Diving into the Wreck

I tell people I sleep alone because I prefer to be alone. I do prefer to be alone. I like my own company. But the reason I sleep alone is that I dream.

Or, more accurately, I nightmare.

I thrash and moan and frighten anyone within hearing distance. The cabins on my ship, Nobody’s Business, have soundproof walls, as does my berth on Longbow Station. I put my bed in the center room of my apartment on Hector Prime, and hope no one can hear me through the floor.

So far no one has. Or, at least, no one has tried to come to my rescue.

Even though I was rescued before.

For almost forty years, I have had the dream every night—unless I’m traveling in the Business or in my single ship. Movement—movement through space—somehow negates the dream.

Or maybe it echoes the rescue.

For the dream is based on fact. The nightmare actually happened,

My mother and I suited up and walked, hand in hand, into a room on an abandoned space station. Mother wanted to explore, and I didn‘t want her to go alone. I was maybe four, maybe five. I don’t remember exactly, and no one has ever talked of it.

What I do remember is a jumble—colored lights, beautiful voices singing in six-part harmony. Mothers face turned upward toward the lights.

“Beautiful,“ she said, her voice blending into the chorus. “Oh, so beautiful. “

And then she left me and floated toward that light.

I called for her, but she never came back. I huddled on the floor of that room, surrounded by light and voices, and wrapped my spacesuited arms around my spacesuited knees, waiting.

Alone.

I didn’t scream then, and I don’t scream now. I never scream. But I gasp myself awake as the oxygen in my suit fails. My visor cracks, and even though I am four, maybe five, I know I am going to die.

Obviously, I didn’t die. My father found me and brought me back to our ship. But he never did find my mother.

And he never spoke of her again.