The Long Way Home from Gaia BH1 by Manuela Amiouny
3300 words, 16 minutes reading time
Issue 2 (Spring/Summer 2023)
Hoda was always there, waiting for her.
Like Terese’s previous eight attempts, she was once again standing in the ground crew area near the landing strip. Around her, everything looked exactly as Terese had left it three weeks ago: the sky was blue, and the sleek lines of the Lisbon spaceport were gleaming in the sun. It was a beautiful day to come home. Terese allowed herself to believe that she got it right this time and angled her ship towards the runway, embracing the familiar curl in her stomach as her velocity dropped, and she touched the ground.
Ship time: 14:56:04 UTC, 12/07/2287.
On her visual feed, Terese zoomed in on Hoda, her excitement swelling. She couldn’t wait to be out of the pilot chair, to breathe some fresh, non-recycled air, and to peel off her bodysuit. Her friend would be ecstatic to see the data she brought back, and Terese couldn’t wait to tell her, you’ll never guess what happened out there–I’ve got to admit that I was stressed for a bit at the end.
Hoda wouldn’t like to learn of all her accidental detours, but it wouldn’t matter anymore. Terese would be home, and they could celebrate at Hoda’s apartment, drink some wine, and eat all of the maamouls Hoda always baked when she was stressed about Terese’s missions.
On her screen, Hoda raised a seven-fingered hand in greeting, and all of Terese’s hopes came crashing down.
Wrong Hoda, again.
Before her ship could fully stop, Terese punched her speed back to full throttle and launched herself back into space.
•••••••••••••
Ship time indicated Terese was only a week late, still too early for anyone back at the Research Center to realise something was wrong. Her mission into Gaia BH1 was a first for human spaceflight, and time around singularities was finicky, so a margin of error had been accounted for.
Hoda was going to throttle her when she got back. She had already called Terese three shades of reckless for taking on this mission, so Hoda would be even more furious to learn she had been right about the risks.
“When you said ‘one last mission before retirement,’ I expected something less likely to keep you trapped in a time vault,” she said, lips curling in disapproval when she saw Terese’s name on the roster as pilot for the Gaia BH1 dive.
Terese knew Hoda was secretly relieved to see her take on less strenuous missions in recent years. She looked forward to the day Terese felt ready to stay earthside, but this mission was too good to pass up, even Hoda admitted it in the end. She even got herself involved in the project, just to be prudent. Black hole aside, this was a perfectly standard mission for them. Terese was collecting data on the possibility of using black holes as intergalactic shortcuts: jump gates to shave lightyears off travel distances. Hoda crunched some very large and very complicated numbers to build a flight path and Terese got to sit around and supervise a computer whilst touring a black hole. It had all gone very smoothly at first.
However, coming out of Gaia BH1 proved problematic.
In theory, Terese should be able to reel herself back to Earth easily: her ship computer was anchored home by a virtual lifeline that Hoda and an entire team of mathematicians and computers had spent months perfecting. It was a tried and tested method by all the unmanned probes that had been sent before her and technically, it worked. Terese made it back to Earth at the right coordinates, just not in the right universe.
Terese couldn’t identify what went wrong and it was vexing. Diagnostics reports came back green across the board, and there were no performance glitches or equipment failures. No turbulence that could be attributed to kicking her off course either. This could only mean it was an unexpected side effect of the singularity.
If Hoda were here, she would probably moan something like, “what could go wrong just went wrong,” but it was also Hoda’s job to worry. Her math always brought Terese home safely because she always saw the worst-case scenarios before they could happen. As the optimistic half of their duo, Terese knew her best course of action right now was to keep trying until she out-stubborned space. It had worked very well in her 35 year career. Best case scenario, she would make it home next time around. Worst case, more data would undoubtedly help the computer sort itself out.
When Terese made it home, maybe she would finally admit Hoda was right about her hero complex. Because at this moment, she much preferred to be the one stuck out here rather than some rookie who hasn’t even seen the dark side of Pluto.
•••••••••••••
Sometimes there were obvious markers that Terese was in the wrong place: one Earth with twin suns, another encapsulated in a giant glass-looking dome. She tried not to think too much about the two universes where Earth was a scorched wasteland. But most of the time, she couldn’t be sure until she saw Hoda.
Hoda-12 had a weapon strapped to her leg, and the control tower had its lasers trained on Terese’s ship the moment she entered the atmosphere. She was told in very clear terms to turn back now or die.
Wrong one again.
•••••••••••••
Terese didn’t stop to talk to any of the Hodas. She didn’t want to waste a single minute in the wrong universe, and she could practically hear the two dozen Research Center specialists shouting at her about space-time continuum and not breaking it.
At Hoda-20, however, she was hit by what looked like a mechanical bird upon entry, and she was forced to land for maintenance. Thankfully, this universe was not hostile: no weapons were drawn and the control tower pinged her back in the affirmative when she requested landing. The runway stretched into a field of sunflowers populated by various species of cybernetic birds, dotted with satellite ground stations and what looked like a maintenance garage. This Hoda wore overalls and for a fraction of a second, she looked devastated when she spotted Terese, but that flicker of emotion immediately morphed into cool professionalism, and Hoda-20 whipped out a ship scanner without prompting.
Terese pretended to walk around and stretch so it wouldn’t be too obvious she was staring. Hoda-20 was surface-familiarity, but Terese’s attention snagged on the small details that screamed something was off; it was dizzying: nails a shade of red Hoda hated, the complete chaos of the toolbox, right-handedness, and a particular shock–the wedding band on her finger.
Hoda–her Hoda wasn’t interested in marriage or romantic relationships of any form: it was one of the very first things they discovered they had in common. After a rocky start in their relationship defined by a fierce rivalry in their quantum physics course in university, they bumped into each other at an Aro/Ace poetry reading. Terese remembered how electrifying it was to find someone who felt the same way as her, and over the next 40 years it had been a continuous delight to build their intimacy on their own terms. It was jarring to think it could be different here.
Terese reminded herself that Hoda-20 was a stranger. There were dozens of reasons to get married that didn’t involve romantic relationships—and it wouldn’t be proper to start interrogating the woman helping her out, so she held her tongue.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” said Terese instead, needing to fill the silence.
“How often do you meet people from other universes?” retorted Hoda-20.
Fair enough. Twenty Hodas ago, Terese’s answer would have been never, but she could tell from the way Hoda-20 avoided her gaze that this wasn’t the reason.
“Come on, what aren’t you telling me?” insisted Terese.
Hoda-20 kept quiet, fiddling with her tools long enough that Terese thought she wouldn’t reply.
“When you came back,” Hoda-20 said at last, “it had been 37 years for you, out there, but barely two for me.”
The crushing fear Terese was stubbornly ignoring suddenly stepped right onto her chest. If this world’s Terese had been like her, she would have been 58 when she left for that mission.
“You passed away last year,” said Hoda-20.
As she spoke, Hoda-20 glanced to the sky with such terrible anger and grief, Terese regretted asking. This was why she hadn’t wanted to stop. Here, laid bare, was all the pain she would be creating if she didn’t make it back.
•••••••••••••
Ship time indicated Terese was officially a month late. Between jumps 35 and 36, she paused in Gaia BH1 to run another diagnostic, going as far as removing the back panel for a manual check of her engines. All the while, she tried to come up with a new plan and to bury her slowly mounting horror underneath her initial enchantment for one of the most elusive corners of the galaxy.
Contrary to what she expected, Gaia BH1 wasn’t all darkness. She would compare it to an egg–a time and light devouring egg, with an outer shell of matter that made her ship shiver when she crossed it, followed by a middle layer, where she was currently located, and a dense center that was too dangerous to approach. To her fascination, the second layer constantly shifted: pitch black at times yes, but also foamy green one moment, white lipoidal the next, and silky red right after.
When she first dived in, the inner layer of Gaia BH1 was pink cotton-candy. The changes didn’t follow any pattern that could be detected yet, but that fluffy texture had since reappeared twice, and Terese was hoping it would pop up a third time. Maybe she needed to jump out from the same environment she had jumped in. Maybe the solution was as simple as timing it right. At least, it was something new to try.
•••••••••••••
Fun fact: on her first attempt, Terese failed the astronaut’s entry exam. When Hoda heard, she showed up at Terese’s apartment unannounced, and took her surfing at Carcavelos beach to distract her. It was a terrible day for it because the ocean was flat as a mirror, but they still paddled out to the deep end and sat on their boards to wait for waves.
They were the only ones out that far in the water as the sun set around them and painted the ocean in a fiery-orange and blush-pink, then bruise-purple. Terese laid down on her board, counting the stars as they winked awake, soothed by the sound of her friend’s voice as Hoda promised they would revise the medical section together and declared with utmost confidence that Terese would get it next time. She had to wait six months to take the exam again and, in that moment, that length of time felt eternal.
“You should come with me,” Terese blurted out.
“Where to?”
“To space.”
Hoda didn’t like space; she said they couldn’t pay her enough to make her sit atop what was essentially a slingshot powered by dynamite. Terese knew better than to ask, but her failure burned in her chest; she felt sad, and a little selfish. She wanted the comforting fantasy of Hoda following her out into the stars. But instead of the expected mock outrage, Hoda heaved a heavy sigh.
“It was going to be a surprise when you passed your exam but… I already enrolled at the Deep Space Research Center. My training starts in six months.”
Terese stood up so fast her board swayed dangerously underneath her. With a raised hand, Hoda interrupted her shout of glee.
“As ground support! Stars know I’m not going up there. Do you know what those kind of speeds do to your body—”
“We’d be starting at the same time,” interrupted Terese, grinning. There was no way she would fail the exam again now.
“Yeah.” Hoda’s lips quirked up in the self-satisfied smile she bore when her plans worked out better than expected. “If you’re going to go out on intergalactic adventures–and I know you will–I’ll be right there with you.”
•••••••••••••
Gaia BH1 rippled. Suddenly, everything was cotton-candy pink again. Terese jumped into action: re-awakened her engines with a tap of her hand and allowed the heat to build, wanting them at full power to escape the crushing suction of the black hole. Hoda had always been by her side and never asked for anything in return. Terese owed it to her to make it home.
Full speed towards the exit.
•••••••••••••
Hoda, baby-faced and 33.
Hoda, already 101.
Hoda, with regular brown hair instead of her usual lavender purple.
Hoda, who didn’t recognise her.
Hoda, who spoke a strange, non-human language on her radio.
Hoda, Hoda, Hoda.
Wrong one. Wrong one. Wrong one.
•••••••••••••
Why were there so many Hodas waiting at spaceports? Didn’t a single Terese ever make it back?
•••••••••••••
There was no Hoda-41.
This time, Terese left her ship, feeling shaky. She needed to walk off the scream of rage bubbling inside her. It was the middle of the night, and it was too quiet around her, without even the sound of crickets. This landing strip was overrun with weeds, and the spaceport looked abandoned when she ventured inside. Dust gathered in the corridors, doors were left wide open, and what little equipment remained was covered in white sheets.
Muscle memory guided her feet to her locker with the same faded nametag and in the exact same spot as her own back home. It unlocked when Terese typed in her code, and out of morbid curiosity for this alternate life of hers, she started poking around its contents. She landed on a picture she recognised instantly from her own life: the group photo of her cohort when she was admitted at the Research Center. She spotted herself easily, standing at the center with the exact same black skin and box braids and brown eyes and bright smile as her own that day, but there was no Hoda standing next to her—or anywhere in the picture.
Despite how weird it had been to see other versions of her friend, Terese hadn’t considered the possibility that there could be an iteration of her life without Hoda in it. This Terese certainly looked very happy, but it felt too dissonant–how far had she gone to have found a universe without Hoda?
Terese had been jumping from one mission to another for so long, she sold her apartment and most of her possessions. What little she kept was neatly packed away in Hoda’s storage room. They planned on visiting apartments for Terese when she came back since she wouldn’t be going out as much or for as long anymore. Terese had been dreading her retirement too much to realise how much she looked forward to that. So much of her life was happier, or at the very least, easier because of Hoda’s presence.
The sun was rising when she walked back to her ship. There was a tight knot in her throat, but she swallowed it back. When she left for her first space mission, she promised herself that whatever happened, she would never regret her choices. For the first time in her life, this was the most difficult thing she ever had to do.
•••••••••••••
“Wait! For star’s sake, Terese Delayney, will you stop for one nanosecond in your life?!”
The authority in Hoda-49’s voice over the comms pinned Terese in place before she could launch herself back into space. After that, it was too late: Hoda-49 was already climbing up the side of her ship and tapping on the glass, signalling to open the overhead.
They were still not-her-Hoda; Terese could tell because they wore a little tag with they/them pronouns on it and they rambled as they talked.
“I know what you’re thinking–no, the math is fine, the problem is more stupid than that. I can’t believe I sent you out there like this, and I know you wouldn’t want me to blame myself, but it’s my rusting job and I should have planned for something like this—”
“Hoda, please,” interrupted Terese, “what are you talking about?”
“It’s like diving, you have to slow down when you resurface otherwise the computer gets the bends and goes haywire. Very counterintuitive.”
Hoda-49 reached over and started fussing with Terese’s command console as they talked. The computer apparently recognised their credentials because it allowed them to access the anchor calling Terese home.
“Of course, it’s not quite as simple as that,” continued Hoda-49 as they uploaded a new formula. “It took the data of two different ‘yous’ to calculate the variations properly, but you get the gist! I adapted the original equation so your ship knows when to slow down, and your anchor should be able to do the rest of the job.”
Maybe Terese shouldn’t let anyone touch her already glitchy computer to introduce an apparently brand-new formula, but relying on Hoda was instinctive, especially when she was as exhausted as she was.
“I haven’t come home, yet, have I?” she asked softly, afraid of the answer.
Hoda-49 looked straight at her, eyes jumping from her head to her face to her hands, and Terese knew from experience they were probably noticing all the things that weren’t quite right, that made her not-their-Terese.
“Not yet,” they said, smiling sadly. “But I know you’re never going to stop trying, and that’s enough for me.”
The computer chirped that it was ready, and Hoda-49 stepped away, climbing back down to the ground.
“It was nice to meet you, Terese-3,” they tapped the side of the ship for good luck as the overhead started to close again. “If you see yourself out there, pass along the message, will you?”
•••••••••••••
Hoda, her Hoda, was waiting when she arrived.
It was pouring rain over the spaceport, the drops hammered against the glass of the ship, and there she was, right on the edge of the safety distance from the landing strip. Ship time indicated Terese was four months late but over comms, she could hear everyone in the control room clapping as she landed.
“Welcome back, Delayney, and right on time too!”
Earth time, Terese was five minutes early. When the ship finally stopped moving, she didn’t wait for the ground crew to set up cover from the rain. She scrambled out, calling for the ladder. She desperately wanted a water shower and food that wasn’t processed by a computer, but a whisper of doubt needled her heart, and she needed to be sure before she could relax.
Hoda was at the bottom of the ladder with an umbrella, watching her carefully with a frown, already spotting something was wrong. Terese threw herself down to meet her and within seconds, they embraced in a full-bodied hug, arms over shoulders, nose in the crook of the neck.
“Welcome home,” whispered Hoda.
And it was her, right down to the small scar above her right eyebrow and the dandelion shaped earrings.
Terese almost cried in relief. She couldn’t wait to tell her, there’s a universe where we have gills! And good thing you never got that tattoo, I can confirm it doesn’t look good on you. The data was sure to be fascinating, there was wine and maamoul waiting for Terese, and Hoda would probably have a few ideas to help all of the other Tereses’ trying to find their way home-after they both had a good cry about it.
However, Terese couldn’t bring herself to let go just yet. She leaned further into the hug, appreciating how Hoda squeezed just as tightly in return. There was cold wind on Terese’s back, and droplets of rain falling on the nape of her neck from the edge of the umbrella, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered more than the warmth of homecoming between them.