We Have Always Been Here

by Lena Nguyen

  Her hair was still wet. She hadn’t taken the time to dry it. Park felt like a piece of damp paper—slowly disintegrating, on the edge of falling apart. She felt the tightness around her temples again and quelled it. Affirmative thoughts, she told herself, taking a breath. Positive action. She went over to the couch and set the MAD to ten minutes.

  Fulbreech came in on minute eight. Park heard him enter but couldn’t force herself to raise her arms and lift the MAD off of her head. Her brain was adjusting its chemical levels, like a violin being tuned: dopamine and euphoria bloomed through her skull. She said something to him, half-slurring. Fulbreech sat down across from her, in the seat she usually sat in, and waited.

  When the MAD powered off, Park lifted the visor and said, “How did you get in?”

  She was embarrassed that he’d caught her in a vulnerable position—that he’d found her using the MAD, something he himself always refused. Fulbreech, studying her with interest, said, “You left the door unlocked. They’re still looking for Holt. I wanted to check on you before I turned in.”

  “Check in on me,” Park repeated. “Because . . .”

  “Well, if this were a horror stream, the woman who goes off into the dark alone is usually found murdered,” Fulbreech joked. Then he sobered at her flat expression. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—it’s just that no one can find him. It’s a little uncanny.”

  “How did he get out of the medical bay?”

  “Wick didn’t say.”

  Bullshit, Park wanted to say. She couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t say I don’t know—only that Wick didn’t say. Couldn’t help but remember what he had told her, just a few hours ago: that he wouldn’t tell her everything. She tried to beam it at him through her eyes—Are you feeding me bullshit?

  But she recognized in this a danger, a breach in objectivity. Fulbreech wasn’t obligated to tell her a thing. But then why go out of his way to win her trust in the first place? The contradiction put her on guard with him. She said in a chilly way, “I see.”

  “I heard about Ma,” Fulbreech continued, probably to divert her. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes,” Park said, surprised—wondering why he wouldn’t ask if Elly was all right. Fulbreech, sensing her confusion, explained: “She was your bunkmate, wasn’t she? And you had to sedate her? And . . .”

  Chagrined, he glanced at the MAD. Park felt a flaring of anger.

  “I’m fine, Fulbreech,” she said. “Thank you for your concern.”

  “I’m sure,” Fulbreech answered, smiling a little to himself. “You’re always fine. I just thought I should ask, since you have to ask everyone else.”

  Meaning, Park assumed, that he thought no one was around to evaluate the evaluator. And Fulbreech meant to assume that role. She thought to ask him for his credentials. “Where do you think Holt could be?” she asked instead.

  He shook his head. “We don’t know. He’s on the ship, certainly. And the computer tells us he’s alive and kicking. He’s just squirreled away somewhere.”

  Park shook her head. “This would be much easier if we had more cameras.”

  “That’s the Privacy Wars for you,” Fulbreech answered wryly. “The one time we need constant surveillance, we don’t have it.” He looked at her face, then away, as if not to stare. Then he looked back again, as if he thought, Why not stare? “You’re very guarded, you know.”

  “I’m not,” Park answered automatically. It came out sterner than she was hoping, grave—as if she’d taken offense. Fulbreech mused, almost to himself, “Maybe it’s part of the job. I don’t know. Or maybe you just don’t trust anyone.”

  Why should I? Park thought, sullen. Fulbreech saw it in her face and laughed; she felt an uncomfortable swooping sensation, as if she’d missed a step climbing the stairs in the dark. She looked away and said, “I don’t know why it matters to you. Whether I trust anyone or not.”

  She really was angry with him, she realized. He expected her to share her thoughts with him, to open herself up—and yet he had shown he wouldn’t do the same. Of course she mistrusted that. But then the sense of wellbeing planted by the MAD picked up on her negative feeling and swarmed on it. Dampened it. She shifted in her seat and suddenly noticed that a light on her desk console was blinking.

  “Have you ever been to the New York biodome?” Fulbreech asked after a moment. She noticed that he didn’t answer her question. But had she even really asked one? And was it something she wanted an outright answer to?

  “No, I haven’t.” Park shuddered, thinking of the claustrophobia, the smog forming dirty gray stains against the biofilm as it curved over the city. “Well, once. For the flight to Baikonur. I didn’t leave the airport.”

  “Where are you from originally?”

  “I grew up in the New Diego biodome.” No harm in disclosing that.

  “Ah,” Fulbreech said, a little lamely. “I was born in the New Chicago dome—but we moved to Mars when I was a teen. After that, Cambien, Elysium, Halla. I was a ship-brat.”

  Of course she knew all this: it was in his files. She even knew that his great-great-grandfather had been a famous NASA astronaut, and his uncle, Isaac Fulbreech, was one of the engineers who’d settled Phobos. His brother was a lead ship-builder for the fleet there, too. ISF ran in his blood. But she said, just to be polite: “I hear that Halla is nice.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  “Is your family there now?”

  He paused. “My parents are. My brother and his wife still live on Phobos. They just had their first baby. A boy.”

  Park looked at him. She read no lie in his countenance, but there had been that barest flicker of hesitation. “Congratulations,” was all she could think to say.

  Fulbreech made a visible effort to change the subject, turning toward her. “Your story is a different one,” he said. “This is your first trip into space, isn’t it?”

  Now where had he heard that from? She supposed he was more observant than she gave him credit for; she’d been careful not to tell anybody that explicitly, wary of coming off as inexperienced. Easy to undermine. She thought about how Sagara had found the anti-emesis tabs. “I enjoy space travel,” Park said, levelly.

  Fulbreech smiled. “You’re not much for talking, are you? Not when it’s about stuff you’re not interested in.”

  “I talk.”

  He was grinning now, rubbing the faint golden stubble on his chin. “But do you say much? I have such a hard time figuring you out.”

  Ditto, Park wanted to say—an embarrassingly dated term that she knew he would laugh at. She wasn’t sure if she wanted him to laugh at her or not. She stole a quick look at his hand, resting on his knee: it was tan and broad and strong, and honest somehow. She said, to prove him wrong, “When I was younger, I was afraid of going into space.”

  Fulbreech looked at her, surprised. “Why was that?”

  “I don’t know,” Park admitted. “It was—too dark for me. Too empty. I was used to crowds of people, like in the domes.”

  “Interesting. But you’re used to it now?”

  “I’m well-adjusted.” As if that was accurate. But she couldn’t think of anything else to say; she’d reached the end of her conversational props. She couldn’t even talk about the weather, because there was no weather on the ship. “You mentioned New York,” she said finally, a little desperately.

  “Right,” Fulbreech said. He leaned back and stared up at the office’s gray ceiling, as if viewing some invisible projection up there. “There’s a famous art gallery there. I can’t remember the name. Something French. My father took my brother and me when we were teens. I can give you the address sometime.”

  He was very optimistic, Park thought to herself, thinking of disaster, of Holt and Ma—but she decided to try her hand at the game. “Or you could just take me there yourself.”

  Fulbreech’s e
yebrows raised. “What do you mean?”

  “I assume you’re coming back to Earth when the mission is done.”

  Fulbreech’s face went blank. It was momentary, but Park saw it: confusion, and then shame. Quickly he hid it, but in that moment Park felt such a hatred of him that even the dumb peaceful glow of the MAD faded a little, burning at the ends like a cigarette. He was too attractive, she decided; it annoyed her. His jawline was absurd. The scraps of stubble, deliberate, vain. And the boyishness, the goodness—it was a front. She was half-convinced that ISF had put him in her way as a means to test her.

  “Of course,” Fulbreech said slowly. Constructing a lie. “But I might have to hop off before then—maybe when we resupply at Corvus. They may want me to consult with the researchers there.”

  “Of course,” Park echoed. Her lips felt stiff as she spoke. She noticed that his leg was close to hers, under the table that separated them. She moved hers away. Liar.

  Fulbreech looked away from her. “That gallery,” he said finally, after a moment of heavy silence. “There was this amazing statue in it. I want you to see it someday—you remind me of it. Or it reminds me of you.”

  “It was nude, I’m sure.” To her satisfaction Fulbreech reddened and coughed.

  “It was, in fact,” he said. “It was of this naked woman, sitting in the lotus position. Looking very composed. Striving for inner peace. Total zen, you know. The artist won prizes for it. People said her expression was as mysterious as the Mona Lisa’s.”

  “I see.”

  “But the most striking thing about it wasn’t exactly her expression. Not to me.” He looked thoughtful. “It was that the woman’s body was full of cracks. Fissured all over. And there was light coming out of the cracks. That was what made it such a masterpiece, everybody said. That the statue was full of things you didn’t expect—empty spaces, voids, chasms. Flaws. Well, that’s what the critics called them, but I used the term ‘mysterious places,’ personally.” He paused. “Things you wanted to look into and explore, only the light was too bright for you to look at, once you came too close.”

  He looked at her. Park was aware that something was happening, that there was a current of meaning passing between them that she ought to turn her cheek to. She had a hot, tense feeling in her stomach, as if she were awaiting some reprimand. She said, lamely, “I don’t understand.”

  “I didn’t, either,” Fulbreech said. “Not then.” Then he stood up. “Good night, Park.”

  She could not help but stare at him. “Good night.”

  He made to leave, then paused at the door. “There’s a solar wind that’s about to hit, by the way. A proton storm. I thought you should know; I guess they’re pretty common here. We’ll have to detach from the surface and shield ourselves on the dark side of Eos for the day. Otherwise the radiation will cook us like bacon.”

  “Thank you,” Park said as he turned away. It was a white flag, she decided. An olive branch. As a non-expedition member, she wasn’t privy to such information. Things and decisions on the ship just happened, and she was lucky if she got to hear the reasons for it afterward. Fulbreech wanted to give her that much knowledge—make sure she wasn’t too left in the dark. Perhaps to make amends for earlier, sensing her upset. She didn’t know if she felt more grateful to him or annoyed.

  He left. Park went to her flashing console and found an error message from the ship’s computer, METIS: it informed her that it had been unable to send her latest message out to ISF Corvus.

  The atomic storm, Park thought, too tired to feel anything other than numbness. All of that radiation must have interfered with her signal; communications would probably be down until the solar wind cleared. What goddamn inconvenient timing! Of course the storm would hit just as she needed to call for help. It was almost beginning to feel as if the ship was cursed.

  She sat there for a while in the dark, watching the simulated fish tank in the wall. Her favorite fish, the hologram of the bumblebee goby, was nowhere to be seen, no matter how much she hunted for it. A glitch in the program, Park thought, thinking of Holt. Just like everything else in this place.

  After a while she felt a slight pressure change in the air—an airlock closing somewhere far off. Her ears plugged; a great hush seemed to settle over the Deucalion. She felt a tremor under her feet, then the familiar stagger as the ship lifted up its great legs. Energy simmered softly through the walls. Park felt both relief and a tinge of panic: for a moment she could convince herself that they were leaving Eos altogether, that they were headed back to Corvus to get Holt and Ma help, and to wake up Reimi Kisaragi.

  But no, she thought. Impossible. Colony missions were never abandoned. Not even if people died.

  She closed her eyes. Lay down when she felt the gut-bouncing lift of reconfiguring gravity. They were better equipped for solar storms and subatomic winds than most expedition ships. Not because they had more advanced technology, or a better-trained crew—but because they had less to save. Normally there were plants that needed to be covered or moved to protected areas. Genetically augmented animals to be herded into the little shelters. Seeds and embryos to be locked into the vaults. But here, on the Deucalion, there was none of that. Only the directive to hide—and wait.

  I can do that, Park thought. She flattened her body against the cold, viscoelastic foam of the couch and imagined the Deucalion drifting silently through the dark waters of space. Her head felt full of static.

  They were off; there was the jolt as they broke out of the atmosphere. The sounds of the ship slowly receded. If Park tuned out the low roar of the engines, she could pretend that she was totally alone, a single soul in a black and soothing vacuum. Thank God Fulbreech was gone. He would have tried to coach her through liftoff, talked to cover up the blast, tried to make her feel comfortable. Maybe he would have looked earnestly into her eyes and asked if she needed him to hold her hand.

  Park’s insides shriveled like peach pits. Solitude for her was like a religious blessing to others: it was her church of one. Always she closed the doors behind her with the awareness that she was giving herself sanctuary, an opportunity to cleanse and be purified. Fulbreech was like the neighbor who kept her from shutting the door, asking if she was interested in participating in the annual bake sale.

  That was the problem, Park thought. Fulbreech thought she was mysterious, and that appealed to him. He thought that her guardedness, her need to be alone, was all a defense mechanism that he had to get past. Either she was a puzzle to be solved—and then later, discarded—or he simply thought that he needed to get to know her better, to break through to some other place, some core where another person lived inside of her. But that was the catch. There was no other person, no self that she was hiding. Park was who she seemed to be from the outside. That would never change. Fulbreech just hadn’t realized it yet.

  She liked Hilbert’s illustration of infinity, using a hotel as an example. A hotel with an infinite number of rooms could accommodate an infinite number of guests, even if the whole place was already fully occupied. Whenever a new guest arrived, the guest in room one would simply move to room two; the guest in room two to room three; and so on and so forth. What Park liked was that, even with an infinite line of people waiting out the door, the thought of making guests share a room never occurred to anyone in the hotel. Each guest had to be solitary; each had to have a room of their own, even if it meant that everyone else performed an infinite series of actions to ensure this. It was the natural order of things, assumed. This made sense to her. She wished the Deucalion was Hilbert’s hotel.

  But it’s not, Park thought then. She was not like the hotel guest, come in safely from the night. She was more like a glacier, alone and adrift on a warming sea. Cold, remote. But shrinking rapidly under the circumstances.

  5.

  [Hi,

  Another day, another transcript. I segmented off some of the stuff that
didn’t matter, to keep the file size small. You were right to have your suspicions: it seems some very weird shit went down here. I hope you’re doing okay. I hope you’re staying safe. We are doing our best here, though every day I think Requisitions is going to storm our place and throw us out. I hope that doing this is worth it. I hope that Eos can really be a home.

  Love,

  S.S.]

  VIDEO LOG #8—Ship Designation CS Wyvern 7079

  Day 2: 9:42 UTO

  Daley: And you’re sure it’s okay for us to go out there.

  Taban: That’s what the HARE said. Look: rad levels are okay. Average temperature is -125 Celsius during sun-facing hours. That’s about the temperatures of the poles back on Mars.

  Daley: What is that in Fahrenheit?

  Taban: Are you serious?

  Daley: I know. My old partner tried to get me to do everything in metric, too. Some things are just hardwired.

  Taban: You really are old. Minus 125 Celsius is, uh, about negative 200 Fahrenheit.

  Daley: (grunt)

  Taban: It’s doable. Our suits will work, anyway. Air doesn’t seem breathable, but when is it ever? We’ll need to bring auxiliary tanks. But the HARE was out there for over twelve hours and it was fine.

  Daley: It’s just. It got dark so fast.

  Taban: The suns here are weaker than even Tau Ceti—that’s why it’s so cold. ‘Daylight’ won’t last long. We’ve gotta move fast if we want to get this thing fixed.

  Daley: Right.

  Taban: And hey, will you grow some balls? You were going to send me out there to fix the engine, no problem.

  Daley: All right, all right. You’re right. Don’t know what’s going on with me. Let’s go.

  [The HARE watches as Daley and Taban step into their cybernetic exo-armor suits, which are scuffed and battered from presumably years of outer-ship repairs and mining. Old-model suits, they look to be of Chinese or Martian make. Daley is breathing heavily. Taban finishes suiting up first and waits for him. They give each other the sign for all-clear and open the airlock of the ship. The vacuum of the Wyvern’s air being sucked into the wind outside is so loud that the recording goes completely silent.]