Hi, Mom,

          Thanks for the vidpost. Works best, this way. Since I got moved to intermittent they only unshelve me when there’s work, and when that’ll be I almost never know.

          Oh, and the slang is “shelf-lifer” or “time-parter,” not “half-lifer.” Protective hibersleep punctuated by work-status revivification, technically.

          Thanks anyway for your concerns about my safety, and for all your advice. I especially took to heart two things you said: “Everybody was somebody sometime, but don’t become one of those people who sits around wondering, ‘Whatever became of me?’” and “Always keep working, but never take a job that’s beneath you.”

          Having been a sometime-astronaut—having floated in space with the world under my feet and the moon and stars around my head—I guess most jobs have been “beneath” me. Still, I try my best to be happy. Spacewalking isn’t much like walking on earth, but they both involve falling short of falling. The only way to avoid crashing is to stay in orbit, speed forward faster than speed downward. I won’t be “sitting around.”

          The work’s not so bad, either, when I can get it. Time-parting—with its long sleeps and short wakings, all at the Company’s command—can be damned disorienting, and yes, it wasn’t good for the remains of my marriage. But sometimes I can swing a schedule. Got to be inside the 20 April total eclipse, from the far end of the space elevator, for one. Sandalphon Technologies owed me that much, for the years I put in on the Babelevator.

          And something wonderful happened, Ma. I saw an angel—swear to God. That angel was unemployed, or at least underemployed, just like me. And for pretty much the same reason.

          Safety. A heaven safe for astronauts must be devoid of angels, and vice versa. That’s what the angel told me. Even without angels, it’s not safe enough for human crews. That’s what the company said, when they had the 'bots take over the Babel construction. The word is, if there’s to be any hope of preventing cosmic radiation from making us cancer-perishable, it lies in the shielded, deepsleep storage of shelf-life.

          But about that angel. Hard to communicate at first, until we got the direct head-talk thing worked out. Even then not the best. Totality—got hung up on that word. I meant the eclipse, but it was something more, for the angel. Told me the totality of the eclipse and the totality of all possible universes—all possible pasts, presents, futures—had gotten intertwined, in our situation. The totality of forking or branching paths through spacetime must include paths that cross. That’s why our paths overlapped. Even remote future and remote past can intersect, in a remotely possible present.

          That got us arguing in each other’s heads about which of us was from the other’s future, which from the other’s past. Difficult to tell. The angel claimed to be headed to some Celestial City coming down from heaven. To me that sounded way too much like something out of an ancient holy book about things to come.

          Honestly, though, my spacesuit did look more than a little cumbersome and clunky by comparison with the angel’s winged form. Bird, to my dinosaur. That pale glow, those bright wings—in function they seemed like my own spacesuit and rocket chair, only much less mechanical and primitive. Like they evolved from some distant future livesuit, long after glowing forcefields took the place of reinforced fabric and winglike solar-collectors took the place of batteries and rocketry.

          But I still thought that glory feathering around the angel looked more theological than technological. Catching my drift, the angel joked that everything happens twice: first as theology, then as technology. And vice versa.

          By the time totality ended and we parted, we’d decided: Who came first, or when, or who became whom, or didn’t—was undecidable. So long as we could agree we were both of us alive and awake in that present moment, we could agree to disagree on everything else.

          I know what you’re thinking, Mom. That I wasn’t really awake. That this was all just some dream or hallucination of hibersleep. That the idea I met an angel who was just another obsolete star-jobber—a space zero, an astro-naught—is only a self-pitying delusion prompted by my fall from what I once was.

          You’d be wrong. Maybe the main reason I bother to keep falling forward at all is because I know the angel and the undecidable propositions the angel presented to me are just as real as you and your advice are, Mom. And not so very different, either.

          The safety 'bots are here to take me back to hibersleep, so I’ll be brief. I’m sorry to fall short of your expectations, Mother, but no one will blame you when I didn’t follow the advice of any of my guardian angels. You’re right, I could never stake everything to one thing, so now I have nothing to bet on anything. Except my life.

          I will keep falling forward as fast as I can. If I fail to stay in orbit and instead spark a shooting star across the sky, no one will have to ask whatever became of me. You’ll know I was coming home to you, when both of us least expected it.










Howard V. Hendrix is the author of six science fiction novels, as well as many more works of shorter fiction and poetry. He is also lead editor of the science fiction literary critical book Chronicling Mars: Stories and Histories of a World Next Door, forthcoming from McFarland and Company.