“You’ve got to be kidding,” he said to no one. “Come on, then.” He turned to go and beckoned her with a flick of his hand. She didn’t speak, just followed him back to the control room. He tossed her a bag of dried fruit and nuts while he heated a pot of water, and she ate the whole thing. He made her a packet of instant oatmeal and she ate that too.
“This is ridiculous,” he said to no one. Still she was silent. He handed her a book and she flipped through the pages—whether she was reading it, he couldn’t tell. Augustine busied himself with his work and tried to ignore the inexplicable, inconvenient presence of a little girl he couldn’t remember ever seeing before.
She would be missed, of course—someone would be back to collect her any minute. Surely it was only the commotion of the exodus, a crossing of wires, that had resulted in her being left behind: “I thought she was with you,” “Well, I thought she was with you.” But evening fell and no one returned. The following day, he radioed the Alert military base, the northernmost year-round settlement on Ellesmere Island. There was no answer. He scanned the other frequencies—all of them—and as he flipped through the bands a surge of dread washed over him. The amateur waves were silent; the emergency communication satellites hummed an empty tune; even the military aviation channels were mute. It was as if there were no radio transmitters left in the world, or perhaps no souls to use them. He kept scanning. There was nothing. Only static. He told himself it was a glitch. A storm. He would try again tomorrow.
But the girl—he didn’t know what to do with her. When he asked her questions she stared at him with detached curiosity, as if she were on the other side of a soundproof window. As if she were empty: a hollow girl with wild hair and solemn eyes and no voice. He treated her like a pet because he didn’t know what else to do—with clumsy kindness, but as a specimen of a different species. He fed her when he fed himself. Talked to her when he felt like talking. Took her for walks. Gave her things to play with or look at: a walkie-talkie, a constellation map, a musty sachet of potpourri he’d found in an empty drawer, an Arctic field guide. He did his best, which he knew wasn’t very good, but—she didn’t belong to him and he wasn’t the sort of man who adopted strays.
That dark afternoon, just after the sun had risen and then sunk once more, Augustine looked for her in all the usual places: buried beneath the sleeping bags like a lazy cat; twirling in one of the wheeled chairs; sitting at the table, prodding the insides of a broken DVD player with a screwdriver; gazing out the thick, dirty pane of glass at the never-ending Cordillera Mountains. She was nowhere to be seen, but Augustine wasn’t worried. Sometimes she hid, but she never wandered far without him and she always revealed herself before too long. He let her keep her hiding places, her secrets. There were no dolls, no picture books, no swing sets, nothing she could call her own. It was only fair. And besides, he reminded himself, he didn’t really care.
DURING THE LONG polar night, after several weeks of total darkness and nearly two months after the evacuation, Iris broke her silence to ask Augustine a question.
“How long till morning?” she said.
It was the first time he’d heard her make a sound, other than the eerie humming he’d grown accustomed to—that aria of long, trembling notes deep in her throat as she looked out the control tower windows, as if she were narrating the subtle movements of their barren landscape in another tongue. When she finally did speak that day, her voice came out in a throaty whisper. It was deeper than he expected, and more confident. He had begun to wonder if she was capable of speech, or if perhaps she spoke another language, but those first words fell easily from her mouth, enunciated in an American, or perhaps a Canadian, accent.
“We’re about halfway there,” he told her, with no indication that she’d done anything unusual, and she nodded, similarly unsurprised. She continued to chew the jerky they were eating for dinner, holding the strip of meat with both hands and ripping away a mouthful like a baby carnivore just learning to use her teeth. He passed her a bottle of water and began thinking of all the questions he had for her, only to realize he actually had very few. He asked her name.
“Iris,” she said, without turning away from the darkened window.
“That’s pretty,” he remarked, and she frowned at her reflection on the glass. Wasn’t that something he used to say to lovely young women? Didn’t they usually like hearing it?
“Who are your parents?” he ventured after a moment, a question he had of course already asked and couldn’t help asking again. Maybe he would finally solve the mystery of her presence here and figure out which of the other researchers she belonged to. She kept her gaze on the window, chewing. She didn’t speak any more that day, or the next.
As time wore on, Augustine began to appreciate her silence. She was an intelligent creature, and he valued intelligence above everything else. He thought of his morbid rants in the beginning, just after he’d found her, when he was still scanning the RF bands and hoping someone would return for her, would emerge from the desolate silence to scoop her up and leave him in peace. Even then, while he’d been spinning through the hows and whys—the bands were empty, she was here, etc.—she had simply accepted the reality at hand and begun to acclimate. His irritation with her presence and then with her silence faded. A kernel of admiration took root and he let his unanswered questions go. While the long night blanketed their mountaintop, the only question that mattered was the one she’d asked: how long would this darkness last.
“WHAT WOULD YOU think if I told you that star was actually a planet?” his mother had asked him once, pointing up at the sky. “Would you believe me?” He’d answered eagerly, yes, yes he’d believe her, and she told him he was a good boy, a smart boy, because that burning white dot, just above the rooftops, was Jupiter.
Augustine had adored her when he was young, before he began to understand that she wasn’t like the other mothers on his street. He was caught up with her excitement and brought down by her sadness—following her moods with fervent loyalty, like an eager dog. He closed his eyes and saw her frizzy brown hair shot with strands of gray, the sloppy line of her burgundy lipstick, applied without a mirror, the awestruck glow in her eyes as she pointed toward the brightest star, hovering above their Michigan neighborhood.
If that good, smart boy had found himself in this inhospitable place, alone except for an ancient, unfamiliar caretaker, he might have cried or screamed or stamped his feet. Augustine had never been a particularly brave child. He might have made a halfhearted attempt to run away—gathered some supplies and marched off into the desolate distance, headed for home, only to return in a few hours. And if little Augie had been told there was no home for him to return to, no mother to soothe his tantrum, no one else in the world left for him, what would he have done then?
Augustine considered his young companion carefully. Now, in his old age, he was trapped in memories. He never used to think of the past, but somehow the tundra brought it all back to him—experiences he thought he’d left behind long ago. He recalled the tropical observatories he’d worked in, women he’d held in his arms, papers he’d written, speeches he’d given. There had been a time when his lectures drew hundreds of people. Afterward, there would be a cluster of admirers waiting around to ask him for his autograph—his autograph! His accomplishments haunted him, specters of sex and triumph and discovery, all the things that had seemed so meaningful at the time. None of it mattered anymore. The world beyond the observatory was quiet, empty. The women were probably dead, the papers burned to ash, the auditoriums and observatories in ruins. He had always imagined his discoveries being taught in universities after he was gone, written about by generations of scholars not yet born. He’d imagined that what he left behind would endure for centuries. In this way his own mortality had seemed inconsequential.
He wondered if Iris thought about her earlier life. If she missed it. If she understood that it was gone. A house somewhere, maybe a brother or a sister, maybe both. Parents. Fri
ends. School. He wondered what she missed the most. Toward the end of the long night they walked around the perimeter of the outpost together, shuffling through a layer of new powder that swirled on top of the hard-packed snow. A low moon lit their path. They were both wrapped in their warmest clothes, bundled into the thick folds of their parkas like snails in their shells. The scarf tied across her nose and mouth hid Iris’s expression. Icicles had formed on Augustine’s eyebrows and eyelashes, framing his view with a glittering blur. Iris stopped in her tracks suddenly and pointed an oversized mitten up at the sky, directly above their heads, where the North Star glimmered. He followed her gaze.
“Polaris,” she said, her voice muffled by the fabric.
He nodded, but she had already moved on. It wasn’t a question; it was a statement. After a moment he joined her. For the first time, he was truly glad of her company.
THE WORK HAD seemed so important when Augie chose to stay behind at the observatory—keeping track of the data, logging the sequences of stars. After the exodus and the subsequent radio silence, he felt it was more vital than ever to continue observing, cataloging, cross-referencing. It was all that had stood between him and madness, a thin membrane of usefulness and importance. He struggled to keep his mind whirring in its accustomed track. The immensity of a civilization’s end impressed upon his brain—a brain trained to absorb immensity—was almost too much for him. It was stranger and more colossal than anything he’d contemplated before. The demise of humanity. The erasure of his life’s work. A recalibration of his own importance. He devoted himself instead to the cosmological data that continued rushing in from outer space. The world outside the observatory was silent, but the universe wasn’t. In the beginning it was the technical upkeep of the telescope, the maintenance of the data archive programs, and the calm, indifferent anchor of Iris’s presence that kept him from going mad. Iris seemed unaffected, easily lost in a book, a meal, the landscape. She was immune to his panic. Eventually he came to grips with the state of things and grew calmer. Accepted futility, then moved beyond it.
He paced himself—there was no deadline, no end in sight. The data was steady, unaffected. He reprogrammed the telescope’s eye for his own curiosity and began to spend more time outdoors, wandering around the abandoned outpost buildings in the deep blue of the long night. He relocated everything he had use for to the top floor of the control building, one piece at a time. He dragged the mattresses through the snow, one by one, and up the stairs, one by one. Iris trailed behind him with a crate of cooking utensils. When he stopped for breath and looked back, he noticed that she carried it well. She was a strong little thing, and tough. Together they moved the essentials out of the dormitories and up to the third floor, where there were only desks, computers, and filing cabinets full of paper. They brought up stores of canned and freeze-dried food, bottled water, generator fuel, batteries. Iris pocketed a deck of playing cards. Augustine salvaged a sepia-tinted globe from one of the dorms and tucked it under his arm, the brass axis digging into his ribs through the thick down of his parka.
The third floor was plenty big for the two of them, but there was a shocking amount of clutter when they moved in: useless, anachronistic machines, outdated papers stating hypotheses that had long been disproved, dog-eared back issues of Sky & Telescope. Searching for an empty surface to display his new globe and finding none, Augustine set it on the floor, opened a heavy window with some difficulty, and unceremoniously shoved out an old, dusty computer monitor. Iris ran over from where she was plumping sleeping bags and regarded its remains below, a few dark pieces scattered across the bright snow, some still rolling down the mountain. She looked at him with a silent question in her eyes.
“Junk,” Augie said, and set his sepia globe down in the space the monitor had occupied. It looked elegant there, a thing of beauty among the detritus of science. He would go out later, after the moon had risen, and collect the debris, but it felt good to send the monitor sailing out the window. A small release. He took the keyboard that went with it, the mouse cable coiled around it, and handed it to Iris. Without missing a beat, she threw it into the night like a Frisbee, and together they leaned their heads into the bitterly cold air and watched it disappear, spinning out into the dark.
AFTER THE SUN returned, the two of them began walking down beyond the outbuildings to watch it rise and set. In the beginning this didn’t take long. The sun would well up from beneath the horizon, casting a soft orange arc to herald its arrival, flooding the tundra with fiery pink, and as soon as it cleared the snowy peaks it would begin to sink again, sending sheets of violet and rose and cool blue into the sky like a pastel layer cake. In one of the nearby valleys, Augustine and Iris observed a herd of musk oxen returning daily, nuzzling the snow-covered ground. The grass they were eating was invisible from where he and Iris sat, but Augie knew it was there, strawlike stalks pushing up out of the snow, perhaps trapped just beneath it. The musk oxen were enormous, their shaggy coats riddled with thick dreadlocks that nearly brushed the ground. Their long, curved horns pointed skyward. They looked ancient, almost prehistoric—as if they’d been grazing here long before humans had stood on two legs and would continue to graze long after the cities built by men and women crumbled back into the earth. Iris was transfixed by the herd. She persuaded Augustine to sit closer and closer as the days passed, tugging him silently forward.
After a while, when the sun had begun to linger in the sky for several hours at a time, Augustine considered the animals in a new context. He thought of the small armory at the observatory, the rack of shotguns he had never used. He thought of the taste of fresh meat after almost a year of timeless, tasteless food. He tried to picture himself butchering one of these woolly creatures, cutting away steaks and ribs, dissecting the organs and the bones from the meat, but even in his imagination he couldn’t bear it. He was too squeamish, too weak to stomach the blood and the violence. But what about when their supplies waned—would he be able to bear it then?
He struggled to imagine Iris’s future here, but it made him feel hopeless and useless and tired. And something else—angry. Angry that this responsibility had fallen to him, that he couldn’t leave it behind or pass it off to someone else. Angry because he did care, despite his best efforts not to. The mess of survival was so distasteful. He preferred not to think about it. Instead he admired the gradual slope of the sun’s path as it descended, then waited patiently as the stars emerged. A prick of silver, moving too quickly and shining too brightly to be a celestial body, rose from behind the mountains. Augie watched it climb forty degrees into the deepening blue. It took him a moment, but as it curved back down to the southwesterly skyline he realized it was the International Space Station, still orbiting, still reflecting the light of the sun down onto the darkened Earth.
TWO
SULLY’S CLOCK READ 0700 GMT—five hours ahead of Houston, four hours behind Moscow. Time means very little in deep space, but she roused herself anyway. The regimen that Mission Control had prescribed for the crew of the Aether spacecraft was precise, down to the minute, and although Mission Control was no longer available to enforce it, the astronauts continued to adhere for the most part. Sully touched the lone photograph pinned to the soft, upholstered wall of her sleeping compartment, a gesture of habit, and sat up. Running her fingers through her dark hair, uncut since the journey began more than a year ago, she began to braid it, savoring the dream that had just left her. Except for the persistent hum of the life support systems and the soft whir of the centrifuge, everything was quiet beyond her privacy curtain. Their ship: a vessel that had seemed so immense when she boarded it now felt like the tiniest of life rafts, lost at sea. Except it wasn’t lost. They knew exactly where they were going. Jupiter was mere days behind them, and Aether was finally headed home.
At 0705 she heard Devi rustling in the compartment next to her. Sully slipped into the dark blue jumpsuit tangled at the foot of her bed. She zipped it halfway, tied the arms around her waist,
and tucked in the gray sleeveless shirt she’d slept in. The lights were just beginning to come on, brightening slowly to simulate the unhurried daybreak of Earth: a perfectly gradated white dawn. The slow illumination of the compartment was one of the few Earth-like experiences available. Sully made sure she saw it every morning. It was a shame the engineers hadn’t added a little pink, or a smudge of orange.
The dream clung to her. Her sleep had been full of Jupiter ever since the survey last week: that overwhelming, unstoppable girth; the swirling patterns of the atmosphere, dark belts and light stripes rolling in circular rivers of ammonia crystal clouds; every shade of orange in the spectrum, from soft, sand-colored regions to vivid streams of molten vermilion; the breathtaking speed of a ten-hour orbit, whipping around and around the planet like a spinning top; the opaque surface, simmering and roaring in century-old tempests. And the moons! The ancient, pockmarked skin of Callisto and the icy crust of Ganymede. The rusty cracks of Europa’s subterranean oceans. The volcanoes of Io, magma fireworks leaping up from the surface.
A wave of quiet reverence had overtaken the crew as they contemplated the four Galilean moons. A spiritual pause. The tension that had led them into deep space—the anxiety that perhaps the mission was beyond them, that they would fail and never be heard from again—evaporated. It was done. They had succeeded. Sully and her colleagues had become the first human beings to delve this deep into space, but more than that: Jupiter and her moons had changed them. Soothed them. Shown them how tiny, how exquisite, how inconsequential they really were. It was as though the six members of Aether’s crew had been awakened from the small, insignificant dreams that constituted life on Earth. They could no longer relate to their own history, their own memories. When they arrived at Jupiter, an unfamiliar layer of their consciousness overflowed. It was as if the light had been turned on in a dark room and revealed infinity, sitting naked and glorious beneath the swinging bulb.
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