On Aether, even as the communication blackout continued, Harper was the ground, the tether that made his crew feel just a tiny bit closer to Earth. With Devi he requested tutorials on the mechanics of the ship, plying her with questions about life support and radiation shields and the centrifugal gravity of Little Earth, trying to draw her back to the present. He played videogames with Tal and listened diplomatically to Tal’s fount of gaming advice, pretending to take the games as seriously as Tal did. Even Ivanov became civil when Harper went into his lab, showing him the work he had been doing and explaining its significance in an only slightly condescending tone. The old friendship with Thebes grew ever deeper; Sully could see him drawing strength from the older man’s stoic calm, funneling it into his own body and channeling it back out to the rest of the crew. The two had been in space together before, more than once, and they had always survived. Between them, they were keeping everyone else sane.
With Sully, Harper listened to the probes in the comm. pod or played cards or sketched her profile while she went over Jovian data. He didn’t have to work as hard with her; she liked his company. Looked forward to it. They spent hours sitting across from each other at the kitchen table on Little Earth. Sometimes she read to him from dense scientific papers while he exercised, and with sweat glistening on his face he would poke fun at the stilted turns of phrase. She humored him, all the while suspecting that his questions about the research were for her benefit, not his. Sometimes they talked about home, about what they missed, but home was an uncertain and dangerous variable. It was the lead weight that tugged each hopeful feeling back to the cold, dark bottom of their consciousness.
Sully found herself thinking more and more about what Thebes had told her: how to survive as a broken vessel. Tal and Ivanov and Devi had begun to spin out of sync, to exist either in memories or in projections, never fully present when she spoke to them. Sully tried to stop herself from doing the same, tried to brush her teeth and think only of brushing her teeth, to stop reconstructing the house in Vancouver, the smell of Jack’s cologne, the sound of Lucy splashing in the bath down the hall while she filled her drawers with clean, poorly folded laundry. When she caught herself dwelling in another year, another place, she counted to ten and discovered herself back on Aether, still in the asteroid belt, still en route to the silent Earth. She would put down her notes for the day, turn off the sound on her machines, and propel herself back to the entry node of Little Earth. She would feel the strain of gravity returning to her muscles, the food in her stomach settling to the bottom, the tail of her braid slithering down her back. She would be home, the only home that mattered just then. If she was in luck, Harper would be there, at the table, shuffling a deck of cards.
“C’mere, Sully—this time, you’re going down,” he would say, and she would sit, and she would play.
FIVE
THE SUN CAME and went so quickly that it was hard for Augustine to tell how long he was laid out. Drifting in and out of dreams, his fever burning red hot, he would wake in the dark and struggle to sit up, thrashing in the tangle of sleeping bags like a fly caught in a web. At other times he opened his eyes to see Iris hovering above him, offering him water or a blue camping mug full of chicken broth—but he couldn’t raise his arms to take it, or even command his tongue to form the words that tumbled through his hot, heavy brain: Come closer or How long have I been here? or What time is it? He would close his eyes, and again he would sleep.
In his fevered dreams, he was a young man again. His legs were strong, his eyesight sharp, his hands smooth and tanned, with wide palms and long, straight fingers. His hair was black, and he was clean-shaven, the prick of dark stubble always just beginning to shadow his jawline. His limbs were responsive, fluid and nimble. He was in Hawaii, in Africa, in Australia. He wore a white linen shirt barely buttoned, pressed khakis turned up to his ankles. He was wooing pretty girls in bars, classrooms, observatories, or else he was in the dark, wrapped in an olive field coat, pockets bulging with snacks and gear and pieces of rough quartz or stones with pleasing shapes and colors, looking up into the starry night sky above whichever corner of the earth he was presently passing through. There were palm fronds, eucalyptus trees, fields of sawgrass. White sand next to clear water, yellow mesas punctuated with lonely baobab trees. There were long-legged birds with multicolored wings and curved bills, little gray lizards and big green ones, African wild dogs, dingoes, a stray mutt he used to feed. In his dreams, the world was big and wild and colorful again, and he was part of it. It was a thrill just to exist. There were control rooms full of humming equipment, enormous telescopes, endless arrays. There were beautiful women, college girls and townies and visiting scholars, and he would’ve slept with them all if he could have.
In his dreams he was a still-young man just beginning to fall in love with himself. He was growing more and more certain that he could, should, have whatever he wanted. He was smart, and ambitious, and destined for greatness. The papers he wrote were being published in the best journals. There were endless job offers. He was written up in Time magazine’s “young science” issue. A wave of praise and admiration followed, which he rode into his late thirties. His work was written about with unmistakable reverence. The word genius was tossed around. All the observatories wanted him to do his research there, all the universities were begging him to teach. He was in high demand. For a time.
But delirium wasn’t his friend. The sun began to fade, the stars to dim, and the clock ran backward: he was an awkward, spotted sixteen-year-old again, in the lobby of a mental hospital, watching two men escort his mother to the locked ward while his father signed forms at the front desk. He was alone with his father in an empty house, hunting in the woods with him, riding in the truck with him, living with his foot poised above a perpetual land mine. He was visiting his overmedicated mother at the hospital before he left for college, listening to her mumble about fixing dinner, her eyes half-closed, hands trembling in her lap. And he was at his father’s grave ten years later, spitting on the freshly laid turf, kicking the tombstone until his toe broke. Augustine watched himself from afar in these scenes. He saw his own face, over and over, from behind the eyes of women he’d abused, colleagues he’d cheated, servers and bellhops and assistants and lab techs he’d neglected, slighted, always too busy and ambitious to pay attention to anyone but himself. For the first time he saw the damage he had caused, the hurt and sadness and resentment. He felt shame, and deep inside the husk of his illness he named it.
The warmth and the beauty and the vistas were tantalizing, but they slipped away when he tried to hold on to them. The other, more painful memories were a reckoning in real time. Long minutes and even longer seconds: the feeling of his hunting knife slicing into taut, living deer skin, the pulse of its lifeblood, the metallic stench of it; the sensations of guilt and regret, emotions that in the past he had mistaken for physical ailments, burning deep in his stomach or intestines or lungs; the sound of his father’s fist against a wall, against his own body, against his mother’s. His mother before she went to the hospital: an unmoving mound beneath her patchwork wedding quilt, day after day, week after week, then watching her rise like a phoenix and burst into the living room, fire in her eyes, ready to do do do, go go go. Not stopping until she had spent all she had—energy, money, time, and then collapsing back into the blankets, to remain dormant until she would rise once more, or until her husband dragged her out to test her resolve. Augie was trapped in these moments by his sickness, held captive within the walls of memories he wanted to forget.
AFTER A TIME—HE couldn’t tell how long—the fever passed. The nightmares finally left him, and he became aware that he was awake. Weak but conscious; hungry. Pulling himself to a sitting position, Augustine looked around the control room, rubbing the sleep from the corners of his eyes. The room was unchanged. He swiveled his head and let out a short sigh of relief when his eyes found her. Iris was sitting on the windowsill, looking out onto the twilit tundra.
When she heard him getting up and kicking off the heap of sleeping bags, she turned. He realized that he had never seen her smile before. One of her bottom teeth was missing, and he could see the pink wrinkle of her gums showing through the gap. A dimple lingered on her left cheek and a flush crept across the bridge of her tiny nose.
“You look terrible,” she said. “I’m glad you’re awake.”
It was still rare to hear her voice, and it again surprised him with its deepness, its scratchiness. He was relieved to hear it. She circled the nest of sleeping bags like a wary animal, tempering her excitement, surveying all the details before she moved closer. She produced a vacuum-packed serving of jerky, a can of green beans, and a spoon, and held them out to Augie.
“Do you want broth also?” she asked as he took the food. He peeled back the tab on the green beans and began scooping them into his mouth. She ripped open the jerky package with her teeth and set it down beside him, then went to heat the electric kettle. He was ravenous, and suddenly alive again. After the can was emptied he turned his attention to the jerky, wiping bean juice from his beard with the back of his hand.
“How long was I out?” he asked.
Iris shrugged. “Five days, maybe?”
He nodded. It seemed about right. “And you…you’re okay?”
She looked at him strangely and turned back to the kettle without answering, unwrapping the foil from a bouillon cube and dropping it into the blue mug while she waited for the water to boil. The mug was too hot to hold, so she let it cool on the countertop and returned to her perch on the windowsill, silent once more, looking out over the darkening tundra.
AUGUSTINE BEGAN TO test his atrophied muscles on the stairs of the control tower. When he could trudge down to the first floor and back up to the third without collapsing, he decided it was time to go farther afield. Navigating the snow and ice outside tired him even faster than the stairs, but he went out every day, sometimes more than once. After a while, his endurance returned. He would walk down the narrow path cut into the mountain, through the abandoned village of outbuildings, and out onto the open, rolling mountains. He was winded and weak, but alive, and the joy of that simple fact flooded his tired old body. Both the joy of survival and the weight of regret were unfamiliar to him, but neither would let him go, as hard as he tried to sweat them out. The feelings from his fevered nightmares still remained vivid. His muscles ached from exercise, but also from the unfamiliar emotions that coursed through him, like someone else’s blood running through his veins.
On these walks Iris often tagged along, either running in front of him or lagging behind. The snatches of daylight lengthened from barely an hour, to a few hours, to a whole afternoon. As the days progressed Augustine began to walk farther, always keeping the emerald green of Iris’s pompom hat in his sights. She seemed different since his fever, as though there was more of her—more energy, more physicality, more words. Before, she had hung back in his peripheral vision, sitting aloof in the control room, wandering stealthily among the outbuildings, always elusive. Now, Augie couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her. She was everywhere, and her smile—still rare but somehow always hinted at just beneath the curve of her cheeks—was glorious.
One day, when the sun had been hanging low in the sky for several hours before it began to sink, Augustine went farther than he had been able to go since the hangar—since the fever. Now he always went north, over the mountains. Never south, toward the tundra and the hangar and the wolf’s mounded grave, marked with veins of pink blood running through the white. To the north, the Arctic Sea stretched up over the top of the globe, an icy blue cap covering Earth’s cranium. The shore was miles away, a distance he could never hope to cross on foot, but he imagined that when the wind was blowing in the right direction he could smell the crisp salt air from the unfrozen sea, rolling up over the glaciers and traveling to his keen, searching nostrils. He decided that the farther he walked, the stronger the brackish smell became.
That day, they’d already been walking long enough that his muscles burned and even Iris had slowed her gait, dragging her little boots through the snow instead of lifting them with each step, but Augustine wanted to go farther. There was something ahead, he told himself, something he must see. He didn’t know what. The sun slipped behind the mountains, sending shots of color into the sky like a dancer throwing silk scarves in the air. He was admiring the sunset melting into the snow when he saw it: the solid outline of an animal against the changeable northern sky. It was the polar bear he remembered from the first day of sunlight—the same bear, he was sure of it, not because he could see any distinct features but because he recognized it by the quickening of his heartbeat. It was so big it had to be a bear, with long, shaggy fur, a deep, aging yellow. Augie was at least a mile away, perhaps several, but he saw these details with telescopic clarity. This was what he’d been searching for. It was as though he were standing next to the bear, or as though he were riding high on its massive, arched back, his fingers dug deep into the matted fur, heels locked around the wide, padded rib cage. He could feel the thick fur between his knuckles, see the yellow tint of it, the pink stains on its muzzle, and smell the musky, rotten odor of old blood.
The bear stopped at the top of the peak and raised its snout. It swiveled its head one way and then the other, finally turning to look in Augie’s direction. Iris was skidding down a small slope on the seat of her snow pants, green pompom bouncing as she went, unaware of what Augustine was seeing. Augie and the bear looked at each other, and across the miles of snow and jagged rock and buffeting wind that separated them Augustine felt a strange kinship travel between them. He envied the bear its immensity, its simple needs and clear purpose, but across the vista a whiff of loneliness swirled, too, a feeling of longing and doom. He felt a piercing sadness for the bear, all alone on the mountain range—a creature consumed with the mechanics of sustenance, the killing and gnawing, rolling in the snow, the necessary bouts of sleep among the drifts and in the snow caves, the long walks to and from the sea. That was all it had, all it knew, all it needed. An emotion stirred in his stomach and Augustine realized it was discontent—for the bear, but also for himself. He’d lived through his fever, but for what? He looked down the slope in front of him in time to see Iris barrel-roll to a stop and sit up, her green pompom dusted with white. She was waving up at him, smiling—a child at play. The usual pallor of her face was lit from within, a pink glow flooding her white skin. When Augie looked back to the mountain range, the bear was gone.
“Iris,” he called, “time to go back.” On their way home, Iris stayed close, by his side or right in front of him, looking back to check on his progress from time to time. In the last stretch, as they climbed the path up the mountain to the observatory, to their home in the control tower, she took his mittened hand in hers and held it till they were inside.
IN THE BEGINNING, Augie had felt it fitting that his life should end so quietly, so simply: just his mind, his failing body, the brutal landscape. Even before the exodus of the other researchers, before the eerie silence and the presumed cataclysm—even before all of that, he had come here to die. In the weeks before his arrival, when he was still planning his Arctic research from a warm beach in the South Pacific, he’d considered the project to be his last. A finale, the capstone of a career, a bold conclusion for the biographer who would someday write a book about him. For Augustine, the end of his work was inextricable from the end of his life. Perhaps his heart would beat for a few more empty years after the work was done, or perhaps not; it didn’t trouble him to think of it. So long as his legacy burned bright in science’s archives, he was content to flicker and die alone, a few degrees shy of the North Pole. In a way, the evacuation only made it easier. But something happened to him when he looked across the Arctic mountains and saw the great yellow polar bear looking back at him. He thought of Iris. He felt gratitude for a presence instead of an absence. The feeling was so unfamiliar, so unexpected, it moved something ins
ide him, something old and heavy and stubborn. In its wake there was an opening.
In the early days with Iris at the observatory, he had idly wondered what would become of her when he died. But following the bear sighting, as the sun hung in the sky longer and longer, he began to consider it more carefully. Augie began to think beyond his own timeline and into hers. He wanted something different for her—connection, love, community. He didn’t want to go on making excuses for his inability to give her anything but the same emptiness he’d given himself.
After the other scientists had evacuated, he’d made halfhearted attempts to contact the theoretical remnants of humankind, to find out what had happened out there beyond the icy borders of his reach, but once he’d realized the satellites were silent and the commercial radio stations had gone off the air, he’d abandoned the search. He got comfortable with the idea that there was no one left to contact. That something, everything, had ended. He wasn’t troubled by the physical reality of being marooned—that had always been his plan.
But things had changed since then. He was suddenly burning with determination to find another voice. The probability of survivors had always been in the back of his mind, but even if he had cared enough to search them out, the remoteness of the observatory made such contact logistically useless. Assuming he could locate a leftover pocket of humanity, there would be no way to get there. And yet—it was suddenly the connection itself that was important. He knew the odds—in all likelihood his search would yield nothing, or as good as nothing. He knew they weren’t going to be rescued, or discovered. Even so, he was fueled by this new feeling, this unfamiliar sense of duty, this determination to find another voice. He abandoned the telescope and turned his attention to the radio waves.
Good Morning, Midnight Page 7