Read Into the New Millennium: Trailblazing Tales From Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 2000 - 2010 for Free Online Page A

that God would judge us by how we bore our pain and burdens, right?"
    These words seemed to bring her back to herself for a moment, enough that she replaced the photo in its holder and pushed off to drift down to me.
    The slap that came was unexpected, and the first and last time she ever laid a hand on me in anger.
    I was too shocked to be angry.
    "Don't quote God at me, boy!" Tab said sourly. "I've spent my last years trying too hard to open a door into your heart, through which Christ might step through. But you've rejected Him, and a part of me too. Now go away and leave me be. I'm too old to help anyway."
    There was nothing to say, so I left, and got a few hours of harried sleep before returning to Tab's room.
    Her body was suspended in the zero-gee bed. She was dressed in her white smock, and her eyes were closed, though her mouth hung slackly open while her chest drew no breath. A little roll of paper was held in one cool hand.
    I shakily reached for it, and when it unrolled, it said, in Tab's handwriting, "You are a good soul, Mirek. Thank you for letting me have you as my boy."
    I couldn't think for the rest of the day. Only the seriousness of my predicament kept me moving. But my mind and heart were as empty and cold as the space through which the observatory now lamely traveled.
     
    I eventually put Tabitha's body next to her husband's, in the tomb they had made for themselves on the far side of the observatory. There was no ceremony, no words of eulogy. There had been none for Papa, nor Mama, nor Irenka after them. There seemed none appropriate now, and I felt anything I said that even remotely touched on the spiritual would be almost profane. Tab had been right. My heart was deaf to God. If God even existed. I stared at the closed doors to the final resting place of my second set of parents, and doubted very much that Jesus, or any other saving deity, existed. There was only the harshness of life, followed by the silence of death, which came suddenly and without warning, and always took those who least deserved it.
    That month, my work on the observatory was purely mechanical. And ultimately futile. Too much had been ruined in the micrometeoroid storm. Without the expanded capacities of Howard—his ability to be everywhere and see and feel and "think" the observatory all at once—there was no way for a single person to manage.
    The local software kept things going for a time, but when three months had passed, it became clear that the hydroponics were failing, along with the waste cyclers. Even with the stores that had been kept safe down in the many cellars we'd dug into the rock, within a couple of years, I was going to be out of both air and food.
    I went back to the main computer core and considered my options. There were enough good arrays to try and reassemble a new master program using the original factory defaults that were kept on disc, but since everything I knew about computers I'd learned piecemeal from helping Howard and Tab, I didn't have the expertise to make more than a half-assed attempt.
    I tried anyway, and created a computerized retard whom I promptly erased.
    I didn't even think of messing with what was left of Howard. Those arrays I kept isolated, in case there was still some chance of sieving data from them which might prove useful.
    Days I spent wandering alone through the halls of the observatory, wondering just what in the universe I was even doing here, and why I should keep trying to extend a life that seemed to have amounted to futility.
    Whether by luck or design, that was when the next beacon revealed itself.
    Like the other, it was very faint, but it called softly from directly ahead, in the belly of the Kuiper Belt, like a siren beckoning a lonely sailor.
    I went to it. Dumping more antimatter than I should have into the reaction, I thrust viciously, pushing the observatory up the relative velocity scale, not caring if I was risking more micrometeoroid storms. If there was going