I took his clenched hand within mine. He relaxed, just a touch.
Where do you want to go?
Home, I thought. But where was that, now? The Merian had fit that bill for years, but she no longer felt like home, just a machine we were trapped inside. Did I want my parents’ apartment, the one I’d grown up in? Someone else owned it now, surely, if it hadn’t been torn down. The latter was the more likely scenario, I figured. I imagined the walls of my childhood room, such a sturdy, immutable fortress then. I imagined them being torn apart by construction equipment, cheerful paint giving way to raw wood and bent nails and weary insulation, a space within a space, an impermanent dimension in the place that had been an eternal refuge.
A new home, then. I forced myself to entertain the thought, despite the headache I could not shake, a product of both the steady noise and my growing malnutrition. What kind of home did I want? A city apartment? A rural house? Did I want a place of my own, a place to set roots and settle, or would I be content to rent furnished rooms, bouncing from country to country as whim or opportunity suggested?
The rats shrieked. Thunder growled. Choppy waves smacked the hull. I gave up on the questions. I couldn’t cosy up in the future. The present was far too loud.
Please let me sleep, I thought. It was a wretched plea, transmitted in no direction in particular but asked from the bottom of my heart all the same. Please, please let me sleep.
I did not.
Elena ducked her head out of the guts of the water filtration system, a wrench in her gloved hand. ‘Do you think they could come through the hull?’ she asked.
I blinked, lowering my flashlight. ‘The hull that can withstand micrometeoroids at half the speed of light.’
‘A single impact is different than something scratching all day, every day. Could they erode the outer plating?’
‘No,’ I said, but now I didn’t know. Could they? The notion seemed ridiculous.
… but could they?
‘They won’t get inside,’ I reassured her, despite my lack of certainty. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘Okay, that’s good,’ Elena said. She paused in thought. ‘Even if they don’t get in, could they damage the hull in such a way that might compromise our safety in flight?’
I stared at her. I hadn’t considered this. ‘I doubt it.’
‘But is it possible?’
‘I—’ My mind itched now, wondering what other dangerous possibilities I hadn’t thought to examine. ‘I’ll have to think about it.’
She nodded, glad that I was taking her question seriously. She continued to inspect every pipe, every wire. We’d done a full inspection like this four times in the past two months. A strange part of me wanted to find something wrong, something that would tell Elena her gut feeling had been right, something was amiss, but hey, our diligence paid off. We solved a problem before it happened. We prevented catastrophe.
Instead, we found nothing. Again.
The more nothing we found, the less she trusted it.
I had no reason to join Jack in the data lab, and would have kept walking, were it not for one muttered word:
‘Idiot.’
I stepped back and ducked my head in the door. ‘Who is?’
He hadn’t realised I was there, his expression said. He shook his head and gestured at the monitor. ‘Cubesats finished mapping the sea floor.’
‘And?’ I walked into the room and glanced over the screen. Opera’s surface was spread out before us, flattened like a fur pelt. Water-filled canyons were carved deep into the rock, teasing us with secrets our hydrodrones could reveal if only there were a way to launch them. ‘Isn’t a map good?’
‘There’s no evidence of a recent impact event.’
I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. A dim memory surfaced: him suggesting that possibility upon arrival. ‘Well, we can rule that out, then.’
‘It was a stupid thing to suggest,’ he said.
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘We had no data. I was talking out of my arse, like always.’
I frowned at him. ‘It was just an idea. We toss around wrong ideas all the time.’
He wasn’t listening to me. He shook his head at the sea floor maps. ‘This is my fault.’
‘What is?’
‘Landing in the shallows was my idea. It’s my fault we’re stuck here.’
I stared hard at him. I wasn’t entertaining this. ‘We had consensus. We all agreed.’
‘I don’t know why,’ he snapped. ‘You should know by now that I never know what the fuck I’m talking about. I’m just bullshit with a big smile. I always knew it was going to catch up with me, and now it has, and it’s fucked all of you over as well.’
‘Jack—’
He stood up, and stormed out. A banging rang through the ship a few minutes later. He was trying to scare the rats off the windows again.
Chikondi’s cabin door was closed, so I knocked. He didn’t answer. I went in anyway.
He lay in bed, partially clothed, hands folded on his chest. He didn’t welcome me, but he didn’t turn me away, either. I sat on the end of his bed.
‘Is there some kind of event you’d like to see when we’re back home?’ I asked. ‘Some kind of festival, or holiday, or—?’
He shut his eyes. ‘I don’t know.’
‘So think about it.’
He sighed. ‘The World Cup,’ he said. ‘If the World Cup still exists, I want to go see the World Cup, wherever it is.’
I nodded with approval. ‘I’d like to see a solar eclipse.’
He craned his head up from the pillow. ‘You’ve never seen a solar eclipse?’
‘Partial, sure. I want to see totality.’
‘You’re an astronaut. Wouldn’t an eclipse rank low for you, given all you’ve seen?’
‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen one. Have you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Home,’ he said. ‘2095. I think it was June. My parents took the day off work so we could take a car out and see it together.’ There was a smile at first, but then a faltering, a sombre remembrance that pulled him toward the past, not the future. The opposite direction I wanted to steer him in.
‘Tell me about the World Cup,’ I said. ‘Pretending that all the same countries are still around, who would you want—’
He gently stopped me with a raised hand. ‘Ariadne, I – I see what you’re trying to do. I appreciate it, I do. But I’d really like to be alone right now. I’m sorry.’
I swallowed. I nodded. ‘Come find me if you change your mind,’ I said with a forced smile. I squeezed his leg, and I left.
In the first two months, I would go to bed at night and cross my fingers that the storm would be gone in the morning.
In the third month, I begged whoever might be listening to stop the storm, to let us go.
In the fourth month, I began to forget that life could be any different.
I walked past Elena, going through her inspection checklist step by step. It didn’t matter that I wouldn’t help her anymore. She still needed to check.
I walked past Jack, kicking the airlock door. ‘Stupid,’ he said. ‘You’re so fucking stupid.’ The rats paid him no mind.
I went to the cabin deck. Chikondi’s door was closed, so I knocked. He didn’t answer. I put my ear up to the door. I could hear his movement within the room. I did not go inside, not when I was not wanted.
I went to my cabin and lay down in bed, the blanket up to my chin.
Where do you want to go?
I tried to visit my imagined childhood treehouse, but there were rats – real rats – running in the corners and flies crawling on the ceiling and black mould eating away the wood.
I tried to board my pirate ship, but the merfolk pulled their cold lips back and laughed through ragged teeth. They only wanted to see me drown.
I tried to remember stories I’d drawn strength from, but I could only remember the skeleton shape of the
m, not the beating heart within. Their warmth had gone cold.
Where do you want to go?
I couldn’t answer that. There was nowhere to go. There was nowhere but this. There would never be anything but this.
The next day, I got up. I didn’t want to, but I did. I don’t know why. There was no good reason to.
I went down to the control room. Elena was in there, running her morning systems diagnostic. We didn’t say anything to each other. There was nothing to say.
A flash on the comms monitor caught my eye. A tiny spark of hope shot through me, but it died quickly. The notification wasn’t anything from OCA. Just the morning’s weather data, freshly downloaded from the cubesats.
I glanced at Elena. Her diagnostics looked to be half complete. I knew she’d sit vigil until they were done. I also knew that she’d look at the weather data in turn, so there was no rush for me to open it. I did anyway. It was something to do.
I have learned, in the years I’ve spent working by Elena’s side, what all the swirls and colours mean on a weather chart. I lack her honed sense for an atmosphere’s choreography, but I can read the map. There was one particular change that morning that caught my eye.
‘Elena,’ I said.
‘Mmm?’
‘Can you come look at this?’
She glanced at my screen. ‘I’ll do the weather map when I’m done here.’ Everything in its precious order.
I stood up, swivelled her chair toward my monitor, and pointed. ‘Tell me this is what I think it is.’
Her eyes narrowed at my disruption, then widened at my suggestion. She rushed over. ‘How did I miss this?’
‘Weather does unpredictable things,’ I said.
She’d taught me that ever-present rule, but it wasn’t explanation enough for her. She’d spent every day on Opera in a desperate defence against the unpredictable. Anything that happened, she wanted – needed to have a game plan waiting for it.
The thing was, she’d spent so much time focused on what could go wrong, she’d forgotten the possibility of something going right.
‘I’ll get the boys,’ I said, hurrying toward the ladder.
Chikondi’s door was closed. I did not knock. I stuck my head right inside.
‘Control room,’ I said. He sat up in bed to look at me. ‘You want to see this.’ I didn’t wait for his reply, nor did I shut the door.
I found Jack sitting slumped in the cargo hold, glaring emptily at the airlock. I took his hand and led him upstairs.
Elena still looked bothered to be in a reality she hadn’t anticipated. ‘There’s … there’s a drop in wind speed.’ Her eyes darted around the map, still expecting a mistake. ‘Doesn’t look like it’ll last long. Maybe a day or two, given these pressure systems.’
Chikondi sat up a little straighter.
‘How much of a drop?’ Jack asked.
She looked him in the eye. ‘Enough.’
I saw a spark in him that had been lost for months. ‘What about the other landing sites?’
She reoriented the map, bringing each island into focus. None of their prognoses were good. Four months, and still, the only ground on Opera was inaccessible.
‘We could orbit for a while,’ Jack said hesitantly. ‘Global storms that last this long – I mean, we’ve seen that on gas giants—’
‘Dust storms on Mars,’ I added.
‘—but not rain. This is new. We could … we could make something of our time here.’ He sounded unconvinced of his own words, as if they were what he knew he should say but nothing more.
Elena thought. ‘It’d be a waste of that time,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing we could do from orbit that a team of researchers back home couldn’t do with the same data. You don’t send bodies if all you’re going to do is study satmaps. That’s not what we’re here for. That’s not what we were sent to do.’
The room was silent for a while. Nobody needed to say what we all knew: none of us wanted to stay. We wanted to be gone, as far from this place as the universe would allow. We had spent a third of a year on Opera, and we came back with a one-sided portrait of a single new species and an inconclusive parcel of weather data. We had gained nothing.
‘We could leave a couple of cubesats in orbit,’ I said, ‘so that people back home can study this.’
‘That works,’ Elena said. ‘There’ll be plenty to dig into.’
We were quiet again. ‘Consensus?’ Jack said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Elena said.
Chikondi nodded.
Nobody moved for a moment. Were we abandoning our mission? Or were we doing what we needed – what we, as living animals, needed – for that mission to continue?
I still haven’t made up my mind about that.
Jack broke the silence. ‘Let’s start prep.’ There was no discussion about it. Consensus had been unnecessary; we’d given it months before.
Everybody got right to it, putting away the lab equipment that had never been used, packing up the tools left here and there. I admit that we were not careful. We didn’t do things perfectly. We didn’t use our checklists. We just threw things in boxes, tied them down, and moved on to the next. A door had been opened, and we’d be damned if we let it close.
Launching a spacecraft is a violent act. For all our fine technology, all the wondrous advancements we love to pat ourselves on the back about, the process of leaving a planet has always been the same: push as hard and fly as fast as possible. I had been through over a dozen launches before Opera. I was always overwhelmed by the experience, awed by the raw power at my back – and yes, obviously, a little bit afraid. I’ve heard some astronauts describe the feeling as like somebody putting a massive foot in the middle of your back and pushing you away. I never imagined a foot. I imagined the hands of every scientist and supporter, lifting us up to a place no one could reach alone.
Leaving Opera felt different.
It wasn’t different, I know this – not in mechanics, not in process, not in anything but context. We were strapped in, systems nominal. The engines roared. The seats rattled. I did not feel supportive hands as we lifted away. I felt the reverse: the grasp of a planet that did not want us to escape. My body sagged into itself as the G-forces clocked up and up. The Merian erupted in a chorus of metallic squealing as it fought against Opera’s impartial physics. We were no longer riding a spacecraft, but a tiny bird, caught in a vast pit of tar, beating her wings so hard she risked leaving a piece of herself behind.
The rats were terrified. Some had fallen with the initial blast, but others were still clinging to the goddamn windows, too stupid to understand that the longer they held fast, the more certain their doom. I watched their shuddering bodies as the rushing air sent them flailing, as the ones that did not fall were swallowed in flame and rendered ash. I felt nothing but quiet loathing toward them, and the purity of that feeling was the ugliest I’ve ever felt. It’s not their fault, the good scientist in me feebly argued. They meant no harm. This is a terrible death. They don’t deserve this.
I don’t care, the raw spite in me replied. And I didn’t. For all my impartiality, for all my trying to set aside anthropocentric biases and see the beauty in all forms, I truly didn’t care. I watched them burn, and felt a twisted gratitude.
I have never stopped hating what that says about me.
As if someone had thrown a switch, everything changed. The last wisp of atmosphere melted away. Where clouds had menaced, stars now glittered. My limbs, my head, my chest lifted away from the chair, pushing against the straps that kept me down. I unbuckled my harness without so much as a glance at the readouts, protocol be damned. I shut my eyes. I let my body go limp. I floated in all directions and none, the concept of weight forgotten. I bit my lip hard to stifle the whimper that bubbled up in my throat. It was the moment when the painkillers kick in, the sip of water that keeps you from dying.
More. I needed more.
I flipped myself around, headed stra
ight for the cargo hold, and got myself into my EVA suit. I could hear the others calling me, but their words didn’t stick.
‘Hey,’ Jack said. He put his hand on the window of the airlock as I prepared to let myself outside. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I need to check for damage,’ I said. This was true. We hadn’t been able to inspect the outer hull, and though we’d clearly been okay for launch, I needed to make sure the rats hadn’t damaged anything vital.
Jack opened his mouth to argue with me. Elena appeared behind him, and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘She’s right,’ she said. ‘Let her check.’
The airlock opened before me, edgeless vacuity beyond. There were no winds here, no crashing waves. Only the cold constancy of stars, to which I was just a crude bit of wet carbon, a flake of skin you brush aside. My pain and pettiness and mistakes and inadequacies did not matter. I did not matter. Nothing we did out here mattered. Nothing we could or would ever do would matter, in the face of this.
My comms crackled on. ‘Ari, your tether,’ Jack said. ‘You forgot your tether.’
I hadn’t forgotten. I just hadn’t brought it.
I tested the metal handholds in the airlock below my thick gloves, like a kid getting ready to let go of the side of the pool and kick off into the deep end. I didn’t know what I was doing. I hadn’t thought any of this through. All I knew was that one of my options was easy. So easy.
‘Ari – son of a bitch—’
Elena took over the comms, her voice cool and hard. ‘If you’re going to inspect damage, that’s fine, but you have to follow protocol. If you can’t do it now, come back in and do it later.’
I let go of one of the handholds. I raised my finger, traced it over the stars. God, they were beautiful. How had something as crude as us ever come from something so beautiful?
I could hear Jack in the background. ‘I’m getting my fucking suit—’
‘She’s got the airlock open, you can’t—’
‘Well, she can’t, either! Ari, listen—’
The comms went silent again. I took a breath. That’s all I could hear – my own breath. No screaming wind, no endless waves, no slimy mouths sucking. I heard nothing but the air travelling in and out of me. This was good. This was good. I didn’t want anything but this, not ever. I didn’t even need to look at the stars anymore. Just knowing they were there and that there was no wall between us was enough. I could live behind my own eyelids. This was good.
To Be Taught, if Fortunate Page 10