Good Morning, Midnight

by Lily Brooks-Dalton

  AS A BOY, eleven or twelve or so, Augustine knew the radio bands better than he knew his own body. He cobbled together crystal sets out of wire and screws and semiconductor diodes and quickly tackled more-complex projects—transmitters, receivers, decoders. He built radios with vacuum tubes and with transistors, analog and digital, from kits, from scratch, from scavenged appliances. He constructed big antennas, dipoles in the backyard, delta boxes hoisted up into the trees—whatever he could forage the parts for. It took up all of his free time. Eventually Augie’s interest caught the attention of his father, and this new intimacy was a surprise to them both. His father was a mechanic, not for cars but for car factories. The machinery he spent his time on during the day was enormous, bigger than houses, and so when his son began to tinker with the tiniest of mechanisms, the boy piqued his curiosity. Before he built radios, Augie had been his mother’s son, stirrer of batter, peeler of potatoes, escort to the hair salon. He’d do his homework at the kitchen counter when she was well enough to cook, or in her bedroom, curled at the end of the bed like a dog, when she wasn’t. He was her mascot, a little boy easily molded to fit any of her moods. Even as a child, Augustine sensed, without knowing why, that his father hated their rapport.

  He felt the shift of his mother’s moods keenly. He could sense the darkness descending before she did. He knew when to let her wallow in her dim bedroom and when to lift the blinds; he knew how to coax her back home when things got out of hand during one of their errands. He managed her with such subtle skill that she never suspected manipulation, never saw him as anything more than her little boy, her trusted friend, her constant companion. No one else could soothe her the way he could, especially not his father. Augie engineered his mother’s moods out of necessity. Reining her in was the only way he could protect her, and as he got better and better at it he began to think he had decoded her affliction, that he had bested it—that he had fixed her.

  The winter he turned eleven she went to bed and didn’t get up until spring. That was the winter he realized she was a puzzle he’d never be able to solve, that despite all his efforts and skill, she was beyond his understanding. He was alone, all of a sudden, and lonely. He didn’t know what to do without her. While his father berated the inanimate mound of her fetal form beneath the bedspread, Augustine retreated to the basement and found a new pleasure in the clarity of electronics: the joining of wires, the flow of current, the simple mechanisms that fit together and made something so wonderful it bordered on magic, plucking a symphony of music and voices from thin air. The basic lessons he received in school on amps and watts and waves were all it took to give him a running start. He’d always been a good student. In the dark, musty cellar, in a circular pool of yellow light, he taught himself the rest. On rare occasions, Augustine’s father descended the crumbling wooden steps and sat with his son, and on even rarer occasions, Augustine enjoyed these visits. More often than not, his father came to chide him, to show him his errors, to gloat over his failures. By then it was clear to everyone in their household that Augie had no ordinary intellect, and his father was sure to punish him for it every chance he got.

  Now, years later, in the cold Arctic, Augustine remembered that basement as clearly as if he were still sitting down there, alone at his work table with the spools of wire, germanium transistors, rudimentary amps, oscillators, mixers, filters laid out before him. The soldering iron at his right elbow, plugged in and already warm, the schematics for his latest endeavor to his left: a smudged pencil sketch, little arrows and clumsy symbols to remind himself of the current’s flow. His father wasn’t welcome in these memories, but his voice intruded from time to time:

  “What kind of an idiot can’t fix a transistor?”

  “This looks like a two-year-old made it.”

  At the observatory, in the control room, Augie double-checked the satellite phones and the broadband network to be sure he hadn’t overlooked something. Communication from the outpost had always been haphazard, mostly reliant on satellites, but without the satphone or broadband working, with no satellite connection to speak of, there was only ham radio. He hunted through the control tower and the outbuildings for anything that might be useful, but there wasn’t much. The equipment was there only for backup. The system in place was less than ideal, barely powerful enough to talk to the military base on the northern tip of the island, mostly used for communication with planes passing over. The power supply was weak and the antenna sensitivity even weaker; a signal would have to be very close, very powerful, or riding a lucky sky-wave to register. Assuming there was anyone out there to hear it in the first place.

  It reminded him of his years in the basement, turning his machines on and transmitting the first CQ of the day. Simple, straightforward, with a single purpose. He was seeking anyone, it didn’t matter who. He’d collected QSL postcards—confirmations of radio communication between two ham operators—from his various contacts and filed them away. There were earnest cards with call signs scrawled over an outline of the operator’s home state, silly cards with cartoon sketches of the operators hanging from their antennae like monkeys or wet laundry, dirty cards with busty, half-naked women draped over radio equipment and murmuring into a handheld microphone. Augustine would sit down at his microphone in the basement and scan the empty ham frequencies, issuing his call as he moved through the dial, and whether it took him a minute or a few hours, someone would eventually respond to him.

  A voice would fill his speakers and say, “KB1ZFI, this is so-and-so responding.” They would exchange locations and Augie would add up the miles on the atlas he kept nearby—the more distant the contact, the better. The QSL cards were just for fun—it was the contact itself that thrilled him most, the idea that he could send his signal out across the country, across the world, and make an immediate connection somewhere, anywhere. There was always someone at the other end—someone he didn’t know, someone he couldn’t picture and would never meet, but a voice all the same. He didn’t bother chatting over the airwaves after the initial contact. He just reached out to see if someone was there, and he was satisfied once he knew there was. After the initial connection had been made, he might go for two, three, half a dozen if the weather conditions were prime and the signals were traveling far. When he was finished with his CQs he’d turn off his equipment, address a few QSL cards of his own—a simple globe with a signal shooting off into space, scattered stars and his own call sign in block letters at the top—and then tinker with the electronics in the quiet solitude of the basement. These were his happiest moments as a child. Alone, without the cruelty of the other kids at school, without the volatility of his mother, without the belittling comments of his father. Just him, his equipment, and the hum of his own mind.

  In the Arctic, he fine-tuned the equipment, and when he was finally satisfied he turned it all on. Iris had been watching him work with vague curiosity but didn’t say anything. She was outside wandering among the outbuildings when he began transmitting. Augie could see her from the window, her small shape dark against the snow. He picked up the handheld microphone, pressed the Transmit button, then let it go. He cleared his throat; pressed it again.

  “CQ,” he said, “CQ, this is KB1ZFI, kilo-bravo-one-zulu-foxtrot-india, over. CQ. Anyone?”

  SIX

  SULLY DRIFTED THROUGH the comm. pod from one machine to the next. She kept her knees slightly bent, her ankles tucked around each other, and used her arms to propel her, like a swimmer. Her braid floated out behind her and the empty arms of her jumpsuit, tied at her waist, hovered in front of her stomach like extra limbs. Aether had traveled far enough into the belt that a lag in the transfer of data from the Jovian probes had developed. The information from Jupiter’s system was already old by the time it arrived in Sully’s receivers, and it got older each day as they moved a little farther away from Jupiter and a little closer to Earth. Lately she’d been neglecting her probes and scanning the radio frequencies of home instead. She swept the entire com
munication spectrum again and again, no longer content to monitor the designated DSN bands. There should be some noise pollution: satellite chatter, errant TV signals, very high or ultra high frequency transmissions that slipped through the ionosphere and out into space. There should be something, she thought. The silence was an anomaly, a result that shouldn’t, couldn’t, be correct.

  Sully kept it to herself. There wasn’t much use in sharing empty sine waves with the rest of them, just confirmation of the same bad news, but at least the act of scanning helped her through the days, helped her to feel she was doing something. One way or another, the closer they got, the more she knew. It’s strange, she thought, how pointless the Jovian probes seemed now. She would trade them all, every byte of data they’d collected, every single thing they’d learned, for just one voice coming into her receiver. Just one. This wasn’t wistful bargaining, or hyperbole, just a fact. She had boarded Aether believing that nothing could be more important than the Jovian probes, and now—everything was more important. The whole purpose of their mission seemed insignificant, pointless. Day by day, there was nothing except the digital binary of mechanical wanderers and the cosmic rays from the stars and their planets.

  Sully propelled herself back to Little Earth, floating through the twists and turns of the spacecraft: seemingly empty stretches padded with storage and electronics, Aether’s organs secreted behind her light gray tunnels. As Sully drifted headfirst down the greenhouse corridor, where the walls were lined with grow boxes for aeroponic vegetables, she untied the sleeves of her jumpsuit from her waist and shrugged into the top half. Approaching the entry node, she reached up and caught one of the rungs studding the padded walls, then flipped herself around to enter the node that connected the rest of the craft to Little Earth feetfirst. She dropped through a short tunnel, gravity gaining on her as she moved, and was deposited on the centrifuge’s landing pad with a thump, right between the couch and the exercise equipment. Sully’s feet were grabbed by the ground as if there were suction cups on the soles of her shoes, and she paused while her body recalibrated and found its balance. She zipped up the front of her suit and untucked her braid, which fell heavily on her shoulder like a length of rope. The centrifugal gravity made her feel instantly exhausted, as though she’d been running for hours, awake for days. As soon as she trusted her legs she walked over to the sofa and sat down next to Tal, disguising her fatigue by watching him finish a first-person shooter game. The two-year journey was taking its toll—she could feel her muscles weakening, her health waning. She’d been in the best physical shape of her life when they left, but not anymore. For a moment she wondered what it would be like reacclimating to Earth’s twenty-four-hour gravity, and then she cut the thought short. No point thinking about it now. Tal tossed the controller onto the floor and turned to her.

  “Wanna play something?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe later.”

  He sighed and waved her off, quickly distracted again by the glow of the screen. Sully got up and walked along the slope of the ring, through the kitchen area, to where Thebes and Harper sat reading, Harper on his tablet, Thebes with another one of the paperback books he had insisted on bringing—Asimov this time—despite the initial uproar over the amount of space they would take up. It wasn’t that much space, Thebes had argued, and because Thebes never argued about anything, the mission’s oversight committee stepped in and overrode the naysayers. The committee wrote off the extra cargo as psychologically necessary equipment. The crew had laughed about it at the time, but now, watching Thebes turn the page, Sully wondered about that phrase. Psychologically necessary equipment. The human mind had never been tested quite like this. Could they have been better prepared? Trained more extensively? What tools would help them now? It seemed ridiculous, but perhaps these books, sheaves of paper made from trees that had once grown on their home planet, full of made-up stories, were what kept Thebes so much more grounded than the rest of them.

  Thebes and Harper both looked up as she slid onto the bench. “How is the comm. department faring?” Thebes asked.

  She shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “Did you guys eat on schedule?”

  They nodded. “I saved you some,” Harper said. “Would’ve radioed over that we were starting, but I figured you were wrapped up in something.”

  Sully found the plate waiting for her on the range, a few strips of test tube beef, aeroponic kale, and a puddle of freeze-dried mashed potatoes. She couldn’t help but smile when she saw the dinner, carefully arranged on the plate, a few notches above the usual fare. “Wow, classy,” she said, bringing the plate back to the table. Thebes jerked his thumb toward Harper.

  “All him,” he said. “The commander’s showing off tonight.”

  Sully scooped up a forkful of mashed potato and speared a leaf of kale. “It shows.”

  “Shucks.” Harper pretended to be embarrassed, or maybe he actually was—she couldn’t tell. He put down his tablet and raised his voice a little so Tal could hear him. “Anyone up for a round of cards?”

  He was looking at Sully as he spoke—he knew she was the only one who would play. Tal declined, as did Thebes, and a muffled “No, thank you” came from inside Devi’s curtained bunk. “Whaddaya say, Sullivan?” Harper persisted.

  “Yes, but in a minute,” she said, thinking of Devi’s listless reply. Sully walked to Devi’s bunk and rapped her knuckles on the side of the compartment. “Hey, can I come in?” She slipped inside without waiting for an invitation. Behind the curtain Devi lay curled around one of her pillows, holding it tightly against her chest, her nose buried in the top, her thighs locked on either side.

  “Sure,” Devi whispered, belatedly, but she didn’t move.

  “What did you do today?” Sully asked, sitting on the bed. Devi shrugged but said nothing. “Have you eaten anything?”

  “Yeah,” she said, without elaborating. Then, after a minute: “Tell me something.”

  Sully waited, but Devi was silent. That was it. Tell me something. Sully flopped onto her back and tucked her arms under her head, searching for something to tell. What was worth saying? After a moment she remembered passing through the greenhouse corridor that morning, and the day’s thoughts came tumbling out—an edited version, without any mention of Earth.

  “You know that yellow tomato plant that hasn’t been yielding? I noticed a few flowers on it today, might do something yet. And Tal says we’re nearly through the asteroid belt, a few more weeks maybe.” Sully walked her feet up to the ceiling of Devi’s bunk and looked at her toes, shod in the rubber slip-ons they’d all been issued. They seemed strange from this angle, like alien hooves. She let her legs flop back down onto the bed.

  “The Jovian probes are all still transmitting, but there’s so much data coming in sometimes I feel like I don’t have the heart to catalog it all. It’s hard to care.” She paused, suddenly afraid she’d veered into dangerous territory, but Devi didn’t say anything. Sully continued in a different direction, her voice low and confidential. “I ran into Ivanov coming out of the lavatory today, literally ran into him. He was a jerk about it—like it’s my fault this ship is so fucking small, you know? Like he would be so much better off without us, all alone out here, taking his shitty mood out on his rock samples.”

  That worked. Devi turned over at least, and gave her a half smile. “He would never be angry at his rock samples,” she whispered.

  They both laughed quietly, but the smile that flashed across Devi’s lips shriveled and died away almost immediately.

  “I think he’s unkind because it’s easier to be angry than frightened,” Devi said. She paused, then pulled the pillow tighter against her chest. “I’m really tired, okay? Thanks for saying hi, though.”

  Sully nodded. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said, and wriggled back out of the bunk. Harper was waiting for her at the table, shuffling a deck of cards, score sheet at hand.

  “Ready?” he
asked.

  “Well, I’m ready to kick someone’s ass,” she joked. It felt hollow and forced after seeing Devi so low. “Might as well be yours.” Her plate was still half-full of dinner, which had been lukewarm to start with and had now grown cold. She didn’t mind, folding a leafy bite of kale into her mouth and wiping a smear of olive oil from her face. They played rummy, as always. Sully won the first hand, then the second. An hour later, Thebes wished them good night and retired to his bunk. Harper dealt a third hand, and when he laid down the deck and flipped over the ace of spades, Sully was reminded of learning to play solitaire when she was a little girl. The silver centrifuge of Little Earth melted away, and for just a second she was looking at her mother’s delicate, tapered fingers snapping down cards onto her imitation wood desk deep in the Mojave Desert.

  Her mother had taught her one afternoon when she was about eight years old, when Jean worked long hours at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone facility. The two of them, mother and daughter, lived in the desert. It was a boiling hot afternoon, and Jean—Sully had always called her mother by her first name—was stuck in signal processing meetings all afternoon. With no one to take care of Sully and no one to take her home, Jean borrowed a deck of cards from one of the interns. Between meetings, she took Sully into her office, barely more than a cubicle, really, sat her down and showed her how to lay the cards out. Sully fiddled with her mother’s plastic nameplate, Jean Sullivan, PhD, and pretended to pay close attention.

  “So then it goes black on red, red on black, in order, until you can get all the suits sorted onto the aces. Understand, little bear?”