Time Drift by Alexis Ames
A small crew researching a distant human-habitable planet are cut off from communications with Earth, until a transmission arrives that reminds them of what they left behind.
Seren looked up from his breakfast as Ellis's tray clattered onto the table. The other man dropped into the seat across from him, a frown marring his features.
"What's Doc got for you this time?" Seren asked.
"Rocks." Ellis hunched over his food, stabbing his reconstituted eggs with his fork. "Same as every other transmission. You?"
"I'm still doing the river inventory." He could bore a person to tears with everything he was learning about this planet's waterways and the fish that inhabited them, but restrained himself for Ellis's sake. Lately, it seemed that talk of pH and solidity and different alien fish species only dampened his mood.
"Makes you almost long for the days when Earth couldn't contact us," Ellis said. "Those were a nice twenty-five years."
"I don't think it counts if we were asleep for twenty of them."
"A nice five years, then," Ellis said, as if he hadn't been the one most affected by the unexpected silence from Mission Control when they first arrived on Nova. Waking up on an alien planet after twenty years of cryo-sleep had been bad enough, but when the expected transmissions from Mission Control never arrived - the ones that had been sent out as soon as their ship launched so that they would reach Nova when the crew did - Ellis had shut down completely.
Before Seren could point that out, something chimed in the control room. The cafeteria quieted as everyone looked at each other, perplexed. Janus got up from their table and went to investigate.
"It's another transmission!" they called, and chairs scraped against the floor all around the room as everyone abandoned their meals to crowd into the control room.
Decades ago, Earth had selected this planet for the mission, named it Nova and chosen an elite group of scientists to spend the rest of their lives there. All communication from Earth was meticulously planned, having been sent when their ship left the planet so that the messages would arrive at the same time as the crew, twenty years later. What Earth hadn't known - what Seren and his crew hadn't discovered until they woke - was that a strange phenomenon surrounded the planet. It warped time, slowed messages down or lost them altogether, and communications sometimes arrived months or even years later than expected.
They had never received a daily update from their home planet.
It was mainly static, but if he strained, Seren could hear the faint undercurrent of voices.
"See if you can clean it up, and then play it back from the beginning," he said.
"I'm a paleontologist, not an electronics expert," Janus muttered under their breath, but their fingers were already flying across the controls. For all their protests, they were the mission's de facto technology whiz, and no one ever let them forget it.
There was another burst of static, and then clear voices filled the small room.
"It's a beautiful day in McCarty Stadium here in Little Rock. The sun is shining and it's seven-five degrees, on the field it might be just a bit warmer -"
"The hell?" Asir muttered. "That's not Doc."
"No," Ellis breathed, "it's a baseball game."
"Why would Earth send us a baseball game?"
"They wouldn't have," Seren and Nikos chorused. Mission Control had come up with the communications protocol for the Nova mission in the first place, and had no reason to break it. Still, Seren knew it was a difficult thing to control - radio waves left Earth in all directions. The ones they received on their far-distant outpost had been deliberately aimed at them more than two decades before by Mission Control, but it wouldn't be unheard of for other stray radio waves to get in the way.
"Shh." Ellis waved a hand at them. He was listening intently to the staticky words, and Seren was momentarily struck by the realization that these were the first voices from Earth that he had heard - that any of them had heard - in almost seven years. "The Rays and the Mariners? Are you kidding me?"
"How the hell did those two make it to the World Series?" Mila asked.
"More and more of the coasts flood every summer. Maybe the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Red Sox all got wiped out," Asir said. "At least the Rays and the Mariners had the sense to move to flyover states before the turn of the century."
Ellis shot Seren a cheeky look over his shoulder, apparently having noted his silence. "Are we being too American for you, boss?"
"Yes," Seren said, "which is odd, considering you're the only one from there. How long do these things last?"
"Couple of hours, maybe longer."
Seren sighed. Earth was going to have to wait twenty-odd years for their data to arrive anyway. What was a few more hours? This was the liveliest he had seen the crew in ages, and if he forbade them from listening, they would simply find a way to do it without him knowing. "Listen to the game, then get to work."
Seren checked the computer panel in the airlock when he returned to base that night. Only Mila and Nikos were still in the field, out cataloging plant species and collecting samples for testing from a location an hour away. Janus had returned from their excavation site in one of the nearby caves, Asir had returned from atmospheric testing, and Ellis had finished his geological survey for the day.
He peeled out of his wetsuit, left it in the 'fresher unit, and stepped into the adjoining shower. The warm water loosened the stiff and aching joints he was far too young to have - by Earth years, he might have been sixty-seven, but biologically, he was twenty years younger than that. Far too young for the aches and pains he had after a day's work. He dressed in the neighboring locker room after his shower, and then made his way home.
The ship that had carried them to Nova had been comically large compared to the small crew sleeping inside, but it had needed to sustain them through twenty years in the void and a lifetime on this planet. After their landing and reanimation, the ship had been converted into the outpost that stood on Nova's lone continent today. There were six wings, one for each crewmember, and all of them converged on a central area that contained all the common spaces. The sixth, unused wing had been converted into a generalized rec area separate from the main gym, which they had put to good use during the five years they were without instructions from Mission Control.
Ellis was cooking dinner in their quarters, and Seren kissed his stubbled cheek as he reached around him for the kettle.
"How are the fish?" Ellis asked.
"Fishy," Seren said, and that pulled a tiny smile out of his husband. "I'll need to go to the lab later and send off those turbidity measurements Doc asked for."
"I sent some chemical reaction tests earlier that'll make the geology team wet themselves," Ellis said. "And get this - the seismograph even picked something up."
"Anything we need to worry about?"
"Nah, but it will probably make Doc's entire year."
Sometimes, Seren wondered if it was odd - maybe even unhealthy - that they all referred to the team on Earth in charge of the Nova mission in the present tense. Most of them had been in their forties when Seren and his crew had been launched in their cryo-pods. By now, they were long retired, and Doc, who had been well into his sixties at the time, was likely dead.
It was a difficult habit to break, though.
"How was the game?" Seren asked.
"It was only two innings," Ellis said, the fragile cheer leaching out of his voice. "The rest of it must be caught in the phenomenon."
Which meant that it could arrive in a matter of hours, or it might not reach them for months, if at all.
They ate in their usual silence. The gloom was back, settling on Ellis's expression and in his shoulders, which slumped forward as he stirred his bowl of vegetable stew disinterestedly. The unexpected baseball game was the liveliest Seren had seen him in a while, and he wondered how he could bring that back.
"Transmission detected," the computer said suddenly, causing Seren to nearly jump out of his skin. A grin split Ellis's face.
"How long until arrival, computer?" he asked.
"Ten hours, twenty-two minutes."
"Perfect," Ellis said, mostly to himself. "That means it'll get here first thing in the morning."
"You set up the computer to detect the incoming transmissions?" Seren asked. They didn't plan their days around communications from Earth, given how unpredictable the phenomenon made them.
"We wanted to know when the rest of the game would arrive," Ellis said. "We'll be starting late again tomorrow."
Seren bristled at that - he was the commander in charge of the mission, not Ellis. "I don't remember saying that."
Ellis shrugged, licking the spoon. "Good luck trying to get everyone to work while it's on, then."
"You don't even know that it's the game!"
"There's a good chance it is!" Ellis said heatedly. "That phenomenon might change the speed of electromagnetic waves, but it always delivers transmissions in chronological order. Whatever is coming next would have been sent at the same time as the game, so it likely is the game. This is the only piece of Earth we've had in seven years, and you're not going to take that from this crew."
As soon as the transmission came through the next morning, everyone abandoned their spots in the cafeteria to crowd into the control room once again.
"It's the top of the third, and Acosta is up to bat. The Mariners are trailing the Rays -"
"Pause playback," Ellis said, reaching for a pad of paper. "Right, third inning, how do we think this is going to go?"
"Rays will get two home runs," Asir said promptly, and Mila scoffed.
"No way. No home runs, and put me down for Acosta striking out."
Ellis scribbled down both of their predictions. "Anyone else?"
"Someone's gonna get in a fight with the umpire and they'll be ejected from the game," Nikos said, and Seren shot the biologist a betrayed look. He had helped NASA develop the communications protocols, after all.
Ellis snorted, but wrote that down anyway. "Anyone care to wager anything?"
"Twenty euros," Mila said, and Janus rolled their eyes.
"How about you wager something that's actually of worth on this planet? Like that bottle of wine you sneaked into your things."
"No one's touching that wine but me!"
Seren left them to it.
For the next fifteen days, it seemed that all the crew could talk about was the baseball game. The last transmission had ended in the middle of the fourth inning, and speculation and analysis had run rampant since then. Janus patched the separate transmissions together so that they could be listened to in a single stretch, and the crew pored over the recording as intently as they studied the data from their experiments.
As annoying as it was to not be able to go more than an hour without hearing about batting averages and strikes and scores, Seren kept his mouth shut. The crew's performance hadn't suffered - they were still working hard in the field, running their experiments, and sending their data back to Earth. Morale was vital on a lifelong mission like this one - they had signed up for it knowing that they would live out the rest of their lives on an alien world, and communication with Earth was a forty-year round trip. Disharmony threatened not only the mission itself, but their lives.
Still, that didn't help when Seren walked into the cafeteria one morning to find it bursting with navy blue, yellow, silver, and teal.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded.
"We decorated," Mila said, and he recalled from one of his conversations with Ellis that these were the respective teams' colors.
"I can see that." Seren rubbed his eyes. "When is this hellish thing going to be over?"
"The computer says the next transmission will come through the phenomenon in three weeks."
"It better be the last one," Seren grumbled.
Seren didn't know how Ellis managed it, but by the time the third transmission arrived, he had marshaled the crew into creating jerseys and pennants for their respective teams. They were crude, but everyone wore theirs with pride, and Ellis rigged up a handheld radio in the cafeteria so they could listen there instead of the cramped control room.
"Aw, boss, where's your jersey?" Asir asked as Seren filled his plate. It was Nikos's turn this week for the dinner rotation, which meant that the food was half-decent.
"Not really my thing, Asir," he said, and pretended not to notice the flash of hurt across Ellis's face. They had left Earth behind for a reason. Theirs was an unprecedented and history-altering mission, to study the first planet discovered that could support Earth species. How the monumental work they were doing here compared to a twenty-seven-year-old game from Earth, he would never know.
Weeks passed without another transmission, and Seren hoped that would be the end of it. With any luck, the next communication that came through would be one from Mission Control.
He was in one of the caves with Janus one morning when Mila came sprinting towards them.
"New transmission," she said, skidding to a halt and holding out a radio. Janus's entire demeanor lit up. "Ellis says this one's almost forty-five minutes long. Should be the rest of the fourth inning and maybe even part of the fifth."
"Sweet." Janus set the radio on a nearby boulder and turned up the volume.
Seren returned to his sifting tray, using the tools Janus had given him to single out items that might be of paleontological interest. Janus remained hunched over their shovel test pit a few feet away, excavating larger bones and recording everything in their notes. Seren would have preferred to be on the water, but storms had been rolling through all day, so he had opted to make himself useful elsewhere.
"Damn it," Janus muttered as the crowd on the radio erupted into screams and cheers. "Llewellyn hitting a home run? Hell really must have frozen over after we left."
"How much do you owe Ellis?" Seren asked, and Janus sighed.
"My best bottle of whiskey."
"We'll put it to good use."
When Seren stepped through the door to their rooms that evening, he was hit in the chest with a glove from an EVA suit. He fumbled to catch it, and then glared at Ellis. "What was that for?"
"Good reflexes; you'll be perfect," Ellis declared, grinning. "We're playing a game tomorrow once everyone gets back in from the field. You'll be the catcher. We don't have a mitt, so the EVA glove will have to do. And obviously it will have to be a modified game since there are only six of ut, but -"
"I'm getting sick of you telling me what I will and won't do!" Seren tossed the glove to the side. "Frankly, this baseball nonsense has gone on long enough. It's been a distraction for weeks."
Ellis's eyes flashed. "This is the only communication we've had from Earth in seven years that isn't Doc and the rest of the team telling us what to do. Why can't you let us have this?"
"The protocols are in place for a reason, Ellis! We're not supposed to have any personal communication with Earth, none. No letters, no recordings, nothing. We have every piece of media ever produced by humanity in our database, and that's it. We don't get anything new."
"It's a pointless protocol and you know it. It's cruel."
"It's kind!" Seren countered. "We can never return home. Everything that's sent to us is twenty years old at a minimum without taking the phenomenon into account. Our only contact with Earth should be messages about the mission."
"It's a piece of home."
"This is home now, Ellis!"
"Just because you wanted to escape Earth doesn't mean that everyone else on this mission did, too!"
Seren frowned. "What are you talking about? We all knew -"
"Yes, we all knew what we were getting into, but would it kill you to acknowledge that I did it for you?" Ellis burst out. "That I left behind my home, my friends, my work, my planet for you? Tell me that you know that!"
That pulled Seren up short, as if someone had wrapped a rope around his waist and wrenched it. "What?"
"I was happy in the Sierra Nevada." Ellis folded his arms over his chest. "The job was steady, the pay was good. It wasn't glamorous, not even by geological standards, but I didn't need it to be. You were the one who was never content, who needed to push the boundaries of the frontier, who needed to do something that would put him in the history books. You were never going to be happy on Earth."
"Do you regret it?" Seren felt sick. "Did you - did you not want to come? Did I force you? I never -"
"I'm a grown man, Seren, you can't force me to do anything," Ellis said wearily. "We're married. That's what that means - I carry your dreams and you carry mine. My home is wherever you are, but sometimes it'd be nice to hear that you know what I gave up for this."
"I'm sorry," Seren said wretchedly, knowing that it was a paltry offering. He had been the one to push for this mission, and even for him the first five years had been difficult. For Ellis, they must have been hell, and he had never even noticed. "I would have stayed, if you'd asked."
"I know," Ellis said, "and that's why I didn't."
The river's pH was rising.
This was the first indication they had of the coming seasonal change. In the five years Seren had been taking measurements from this river, the pH was always highest during the cold months and low during this hemisphere's summer.
Ellis loved winter. Back on Earth, every day that he didn't spend in a lab or out in the field had been spent on the slopes. He loved every form of activity to do with the season. Skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, he had mastered them all. Seven years ago, during their first winter on this planet and still without any word from Earth - back before they had realized that the space around this planet distorted time - he had fashioned himself a set of snowshoes and spent most days exploring the wintry landscape around them.
He hadn't touched those snowshoes in two years. Seren hadn't noticed.
"I'm an idiot," he said out loud.
"No argument there," Mila said from across the lab, and Seren glared at her back.
"You don't even know why I'm an idiot."
"Is it because you've been so focused on getting what you want that you didn't even notice that your husband has been miserable?"
Seren turned his glare back to the graph on his screen. "I did notice, I just -"
"You just didn't think about why that might be?"
Seren's shoulders slumped. "I can't send him back to Earth."
"He doesn't want to go back, he just wants you to acknowledge how hard it's been," Mila said. "We spent twenty years in cryo-sleep, expecting to wake up on a brand-new world with a host of messages from Mission Control waiting for us, only to find out that this part of space warps time. Electromagnetic waves don't travel as fast as they should, and we woke up to silence. The phenomenon caught those messages and slowed them down, and no one was expecting that. Even though Earth was twenty years away, we were never supposed to feel alone."
Seren had relished the silence, the freedom. Five years without a word from Mission Control had given them free reign to build their outpost and explore their new planet to their heart's content. He had forged a new life on a planet no human had ever stepped on before with the love of his life at his side. He had thought Ellis enjoyed it as much as he did.
"If you want my advice -"
"I don't."
"- there's an entry on baseball in the computer's database. Read up on it."
Two more transmissions trickled in over the course of the next few weeks. Instead of going about his duties as he normally would have, Seren lingered in the cafeteria while the rest of the crew clustered around the radio, pretending to write up some reports. He was taking notes instead - the names and positions of the players, the score, the unfamiliar lingo.
There was a bite to the air by the time the seventh inning arrived. It had been nearly six months since they had received the first part of the game, and this planet's autumn was closing in quickly. This was Seren's favorite season, one that he had read about in Earth stories but never experienced for himself. Earth only ever had summer and winter, and autumn was still a novelty even after seven years on this planet.
When the crew gathered to listen to the latest transmission, Seren sidled up to Ellis and slid an arm around his waist.
"Hey," Ellis said, surprised.
"Hey, yourself." Seren kissed the side of his head, and then murmured in his ear, "Want to sneak off to a supply closet and make out during the seventh inning stretch?"
Ellis pulled back and stared at him. "You know what a seventh inning stretch is?"
"I know the song, too."
"Prove it."
The score was tied by the time he got a chance to, and the crew sang along jubilantly with the crowd. Ellis dragged Seren off to a supply closet after, and they barely made it back in time for the rest of the inning.
The next transmission was detected in the phenomenon a few days later, and their calculations indicated it would take two weeks to reach them. Based on the size of the transmission, it was most likely the remainder of the game, so Seren relieved everyone of their duties on the day it was scheduled to arrive. Nikos and Mila spent the morning in the kitchen while Seren helped Ellis with decorations. Asir and Janus organized a pickup soccer game in the afternoon to help everyone burn off some nervous energy. By nightfall, they were back in the cafeteria, filling their plates and waiting for the download to finish.
"How do you think it's going to end?" Seren asked Ellis.
"It's going to go into extra innings, given the size of the file," Ellis said. "Mariners will win in an upset."
"No way!" Asir shouted across the room at him, and that started an argument that Seren grinned through. It was wonderful to see Ellis passionate about something again, and he couldn't believe that he had missed this, that he had been so wrapped up in himself that he hadn't noticed when his husband stopped smiling, stopped laughing, stopped enjoying life.
He would do better from now on.
"What's taking so long?" Mila demanded, and Janus hurried over to the control room.
"It's still downloading!" they called back.
"Must be a hell of a game," Nikos said, and there were murmurs of agreement.
"Hold on," Janus said, and something in their voice sent a chill down Seren's spine. He went into the control room, the rest of the crew close behind. "It's downloading now, it's -"
They broke off.
Seren glanced at them. "Something wrong?"
"It's not an audio file," Janus said quietly. "It's a text one."
"Let me see," Seren said, and Janus moved out of the way. He skimmed the file quickly, then had the computer run an analysis to be sure. He sighed. "It's from Mission Control. More instructions from Doc and the team."
"When were they sent?" Ellis asked, and Seren tapped into the metadata.
"November 30th, 2141," he said quietly. Three weeks after the World Series ended.
The disappointment in the room was palpable. It hurt to look at the faces of his crew, but especially Ellis, whose expression had shuttered.
"Suppose it's a miracle we got as much of the game as we did," Mila said finally.
"Take the rest of the afternoon off," Seren said. "I'll send these new instructions to your terminals tonight. We can start tomorrow."
Seren returned to the control room late that night, after the rest of the crew had gone to bed. There was a light blue and yellow pennant on the floor, and he picked it up and tucked it into a corner of the console.
He pulled up the screens for the satellites they had in orbit, all of which were programmed to send a steady stream of data to the computer. It was a quiet night, nothing unusual on the sensors, but he watched anyway. Just in case.
"Seren?"
Ellis stood in the doorway, knuckling his eyes.
"Why are you down here?" he rasped, squinting against the bright lights.
"I could ask the same of you." Ellis had been sleeping soundly when he slipped out of bed less than an hour ago.
"Woke up and you weren't there. What are you doing?"
"Keeping an eye out for a transmission."
Ellis sat in the other chair. "You don't have to be here. There's nothing coming through."
"You don't know that."
Ellis let out a slow breath. "Communications arrive in chronological order. If we're receiving messages from November 2141, then it's over. The rest of the game isn't coming through. You don't have to pretend for my sake."
"I'm not pretending." Seren pressed his ankle against Ellis's. "I'm keeping your dream alive for you. That's what this is about, remember?"
A ghost of a smile flickered across Ellis's face, and then he sobered. "Strange to think we'll never know how it turned out."
"Sure we do." Seren took his hand. "Mariners upset, that's what you said. How many extra innings?"
Ellis pondered this for a moment.
"Three," he decided.
"A Mariners win after three extra innings at the 2141 World Series," Seren said. "That sounds good to me."
A chime sounded in the small room, and a red light started flashing on the console.
"Transmission detected," the computer intoned.
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"What's Doc got for you this time?" Seren asked.
"Rocks." Ellis hunched over his food, stabbing his reconstituted eggs with his fork. "Same as every other transmission. You?"
"I'm still doing the river inventory." He could bore a person to tears with everything he was learning about this planet's waterways and the fish that inhabited them, but restrained himself for Ellis's sake. Lately, it seemed that talk of pH and solidity and different alien fish species only dampened his mood.
"Makes you almost long for the days when Earth couldn't contact us," Ellis said. "Those were a nice twenty-five years."
"I don't think it counts if we were asleep for twenty of them."
"A nice five years, then," Ellis said, as if he hadn't been the one most affected by the unexpected silence from Mission Control when they first arrived on Nova. Waking up on an alien planet after twenty years of cryo-sleep had been bad enough, but when the expected transmissions from Mission Control never arrived - the ones that had been sent out as soon as their ship launched so that they would reach Nova when the crew did - Ellis had shut down completely.
Before Seren could point that out, something chimed in the control room. The cafeteria quieted as everyone looked at each other, perplexed. Janus got up from their table and went to investigate.
"It's another transmission!" they called, and chairs scraped against the floor all around the room as everyone abandoned their meals to crowd into the control room.
Decades ago, Earth had selected this planet for the mission, named it Nova and chosen an elite group of scientists to spend the rest of their lives there. All communication from Earth was meticulously planned, having been sent when their ship left the planet so that the messages would arrive at the same time as the crew, twenty years later. What Earth hadn't known - what Seren and his crew hadn't discovered until they woke - was that a strange phenomenon surrounded the planet. It warped time, slowed messages down or lost them altogether, and communications sometimes arrived months or even years later than expected.
They had never received a daily update from their home planet.
It was mainly static, but if he strained, Seren could hear the faint undercurrent of voices.
"See if you can clean it up, and then play it back from the beginning," he said.
"I'm a paleontologist, not an electronics expert," Janus muttered under their breath, but their fingers were already flying across the controls. For all their protests, they were the mission's de facto technology whiz, and no one ever let them forget it.
There was another burst of static, and then clear voices filled the small room.
"It's a beautiful day in McCarty Stadium here in Little Rock. The sun is shining and it's seven-five degrees, on the field it might be just a bit warmer -"
"The hell?" Asir muttered. "That's not Doc."
"No," Ellis breathed, "it's a baseball game."
"Why would Earth send us a baseball game?"
"They wouldn't have," Seren and Nikos chorused. Mission Control had come up with the communications protocol for the Nova mission in the first place, and had no reason to break it. Still, Seren knew it was a difficult thing to control - radio waves left Earth in all directions. The ones they received on their far-distant outpost had been deliberately aimed at them more than two decades before by Mission Control, but it wouldn't be unheard of for other stray radio waves to get in the way.
"Shh." Ellis waved a hand at them. He was listening intently to the staticky words, and Seren was momentarily struck by the realization that these were the first voices from Earth that he had heard - that any of them had heard - in almost seven years. "The Rays and the Mariners? Are you kidding me?"
"How the hell did those two make it to the World Series?" Mila asked.
"More and more of the coasts flood every summer. Maybe the Yankees, the Dodgers, and the Red Sox all got wiped out," Asir said. "At least the Rays and the Mariners had the sense to move to flyover states before the turn of the century."
Ellis shot Seren a cheeky look over his shoulder, apparently having noted his silence. "Are we being too American for you, boss?"
"Yes," Seren said, "which is odd, considering you're the only one from there. How long do these things last?"
"Couple of hours, maybe longer."
Seren sighed. Earth was going to have to wait twenty-odd years for their data to arrive anyway. What was a few more hours? This was the liveliest he had seen the crew in ages, and if he forbade them from listening, they would simply find a way to do it without him knowing. "Listen to the game, then get to work."
Seren checked the computer panel in the airlock when he returned to base that night. Only Mila and Nikos were still in the field, out cataloging plant species and collecting samples for testing from a location an hour away. Janus had returned from their excavation site in one of the nearby caves, Asir had returned from atmospheric testing, and Ellis had finished his geological survey for the day.
He peeled out of his wetsuit, left it in the 'fresher unit, and stepped into the adjoining shower. The warm water loosened the stiff and aching joints he was far too young to have - by Earth years, he might have been sixty-seven, but biologically, he was twenty years younger than that. Far too young for the aches and pains he had after a day's work. He dressed in the neighboring locker room after his shower, and then made his way home.
The ship that had carried them to Nova had been comically large compared to the small crew sleeping inside, but it had needed to sustain them through twenty years in the void and a lifetime on this planet. After their landing and reanimation, the ship had been converted into the outpost that stood on Nova's lone continent today. There were six wings, one for each crewmember, and all of them converged on a central area that contained all the common spaces. The sixth, unused wing had been converted into a generalized rec area separate from the main gym, which they had put to good use during the five years they were without instructions from Mission Control.
Ellis was cooking dinner in their quarters, and Seren kissed his stubbled cheek as he reached around him for the kettle.
"How are the fish?" Ellis asked.
"Fishy," Seren said, and that pulled a tiny smile out of his husband. "I'll need to go to the lab later and send off those turbidity measurements Doc asked for."
"I sent some chemical reaction tests earlier that'll make the geology team wet themselves," Ellis said. "And get this - the seismograph even picked something up."
"Anything we need to worry about?"
"Nah, but it will probably make Doc's entire year."
Sometimes, Seren wondered if it was odd - maybe even unhealthy - that they all referred to the team on Earth in charge of the Nova mission in the present tense. Most of them had been in their forties when Seren and his crew had been launched in their cryo-pods. By now, they were long retired, and Doc, who had been well into his sixties at the time, was likely dead.
It was a difficult habit to break, though.
"How was the game?" Seren asked.
"It was only two innings," Ellis said, the fragile cheer leaching out of his voice. "The rest of it must be caught in the phenomenon."
Which meant that it could arrive in a matter of hours, or it might not reach them for months, if at all.
They ate in their usual silence. The gloom was back, settling on Ellis's expression and in his shoulders, which slumped forward as he stirred his bowl of vegetable stew disinterestedly. The unexpected baseball game was the liveliest Seren had seen him in a while, and he wondered how he could bring that back.
"Transmission detected," the computer said suddenly, causing Seren to nearly jump out of his skin. A grin split Ellis's face.
"How long until arrival, computer?" he asked.
"Ten hours, twenty-two minutes."
"Perfect," Ellis said, mostly to himself. "That means it'll get here first thing in the morning."
"You set up the computer to detect the incoming transmissions?" Seren asked. They didn't plan their days around communications from Earth, given how unpredictable the phenomenon made them.
"We wanted to know when the rest of the game would arrive," Ellis said. "We'll be starting late again tomorrow."
Seren bristled at that - he was the commander in charge of the mission, not Ellis. "I don't remember saying that."
Ellis shrugged, licking the spoon. "Good luck trying to get everyone to work while it's on, then."
"You don't even know that it's the game!"
"There's a good chance it is!" Ellis said heatedly. "That phenomenon might change the speed of electromagnetic waves, but it always delivers transmissions in chronological order. Whatever is coming next would have been sent at the same time as the game, so it likely is the game. This is the only piece of Earth we've had in seven years, and you're not going to take that from this crew."
As soon as the transmission came through the next morning, everyone abandoned their spots in the cafeteria to crowd into the control room once again.
"It's the top of the third, and Acosta is up to bat. The Mariners are trailing the Rays -"
"Pause playback," Ellis said, reaching for a pad of paper. "Right, third inning, how do we think this is going to go?"
"Rays will get two home runs," Asir said promptly, and Mila scoffed.
"No way. No home runs, and put me down for Acosta striking out."
Ellis scribbled down both of their predictions. "Anyone else?"
"Someone's gonna get in a fight with the umpire and they'll be ejected from the game," Nikos said, and Seren shot the biologist a betrayed look. He had helped NASA develop the communications protocols, after all.
Ellis snorted, but wrote that down anyway. "Anyone care to wager anything?"
"Twenty euros," Mila said, and Janus rolled their eyes.
"How about you wager something that's actually of worth on this planet? Like that bottle of wine you sneaked into your things."
"No one's touching that wine but me!"
Seren left them to it.
For the next fifteen days, it seemed that all the crew could talk about was the baseball game. The last transmission had ended in the middle of the fourth inning, and speculation and analysis had run rampant since then. Janus patched the separate transmissions together so that they could be listened to in a single stretch, and the crew pored over the recording as intently as they studied the data from their experiments.
As annoying as it was to not be able to go more than an hour without hearing about batting averages and strikes and scores, Seren kept his mouth shut. The crew's performance hadn't suffered - they were still working hard in the field, running their experiments, and sending their data back to Earth. Morale was vital on a lifelong mission like this one - they had signed up for it knowing that they would live out the rest of their lives on an alien world, and communication with Earth was a forty-year round trip. Disharmony threatened not only the mission itself, but their lives.
Still, that didn't help when Seren walked into the cafeteria one morning to find it bursting with navy blue, yellow, silver, and teal.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded.
"We decorated," Mila said, and he recalled from one of his conversations with Ellis that these were the respective teams' colors.
"I can see that." Seren rubbed his eyes. "When is this hellish thing going to be over?"
"The computer says the next transmission will come through the phenomenon in three weeks."
"It better be the last one," Seren grumbled.
Seren didn't know how Ellis managed it, but by the time the third transmission arrived, he had marshaled the crew into creating jerseys and pennants for their respective teams. They were crude, but everyone wore theirs with pride, and Ellis rigged up a handheld radio in the cafeteria so they could listen there instead of the cramped control room.
"Aw, boss, where's your jersey?" Asir asked as Seren filled his plate. It was Nikos's turn this week for the dinner rotation, which meant that the food was half-decent.
"Not really my thing, Asir," he said, and pretended not to notice the flash of hurt across Ellis's face. They had left Earth behind for a reason. Theirs was an unprecedented and history-altering mission, to study the first planet discovered that could support Earth species. How the monumental work they were doing here compared to a twenty-seven-year-old game from Earth, he would never know.
Weeks passed without another transmission, and Seren hoped that would be the end of it. With any luck, the next communication that came through would be one from Mission Control.
He was in one of the caves with Janus one morning when Mila came sprinting towards them.
"New transmission," she said, skidding to a halt and holding out a radio. Janus's entire demeanor lit up. "Ellis says this one's almost forty-five minutes long. Should be the rest of the fourth inning and maybe even part of the fifth."
"Sweet." Janus set the radio on a nearby boulder and turned up the volume.
Seren returned to his sifting tray, using the tools Janus had given him to single out items that might be of paleontological interest. Janus remained hunched over their shovel test pit a few feet away, excavating larger bones and recording everything in their notes. Seren would have preferred to be on the water, but storms had been rolling through all day, so he had opted to make himself useful elsewhere.
"Damn it," Janus muttered as the crowd on the radio erupted into screams and cheers. "Llewellyn hitting a home run? Hell really must have frozen over after we left."
"How much do you owe Ellis?" Seren asked, and Janus sighed.
"My best bottle of whiskey."
"We'll put it to good use."
When Seren stepped through the door to their rooms that evening, he was hit in the chest with a glove from an EVA suit. He fumbled to catch it, and then glared at Ellis. "What was that for?"
"Good reflexes; you'll be perfect," Ellis declared, grinning. "We're playing a game tomorrow once everyone gets back in from the field. You'll be the catcher. We don't have a mitt, so the EVA glove will have to do. And obviously it will have to be a modified game since there are only six of ut, but -"
"I'm getting sick of you telling me what I will and won't do!" Seren tossed the glove to the side. "Frankly, this baseball nonsense has gone on long enough. It's been a distraction for weeks."
Ellis's eyes flashed. "This is the only communication we've had from Earth in seven years that isn't Doc and the rest of the team telling us what to do. Why can't you let us have this?"
"The protocols are in place for a reason, Ellis! We're not supposed to have any personal communication with Earth, none. No letters, no recordings, nothing. We have every piece of media ever produced by humanity in our database, and that's it. We don't get anything new."
"It's a pointless protocol and you know it. It's cruel."
"It's kind!" Seren countered. "We can never return home. Everything that's sent to us is twenty years old at a minimum without taking the phenomenon into account. Our only contact with Earth should be messages about the mission."
"It's a piece of home."
"This is home now, Ellis!"
"Just because you wanted to escape Earth doesn't mean that everyone else on this mission did, too!"
Seren frowned. "What are you talking about? We all knew -"
"Yes, we all knew what we were getting into, but would it kill you to acknowledge that I did it for you?" Ellis burst out. "That I left behind my home, my friends, my work, my planet for you? Tell me that you know that!"
That pulled Seren up short, as if someone had wrapped a rope around his waist and wrenched it. "What?"
"I was happy in the Sierra Nevada." Ellis folded his arms over his chest. "The job was steady, the pay was good. It wasn't glamorous, not even by geological standards, but I didn't need it to be. You were the one who was never content, who needed to push the boundaries of the frontier, who needed to do something that would put him in the history books. You were never going to be happy on Earth."
"Do you regret it?" Seren felt sick. "Did you - did you not want to come? Did I force you? I never -"
"I'm a grown man, Seren, you can't force me to do anything," Ellis said wearily. "We're married. That's what that means - I carry your dreams and you carry mine. My home is wherever you are, but sometimes it'd be nice to hear that you know what I gave up for this."
"I'm sorry," Seren said wretchedly, knowing that it was a paltry offering. He had been the one to push for this mission, and even for him the first five years had been difficult. For Ellis, they must have been hell, and he had never even noticed. "I would have stayed, if you'd asked."
"I know," Ellis said, "and that's why I didn't."
The river's pH was rising.
This was the first indication they had of the coming seasonal change. In the five years Seren had been taking measurements from this river, the pH was always highest during the cold months and low during this hemisphere's summer.
Ellis loved winter. Back on Earth, every day that he didn't spend in a lab or out in the field had been spent on the slopes. He loved every form of activity to do with the season. Skiing, snowboarding, snowshoeing, he had mastered them all. Seven years ago, during their first winter on this planet and still without any word from Earth - back before they had realized that the space around this planet distorted time - he had fashioned himself a set of snowshoes and spent most days exploring the wintry landscape around them.
He hadn't touched those snowshoes in two years. Seren hadn't noticed.
"I'm an idiot," he said out loud.
"No argument there," Mila said from across the lab, and Seren glared at her back.
"You don't even know why I'm an idiot."
"Is it because you've been so focused on getting what you want that you didn't even notice that your husband has been miserable?"
Seren turned his glare back to the graph on his screen. "I did notice, I just -"
"You just didn't think about why that might be?"
Seren's shoulders slumped. "I can't send him back to Earth."
"He doesn't want to go back, he just wants you to acknowledge how hard it's been," Mila said. "We spent twenty years in cryo-sleep, expecting to wake up on a brand-new world with a host of messages from Mission Control waiting for us, only to find out that this part of space warps time. Electromagnetic waves don't travel as fast as they should, and we woke up to silence. The phenomenon caught those messages and slowed them down, and no one was expecting that. Even though Earth was twenty years away, we were never supposed to feel alone."
Seren had relished the silence, the freedom. Five years without a word from Mission Control had given them free reign to build their outpost and explore their new planet to their heart's content. He had forged a new life on a planet no human had ever stepped on before with the love of his life at his side. He had thought Ellis enjoyed it as much as he did.
"If you want my advice -"
"I don't."
"- there's an entry on baseball in the computer's database. Read up on it."
Two more transmissions trickled in over the course of the next few weeks. Instead of going about his duties as he normally would have, Seren lingered in the cafeteria while the rest of the crew clustered around the radio, pretending to write up some reports. He was taking notes instead - the names and positions of the players, the score, the unfamiliar lingo.
There was a bite to the air by the time the seventh inning arrived. It had been nearly six months since they had received the first part of the game, and this planet's autumn was closing in quickly. This was Seren's favorite season, one that he had read about in Earth stories but never experienced for himself. Earth only ever had summer and winter, and autumn was still a novelty even after seven years on this planet.
When the crew gathered to listen to the latest transmission, Seren sidled up to Ellis and slid an arm around his waist.
"Hey," Ellis said, surprised.
"Hey, yourself." Seren kissed the side of his head, and then murmured in his ear, "Want to sneak off to a supply closet and make out during the seventh inning stretch?"
Ellis pulled back and stared at him. "You know what a seventh inning stretch is?"
"I know the song, too."
"Prove it."
The score was tied by the time he got a chance to, and the crew sang along jubilantly with the crowd. Ellis dragged Seren off to a supply closet after, and they barely made it back in time for the rest of the inning.
The next transmission was detected in the phenomenon a few days later, and their calculations indicated it would take two weeks to reach them. Based on the size of the transmission, it was most likely the remainder of the game, so Seren relieved everyone of their duties on the day it was scheduled to arrive. Nikos and Mila spent the morning in the kitchen while Seren helped Ellis with decorations. Asir and Janus organized a pickup soccer game in the afternoon to help everyone burn off some nervous energy. By nightfall, they were back in the cafeteria, filling their plates and waiting for the download to finish.
"How do you think it's going to end?" Seren asked Ellis.
"It's going to go into extra innings, given the size of the file," Ellis said. "Mariners will win in an upset."
"No way!" Asir shouted across the room at him, and that started an argument that Seren grinned through. It was wonderful to see Ellis passionate about something again, and he couldn't believe that he had missed this, that he had been so wrapped up in himself that he hadn't noticed when his husband stopped smiling, stopped laughing, stopped enjoying life.
He would do better from now on.
"What's taking so long?" Mila demanded, and Janus hurried over to the control room.
"It's still downloading!" they called back.
"Must be a hell of a game," Nikos said, and there were murmurs of agreement.
"Hold on," Janus said, and something in their voice sent a chill down Seren's spine. He went into the control room, the rest of the crew close behind. "It's downloading now, it's -"
They broke off.
Seren glanced at them. "Something wrong?"
"It's not an audio file," Janus said quietly. "It's a text one."
"Let me see," Seren said, and Janus moved out of the way. He skimmed the file quickly, then had the computer run an analysis to be sure. He sighed. "It's from Mission Control. More instructions from Doc and the team."
"When were they sent?" Ellis asked, and Seren tapped into the metadata.
"November 30th, 2141," he said quietly. Three weeks after the World Series ended.
The disappointment in the room was palpable. It hurt to look at the faces of his crew, but especially Ellis, whose expression had shuttered.
"Suppose it's a miracle we got as much of the game as we did," Mila said finally.
"Take the rest of the afternoon off," Seren said. "I'll send these new instructions to your terminals tonight. We can start tomorrow."
Seren returned to the control room late that night, after the rest of the crew had gone to bed. There was a light blue and yellow pennant on the floor, and he picked it up and tucked it into a corner of the console.
He pulled up the screens for the satellites they had in orbit, all of which were programmed to send a steady stream of data to the computer. It was a quiet night, nothing unusual on the sensors, but he watched anyway. Just in case.
"Seren?"
Ellis stood in the doorway, knuckling his eyes.
"Why are you down here?" he rasped, squinting against the bright lights.
"I could ask the same of you." Ellis had been sleeping soundly when he slipped out of bed less than an hour ago.
"Woke up and you weren't there. What are you doing?"
"Keeping an eye out for a transmission."
Ellis sat in the other chair. "You don't have to be here. There's nothing coming through."
"You don't know that."
Ellis let out a slow breath. "Communications arrive in chronological order. If we're receiving messages from November 2141, then it's over. The rest of the game isn't coming through. You don't have to pretend for my sake."
"I'm not pretending." Seren pressed his ankle against Ellis's. "I'm keeping your dream alive for you. That's what this is about, remember?"
A ghost of a smile flickered across Ellis's face, and then he sobered. "Strange to think we'll never know how it turned out."
"Sure we do." Seren took his hand. "Mariners upset, that's what you said. How many extra innings?"
Ellis pondered this for a moment.
"Three," he decided.
"A Mariners win after three extra innings at the 2141 World Series," Seren said. "That sounds good to me."
A chime sounded in the small room, and a red light started flashing on the console.
"Transmission detected," the computer intoned.
from FICTION on the WEB short stories https://ift.tt/wmSK7Dq
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