SUMMER SEEMED TO fade faster than it had arrived. The warmth seeped out of the valley and a cold front crept in, chilling the delicate wildflowers and icing the muddy shores of the lake with frosty crystals. Augustine continued to sit in his Adirondack chair by the lake, watching the progression of time, the descent of the sun, but now he bundled himself again in woolly layers. The cold returned to his bones, his joints, his teeth. He didn’t leave the camp anymore. Iris wandered the tundra and the mountains alone. They still fished together, taking the dinghy out for as long as the lake would allow it, but rowing had grown difficult for him in the cold air and the frosts fell heavier with each passing week. It won’t be long now, he thought.
Augustine continued to scan the bands once a day in the radio shelter, but the silence was perpetual, the isolation complete. He listened only out of a need for work, for purpose. As the days passed and grew colder, getting from his chair to the shelter and back again escalated from a pleasant stroll to a challenge. Augie hoarded his energy for the short walk, unwilling to give it up. He became unable to row the dinghy even a short way. Eventually a thin rind of ice formed at the edges of the lake. It’s just as well, he thought. Not long after, the sun finally reached the horizon and dipped beneath it before climbing back up. The sunrise/sunset concert it created was magnificent and lasted several hours, bathing the mountains in a fiery orange glow and sending spurts of violet cloud into the sky before fading back into vivid blue. These moments of day’s end and day’s beginning, pressed together into a continuous event, became a regular marker of time’s passing.
The lake froze, then melted, then froze once more. One afternoon, as the sun dipped behind the mountains and hid there briefly, a cold drizzle began to fall. In the cool twilight, the rain hardened into sleet and then softened into thick, white flakes of snow, which drifted slowly down and covered the brown landscape. Augie had retreated from his chair when the drizzle began, but he returned to it when the sleet changed to snow. Iris joined him, sitting on his little footstool made from a packing crate, and together they watched the contours of the land disappear beneath a blanket of white. When the sun cleared the mountains a few hours later it bathed the freshly covered peaks in pale fire, and as it climbed higher the tundra burned brightly, a field of white flame. The familiar cloak of the Arctic had returned and would not be shrugged off for many months to come.
The stars also returned. One night, after the color-soaked mountains had dimmed and then darkened into black peaks set against a sleepy blue sky, Augie walked down to the edge of the frozen lake to test the ice. He tapped it with his boot, and when it held he took a few cautious steps, giving it another tap and finally a good hard stomp. It was firm. It would hold him. He walked back to the shore and headed toward the radio shed. He noticed a set of fresh tracks in the snow, illuminated in the starlight, leading down from one of the hills and then disappearing at the edge of the lake. The prints were enormous and widely spaced, with the pricks of long claws indented around the impressions: polar bear prints. Here? He was surprised—forgetting the radio for a moment he doubled back, following the tracks to the shore, where they disappeared onto the ice. He bent down to examine the shallow scratches on the surface where the bear had dug in as it crossed the frozen water. Perhaps it was on its way to the fjord, he thought. Perhaps it was lost. He shrugged and turned back toward the radio shed.
Slipping the headphones over his ears, he began to scan, adjusting the controls in the soft glow of the flickering kerosene lamp. The static was soothing—it obscured the utter silence of the Arctic, a silence so complete it seemed unnatural. The lapping of the water had ceased, the air was still, the birds had all gone. The silence of winter had descended. The terns had left their beautiful nest, flying south toward the other pole, and the musk oxen and caribou had returned to the wide-open tundra. Every now and then the quiet was punctuated with the long, trembling howl of a wolf, but otherwise the lake was wrapped in hushed stillness. The white noise of the radio waves was a relief, a soft crackle to obscure the loneliness. He set the receiver to scan automatically and closed his eyes—let his consciousness drift. He’d fallen asleep when he heard it: a voice, slipping through his eardrums and into his dreams. He bolted upright and pressed the headphones against his ears. It was so faint Augie wasn’t sure he’d really heard it. But no, there it was again—not words, just syllables, interrupted by static. He strained to make out what they were saying and pulled the microphone toward him, suddenly unsure how to respond. The language of amateur Q codes abandoned him in his excitement, but it didn’t matter. The FCC wasn’t listening anymore.
“Hello?” he said, then realized he was practically shouting. He waited, straining to hear a response. Nothing. He tried again, and again, and finally, on the third try, he heard her. A woman’s voice, clear as a bell.
SIXTEEN
MARS WAS BEHIND them and the pale blue dot of Earth was growing larger by the day. They began to spend their spare moments in the cupola, watching the color of the atmosphere become more vivid as they moved closer—everyone except Sully. She kept long hours in the comm. pod, dividing her time between tracking the Jovian moon probes and listening for signals from Earth as they drew closer to home. She barely interacted with the others. She usually slipped out of the centrifuge early, as the artificial sunrise began to dawn, and returned to it late, when the others were already in their bunks. There was nothing, not so much as an errant cable news broadcast or a Top 40 countdown, but she kept listening. The nearer they came, the more likely it would be for their antenna to pick up a signal. In times of disaster, ham operators were always the first to get information flowing along the airwaves; surely, she thought, there would be some chatter. There had to be. There was still no theory that made sense, no possible explanation for the silence. But gradually they had accepted it.
They were close enough to see the moon circling their little blue planet when Sully finally lost track of her probe on Io. It wasn’t unexpected—the conditions on Jupiter’s closest moon weren’t kind, and the probe had already outlasted its expected life span. It was an overachiever, yielding extraordinary data, but Sully was nonetheless saddened by the silence. There were only so many signals out there, and having one less to keep track of—first Voyager, now this—made her feel even more lost. There were so few things to hang on to. The universe was an inhospitable place, and she felt fragile, temporary, lonely. All of their tenuous connections, their illusions of security, of company, of camaraderie, were disappearing. Judging by its last transmission, the probe had strayed into volcanic territory, away from the sulfur dioxide snowfields they had set it down in. Its final temperature readings suggested submersion in lava—and even NASA didn’t design things that could survive that.
Sully left the comm. pod for the night and floated down the corridor toward the cupola. At least they were nearly home. Regardless of what waited for them, it was good to see their little planet through the heavy glass, its silvery moon whirling around and around like a lazy pinball. Tal and Ivanov were floating in front of the view side by side when she arrived. They made room for her in the cupola. The three of them drifted there, suspended in space, watching the blue dot where they’d begun their lives loom closer. There was a barely discernible prick of brightness near the surface of the planet, there and then gone, and Ivanov’s hand shot out to point at where it had just been.
“Did you see?” Ivanov said. “Just there—the International Space Station, I think. It must have been.”
The spark had disappeared over the edge of the earth before he could even raise his hand. Tal shrugged and buried his fingers in his beard in contemplation.
“Could be,” he said.
“Could be?” Ivanov sputtered. Two drops of indignant saliva left his lips and hovered in front of his face. “What else would it be?”
Tal shrugged again. “I dunno,” he said, “a satellite, maybe. Hubble. Space trash. Could be a lot of things.”
Ivanov shook hi
s head. “Not possible. Too big for that.”
Sully began to back out of the cupola, not interested in playing the referee, when she saw Tal put his hand on Ivanov’s shoulder. “You could be right,” he conceded. “I’m just saying—we’ll wait for it to come round again, yes?”
Ivanov nodded and they continued their vigil, watching their looming planet. Sully was surprised to see them compromise this way, surprised and pleased—a new connection, in the midst of all this loneliness. She slipped out of the cupola. Neither of them noticed her go.
When she arrived back at the comm. pod Harper was waiting for her. She felt ambushed. She tried to hide the irritation she felt at finding him there, in what she thought of as her private space. He pointed at the last transmission from the Io probe, the telemetry she had left on her main screen when she wandered away.
“The Io probe finally kicked the bucket, eh? Death by volcano?”
Sully nodded. “Yeah, it quit on me yesterday.”
“Wanna take a break? Make some food? Play some cards?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “I have some things to do in here, and I just took a break. But thanks.”
“I get it. It’s just that I haven’t really seen you in a while. I wanted to ask how you were doing.” Harper’s face was wide open, an invitation for her to unload, to emote, scrawled across his forehead. He wanted her to talk to him, but somehow it was infuriating. She didn’t want to be rude, or unkind, but she didn’t know how to respond, and the question itself irked her. How was she? How were any of them? They were in an impossible situation, doing whatever they could to get through—to pass from one moment to the next in a single piece: staring at Earth, listening to Earth, playing games while they thought of Earth.
The pause dragged on. Finally she said, “I’m a little out of sorts for all the obvious reasons, but I think you know that. Otherwise, I’m fine.”
“Sure, sure.” He seemed uncertain all of a sudden, as though the script he’d rehearsed in his head was no longer relevant to their conversation. “I just miss seeing you. But, you know. Take your time. Maybe we’ll see you for dinner.” He pushed past her and out of the pod. One of her machines chirped to signal an incoming telemetry delivery. The rest buzzed softly—nothing but empty sine waves.
Sully stared after Harper, immediately sorry that he’d gone. Did she have to be so brusque? So cold? Why couldn’t she articulate how she was feeling? She was ashamed but also angry—that he’d bothered her, that he’d stirred up this unexpected vortex in her chest. Her mind started spinning through memories of Devi, of Lucy, of Jack—even as far back as her mother, Jean. She had lost them all, in one way or another. Each loss returned to her as she floated in the comm. pod, adding to the whirlpool swirling over her heart until she wasn’t sure what was old and what was new. She took a breath, then another. She visualized Earth, its hazy blue outline, its rugged topography, the wisps of cloud, but it didn’t soothe her. She thought of Harper, Thebes, Tal, Ivanov—there was always more to lose. She tried to calm herself, to still the drift of her body, but the lack of gravity made it difficult to remain stationary. Her shoulder bumped one of the speakers, her hip nudged a screen, and the more she fought to be still, the more she drifted. She was fighting an absence instead of a presence, and it suddenly chilled her. Which way was up? As the floor dropped away to become the ceiling, she felt the thread of logic she’d followed throughout the mission, throughout her entire life, snap. Hard work and intelligence could not keep her safe—there was nothing she could have done, no amount of effort or foresight or skill could have kept any of this from happening. Nothing in this universe could possibly keep any of them safe. She felt her perspective darken, and again she was watching an astronaut drift away into the blackness, only this time it was her inside the suit—screaming, pleading, shaking, unable to breathe.
SULLY HAD ONLY ever had one other panic attack, after her stepfather called to tell her Jean was dead. Sully had never lost hope that they would find their way back to each other, that someday they would be in the desert together again, looking up at the stars, just the two of them. Jean would call her “little bear,” the way she used to, and they would admire the luminous craters of the moon, the swirls of the Orion nebula, the misty sparkle of the Milky Way. They would heal. They would drive home on sand-strewn roads and they would forgive each other. After that call, the fantasy that had sustained her since she was a girl evaporated. Her mother had drifted away from her somewhere between the Mojave Desert and British Columbia, but there had always been that hope. There were times when it seemed right around the corner, and when it was finally, conclusively too late, the weight of loss was too heavy to hold all at once.
She remembered putting her phone down on the kitchen counter in her first real apartment in Santa Cruz and staring into the texture of the countertop—grainy silver-gray flecks—then slowly letting her back slide down the length of the refrigerator, her legs crumpling beneath her. She remembered staying there for a long time, choking on her tears, wondering how she was still conscious, still alive. In the morning she woke up with her cheek pressed to the tile floor. She kept her gaze on the white grout between the salmon pink of the tiles for hours, thinking that if she could only keep that pattern in her mind, nothing else, she could survive the day.
She reconstructed the pattern of the tile. She let it fill her. Diamond after diamond of pink framed with white. She remembered that she had eventually gotten up off the floor, had walked to the back door and opened it. She had sat on the stoop leading down to her tiny courtyard and looked up at the sky, the crisp blue dome of it. She had found a way through. She could do it again.
When Sully returned to Little Earth that night, the flood of adrenaline had subsided and in its wake a gnawing emptiness gripped her tender muscles. Harper was still up, sitting at the long table playing solitaire. He didn’t greet her, and she couldn’t think of anything to say. She got ready for bed and climbed into her compartment. She hesitated, left the curtain open, her bare feet still resting on the floor.
“I’m sorry about before,” she said without looking at him. She heard the snap of a card being laid down.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, but it wasn’t a tone she was used to hearing from him. It was detached, as if he was issuing commands to a computer. As if he wasn’t even speaking to a human being. She understood that she’d hurt him—that this was her penance. Losing a man who was still right in front of her.
“Okay. Well, good night,” she said, and waited. He didn’t respond. After a moment she drew her curtain and lay down. She would’ve wept if she’d had any tears left, but her eyes were red and dry. She turned out the light.
“Good night,” he finally called, and he sounded like himself again.
She laid her cool palms against the pulsing heat of her eyelids. She would’ve smiled, but she didn’t have any of those left either.
THE PLANET LOOKED the same as it had when they’d left it—no cloud of dust choking the atmosphere and obscuring the continents, no smoke billowing from the surface. An enormous round oasis in the midst of a parched black desert. It wasn’t until they were nearly in orbit that Sully realized what was wrong. When they faced the dark side of the planet it was indeed dark—no illuminated cities, no tapestry of twinkling lights. The sickening apprehension that had been growing since the receivers went dark, since before Jupiter, grew larger still. All the lights in all the cities, extinguished. How could that be?
She kept scanning the frequencies, kept listening for something, anything, that might indicate the remains of humankind. She began to transmit when she thought the rest of the crew wouldn’t hear her. Her transmissions weren’t exactly professional. They were prayers—not to God, who she’d never liked the sound of, just to the universe, or to the earth itself. Please, please, just one voice. One answer. Anybody, anything. There was nothing. Just a dark, silent planet circled by space trash and dead satellites and the ISS. They crept closer. St
ill nothing.
It wasn’t until they passed the moon that she heard it. It was early in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, and she’d been murmuring into the microphone almost without realizing it, talking to herself. She was the only person she had much to say to these days. And then she heard it: so faint, so distorted she thought it was just atmospheric disturbance whistling into her receiver. She transmitted again, a cautious Hello. When the voice responded she almost screamed. She thought she must be crazy, delusional. It was like sitting down to a séance she didn’t believe in day after day and finally feeling a presence. But no, there it was again, clearer this time, a man’s voice, scratchy and old and unused. But a voice. A connection, reaching out to her. She brought the microphone right up to her lips. She pressed the Transmit button. Contact.
SEVENTEEN
IT LASTED BARELY two minutes before the signal cut out, but during that brief exchange, clouded with atmospheric disturbance, Augustine learned quite a bit. The woman on the other end of the signal told him she was on board a spacecraft called Aether, an ambitious deep space exploration project he remembered hearing about while it was being built in Earth’s orbit some years ago, before he went north. She told him they were a little less than two hundred thousand miles from Earth, that they were headed home and had lost contact with their Mission Control team more than a year ago. He was the only radio contact they’d been able to make since then.
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