Janus

The door slid shut behind me with a smooth hum. The captain’s office was spartan compared to the rest of the ship: a desk lit by a dim light overhead, a chair, cabinets containing all manner of filing standing against the left wall. Opposite this was not a wall but a great window, with all of space piled against it, the speckled black doing its utmost to reduce the room even further, just one more insignificance in the scheme.

Captain Wesley Blum strode easily to the other side of the desk, fingers brushing the desktop as he went. “Take a seat, Connor,” he said, settling into his own chair. “Sorry, I keep the other one in the corner, behind that locker. See it? Excellent. Drag it over.”

Chairs these days floated. Not this one, though. This was a relic, like so many other appliances on the ship. Nevertheless, I took it over with grace, eager to please Wesley. Not out of some grovelling desire to make the boss happy; I had requested this meeting for entirely opposite reasons, in fact, and I wanted him to be as amenable as possible. We regarded each other over the desk. The light turned his slicked blond hair grey, made what few lines he had accrued on his face stand out. I likely looked similar, though I did not have his cool smile.

It was by unspoken agreement upon our ship that one only began addressing the captain when he gave them leave to. But that was when we were working. In the office, it was not clear if comportment could be loosened, if just a little, or if Wesley was going to fill in the silence himself, and all of a sudden caught up in anxiety about this whole thing, I had to look away. My eyes settled on a strange ornament upon the desk. A small glass cylinder, inside of which a small disc floated, flipping at middling speed, the silver flashing first on one face and then the obverse.

“You’ve spotted my little treasure,” Wesley said. His smile had widened. He folded his hands across his belly.

“What is it, Sir?”

“You don’t have to call me that here, Connor. And that there is a coin.”

“A coin?”

“Yes. Have you ever seen one before?”

I had to admit that no, I hadn’t. What I didn’t admit was that it looked rather sad for a treasure: slightly bigger than my thumbnail, with grimed embossing and dings along the edges.

Wesley nodded. “They are quite rare these days. Though they used to be awfully common. People used them to pay for things, would you believe? Imagine: you want to buy something expensive and dump a pile of these coins in front of the shopkeeper.”

“I’m imagining the shopkeeper’s face,” I tried, and was rewarded with a chuckle.

“Quite. Thank the Lord we moved on to Credits.”

Wesley moved a tablet and carefully shifted the cylinder to the centre of the desk. The fact that this had become the topic of conversation rather than my own concern irritated, but I was forced to stick with it.

“How much was that worth?”

“Now? Or back then?”

“Both, I suppose.”

“It might have bought you some small things back then.” He fixed me with his dark eyes. “I paid fifty-thousand Credits for it.”

I blinked at him. He continued.

“Bearing in mind that this coin is especially old; it was made in the era when they thought Sol orbited the Earth, for crying out loud. It’s so old that I need to keep it afloat in containment in case it gets damaged. Hell, it’s already damaged, which is why I got it so cheap. Yes, cheap. I saw you raise your eyebrows when I told you the price, but these coins can fetch far more, believe me.”

The ship was drifting in one direction, and yet the coin was flipping the opposite way, as if eager to push it back, to turn back time, a minute fleck of matter struggling against the inexorable forces of the universe.

“I like to look at it,” Wesley said. “It’s a reminder that life is nothing but a series of coin tosses, even before we as a race existed. Earth was in just the right place at just the right time for us to be. Isn’t that just crazy?”

I grunted an affirmation, crossed one leg over the other. “Sir, what’s a coin toss?”

Wesley sat back and laughed, his face bowing away from the light for just a second. “An old-fashioned way of deciding things. Back then, if someone was unsure what path to take, they would assign a decision to one face of the coin and another decision to the other face. And then they would toss it.” Wesley mimed flicking a coin into the air. I imagined the coin spinning high, an intersection of two possibilities. “Whichever side landed face-up was the decision you would make. Simple, right? I do it myself sometimes.”

“You do?”

“Of course!” Wesley leaned in close, planting his elbows on the desk so that his face hovered over the coin. “Shall I let you in on a secret? About how the great Captain Wesley makes all his important decisions?”

“Alright…”

“First, I stare out the window.” As one, we looked to the side, out to the cosmos. For all the stars beyond, it did nothing to brighten our faces. “When I do that, I’m reminded of the vastness of everything. All those stars that look so close are so far apart it isn’t even worth thinking about. Their light is old: the distant projection of the past. What can we do except admire what has happened and move on? When I stare out that window and consider the greatness of everything, I laugh, shake my head, and decide that maybe my fretting about which trading station to sell to isn’t such a big deal. This method solves most decisions. But when admiring the universe doesn’t work… I turn to the coin.”

And, once again as one, we looked at the coin. I was struck by a different image: the little silver circle caught in an unending spin, dragging up all the strings of fate into a spool, the very same fate that had provoked the Big Bang and thus allowed Man to be. Then Wesley tapped the top of the glass, and it was just a coin once more.

“I’ll do like I described and give each side a decision. Traditionally, people would say heads or tails? and one choice would be heads, and the other, tails. Then, I’ll press this button here, which turns off the field, allowing the coin to drop.”

“I see.” I frowned. “But I thought you didn’t want to damage it?”

“Ah, that’s the beauty of it. I don’t. Would you like to try it?”

“I’m sorry, Sir?”

“Oh, come on. I know why you wanted to speak with me. You want to leave our ship. Word’s been round and round again.”

I was on the backfoot, wishing that I had been able to bring up the issue my own way, with at least some semblance of tact. But the captain’s face had not changed. He still smiled as if we were friends, not colleagues.

“It isn’t that I want to leave,” I said, trying not to sound defensive. “But I’ve been… thinking about it. I’m not so sure if this is the life for me.”

“What’s stopping you from going?”

There was a lot to appreciate about Captain Wesley, and in that moment, I especially appreciated how he skipped over any sort of demands for an explanation. Life out in space was hard. Having to constantly make checks on the ship’s operations lest they fail and kill us, spending months at a time alone with only ourselves to talk to, and the sun lamps were a poor imitation of the real thing. I missed exercise and good food. Fresh air.

Wesley was waiting for an answer.

“The thing is… I’ve put a lot of time into this job. And effort: you know what the training is like. And that’s for years. I’ve gained so much experience aboard a ship that throwing it all away just feels, I don’t know, wrong.”

“So: toss a coin. Come on.” Wesley gently turned the cylinder so that the off button faced me. “I’ve always favoured heads, so let’s say heads is you staying on. Tails is you leaving. How about that?”

“Why favour a side if it makes no difference?”

“Good question. I suppose if you always choose heads and it lands tails, it feels better, because things were always going to play out that way; but if you randomly chose heads or tails, and just happened to choose heads, you might regret not picking tails. You could have picked tails. Does that make sense?”

I nodded. The silence grew expectant, so I reached towards the cylinder and let my finger hover over the button at its base. The coin, having been turned to face the other way, spun with the ship now. No longer fighting the past. Heads then tails. Heads then tails. The head: the visage of some ancient ruler. The tail: a barely visible crossing of lines. Perhaps, if one were to do the impossible and step backwards in time, they could collect these coins, pristine and glistering, and bring them back to the present to sell. They could retire rich. The thought almost made me smile. Perhaps it was for the best that time travel was as yet unable to be done; and besides, very few have such foresight about the future. Best not to linger too long in either places.

Best not.

With care, I withdrew my hand. My fingers curled into a fist as if clutching something, and then they loosened their grip, and I rested my hand on my thigh.

“Do I have to make the toss?”

Wesley's eyes narrowed, ever so slightly. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“I think I’ve made my decision.”

All of a sudden, Wesley beamed. “And that, Connor, is my secret to making choices. Your brain overthinks every single thing, but when you’re in the moment, your heart is never wrong.” He extended a hand. “For what it’s worth, you have been a pleasure to have aboard the Janus.”