The Fated Sky

by Mary Robinette Kowal

TEN

  CREW OF MARS EXPEDITION TRAINING IN SPACE

  KANSAS CITY, KS, July 18, 1962—In three months, at 9:32 a.m. Central Daylight Time, the dreams of centuries and the technologies of the decade should converge in a fiery, thunderous instant to launch fourteen astronauts representing the United Nations toward man’s first landing on another planet: Mars.

  Preparations for the epic, three-year journey to Mars and back continue to run smoothly and on schedule. At Launching Pad 39-A Col. Stetson Parker, the Mars Expedition commander, and his crew are blasting off to continue their training on Lunetta, and in the Mars fleet itself, so that they will be free from worldly distractions as they complete preparations for the 34-million-mile mission.

  Once we were on the station, I seriously wondered why this hadn’t always been the plan. I mean, why stick us in the neutral buoyancy pool to simulate zero-g when we could practice in actual zero gravity? Well, I mean, besides the obvious fact that it was a lot easier to die in space. But other than that, everything got easier.

  I aimed my sextant out the observation window at real stars. The tiny variations in color that might have been hidden by the atmosphere of Earth, even before the Meteor, blazed with crystalline wonder from the velvet blackness of the sky. There were thousands—hundreds of thousands—more stars visible in space than at even the best planetarium on Earth, and yet the job of picking out one star from a sea of them was easier.

  I registered Alkaid and Spica, spun down to sight on Earth, and, presto chango, I had the coordinates I needed to confirm our state vector. I scribbled down the answer. Plus 0771145, plus 2085346, minus 0116167, minus 15115, plus 04514, minus 19587. “Finished!”

  Behind me, Parker clicked a stopwatch. “Best time yet.”

  A snort came from one of the observers floating behind us. Even before his South African drawl began, I was pretty sure it would be Vanderbilt DeBeer. “She could write down any random memorized coordinates and still you would believe.”

  Heidi Voegeli, the Pinta’s NavComp, shut her notebook with a snap. “Please, DeBeer. You know better than that.”

  She took a linen handkerchief to her finely tooled Swiss sextant. I’ll admit to some envy for the beautiful stainless-steel wonder. It had a built-in slot for a pen, a fold-out stopwatch that you could set to keep track of time elapsed, and really lovely, completely superfluous engraving on the supporting arms.

  “Yes, but I am only saying that, since no one checks the work, either of you could cheat and we would not know.”

  I unhooked from my foot restraints to turn and give him one of my mother’s patented cold, polite glares. “I thought I was practicing a skill that would keep my team alive. Cheating isn’t something that even occurred to me. Why … I wonder what made you think of it?”

  From the flush that rose to his cheeks, I may have put a tiny bit too much emphasis on the you.

  Benkoski clapped a hand on his copilot’s shoulder. “You haven’t known York as long as I have. There’s a damn good reason we don’t bother to check her numbers.”

  “Ja, ja … The Lady Astronaut.” DeBeer gave a smile and a little bow. “I know. I know … It is only my competitive nature. I meant nothing by it.”

  Heidi met my gaze with a little twitch of her eyebrows. DeBeer must be a joy to work with in sims if he questioned her all the time, and she’d be spending three years with the man? Suddenly I had a new appreciation for Parker, who never, ever questioned me in my area of expertise.

  I pushed off from the wall to float over to the Niña group. “Who’s up next?”

  “Grey.” Parker gave a little wave to Florence. “Have at it.”

  The theory was that we all needed to be versed in how to use the sextant, just in case something happened to me or Heidi.

  But the practice meant that Parker was pulling Florence out into the focal range of DeBeer, a man who loathed her existence in general and her presence on the mission in specific. After three months in space with both teams mixing, I’d gotten to know the Pinta team better than we would have if we’d been running parallel training tracks on Earth.

  DeBeer was a product of South Africa and a firm believer in the value of Apartheid. He’d also been on the rocket that had gone off course, and I would place solid bets that he’d been the one to lie to the FBI. So Parker suggesting that Florence have a go now was either cruel to her, or a dig at DeBeer. Actually … knowing him, it was probably both.

  Florence drifted out from behind our group, where she and Leonard had been watching. Her jaw was set and she kept her gaze fixed on the rail where I’d been anchored. I held out my sextant. Florence took it with a nod.

  Benkoski traded a look with Parker. I couldn’t guess at what passed between them, but he turned to DeBeer. “Say … Why don’t you go next.”

  DeBeer nodded, but also muttered something in Afrikaans. “Teen die agterplaas aap?”

  Parker gave one push with his toes and bounded across the room to land with military accuracy in front of DeBeer. His voice was clipped with equal military precision. “Ek vind dat offensief. Sê dit weer, en ek kry jy permanent gegrond.”

  Recoiling, DeBeer overcompensated and flailed comically backward. Benkoski stuck out a hand to right his copilot, shaking his head at Parker. “Jesus Christ. Afrikaans now, too?”

  “I like languages. What can I say?” Parker shrugged, back to the charming, shit-eating, aw-shucks astronaut hero that he showed the American public.

  Heidi laughed and handed her sextant to DeBeer. “Wie viele macht das?”

  Parker cocked his head to the side, his fingers twitching as if he were counting on them. “Elf? Nein—zwölf. Zwölf, aber ich bin wirklich nur Konversation in sechs oder sieben von ihnen.”

  Heidi laughed again, and it was easy to see why Switzerland had chosen Heidi as its poster child for the space program. Perfect teeth. A swan’s neck. Capped by a braided coil of golden hair. “Only six or seven, he says.”

  As DeBeer hooked into the restraint next to Florence, he busied himself with Heidi’s sextant. “How long have you had Afrikaans?”

  “Started learning it the moment you were assigned to the Mars mission.”

  “I am flattered,” DeBeer said.

  “Eh. It was the only one I didn’t have already.” Parker shrugged. “’Course, I learned Taiwanese for no reason.”

  I winced at his not-so-subtle reminder of Helen. “But have you learned Yiddish?”

  “Yiddish, not Judeo-Spanish? I thought your family was from Charleston.”

  I blinked at him while my brain struggled with which part of that was the most surprising. Was it the fact that Parker knew where my family was from? The fact that he knew that Charleston was mostly Sephardic Jews, not Ashkenazi? Or that he knew that not all Jews spoke the same language? “Um … yeah. Came over in the seventeen hundreds from Germany. How did you know…?” I’m not sure which question I wanted answered.

  “My mother-in-law is Jewish. Sephardic by way of Holland.” He glanced past me, and a scowl surfaced for a moment before getting plastered over with a grin. “Incoming.”

  Parker pushed off and did a showy somersault over my head to land neatly by the door to the observation room, where Betty was shepherding in our reporting pool. Goddamn it. They were early. Hooking his feet under one of the guide rails, Parker did a nice imitation of someone standing at parade rest, even with the zero-g. Around me, twelve astronauts snapped on their regulation smiles.

  You would think that being off the planet, I’d have escaped the orbit of the press. You would be wrong. Every country that had invested money in the Mars Expedition wanted news of it. The shenanigans that Nathaniel and Clemons had pulled to get us off-planet earlier had gotten us away from congressional hearings, but not the need to keep money flowing toward the IAC’s coffers. I didn’t even want to know what it took to get the press pool certified for space travel.

  I pushed off to join Parker in greeting the press corps, hopefully giving the rest of our team breat
hing room to keep working with their sextants. After all, being a face for the public was why I was on the mission.

  At the front of the group trailing Betty was—joy of joys—Jerry, the photographer from the Times. Maybe I could get him to take Parker’s photo with a single punch card. Betty spun in place and smiled at her charges. We did so much smiling for the public. “Oh my! This is lucky. May I introduce the first man into space, Colonel Stetson Parker?” When she gestured to him, Parker grinned and waved. “And of course, Dr. Elma York—better known as the Lady Astronaut.”

  Smile and wave. Smiiiiile and wave.

  My job was to make space look as glamorous and exciting as possible. It would be a chore, since at least two of the reporters looked green with the early signs of space sickness. With my luck, one of them would chalk any vomiting up to “space germs” instead of good old-fashioned vertigo. I patted a pocket on my flight suit for the reassuring crinkle of a vomit bag. “Welcome to Lunetta!”

  “We’re so pleased you could join us.” Parker had the aw-shucks thing down pat. “Hope your flight up was uneventful.”

  “Betty, what do you have on the agenda for these fine folks?”

  “I thought that they might want to take a look at the observation lounge while their luggage is being offloaded, but I didn’t realize you all were in here.” That was not true, since we’d discussed this trip at the Monday morning staff meeting. This little exercise was so they’d feel like there was some spontaneity to our dog and pony show. Funny what people respond to.

  “We’re practicing using sextants, but you’re welcome to watch.” Parker turned to gesture to the window, where Florence was at work. “We’re spicing things up a little by making it into a contest.”

  Here’s a question: did Parker plan to have Florence be the subject of photographs, or was that an accident? It’s hard to tell with him, but I was pleased she was getting the spotlight right now. Especially with the news from Earth about the sit-ins at the launch centers.

  “Sounds fun, but it’s not the view I promised you. Sorry, folks.” Betty’s curls bobbed freely, as if she were underwater. “If any of you want to head back to your quarters, one of the crew can escort you straight there.”

  If she’d said “cash bar,” then we might have lost some of the reporters, but otherwise, none of them were going to risk being scooped. She knew that. Their cameras were already out and snapping away.

  “Well, we’ll get back to the contest, then.” Parker pushed off, and I followed him back to the group of Niña astronauts. He stopped and hung upside down this time. You’d think that “up” and “down” shouldn’t have any meaning here, but we tend to orient in the same direction because back on Earth, we train in gravity. The engineers install labels in gravity. The lights are “overhead” because of gravity. Also, there’s the courtesy of making it easier to read facial expressions. We don’t have gravity, but we do have “up” and “down.”

  I glanced at him. “You want to disorient them immediately?”

  “I’m trying to provide a vivid photographic opportunity for the press corps.”

  Kamilah Shamoun, our medic, rolled her eyes. “If you fart, I swear to God I am going to light it.”

  “That’s terrible for propulsion.” Parker pulled out his stopwatch. “Okay. What’s their goal? Benkoski?”

  The pilot for the Pinta team shook his head. “York, you won the last round. You pick.”

  “Good call. Then she can go back and explain it to the peanut gallery.” Parker nodded and stared at me expectantly, from upside down.

  I considered for a moment. “Let’s have the state vector for Lunetta using Deneb and Aldebaran for guidance.”

  While they worked, I kicked back to the press corps, who snapped photos. Or, rather, tried to snap photos. Most of them had forgotten to anchor, and one clearly hadn’t yet learned to conserve movement, so not only was he floating free, he was also spinning. I snagged the lanky blond man and helped him settle.

  Keeping a hand on the reporter, I smiled at the rest of the group. “Can I answer any questions for you?”

  A reporter with a movie-star mane of dark hair raised his hand. “Justino Coronel, of Folha de São Paulo. What are we over now?”

  “Good question.” I gestured to the wall of windows to the right of the door. “Follow a guide rail over here and we’ll take a look. We orbit the Earth about every ninety minutes, but since we’re not oriented on the ecliptic, we see a slightly different part of the planet with each revolution.”

  I kicked off with my toes and flew down to the window, rebounding off of it to change orientation and face them.

  “Is that safe?” The Times reporter hung back a little.

  “Absolutely.” Unless a meteor passed by, but there wasn’t any point in alarming them. I snagged a handgrip to anchor myself. “Each window has four panes of glass that are each three centimeters thick. So there’s twelve centimeters between you and outer space. A ninety-one-kilogram man could stand on this on Earth and even jump up and down without problems. In zero-g, I weigh significantly less than that.”

  The Times reporter raised his camera, as if he couldn’t help himself. “Is that to protect against meteors?”

  “An impact with someone’s lunch box is more likely.” I smiled. Again. And looked down to where the Earth spun past us in glorious blues and silver grays. Flashes of brown or green land peeked through the cloud cover like secret promises. “We’re over Africa right now.”

  A lanky blond man pushed himself to the front of the pack. “Home!” His broad accent placed him at the bottom of the continent. He raised his camera and started snapping photos. “Do you think I could get Vanderbilt DeBeer in front of South Africa?”

  “By the time he finishes, we’ll have rotated off of it, I’m afraid.” I glanced over to the cluster where Florence and DeBeer worked. “Our next orbit should still be over the landmass, though.”

  “Alas.” The reporter straightened and it sent him careening up and away from the windows.

  I snagged his foot and guided him to one of the rails. “Careful there. Make sure you always keep a hand on something until you get used to zero-g.”

  “How long did it take you?” The Brazilian reporter had one hand on a rail and used the other to steady his camera.

  I shrugged. “By the second or third day, I was fairly comfortable, but it’s different for everyone.” I gestured to the group of astronauts. “For instance, Graeham Stewman, who is the geologist for the Pinta, was an Olympic diver before going into geology. He took to space as if it were water. Derek Benkoski, the Pinta’s pilot, had done skydiving with the air force, and that experience seemed to translate to weightlessness.”

  “What about the other geologist?” The South African reporter lifted his camera toward the group and adjusted the focus but didn’t snap a picture.

  “Dr. Flannery was about average. Though, in truth, one of the criteria that the IAC looked for in Mars Expedition candidates was our resilience to space sickness.”

  All of their heads snapped around toward me. One of the greenish men gurgled and swallowed with an audible gulp. “Space sickness? Like the disease that the astronauts had on the rocket that crashed?”

  It is sometimes difficult not to laugh outright at people, but, honestly, weren’t reporters supposed to know better? “If you are thinking of something microbial, there’s no such thing. What astronauts are afflicted with is a disturbance of the vestibular system in the inner ear. It is annoying, but not dangerous. Think of it like seasickness.”

  In near unison, most of the reporters exchanged their cameras for pads of paper and dutifully wrote something down. That would probably translate to something like, “Elma York says that space sickness is like seasickness.” It could be worse.

  “Speaking of crashed rockets, are you comfortable with Leonard Flannery’s continued involvement in the expedition, considering that he is under investigation for the crash of the Cygnus 14 rocket?” This w
as the South African reporter again.

  Years of anxiety gave me the ability to look calm and smile even when my heart started racing. Though, this time, it was from anger. “Leonard was inside the rocket, same as I was, and couldn’t have had anything to do with the crash. So I’m absolutely fine with having him on the crew. Among other things, he literally wrote the book on the Martian landscape.”

  “What about his EVA?”

  I blinked, which seems to be what I do when I’m surprised. I blinked again. “Excuse me?”

  “According to sources, Leonard Flannery did an EVA practice the morning before the Cygnus 14 rocket returned to Earth. Couldn’t he have damaged the ship then?”

  “According to ‘sources’?” The only good thing coming out of this circus was that it narrowed down our likely subjects for the person who was talking to the FBI. If they shared a source with the South African reporter, then it stood to reason that the South African astronaut was the link.

  Vanderbilt DeBeer. He and I were going to have a very interesting talk.

  ELEVEN

  WHAT KIND OF MEN ARE THEY?

  The Crew of the Mars Expedition

  July 19, 1962—TIME Magazine—COLONEL STETSON PARKER walked into the room, a conservative plaid sports jacket draping his well-proportioned 5'11" frame, giving an immediate impression of suave urbanity. His disappearing blond hair, once thick, is closely cropped, accentuating his strong jaw. His lopsided grin suggested he was aware of his role as an historic figure and was trying hard to make people remember that he was just a man. It is easy to be blinded by his role as the first man into space and forget that beneath this charming exterior is a skilled fighter pilot who flew more than 80 missions in the Second World War.

  After a day of trying to catch DeBeer without any of the others around, I had enough time to calm down and realize that I should talk to Florence and Leonard first. Leonard was in his lab, experimenting on … something. There were rocks. And a drill. Anyway, I went to track down Florence and found her in the gym, running on the treadmill under the gentle centrifugal gravity of Lunetta’s spinning donut.