23 AUGUST 1998
TRIKON STATION
LAST TESTAMENT OF THORA SKILLEN
It seems strange to be writing to a dead person, Melissa, but you were always the only one I could confide in. Soon I will be joining you, but before I do I need to tell you how much I depended on you, how much I miss you, how much I love you.
You always thought I was the strong one, I know. But without you I would be nothing. I protected you against Father, true; that was easy to do. I hadn’t the real strength I needed to protect myself.
When I watched you dying, week after week, month after month, I realized that my whole life had been a lie. At first I felt guilty that it was you who was dying, the good one, while I was being allowed to live. But less than two weeks after we buried you, they told me I had cystic fibrosis, too. A bad gene, they said. What irony! A molecular geneticist with a bad gene.
It was at that moment that I realized how much of a lie I had been living. My so-called brilliant career has been based on using their antidiscrimination rules against them. They couldn’t refuse to hire me, they couldn’t refuse to promote me. That would be discrimination against women, against lesbians, against the diseased. That’s how I got here to Trikon Station over the heads of better scientists.
Of course, they saw a chance to use me as a guinea pig in this weightless environment. They got something out of me, after all. So be it.
I belong to an organization of sisters now. Not sisters in the same sense we are, so close that not even death can entirely separate us. But my new sisters care for me, and I for them. They have helped me to advance through the labyrinth of male-dominated corporate organizations, helped me to get to Trikon Station.
The work here is the most advanced genetic engineering yet attempted. Not satisfied with having already ruined the Earth, they want to defile outer space and make more genetically altered microbes that will cause more problems for the world. My task is to keep that from happening, to make this research so painfully slow and expensive that they will eventually abandon it.
But another idea keeps running through my mind. How delicious it would be if everyone here died of some toxic microbe that they themselves have concocted! That will show the world how wrong it is to meddle with life. That will put an end to their constant interference with nature.
Do I have the skill to pull it off? I have the nerve—I think. When you know you’re going to die anyway, what difference does it make?
Whatever happens, I will be with you soon. Our loneliness will end forever.
In the darkness of his compartment, Dan Tighe unhitched himself from his sleep restraint, floating out like a dolphin leaving the womb. He flexed his shoulders and straightened his knees, savoring the welcome sensation of morning in his muscles and bones. Rather than switch on the light, he groped along the array of storage compartments for his toiletry kit and a fresh towel. Then he carefully pulled back the accordion door, still wearing the wrinkled, faded coveralls he had slept in.
Dan enjoyed early morning. Even though Trikon Station went through sixteen sunrises in every twenty-four-hour period, hardly anyone aboard the station saw the outside except through video screens. The planners had designed the interior system to cue normal circadian rhythms. The lights in the connecting tunnels and other common areas dimmed every evening and brightened every morning in an artificial approximation of dusk and dawn. The system effectively prevented the inhabitants from “going around the clock,” the tendency to awaken and retire one hour later each day unless aroused by the morning sun.
At 0530 hours, the lights were still dim. Dan had the station to himself, a feeling of solitude that he cherished. The only sounds were the hum of the ventilation system and the occasional creaks of the module shells as they expanded or contracted in sunlight or darkness. They weren’t cricket chirps or bird songs, but they were comforting just the same.