Forgotten Womb

The alarm started at 4:17 a.m. Ship time, which meant nothing anymore, because the sun wasn't real and neither was the morning. I'd been awake for an hour already, lying in the dark with my hand flat on my belly, feeling for the flutter that the medical console insisted was there. Quickening, it called it. A word from a language nobody spoke.

I got up. The floor was cold through my socks. Habitation ring spun at a constant three-quarter g, enough to keep my muscles from melting but not enough to make a glass of water sit flat. I'd watched a vid once, some old thing from the archive, where people poured water on Earth and it just fell straight down. I must have watched it forty times. The way it hit the sink and stayed there, like it belonged.

The corridor lights came up as I passed, one by one, the way they'd been programmed to two hundred years before I was born. Nobody'd changed the settings since. Nobody'd changed anything.

"Morning, Cora," said the ship.

"Morning, Ship."

That was the whole conversation. It used to say more. It used to ask about my day, my sleep, my dreams. But the voice module had degraded, or maybe it had just gotten tired. I couldn't blame it.

I walked the long way to the mess. Past the hydroponics bay, where the tomatoes were fruiting in their racks, red and obscene under the grow lights. Past the cryo bay, sealed and dark, the pods empty and clean, waiting for people who'd never come. Past the chapel, which wasn't a chapel anymore, just a room with a bench and a window that looked out on nothing but the long black.

The mess had coffee. Real coffee, or as real as anything got up here. I poured a cup and sat by the observation window and watched the stars do their slow wheel. They didn't move, of course. We did. But it felt the same.

I was thirty-one years old. I was the last person on the ship. And I was pregnant.

Neither of those things was supposed to be possible.

The pregnancy was the newer problem. Sixteen weeks, according to the console, which had run the numbers three times because I'd asked it to. No father. No donor. No explanation. The console said the embryo was viable, genetically human, and developing normally. It said this in the same flat tone it used to tell me the oxygen scrubbers needed a filter change.

I'd stopped asking it questions. It didn't have answers, and I was starting to think it didn't want to.

The coffee was bitter. I drank it anyway. Down in the ring's slow curve, the hydroponics bay hummed, and somewhere far below, the engines did whatever engines do when they've been running for two centuries without anyone to tell them where to go.

We weren't going anywhere. That was the thing. The ship had a destination, once. A colony world, a garden planet, a place with weather and oceans and a sky you could stand under without a helmet. I'd read the files. I'd memorized the files. But somewhere along the way, the navigation system had lost its lock, or the star charts had gone stale, or the people who were supposed to wake up and fix it had never woken up.

So we drifted. The ship and me. Around a star that wasn't ours, in a galaxy that didn't care.

I finished the coffee and went to work. That's what you do. You get up, you eat, you check the systems, you run the diagnostics, you pretend the day matters. I'd been pretending for eleven years, since the last of the others had died. My mother went first. Then the twins. Then Old Harad, who'd been a botanist and had taught me how to graft a tomato vine onto a pepper root, which shouldn't work but did.

I was nineteen when I buried them. Twenty when I stopped counting the days. Thirty when I stopped hoping the ship would find its way.

Then the pregnancy.

The medical bay was two decks down, in the ring's inner curve where the spin was gentler. I went there every morning now. The console would hum and flash and tell me what I already knew. The embryo was fine. I was fine. Everything was fine.

Except that I hadn't had sex in four years, and the last time had been with a man who was dead, and even if he weren't, we'd been careful.

I sat on the exam table and let the scanner do its work. The screen showed the shape, small and curled, the size of a plum. A plum. I'd never eaten a plum. The hydroponics bay couldn't grow them.

"Any change?" I asked.

"Development is proceeding within normal parameters," the console said. "Estimated gestation: twenty-four weeks remaining."

"Not that. The other thing."

The console was quiet. It did that now. Long pauses, like it was thinking, or like it was deciding what to tell me.

"The origin of the embryo remains undetermined," it said finally.

"You've said that."

"Yes."

I pulled my shirt down and slid off the table. The floor was cold again. Everything on this ship was cold, except the hydroponics bay and the engine room and the small warm spot in my chest where I kept the things I didn't say out loud.

I walked back up the ring, past the chapel, past the cryo bay, past the hydroponics with its obscene tomatoes. I stopped at the observation window and put my hand on the glass.

The stars didn't move. The ship didn't move. But something was moving, inside me, a small and stubborn thing that shouldn't exist.

I thought about my mother. She used to tell me stories about Earth, the way you tell stories about a place you've never been. She'd say the sky was blue, and the grass was green, and the rain fell down instead of sideways. She'd say people lived in houses with windows, and the windows looked out on other houses, and other people, and the whole world was full of faces you didn't know.

I used to think she was making it up. Now I thought maybe she was just remembering something she'd never seen either.

The ship hummed. The stars burned. And somewhere in the dark, a signal pulsed, faint and regular, like a heartbeat.

I'd been ignoring it for three weeks. It wasn't in the logs. It wasn't in the charts. It was just there, a whisper at the edge of the sensors, a pattern that didn't match any star or any known object.

I didn't know what it was. I didn't know if it was real.

But I knew I was going to answer it.

I put my hand back on my belly. The flutter was there, small and insistent. A question, maybe. Or an answer.

"Okay," I said, to the ship, to the stars, to the thing inside me that had come from nowhere. "Okay. Let's find out what's out there."

The ship didn't respond. It never did. But the signal pulsed again, steady and patient, and I stood there in the cold light of a dead star and let myself feel something I hadn't felt in years.

Hope. Or something like it. Something that might have been hope if I'd remembered what hope felt like.

I turned away from the window. I had work to do.