The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  I dropped my eyes. “Diaphragm.”

  “Well, let’s have a look,” he said, but he didn’t lead me to the examining table, not yet, and he didn’t let go of my hands. Just held on till we were both conscious of the moment.

  “You’re with Vodge now, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t say anything. But I lifted my eyes to his, to show him I wasn’t evading the question. What everybody else knew, he knew.

  “And you’re being careful?”

  “As far as I know. Except maybe—”

  “Yes? You can tell me.”

  “That first night?” And now I couldn’t hold it back any longer, the truth laid out right there for both of us like some slide in biology class, and I started to cry. “Maybe. I don’t know. I just—I don’t know anything anymore.”

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  All right, so call me heartless, call me a shit, a poser, a hypocrite and anything else you can think of, but when E. laid the news on me, it struck me as the ultimate act of betrayal, not to mention stupidity, and if I was less than sympathetic, I’m sorry. That she wasn’t on the pill was beyond comprehension. Every female in this country from the age of menarche to menopause was on the pill—wasn’t that what the sexual revolution was all about? I’d never known a woman who wasn’t on it, never even imagined it. In college, I’d even had a girlfriend who worked for Planned Parenthood, doing outreach work in the projects and trailer parks, and she was on-message pretty much all the time—female empowerment, population control, no more womb slavery and the like. She pinned a poster of Dr. Pincus up on the wall over our bed, as if I needed a reminder. Well, I didn’t. I had no intention of bringing another mouth into this world, not then or now or ever—I was an environmentalist, we all were, and it was clear that the fundamental problem facing our species, the root of all the world’s woes, the very reason we needed a place like E2 to begin with, was overpopulation. Nothing definite, E. told me that first afternoon, nothing written in stone, but even if that was true it put a chill in me—really, what had she been thinking?

  We were in bed. I’d dozed off. Five minutes earlier I’d made love to her, had been in love with her, floating on the ascending beauty and rightness of it as if I were stretched out on a raft in the middle of the big hot tub we called an ocean, and now she was telling me she’d missed her period two months running? And it was just a dietary problem?

  “It’s probably nothing,” she said.

  “Then why mention it?”

  She was propped up against the headboard, gazing down at me, her mouth clamped tight. She’d pulled her T-shirt back on and pushed the hair up away from her temples, where it flared in the light coming through the blinds. “I just thought you ought to know.”

  “Ought to know what? You just said it’s probably nothing, didn’t you?”

  She was silent a moment. “I’m saying, just in case—”

  “In case you’re knocked up? In case the mission’s fucked? We’re fucked? I mean, is that what you’re trying to tell me, because I can’t believe what I’m hearing.” I’d pushed myself up to a sitting position, and though we were in bed together, inches apart, we might as well have been shouting across canyons. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted a drink. My hands were shaking. “I can’t believe you. Really, I can’t. Did you tell anybody?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about Richard? You see Richard yet?”

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  I came up off the bed then, naked, enraged, the wet condom still clinging to me as if in some X-rated cartoon, and before I could think I snatched it off and flung it across the room. “Christ, talk about a circular conversation—I mean, we could be doing Mr. and Mrs. Smith here. Talk to me. What do you mean, it’s nothing?”

  In a small voice: “I looked it up. In this book about the Japanese camps?”

  That was when I learned about hypothalamic amenorrhea, our big hope. “Okay,” I said, “okay,” but I wasn’t mollified, not even close. She’d put a scare into me—everything we’d worked for crashing down around our ears—and I wasn’t about to let it go. “And the pill,” I said. “Tell me again why you’re not on the pill? What kind of sense does that make? In here, of all places?”

  I didn’t like the look she was giving me—it wasn’t a loving look and it wasn’t apologetic either. “If you want to know, Gretchen and I felt right from the beginning we didn’t want to put anything artificial in our bodies because wouldn’t that defeat the whole purpose of E2?”

  That made me go cold all over: Gretchen. Jesus. What had I gotten myself into? Did I have any dignity in that moment, standing there naked, limp, dripping, trying to summon the proper degree of inquisitorial outrage? Did I have gravitas, did I even have a reason for being part of this ridiculous conversation in which nothing was decided and everything pushing us farther and farther apart? “I don’t see your point,” I said as savagely as I could, bending now to snatch my shorts from the floor and press them to my groin, as if my privates had become private all over again. “I mean, wouldn’t being”—I could barely get it out—“knocked up defeat the purpose a thousand times more?”

  I avoided her the rest of the day. I was angry, furious, right on the verge of snapping—and as soon as I left her room, slamming the door for emphasis, I went out into the rain forest to try to calm down. At first, I just sat there on a damp rock, blind to everything around me, but before long I got up and began to lose myself in work, cleaning debris out of the deep pool at the bottom of the waterfall and adjusting the flow in the smaller pools at the top of the cliff above it. This was our tepuis, or cloud forest, replete with misters that were timed to come on at five-minute intervals, and since I was there anyway I decided to clear the vegetation away from the nozzle heads, hacking at things with my sickle while the stream gurgled and the mist rose like steam around me, and before I knew it the afternoon was gone. I was a no-show for dinner—Stevie, who was chef of the day, set a plate of food aside for me, which I took down to the beach so I could be alone—and I didn’t go back to my room till it was past midnight. I didn’t want to see Dawn, not till I had time to think. What she was going through, what she must have been feeling, really didn’t cross my mind, or not yet anyway. Understand me: this wasn’t like the young wife laying the happy news on her befuddled hubby while the music soars and the robins burst into song, this was like stabbing seven people in the back. Or no, hundreds of people, thousands even, everybody who’d invested in E2, from the four hundred consulting scientists to G.C., G.F. and Judy and every schoolchild who’d written a report and crayoned a galago leaping across the white margin at the top of the page. If she was pregnant, and that was the crux of it, that hovering fateful if, then closure would have to be broken, if only for the five seconds it took to push her and what was growing inside her through the airlock. Nothing in, nothing out. What a joke.

  I didn’t sleep well that night—how could I? Every time I dozed off it felt as if there was a craps game going on in my head, lucky seven (she isn’t), snake eyes (she is), lucky seven, snake eyes, snake eyes, snake eyes. I woke exhausted in an envelope of sweat. I’d had three or four hours’ sleep, total, and maybe that was part of it, but I felt calmer. She wasn’t pregnant, I was sure of it—I mean, really, truly, what were the chances? It was a scare, a false alarm, a warning. The phrase Led by his dick came into my head. I was a fool. Worse than a fool. Hadn’t I learned anything from the Gretchen fiasco?

  The thing was, I still wanted E., wanted her more than ever. I’d acted in the heat of the moment, thinking of myself first, thinking of the mission and Judy and the nightmare of how I was going to spin this if the throw of that infinitesimal chance did turn up snake eyes, and I regretted that now. I’d showed my true colors, that was for sure. I hadn’t done a thing for E., hadn’t given an inch, and I wondered how that would affect us going forward—she must have been suffering all this time, holding everything in, never breathing a word of it, and of course she was as d
edicated to the mission as I was, as anybody was, and the implications must have been even starker for her than for me. I’d been wrong and I vowed to make it up to her. Especially since I couldn’t imagine going through the next three hundred sixty-three days without her, without her lips and her laugh and the way she clung to me and caught her breath when she came.

  Still, I couldn’t bring myself to face her just yet—she was going to see Richard that afternoon to resolve the question one way or the other—and so again I prevailed upon Stevie and asked her to set aside a plate for me at breakfast, which I wound up taking back to my room. I didn’t actually lay eyes on E. until we were in the paddies together, setting rice seedlings, and of course we couldn’t talk because Diane was there. Watching. And listening. Not to mention a whole mob of straight-arrow tourists and their monkey-faced progeny tapping at the glass till we were all three of us waving and smiling our official Terranaut smiles every thirty seconds. I did ask how she was feeling—everybody knew she’d been under the weather so I was covered there—and I tried to help with the lifting and bending a little more than usual and let her know through my body language that I was sorry about what had passed between us the previous day. Then there was lunch. I sat next to her, though she didn’t have much to say and seemed content to let the communal conversation wash round her. After lunch I went out into the savanna, where our resident acacias and thorn bushes were—a prickly place, the only place in E2 where you had to wear shoes—and found a spot to spread a towel, stretch out with a book and try to take my mind off what was happening in Richard’s office.

  At first I couldn’t get into the book at all (the first volume of the Bigger Bang series, which Linda Ryu had insisted E. bring in with her), rereading the same paragraph over and over, but finally I lost myself in a description of how a team of eight—eight!—terraformers went about defrosting the ice of a frozen planet with nuclear heaters inserted beneath the surface and seeding it with blue-green algae, the first step in producing a viable atmosphere. They were six men and two women, but the disparity in numbers didn’t matter because the women were heroically built and sexually free, and I was just getting to one of the juicier passages—the ship, the void, the greening planet floating beyond them in a globe of radiant light and astronaut Vita Novgorod stripping down to step into the zero-gravity shower with two of her male teammates—when my walkie-talkie buzzed. It was E. “We need to talk,” she said. “Over.”

  “Sure,” I said, “of course, yeah.” I could feel my pulse accelerating. “Everything cool?”

  “Not now. Not over the air.”

  Her voice was drawn tight, bad news, I knew it was bad news, but then the walkie-talkies distorted everybody’s voices so you could barely recognize them. Or so I told myself. “Just give me a word, one word, that’s all.” And then I added, superfluously, “Christ!”

  Nothing.

  “Come on, E. I’m dying here. Over.”

  The connection crackled and that crackle infuriated me—here we were almost at the end of the twentieth century and they couldn’t even make a reliable two-way communications device?

  “Meet me in five minutes,” she said. “The rain forest. Over.”

  It was that tranced time of day when everybody was in their rooms, dozing, digesting, writing in their diaries, and there was nothing moving but the animals—lizards, frogs, toads, turtles, snakes, crazy ants running crazy over every surface in their long anfractuous streams, dragonflies maneuvering, bees fumbling over the flowers. The air handlers blew. The wave machine coughed and spat. In my hurry I wound up stumbling into one of the acacias that formed the border of the savanna and felt the sting of a two-inch thorn puncturing the flesh of my upper arm as if I were taking an inoculation, blood there, surface pain as prelude to the deeper trauma ahead of me because the tone of her voice had told me everything I needed to know and all I was doing now was careening blindly through the biomes to pick up the pieces.

  What would I say, what could I say? She was out. No two ways about it. Dawn Chapman, the Terranaut who brought down Mission Two. Disgraced. Cast out. Number one on the Roll of Dishonor and Roberta Brownlow right behind her. I let out a curse, swatting at the heavy drooping leaf of a plantain that just happened to be in my way, right in my face, as I burst into the rain forest and started down the path. “Dawn!” I called, my voice a hurled whisper. “E.! Where are you?”

  Nothing. I stepped over the várzea stream that wound its way out from the waterfall pond, conscious of the cameras overhead. Something rattled in the undergrowth. “E.?” I called, louder now, because who would be listening—except maybe Gretchen, and she could be anywhere. I was sweating heavily, the shirt glued to my back, the air barely circulating. “E.?”

  Her voice drifted to me then, thin, battered by the roar of the waterfall, a plaintive bleat that threaded its way through the call of the tree frogs and the chatter of the insects: “Here.”

  “Where? I don’t see you.”

  “Here,” she repeated and suddenly she came into focus, her limbs separating themselves from the vegetation around her and her face a pale cameo floating there in the greenery as if it were separate from the rest of her. She was on the ground, in the mud, buried in the dense stand of ginger the Mission One crew had planted around the margins of the rain forest to protect the understory from the blast of Arizona sun, hugging her knees to her chest. Her face was dirty. She’d been crying.

  If I were to stop here to enumerate my strengths, my virtues, I could go on for pages, but one of them, most emphatically, is not empathy. I’ve never been good in situations of loss, hurt, sorrow, because I just can’t summon the standard clichés, not least because they sound false in my own ears. There she was, crying, wrapped in her own arms and rocking back and forth, and what consolation could I offer? We both knew what this meant and it was beyond consolation. Forgive me if I was thinking of Judy and G.C. and how they might tend to view my part in all this and what I could say in my own defense, because if one person was going through that airlock they might as well bring down the cleaver and make it two. I went to her, squatted over my knees. “It’s that bad then?” I said.

  She lifted her head but she didn’t answer, just stared right through me.

  “He’s sure? I mean, it’s not like he has one of those test kits on hand, does he? What would be the point—in here, I mean? It’s not as if—” And I stopped myself right there.

  “He did an examination, Vodge—he examined me.”

  I wanted to raise objections—there’d been no urine test, no blood test, so how could he be sure, how could the guillotine drop so finally and definitively?—but she just said, “He can tell. He’s a doctor, don’t you get it? I’m pregnant!”

  What he’d done—and this made a shiver run through me despite the temperature—was have her climb up on the examining table and spread for him while he inserted his speculum and noted the dark purplish-red blush in the vaginal mucosa due to the increased blood supply there (Chadwick’s Sign, after James R. Chadwick, 1844–1905), which appears around the sixth week of pregnancy, before moving to her breasts to probe their tenderness and observe how her nipples had enlarged and darkened in preparation for milk production and delivery. Richard had measured her, measured all of us, and of course he’d examined every inch of her too, but I hadn’t been involved then, hadn’t even thought about it. Now I was involved. And I didn’t like the picture developing in my mind—of him, of her—not one bit.

  “How long? Did he say how long?”

  “Two months, maybe a little more.”

  “What about Gyro?”

  “Gyro? What has he got to do with it?”

  “I don’t know, weren’t you two—I thought, for a while there?”

  “God, you’re a shit—you can’t be serious?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It was that first night, Christmas,” she said, as if she hadn’t heard me. “I’m sure of it. It was the only time we—you—didn’t use protectio
n.”

  That was when I became aware of the thumping on the glass behind us, some moron there with his camera, and then the flash, and I was beyond caring at that point, all my training, all my slickness, my cool, deserting me, and I gave him the finger—and more, and worse. “Fuck you!” I shouted, and in the next instant I was there, pounding on that three-eighths-inch-thick panel of safety glass as if I could burst right through it.

  “So, Richard, you got a minute?”

  This was after dinner that night, E. having excused herself because she wasn’t feeling well. Diane, with a face set in concrete, had stalked down the hall to bring her a plate of lablab bean burritos and baked squash and suss out the problem (sickly Terranauts just wouldn’t do, and whatever was wrong, whether it was a dietary deficiency, monthly cramping or simple exhaustion, it ultimately came down on Diane, as crew chief). I’d lingered in the kitchen, helping Richard, our chef of the day, with the cleanup, and to this point our conversation hadn’t risen above the trivial, though we both knew what I was doing there.

  He gave me a hooded look, then leaned over the counter to shoot a glance round the dining room—only Gyro was there still, sitting over a book at the end of the table, his elbows splayed and his chin cupped in one palm. “Sure,” he said, straightening back up and giving his hands a quick wipe on the apron, which he then removed and hung ceremoniously on its hook beside the refrigerator. “You want to go to my office?”

  The office had its own smell, a lingering undertone of medicinal odors, and it hit me the moment we stepped through the door. It was subtle, but the effect was magnified because I was so inured now to an atmosphere free of artificial scents, and I couldn’t help commenting on it. “Whew,” I said, “what’s that smell—or don’t you notice it?”

  “You’ve been out in the biomes too long,” he said, sinking into the chair behind his desk. “Call it the sweet breath of healing.”

  “What is it—alcohol? Camphor? Like Vicks VapoRub or something?”