes, straight and severe against a landscape draped in virginal white.

The carriage left him at an estate painted blue with white trim, seeming little more than an illusion against the morning snow. Inside, Warp suspected he’d find more blue walls with more white trim until the color motif took over the furniture as well, and everything became weightless and irrelevant.

In the distance, a hunter trudged through drifts, and Warp turned and followed her into the fields. The hunter walked with the butt of her rifle cradled in the crook of her arm and the muzzle aimed to the earth. Warp was close enough now to recognize her, and he almost called out when other sounds silenced him.

A dog’s bark was followed by a train’s whistle. Zasha stopped, shielded herself against the wind and snow, and listened. She took aim at the low and empty sky. The dog sounded again. Birds bolted from hiding, and Zasha fired.

Warp drew closer, and she spoke to him without looking back. “When my people left their home, they built a place much like this, like it, but not precisely the same. This, I inherited from another people. They lived here for as long as life retained its allure, and then they willed themselves away.”

Laika trotted to them with two birds in her mouth, a single wing outspread and askew, and Warp’s heart cried out in silent revulsion. He’d never trained Laika to be a hunter. With her tail wagging, she dropped the birds at Zasha’s feet and then, at her command, tore off again through the brush.

The train whistled, and this time Warp saw the trailing cloud of steam and the tracks which emerged from the woods and stretched out across the plain in their direction.

“Is any of this real?” he asked.

“That’s not the question you need to answer.”

“It would seem to be the only question that matters,” he said.

“You’re progressing slowly, and the others haven't even started. I can’t do this by myself.”

“Are we all just figments of your dream?”

“This world was meant to be a societal effort. Stop worrying about what’s real and start asking yourself what’s right.”

Laika’s cry sounded from across the tracks. The train drew closer. A flock of birds filled the sky, but Zasha didn’t take aim.

“I don’t understand,” he said, louder now, to be heard over the approaching train.

The wind howled an eerie, mournful cry.

“Not everything’s about what you know,” she said. “Sometimes the most important things are felt.”

Zasha stood at the tracks’ edge; the train plowed through snow in its labored approach. She called Warp to her, drew up his collar in her gloved fist and pulled his ear to her lips.

“Sometimes, we have to step out of the way. I believe in you, Warp. You’ll find your path. Our lives depend on it.”

She struck him in the chest, and he stumbled backward into the snow. Zasha fell onto the tracks.

The winter wind and the passing train blended together, screaming in shared horror at the violence and human debris; blood crystallized into frozen rain and marred the field’s winter blanket with shards of garnet. Warp lay where he fell and stared, startled and mute, and in a place beneath human language, he told himself he was dead, as all life seeks death. The cry in his heart roared like the train, deafening him from within. Woodcock feathers tumbled in the turbulence.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.

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Now let’s read Chapter 9.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Nine:

Pодной Mир
(Rodnoy Mir)

Galina

Dmitri cleared his throat. “We still going?”

Galina couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth. “Why don’t you check on the others and get some rest? I have a few things to figure out before launch.”

She watched him go and let her mind wander, chasing guilt and regret back across space and time. From the satellite they’d left in orbit, she charted weather patterns and timed the planet’s rotation and the tidal effects of its single moon. She measured the heat reflected off its surface, from pole to pole and from dawn to dusk. In all things, the planet acted as a planet should.

She tried again to broadcast an alert back to the fleet, but that, it refused to do.

So many years before, Earth had discovered Rodnoy Mir, and at that great a distance they’d studied its atmosphere and its climates. Every reading suggested the same thing; the planet was ideal. It was an invitation to reach beyond the sickly limits of their own world, but that invitation had left them in the grass.

The grass.

She scanned the surface on the assumption that everything was as it appeared, but she knew better. The truth had shown itself. She adjusted the sensors to look for things she knew shouldn’t be there: structures; populations; technology. The routine rhythms of the planet took on a different cast. The planet’s shell suggested a network of interlinked cells where rock and dirt should have been, and those cells produced heat, like a living being or a machine. The greatest of those heat signatures registered in their little seaside prairie, and there, the cells moved like water.

She frowned at the results. Such a thing was impossible. Meaningless. She unbuckled and exited into the hall that passed by the crew quarters on its way down to the bay. Warp’s door was ajar. Shadows moved within, and a man’s voice moaned, as if in pain. Galina had the door half open before she saw Zasha, writhing naked on Warp’s cot, her legs and arms tangled in the sheets, a half-seen body thrusting beneath her.

Galina jerked away and fell into the opposing wall, babbling apologies like a frightened child. She ran down the passage and into the bay, gasping, choking. What she’d seen couldn’t have been Zasha or Warp. Both were in sickbay. Her eyes darted to the open door, and at that moment, Dmitri walked out.

“Our patients are resting comfortably. Any word on the launch?”

She stared at him and then back up the passageway. “They’re both there?”

He moved past her on his way up the passage. “Where else would they be?”

A hollowness swept over her, and she turned away without any understanding. The only idea that came was the long-practiced one of filling emptiness with food. In the mess deck, she sat alone in a wash of soft white light and nursed a tube of porridge. When Zasha waltzed in, Galina swallowed a cry of horror and said, instead, “You look happy.”

Zasha pushed the button to warm another tube. “Dramatically unburdened.” Her tone sounded forced, and for a moment, she stood still, staring inward, at something beyond Galina’s knowing.

“I didn’t realize...”

“My fault,” Zasha said. “Did you see much?”

Galina took another bite.

Zasha sat across from her. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“I didn’t see his face.”

“That must have your gears turning.”

“It does.”

“Strange times,” Zasha said.

“You were in Warp’s quarters, so I assume—”

“—Has Warp asked you why you’re here?” Zasha interrupted, the warm smile still plastered across her face. “Anyone could’ve come, or no one at all. Why leave children and grandchildren behind?”

Galina brought the tube to her mouth, but her eyes were locked on Zasha, who hadn’t asked why there had been no launch. “My sacrifice in coming is great, but so is my reward. I share in the honor the fleet bestows upon you, as does my family, and unlike us, they get to enjoy the benefits of that honor. My grandchildren will be grandparents now, and the grandchildren of their grandchildren will one day walk out of that ship. All their lives will be different, will be better, for their connection to what we do here.”

“You gave up your remaining time with them so they could enjoy promotions and prestige? I don’t buy it.”

“I’m not asking you to believe anything,” Galina said, knowing her words held little truth. “It was my choice to come. I didn’t trust what they’d make of this expedition without me.”

Zasha studied her, as if she might see some clue hiding in the strands of her hair. “I don’t know how this would’ve been different without you, but so be it. You have your secrets, and I have mine.”

“As in how you’re out of sickbay?”

“Am I?”

Something in Zasha’s tone made Galina move. She crossed the bay without breathing and stopped in the doorway, sickened to despair by what she saw. Zasha strapped in bed, sleeping.

She stumbled back into the mess deck. “None of this is real.”

Zasha’s answer came calm and low. “If one of us suggested that, you’d tell us we were disassociating.”

“Existence seems real, but that’s no proof,” Galina said, her voice higher pitched than normal. It grated in her ears. “As the end finds you, you’ll have no context to differentiate between dream and wakefulness, but how is it I should see you both here and there except that I, too, am mad?”

“You’re not sick,” Zasha said, “and Rodnoy Mir is real.”

Galina offered up the slightest laugh. “We’re nothing now but the stories we tell, the context we create to understand the impossible. You could be a program running through a script, and it’d all seem the same to me.”

“And if I’m not?” Zasha asked.

The room felt small and distant, as if Galina had withdrawn deep within herself. “If we assume we’re both self aware and experiencing the same moment, then Warp’s mother was right. We’re copies on Titan, participating in a communal dream, seeking a shared escape to the stars.“

Zasha held Galina’s hand. “That’s not the right story. It’s not the right context.”

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Now let’s read Chapter 8.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Eight:

Pодной Mир / Cтрелки
(Rodnoy Mir / The Strelki)

Warp / Svetlana / Galina

Popov weaned Warp off the neural blocker and birthed him into a new realm of pain. Sedatives kept him asleep between the waves. He awoke into agony and subsided into unconsciousness, a cycle that lasted for days.

“Eight hours,” Popov said.

Warp breathed hard and with purpose. His fingers clutched the bed beneath him. “Impossible,” he whispered.

“Your sleep cycles were short but deep. You’re holding a conversation now, and that’s good.”

He tried to say, Happy to impress, but only whimpered.

“I know; I’m sorry,” she said. “The mind can only handle a blocker for so long. Already, you can experience side effects, a rush of fractured memories and dreams. Don’t worry. It’s all completely normal.”

She moved to check on Zasha. Once again, Warp was alone with his pain, and he lingered before drifting into troubled dreams where Baba Yaga roasted him on a spit and peeled away his crispy skin. He awoke, thinking of his mother.

The pain had lessened, and he lifted a hand, if only to prove to himself he could. He expected bandages but found none, only faint scars in a hatch-mark pattern that ran without interruption down and between his fingers, across his palm, and around his wrist and forearm until they disappeared into the white sleeve of his gown.

“You’re healing quickly,” Dmitri said, standing where Popov had been. “Enzymes in the grass seem to facilitate the regeneration of cells.”

He uttered a whispered oath. “What now?”

“We’re preparing to re-enter orbit,” he said. “Our next steps can be decided from there.”

“You’ve alerted Pervoye?”

“Soon,” he promised. “Soon.”

Warp anticipated the release weightlessness would bring. He longed to unstrap himself from the bed and then linger so close to the mattress as to leave no visual distinction. He’d feel it, though. If he’d soared through the clouds like a bird, it wouldn’t feel any better. Every strain and ache would be gone or close enough to being gone that his brain would call it even. Every physical trauma would melt away, and he’d laugh and soon realize others were laughing, too.

Dmitri took one last look at the readouts. “The doctor just needs to check a few things before launch.” He paused at the door before leaving. “We’ll be away soon.”

There was that word again. Soon.

Dmitri was gone, but his voice kept Warp staring at the open door. Popov passed by and, from there, entered the mess deck and not the ramp that would lead her to the cockpit. Warp wondered who was preparing the launch. There was no powering up of the engines and certainly no laughter, but they’d both come soon enough.

He closed his eyes and felt the emptiness the laughter would fill. The joy of it would wash over him. He listened closely to the silence, and, in his listening, he heard something else, a traditional folk song softly plucked upon a balalaika. Notes jumped over one another in an expression of resilience over suffering and loss, an expression of the Russian soul as a stubborn act of will.

Warp’s eyes snapped open. The music remained and grew louder. Somewhere in the unseen distance, the musician was drawing near.

“Russian Winter,” Zasha whispered, giving name to the approaching music. Her whisper sounded like a roar.

“You’re awake,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

Something else wafted through the air, a spread-out swarm of blurry, white somethings, articulated as if upon a breeze; one landed on Warp’s wrist, a snowflake. It tilted along his hair and melted out of existence.

Warp braced himself with one hand and caught snowflakes with the other. He felt the ship shudder, and the snow shone like stars. The walls flickered away to a snowy field and a horse-pulled carriage and then flickered back again. The snow disappeared, leaving behind wet kisses upon his flesh.

He closed his eyes, exhausted and lost in hallucinations, but even as he drifted to sleep, he felt the wet upon his skin, like Laika’s tender tapping with her nose, waking him from a seizure.

#

In the privacy of their apartment, Laika rolled into her blanket, lay on her back, and squirmed happily. Her tail thumped against the floor. A drum. A heartbeat. A countdown. The time had come. Warp’s chest tightened, and a cold sweat beaded on his neck.

Starlight burned white hot and went dark. Even in the midst of it, with everything new and strange and his brain useless for anything intentional, Warp knew what was happening to him. The floor beat against the side of skull; urine warmed his legs. Everything fell apart, and he wondered if death was close by. Maybe, it was here already.

Long after it ended, he lay motionless on the floor, his muscles cramped into twitching knots. His head throbbed. It would have been worse, but Laika had scooted herself between him and the floor. She lay there, whimpering, and he hoped he hadn’t bruised her ribs.

He tried to comfort Laika but couldn’t bring himself to speak. She licked his hand, and the whimpering stopped, as if she could sense that he was safe now, apart from the tenderness and the pain. Her fur caressed his cheek and warmed him, and beneath that warmth, he heard the beating of her heart, a sound distinctly its own and not nearly as reminiscent of her thumping tail as he’d imagined.

She was a daughter to him, and she loved him beyond anything his human consciousness could comprehend. The human population was carefully regulated aboard the Strelki. Everyone who had ever applied to become a parent understood that. With every new consumer, resources dwindled, and so balance had to be maintained. It had been that way for centuries across light-years of empty, dark space.

Now, they wanted him to abandon his child, but such a thing was unthinkable. He frowned. Unthinkable didn’t mean impossible, merely cordoned off and shut away.

When Laika was a newborn, Warp had bottle-fed her and rubbed her belly to stimulate her need to urinate, just as a mother would’ve done. He felt her isolation; even if she did not, he felt the lack of siblings and wondered at the difference that would play in her mental and physical development, the only pup to a human parent, tucked away in a private apartment deep within Pervoye. He fabricated fur aprons, which helped him imitate a mother, but the difficulty came in the brothers and sisters, jostling for a place at the teat. His instincts railed against the notion of making her fight for that which love would freely give.

He turned on the holographic mirror for the first time in weeks. Such rituals had lost their meaning, but Popov was bringing Zasha to meet Laika. He paced around his image, stared at his own butt, and changed outfits, and then an idea struck.

With the mirror on the tailor setting, he stood before three images of himself and adjusted the setting to focus on Laika; in an instant, she was quadruplets. With filters that allowed him to try different hairstyles, he adjusted each of her imaginary siblings until they became a brood, each resembling one another but uniquely distinct. He lowered the ambient temperature in the apartment and increased the spot heating in the area where the puppies cried for their mother. He gave the siblings substance by wadding aprons into balls within their projected space, and then settled down among them to feed not one pup but a family.

Laika fed and found herself in competition for a nipple that had once been hers alone. She whined and struggled to regain her perch; she fed again, and when she lost the nipple, she wrestled with the apron before settling down for a nap, wrapped within its twisted embrace.

Warp switched over the holographic mirror, and had the mirror read her heat signature and then impose a reconstructed image of her upon that outline, based on the details it captured just moments earlier. He saw two Laikas, one wrapped in fur and one with the apron’s fur pulled away, revealing the wrinkling brow, tiny yawns, and stretched-out paws.

Before him were two puppies, and the one he studied—the one that revealed the personality of a living soul—was an illusion. Had they still been in Tret’ya, in the apartment he’d shared with his mother, the mirror would’ve held her in its memory, and he could have recalled her just as easily. A question lingered within him, asking if that was what he’d want, given the chance, and he had no answer.

He unwrapped Laika from the apron and pulled her to his chest, and her warmth radiated peace within him. He studied her tiny, shut eyes. His work was dedicated to raising the life birthed through Zasha’s department, and that work depended on the premise of experiences other than his own. Popov’s work with survivors was predicated upon the experiences of others.

He recalled a popular saying, a paraphrase of Tolstoy, and it explained what he felt: We only understand our lives, when we can see ourselves in others.

In reaching out beyond themselves and touching the life of another, their lives found purpose. The experience of others gave meaning to their own, maybe not despite an inability to prove that other experience actually existed but because of that inability. Only by impacting the life of another could they convince themselves they weren’t alone.

#

“You were real,” Svetlana whispered. “You were my son, and I loved you.”

Warp clung to his mother’s hand and wept against her shoulder. “Out of death, you gave us life.”

She sucked in a breath and let loose a tortured cry of grief. When her voice gave out, she fell silent, and when her silence gave out, she spoke. “I’ve carved my own Buratino.”

Warp brushed her cheek. “I’m a real boy, Mama.”

“I begged Cagliostro to bring my dreams to life and now wish only for death.”

Warp buried his face into her pillow.

“A son and a ship among the stars is easy,” she continued, “but I cannot dream my own nonexistence.”

“I hope I was a good dream, mama.”

“You were the best a mother could hope for, and if I had it in me, I’d dream myself away and give you life. Why can’t it be so? Why must Cagliostro fail me? If the program could copy and store my consciousness, if it formed your consciousness from my own desire, then it can make you real, at least as real as me. I’ll dream you into existence, and when my time is done, I’ll ask the program to wipe me clean; I will go, knowing I leave you in my place. You’re my rest and my hope. Give me this, I plead, or what purpose is there? Give us space and breath as well as need. Let my son struggle and thrive; let him love and be loved. Let life embrace us fully and then let us go, or else it’s not life at all.”

#

Zasha’s session with her fiance, and there had been only one, went more as Galina expected. Hell broke loose in a confusion of misery and fear, and it never let up. Within twenty minutes, Zasha ran from the room, and Galina tucked her fiance back into his coma with no wisdom earned, no insight gained.

Warp and his mom had surprised them all. He left only when Galina insisted and returned as soon as she allowed. Every day, he talked to his mother, and at least once a day, Svetlana responded like she’d understood. In her notes, Galina wrote that Zasha’s fiance had no context for the randomness his poisoned mind imagined, but Svetlana had the seas of Titan; she died believing she was a copy in a computer on a moon orbiting Saturn, and that belief squeezed meaning out of every moment, no matter how bizarre.

In their sessions, over the month following his mother’s death, Warp and Galina always touched upon the same two subjects: first, Laika’s progress; and second, a context to understand what had happened to him.

“If my mother understood there was a problem,” he’d said, “Control had to see it. Why delay the evacuation?”

She’d played her role as a therapist, drawing the answer out of him, even after such a ploy became deceitful. “Why do you think they delayed?”

“Denial,” he’d said. “Their pride couldn’t imagine the failure of one of our ships.” Then the day came when he’d offered the answer that made her pulse quicken and unsettled her stomach. “Maybe there was never meant to be an evacuation.”

She’d steadied herself before trying to answer. “What do you mean?”

“I’m young to be the head of a department sub-section, but then, there wasn’t much use for what I did. We couldn’t birth many animals because each ship’s balance was so precarious.” He’d begun his answer detached, but as he talked his mouth twisted with grief. “If you evacuate the Tret'ya and divide its citizens among the other three ships, each population has now grown by a third. Maybe, they decided the best solution was to let the tragedy happen.”

Do you have any idea what your father did? She’d wanted to ask and knew she never would.

“Or maybe my mother was right?” he continued.

Even as she found her voice, it cracked. “How do you mean?”

#

Warp awoke into darkness and the sound of Zasha breathing, but none of it felt real. Not all of it, anyway, of that he was certain. Something within his immediate experience was not as it seemed.

Dr. Popov had discounted his mother’s philosophies, considering them a coping mechanism and blaming herself for the inability to offer a better remedy. For Warp, some deep part of him would always wonder if his mother was right, that they were all together dreaming in the seas of Titan.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Now let’s read Chapter 7.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Seven:

Pодной Mир / Cтрелки
(Rodnoy Mir / The Strelki)

Galina

Doctor Galina Popov anticipated the blue-white atmosphere giving way to the black edge of space and the peace of Lazorevka settling into orbit. Soon, she would listen to the silence, feel the pressure of the restraints as they held her back against the weightlessness, and watch the curved horizon of Rodnoy Mir fall gently into night. Oceans and continents would stretch before her, and if she could not trust the grass, a desert beckoned or a tundra, a forest or a glacier-filled mountain.

The launch didn’t come. Lazorevka refused to respond but remained still and quiet in their little base among the grasses. A silent dread swept through her, like the winds that rolled in from the sea. It whispered questions. Was this the planet’s doing? Had the end reached them so soon?

Behind her and to her left, in the auxiliary chair, Dmitri answered the unspoken question. “I never considered the mundane ways an alien planet might kill us; now I’m considering little else, and this is what strikes me. They were sliced across every measurable space of skin. Yuhang has a name for it; he calls it Lingchi, the death of a thousand cuts, but they’re not dead. Why?”

“It’s the nature of Lingchi that death is slow,” Galina said.

“But what does torture benefit the grass?”

She had no answer, only her apology; she had failed to keep them safe. Maybe failure would always be a certainty. They’d touched one living thing upon that planet, and what could they expect anywhere else they landed? Would the sand crawl into the ship? Would the snow take flight and bury them in a blizzard? Which possibilities could be counted absurd, when the absurd was clearly possible?

Dmitri cleared his throat. “We still going?”

She couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth. “Why don’t you check on the others and get some rest? I have a few things to figure out before launch.”

In a ghostly reflection on the cockpit’s transparent bubble, she saw Dmitri unstrap himself and leave through the hatch in the back. She thought to wish him a good night but said nothing. Other conceits distracted her. The grass was not all they’d encountered, for there had also been Warp and Zasha’s projected selves.

Galina punched up communications to make her report, but the disobedient screen remained focused on the thrusters. She sighed, and the sound of her own calmness surprised her. Everything was wrong. If ever there was a time to panic, this was it, but she choked down her emotions into something resembling resignation.

She laughed at her own impotence. Maybe all she needed was a dog. Everyone loves a dog.

Laika had been nearly full-grown by the time Galina finished her tests on the survivors. When Command called her to the bridge, she was with Laika and Warp in the ship’s green space.

“It’s a great honor,” Warp had said.

No citizen ever entered the bridge, and she could only think of one reason for such an order: secrecy, guaranteed and absolute secrecy. The idea frightened her, but she went. She had no other choice but to go.

A secure corridor led her to a turnstile. Beyond that, the annalists had their stations. Someone at one of these consoles, several of those someones, had been responsible for predicting a shield failure before it happened. Ship documentation suggested embryology was the only area with a double chrysalis, but now they brought her to a second turnstile. It opened to the offices of the intermediaries, but intermediary was Galina’s word. The fleet called them vice-executive officers, and the heads of the various departments reported to them in conference rooms outside the turnstiles.

Then, as if she’d slipped into a dream of endless passageways and doors, her escorts led her through a third turnstile and onto the bridge, where the admiral and six executive officers led all ship operations—from inside a secret, triple chrysalis.

Eight people awaited her arrival. Seven of them she recognized as the members of Pervoye Strela’s Command, but the eighth wore the colors of the Tret’ya. He looked like Warp, aged thirty years. She saluted the various members of Command, and then addressed only him.

“Oleg Tereshkova?” she asked.

He gestured to his clothes. “I thought if I wore the uniform, it might get us past this first difficulty.”

“Your son thinks you're dead.”

“And you’ll not tell him otherwise,” Oleg said. “Anything you see or hear in this room will die with you. Do otherwise, and you’ll be a traitor to your people.”

Traitor. That word carried a heavy weight.

“How many others survived? What’s your condition?”

“We are tending to the bridge survivors separately, based on your data,” he said. “For those outside the third Chrysalis, we’d modeled much of their care on your efforts with Oleg and his friends, but your tests have shown the futility of such efforts. Those doomed to suffer have been afforded a peaceful, dignified end.”

A dignified end. She sat in the closest chair without asking anyone’s permission.

“I wish I could do the same for my son,” he continued, “but the fleet knows of his existence. What we need is an option that’s better for morale.”

She stared up at him and, after a moment, realized her mouth hung open. “Morale?”

“We have a solution, but you’ll need to convince your patients. We want them to be the first to land on Rodnoy Mir. They can live there for as long as they’re able, and when it’s necessary, they’ll be allowed their dignity. I can think of no greater honor.”

“Allowed?” she asked. “Who will administer this dignity?”

Instead of answering, he spoke of the ways he’d honor their memories; history would immortalize them as heroes.

“Did you watch your wife die?” Galina asked.

Oleg cut himself off mid-sentence and stared at her, a little shaken, unprepared for the question.

“Did you listen to their conversations?” she asked.

“Enough to know they weren’t conversations. She was out of her mind. Delusional. I’d spare him that.”

“Did you visit her?” she asked.

“That’s not—”

“—Your son never left her side. To the best he was able, he talked her through her storm. You should be proud of him, sir, and when his time comes, you have the opportunity to do for him what he did for his mother.”

For the first time, he looked away. “That’s not possible.”

She rose to her feet, in defiance and in strength, neither hands nor voice shaking. “This room dictates what’s possible.”

Her eyes darted from one officer to the next, and in their silence, her mind screamed to know why they’d brought her here. Oleg was an executive officer aboard the Tret’ya, but Pervoye officers led the fleet. Yet, he did all the talking.

“Once we’d administered dignity to the others,” he said, “I became the last executive from the Tret’ya Strela to possess a living family member, and the only one whose family is part of the known survivors.”

“Why am I on the bridge, sir?” she demanded.

“Because of my unique situation, it’s fallen on my shoulders to judge what our next steps should be. The mission must be preserved. When our people arrive on our new home world, they must believe in the integrity of the land from which we’ve come, the voyage, and its many generations who brought us there. This is the foundation on which the new Russia will be built.”

Why am I here?

He squared up before her, overbearing with some imagined moral superiority. “Do you understand the importance of what I’ve told you?”

She nodded.

“It’s imperative that the survivors agree to this journey,” he continued. “If not, they’ll suffer unexpected complications, which, tragic though they may be, will spare them the horrors to come.”

She stared at him, barely breathing. “You’d kill your own son?”

“I’m a merciful man, doctor, and once they’ve arrived at their new home, that mercy will continue. We’ve considered how this might be done. We thought one of their own could be trained; Zasha, for example, but as their cognitive abilities fail, her capacity to follow through on that training can’t be trusted. We considered estimating a life expectancy and preparing a remote termination, but there are concerns about such a device surviving stasis.”

“Then don’t send them,” she said. “Leave me in command of their medical treatment.”

“We intend to leave you in command.” A smile eased across his face. “You know the future that awaits them. Reality will cease to hold meaning as they descend into a hellish dream state from which they’ll never awake. Is that what you wish your fellow citizens to see? We are better than that, doctor. Be better. Let go of your petty, selfish concerns, and do what’s best for both your patients and society. There’s no other path open to you. There’s no escape from this, your ultimate obligation to both your people and their future, but in doing what you must, you will secure your place in the annals of history. I, personally, will see to that.”

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Now let’s read Chapter 6.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Six:

Pодной Mир
(Rodnoy Mir)

Warp

The Lazorevka dominated the camp like a great, blue insect. Inside, replicated wallpaper decorated every available flat surface, and a Persian rug hung from one wall. Warp wondered if these touches had always been the intent or if Command had merely used them to lure the survivors with a sense of the familiar. In the end, all six had agreed to make the journey and with them, the only representative from Pervoye, Doctor Galina Popov.

Popov led Warp and Zasha to Lazorevka’s medical bay and tested them both for contamination and contagion. Warp told her about getting lost in his memories and how it was a remembered version of her who talked him back to reality. He thought she might like that even in a dissociative state he couldn’t help but listen to her advice.

She huffed and said he was only dreaming.

“I wasn’t dreaming when I saw Laika.”

She cleaned the probe. “Laika?”

Warp glanced at Zasha, to see if she would say anything. She did not.

“Saw her. Heard her. Felt her. We ran together through the grass.”

Her brow knit together for the briefest moment. “If you see her again, I need you to tell me.”

“I tell you everything.” He flashed her a smile that was meant to reassure. “Does it mean something, my seeing her?”

She reviewed the numbers. “We’ve been awake for months, and your hallucinations didn’t start until today. I think your experience has more to do with us being planet-side than any symptom of your illness.”

Light from outside played against the walls of Lazorevka’s bay, the central hub of the ship. “Zasha’s made a discovery.”

Popov cleaned the probe. “Yes?”

“Not a discovery, a theory,” Zasha said. “My findings are still preliminary.”

Popov brushed a blade of grass from Warp’s hair. “Your minds are still coping with everything you’ve been through, including the new reality of being in the starlight and open air. All your experiences will feel new and strange, but that’s to be expected.”

They exited the ship. Equipment on the surface, along with a satellite in orbit, probed the planet, recording seismic movement, atmospheric fluctuations, and radiation. Flora and fauna were, again, Warp’s responsibility. One species of winged creatures moved in a murmuration the way starlings did on Earth; so, for now, he called them starlings or (generically) birds, knowing they would prove to be neither.

He looked out over the field in the direction they had come. There stood Dmitri, repeatedly thumping a handheld scanner with the butt of his palm.

“I knew I was getting a bad reading.”

“What is it?” Warp asked.

Dmitri shelved the scanner. “According to this, you’re still out there.”

The doctor said something Warp couldn’t hear and climbed down the ramp. At her apparent command, Dmitri repeated himself. “The scanner says Warp and Zasha never came back.”

He showed Doctor Popov the readings on the scanner. She set it for Warp’s signature and aimed the device directly at him. It chirped, and she smiled.

“But you get similar readings outside the camp?” she asked.

Dmitri led her out into the field, in the direction Warp and Zasha had gone. Warp tried to follow, but Popov waved him back to camp.

“Your presence will only confuse the results.”

Popov was older than the rest of them, but no older than Warp’s mother had been. As weird as it was to think about, he knew now his mother had been young enough to marry again. She’d had more years ahead of her than he had behind him. So, why had Popov come? Once the last of the crew was buried, if she found her way home again, eighty years would’ve passed. Maybe more.

He ached to ask why she would have done such a thing. Instead, he said, “What do you think you’ll find out there?”

“An atmospheric anomaly,” Popov called back. “Now stay inside the camp. I’m serious about this.”

“Should we be worried?” Dmitri asked.

“I’ve ordered the others back to camp,” Popov answered. “They’ll do as I say.”

Again, Warp saw a reflection of his mother.

Why did you come?

His question remained unspoken, and Popov disappeared beyond the rise as the tall grass swallowed her passing. He turned and found Zasha, waiting. Her fierce eyes darted, exploring his face. Then her fierceness mellowed into something softer, something kind.

“I almost stayed behind,” she said. “I came because of you. Unlike the rest of us, you found something on Pervoye. You found healing in Laika, and I thought maybe that’s what I needed. I almost changed my mind and told Dr. Popov I’d take a damn dog, but I didn’t. I refused the dog because I didn’t want to heal. Healing meant letting go, and I couldn’t do that. The only thing I wanted was to be alone and to remember until the poisoning took my mind.”

“But you came.”

“Because of you,” she said and cupped his face. “You had Laika when I had nothing, and you let her go to come here. If you could do that, if this place gave you that much hope, then I could come, too. You promised me something would change, that Rodnoy Mir would be different.”

“I didn’t promise you anything.”

“In choosing to come, you did,” she said, “and now I want you to promise me something else.”

He could still feel the heat of her touch upon his cheeks. “I don’t understand. What can I promise?”

“Don’t let them take the planet from us. They’re not ready for what they’ll find, and it’ll scare them. Fear makes people irrational. Stupid.”

“What will they find?”

She shook her head, but it seemed more an expression of disappointment than ignorance. “Promise me.”

“No one’s taking the planet from you,” he said. “They can’t.”

Zasha stepped away from him and looked toward the ocean in the direction Dmitri and the doctor had gone. Alone, Warp walked into the endless grass, in the direction Dmitri and Popov had gone. When he topped the rise, he saw them kneeling beside a body covered in grass, not buried in it but connected to it, blades growing into its skin.

The body was his own.

Thoughts left him. The land around him wiggled and rocked. Above, in the white sky, birds, like vultures, circled. One swooped in low, examined the scene before him, and with a cry, dismissed the others. They left the heavens empty with their passing except for the swaths of blue that traced their paths.

Warp heard a song, one his mother used to play when days were long and her glass was empty. A woman’s voice held sustained notes that undulated into silence; her words spoke of death and the nothing that waited beyond the grave. We can hold back the ineluctable, she’d told him, but nothing waits forever.

Popov and Demirti moved toward another grassy mound, another body woven into the earth, and this one, he knew, was Zasha’s.

He stumbled, and the world went black.

#

Warp straightened from his huddle-against-the-cold to witness the thunder of frost-laden clouds. The train came like beasts herded nose-to-tail into the great barn of the Nikolayevsky station. The engine’s white breath filled the massive expanse as if the ceiling were an engineered sky birthing a roiling storm. Beneath the false weather, immense arched windows cast golden rays, brilliant, like the genesis of life at God’s own word.

A dog whined inside the luggage car.

The mist, solidified from his breath, rose like a veil between him and the stowed dog. At the edge of the train, where the tracks hid beneath the platform and the car, he placed his gloved hand on the luggage car wall and watched the door slide open and porters file out with baggage marked for Moscow.

A guard stepped out of a carriage and blew his whistle. Summoned, the passengers bustled out. Warp, skirting by the wealthier cars, saw a woman slip through the crowd. She turned to look at him, and tucked within all that fur, it was Zasha who smiled at him. She spoke but the distance and the noise stole away her words. Then a guard held his hand out to her, and she stepped into the compartment.

Warp followed. A porter checked the ticket Warp didn’t know he carried, and directed him onboard. He settled in next to Zasha.

“Where are we?”

“Moscow,” she said.

That sounded reasonable. It sounded right. They were leaving the city for a trip into the country

“Did you feel it?” she asked. “When you lay in the grass beside me, did you feel it move?”

Such a strange question, he thought, but somehow it also made sense. There had been something. It seemed so long ago now that they’d lain together in the grass, but he had felt something large and dark move within the world beneath them.

As he had then, he placed his hand over hers.

“You can’t let them take it from us,” she said. “Promise me.”

#

Warp awoke to daylight and grass. Dmitri and Popov stared at him, their faces distorted. Gasping and confused, he told himself he’d had a seizure but knew that was a lie. No seizure ever felt like this. A scurry of insects ran along his spine and in between his toes. Green forms blurred at the edges of his vision, but through the odor of must and decay, he clung to reality and reality clung to him.

His vision went black in one eye, washing Dmitri away, leaving only Popov whose hands darted in and out of view. A thousand tiny cuts played upon his nerves. His struggles only drove them deeper. Clouded lungs wheezed, bags of sharp and puff-tailed seeds. His veins undulated beneath the skin. He felt them move, like snakes writhing their way to his heart.

Popov knelt over him; a flame blazed upon her scalpel, blood peppered her face. They rolled him onto his side and lifted him; the stench of decay fell away like a sheet, slipping from his body and tumbling away with the wind.

He slept but did not dream, nothing he could remember. He awoke aboard the ship, doors closed, the hum of activity muffled, but he felt human movement, hurried and bemused. A heaviness covered him, and he couldn’t move. He breathed deep and realized that Popov had given him a neural block. It spared him most of the pain from his injuries. When he sought out those injuries, they entered his awareness. Maybe not all of them; he never got that far. The sheer quantity overwhelmed him.

A tear crept down his face, one he could not wipe away.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.

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Now let’s read Chapter 5.

Warp & Woof

Chapter Five:

Pодной Mир
(Rodnoy Mir)

Warp

There was nothing left but to wake up.

Warp opened his eyes to an endless heaven. Fields rolled down to the ocean, and a murmuration of birds lifted in great, black ribbons. He looked to the hill’s horizon, and the starlings twisted back again, painting an ever-changing design upon the sky. Laika would have loved it.

Zasha lay in the grass nearby, close enough to hear her breathing.

“Dmitri called,” he said. “Popov wants to run tests.”

Her eyes remained closed. Her expression didn’t change, but she told him to come to her, more a demand than an invitation, frank but friendly. “The doctor worries too much. Lie next to me. I had the most wonderful dream.”

He moved to her but remained upright like a schoolchild, not knowing what to do with his body.

“Beside me,” she said. “Lie down.”

“Dmitri…”

“I’m staying right here until I’ve tested my hypothesis. If you’re going back, you’ll have to do it without me.”

Tired of leaving the ones he loved, Warp settled into the grass and felt her warmth at his shoulder.

“Wait for me to fall asleep, and when I do, when you think I’m dreaming, just lie there with your eyes closed. Don’t think about what’s happening. Just lie still and wait.”

“What am I waiting for?” he asked.

She didn’t answer but put her hand in his. Her breathing settled into a steady pattern, and the sound of it washed over him like the sea. He felt something beneath him, distant and huge. It frightened him, but he fought the urge to run. Zasha had told him to wait for something to come, and that something had come. He relaxed into its presence.

Warp moved in darkness, a flying sensation that left him unsettled and searching for a solid perch. The air stank of grass and dung and his own bovine breath. He pulled back and thought himself sick as his whole body swayed like the sea.

He sat upright, awake and certain he’d vomit, but just as quickly the sickness passed.

Zasha opened her eyes. “Awake already?”

He was about to remind her that the others waited, but she put a finger to his lips, silencing him. “I want to show you this world.”

He laughed softly without the certainty there was anything to find funny. “You just got here. Same as the rest of us.”

With a chuckle, she pushed herself to her knees. Long tufts of grass clung to her like wires connected to an unseen machine until, one by one, they broke free. She jumped to her feet and reached out for him to follow, saying, “The hypothesis remains. Everything else waits until the study’s complete.”

She ran down the hill to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. He stopped a few meters back, but she stepped right to the edge, as if daring gravity to take her over. He inched beside her and looked into a bright and blue abyss. In areas, fingers of the highlands reached out into the sea, while fingers of the sea reached in, as one did here. The receding waters all but revealed the stony bottom, and the oncoming waves rolled high along the sides of the jetty-like cliffs and roared up the face of the natural harbors, ending in a spray that topped the plateau and left the land nearest the edge barren and rocky. At the furthest reaches of the outgoing cliffs and at the islands that fallen cliffs had left behind, where waves couldn’t build to the fullness of height and ferocity, birds roosted in the crevices of dry rock.

“You should come away,” he said. “This isn’t safe.”

“I could dive unharmed into the sea and ride the wave back again, and a hypothesis left untested is nothing more than a daydream.”

He looked at her and then back into the roaring deep. “You’d die.”

“Only if I’m wrong.”

The sea covered them with a brief and torrential rain.

“It’s not scientific to wager your life on your results,” he said.

“That makes my theory untestable, but if the same assumptions predict a different result, with safety for both success or failure, I could test my theory there.”

He pulled her away. “That would be a much better idea.”

“Reach behind you,” she said.

He hesitated a moment, perplexed, and then glanced over his shoulder.

“Don’t look,” she said. “Reach. Hold out your hand behind you and keep it there.”

He didn’t understand but stuck out his hand.

“Tell me what you were dreaming of,” she said.

“Nothing. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.”

“Before that,” she said. “Before the confusion. Before you moved over to be next to me.”

“The Pervoye. You, me, and the doctor, before we came here.”

“But what was it really about? Were you seeing your mom again?”

“No.”

“Who then? Why the Pervoye?”

He understood at last what she was asking him. “Laika. I was there to see Laika.” As he spoke, his hand hovered in empty space, and he felt a wet nose nuzzle into it. With a gasp that nearly choked him, he pulled his hand away and turned, but there was no one there.

“You were so close,” she said.

“Close to what?”

“Try again.”

He didn’t move. A wave roared and painted the air with rainbows.

“You’re serious,” he said.

“Try again.”

He obeyed, and again he felt it, the brush of fur and the wet nose buried into his palm. He dropped to his knees, and Laika looked at him with black, soulful eyes and drew her tongue across his cheek. She tucked her head against his neck, and he wept.

— Thaddeus Thomas

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And now the fourth chapter:

Warp & Woof

Chapter Four:

Cтрелки
(The Strelki)

Svetlana / Warp

Within the little house’s covered porch, Svetlana held her son’s tiny hand and stared out at the fields as they rolled up in the distance and circled overhead. The fields narrowed into blackness in the east with the coming of night, and in the west, they burned with the setting of the sun; in that darkness, Oleg’s fleshy lips floated through space, drawing nearer and nearer until they encompassed the full circle of the horizon, with nothing left visible but the glistening of saliva upon his tongue like the twinkling of stars; he sucked in, and a mighty gale whipped through the farm and toppled her potted petunias. The far horizon burned bright and blew billowing clouds of smoke over the house.

Svetlana pulled every towel from its place, drenched them in the sink, and shoved them into the crack between every door and its threshold. The windows turned white, and her son’s sniffles became whimpering tears. She clutched him to her bosom and sang a lullaby passed down from the fathers.

Sleep, sweet son; another child, I’m birthing;
come name-day, mommy’s tummy will swell;
slumber, sweet son; at your funeral, I’m weeping;
buried with a fresh garden rose,
in dirt where nothing grows;
and they ring the great big bell.

Her tiny son wouldn’t sleep but with his father’s face, sucked upon her nipple and smoked her down to a trail of ash and one slight but glowing ember.

#

Warp waited, but for a long time, nothing happened. The silence of the room filled with all the background noises one learned to ignore aboard a ship, and then the pattern of his mom’s breathing quickened. She moaned softly like an engine warming up and sang, “Sleep, sweet son; another child, I’m birthing…”

Her voice carried more than a melody; with it came sorrow laced with fear. Warp heard it in the thinness of her voice and the way it caught in her throat.

The song itself felt familiar, as from memories beyond remembering. He imagined hearing it when he was just a baby, the words designed long ago to allay a mother’s fears, for what it ushered into the imagination, it warded off from reality. Terror sung sweetly to comfort mother and child, the child in its melody and the sound of mommy’s voice, and the mother in the paradoxical power of its lyrics.

#

Svetlana covered her face and called for her son. The ash glowed red and became an emergency light on a metallic wall. The light melted, popped, and went dark, and she covered her face against the heat and called again for her son.

Her husband’s voice answered, “This way my love.”

She coughed against flames that tickled her throat. “I’m not your love.”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

She slumped to her knees but found no floor on which to land, only the ash and space into which she fell.

#

With Dr. Popov’s approval, Warp took his mother’s hand. She called his name in a choked and pleading voice and then in soft defiance cried, “I’m not your love!”

Warp looked to the doctor for rescue.

“Don’t assume you can interpret any meaning,” she said. “One sentence may have no connection to another in her mind.”

A tear streamed down his face. “Then why are we doing this?”

Popov wore a false smile that unsettled more than it comforted. “We’re timing her words to her brainwaves, but you’re here because this is your chance to talk. Whether or not she reacts in any recognizable way, there is a good possibility she will hear you.”

He pressed his mother’s hand to his tear-stained face.

“She can’t feel your touch,” Popov continued, “but she might hear your voice.”

He closed his eyes and trembled.

#

In the emptiness of space, nebulae of ash gave birth to stars, and out of that near void, her son’s voice cried: “Why are we doing this?”

Four Strelki traced the distance between stars, the third, shriveled and burnt, and Svetlana searched her heart for an answer: “Our ancestors chose this because they chose life.”

#

Warp gasped and let out a warbling cry. She’d answered; his mother had answered.

“Did you hear about Varp-i-Vol’?”

He covered his mouth, remembering the night they planned Dmitri’s invitation.

“That’s the future the generations since have chosen. They’ve abandoned us; they’ve abandoned hope,” she said in sputtering, halted phrases.

He remembered his response. Those remaining on earth had found immortality.

“They’re not eternal, my love,” she continued. “They’re dead. They died in the process of being copied, and it’s a copy that lives in the methane seas of Titan. If that’s immortality then Mikhail Bulgakov is immortal; his fame and honor as a novelist came only after death; he knows nothing of it. He knows nothing of our thoughts of him, as the dead of earth know nothing of the thoughts of their copies. They are less than remembered; they are replaced.”

Warp opened his mouth to answer, but Popov held him off, motioning for him to let her continue on her own. So, he waited.

“It’s suicide, and worse than suicide,” she said. “They’ve murdered the generations who were to follow but now will never be. That’s why we’ve come, my son, that we might continue.”

#

The Strelki drifted in a dark expanse that undulated and shimmered, less space than ocean. Svetlana floated with them in the unlit liquid, silent and questioning, but the liquidity was not a movement of atoms but of bits, a sea of information, a unity of data, a digital approximation of herself.

The Strelki were gone and had never been, nothing more than projections of her desire—manifestations of quantum imaginations—and she was back among all that remained of humanity and all it would ever be. She was the memory of someone who’d once been Svetlana Tereshkova, a woman who had dreamed of escaping to the stars, of forging a new destiny for humanity, of having a child. Instead, her copy had been deposited here, in a giant computer cooled within the seas. Humanity could live out any dream it wished, but a dream was all it would ever be. They were saturnine copies within a Saturnian moon.

Voiceless, formless, her mind a self-aware conglomeration of facts: Svetlana screamed, a virtual heart torn with grief over things that would never be, for anyone, ever again.

“You were real,” she whispered. “You were my son, and I loved you.”

That imagined son appeared before her, in the apartment they’d shared after his father left. The son’s name was Oleg, and most of all he loved animals; intelligent creatures who were born and aged, gave birth, and died, passing on their information to the generations to come, not hoarding it unto themselves in some pretense of immortality. His friends had called him Warp, after this very program, and he had hated it.

She wept out of a deep and digital agony. He’d hated the name because she’d hated the program; she regretted the choice she’d made and that all of humanity had made with her. In life, the stars had proved unattainable, space expanding beyond their reach. Only here, in the dark, she could dream; here, humanity could explore, and new planets swept by grassy fields awaited the touch of her son’s feet, planets where all Earth’s children could have a future, where aging parents could be laid to rest, and where life had both a future and an end.

—Thaddeus Thomas

Chapter Five

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And now the third chapter:

Warp & Woof

Chapter Three:

Cтрелки
(The Strelki)

Galina

All those years ago, they loaded the first families onto the fleet and sent with them a consensus of what it meant to be Russian, or so Warp’s mother had once said. Ever since, there have been two threads of thought. They’re not factions; neither thread is militant, and neither is really a side one takes over another. These two thoughts rise and fall like waves passing through our generations. One thought says that we must preserve all that we know of Mother Russia and maintain that legacy across a sea of stars. The other says we cannot know the Russia we left behind, and even if we could, their culture would have evolved into something our fathers never predicted. Our job is not to fossilize the past but to grow out of it. The Russia-that-was is the soil; we are the tree.

Doctor Galina Popov listened without comment as Warp talked.

“If the Strelki are the tree, Tret’ya is the pruned branch,” he continued, “and we are the last of its fruit to rot.”

Before their first session, Galina conducted her research on the survivors and their families; she knew what parts of his life Warp was open about and which ones he concealed. He talked about his mother’s position and rank, but never her name, not once. She was Svetlana Tereshkova. He avoided mentioning his father, Oleg. (Warp was the second of his name.) His father—a member of Tret'ya’s Command—abandoned his family, and Warp had edited him out of his life. Maybe that wasn’t pertinent to her immediate objective, but she found it interesting.

Over the month that it took the dog embryo to gestate, Warp had become her best patient. He gave her more than his trust and placed upon her an innocent and complete faith. Maybe for that reason, she never asked about his father. She knew if she asked, he’d tell her, whether he was ready or not.

The month prior had been something else entirely, in those weeks while Svetlana still lived. Those caught within a single chrysalis hadn’t died immediately but lingered, trapped in a sleep from which they never awoke. The neural evidence of traumatic dreams stubbornly persisted, and conventional treatments failed. Expertise preserved across centuries proved impotent. All the people’s cavalry and all the people’s army couldn’t put them back together again.

For those patients related to conscious survivors, which only meant Svetlana and Zasha’s fiance, Galina suggested a bold experiment.

“The other heads balked, citing ethical concerns,” she told Warp, “but your mother will suffer no more and no less due to what I propose. The difference is whether we participate in that suffering.”

“Participate?”

“Eventually, they saw I was right.”

“What are you recommending, exactly?”

“I want to wean your mother off the drugs and apply a neural blocker. It will keep her from moving and dissociate her from any physical pain, but the crux of her suffering is mental.”

“Why? To what end?”

“To communicate,” she said. “As doctors, we’ll get a better understanding of what they’re experiencing; as family, you’ll get to say goodbye.”

“She’d be awake?”

“Probably not, but any unconscious state won’t be medically induced. I’m pulling back as much of the veil as I can, but I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to reach through.”

“And the suffering?”

“She did a great deal of talking before the drug regiment was introduced, and it’s likely that will resume. If so, it won’t be easy to hear.”

He blinked and ran a hand across his eyes. “I want to hear my mother’s voice again.”

Not like this, Galina thought but then said: “We can make that happen.”

Galina had heard their babbling cries, and their words, like invading armies, had laid siege to her mind. She made the unilateral decision to medically deepen their comas, a decision the other heads quickly supported. What she’d heard of their suffering haunted her, and others might have kept the victims silent for as long as they lived, but each word left a question that would never be answered if they weren’t brave enough to hear.

So she stated her case. She didn’t lie, but at the same time, she could never say enough. To propose the possibility was to mislead and understate; there could be no other way. She asked, and Warp gave his consent, as did Zasha. No one else had family lingering.

In his Diary of a Writer, Fyodor Dostoyevsky claimed the Russian soul was “suffering, ever-present and unquenchable, everywhere and in everything.” For every human being, however, there was always a limit to how much torment they could take, even for a Russian.

What did being Russian mean for a citizen of the Strelki? Galina thought she knew a little of how Svetlana might answer, although the scope of her knowledge was confused between what she’d heard and the dreams Galina, herself, had woken from in the night, her gown clinging in patches of sweat. They intertwined with her waking thoughts, like vines choking out a flower, and she hoped that in hearing Svetlana again, she might better separate the two. She’d gain insight into the mental world of the victims of the Tret'ya disaster, and she’d regain her own thoughts as distinctly her own.

In former times, the first families entered the fleet and brought with them a consensus that to be Russian meant Orthodox Christianity, although no longer the meat of the meal, it had been the herb that flavored everything. Being Russian also meant being a skeptic and a philosopher who pondered the deep meanings of life and questioned the answers others so readily proffered. It meant the unbreakable bonds of friendship and family; almost no earthly force could overcome them, and yet never once had Warp mentioned his father, who had still lived at the time of the disaster.

He wouldn’t like what he was about to hear, and Galina hated her willingness to have him hear it.

#

Later in their stay aboard the Pervoye, the survivors would have their own apartments decorated to their tastes, even replicating what they’d lost, if they so wished. They’d have access to the scope of the ship, at least to the extent of any average citizen, but in those early days, Command limited their exposure. When Galina came for Warp, the other survivors watched him leave the confinement of their assigned space, much (she imagined) like inmates watching another prisoner depart on furlough. No matter the emotional trauma that awaited, they’d envied him, but Zasha watched with less jealous eyes; her time was coming soon.

Galina moved Svetlana to a private room, a luxury that hadn’t been necessary when the victims were kept silent. Her bed lay within a circle of cameras, ready to record every word and every facial gesture. Once Svetlana began to speak, it seemed doubtful Warp would allow the experiment to continue, and a condition placed by the other heads was that the patient would be returned to her deep state immediately upon the family’s request. Galina couldn’t know if she had minutes or only seconds, and every word spoken or mouthed in voiceless horror had to be preserved and studied.

As always, she recorded Svetlana’s brain activity, and she hoped by repetition of phrases (and if prior experience meant anything, there would be repetition) she might be able to map vocal expressions with their cognitive counterparts. Those cognitive recordings, when compared against records from other mental diseases, present and past, would offer a better understanding of the victims’ shared dilemma; and when compared to brain scans of the survivors, a prognosis for survival could be established.

She opened the door, and Warp ran to his mother’s side, the wrappings that guarded her radiation burns acting as a talisman, warding off his touch, but Galina would not have interfered if he’d held her. For however much longer Svetlana lived, neither physical pain nor healing was her concern.

Galina brought Warp a stool, a small token of kindness for the condemned, and asked if he was ready. When he nodded, she modified the flow of Svetlana’s drugs. Then she stepped back, out of the way of the cameras, and waited.

—Thaddeus Thomas

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Chapter Four

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And now the second chapter:

Warp & Woof

Chapter Two:

Cтрелки
(The Strelki)

Galina / Warp

Dogs give birth in litters.

Doctor Galina Popov waited patiently as this point was repeated by the ship’s head of the fauna sub-section of Ecological Sustainability. Dogs give birth in litters, but Pervoye Strela, like all the Strelki, did everything within constrained measures; the minimal resource consumption for the maximum output. The concept of bringing forth a dog, with all its consumption and waste, could only ever mean one dog—two if the replenishing of embryos was in mind—but if Doctor Popov recommended the birth of comfort animals to nurture the healing process for the Tret'ya disaster survivors, that meant multiple people receiving dogs of their own; that meant a litter, and they could reproduce the family linkage integral to a litter by selecting embryos from a single mother, sired by a single father. All this meant that in the fullness and completion of time, a miracle had come upon them. Pervoye Strela could house a true family-unit of dogs.

“Just one,” Dr. Galina Popov said. “The others declined.”

Declined. How does one decline a dog?

Galina could answer that question, but she couldn’t really understand. Not really. Under normal circumstances, anyone born to a Strelki generational ship would delight in something so common to Earth and yet so exotic. The birth would rocket the dog’s owner to stardom and envy, inducing something akin to class in a nearly classless society. To have a dog was wealth beyond measure and a link back to a heritage lost, and yet, these were not normal circumstances. A dog could offer a survivor a myriad of gifts, but she couldn’t give back what was lost, and if she represented the possibility of healing from that grief, most survivors wouldn’t allow it. The price for survival was pain, and the mythical concept of a dog’s love for her human threatened that pain. Thus they said no, everyone but Oleg Tereshkova, the one who called himself Warp.

“Help me understand,” she said in one of their sessions. “That name is the reason you broke Dmitri’s nose, and yet you’ve adopted it for yourself.”

“Now,” he said. “Here. After.”

“You no longer want to be Oleg?”

“Everything we were is gone. Changing names is just a refusal to pretend otherwise.”

Like the others, Warp protected himself against the threat of healing, but unlike them, he couldn’t refuse Laika. On Tret'ya Strela, he’d been the head of the fauna sub-section of Ecological Sustainability. From the embryonic samples Zasha had kept viable, he brought a precious few to life, but never anything so grand as a dog. The implications of the offer resonated far too deep to be ignored, but even then he could only go so far. She had to choose the breed for him, a Chocolate Labrador; she named her Laika, after the first dog in space, but when the task she could not take on his behalf was to love her. On the day Galina delivered the puppy to his apartment, Warp crumbled to his knees and wept his mother’s name.

“Tell me about your mom,” she said in another of their sessions.

“Every human consciousness,” he said. “Can you imagine?”

“Imagine?”

“My mother asked me that, and I answered, ‘Every human on Earth.’ The fear was always that they’d build faster ships and beat us to an inhabitable planet, but in the end, they found a way to never leave. Then she asked me if I liked my soup; and I laughed, and she laughed with me. What else could we do?”

Within giant computers in the methane seas of Titan, the consciousness of every man, woman, and child left on Earth was now stored. The descendants of those the Strelki left behind—they’d become immortal.

“I’ve heard no such news,” Galina lied.

Warp explained. In the life they’d once known, Dmitri Afansyev had been head of communications. Aboard Tret'ya Strela, that meant inboard communications. The flagship, Pervoye, tracked the interchange with the drones sent to the new planet, and the flagship also took messages from Earth and determined what responses they alone would broadcast back to some distant generation.

But Dmitri had listened; what Pervoye would not tell, Dmitri shared in whispers.

In the armada of generational ships, they had grown up with an abstract awareness of three others, but one ship they had known in all the intimacy, awareness, and imperfection of home. Within that imperfection, Dmitri became a legend.

“You heard about Varp-i-Vol’; yes?” Warp’s mother asked over dinner, speaking in hushed tones and casting sideways glances about their apartment. She was a chief starshina, the second-in-command of engineering, and she had only heard about the communication through rumor.

Warp sighed, and her eyes widened.

“This is why that boy calls you Varp?” she asked.

Warp awkwardly shrugged his left shoulder. His right arm rested in a sling, and bandages covered his busted knuckles.

“Everyone forgets soon enough.” She was a tall woman, powerful and intelligent, but she was still his mother. She believed in things simply because she thought her son deserved them. Reality be damned.

Doctor Galina Popov tapped her screen, noting the time; she would have to report this to Command. It seemed irrelevant now, this breach of protocol, but that wasn’t her call to make. She studied her patient as he sat in what was rumored to be the comfiest chair in the fleet. It engulfed him like a womb. She wondered if the imagery had occurred to him, a womb; probably not; men didn’t take comfort in such ideas. She encouraged him to continue.

Exhausted, Warp dropped his spoon into the empty bowl, and his mom watched with a mixture of compassion and judgment.

“You shouldn’t have hit him,” she said. “It’s a term of endearment.”

The English name for the Titan program, Warp and Woof, was an idiom for a thing in its entirety, literally: a fabric’s underlying structure. The Russian transliteration was Varp i Vol’, and vol’ was similar to the word for an ox. As the ship’s animal wrangler, nicknaming him Warp was the crew’s way of dealing with yet one more thing they’d lost when their ancestors began this journey.

Warp should have taken it better. He knew that.

In keeping with tradition, a rug hung on the wall beside their little table. A flower-patterned wallpaper covered the rest of the apartment; it meant home to them.

His mom pushed aside her bowl and poured them both a glass of Nastoiki. It tasted of fresh-plucked plums.

“Ambient hydrogen levels are still elevated.” She placed her empty glass on the table with a flourish.

“No identifiable source?” He poured.

“Nothing good.” She held her drink, pondering its faint hues. “I want you to apologize to Dmitri.”

“Mom.”

“Bring him here for dinner, alone. Promise me.”

“Just let it go.”

“Command looks the other way when he gossips about news from Earth, but they will keep him quiet where it matters, especially if such news could cause a panic.”

“What news?”

“There are things happening on this ship. Convince Dmitri to come. No wife. No child. Just him. Tell him you want to mend your relationship.”

“And then what?”

His mom put away the bottle and shuffled off to her room. Her shoulders sagged beneath an unseen weight, but when she spoke, Warp heard only determination. “We make him talk.”

Doctor Galina Popov tapped her screen. Warp believed Command had known about the threat and yet said nothing. For a moment, she considered the possibility of keeping this news to herself, but if the other survivors believed the same, the secret wouldn’t last. Word would spread; belief in Command and in this ship, their home, would crumble; the trust that underpinned their society would fail.

#

Warp’s breath felt flammable, ready to bellow destruction from his chest. He was no longer Oleg Tereshkova but the great dragon, Zmei Gorynych, devourer of the sun.

Warp’s mother slammed her glass on the table; Dmitri matched her without hesitation, but Warp pushed his glass away, complaining that his teeth were numb.

His mom poured new shots for Dmitri and herself. “The ambient hydrogen levels are elevated.”

She drank.

Dmitri followed her lead. “So?”

She poured again. “Hydrogen plays many roles on the ship. It’s laced into the very materials. It’s fuel for the pulse engines.”

Dmitri eyed his glass, and when Warp’s mom downed hers, he didn’t rush to follow. He looked to the door and then at Warp, who was fixated on the bruising around Dmitri’s eyes.

“In either case, it’s a shield against cosmic radiation,” Warp’s mother continued. “What have you heard?”

He stammered. “I can’t.”

“I’m Engineering’s second-in-command,” she said. “Don’t you think I should know?”

“If it proves to be significant, we have time to evacuate.”

The bottle fumbled in her grasp, almost falling. “Evacuate?”

Dmitri’s face flushed. “I didn’t say anything.”

She turned to Warp, her skin the color of ash.

“Mom?” His voice sounded like a child’s.

“Embryology,” she said. “The shielding is doubled there because of the fragility of the specimens. I’ll have your work routed through their systems, your wife’s as well, Dmitri. You’re both to live and work there until I get this thing figured out. Your child, too, Dmitri. I’m serious about this.”

“But Command…” Dmitri’s argument drifted off.

She slammed her fist into the table. “If secrecy is so damned important, they’ll do as I say. You’re moving there tonight.”

The ship contained vital areas within redundant shielding, a chrysalis, into which one entered by way of an enclosed turnstile. That night, Warp, his mother, and Dmitri passed through the first turnstile to enter the outer ring of the embryology department. The faces of those working swam within Warp’s vodka-impaired vision. As they approached the second turnstile, someone offered a mild objection which his mother’s credentials silenced.

They moved within the massive wedge, surrounded by walls as black as the void, and entered the inner chrysalis. Zasha and her team looked up from their work, startled at the intrusion.

“Bring the rest of your team inside,” his mom ordered, ignoring the realities of rank. “All in, including your families. I’ll send you a few more.”

“What is this?” Zasha demanded.

“Command doesn’t know it, yet, but this is an evacuation.”

“You’re drunk,” Zasha said.

“In vodka, veritas.”

His mother kissed him as Zasha watched, Zasha’s wide and chiseled face rigid with the shock of their intrusion. Warp wasn’t thinking about the danger. He wasn’t worried about his mother heading back beyond the shielding. He was none of the things he should’ve been; Warp was only embarrassed.

His mother was going back out to face a threat only she understood, and he pulled away, ashamed.

Dmitri followed her to the turnstile, but she held him back, promising she would send his family. Then she was gone.

“This is a clean area,” Zasha said in protest.

Warp couldn’t look directly at her. She wanted them out, and he wanted to run. She was older, powerful, and betrothed, but most of all, she was beautiful with a quality of self he’d never experienced in another. Her presence took up a room. The idea that she had an opinion of him made him tremble, and the possibility that she thought ill of him was worse than any death the universe could bring.

The soft rumble of the turnstile stopped, and he knew his mother was entering the outer ring, where Zasha’s fiance worked.

“Get out,” Zasha said.

“You should bring the others in,” said Dmitri.

Later, they’d report that Warp moved to the turnstile and triggered its return with the intention of rescuing the others. He never admitted that, in truth, he was only trying to leave.

The floor rumbled, and they looked at one another. Warp hoped the vibrations came from the turnstile’s movement. Time became uncertain, at least in his memories and maybe in the moment. His mother was still in the outer ring. She would have known what the rumbling meant and warned the others to flee. If they’d delayed at all, then perhaps Warp’s actions meant nothing, and he knew his mother’s nature, she’d have been the last one out.

Later, Warp diagrammed everyone’s position and timed the distance. Counting from the end of the first shock, even granting an additional second before she responded, they had time enough to enter the wedge, time enough for the turnstile to begin its revolution and seal off the gap.

In his heart, Warp knew he’d killed them, and every night, he told himself it didn’t matter. The Tret'ya had no survivors.

Chapter Three

—Thaddeus Thomas

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And now the first chapter:

Warp & Woof

Chapter One:

Cтрелки
(The Strelki)

Warp

Warp climbed the ship’s levels to the great cylinder of earth, unhooked the labrador’s leash, and felt her joy and his mingle, magnify, and blossom as he sent her running up the field and across the green sky. He laughed with unrestrained glee, as he did whenever she ran the loop of the ship’s agricultural core. When he observed now could be seen but never done. In Laika’s eyes, Warp now hung from his own green ceiling, while she sprinted across the field that stretched along her valley. Each and every soul, no matter man or dog, was confined to the bottom of his loop, no matter where he stood.

The door opened, and Dmitri joined them.

“Laika runs the same path every time,” Warp said, “She knows no other way.”

“There’s never any other way but the one that lies ahead.” Dmitri’s voice was thin and fragile. His eyes followed the dog, revealing the profile Warp had once flattened with a single punch. At the time, they had thought themselves big men. Now, they knew better. “Zasha thinks you’re avoiding her.”

“She has her results.” Warp almost laughed at the idea that he could disappear aboard a ship like Pervoye Strela, like a child concealing himself behind covered eyes.

Dmitri took a deep breath full of loss. “You haven’t gone.”

“The doctors won’t tell me anything I don’t know.” Warp never took his eyes off Laika’s clean, muscular movements, the embodiment of joy. In her presence, nothing else mattered.

“There may be something more,” Dmitri said. “One last adventure.”

Not for the first time that day, Warp thought he heard waves crashing on a shore he’d never known. Laika completed the circuit and trotted down the other side, panting, and he knelt to welcome her kisses.

“We don’t have to wait for our brains to rot,” Dmitri insisted. “We can still do something and do it together.”

Warp scratched Laika behind the ears. “There’s no running away from this.”

“There’s no hiding from it, either. Command wants us as their scouting team. We can get out of these damned ships for once in our lives.”

Again, the unseen ocean rolled. Seabirds cried one to another, and the air of the ship, recycled repeatedly for hundreds of years, smelled fresh. The aroma of grass was no surprise; even Dmitri would smell grass; it was all around them, but Warp smelled salt upon air that buzzed with imagined sounds and felt the mist that lingered after hallucinated waves crashed upon non-existent rocks.

He pressed his forehead to Laika’s. “I can’t leave my girl.”

#

A Persian carpet hung on one wall of Zasha’s apartment, and on another, a screen presented a quote: Being determines consciousness. As this ship resembled the one they’d lost, so this resembled her old apartment, but the places were not the same. Warp knew that they, as people, were no longer the same, either, not after all they’d suffered.

Four cylindrical ships flew in formation. Three still lived. One was now a tomb.

Warp was large and fleshy, and Zasha, thin and pale with a wide, chiseled face. They greeted one another with a hug.

“You’re not going?” she asked.

“Dmitri told me about the offer.”

She offered him a seat at her tea table as her eyes asked the question. Why didn’t you see the doctors?

“They don’t know as much as they claim,” he said. “They’d rid themselves of the last reminders and have us out of sight, immortalized as heroes. That’s their healing process.” He waved his hand to the room. “This is ours.”

She closed a holographic copy of Anna Karenina, and it disappeared into the table. At her command, the quote on the wall disappeared and archival footage of the ancestors appeared in its place. Those who entered the ships and those they left behind had created a remembrance of who they had been. Those memories occupied the apartments like so many domovois or ancestral house spirits. Every citizen had the recordings, but for Zasha, they were an obsession. Her fiance had been the one person to truly understand, and Warp knew they served as a reminder of him as well.

“Immortalized as a hero doesn’t sound so bad,” she said.

“It isn’t real. They offer a mythology you’ll never hear, told to comfort those you leave behind.”

“A eulogy for the dying,”

His eyes focused on something distant. “Laika helps with the seizures.”

The image of a young woman appeared on the wall, dressed in the uniform the Strelki crew wore for their first few years, before the sameness of the voyage created a longing for home that overwhelmed any romanticized view of space travel.

Life is a search for understanding, the woman said. We long to understand who we are, where we belong, and where we’re going. Those answers are rooted in the past and in a place, but they blossom in an unknown future.

Zasha looked at him as if the recording were his fault. “The dog’s a distraction. The time you spent with your mother, that was real. What they’ve called us to do now, that’s purpose.”

Her focus fell fully upon him, and he felt the weight of her unspoken question.

“The hallucinations have started.”

She shook her head, scowling. “It’s too soon.”

“Sometimes, I feel like we’ve already arrived. The grass tickles my skin, and my lungs fill with an air that’s impossibly sweet.”

She reached for his hand, and they sat in silence, staring at the space between them.

#

Warp slept with Laika beside him and dreamed of the deaths of hundreds, and he awoke as their families baked in cosmic radiation. The shields failed; their modified DNA failed; of the nearly five hundred souls aboard Tret'ya Strela, only a handful survived, and now this survivor had surrendered to the brain rot that would take them all.

#

Laika accompanied Warp to the sickbay, her tail wagging with the bliss of the unburdened, its sway growing wide, beating upon her own haunches, and the sound of each swish and thwack chipped and cracked the burden Warp’s heart carried. He knelt beside her as they waited by the door, and she nuzzled his throat with kisses.

He was the only patient waiting when the first doctor arrived. Galina Popov was an olive-skinned woman in her late sixties, and it had been her suggestion that each survivor be paired with a dog. Warp alone had shown interest, and for him, Laika was born.

Instead of inviting him back to her office, they stayed in the empty waiting room, and Popov sat beside him. Her plump hips filled the azure seat, and Warp relaxed in the comfort of her presence.

“You’re holding back,” she said. “I’ve seen inside your brain and always known there was more.”

“Being determines consciousness.”

She waited.

“As my being deteriorates, my consciousness unravels,” he said.

“You’re worried about losing who you are.”

“I already have. Intellectually, you understand that. Emotionally, you can’t fathom the loss.”

She squeezed his hand. “Tell me.”

“Everything.”

“The damage is evident, as is the rate of progression,” she said. “We know what symptoms you can expect and when.”

“Do you know I’ve been hallucinating? Last night, I was on Rodnoy Mir in a field overlooking the sea.”

“You’re not hallucinating.”

“I was there, damn it!”

“Exactly. You’ve detached from an overwhelming present moment and immersed yourself in the memories of another place and time.”

“I can’t remember a place I’ve never been.”

“You’ve spent your entire life on these ships. You know this one every bit as well as the one you lost.”

He discovered he was pacing now, wringing his hands together like he meant to rip the skin from the bone.

“But while you were on this ship, you didn’t know the experience of being planetside,” she said. “You didn’t know the smell of the sea or the feel of starlight.”

“I do now.”

“Yes, you do, and you’re hiding.”

“Why would I hide from something so perfect?”

“You survived when others did not. Your mother didn’t. You worry you’ve abandoned her.”

He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think.

She rose from her chair and placed her gentle hand at his bicep. “We’re not having this conversation, you and I. You do realize that, don’t you? Your reality is the grass and the tickle of pollen upon your nose.” Her fingers left his arm, and she crossed the room. “You’re wrong about one more thing. I know loss. Command wouldn’t send you without medical supervision.”

He watched as she closed the door and left him standing, alone and shaken. Desperate for a sense of grounding, he reached his hand into empty space and felt Laika’s wet nose nuzzle against his palm.

#

Warp walked the empty hallways of the Pervoye, and Laika padded along beside him. She followed as he climbed the stairs, the gravity weakening with every step. Upward was inward as the ship’s rotation replicated the experience of gravity. The lowest decks bordered the hull, but at the top, in the center of the ship, the expansive habitat ran the length of their world. They knelt beside a stream. They wandered among fields of corn, and as they drew close to one end, the ground sloped upward, allowing them to gaze back across the green expanse.

Warp imagined the waves on Rodnoy Mir crashing in the whispered distance, but it wasn’t Rodnoy Mir he imagined.

Laika looked up at him, panting; the illusion of a smile traced the edges of her mouth. He knelt beside her and rubbed her head.

“You didn’t come with us, did you, girl?”

Her tail counted out the seconds.

“I imagined all this just to be back with you.”

She looked down the barrel of the inverted world, barked once, and sprinted away, faster than he could ever follow, but if he was dreaming this moment, then other possibilities remained.

He could fly.

He ran down the grassy slope and leaped into the air, and the ground swept by, beneath him. He overtook Laika, and the hairs on the top of cornstalks tickled the back of his hand.

Laika barked, and Warp cut back and landed gently in the grass. She lay her head over his shoulder and pressed her neck into his.

“I miss you, too,” he whispered.

#

They journeyed back to the outermost levels and the fleet bays where crews spent lifetimes maintaining and rebuilding vessels that never flew. Warp sought out something familiar and found the Lazorevka, and he understood, if not really remembered, that he had flown her to a new world.

A future generation would arrive at their long-awaited objective, but they were close enough now to test its waters, its air, its grass and dirt. Command had sent drones, but they wanted more. They wanted human feet on that distant soil. They wanted confirmation.

Laika whimpered.

“We were never meant to return,” Warp said, “but I found my way back to you.”

She looked up with dark and soulful eyes.

“While we were in suspended animation, those we left behind on the Pervoye aged, some died. By the time I awoke, you must have been gone thirty years.”

Her tail stopped wagging and curled between her legs.

“I’m sorry all we could ever give you was a world in a bottle, because it truly cannot compare.”

He felt the arrival of another presence, like a burst of static in his ear. Laika pressed against him.

Warp, come in, Dmitri said.

“Warp here.”

You’d better get back to base. The doctor wants to run some tests.

“Tell her we’re on our way.” He paused before correcting himself. “I’m on my way.”

With a burst of static, they were alone, and Laika pressed her full weight against him.

“I know, girl,” he said. “I know.”

She whimpered, and her tail thudded against the metal floor.

“This isn’t really you crying,” he said. “It’s only me.”

She squirmed, as if to prove she was real, and placed a paw in his hand. Her eyes were his eyes, staring back with accusation and wide with desperate pleas that came too late. A path chosen long ago could not now be changed. The destination found could not be swapped for another. This place was just a memory, and Laika had become an emptiness in his heart which no dream could fill.

He had nothing left but to wake up.

Chapter Two

—Thaddeus Thomas

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