“The core is bringing you in,” Petr said. “It looks like it has its own mild gravitational influence. Feeling good up there?”
“Feeling great. How much time before I reach the core?”
“At this pace, about twenty minutes. Let’s allow ten more for collection, then activate the propulsion engines and shoot you out of there. We’ll stabilize your trajectory back to Earth remotely. After that, you get those golden hands in the lab.”
“Roger.”
I looked around and realized Hanuš had gone away. I did not feel his presence in my temples. An echo of sandpaper scratching upon metal spread through the ship. I listened to locate its source, but it seemed to be everywhere, a merciless grinding. The speed at which I spun was increasing quickly. The core seemed too close. Solid, like a piece of rock. Impenetrable.
The lights above me flickered, as did the Flat monitor. A rush of cool air chilled my shoulders.
“Something funny with your power source,” Petr said.
The scratching turned into a steady hiss. The lights flickered at more prolonged intervals. The ship was no longer merely trembling—massive vibrations rocked it back and forth, and the purple dust crashing against my window had become so thick that I could no longer see Venus.
“It’s speeding up,” Petr said, his voice cracking. He pinched his beard and pulled a few hairs out.
Senator Tůma stood next to him, a foolish smile frozen on his face, champagne glass now empty. The hired help all watched the screens, mouths agape.
The light bulbs above me exploded, their tiny, sharp pieces crashing against the protective plastic ensuring the shards wouldn’t float around the cabin. The blue emergency lights kicked in, powered by a generator disconnected from the main circulation, the same generator powering the Flat. A sharp emergency ring interrupted the gentle symphony of Rusalka. I focused all of my thoughts on Hanuš, hoping he would come back.
“Jakub, the mainframe is down. Visual diagnostics?”
I unstrapped from the chair and pulled myself toward the Corridors, relieved to be free of the rough vibrations now that I wasn’t attached to any surface. All seemed normal in zero gravity. Just as I was about to leave the Lounge to inspect the mainframe, I noticed a few purple grains making their way in between the thin bars of a filter vent. I leaped back toward the Flat.
“The dust is penetrating the ship,” I told Petr.
“Fuck, what?” he said. Seconds later, the video feed to the IMAX screen on Petřín Hill faded, leaving a paralyzed herd of onlookers squinting at the crude stadium lighting. Secret service agents ushered the politicians and journalists outside the Control Room while Petr barked orders at his engineers.
“All right, we’re calling it. Run the propulsion engines. Get the hell out of that thing.”
I checked the Ferda collection levels. Only about 6 percent filled—not nearly enough. “Another minute,” I said, “just one more.”
“The dust is eating through your ship, Jakub. The electrical cables are already eroded. Get out. I’d override your controls if it still worked.”
“I need just another minute,” I said.
“Do as you’re told. Propulsion in three—”
“I’ve spent four goddamn months,” I said. “My tooth is rotting, my wife left me, and now he’s gone too. One more minute.”
“Who’s ‘he’?”
“Just a bit of time, Petr.”
I took out my earpiece. A bit of time. I figured it would make me wiser, that one minute. Make me understand something about the universe, or myself. Perhaps I believed Hanuš that Chopra held the key to the beginning. Perhaps I was daring myself to die. See what the fuss was about.
Wisdom did not arrive at the minute’s conclusion. Within thirty seconds, the blue emergency lights melted into darkness, as did the Flat.
I hadn’t realized just how loud JanHus1 was when operating. Without the hum of filters and air-conditioning and screens, all I could hear was the ceaseless grinding. The purple phosphorescence provided only a fragment of light. I heard a quiet voice and felt around the desk for the earpiece.
“… ammit, JanHus1, respond, fuck…”
“Petr?” I said.
“Jakub. I can’t see you. Report.”
The vibrations ceased. The vision of the core covered the rest of my universe. It seemed I was so close that I could touch it. The layer of the cloud I found myself in was free of dust, free of any debris, like an atmosphere that had rejected everything else but me. The core no longer pulled. JanHus1 was perfectly still within this sphere of nothingness.
“I’m close,” I said, “but the gravitational influence has weakened.”
“Comms are the only thing that’s working. Not a single sensor in the ship is functional.”
Something landed on my cheek. I wiped it with my finger and found purple smeared on my fingertip. The flakes surrounded me now, falling from crevices in the ceiling. The air was stale and hard to breathe.
“Petr,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I think the oxygen tank is out.”
I recovered a flashlight from the desk drawer and made my way through the Corridors. The electronic door panel leading to the mechanical bay was not functional, and I had to pull the levers and push with all my strength to open the hatch. I passed the engine control bay and entered the oxygen room, where a trio of massive gray barrels rested on the floor. As long as an electrical current ran through these tanks, allowing them to separate hydrogen and oxygen, they were perhaps the most crucial parts of the ship. Now they were simply three useless water towers tossed on their bellies like pigs about to be slaughtered. No fresh oxygen was being pumped into my world, just as the carbon dioxide was not being filtered out.
I informed Petr.
“Tell me when you start to feel dizzy,” he said. “And get your ass to the mainframe panel. Let’s fix this. Let’s get you out.”
I took comfort in his orders. Someone was in charge. As long as Petr was providing clear steps to follow, things could still be okay. I didn’t need to think about anything else.
I turned off the earpiece. “Hanuš!” I shouted into the Corridors. “Hanuš!”
The mainframe panel was cold and dark. At Petr’s instructions, I removed the panel cover and checked the wires inside. They were untouched, disturbingly clean just as they were when the ship was assembled. I took the panel apart, looking for burned-out motherboards, misplaced plugs. Everything was just as it should’ve been. I gave Petr a chance to say it before I did, but he was silent.
“Either the solar panel wiring got eaten through,” I said, “or the solar panels are gone.”
“Go put your suit on,” Petr said.
“The suit?”
“I don’t want you fainting when the oxygen drops. Put it on. I have to… I have to brief the people upstairs.”
The line went quiet.
I dressed first in the cooling garment, a sophisticated onesie that circulated water through a hose system to regulate body temperature, then pulled the thick mass of my space suit over my body. It smelled faintly of thrift stores and burning coal. On Earth, tens, perhaps hundreds of millions of humans were gasping at their televisions, obsessively refreshing the front pages of media blogs, their minds attuned to a single thought: what would become of their spaceman? Yes, it was more than likely that my journey on JanHus1 had captivated the imagination of all of humanity, well beyond my countrymen standing on Petřín Hill and groaning at the dark screen ahead. Show must go on, even when it is not seen.
While I trapped myself inside the suit, I did not worry, as the task of living remained methodical—pulling at straps, placing the Life Support System on my back, securing the helmet, greedily inhaling fresh oxygen. My toothache pulsed brutally along the right side of my jaw, now that my senses were renewed. Once the suit was on, however, I found myself without tasks. I shone the flashlight into the ship’s dark corners, almost expecting a daddy longlegs to crawl out.
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I made my way into the Sleeping Chamber and I reached inside a drawer, feeling around underneath the sweatpants and underwear. I removed the cigar box and slid it inside the pocket of my suit. More than likely, this was the end, and I had to keep my grandfather close. Briefly, I considered hiding inside the spacebag, using the same invisibility cloak that had protected me from monsters in the night when I was a boy. I did not.
The Life Support System on my back was to give me three hours of oxygen, and those hours seemed like a lifetime. So much could be done. Within three hours, wars could be declared, cities annihilated, future world leaders planted within their mothers’ wombs, deadly diseases contracted, religious faiths obtained or lost. I returned to the mainframe and tugged at cables, kicked at the dead panels, saliva dripping from the corner of my mouth and soiling my helmet glass. Finally, a voice came back to me, but it was not Petr’s.
“Jakub,” Senator Tůma said. “Can you hear my words?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I’m speaking to you on behalf of the president and your country. I have taken this unfair burden from Petr. I sent you on the mission, Jakub. It is only right that we have this conversation together.”
“You sound calm,” I said.
“I am not. Maybe what you hear is how much I believe in your mission. In your sacrifice. Do you still believe?”
“I think so. It’s hard to think about a higher purpose during decompression. You’re a diver. You know the strange ache in your lungs.”
Tůma told me that sensor readings captured seconds before the ship’s power source had failed showed twenty different points of damage in the ship’s internal wiring, and two of four solar panels were disabled. The dust had cut through them like a saw. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he finished.
I let go of the mainframe cables and hung my arms loosely along my body. “Yes.”
Replacing all the damaged wiring would take approximately twenty hours, he said, for which I had neither the oxygen nor the supplies. And more damage could have been done after the ship had shut down. Comms could fail at any minute—the independent battery powering it was also damaged and wouldn’t last much longer. “Do you understand?” he repeated.
“Senator. Of course I understand.”
My chest felt hollow. It was a strange sensation, the opposite of anxiety or fear, which to me was always heavy, like chugging asphalt. Now I was a cadaver in waiting. With death so near, the body looks forward to its eternal rest without the pesky soul. So simple, this body. Pulsing and secreting and creaking along, one beat, two beats, filling up one hour after another. The body is the worker and the soul the oppressor. Free the proles, I could hear my father saying. I almost cackled. Tůma breathed quietly. Don’t lose it on me now, I heard from a distance.
“Jakub. I could not be more sorry.”
“Senator. What happens now?”
“Tell me what it feels like up there, Jakub.”
“Is my wife there, senator?”
“She is not, Jakub. I’m sure she’s thinking of you. She will be there when I declare you the nation’s hero. She will be there when I establish a holiday in your name, along with scholarships for brilliant young scientists.” His words were interrupted now and then by echoes, scratching, an occasional mute pause. “I will make sure these people don’t forget your name for the next thousand years, Jakub. Tell me what it’s like up there. Pretend I’m a friend and you’re telling me about a dream you can’t forget.”
Tůma’s voice was terribly nice, I decided. Like silk wrapped around a stone. A soothing timbre that could break empires. Not bad to die to. Yes, the word at last came out. Die die die die, I whispered. Tůma ignored it.
I made my way to the observation window. In front of the purple core floated a torso of fur and sagging legs. Like a worshipper kneeling at the stairs of a shrine, begging for entry. He looked back at me, all thirty-four eyes glowing. His irises did not change when illuminated by the flashlight.
“It reminds me of a time I almost drowned,” I said. “I looked up through the murky water and saw the sun. And I thought, I am drowning, and yet the star of light and warmth is burning itself up to keep me alive. Now I’m thinking the sun too looked purple back then. But who knows?”
“That sounds good, Jakub. I’ll tell it to all the people outside who wish they could hear from you.”
“Tell it to Lenka. Tell her how glad I am that I didn’t drown back then. So I could go on living and meet her in the square.”
“Go to… Sleeping Chamber. I need… give… thing,” the senator said. The transmission was so weak now that I could hear only every other word.
I floated into the Sleeping Chamber, wound up the flashlight lever, and shone it into the corners, expecting to find something new.
“… emove… sleep… small hook…”
I removed the sleeping bag from its hinges and let it float away. I would not be in need of sleep anymore. There, just as Tůma had said, a seemingly random hook was placed in the midst of the sleek wall, an apparent design flaw. I pulled at it, and a book-size box slid out.
“… bite down… immediate…” Tůma said.
I opened the box. A clear packet containing two black pills entered free zero gravity space, along with a small printed leaflet issuing a stern warning: Consumption strictly forbidden without permission from Central.
I gave a loud exaggerated laugh to ensure Tůma heard me. “Thank you, senator. I have a better way.”
The communication stream faded. I wasn’t sure whether Tůma had heard my last words. Outside the Sleeping Chamber, Hanuš awaited, his eyes turned toward me in anticipation. Yes, there was a better way. I would have to breathe pure oxygen for another hour to eliminate all nitrogen in my body. I imagined the gas bubbles inside of me dissolving like a sodium tablet in a glass of water. After the hour, I would join Hanuš in Deep Space, and hand the ashes of my grandfather over to the cosmos before I too would be consumed. I floated to the kitchen, removed the last remaining jar of Nutella, and put it inside my pocket. The hour would be long. I waited, thinking of the first days at the Space Institute, the weight loss, the constant chewing of gum, the pain.
These faint memories of spacewalk training brought back my old sour stomach, like a fingernail probing its way around my abdomen. My body trapped by a heavy underwater suit, my mouth stuffed with an oxygen propellant, the training pool stinking of bleach and illuminated by azure bulbs. Along its one-mile circumference paced men who recorded my progress in yellow notepads. The first time I retched, the mask slipped out of my mouth and I released bile and peanuts into the water, immediately gasping for breath and receiving in exchange a liter of pool water in my throat. Coming up for air felt like rock climbing, muscles and veins fat with blood, the surface concealed by the play of shadows.
We tried many things—antinausea medication, different masks, relaxation exercises, a multitude of diets—but every training session had the same ending. It wasn’t that I feared enclosed spaces. Mine was a unique breed of claustrophobia. The training pool wasn’t a dark closet, it was thousands of dark closets lined up, with no door one could open to escape. I could only swim, and swim, and swim, with every foot the same silence and loneliness, the same sense of abandonment. I couldn’t take it. Or, perhaps, I got sick simply because of the physical strain of diving. We couldn’t be sure. In the end, after rapid weight loss and a decrease in my cardio performance, we ended the spacewalk training a week early. It was extremely unlikely that I would go outside anyway, they said. I was okay with it.
I wondered now why I still feared these endless closets, the vacuum outside that would remind me of those bleached diving pools. It was all to end there. But no one was watching anymore, no one would think worse of me. The end was up to me, and yet the nausea held on.
Hanuš interrupted these thoughts. “You are to join me soon,” he said.
“It looks that way.”
“Your tribe has abandoned you.”<
br />
“Something like that.”
“Do not worry, skinny human. I am an accomplished explorer. Together we shall explore the Beginning.”
I let go of the flashlight and floated to the air lock door, located below Corridor 4. I did this slowly, patting the walls of JanHus1, memorizing its dead, lightless crevices and feeling guilt, as if I had somehow drained the life out of this spacecraft entrusted to me. The incubator that had carried me and kept me warm, fed, clean, and entertained for four months was now a shell of useless materials. An overpriced casket. But it had gotten me to Chopra and I could not fault it for failing against the unknowable forces of other worlds. I closed the compression door behind me. I opened the hatch leading into the universe.
My tether slid along the side of the ship as I shifted outside, and the unfiltered vacuum tightened around me like bathwater. In the distance, Hanuš was a silhouette within the purple storm. I was not afraid of anything except the silence. My suit was built to eliminate the hiss of oxygen release, and thus all I heard were the faint vibrations of my own lungs and heart. The noise of thought seemed sufficient in theory, but it offered no comfort in physical reality. Without the background racket of air conditioners, the hum of distant engines, the creaks of old houses, the murmur of refrigerators, the silence of nothingness became real enough to make any self-professed nihilist shit his pants.
I waited to reach the length of the tether before detaching from the ship, if only to tell the cosmos I remained a believer in small odds. The chance of rescue, be it JanHus1 miraculously coming back to life or a top secret American drone swooping in to carry me home, was astronomically low, and yet there was some chance, and where there was a chance there remained a desire to gamble. At last I unsnapped the tether and I was free, floating toward Hanuš. Like him, I was now a piece of debris sailing through Space until meeting its end, as most things do, inside a black hole or the burning core of a sun. I could reach into the darkness of eternity and grasp at nothing.
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