Good Morning, Midnight

by Lily Brooks-Dalton

  TEN

  THE AIRLOCK OPENED. Sully watched as the mechanical door swung back to reveal the gaping hole of space just outside, bottomless and empty. Devi climbed out first, and Sully followed. She took a moment to breathe and observe her surroundings as she clung to the rim of the airlock chamber, then stepped out into the void. Aether seemed enormous from the outside, but so much of it was storage tanks, radiation shields, solar panels, the propulsion system—components the crew never saw from within. She turned her gaze to the whirling centrifuge, so small next to the rest of the ship. It was amazing that all six of them had lived there for so long, jammed together in the midst of all this space. She propelled herself past the greenhouse and life support areas, past the research pods, to the front of the rounded cupola, where she waved her massive white glove at the four faces pressed against the glass.

  “Good so far,” she said into her helmet comm.

  She turned to see Devi a few yards away, looking not at Aether but out into the depths of space. Sully turned to look too, and suddenly the ship didn’t seem large at all. It seemed microscopic. She heard Harper in her ear, asking Devi if she was good to go.

  “Copy, good to go,” Devi repeated.

  Devi and Sully slowly made their way toward where the base of the comm. dish had been connected to the hull of Aether, at the aft of the ship, in front of the propulsion system and behind the storage tanks. The remote modification tool, a long, flexible arm, was at the other end of the ship, where it could work on extravehicular problems that arose in the living and working quarters, but the arm was not long enough to reach the site where the dish had been. Devi and Sully moved slowly, crawling over the enormous hull like climbers on the face of a mountain, fastened to the ship by their tethers, lengths of steel cable floating behind them like the silvery thread of a spider. From the command deck, the rest of the crew was following along via the EVA cameras mounted in their helmets. Harper kept them on course, occasionally making suggestions about their route when they hesitated, but mostly staying silent, letting them move at their own pace.

  Sully appreciated Harper more than ever in that moment, when all that separated her from the void was a thin cable. The last commander she’d served under, on her last space mission, had directed her nonstop as she worked, issuing orders as if she were his avatar in a videogame instead of an expert in her own right. That was when she was living on the International Space Station, her first time up, a dozen years ago, just after she’d graduated from the AsCan program. It was a ten-month research mission. She was green, not stupid, but she kept her mouth shut. At that point she had already heard the rumors that the Aether selection committee was beginning their search, and rumor was that anyone going up during the search was basically auditioning. She wanted a spot on their list so badly it hurt.

  That first trip into space had convinced her that she would do anything in her power to get a place on Aether. The planning had been under way for years by then, and the craft itself was already being assembled in space, orbiting the planet while they built the components on Earth. At the right time of day she could see Aether from the ISS, the sun glinting off its hull, shining in the distance like a man-made star. When Aether eventually returned from its long voyage, to Jupiter and back, it would dock with the ISS and become a permanent addition. There wasn’t an astronaut in the program who wouldn’t have traded their soul for a place on its maiden voyage—a place in history, right next to Yuri Gagarin and Neil Armstrong. No one knew for sure when the team would be selected or even when the mission would launch, but veterans and newcomers alike had been buzzing about the possibility for years by the time Sully graduated from candidate to astronaut.

  Floating from mark to mark, scrabbling for handholds on the tin can that had been her home for almost two years, she remembered the day they announced the search for Aether’s crew, seven years ago. She also remembered the day they offered her a spot on the crew, sixteen months later, and the look on Jack’s face when she told him. They were living separately by then, but no one had said the word divorce yet. She couldn’t recall Lucy’s expression because she hadn’t been the one to tell her. Jack had done it. They agreed that the news would be easier coming from Jack, but they both knew the real reason—that Sully was the one who couldn’t handle telling her only child that she would voluntarily be spending more than two years apart from her. Was it worth it? Would she do it again? All the hard work and sacrifice and endless training had landed her here: the loneliest place in the solar system. She almost laughed out loud. If only she could have warned her past self how it was all going to turn out. But even if she had known—she wouldn’t have done a thing differently. Ivanov’s words returned to her: Not everyone has a calling. Out there, floating in the emptiness, she felt a sad serenity: she had followed hers. She hadn’t been outside the spacecraft since Callisto and it was a beautiful day for a walk, just like all the days, and all the nights, that had come before. She let her memories recede, and she let the future spin away from her. None of that mattered anymore. There was only the next handhold, and then the one after that.

  “Try the fourth storage pod—there should be a ladder on the side facing away from you.” It was Harper, mistaking her pause for indecision. She glanced over her shoulder and caught a glimpse of Devi, making her way across the row of storage pods on the other side of the ship.

  “Copy,” she said, and leaped out across the smooth, cylindrical pods labeled with tall black numerals. She grabbed hold of the rungs she hadn’t quite been able to see. The two women arrived at the aft, where the comm. dish had been ripped away, at the same time. Sully laid her white hand on Devi’s shoulder and Devi flashed her a thumbs-up.

  “Good so far?” Sully asked.

  “Good so far,” Devi repeated.

  They tethered themselves to the site and set to work inspecting the damage, prepping for the installation.

  SULLY PULLED THE airlock shut behind her and they waited for the chamber to pressurize before they began taking off their suits. They’d been outside for more than five hours. The rest of the crew was crowded against the other side of the lock, waiting for them to reenter the ship. Eventually the interior airlock hissed and Harper pulled it open. Devi and Sully went through to join the others in the greenhouse corridor. Ivanov shook Sully’s hand. Thebes and Tal hugged her. Harper’s expression of worry collapsed into one of relief, and Sully draped an arm across Tal’s shoulders so that she didn’t have to decide whether to hug Harper like a friend or shake his hand like a colleague. Thebes didn’t seem to want to let go of Devi; he held on to her for a long time, like a parent reunited with his child. The others followed Harper back to the observation deck and gathered in the cupola as they discussed the next spacewalk. They went over the footage from the helmet cameras.

  The walk had been successful in that they’d made a viable plan for the replacement installation and had sent a few pieces of the old system that were too damaged spinning out into the asteroid belt, where they would drift for more than a million human lifetimes. There were compliments and cheers all around as they fast-forwarded through the footage of the day, letting the more complex moments play in real time; but when the screen went dark, the mood grew somber. The success of the second walk was less certain. The repair work would be improvised as they went. There had been no training in the underwater facility for what came next. Concerns for the second walk were raised, solutions brainstormed, but after a few hours Harper called an end to the session. The crew was exhausted, the sudden burst of activity over the past days had begun to show on their faces.

  “Take a day,” Harper said. “I want everyone rested for round two. Let’s get some dinner started and go over the fine print.”

  Ivanov insisted on making dinner, which he never did. They sat at the long table and watched as he threw together an odd-looking stew of canned tomatoes, potatoes, kale, and frozen sausage, which in the end tasted quite good. Tal picked up his bowl to slurp down the vivid red b
roth and came up for air with a smear of orange across his mouth.

  “Not bad,” he said, and served himself a second bowl.

  Ivanov shrugged. “Old recipe,” he said, and almost smiled—not quite.

  As they ate, they revisited plans for the second spacewalk. The new comm. dish was much smaller, reaped from the lunar module, but with a few adjustments and a couple of attachments, they had figured out how to make it work. Thebes would recalibrate the system from within while Sully and Devi installed it outside. The trickiest part would be getting the thing out the airlock and over where it needed to go.

  Tal, Thebes, and Harper cleaned up after dinner while Ivanov had a go at the gaming console. Sully and Devi were falling asleep at the kitchen table and went to bed almost immediately after dinner. Sometime in the night Sully awoke to the sound of Devi whimpering in her compartment. She pulled back her curtain, shuffled across the centrifuge, and slipped inside the bunk. Devi was having a nightmare, and when Sully shook her awake, the terror in her eyes was so deep and wild that it unsettled Sully too.

  “What is it?” Sully whispered. “Bad dream? You’re safe, Devi, you’re safe.”

  Devi scrabbled at Sully’s shirt, pulling at the thin gray fabric as if she were drowning. It took Devi a moment to realize she was awake. Eventually she lay back against her sweat-drenched pillow, her breath shallow and her muscles tense.

  “Tell me about your dream,” Sully instructed.

  Devi curled against her and shuddered. “We failed.”

  “What happened?”

  “We lost the dish. I let it go and it drifted into the sun, and then we—we drifted into the sun too. It was my fault.”

  Sully began to stroke Devi’s hair, as she might have done once for Lucy, combing her fingers through it and stopping to gently undo each tangle she encountered. Devi sniffled beneath her hands, her chest shivering with unexpressed sobs. Sully imagined the dream Devi had described to her, and it frightened her too. Not only that they might fail, or that they might all die without ever returning home, without ever knowing what had happened to Earth and everyone on it—but that it would be her fault. Sully realized anew how much responsibility she and Devi had in their hands.

  Devi drifted back to sleep but Sully stayed with her, the younger woman’s head nestled into the curve of her shoulder. Her arm ached but she kept still, waiting and thinking, until the artificial dawn began to creep over Little Earth. Finally she slipped out of Devi’s bunk and returned to her own, padding across the quiet centrifuge, bare feet and bare legs, her long hair limp and wavy from yesterday’s braid. In her bunk she changed her underclothes, slid on her jumpsuit, and tied the arms around her waist. She set about combing her hair into sections with her fingers and opened her curtain while she wove them together, watching the lights glow, then strengthen, then shine.

  THAT DAY WAS full of preparation. Thebes was going over the suits and EVA toolkits, testing for weak seals and possible malfunctions. Ivanov was giving Sully and Devi a full medical workup before round two while Harper and Tal rigged the communications dish for transportation. In addition to his duties as an astrogeologist, Ivanov was Aether’s doctor. He hadn’t practiced medicine in decades and his bedside manner wasn’t much to speak of, but he made the blood work quick and painless. The second spacewalk would take at least eight hours, maybe more—about twice as long as yesterday’s outing. After Ivanov had finished Sully’s medical exam she left the lab and went to the command deck, where Harper and Tal were watching the footage of the first walk.

  “Fellas,” she said. “Not worried, are you?”

  “Hell no,” Harper scoffed. Tal pursed his lips while he shook his head with comic certainty, arms crossed, eyebrows scrunched. The bravado was a joke. Everyone was worried.

  “Good, me neither.” Sully floated toward the cupola and looked out. In the distance she could see Mars, still just a pinprick, lost among the stars. At the control board Harper and Tal went back to their reconnaissance, rewinding and replaying the video until they were satisfied, then moving on to the next piece of footage. Sully stayed in the cupola, communing with the darkness just beyond, the savage landscape she was about to inhabit once again—dangerous and beautiful and unknown. She knew she was ready; she’d gotten the physical okay from Ivanov, and the playbook for the walk was firmly imprinted on her brain, but there was an emotion stirring that didn’t belong. Devi’s dream—it must be fear. A thick-rooted fear, growing in the part of her where reason didn’t live. Someone else might have called it intuition, but not Sully. She wrote it off as nerves and turned away from the window, back to the ship, back to the plan.

  ELEVEN

  AUGIE AND IRIS reached the small camp by the lake as darkness fell, and they stumbled into the first tent they came to, a sparse but welcome respite from the raw cold of the outdoors. Despite the dilapidation, the crisp scent of frozen mildew, and the minimal furnishings, it felt more like a home than anywhere Augie had lived in years. There were four camping beds with canvas mattresses, an oil-burning stove, a gas range, and a few sticks of furniture. The aluminum rods that held the vinyl shell of the tent in place curled overhead. Augie felt he was sitting inside the belly of a whale, admiring its rib cage. In the center of the room was a card table with a few folding chairs, and beyond it a desk covered with meteorological maps and weather records, a small generator, a few wooden crates used as bookshelves. A dozen kerosene lamps with blackened glass chimneys were clustered in the center of the table, and a mismatched collection of ragged carpets lay on the plywood floor. There was a comfort in that one room that the entire Barbeau outpost had lacked—a sense of personality, of coziness. It was clear that lives had been lived here. Meals had been made, novels had been read, games had been played.

  They put down their gear and began to look more closely at what had been left behind. The crates were packed with paperback books, mostly romance novels, along with a few mysteries and one or two basic cookbooks. The mattresses on the cots were sheathed in protective plastic, and upon unwrapping the first one, Augustine found a few wool blankets, a crumpled sheet, and a mealy pillow stuffed inside the plastic case. He shook out the sheet and stretched its elastic to cover the corners of the slim mattress. Plumped the pillow. Refolded the blankets.

  At the table, he lit a few of the lamps, then propped the front door open to let in the last of the natural light. The musty smell of abandonment stirred around him and started to trickle out into the open air. Iris had gone back outside and was sitting in the snow a few yards from the edge of the lake, drawing figure eights with a rock. Augustine found a boulder to sit on and stayed with her there for a moment, taking in the view. He was filled with a sense of relief. The journey had been worth it. They had made it. There would be no return trip, and yet—he felt safe there. Without the shadow of the evacuation, the looming emptiness of the hangar and the runway, this place felt more like an oasis than a place of exile.

  The sun was already gone, captured by the mountains that circled the lake, and the sky had deepened to a dark blue. There would be plenty of time for exploring in the coming days. They sat in silence and listened to the ice. A wolf howled somewhere far away, and then another answered from the other side of the lake. Still they sat. Full darkness settled and a snowy owl swooped overhead, landing on one of the antenna poles, where it watched the two humans with curiosity. Stars began to prickle in the sky above them.

  “Hungry?” Augustine asked, and Iris nodded. “I’ll make something,” he said, and slowly, stiffly rose from his boulder. He was looking forward to sleeping on the cot—it would be no worse than the nest they’d made in the observatory and much, much better than the frozen ground they’d spent the last few nights on. As he approached the hut, he saw the glow from the kerosene lamps illuminating the walls and the flicker of their flames from just inside the threshold. He was glad they’d come.

  Inside, he started the oil stove, but he left the door unfastened so that Iris could slip through wh
en she was done communing with the first body of water she’d seen in—well, he didn’t know how long. He hadn’t seen water since flying over the fjords on his way back to the observatory outpost after his last vacation, over a year ago now. The frozen lake was a reminder of a gentler season fast approaching. He closed his eyes and imagined how it would look in a month, when the midnight sun had risen and the trickle of spring had found its way to them. He imagined the softness of the mud, the virility of grass poking up through the barren land, the liquid glass of the melted surface, and it filled him with a sense of serenity. He could stop fighting the landscape, just for a moment, just this once. Since the evacuation, since Iris, he had felt more earthbound than he had in years. There was a time when the changes in the sky meant more to him than the ground beneath his feet, but not right then. He had been looking up for long enough; it felt good to think of the dirt instead, to imagine the life that would soon return to the land.

  As the stove began to warm the hut, Augustine shed a few layers and rummaged through the boxes and packages stacked around the gas range. There was an abundance of food, and he suspected that one of the other huts would have an even larger store packed away for the long winters and rare supply runs a location like this would get. He found a skillet, sticky with old grease and dust, and rinsed it in a tin basin with water from the big insulated tank in the corner of the tent. When he set the skillet down on the hot range, the moisture began to spit and crackle. He emptied a can of corned beef hash into the pan, and when the hash was brown and crisp, he flipped it out onto two plates and scrambled some powdered eggs. There was an enormous can of instant coffee and both condensed and powdered milk—what riches, Augie thought—and while Iris began to eat he set some water to boil for coffee, then sat down beside her.