The Fated Sky

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  As we walked down the hall, away from the classroom, Betty glanced over at me. “You okay?”

  “Sure!” I chirped.

  “I tried to put it off. Honest.”

  “I know. It’s just … I’m already struggling to catch up.”

  Betty nodded with a grimace. “I’m refusing most interview requests, believe it or not. It’s just…”

  “I know. This is why I’m on the team.”

  She led me to the room that PR had co-opted as a makeup and prep room. With a sigh, I settled in front of the mirror and let other people worry about my makeup and hair while I concentrated on my binder of information, without the benefit of the rock samples.

  On Mars, we’d need to know how to look for potential water flow. That could be identified by small laminations or cross-stratification that showed festoon geometry from transport in subaqueous ripples.

  I rubbed my forehead, and the makeup lady gently pulled my hand away. “Mustn’t smudge.”

  “Right.” My priorities were a mess. In the mirror, it looked as though I were going to a holiday party wearing a flight suit. My hair fell in perfect soft curls that would never have survived if I’d actually been working. In sims and on the moon, I tended to keep it out of the way in a kerchief, but accuracy wasn’t the image that publicity had wanted.

  The makeup lady spun the chair around to release me, and, like a trained hound, I followed Betty down the hall to the engineering wing. Annoyed as I was, I still felt lighter when we rounded the corner into Nathaniel’s office.

  Someone had cleaned it. An orchid sat on his desk and a lamp warmed the corner by his drafting table. They hadn’t made him change clothes, though. He wore his tweed jacket and a plain blue tie that—

  On second thought … I didn’t recognize the tie, but it brought out his eyes. They lit up when he saw me. “Hello, Dr. York.”

  “Good morning, Dr. York.” I stifled the urge to kiss him on the cheek, less because of the photographer and the reporter, and more because I didn’t want to leave a giant red stain on his face.

  The reporter, a white man in his mid-fifties, rested a notepad on his paunch as he scribbled. “I’ll try not to take up much of your time … Jerry. How do you want them?”

  “Natural. How do you two usually work together?”

  We didn’t. Not these days, at any rate. I glanced at Nathaniel and shrugged. “What are you working on?”

  “Um…” He went around to his desk and sat down. The desk drawer squeaked as he dragged it open. “I was reviewing the flight plans for the supply ships to Mars.”

  As he laid the folder on the desk, I went around to stand behind him. Leaning over his shoulder, I studied the equations and once again felt out of touch. I rested a hand on his back, frowning as I tried to figure out what “AMz squared” referred to.

  A flash went off.

  “Try to look happy.” Jerry, the photographer, leaned in closer. Behind the camera, his lank black hair draped across his forehead.

  I smiled. That damn regulation smile. Everything is wonderful and I just love outer space! Don’t you?

  Flash. I couldn’t see the numbers on the page through the purple splotches floating in my vision. Flash. 2, 3, 5, 7 …

  “Dr. York—Elma. May I call you Elma?” The photographer didn’t wait for a response, he just came forward and patted the edge of the desk. “Can I have you sit on the desk? I love the costume you have on, and I can’t really see it behind your husband. Nathaniel, right? Great—right here. Good. Perfect.”

  I sat on the desk, which made it hard to look at the equations, but no more awkward than being in one of the early capsules.

  “Is there something more sciencey you could do?” The reporter stepped forward, tapping his pencil on his notepad. “I mean … you could be looking at tax returns here.”

  Nathaniel looked down at the equations, which were really “sciencey,” and rubbed the back of his neck. “Um … I just sent all of the models over for wind-tunnel tests. Blueprints?”

  “What about one of these?” Betty lifted a punch card out of a box sitting on the edge of the desk.

  “Don’t—” Nathaniel pulled it out of her hand. “Don’t get them out of sequence.”

  The reporter’s eyes rounded at the sight of the card, as if Nathaniel had said nothing. “Oooo! That’s perfect. Better than a model, which any kid could put together. But programming an electronic computer? That’s Science with a capital S.”

  Jerry focused the camera on us. “Why don’t you show it to your wife, Nate? Like you’re explaining it to her.”

  Nathaniel shot me a look, brows raised, as if he were trying to figure out if that was a serious question. This really wasn’t any worse than powdering my nose in a T-38.

  I leaned closer to him, a laugh bubbling right at the back of my throat. “Yes, sweetie. Tell me what crucial piece of programming you have.” I batted my eyes at him.

  Nathaniel burst out laughing, holding the card up as if it were somehow meaningful by itself. It was a tiny part of a larger program, with as much relevance as an individual bolt. The spacecraft might fall apart without it, but it didn’t define the thing.

  The camera whirred and flashed and caught me with an unguarded, nonregulation smile. That’s the photo they wound up using, billed as “The joy of space flight.”

  But we were laughing at the utter lack of science, while, back in the classroom, my teammates were learning actual science. If they really wanted something more “sciencey” they would have taken photos in that room. Instead, they had pulled me out of the pile and turned me into something as useful as an individual punch card.

  * * *

  The thing about wearing a space suit on Earth is that it’s designed for lower gravity. Even being in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab’s pool didn’t change the fact that gravity pulled at me. Sure, it didn’t pull at the suit, but inside it, I slid around every time I changed orientation. As a woman, I was smaller than the men the suits had been designed for, so I had to wear padding around my hips to sort of wedge me in. This kept the air bubble surrounding me inside the suit distributed evenly, allowing me to move from horizontal to vertical over the course of the NBL run without fighting gravity. Without the padding, the air bubble acted like a giant beach ball, strapped to my stomach, always wanting to be pointed up to the surface. It made it difficult to roll any other way.

  In truth, having an air bubble inside the suit wouldn’t be a problem in space, but the NBL was where people decided if you had what it took to do a spacewalk. So neither I nor any of the other women would complain. No, sir. Everything was splendid and we were happy to be in the pool.

  I hung sideways in the water with the fiberglass shell digging into my armpit. My neck burned from holding my head up inside my helmet. My fingers ached from forcing my stiff gloves to close on the edge of the solar panel we were practicing “repairing.” With the suits pressurized to 4.9 psi above ambient pressure, every movement felt like working against a heavy-duty spring. It wasn’t exactly like working in a vacuum, but it gave us a sense of how exhausting it would be. A wrinkle in my glove felt like a metal wire across my knuckle as the pressure made it rigid. But if you asked me how I was doing, I would have been so very, very chipper.

  On the other side of the panel, Rafael Avelino swore in Portuguese as his gloves slid off the wrench. Our support divers floated in a pod around us and let the wrench drift away. Their job was to keep us safe, and ours was to learn how to do repairs in zero-g. Tethered to the MWS or “mini-work station” on the chest of his spacesuit, the wrench didn’t go far, but it was still a pain reeling it in.

  As Rafael’s curses buzzed over the comm, I grinned inside my helmet. “I’m beginning to understand why Parker is learning Portuguese.”

  On my left and slightly below me, Leonard helped me steady the panel as Rafael got the wrench back into place. “We all need more languages to swear in. I’ve just got Latin and Greek, and there’s only so far that can tak
e you.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s a Latin curse like?” Rafael placed the wrench again, and reseated his feet in the foot restraint secured in a WIF mechanical receptor on the mockup exterior of our craft. What does WIF stand for? No idea. At a certain point the acronyms just become the name. WIF was … Widget Interface Fuggedaboutit.

  One of the many benefits to building the ships in space was that we didn’t have to worry about aerodynamics. WIFs and grips covered the surface of the ship. Rafael’s wrench slipped again, but he didn’t lose his grasp. “Because I could use some more, now.”

  Leonard hesitated and then chuckled. “Actually … most of them aren’t things I can say in mixed company.”

  “Please…” I braced against my foot restraint as Rafael finally got the wrench engaged. “Say the fucking Latin.”

  That got a huge laugh from both men, though my face flamed at having said it. Thank God the helmets meant they couldn’t see me clearly. Even for a laugh, that kind of language was still not in my normal vocabulary.

  And then, predictably, Jason Tsao, our Sim Sup du jour, crackled into our ears. “Language.”

  “Vae me, puto, concacavi me,” Leonard intoned with great solemnity.

  Rafael’s head came up in his helmet. “Huh. That is close enough to Portuguese that I actually understood it. Mostly.”

  “Gentlemen. Lady.” For a guy from Chicago, Tsao could be so prim sometimes. “We have visitors and they are listening.”

  The three of us exchanged glances and Rafael rolled his eyes. “What language do they speak?”

  “English.” Through the microphone, we could just make out someone talking in the background, but not the substance of the conversation. The Sim Sup’s response was sharp and biting. “No. Bringing them up early is absolutely out of the—” and then his mic cut off.

  What had that been? Through the water, I couldn’t see what the guys thought, so I just stood there bracing the panel. It wasn’t like the Sim Sup to leave his mic open, which raised the question of what sort of visitors would distract him that badly. To say nothing of who might be asking us to come out of the NBL run early.

  Rafael got that bolt tightened down and we moved on as a unit to extend the next piece of the panel. This was the fourth time we’d done this particular NBL run, and each time we got a little faster. Of course, it wasn’t likely that I would be the one doing the EVA, but the IAC believed in overpreparation, and after my late start, I supported them in that. Besides, it would make being the IV person—the intravehicular person—easier if I knew what they were facing. Given the communication lags we would have during the mission, we couldn’t rely on ground control to coach the EV team in every scenario.

  “Folks—we’re going to stand down on extending the array.” The Sim Sup’s voice crackled, then the microphone rustled and shifted as though he were handing it off.

  We floated underwater with the constant hum of fans and the sound of our own breath as company. Then Director Clemons came on the comm. “We have to pull Dr. Flannery out—but Dr. York and Captain Avelino will stay and work through the cleanup. Dr. Flannery, I need you out of the tank pronto.”

  Leonard drew a breath as if he were going to argue, then snapped his mouth shut so hard I heard his teeth click. “Yes, sir. See you topside.”

  I am ashamed to say that my primary emotion was not curiosity or even annoyance that our training had been interrupted, but relief that, for once, it wasn’t me. Leonard turned from us and let the divers drag him through the water to the platform that would carry him to the surface.

  Rafael and I floated in the pool. I let my head slump against the side of my helmet, and closed my eyes for a moment, while our support divers reconfigured the ship mock-up to the end state of the run. It took so long to get into the suits, that it made sense to let us practice the end of the run while we were already down there. I kept listening to the comm, waiting for Tsao to tell us something else about what was happening with Leonard.

  When the divers were ready for us, we started the run again, but kept conversation to the bare minimum required for work. After I got over my relief, I had a huge case of What-the-devil-is-going-on. I’d been pulled out of training before, but not an actual NBL run. That required restarting the entire thing, which was expensive and an enormous loss of training time. Heck, the way the suits were configured, it took two days just to replace a crew member. Short of a medical emergency or an equipment malfunction, nothing interrupted an NBL run. So what would Clemons think was so important that it couldn’t wait?

  And why weren’t they telling us?

  The lift out of the NBL’s pool took ages. As my helmet breached the surface of the water, the stand I was strapped to supported the 140 kilograms of my suit. Trying to walk in a full suit in Earth gravity is not possible. Even just the bottoms are like … it’s like wearing diapers in a snow suit made of lead. The robot in Lost in Space had more grace than we did.

  I hung in the donning stand as a swarm of suit techs helped us to disrobe. When you want answers, everything seems to take longer. I waited for my suit tech to remove the tools and tethers and leg weights. As much as I wanted to rush her, everything had to be done in sequence. On the other side of the donning stand, Rafael was going through the same slow, careful extraction from his space suit.

  It was like my suit tech was moving underwater as she opened the valve on the side to depressurize the spacesuit down to below one. Sure, I could talk now and she could hear me, along with everyone else listening in on the comms.

  My suit tech put her hands on the release of my glove. “Breathe out.”

  I exhaled as the remaining bit of delta pressure released when she popped the glove. It wasn’t likely that I would blow out a lung, but over-precautions were IAC’s stock in trade.

  The suit settled around me as she pulled the glove away, then finally she reached for the helmet. The moment it was off, I asked her. “What’s going on?”

  “FBI.” She glanced over her shoulder to the control room. “We were told to get you cleaned up fast.”

  I blinked like an idiot for a minute before my brain joined my body above water. If they wanted to talk to Leonard and me, then it must be related to the protesters, but … it had been nearly seven months since the hijacking. Why on earth would they want to talk to us now?

  EIGHT

  EXEMPLARS OF SOCIETY CHARGED WITH HOLDING UP RACIAL GAINS

  By FRED POWLEDGE

  KANSAS CITY, KS, Jan. 4, 1962—A leading civil rights lawyer has charged that the “exemplars of our society” are guilty of resisting the Federal Constitution. The lawyer, Jack Greenberg, director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in the fund’s annual report: “Those who would maintain the racial caste system have resisted the Constitution and court rulings by force, by deceit, by tokenism, by stalling litigation, and by such legislative maneuvers as the filibuster. Sadly, those responsible for these evasions are exemplars of our society: school and university board members, superintendents of education, leaders of the bar, astronauts, and elected officials.”

  When I was finally escorted into the conference room, one of the FBI agents rose to greet me. He was a painfully slender man, with cheekbones that looked as if they would puncture his parchment skin. “Dr. York. I’m Agent Boone. This is my colleague Agent Whitaker.”

  Agent Whitaker stayed seated, scribbling in a notebook, and barely glanced up. He had generic white-bread good looks, marred by an ugly red scar across his forehead, just below his hairline.

  Boone glanced at his colleague and gave a little shrug, as if he were used to the man’s rudeness. “Thank you for making the time to meet with us.”

  “Did I have a choice?” I smiled to take the sting away, but I was more than a little annoyed. After rushing me out of the sim, they had kept me waiting for an hour and a half. “Honestly, it was a little bit of a relief to have some time to just sit and read.”

  “Well, we’ll try to get you out of
here as quickly as possible.” He gestured across the conference table to a chair facing them. “Please. Coffee?”

  “Thank you, that would be lovely.” I did not comment on the fact that he was serving me coffee from the IAC’s own stock. “Cream and sugar, if you don’t mind?”

  “I have a sweet tooth, so let me know if I go overboard.” He snagged his mug off the table and walked to the back of the room. “We have some questions about the rocket crash and the men who held you.”

  “Of course … though I’m not certain there’s anything I can tell you that I didn’t already say in debriefing.”

  Whitaker drew a harsh line on his notebook, but still didn’t look at me. “Oh, I think there is.”

  “I’ll be interested to hear what you think that is.” I kept my hands in my lap, resting gently together the way my mother had taught me. The fact that I was wearing trousers instead of a skirt would have appalled her, but the general appearance of ladylike refinement was still a good tool.

  From the back of the room, Boone poured a generous amount of sugar into my coffee cup. “Well … Let’s start with establishing some parameters.”

  “Now you sound like a rocket scientist.”

  He chuckled, and the parchment of his skin folded into deep creases around his mouth. “I wish I were that bright.”

  Whitaker shot a quick look toward his partner. “You and me both.” He shoved his notebook away. “How long have you known Leonard Flannery?”

  I opened and shut my mouth like a fish. That was not at all what I thought they’d ask. I’d been expecting to review conversations or go over some bit of minutia. “Um … two years? Ish?” I squinted, trying to remember which class he’d been in. “Yes … He was hired with the class of ’59 recruits. I think. HR should be able to tell you.”