Good Morning, Midnight

by Lily Brooks-Dalton

  Ivanov immediately began his work evaluating the moon rock samples they’d gathered on Ganymede and writing papers on the internal structures and surface processes they’d observed. He floated to and from meals or the exercise bike as if he were a man in love, his default frown softened into something almost inviting. Devi and Thebes nearly forgot their jobs of maintaining the ship, instead crowding into the cupola’s strong, clear dome to look out at the depths that surrounded them, whiling away hours, even days, at a time. They took in the view in companionable silence, young Devi with her long hair in a messy knot, eyes wide beneath thick eyebrows, and Thebes, his round black face split in two by an easy, gap-toothed smile. Thebes called their stargazing “having a big picture moment” in his smooth South African accent. Tal, the pilot of the mission and their physics specialist, was filled with kinetic energy after experiencing Jovian space. He took extra time on the fitness equipment, did zero-G acrobatics for anyone who would watch, and told dirty jokes nonstop. His joy was infectious. Harper, their commander, channeled his transformation inward. He made sketches of Jupiter’s stormy belts as seen from the surface of Ganymede, where he had stood just days before. He filled notebook after notebook and left faint smudges of pencil lead on everything he touched.

  As for Sully, she turned her attention to the comm. pod. She let the telemetry flowing in from the probes they’d left behind on the Jovian moons consume her attention. It was all she could do to pull herself away from her work to eat or pedal through her allotted hours on the stationary bike, peevishly flipping her dark French braid over her shoulder as she checked her time, impatient to get back to the comm. pod. For the first time in years, she felt at peace with the sacrifices she had made to join the space program—the family she had left behind. The aching doubt of whether it had been worth it, whether she had made the right choices, fell away. She floated forward, unburdened, into the certainty that she was following the path she was meant to, that she was supposed to be here, that she was a tiny and intrinsic piece of a universe beyond her comprehension.

  The night’s dream slipped away and her mind was already jumping ahead to the comm. pod. Pulling on a pair of socks, she wondered what mysteries had traveled along the RF waves and into her machines while she slept. Then an unwelcome thought intruded, crowding in from a dark periphery. The mission had been a success, but the truth was she had no one to share her discoveries with. None of them did. Mission Control had fallen silent just before the Jovian survey began. During their weeklong survey, Aether’s crew waited patiently and continued their work. There had been no sign-off from Mission Control, no warning of a comm. interruption. The Deep Space Network was made up of three main sites around the globe to account for the planet’s rotation. If the Goldstone facility in the Mojave Desert was offline, then Spain or Australia would pick up where they left off, but a full twenty-four hours passed and there was nothing. Then another day went by, and now almost two weeks. A break in contact could mean so many things, at first there was no sense in worrying. But as the silence lengthened, as their focus on Jupiter flagged and their anticipation of returning to Earth grew, it began to weigh more heavily on them. They were adrift in the silence. The magnitude of their experience, of the things they had learned and were continuing to uncover, demanded a wider audience. The crew of Aether had undertaken the journey not just for themselves, but for the entire world. The ambition that had fueled them on Earth was nothing more than flimsy vanity out here in the blackness.

  For the first time since it had begun, Sully didn’t push the thought of the blackout away. She, like the rest of them, had been trained to compartmentalize, to lock away the realities that threatened their work, their ability to function on this long, uncertain voyage. They’d had bigger things afoot. But now, letting the thought linger, a wave of panic crashed through her and swept away the serenity Jovian space had instilled in her. She was suddenly awake from the dreamy stupor of Jupiter. The chill of empty, inhospitable space fell over her like a shadow. The silence had gone on too long. Devi and Thebes checked and rechecked the ship’s equipment and Sully had conducted her own thorough examination of the comm. pod, only to find nothing amiss. The receivers were picking up the murmurs of space all around them, from celestial bodies millions of light-years away—it was only Earth that wasn’t saying anything.

  THE RAW DATA spilled across her computer screen while Sully scribbled notes with a stubby pencil on the clipboard she always kept with her. It was warm in the comm. pod and the radio equipment was humming, enveloping her in a familiar cocoon of white noise. She stopped and let the pencil float in front of her as she rotated her wrist and shook loose the cricks in her fingers, then plucked it from the air again. A droplet of sweat dislodged from her skin and hovered in front of her. The heat was stifling. She wondered if the temperature program was malfunctioning. She’d have to remember to mention it to Devi or Thebes—the last thing they needed was for the receivers to overheat. It felt as though her skin was melting into the air, the boundaries between body and environment blurring into one heated mass. There was a squawk of static from one of the receivers built into the pod’s wall and Sully looked to see what frequency it had stuttered on. She’d set the receivers to scan all the usual communication channels after they lost contact with Mission Control, but so far there had been nothing. She knew immediately from the tone that the waves weren’t from Earth. It was a signal from one of the probes they had left behind on Jupiter’s moons. She continued to scan and let the signal play.

  A noise storm between Jupiter and one of her moons, Io, filled the pod—a deep hum overlaid with a sound like crashing waves, or whales, or wind passing through the trees, echoes of things they used to hear back on Earth. The storm died down after a few minutes, giving way to the underlying buzz of the interstellar medium and the sharp crackle of the sun. Everything was so much clearer in space: stars, sounds, the entire electromagnetic spectrum coming alive all around her, like seeing fireflies dance in a dark meadow for the first time. Without the interference of Earth everything seemed different. Sharper. More dangerous, more violent, and also more beautiful.

  With each passing day, their separation from Earth became more acute. Now, after two weeks of silence, it was beginning to feel like an emergency. Without the tether of Mission Control rippling through the vacuum, they were truly alone. Even though they had begun the long journey home, gradually closing the yearlong gap instead of lengthening it, the crew was feeling farther from Earth than ever. All six of them were coming to terms with the silence, and with what it might mean—for them, and for those they’d left behind on the now-mute planet.

  Sully watched the visual readout of the storm pulse on the screen in front of her. Io’s magnetic field and the effect it had on Jupiter had been part of her dissertation. If only she’d had data like this at university, twenty years ago. She looped the audio back to the beginning of the storm while she worked and listened to it again. She couldn’t help but imagine Jupiter as a mother calling to her children, pulling her many moons against her atmospheric bosom to soothe their various cries, then eventually letting them spin back out into the darkness to roll through the void free and alone. Sully was fond of Io in particular, the closest satellite but also the most stubborn, the loudest, a willful cannonball riddled with volcanoes and radiation. The cacophony demanded her attention and for a moment she forgot about her notes. The pencil floated free again. Watching the waves of energy pulsing between celestial bodies on the graph, the magnetic fields dancing across Jupiter’s poles like an aurora, she jumped when Harper, floating into the pod behind her, cleared his throat.

  “Sully,” Harper said, and then stopped, as if he wasn’t sure what to say next. Sully looked up in time to snatch her pencil back before it drifted away. She was suddenly self-conscious with Harper looking at her, aware of the sweat stains beneath her arms and the loose strands of hair that had come undone from her braid, streaming away from her head like sun rays.

  Ha
rper had a slow midwestern accent that seemed to wax and wane: in Houston it had been slight, but here, hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth, it grew more noticeable. She sometimes wondered how a man so grounded made his home in the sky. He had been in space more times than anyone else, a world record—ten spaceflights, Sully thought, or was it eleven? She could never remember. In the cockpit of the shuttle that had taken them to Aether, where the craft orbited the Earth, awaiting its crew, he had been perfect as their commander, blasting them straight through the atmosphere with Tal by his side. There was no one else like him. But Sully could see on his face that the post-Jovian mission tranquillity had passed for him, just as it had for her. He wandered from pod to pod, checking in with each member of the crew, struggling to keep them all connected. The Jovian honeymoon was over, while the effects of the communication blackout and the long journey home had only just begun.

  “Commander Harper,” she said in greeting. He shook his head, smiling. The titles became more ludicrous the more time they spent adrift.

  “Mission Specialist Sullivan,” he replied. Out of habit she smoothed the loose strands of hair down, pressing them against her head—a futile gesture in zero gravity. He propelled himself farther into the pod to get a closer look at the graphs of the noise storm.

  “Io?” he asked.

  She nodded. “It’s a big one. The volcanoes don’t ever seem to stop. Probe might not survive out there much longer.” They watched the colors crackle, pulses of energy flitting between the two celestial bodies.

  “Nothing lasts, I guess,” he said with a shrug. Neither of them said anything else. There wasn’t much to say.

  SULLY SPENT THE rest of her day in the comm. pod, monitoring the incoming telemetry from the probes and scanning the S, X, and Ka radio frequency bands just to be sure, all designated for deep space use. Aether’s assigned receiving frequency was constantly open, ready and waiting for an uplink from Earth, but that had begun to seem less and less likely. They had taken it for granted in the beginning, when communication was as easy as picking up the phone and calling a room full of engineers and astronomers. As the ship had traveled farther into space, a time lapse formed and then widened, but even so, Mission Control had been there, waiting, on the other end of the radio waves. Before, there was always someone keeping watch over them. Now there was no one.

  Occasionally Sully would catch a stream of information coming from a probe born of another project. There were only a handful of them out there, but there was one in particular that she liked tracking: Voyager 3, the third man-made object to travel beyond the solar system and into interstellar space, launched more than thirty years ago by another generation of astronauts. It was dying by then, its signal terribly faint, but when she tuned her receiver to 2296.48 MHz she could sometimes catch a wheeze or two of information, like words gasped by a man on his deathbed. She could still remember when NASA announced that its predecessor, Voyager 1, had finally gone silent, leeched of its power supply and no longer able to communicate with its handlers back on Earth. She was a little girl at the time, sitting at the kitchen table in Pasadena, and her mother had read the headline to her while she ate raisin bran before school: Humanity’s First Envoy to Interstellar Space Says So Long.

  Voyager 3 followed the elder Voyager’s path, through the theoretical Oort cloud, which was full of in utero comets and icy crystals, and eventually into another solar system. Someday it would fall into the gravitational pull of a celestial body—a planet or a sun or a black hole—but until then it would just keep drifting, solar system to solar system, wandering the Milky Way indefinitely. It was a chilling fate, and also a magical one. Sully tried to imagine how it would feel to have no destination. To just drift forever. There were other mechanical wanderers out there. Some were still active, others had gone silently into the void, but Voyager 3 was special. It reminded Sully of the moment she’d begun to understand just how vast the universe was. Even as a little girl the emptiness had called to her, and now she was a wanderer too. Remembering how her journey had begun distracted her from the uneasy question of how it might end.

  THEY CALLED IT Little Earth: the ring-shaped centrifuge that spun round and round, rotating independently of the rest of the ship and simulating gravity by way of centrifugal force. The crew’s six sleeping compartments lined the ring, three roomy boxes on each side, with an aisle running down the middle. The bunks had thick curtains for privacy, shelves and drawers for clothes, and little reading lights for after the simulated sun had set. Farther along the ring a long table with two benches could be pulled out into the center of the aisle or pushed up against the wall, and beyond that there was a rudimentary kitchen. Coming full circle, there was a small fitness center with a stationary cycle, a treadmill, and a few weights beside the gaming console area, fitted with a futuristic gray couch. Between the couch and the bunk area was a small lavatory. There was another toilet in the zero-G section of the craft, but it was considerably less popular.

  During their allotted recreation time Sully and Harper usually played cards. It was tiresome to feel the full weight of her body after spending all day floating in the comm. pod, but it was important to stay acclimated. The effects of gravity weren’t all bad. The cards stayed on the table, her food stayed on her plate, and her pencil stayed behind her ear. Sully could almost forget about the emptiness outside, about the millions upon billions of light-years of unexplored space surrounding them. She could almost pretend she was back on Earth, steps away from dirt and trees and a blue canopy of sky. Almost.

  Harper slapped the jack of clubs down in disgust. Sully picked it up, then laid down a run of face cards in a fan.

  “Thought I’d have to wait forever for that jack,” she said mildly, and discarded.

  “Goddammit,” Harper said, “stop rigging the deck, willya!”

  Rummy was their new favorite. The whole crew had played poker until their first pass through the asteroid belt, six months into the journey. Gradually the others had faded away, then the card games had stopped altogether during the distraction of the Jovian moon survey. Only now, as the uneasiness of the comm. blackout swept in, did they return to the game, but by then it was only Harper and Sully who wanted to play. So now the game was Rummy 500.

  “You’re just making it really hard for me to lose,” she said, and laid down another run, smacking her last card facedown on the table. He covered his head with his arms and sighed.

  “Chalk it up, cheater,” he said.

  They counted their cards and Sully marked their scores down on her clipboard, beside some stray notes on Io’s radiation signature. As she did some quick math in her head, Harper watched her as if he were drawing her, his eyes skimming the curves of her face, observing the flush creeping up her neck and into her cheeks. It felt good to be seen, but also a little painful, as if her skin were burning beneath his gaze. She scribbled down their new running scores.

  “Another?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the tallies. He shook his head.

  “I still need to put in an hour on the bike. I’ll make my comeback tomorrow.”

  “I’m really looking forward to that,” she said, sweeping up the cards and tucking them into their box. She stood up and pushed the table back against the wall. “Wear your brain next time, okay?”

  “Watch that sass, Sullivan.”

  It was late, nighttime in Aether’s time zone. In her bunk, Sully planned to go over her notes from the day, but when she saw the single photo stuck to the wall of her compartment she didn’t feel like working anymore. It was a picture of her daughter, taken when she was five or six years old, dressed as a firefly for Halloween. Jack had made the costume: a pair of black googly-eyes, antennae, a stuffed glow-in-the-dark abdomen, and wings made out of sheer black pantyhose and wire. Lucy would be nine by now, but when Sully was packing she hadn’t been able to find a more recent photo to bring with her. Jack had always been the one to take the pictures.

  IVANOV KEPT TO his lab lately, wo
rking more, sleeping less. It occurred to Sully that she hadn’t seen him eat anything in days. One morning, she lingered in the greenhouse corridor and picked a handful of aeroponic cherry tomatoes for him.

  “I brought you a snack,” she said as she maneuvered into Ivanov’s lab with her elbows, her hands cupped around the bright globes of red, yellow, and orange that floated in the space between her palms. He didn’t look up from his microscope.

  “Not hungry,” he said, his forehead still pressed up against the eyepiece.

  “Oh, come on, Ivanov, don’t be a grump,” she protested. “For later?” His hair became a ridiculous yellow bouffant in zero G and it made him look softer, more lighthearted than he actually was. For a moment she was fooled.

  “Do I interrupt you while you’re working?” he snapped, fixing her with a gaze that unsettled her. His eyes burned with grief and rage, and flecks of spit escaped his lips as he spoke. “I do not,” he said, and turned back to the slide he’d been studying.

  She ate the tomatoes herself in the comm. pod and fought back tears. They were all on edge; there had been no training for this. A seed of discord had sprouted among the astronauts. The harmony that the moon survey had brought to their tiny community had split open to reveal a volatile core. The regimen of Mission Control had gradually been abandoned and the crewmembers had become disconnected, not only from Earth but from one another. They’d stopped observing the schedules for sleeping and eating and relaxing and had begun to function as separate entities rather than a united team. Ivanov grew reclusive and temperamental, sequestering himself in his lab for hours at a time, but he wasn’t the only one hiding out. Tal retreated into the world of video games, and although he could be found sitting on the couch in Little Earth, his mind was elsewhere.