The Calculating Stars

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  “Me too. Maybe we can grab dinner sometime?” I’d gone past the computer department a couple of times after my “promotion,” as they called it, but it had been awkward. I kept wanting to check numbers, but that would just annoy everyone. “What are you reading?”

  She shrugged. “It’s just orbital trajectory calculations. Pretty basic.”

  “Basic for you!” Nicole handed me a martini with a laugh. “Some of us struggle with that stuff.”

  “That’s why we trade. You teach me about simulator. I teach you about orbital calculations.”

  I raised my glass. “And if someone can get the acronyms through my head, I would be greatly appreciative.”

  The clear, cold gin lit up my mouth with all its juniper glory. I closed my eyes and sighed with appreciation as my shoulders relaxed, just a smidge. I’d missed these women. Thank God Nicole had thought about setting up a study group. Opening my eyes, I carried my cocktail and my books over to join Helen on the sofa.

  Kicking off my shoes, I settled down and tucked my feet up under me. “No Pearl?”

  Helen shook her head and scowled. “She doesn’t think there’s any point in prepping for the astronaut tests.”

  “They have to open it up more widely at some point, if it’s really going to be a colonization effort.”

  From her spot on the sofa, Nicole nodded. “And that’s something my husband strongly supports.”

  “Wait—” I blinked, feeling like I’d missed something. “Are they still talking about keeping it a military venture?”

  With a sigh, Nicole scooted forward to face me. “I know you hate the idea, but—”

  “But nothing. We have to get off the planet. I mean, sure, they might—and I stress the word might—be able to keep the greenhouse effect from running away, but by the time we know if that’s going to work, it’ll be too late to try to establish colonies elsewhere. We have to do it now, while we have the resources and the time.”

  “Preaching to the choir.” Nicole smoothed the pages of her book, then reached for her martini. She took a sip of it before she continued. All of us—it wasn’t just me—were staring at her, waiting to see what she was going to say. “But. There are members of Congress—and, in fact, of the UN—who only respond to questions of military threat. So if having a military component to the missions is useful in getting funding and keeping the program going, then that’s what my husband will do.”

  “That’s … Why are people so stupid?”

  Nicole shrugged and unbuttoned her blouse by one. “Hormones. And if men are going to be led by them, then I’m happy to play my part.”

  Ida raised her glass. “Hear, hear!”

  “How are you ladies doing this evening?” Poor Senator Wargin chose that moment to wander into the living room. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t used to a roomful of women laughing at him, but he didn’t seem to mind.

  * * *

  “Does anyone know what a MITTS is?” Jacira looked up from the binder she had been studying. She’d stretched out on the floor with her legs kicked up behind her.

  “Um…” That was all I could offer.

  “Mobile IGOR Tracking Telescope System,” Ida said, without even looking up from the book she had open. She tapped the pencil against the edge of the page as she read.

  “Seriously? An acronym within an acronym?” I tilted my head back to glare at the ceiling. “I’m trying to remember what IGOR means.”

  “Intercept Ground Optical Recorder.”

  Why the hell wasn’t she in the astronaut corps already? I mean, besides the color of her skin. “You should be in the program.”

  Ida snorted, but didn’t look up. Her pencil beat a faster rhythm on the pages.

  “The application rules are such obvious baloney. If they could bend them for Violette and Betty, then—”

  “Elma…” Nicole shook her head.

  “Come on.” All the frustration of the past months rolled out of me. “Violette barely had a hundred solo flight hours when she applied.

  Ida dropped her book. “You did not just say that.”

  “Yeah. You want to give Dr. King some ammunition? You tell him to look into the flight records of Violette Lebourgeois and Betty Ralls. Violette’s in because she’s French and her husband is one of the astronauts. Married couple in space makes a nice story, right?”

  Nicole closed her book. “You’re not wrong. And you’re not right, either.”

  “It’s discrimination, pure and simple.” It was, too. “Betty’s only in because they wanted to control the publicity, and Life gave them a way to do so. Those two spots should have gone to the most qualified candidates.”

  “You think I was the best candidate they saw? You think you were?” Nicole shook her head again, her eyes glittering. “I’m good. I qualified. But my husband is also a senator, and one who’s been backing the IAC since day one. Jacira was a beauty contest queen—”

  “With a master’s in engineering.” I didn’t like where she was going with this. She was undercutting the very real qualifications these women had. And … and I didn’t want her to get to me.

  From the floor, Jacira pushed up to sit and crossed her legs in front of her. “Yes. But I was not the only Brazilian woman with a pilot’s license and an engineering degree. Granted, there are only four of us, but I was not the one with the most flight time.”

  “And I was Mr. Wizard’s Lady Astronaut.”

  “It’s all about the story that the IAC wants to tell.” Nicole shrugged and took a sip of her martini. “That’s what politics is. Stories.”

  “And the story that they want to tell doesn’t include black people?” I winced, realizing I’d cut Helen out of the equation. “Or Taiwanese? Just white people.”

  Ida shrugged and closed her book with a thump. “Same old story. Just another chapter.” She stood up and stretched. “I’d better call it a night.”

  A chorus of yawns and agreements met her, and the party broke up. As I put on my hat and pulled on my gloves, I kept wanting to rant about the unfairness of it. But I didn’t. Ida had made it pretty clear that she was done with the topic.

  And then there was the other nagging thought. The thing is … I don’t know how much of my anger was a desire to help the black cause, and how much was because I wanted to get Violette and Betty out of my way.

  THIRTY-SIX

  DR. KING CHARGES IAC WITH DISCRIMINATION

  Special to The National Times.

  KANSAS CITY, KS, Nov. 22, 1957—Amid allegations that two of the so-called “Lady Astronauts” were not qualified for the program, a Southern Negro minister has charged the International Aerospace Coalition with discrimination. The United Nations governing committee has convened a special hearing to discuss the truth of the charges. Director Norman Clemons has stated that the two women were part of a pilot program to see if “mission specialists” could be trained for the space program without the rigid requirements of the early astronauts—something that would be necessary, he said, for the establishment of colonies.

  The MASTIF is at once a joy and a bane, and not just because it’s another acronym. The Multi-Axis Space-Test Inertia Facility, or gimbal rig, is a giant thing that a mad scientist designed.

  I might even mean that literally.

  Certainly, it would look at home as a torture device in some underground lair. At the moment, Nicole was strapped into the chair at the heart of it. The rigid plastic chair was a replica of the Artemis astronaut couches, except that her head was strapped in a fixed position.

  Surrounding the chair were aluminum tubes that formed a three-axis gimbal rig. I say “aluminum tubes,” but they were really more like cages. Each one could move independently of the others, tumbling the chair over on the roll, pitch, and yaw axes.

  Right now, Nicole was rotating at a leisurely 15 rpm, but the thing could get up to 30 rpm. In theory, it gave us a sense of the sort of tumbling that might happen during a space mission, although if anyone were ever tumbling at 3
0 rpm, something would have gone terribly, terribly wrong.

  I leaned against the wall of the control room, waiting with Jacira and Betty for our turn. An actual scientist ran the test, but our evaluation was done by one of the other astronauts, which is why Parker stood at the observation window with a stopwatch in one hand.

  Betty stood next to Parker and tried to seem relaxed, but she had too much makeup on, which did nothing to mask the puffy bags under her eyes. I gathered from watercooler chatter that her testimony at the UN hearings about the discrimination charges had been rough. It was hard not to feel bad for her.

  A nitrogen-gas jet hissed as Nicole tried to cancel out the rotation. It looked like she was going for pitch first. The jet popped and fired again.

  A whole series of cameras chattered along with it. I’d left the Miltown at home because I couldn’t risk having my reflexes slowed for this test. My stomach turned knots even before I got into the chair.

  At least they’d made the reporters stop using flashes in here, though I suppose you could argue that the strobing would be good practice for being disoriented in space.

  My right hand twitched, trying to anticipate the amount of gas and the timing Nicole would need to slow the pitch down.

  Jacira pulled her hair back from the nape of her neck. “Hey, boss, how much is this really like space?”

  Parker shrugged. “Not much.”

  “So why do we have to do it?”

  He shook his head, focused on the stopwatch and the window. “Come on, Wargin … You got this.”

  Moments later, the pitch evened out and Nicole started working on the roll. It was tricky, because you still had to manage the pitch, but she’d been getting faster each time.

  The jets popped with fast little bursts of gas as Nicole stabilized the yaw. Parker nodded. “Good … See how she’s doing a double tap?”

  I cocked my head, listening to the jets fire as much as watching them. “Is that better than a slow sustain?”

  “When you’re trying to gauge how much force it will take? Yes.” He shifted his weight off of his left leg and rolled his ankle a little. “The trouble with the slow sustain is that it might not be enough to make a difference, and you can bleed off a lot of fuel without realizing it.”

  Outside, the jets popped twice more, then gave a sustained hiss as Nicole got rid of the yaw rotation.

  I watched Parker set his foot down and the way he shifted his weight, as if he were testing it. Clearing my throat, I took a step closer to him. “Should we schedule some more T-38 time?”

  He almost looked away from the window, but arrested the movement and stared at Nicole spinning around and around. “Not necessary.”

  Since that trip to the clinic, he had only asked for one other side trip. We’d done other training, and I kept waiting for him to rat me out, but so far, he’d just been his usual condescending self—except when he taught. I almost liked him then.

  “Why do we have to do it?” Betty laid a hand on Parker’s arm, a disturbingly intimate gesture. “If the gimbal isn’t like space?”

  “It’s not, sweetheart. But it’s more like it than most things you’ll find on Earth.” He clicked the timer off. “Good. York, suit up. Wargin’s been in there enough times today.”

  My heart ratcheted up to a higher gear. I tried to tell myself that it was excitement—well … I mean, it was. I liked the gimbal rig. I just didn’t like having to run the gauntlet of reporters to get there.

  Parker walked to the door and rested his hand on the technician’s shoulder. “Good job with her. Get the logs for me?”

  “Yes, sir.” The tech straightened up, as if just having Parker touch him had somehow revitalized him.

  “Excuse me.” Betty put her hands on her hips. “This is our third time here, and I haven’t had a turn yet.”

  Parker barely cast a glance over his shoulder. “I’m not being paid to waste time, or the government’s resources. You just keep being pretty, and writing your little articles.”

  Juuuuust when you thought he wasn’t so bad. I mean, I didn’t disagree with him, but I wouldn’t actually say that out loud.

  Wait … no. I had said things that bad about Betty before. That’s why she had to testify to Congress. I sighed and turned to her. Her cheeks had gone red, and she had pulled out her reporter’s notebook.

  “You okay?”

  “Of course!” She smiled brightly and jotted a note. “Just need to describe what one of these tests looks like. It’s easier to do that as an observer. Right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Better get going, or Parker will have your ass.”

  I headed to the door, grabbing my helmet from the bench. One of the technicians was helping Nicole out of the gimbal cage, while Parker stood and talked with her. By his hand gestures, he was giving her some tips about the pitch corrections she’d made. I think his patience as a teacher was part of what blindsided me every time we clashed.

  I very deliberately stopped in front of the reporters to put my helmet on. Much like the other astronaut skills I was practicing, I had been trying to desensitize myself to the reporters. Today I focused on posing without seeming to pose. Who knew that astronauts had to do so much modeling?

  “Elma! What’s been the most exciting task today?”

  It was always tempting to say something like “Getting my nails done,” except I knew that they’d print it. “Today I simmed terminal docking maneuvers and tried to fine-tune RHC inputs through an overly generous deadband.”

  See, learning acronyms was useful for something.

  The cameras snapped and whirred as I strapped the helmet on. This was fine. They weren’t a threat, and I knew what they wanted. Maybe that was the key to my anxiety in general: figuring out what people wanted from me. Although, if I kept that in mind, I would have gotten my flight suit tailored to show off my shape a little more, like I’m pretty sure Nicole had done. As she walked toward me from the gimbal rig, her waist nipped in just a little more than seemed possible in these boxy overalls.

  Parker followed her, smiling at the reporters. His limp didn’t seem so bad today, just a slight favoring of the left leg, and only if you were looking for it.

  “Colonel Parker! How are the ladies doing?”

  “They’re a credit to their nations.” He gave that shit-eating grin of his. “We’re all very proud of them.”

  I headed for the gimbal rig, eager to see if I could drop my time from my last run.

  “Any truth to the rumor that you’re being replaced on the moon landing?”

  The room went silent. Even the hum of the generators seemed to pause in mid-oscillation. Parker went pale, but his smile never faded. “I’d be curious to know your sources, but yes.”

  I hadn’t told anyone anything. God. What had Nathaniel done?

  The room snapped back into motion. All of the reporters were shouting questions at Parker now. He held his hands up and, miraculously, they responded by shushing.

  “I have a lingering war injury that needs some attention, so the agency and I decided that it would be better to attend to that.” He gave another smile. “I’m sure you understand that I can’t make any speculation about who is going to replace me. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have some testing to do. York. Get in the chair.”

  Parker walked away from all of us. Instead of heading back into the observation booth, he left the room entirely.

  I hadn’t told. Goddamn it. I hadn’t told anyone. But there wasn’t a chance in hell that Parker would believe me.

  Smiling at the tech, who stood by to strap me into the rig, I gave a little shrug. “I need to run to the ladies’ room. Back in a flash.”

  I hurried across the lab and out the door that Parker had used. As the door swung open, I caught him straightening from the wall, as if he’d been leaning against it, and only the sound of the door had brought him upright. He looked over his shoulder with an easy smile.

  It fell from his face when he saw me. “I
told you to get in the chair.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone.” Besides Nathaniel, of course. But he’d said he would tell me before he took any action.

  Parker’s face stayed blank, but he looked at the floor. “I did.”

  I was still about ten feet away from him, but that stopped me in my tracks. “But—”

  “I have bone spurs in my neck, likely from ejections during my test pilot days. They’re pressing on my spinal column.” He shrugged, as if that was somehow no big deal. “I know what you think of me, but believe it or not, I care more about the program than I do about my place in it. I would have been a danger.”

  “I’m—” What do you say to that? “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Surgery. Tomorrow, actually.”

  “Is there … is there anything I can do?”

  “Yeah. Get in the fucking chair. Like I told you to.” He raised his head and took a step closer. “And don’t insult either of us by pretending you care.”

  “Wow … You really do practice being offensive.”

  The side of Parker’s mouth curled. “Go. When I come back, you’d damn well better have mastered that thing.”

  “Yes, sir.” For a moment there, he’d seemed human. I forgot who I was dealing with.

  “Just so we’re clear, you still need to keep your head down and do as you’re told. So long as you aren’t a threat to the program, my lips remain sealed.” He took another step. “You earned that much, but the moment I think you’re a danger, you’re out. Are we clear?”

  Swallowing, I nodded. Ironically, I wished that I hadn’t left the Miltown at home.

  * * *

  The rumor mill said that if Parker hadn’t done the bone spur surgery, he’d risk paralyzation, which made the whole “I care more about the program” thing complete bunk. Of course, the rumor mill also said that aliens had implanted probes in him.

  The Monday-morning staff meeting started with Clemons and his usual cloud of cigar smoke. “So. The first thing is to let you all know that Colonel Parker has come through his surgery just fine. No complications, and we should see him back here in a month or so.”