Grief's Apogee by R. J. Howell
1200 words, ~6 minutes reading time
Issue 6 (Fall 2024)
Author's Note: “Grief’s Apogee” is part of a wider universe with a sibling story, “Heart Amongst the Heather” appearing in Luminescent Machinations: Queer Tales of Monumental Invention.
I strap into my designated place within the single-occupancy pod overlooking the shipbuilder’s womb assigned to us. To watch. To witness. To be on standby for all eventualities.
The restraining belts of the seat wrap around me as the womb’s docking clamps lock The Sun’s Apogee into place. My ship, my partner, the extension of my body, my soul, my mind for the last fifty-two years of my life, pinned in place to wait, in perfect poise and grace, for her doom.
She's glorious, even in these final moments, her form scarred and scraped and pocked with eight hundred and twelve accumulated years of space debris and frozen interstellar dust. A familiar patina, an aged beauty I know more than my own wrinkled and withered self. Time has been unkind to both of us, though The Sun’s Apogee carries it better than I.
We do not know from where the shipbuilders came or even where they went. Nor do we know who they were—be it our own ancestors, their memory lost to time, or another species of spacefarers that saw in us a like-hearted kin and gifted us their creations to take to the stars, or something else entirely, far beyond our mortal comprehension.
But in their wake, they left a legacy of ships that passed each ship’s knowledge, incarnation to incarnation, down through the generations from mother ship to daughter. A hundred ships, across eight hundred and twelve years of precisely allotted life, sailing across two millennia. And we, in turn, refined upon the technology of those long-lost foregoers, improving our own interface, until we were as one during our time together through the half mile of implanted neural filament beneath our skin, the interface ports along our backs. We pilots, the products of a thousand years of bio-synthetic engineering and innovation.
Always one pilot to one ship, until that ship outlived the pilot and chose anew. The core of their incarnation’s being was forever imprinted with the ghost of the memory of the one they bonded with first. To be a ship’s first was always an honor. To be their last, an inevitable grief.
Tears drip down my cheeks with every blink. The restraints of the pod hold my body in a perfectly braced and cushioned position, but does not give me the leeway to wipe that blur away.
Of the two of us, we always thought it would be I who would go first. That my aching, ageing body would fail, and The Sun’s Apogee would bond some other pilot for the last few years of her life. It is a frail thing, this flesh of mine. So unfitting, so unlike the memory of myself, frozen at some indeterminate age.
That’s untrue. It was frozen on the day my implants were first keyed on, when I first felt the hum and glory of the connection with my ship.
The Sun’s Apogee waits for death, and I wish—oh, did I wish—I could burn with her, if only so that she would not be so painfully alone.
“It’s almost time,” I whisper, my mind reflexively tossing the thought through my implants, to a mind nexus interface that could not receive it. It was a strange sort of cruelty, that the shipbuilders hadn’t created an interface hub access point in the pod.
I imagine the breath of her presence on the back of my neck, tickling the spaces between my neural ports, her laugh in my ear.
It is rare indeed for a pilot to be passed from mother to daughter, like an inheritance of memory. More often, at the onset of a ship’s looming death, her pilot uncouples and hands those leads to another. A younger, fresher soul who guides the dying ship and, after the rebirth, molds the newborn daughter anew over the course of the remaining decades of their life.
Though my situation is uncommon, it is not unheard of. That a new pilot could not be sourced in time. That the countdown of the death pilgrimage could not be postponed without risking the ship’s continuation. For a ship must reach the shipbuilders’ wombs before the conflagration begins. Or else, all is lost. For all eternity.
I admit, neither of us protested when the duty fell to me. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder if the rigid custom was meant as a kindness, in truth. Perhaps a young heart would not be so stricken. Perhaps it would be simply an existential loss, rather than this deeply personal one.
A flicker of light, a silent explosion, silhouetted against the reflection of the dead white sun behind me. A spark, followed by a glittering chain, one after another, beginning at The Sun’s Apogee’s tail and running along the central ridge of her form.
I choke on a sob. Even though I know, intellectually, that this was not the permanent cessation humans experience, it was still the death of my oldest friend. Even though I know a ship could not feel pain, not the way a human body understood it, I drown in sympathetic agony.
And in one shattering moment, the fire reaches The Sun’s Apogee’s gate drive, and the whole of her lights up in a soundless boom plastering me flat to my seat, threatening to peel the flesh from my bones with the sheer pressure of its magnitude.
Against my will, my eyes snap shut, and yet, still, the fire burns white and then green and then black in my vision.
And then…
Silence absolute.
No prickling luminescence dancing on the edges of my implants, no echo of The Sun’s Apogee only a fingerbreadth away. No neural channel, the uninterrupted link and open invitation between us defying all distance and scope. Even when we were parted, even when the interface ports running along either side of my spine stood empty. Should we ever be separated by the impossible space between galaxies, my bond with The Sun’s Apogee would always flow beneath my skin. But now—
Broken. Gone.
A cry escapes me. My friend, oh my friend.
The light shifts from white to yellow to a dull orange laced with red.
And from that plume of fire and death comes the spark and glimmer of a fresh, unmarked, unscored hull.
Despite myself, despite my yawning grief, I cannot help but smile, even through the tears streaming down my cheeks. And in a way, that glint of white sunlight on the outstretched pinions of her fresh wing-sails—designed to capture those solar currents and direct us through the interstellar gates between galaxies—it is like looking upon the face of a child I never thought I would lay eyes on.
Gone was The Sun’s Apogee, yes, but in the wake of her passing was something, someone, new. A nameless ship, unmolded and raw and already magnificent.
Though I know it a fruitless gesture, I reach for the viewport of the pod, reach for that so-familiar, yet so-alien form, as the clamps of the womb release her, at last, into the void.
Welcome, daughter of The Sun’s Apogee. Welcome, daughter of my greatest friend.
I am Pilot Imur.
I am yours, until that day I embark on my own death-journey.
Mother to daughter, pilot to pilot, the filament chains between us stretching on into eternity.
Stretching to the stars.