Second Chance by David D. Levine Page B

undo it?
    While I was digesting that information, trying to decide what to do about what I’d learned, another chime came from the monitor, and another purple rectangle appeared. This one was where I’d expected the first one to be: in the coast-phase data, a couple of months after the data cutoff in Cassie ’s database.
    I tapped the rectangle with my stylus. If nothing else, I thought, it would be a distraction from the painful news about who had vived me.
    I was quickly proved wrong.

    -o0o-

    I worked the latch and entered without waiting for a response. There were no locks anywhere in Cassie .
    Nuru poked her head out of her sleep sack, blinking in the light from the habitation bay outside. “What the hell?”
    “698463 Teitelmann,” I said.
    Sleep immediately fled from her eyes. “Close the door.”
    I shut the door behind me. A sliver of light fell across Nuru’s face. I wanted to cry like a baby, to have her take me in her arms and tell me everything would be all right. I wanted to slap her hard and scream with rage. I wanted her to pray with me, to help me to understand that all of this somehow fit into God’s plans. Torn in so many different directions, I said nothing. I just looked at her, breathing hard.
    “Have you told anyone?” she asked at last.
    “Not yet. But I will. It’s not fair to keep them in the dark.”
    She closed her eyes and buried her face in her hands. “How did you find out?” she mumbled.
    “Bobb helped me download the coast-phase data from Alpha. It was all there.”
    “You disobeyed my orders.”
    “Yes.”
    I waited. Eventually she raised her eyes to me. They shimmered with moisture. “Can you forgive me?”
    It was a hard question. “I think... I think I can understand why you erased the news. I might be able to forgive you for that. But why... why did you vive me? Knowing what you knew?” My throat was choked with unshed tears—tears of rage or anguish or both. “How could you wake me up... to this ? When you could have just left me in peace forever?”
    Nuru’s face was a mask of grief. “I’m sorry, Chaz. I’m so, so sorry. But I didn’t want to be alone .”
    I didn’t understand. “But you weren’t alone...”
    “I couldn’t bear knowing that the only face like mine in the universe was the one in the mirror.”
    I looked into her dark, dark eyes, shining with tears, the yellowish whites and the smooth mahogany skin. So much like mine. And I reached out and took her into my arms.
    We shuddered together, racked with silent sobs.
    The jumbled, fragmentary video and audio from Alpha’s data played over and over behind my eyelids. ... asteroid 698463 Teitelmann’s orbit intersects ... impact in as little as eight months ... entire nuclear arsenal lacks sufficient ... mission to Teitelmann does not seem to have ... millions rioting ... last few places in the shelters ... a world prays ... devastation even greater than ... we are the dinosaurs ... and then the silence, oh Jesus, the silence that went on and on...
    Eventually Nuru dried her eyes on my shoulder, and it all came spilling out—how she’d deleted the data, putting the cut-off at different times in the three modules to make it look like a hardware problem. How she’d kept the news of Earth’s demise to herself, and focused the crew on its original scientific mission to keep us all from falling into despair. How she’d continually sabotaged Bobb’s and my efforts to find the source of the problem. I was amazed she’d been able to retain her own sanity under that pressure, never mind the technical and psychological challenge of keeping her bright and curious crew from learning the truth, and I said so. “I’m not so sure I did retain my sanity,” she said.
    “At least you won’t have to hold it all inside now...”
    “No.” She gripped my shoulders, her long strong fingers biting hard into my flesh. “We can’t let them know, Chaz. Matt, maybe, but the others... they wouldn’t be