She turned back to the fuzziness coming out of the speakers and the wavering signal. There was still work to be done and she threw herself into it headfirst, moving from machine to machine, testing the gain, tinkering with the squelch settings. The signals grew slightly clearer, the feedback slightly softer. By the time the day was done, she and Thebes had calibrated the new comm. system as best they could. The reception was as good as it would ever be. If there was anyone out there trying to call them home, they would hear it.
Sully stayed to listen after Thebes left. She felt…connected wasn’t the right word, because there was nothing out there to link to, but she felt less alone. She’d done her part, she’d extended the electromagnetic red carpet. If no one took advantage, if their welcome was left hanging, unmet even after all this time and work and sacrifice, then it wouldn’t be her fault. She would have done her best. They would have done their best. She was moving beyond the turbulence of loss and isolation, into a quieter space—a space where Mission Control’s signal was already speeding toward them, where she was ready and willing to see what came next.
It was late by the time Sully returned to Little Earth. She found Tal in his usual place, his thumbs poised over a gaming controller, but with one notable difference: Ivanov sat beside him, with another controller in hand. She’d never seen them play together. Ivanov’s blond hair was combed back from his forehead, his ruddy cheeks glowing with competition, the usual stoniness in his features softened to a more manageable stiffness. Tal looked wild with excitement, his brown eyes wide, his teeth bared at the screen, the thick black beard that had taken over his face even bushier than usual, as if even his hair follicles were responding to the acute novelty of having a real live opponent, one he wanted very much to beat. The two men didn’t look up at her, immersed in the challenges of their avatars. Sully moved along the curve of the centrifuge toward the long kitchen table. Harper and Thebes sat across from each other playing five-card draw, betting nuts and bolts from Thebes’s toolbox. Sully sat down next to Thebes and watched.
“Thebes tells me we’re up and running again,” Harper said as he laid down a full house. Thebes whistled through the gap in his teeth and threw his hand down.
Sully nodded. “We’re back. Not much chatter out there, though.”
“Shall I deal you in?” Thebes asked her as he shuffled the deck with his elegant black hands, the pale pink of his fingernails skimming over the cards like tiny butterflies.
“No, thanks,” she said, “I think I’ll just watch.”
“We’re piggybacking Mars’s orbit any day now,” Thebes said as Harper cut the deck. “Then the slingshot back to Earth. I think we’ll have a better chance at picking up something faint as we get closer.”
She looked over at Ivanov and Tal, still intent on their game, united in concentration and competition, then back to Thebes and Harper. Harper noticed her still staring at Thebes’s hands as he looked at his cards, tilting them up without taking them off the table.
“Are you sure you don’t want to play?” he asked.
“I’m sure,” she said. “I think I’m going to go back to the comm. pod for a minute. I forgot to do something.” She got up from the table.
“Aren’t you going to eat anything? We’ve all had dinner already,” Harper said. “Some lasagna thing. We saved you some.” Thebes let the edges of his cards snap back to the table. She took a serving of fruit leather from the kitchen and held it up for him to see before she put it in her pocket. She wasn’t planning to eat it, but Harper was appeased. As she left Little Earth she heard Ivanov shout with triumph, followed by a low groan from Tal.
She passed through the greenhouse corridor slowly, letting the vivid green of the aeroponic plants fill her. They pressed out the thoughts and refilled her mind with color, saturating the nooks and crannies of her brain—green, the color of home. She wondered if she might be able to sustain it, to make this verdant peace permanent, but no sooner had it occurred to her than all the rest of the thoughts came rushing back in and the blazing viridescence faded away. It was too much. She was just a tiny point of consciousness lost in an ocean of chaos, not unlike Aether. Tunneling through the vacuum of space, thin walls weakening beneath the violent forces of the cosmos, losing pieces of herself along the way, just like the ship they lived on.
Sully paused at the entrance to the control deck but didn’t go in. She stayed away from the swimming blackness just beyond the cupola. She turned and propelled herself to the comm. pod instead, raising the volume on the muted speakers and letting the sounds wash over her. It’s been silent in here for too long, she thought. After a few moments she began to scan, seeking out some of their fellow wanderers. She found an old robotic surveyor, still circling Mars. Then Cassini, one of Saturn’s first explorers. And then there it was, the wanderer she always hoped to hear: Voyager 3, heading toward the edge of the solar system, through the heliopause, into the Oort cloud and beyond, to interstellar space. The incoming telemetry was sparse and basic; since she’d last searched it out, some of Voyager’s functions had shut down. From the plasma readings she could guess that it had moved beyond their solar system—had crossed over into a new one.
She stayed in the comm. pod for hours, listening and watching her screens. When she returned to Little Earth the others were either asleep or concealed in their compartments, the glow of their reading lights shining against the curtains. Before she had a chance to shut herself in her bunk, Harper swept his curtain back. He was half inside his sleeping bag, propped up against the wall with his tablet illuminated on his lap.
“You’re back,” he said. “What did you forget?”
She couldn’t think of something credible, something that would have occupied her for this long. The truth was easier. “I didn’t forget anything. I just…wanted to listen for a while.”
He nodded. “But you’re all right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Just tired.” She caught hold of her curtain. “ ’Night,” she said, and drew it shut.
“Good night,” he murmured, and she heard the click of his light going off.
She lay in the dark for a long time, on her back with her eyes open, inspecting all the shadows in her compartment. At the foot of the bed, the craggy mountain of clothes she’d worn today and would wear again tomorrow. On the wall, the square of the photograph of Lucy. Above her, the dark round globe of her reading light. After a while she fell asleep and dreamed she was traveling in the other direction on Voyager 3, away from home instead of toward it. Her feelings in the dream were untroubled, tranquil. She was nestled into the cup of Voyager’s parabolic dish, curled up like a sleepy cat while she looked out into the blackness and realized she’d gone farther than she’d ever expected to. She realized she’d come to the end of the universe, and she was pleased.
THE FIVE OF them gathered at the long table for breakfast and a rundown of the next phase of their journey. Sully sipped orange juice through a straw and arranged a screen of attention onto her features while Tal spoke about the trajectory plan. While they were traveling past Mars, jumping on and off its orbit as if it were a celestial highway, they would be a relatively short way from Mars itself. Tal went on to explain the complexities of Mars’s orbit and how exactly they would use its gravity for their own purposes, but beyond that Sully lost track of what he was saying. She was contemplating the texture of the cabinet behind his head when she realized that she’d reached the end of the orange juice and was making a rude sucking noise with the straw. Tal had stopped talking and was looking at her. She froze in midslurp, and he continued.
“So I know we’ve been seeing Mars from a distance for some time, but if you’d like a better look, the next few days would be the ideal time.”
Her mind drifted out of focus once more. Harper took over and got everyone squared away on their tasks for this final leg of their journey, as Aether drew closer to Earth. Sully nodded in the right places, and when they were finally dismissed she went straight to the
comm. pod. She had lost time to make up on the Jovian probes, and she wanted to be sure the incoming data was recorded and filed correctly. The straightforward labor of data entry soothed her, even if the conclusions she was drawing and the hypotheses she was forming still didn’t have an audience. It helped distract her from the unknowns of their journey. Sully was a few hours into her work before she realized she was ravenous and hadn’t eaten since yesterday. She remembered the fruit leather she’d tucked away in her pocket the night before and ripped into the package while she cataloged the telemetry.
She thought of Mars while she worked. She pictured its cratered red earth, orange dust, and dry, empty riverbeds. She thought of the plans for colonization—an American mission had already been there and back a few years ago, mostly to do a geological survey but also to look for potential habitat sites. Before Aether’s departure, a private space travel company had been entrenched in the logistics of building a permanent colony on Mars. It was supposedly only a few years from realization—too late, apparently.
She was excited to see the red planet so close. Their view on the way out almost two years ago had been fleeting and from a distance. They had been focused on other things—the pull of Jupiter, the planet no one had ever seen up close. Now Mars’s significance lay mainly in its proximity to Earth. The last signpost before their destination: nearly there. When Sully had done a few more hours of work with the Jovian telemetry, she changed her receiving frequency to Voyager 3, still thinking of her dream from last night. She alighted on the signal just in time to hear a shrill whistle, and then silence. She couldn’t get it back, no matter what she tried—found only empty sine waves where the signal had been just a moment before. It was late by the time she gave up. The probe was gone. Perhaps the power had finally quit, perhaps something else had malfunctioned and rendered its comm. system unusable, or perhaps it had traveled so far it was simply beyond their reach. It was possible that she would get it back another day, that something had blocked the signal—a planet in the way or even an asteroid—but she thought not. She floated in the silence of the comm. pod for a long while, remembering her dream. In the end she wished Voyager well and let it go, for good.
It was time to turn her attention back to Earth—not the Earth she’d left, the Earth she was returning to. The long months of retrospection and grief, thoughts of people she’d left, people she’d lost, were too heavy for her to carry anymore. She had been looking backward long enough. Now, finally, she gave herself permission to look forward. She didn’t feel hope, not yet, but she made room for it. Sully adjusted her wavelength and began to scan the frequencies: mostly listening, occasionally transmitting, but constantly searching, from one band to another. When she had scanned both the UHF and the VHF spectrums she began again, from the beginning. There had to be something out there. There had to be.
FIFTEEN
THEY BEGAN TO spend a lot of time in the little dinghy, out on Lake Hazen. Augustine would row them out, halfway to the island, and then they would take turns casting. It never took long—the lake was teeming with char that would snap at anything and the little orange spinner was too tempting to ignore. They would catch one, maybe two if they were smaller, pith and bleed them, then row back and gut them on the shore. Iris grew skilled at casting, and she was getting good at the gruesome parts, too, at severing the spine and removing the guts—she refused to leave the fish for Augie to clean.
The tiny wildflowers grew in thick, colorful carpets across the tundra. As mantles of color popped up among the new grass and the soft brown earth, Augie and Iris started to venture farther and farther from the camp to explore the unfamiliar abundance of summer. The surrounding hills and mountains were full of lemmings and Arctic hares and birds. The musk oxen and caribou kept to the tundra, eating all the tiny, rare botanical specimens like canapés at a fancy cocktail party. During one such hike, Augie rested on a boulder while Iris scrambled on ahead. A caribou approached and carefully snapped up the patch of marsh saxifrage that Augustine had been admiring, fitting its clumsy lips around the little yellow flowers and chomping off their stems at the root before sauntering off to sniff out more delicacies. Augie could see the whorl of fur in the center of its forehead, could hear its teeth clicking together, could smell the rich, musty odor of its breath. He’d never been so close to a wild animal—not a living one. It was enormous, with antlers that towered over him, so tall they seemed to disappear into the brightness of the sky, like the branches of a tree.
Augustine thought of the radio control building, as he often did. He still hadn’t gone inside, and as time passed he began to wonder why. What was he avoiding? He was curious to see what kind of equipment it might offer, what he might or might not hear, but everything else was so pleasant, it subsumed his curiosity. He didn’t want to disturb the tranquillity of their life at the lake. He didn’t know what he would find, and whether it was nothing or something, he was in no rush to risk the brand-new happiness they’d forged. For once, Augustine was content not to know. And yet—this search for another voice wasn’t about him. His own happiness wasn’t the most important thing to him anymore.
When they first arrived, he’d been fooled into thinking his health was improving—the calm of the lake, the relative warmth, the stillness of the wind made him feel stronger. But as time wore on, he came to understand that his days were as limited as ever. Comfort didn’t mean improvement. Life was easier here, but he was still growing older. The long night would come again, and when it did, the temperatures would plummet and his joints would seize and ache just as they had before. His heart would beat a little slower, his mind would not operate quite so nimbly. The polar night would seem to last forever. He both feared and hoped this year would be his last. He was old—wildflowers and gentle breezes would not make him young again. He looked up the incline to see Iris skidding back down, jumping from rock to rock like a mountain goat.
“How was the view?” he asked her. Instead of answering, she handed him a bouquet of mountain avens, a small white flower with a burst of yellow stamen in the center, frothy with pollen. A few of the blooms were spent, their seed heads sprouting long white tufts of fuzz, some still twisted in a glossy bud shape and others already blown out by the wind like the wiry white hairs of an old man’s beard. He laughed.
“Are these meant to look like me?” He gave one of the seed heads a poke and Iris nodded with her best serious-not-serious face.
“Things could be worse, I suppose,” he said, plucking one of the spent flowers and sliding it into his buttonhole. Iris smiled in approval and continued down. Augie struggled to his feet, scrabbling against the smooth surface of the boulder to haul himself up, crushing the flowers against the rock by accident. As he watched Iris make her way back toward the camp, he cradled the crumpled, half-dead bouquet in his hands and followed her. It was time.
WITH HIS COFFEE in hand, he ambled across the rock-strewn plateau and gave the doorknob of the little radio shed a try. It was stubborn, so he set his coffee mug on the ground and gave the door a hard shove with his shoulder. Inside the shed he found exactly what he’d been expecting: a well-equipped base station. With a few stacks of radio components, various transceivers for HF, VHF, and UHF frequencies, two pairs of headsets, speakers, a tabletop microphone, and a sleek generator in the corner, the station was complete—just ready and waiting for an operator. The trouble with the observatory had been its reliance on satellite communication—radio was used only as a backup or for local transmissions—but here the setup was built for radio frequency. He noticed a lone satphone on the desk, a few handy-talkie sets beside it.
Augie started the generator and let it run for a few minutes before he checked that the equipment was connected to the power source, then he started turning things on. Orange and green displays flickered. A low, even static emanated from the speakers, as if there were a hive of bees inside. Some survival gear was tucked under the desk—bottled water, emergency rations, two sleeping bags—and he realize
d that as the sturdiest building at the camp, this must be the emergency shelter as well. The three tents were durable enough to make it through Arctic winters, year after year, but they weren’t indestructible. The Arctic was anything but gentle to its inhabitants.
After a few moments of fiddling, Augustine plugged in the headphones, slipped them on, and began to scan. Here we go again, he thought. But it was different from the observatory—the aerial array outside was going to allow him to reach farther with his voice and his ears than he ever had at Barbeau. He ran an admiring hand over one of the transceivers and wiped the dust from the glowing green display with his thumb. He flicked the microphone on and pulled it close to his chin in anticipation, then chose a VHF amateur band and began to transmit, CQ, CQ, CQ, over and over as he scanned the frequencies. Nothing—but then, he hadn’t expected an answer. He kept transmitting, moving from VHF up to UHF, then down to HF, then back to the beginning. Eventually Iris appeared in the doorway, which he’d left open to let in the summer air. She shook a fishing rod at him. He looked from her to the equipment and back again.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “I’ll meet you at the boat.”
She disappeared from the doorway, leaving the slender rectangle of lake and mountain and sky unbroken. He began to switch everything off, the generator last, then unfastened the headset from where it hung around his neck and coiled the cord. He shut the door behind him, letting his eyes adjust to the blaze of the sun reflecting on the water.
Iris was sitting on the upside-down hull, tapping out a jazzy rhythm with the butt of the fishing rod.
“Ahoy,” he called, and she jumped up.
Together they flipped the boat over and shoved it into the shallows, a smooth and effortless movement by now, after all of their fishing trips. Augie went to get the oars and the net, and then they pushed off from the shore. He let them float for a few minutes, closing his eyes, listening to the lap of the water against the earth, against the hull, and feeling the heated gaze of the midnight sun on his face. When he opened his eyes, Iris was hanging her legs over the side of the dinghy, the tips of her toes dragging on the lake, leaving brief ruts in the water: there and gone, there and gone. He dipped the blades of the oars beneath the glassy surface and began to row.
Good Morning, Midnight Page 17