The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  So I laughed. And E., down there in the muck, caught me unaware, scissoring her legs to knock me off my feet and bring me down with her, which ordinarily I wouldn’t have found all that funny—who would? Think about it. You can live as close to the earth as you want, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. The thing was, despite the smell, I couldn’t help noticing the way E.’s shirt clung to her, as if this were wet T-shirt night down at the local bar—with the obvious limitation that what her shirt was marinated in wasn’t anything so innocuous as water. Or beer. It was a moment. And there I was, on my hands and knees, in the thick of it, and I suppose I reacted instinctively, grabbing at her ankle as she tried to get to her feet so that she pitched forward and went down all over again.

  It was childish. It was embarrassing. And it was nothing I’d ever had even an inkling of doing in all my life to this point, but what made it worse was that even as we were staggering to our feet like drunken mud-wrestlers the flashbulbs went off and we looked up to see a dozen visitors pressed to the glass and high-fiving each other. Worse yet, there was Judy, tour guide du jour, standing amongst them with a face of stone.

  “You know, really, Ramsay, I don’t care what you do—or who you fuck—but when you descend to this kind of thing—”

  “Crap, you mean. Call it crap.”

  “—it just hurts the mission, that’s all. I wanted to say ‘reflects badly on it,’ but that doesn’t even come close, does it?”

  I was in our office cum command center, sitting before the video monitor, watching Judy’s angry face snap at me like a chameleon’s (the roll of the eyes, the recoil of the tongue). It was early afternoon and I was scheduled to entertain, instruct and inform the Yoopers in ten minutes, but Judy had summoned me and here we were. I’d had a shower and changed into a clean T-shirt and shorts, though I suppose I still carried a whiff of the pigpen about me, which was inevitable when you were forced to shower with scentless soap and shampoo. Not that it would have mattered to Judy—or the Yoopers, for that matter. The technology didn’t transfer body odor, or not yet anyway. As far as the rest of it was concerned, my teeth gleamed and the haircut I’d gotten just before closure was holding up fairly well, though I’d had to do a quick trim of the sideburns. What I said was, “I’m not fucking anybody, though I suppose it would be bootless to tell you that—”

  “Bootless? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Useless. You know, as in Shakespeare? ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state/And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.’”

  She clenched her jaw. Her face seemed to expand till it took up the entire screen. “Listen,” she said finally, and then she appended my name, her voice lower now, as if she were fighting to keep it under control. “We’re not playing games here. Those people today? That was a biology class from the School of Life Sciences at U.A. We need their support—we need all the support we can get. And what do they see? You and Dawn up to your ears in shit. Or what—playing in it? Playing in shit.”

  I shrugged. Looked into the camera. “You try shoveling that stuff and see how clean you wind up. Or your precious biology class—take them on a field trip to the nearest pig farm. Or better yet, the slaughterhouse. You live in a real world, you get dirty, okay?”

  “But that was disgusting, just disgusting. And you know what I told them? I told them it was part of an experiment to see how even the dirtiest wash would affect the wastewater systems, as if it was some commercial for Tide or something—”

  I began to feel an edge of remorse. I’d acted like an adolescent, like some hormone-challenged teenager, and in the process I’d made the mission look bad. I wanted to apologize, wanted to say Sorry, Judy, and move on, but I didn’t like her tone, didn’t like her bulging eyes and the tight unforgiving slash of her mouth or the psychic cost of what we’d been doing in the executive washroom before we were interrupted or what she expected from me now. “And they bought that?” I said.

  She just shook her head and maybe she clucked her tongue too, though the audio wasn’t fine-tuned enough to pick it up. “There’s another thing,” she said, “and then I’ll let you go so you can do your conference with the high school kids. It’s the play. Jeremiah’s anxious to get it off the ground, meaning you’ve had a week and a half to adjust and it’s time to get down to business. Like in rehearsals, which really haven’t amounted to much yet, have they?”

  “Yeah, fine,” I said, “okay. But why don’t you tell Diane—she’s team captain.”

  A pause. I watched the screen waver, a pattern of individual pixels blurring Judy’s face before the resolution came back. She was disembodied, what I knew of her from that last night and all the times before invisible to me now, inaccessible, as if I’d never stripped her clothes off or climbed atop her or watched her as she clung to me till she stiffened and went slack again. Her eyes held steady, only her lips moving. “Because I’m telling you,” she said.

  Our first crisis came within a month of closure, and while it wasn’t even in the ballpark with Mission One’s dilemma over Roberta Brownlow and her severed fingertip, it affected us all nonetheless, and me in particular. It was in early April, the days lengthening imperceptibly and the vegetation responding nicely with a burst of new growth (and O2). We were all adjusting to our diet of roughly 1,500 calories a day, our muscles tightening and whatever beginner’s paunches we might have come in with all but gone, and we fell into our roles without any strain or undue tension. We’d all just sat down to dinner one night, feeling companionable and looking forward to Troy’s first vintage of banana wine, of which we were each promised at least one glass and possibly more, when one of the galagos let out with a high riveting call—a screech, really—we hadn’t heard before.

  “Jesus, what was that?” Stevie said, and we all turned to Gretchen.

  “I don’t know,” she said, setting down her wineglass. She looked stricken. “I’ve never heard anything like it—have you, any of you?”

  We hadn’t. To this point the animals had almost exclusively confined themselves to an ascending series of hoots or the sort of soft whining cry you’d expect from a baby in a cradle, hence their popular name, bush babies. For a long moment we all sat there poised over our plates, listening.

  Richard said, “Sounds like somebody died,” and Gretchen said, “Don’t say that.”

  Dinner that night was Troy’s responsibility, and if we hadn’t been overworked and underfed none of us would have been particularly enthusiastic about what we found on our plates—mashed yams and rice topped with a runny peanut/banana sauce and a side dish of borscht featuring some sort of unidentifiable greens floating atop it. Hands down, Troy was the worst cook among the crew, the kind of clueless bachelor who’d subsisted on fast food and Velveeta sandwiches before coming to the project. The wine, which he’d fermented in his chem lab from a banana mash, peels and all, was presented as a peace offering.

  By this time, incidentally, we’d graduated from helping ourselves from the communal pot to having the day’s chef portion out our meals on eight separate plates, assuring that everyone received his fair share, and the first thing we did before digging in was assess the wine. It was young, no question about that, and its color ran from the bright aniline yellow of antifreeze on top to a dark sludgy amber at the bottom of the glass. Its nose, as you might expect, was banana-heavy, and that killed any subtlety the vintner may have been striving for. As for palate, it lingered like mouthwash and gave you the same impression of chemical rigor. Still, and credit the winemaker here, it had tested out at nearly twenty percent ABV, and that, as far as we were concerned, lifted it into the realm of fine wine.

  “Eco-cru!” Richard cried, hoisting his glass. “Way to go, T.T.!”

  That was when the shriek echoed through the biomes and we all froze, glasses in hand, and Stevie looked to Gretchen and Gretchen set her glass down. This was her province—the rain forest and its creatures—and she spent every waking moment obsessing over it. It was
she who’d reported that one species of ant—Nylanderia fulva, the crazy ant—was taking over, wiping out the insect fauna not only of the rain forest but the savanna, marsh and desert as well and she’d made the discovery, pre-closure, that the failure of Mission One’s bee colonies was due to the cockroaches swarming them at night when the bees were at rest and all but defenseless. Which led us to restock the colonies and attempt measures to keep the cockroaches out of them, with mixed results. As for the ants, one of Nylanderia’s survival strategies is to breed multiple queens, so though we eradicated nests wherever we could, it was essentially a losing battle. Chalk it up to experience—you can bet the next generation Ecosphere won’t include any species of crazy ant, not Nylanderia or Paratrechina longicornis either.

  The shriek came again. And then again. And in the next moment two of the galagos burst into view, hurtling through the fruit trees below us and scrambling up the steel struts of the spaceframe till they were overhead, biting and clawing at each other all the while. Fur flew, literally, and the tiny canines came into play. “What are they doing, fighting?” Gyro asked, his thin beaky face turned upward, and I couldn’t help thinking what a stupid question it was.

  “It’s Lola,” Gretchen said, jumping up so precipitously she knocked her chair over. “And”—she was at the rail now, peering out into the darkness—“Luna. That’s Luna, I’m sure of it.” She turned to us, to me, even as the cat-sized creatures shot across the spaceframe and disappeared into the rain forest beyond, still shrieking. “I was afraid of this. It’s the alpha female going after the beta, and that’s inevitable, I suppose, but I was hoping—”

  “They’d all get along?” Richard gave her a smile, raising his glass again. “Let’s toast to prosimian harmony.”

  “Sip it, sip it,” Troy coached. “Don’t just throw it down—”

  But Richard wasn’t listening. He took a good healthy swallow of the swirling amber liquid and made a face. “Holy shit—it’s like setting your socks on fire.”

  In the next moment we all raised our glasses solemnly to our lips, hoping—or no, praying—that Troy’s libation was the answer to what was already becoming something of a slog, all work and no play, one month down and twenty-three to go. I liked to drink, one of the vices I’d always indulged, and not just in the rush to closure. We all needed intoxicants, as a crew and as a species too, something to lift us out of the ordinary, and if there ever were to be a space colony, the colonists would need their intoxicants same as anybody or risk going quietly mad. I flashed on half a dozen bar scenes, the vodka I’d kept in my freezer, the Flor de Caña rum I loved on the rocks with a splash of Coke, the taste of pinot noir on Rhonda Ronson’s lips when we shared a bottle in bed, then I closed my eyes and took a hopeful swallow of our first vintage under glass.

  I didn’t spit it out. And I didn’t gag either, though I had to fight the reflex. Judging from the faces of my fellow Ecospherians, we were all in agreement. All but Gretchen, who hadn’t touched hers—or her meal either. She was at the rail still, listening for further signs of strife, while we sipped and chatted and lifted our forks to our mouths. Troy—he wore his sandy hair long so that it covered his all but perpendicular ears—smacked his lips thoughtfully and looked round the table. “It’s almost there,” he said, “really. It just needs maybe a bit more aging.”

  “A bit more than what—a week?” Richard said, and we were all laughing now, or most of us anyway, the alcohol running through our veins and loosening the cords that still bound us to the outside and whatever commitments we’d left behind. We were having a party, our first true and veritable party. Even the food, bland as it was, began to taste better.

  “Come on, Gretchen,” Richard called out. “Worry about that later—we’re having a party here.”

  Gretchen was leaning over the rail, propped on her elbows and staring off into the distance where the artificial mountain and dominant trees of the rain forest rose against the starry screen of the superstructure. The night pulsed with the calls of the smaller creatures and the intermittent roar of the big vacuum pumps sucking water into the wave machine, a roar that blurred the distinction between artificial and natural so thoroughly I sometimes thought I was hearing whales and walruses blowing in open water (though the biggest thing in our sea was a two-foot parrotfish, if you discount Stevie, who measured five-seven and weighed in at one hundred and twenty-four beautifully proportioned pounds). Gretchen seemed hesitant, but there was her food, getting cold, and her wine—we were all eyeing it—sitting there untouched. In the next moment she was at the table, righting her upended chair and sliding in between E. and Gyro, her face pasty and her glasses catching the light so you couldn’t see her eyes. She was looking old, or older, the worry over the galago scuffle and god knew what else—ants—sitting heavily in her jowls. She was only four years older than me, but carried herself like someone much older, and maybe that was an effect of her total absorption in her work and the humorlessness that underpinned it. I’m not saying she wasn’t fit—she could outwork practically anybody, except maybe E.—it was just that she seemed distracted and didn’t much bother about her appearance, beyond the occasions that is when Judy demanded we all clean up and face the cameras. What am I trying to say? She was unstylish, unhip, frumpy. That’s the word. Frumpy.

  “You think it’s anything serious?” E. asked, turning to her. “They wouldn’t really hurt each other, would they? They don’t go to war in nature or anything like that, do they?”

  “That’s reserved for our species,” I said, and Richard, leering from across the table, said, “I second that.”

  “And ants,” Diane put in from the other end of the table. “Don’t forget ants.”

  Gretchen—hardly anyone used her nickname, Snowflake, which we’d shortened to “Snow,” though I thought “Flake” would have suited her better—let out a sigh, brought the wineglass to her nose, sniffed, and set it down again. “Who can say? In their native habitat, in equatorial Africa, they’ve got space and sanctuary, so a beta female can go off and if she’s lucky hook up with a beta male cast out of another troop—but here, in an enclosure, anything goes.” She lifted the glass again and again put it down. “That’s what we’re doing here, right? Finding out. And I really hope they’ll respond and adjust to their environment, but there’s no telling—”

  That was when the shrieks started up again, as if the beta female, Luna, had found a hiding place and now, suddenly and spookily, Lola had found it too. And here they came again, the same pair (Jimbo, the male, and Lana, the other female, nowhere to be seen). Again they went from the branches to the superstructure, rocketing overhead as if they’d been shot from an air gun, and again they closed in a blur of teeth and claws and whirling limbs, only this time, in desperation, Luna made a leap for the railing right in front of us and just barely made it, bunching like a cat and emitting a low hiss of distress, her eyes trembling and huge.

  This couldn’t have happened during the Mission One closure, by the way, as the original structure of the Human Habitat was glassed in to prevent just such an intrusion, not to mention keeping out the mosquitoes that bred in any errant puddle and the no-see-ums that would rise up out of the marsh come May. We’d voted as a team (seven to one, Troy the lone holdout) to remove the glass during the transition phase from Mission One reentry to Mission Two closure, seeking a more authentic experience. We were here to be one with nature, after all, not separated from it—wasn’t it enough that there was glass everywhere we looked? So we took the panels down and left ourselves open to everything, snakes, lizards, beetles, butterflies and birds—and now this, the galago, our “companion primate,” crouched on the railing just feet from us while her antagonist chittered curses from above.

  “Oh, my god,” E. said. “She’s bleeding.”

  And so she was. We all saw it. A gash over the flexor of one hip, the fur there gone a brilliant saturate red, and the left ear torn. (If you don’t have any experience of galagos, picture a furball
with a fluffed-up tail, oversized ears and big night-seeing eyes, the sort of thing Disney would put front and center if one day the Magic Kingdom should devise its own ecosphere.)

  “We’ve got to treat that,” Gretchen said, and Richard, our source of sutures, anesthetic and antibiotic salve, made as if to rise from his chair. “No, no—shhh!” Gretchen hissed. “Nobody move.”

  I looked to E. Her face was white (not yet orange, as all our faces would eventually be, due to an excess of beta-carotene in our diet) and she sat there rigid, her shoulders clenched and her hands suspended over her plate. I could see she was thinking the same thing I was—that is, how in Christ’s name were we ever going to catch the thing before it either bled out or the other one got hold of it and killed it? Not that it would be an insurmountable loss—this was the way of nature—but the well-being of these things, of all the creatures and plants under this roof, was our responsibility, and the loss of Luna would carry a symbolic weight the media would gleefully take up and strap to our backs. So here it was, our first failure—or potential failure—staring us in the face. Only problem was, what to do about it? Any sort of trap would have to be fabricated in the shop and whatever netting we had was in one of the storage rooms in the basement. Making a grab for the thing—and I thought of it, briefly, before dismissing the idea—would be futile. Besides, they did bite, didn’t they?

  In the event, the decision was taken out of our hands. Suddenly—so suddenly none of us actually saw Lola suspended in mid-air as she made a leap every bit as desperate as her victim’s—there were two galagos on the rail and just as suddenly there were none. Why was this? Again—we were moving in human time and they were moving in prosimian time—it took us a moment to understand that they’d now been transposed as if in some magic trick to the space beneath the table, where they snarled and hissed and spat while we sprang up in something approaching collective panic—what would they do to bare legs?—and finally became spectators to the violence that was as elemental as life itself.