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They both know it’s his last shift so neither says anything. There will be “good night, darling” and “good morning, love” and Henry will disembark the Jackdaw for Serdos 7. He will shed the skin of ship operation engineer and sun himself on all the possibilities afforded to him by this new life.
He wants so badly to dream again, to see Joey as he might have been. But he goes to sleep and wakes with no memory of having done so. The ship is alive - a beehive, an anthill - and anything Joey might say is drowned out in the storm of quotidian activity
The computer ejects a small device, perhaps an inch in diameter. He rubs his thumb over it, his reflection made tiny and distorted.
Something is ending for him. A page is turning, a book closed and placed back on the shelf. He presses his thumb to the disk and holds it to his lips, eyes slipping shut as he counts back from ten. The device clipped to the lapel of his new suit, Henry leaves the Jackdaw for the final time.
The day is filled with examinations and paperwork, the ticking of boxes. His apartment smells sterile but he sags onto the bed with an indecent groan. He’s never felt anything so luxurious. Not worth the centuries of travel exactly but Henry decides to turn a new leaf and not complain about such trivialities.
It’s as if every denied dream has been waiting patiently and his first night is spent pin-balling between wakefulness and sleep, guzzling water and vomiting it back up. The physicians had warned him this might happen. “We still don’t know the full effects of such long distance travel. We expect them to be short term but if they last longer than two weeks…” and his personal assistant device chimed with updated contact information.
He sleeps dreamless and calm on his thirteenth night in the apartment that overlooks a lush park. The next morning he lies in bed, running his thumb over the device. It reminds him of a beetle with its smooth, glossy carapace. He closes his eyes, holding it to his lips as warm laughter and music floods his bedroom.
Henry doesn’t understand the intricacies of his feelings; he’s only human and one who is far from home, from the familiar and comfortable. Everyone he’s ever loved, or could have loved, is long dead. He lets his head drop back before rolling it forward, stretching each muscle with a groan.
“Are you going up as well?”
Only then does he notice he’s been standing in the elevator without giving it a command.
“Hmm? Oh. Yes. Floor 19.”
The woman says a number and the elevator door hisses shut. Henry notices her slimness first, then her thick curtain of dark hair and, finally, her almond-shaped eyes. He hasn’t seen eyes like hers in… so long he can’t remember even abstractly.
“Were you on the ship?”
“Yes,” he answers automatically; it’s been a common question.
“I think you’re all very… confused and therefore easy to pick out.” She turns her head and smiles. It makes her eyes slip shut. Henry finds it endlessly charming. She holds out a hand. “I’m Josephine.”
Henry feels it in his sternum, a hand pressing out from his chest after throttling his heart.
“Henry.”
Her hand is soft and dry, grip firm. He thinks she’s someone he wouldn’t mind seeing each morning.
Seated at the bar, he holds it against his ear, straining to hear amidst the music and conversation. Joey’s voice breaks up but Henry knows the song by heart. It reminds him of sunshine, honey turning to liquid in the heat of his mouth.
“You came.”
He turns. She’s wearing a dark blue dress that flatters her figure, with panels cut out to reveal blocks of creamy skin.
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
She purses her lips and slides onto the stool next to his. She smells of citrus and cypress. “You still look positively baffled on our morning elevator rides. I thought it might have skipped your mind.”
How had he been able to remember his conversations with Joey after centuries of only being awake for a single day at a time? He couldn’t dream but he was able to pick back up right where they left off? That’s what baffles him.
Henry expects her to comment on his silence but she only orders her drink and untangles an earring caught in her hair.
“Mmm.” She finds pleasure in the neon cocktail, squeezing her eyes shut as her salivary glands throb and tingle. “So, spaceman, tell me more about yourself.”
And he does. Everything, really, except for him. The AI that is carving his way across the darkness back to Luna.
They marry three years later and two children follow within the next five. They name them Poppy and Daniel, strange names for children on Serdos 7 but Henry needs something to anchor him to where he’s from.
Josephine is a wonderful mother and Henry finds he can truly breathe when he’s with his family. His children are infinitely fascinating and his days are filled with work and the silence between the rush of his wife and their offspring.
More ships begin to arrive. Some never do. Henry thinks of the interstellar storms he had read about on the Jackdaw. Sometimes, during his maintenance shifts, he would wonder if he’d never wake up because of them.
“Hmm?” He looks down at the hand on his. It is long and elegant, slim fingers tipped with short, buffed-to-a-shine nails. Henry imagines them playing a guitar, caressing the strings like they're a lover's long, golden hair.
“Everything okay?”
“Just thinking about the… trip here.”
They’ve spoken about it erratically. Henry insists it wasn’t interesting but Josephine doesn’t believe him for a second. She knows the sacrifices he had to make, the people he left behind. She never asks about the device, which is always on his person.
When he’s alone in the morning, getting ready for work, Henry holds it to his ear. Thumbing the side, a songbird’s sweet singing fills his head. Sometimes he cannot help but cry. He’s glad no one is there to interrupt these moments or comment on his differing reactions to the same collection of short recordings.
Then, one day when his children are almost through their primary education track, it stops working. No matter how hard he presses the side of the infernally-small disk or in which direction he runs his thumb, there is no singing. His reflection in the mirror blurs into a throat-clenching smear. If he’s late to work that morning, no one mentions it. When he returns, slipping the dead device into the depths of his nightstand drawer, it is eulogized by the sound of his children playing.
Time is a strange thing but it is stranger for someone who has traveled across the stars, asleep for most of the journey. Years aren’t quite blinks but they’re close. The smiles that touch Josephine’s lovely eyes have worn lines into her face. His own visage isn’t much different. When their children move onto university, Henry begins to reevaluate his life. This coincides with Josephine finding the device. It’s never forgotten but Henry has learned to function without his songbird’s morning interludes. He wishes he’d been greedier with it. Then he realizes that might have killed it faster. ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,’ he thinks.
“What is it?”
Henry doesn’t want to touch it so it remains on his wife’s palm.
He runs a hand through his hair, still thick and dark but already threaded through with glistening silver. “Do you promise not to laugh or think less of me?”
She sits beside him on the bed, slipping an arm through his, and rests her temple against his shoulder. “I’m listening.”
He tells his wife about Joey and it only took two decades to finally unburden himself of that well-kept secret. She knows about the fiancée from Luna, the lost child, but she doesn’t know about his complicated feelings for a ship’s artificial intelligence system. Josephine only listens, weaving their fingers together.
“He was your lifeline. Of course you’d fall in love.”
He lifts their joined hands to his lips.
Her fingers unfurl from her palm and the device winks up at him. Henry picks it up delicately, as if it will burn him or he will break it. It’s still cool to the touch and weighs nothing.
“I knew you’d understand despite how ridiculous it is.” He rubs his thumbs over the small device.
“It’s not ridiculous. I’m just sorry you’ve lost this last bit of him.”
While on the topic of ridiculous subjects, he wouldn’t mind introducing them if that were possible. Would Joey be happy for him? Would Josephine like his singing?
“I should throw it out but… I can’t.”
Henry closes his hand around it. It’s smooth all around but he can feel it digging into his skin.
“It’s a small thing,” Josephine says, “but also not.”
When she leaves him to grieve once more, Henry watches her go. He’s so familiar with the lines of her body, the way it moves. Over the years, he’s imagined that familiarity with Joey. Back on Earth and not a thousand years apart, might they have met?
‘Rinse, lather, repeat,’ he thinks as the device goes back into the drawer. Not tucked into the back corner this time, but folded into cloth beside his identification paperwork from when he left on the Jackdaw. It’s all in his online file but he can’t bear to throw any of it out, not when he has so few physical things from the time before.
Poppy marries her long-time girlfriend when she’s almost thirty, another ten years having passed since Josephine found the device during a particularly deep clean. His suit is more elaborate than he’s used to and he fiddles with it endlessly. There’s the shush of fabric entering the room and his wife approaches with a small box.
“Can you figure out how this thing works?” He tries to look down at the fabric that won’t fall into place. “It’s not lying flat or whatever it’s supposed to be doing.”
Her laughter is the shimmer of distant bells. “I can but first, this.”
She holds the box out to him. It’s very small, fitting on her palm. It’s covered in a blue fabric with a silvery sheen. He lifts the box and everything slows to a silent still.
A sapphire winks up at his from the smooth surface of the disk. Henry thinks his wife might have taken the box from his limp left hand because he isn’t aware of it hitting the ground. He presses his thumb to the side and his mind bursts with color long leeched away.
It’s exactly as sweet, as gorgeous, as life affirming as he remembers.
He doesn’t mind Josephine seeing him cry this time.
“Here,” she says gently and when she reaches for the device, Henry almost closes his hand around it like a petulant child but he knows she will only handle it with care. Her free hand smoothes the rebellious fabric over his chest and shoulders before she pins the device to his lapel.
Josephine stands back to admire her work. “It wasn’t easy finding someone to repair it but I’m tenacious when I want to be.” Her eyes sparkle as she folds her hands across the stomach of her plum-colored gown.
Henry hears none of what she says. He reaches up to touch it, the addition of the gem novel against his fingertips. His hand must be shaking because he dislodges it. Josephine catches it before it becomes completely unattached. Joey’s singing is uninterrupted and the lines around Josephine’s eyes soften.
“It’s lovely,” she says. “I’ve never heard singing like his before.”
They’ve never discussed music much. Josephine prefers silence when she can get it. Even Henry doesn’t subscribe to any services that beam music from his personal assistant device into his head. Serdos 7 is loud enough and his mind is already so full of distractions.
Before her hand can slip away, Henry puts his own on it and squeezes her fingers. She wipes away his tears and says nothing as the fragment of a song ends.
“Thank you,” he says.
The device dies several times over the rest of Henry’s life and each time it is lovingly repaired. It lives on his lapel or in his pocket or on his nightstand. His wife only makes mention of it when the voice begins to grow dim and she takes it in to the son of the master craftsman who repaired it the first time.
“Holding on to let go,” Joey sings and Henry can close his eyes and imagine he’s back at that no name bar in Manchester where it was recorded the last night of Joey’s life.
His heart belongs in several places - on Earth and Luna, the Jackdaw, here on Serdos 7 - and one day it all comes together so that it may stop and he may finally rest.
Before the flames consume him, Josephine makes sure the device is pinned to his lapel. She smooths back his silvery curls and presses her lips to his wrinkled forehead. Their children join her, lilies and poppies and roses in their arms to lay around him so he may sweeten the air as he is turned to ash.
Somewhere between the silence of the stars, a musician who became a neural network is making sure things are safe for people who sleep like babies but do not dream. He hums when he thinks no one is paying him any mind. Sometimes he composes, little things he banks away into some corner of his vast storage. He wakes the needed engineers and thinks of a green field overlooking the sea.