by Steve Haynes
There’s nothing out there. I stare into the black dark just like I do every night, and there’s still nothing. I don’t see how that’s possible. How can I accuse Rick of lying; how can I accuse him of anything worse than lying when there’s nothing out there? If we’re where I suspect we are then there shouldn’t be nothing – there should be trojans and centaurs and dwarf planets. There should be asteroids and ices and early warning collision alarms. I’m not an astronaut; I’m not even an astrophysicist. I don’t know enough to mount any kind of attack never mind a defence, but this is what I know, this is what I feel down to my wasting bones and muscles: we are not going home. Regardless of where we are now – where I think we are now – that is the biggest and most irrefutable lie of them all. Rick telling me that we’ve turned around and are going home.
I crane left, imagining the vast solar sail behind us, mercilessly pushing us forwards. And it is vast. When I saw 3D simulations of our ship in flight, our octahedral capsule looked like a little blemish – an imperfection – surrounded by brilliant, golden mirrors reflecting the sun. According to the manual, our solar sail has a surface area of 600,000 square metres. Rick must have told me about 600,000 times that this is the size of ten square blocks in New York City. We never got to see it in the flesh because it was unfurled from our cargo bay once we’d left orbit, but in darker moments I imagine its brilliant face turned and tacked by unseen hands, reflecting photons like balls bounced off a wall, propelling us further and further away from their thrower.
I sit down at the table again and strap myself in. I’ve stopped crying already because crying in zero gravity is a horrible experience – another reminder that my body is not my own anymore. I look at the walls surrounding the dubious relief of the window. They’re lined with black bags and I’m sick of seeing them; they are another example of theory being a better beast than practice. In the beginning, those polythene bags were filled with water and food: a nuclei-rich, half metre thick shield against radiation that was more effective than even metal or the vast water tanks between the living modules and the storage bays.
As we used them up, Rick switched them with bags of our collected shit. The capsule’s water recycling system dehydrates them by osmosis, leaving hydrocarbon-rich waste behind. All very clever, of course. But now there’s no escaping the fact that there is more dried shit lining our living room walls than there is food or water. And there’s no escaping the fact that we breathe recycled air and drink recycled water that was once what our bodies expelled – what they no longer wanted. Everything is used up and then used up again. Nothing goes to waste. It makes me want to scream. Ad infinity is not an option here, but sometimes it doesn’t feel that way at all.
I ball my hands into little fists and hiss other words under my breath: ad hoc, ad nauseam; I have no idea why, which is probably just as well because they make me feel better. If I allow myself to think of the black bags and the water shield tanks behind them and then the three metre wide storage corridor encircling our living space behind them, I might scream and never stop. Even though Rick laughs at most of my Alien movies references, that’s the one he knows I’ll never use. Because it’s true. In space, no one can hear you scream. No one that can help you, at least. No one that wants to.
They isolated us – all twenty-some candidates – for twelve months inside a terrarium called Biosphere 3, just outside Tucson, Arizona. It was before all the TV companies came on board, so it was half-arsed at best. We could come and go as we pleased – although there was nowhere to go, there were plenty deliveries, plenty parties in the desert. Rick got more out of it than me, because he was on the Infinity astronaut program and I was only another lab tech, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the experience. It was nothing like this because it was no preparation for this. And because we were so far down the list of potential candidates that we didn’t even need to pretend that it might be.
They wanted a couple. A married couple. Ostensibly because of the confinement to such close quarters and the length of time of the expedition: two and a half years to our destination and about the same back again, but also because of the symbolism. Rick and I represent humanity: the Adam and Eve of a new era. Only I’m not the one who tempted him with the apple, I’m pretty certain of that.
I hadn’t liked the favourites. Experienced astronauts, as arrogant as they were foregone conclusions; I’ve forgotten their names. I’d laughed when they were pulled because they’d got stuck on the US-SS and couldn’t get back in time to launch. Bill and Stella Flack were their initial replacements: the chief technical officer of the project and his physicist wife. She got pregnant at the eleventh hour, and remembering his blustering swagger aboard Biosphere 3, I imagine that he was pissed to say the least. There were others, of course, lots of them. I stopped laughing around the time I realised that the candidates were dwindling to an alarmingly low number. I cried the night that Rick’s bleep went off; I cried harder when I watched him crouched over the kitchen counter, phone in hand, his too-white teeth getting bigger.
Space exploration is now exclusively the domain of entrepreneurs and private enterprise. Our expedition has been funded by rap stars and millionaires and TV execs and ex-engineers still greedy for what was denied them in their government careers. The rest of it is advertising and television rights. After we were signed up, we spent more time talking to dicks in shiny suits standing in front of cameras and sound booms than we did training in the Astro labs or the space centre itself.
I remember watching one online interview with the deputy director of Astro Infinity a few weeks before the launch date. When asked about the not inconsiderable risk, he’d waxed lyrical about why it was a risk worth taking: that it harkened back to the days when taking risks to further humanity’s knowledge was commonplace; that our expedition was Meaningful. Inspirational. The interviewer’s next question had been whether or not he expected us to have sex in transit. That answer got far more hits. And that was the last night that I begged Rick to reconsider, to forfeit our contract, sell the house, pay the fine – anything. He didn’t even bother to say no.
I am the weakest link, of course. I’m a lab tech, a grunt, a non-entity. And I’m not American. Rick is a mediocre astronaut, rejected by government programmes, and until now a sailor of not even the closest stars, but he’s the All American Jock that the TV studios love to love, and back when I was a struggling student, I modelled underwear online. There were posters of us everywhere, dedicated websites and adzines and pop-ups and cookies. I was almost glad when the launch day came around just so I could escape. Stupid.
I wake up still strapped to my chair. Rick knocks his arm against me as he comes around the table’s edge, handing me another rectangular bar. I don’t say thank you because he doesn’t say anything about me not waking up in bed with him; about spending an entire night sat at a table. I chew the bar – it tastes of synthetic apple – and drink my water. Rick avoids my eyes, though I don’t try very hard to meet his. My fear is alive now, bubbling under the surface like magma, reminding me of what we’ve long left behind.
Rick picks up the remains of our rubbish and disposes of it before kissing me on the cheek. He grabs my left tit and flashes his white teeth. ‘No offence.’
I try on a far weaker smile that pulls tight my skin. ‘Look into my eye.’
‘See ya later, honey.’ As if he’s going to the office via the subway or Route 25, instead of coasting less than three feet to his computer station, next to the clearspan floor deck; as if we didn’t have to catch the escape of someone(s)’s blood post-orgasm where it floated in an ugly, perfect sphere towards the capsule ceiling the night before.
‘Carpe diem,’ I mutter, grinding my teeth. I need to pee, but I hate using the toilet – as much for the effort as the inevitable sample results (a constant flux of galactic cosmic rays has caused tracks of radiation damage in our biological tissues, altering our DNA and lowering our blood c
ell counts; we’re already long past the three percentage points expected over an astronaut’s entire career) – so I pretend that I don’t. Instead, I push past Rick and his studiously faked industry and then into the smaller medical module.
I don’t look at the collated data, nor do I attempt to send it, even though I should have already done so days before. I’m no longer afraid of what that data shows because there’s little point, but I’ll be buggered if I let them see what they’ve done to us – even if I suspect that they already know.
There’s a laminated A4 page tacked above my computer, a joke that Rick thought might make things better 2.7 years ago:
Lena’s Shit List:
GCRs
SEPs
Zero Gravity
Rationing
Re-entry
Her Fuck-buddy
I grab hold of the cycle ergometer, spin myself around onto its saddle and strap myself in. It’s only once I’ve started exercising that I remember to be more angry than afraid. Rick used to make a lot of jokes about re-entry. A lot. They were only funny while I believed it was still a possibility. While we both did. Now it’s just another thing that we don’t talk about.
It was good at first – aren’t most things? We’ve long left the rocky planets and gas giants behind, but I can still remember the moment we bypassed Jupiter, its pull tremendous enough to slow us to a brief crawl. I remember Rick and I clutching hands as we hung onto the handles either side of the viewing window, watching the white upwelling bands and red downwelling bands, laughing at the tiny black shadow of Europa, trying to find the undulating Great Red Spot; the latter a game that never got old: Spot the Spot. We never did.
After Jupiter, our acceleration began increasing, our continuous thrust gaining a momentum far beyond what we’d been led to expect. I’d wondered a little about that – about the laser beams that had been under development in the Astro labs and how they could supplement the sun’s dwindling power at increasing distances. There had been no point asking Rick; he knew as much as me and resented it a lot more.
I start to cry again as my wasted legs pump back and forth, their weakness trembling up into my pelvis.
Ipso facto, caveat emptor. Memento mori.
I loved him. I love him. And I’m scared. When I let myself think; when I let myself know, those are the only two things left. We reached Pluto over two months ago. Astro wanted to assess the contracture of its atmosphere: it’s getting further and further from the sun and yet its atmosphere appears to be getting thicker, bigger. It’s one of the few remaining mysteries of our solar system, but neither Rick nor I have grown any wiser in that regard: all data was collected via telescopes and particle spectrometers; we didn’t have to do anything at all.
Finally reaching Pluto was an anti-climax, partly because it wasn’t Jupiter and mostly because I had a stomach upset that confined me to the cabin for most of the flyby. If you’ve never puked in zero gravity, if you’ve never had to wear an adult nappy because you physically can’t strap yourself onto a toilet and aim at a point narrower than a bulls-eye, you can’t begin to empathise. By the time I could think beyond any of it, our destination had been reached and we were already going back home, our sail turned and tacked towards the sun. Or so I’d thought.
My thighs shake and shake until I finally stop, my fingers curling against my chest, touching my heartbeat. I can feel my fury dissipating like a coastal fog. I need to feel like there’s still something I can do; I need something to happen.
And then it does. There’s a gentle hum – no more than that – and then the alarms start going off, flashing fast red. Rick shouts, sounding more alive than he has done for weeks, months.
And I think, is this it? Have we got a collision alarm? Will we see an ice, a short-period comet? Will I finally be able to say – see? I knew we weren’t going back, I fucking knew it! But as I manage to get free, I hear the servomotor start up and realise that the capsule is turning with the sail in a manoeuvre that was practiced again and again in pilot simulations, and that the alarms are those that warn not of collision but of radiation, which can only mean one thing. A solar flare.
My disappointment is so great that it seems to weigh me down. In the end, Rick is forced to come to the medical module to get me. His face is the colour of ash, his jaw working as if he’s grinding his teeth. I’d forgotten that he could look this way; that he was capable of anything beyond a flat and distant stare.
‘Lena, come on! They’re turning the ship!’
We collide in an ugly embrace, and then he manages to turn us around. We drift through the living area towards our cabin, alarms sounding and flashing all around us, the servomotor humming, and I start to laugh, I can’t help it – an ugly sound pitched far too high. When we reach the cabin, Rick pushes us towards its furthest wall, and there we hunker down where we’re best shielded from the outside, using the bed’s restraints to keep us there.
‘Close your eyes, baby,’ Rick says, and I give him a sharp stare, wondering if he’s being cruel, wondering if he’s turning one of my few remaining defences against me. But he only looks afraid, he only looks concerned. And so I do.
A week after the solar flare, I take more samples from us both and feed the results into the med computer. It’ll take a few hours to properly process our readings against the Rhesus macaque prediction model, not that there’s anything I can do if the results are bad. We’re not dead and we don’t have acute radiation sickness, so I guess the worst we can hope for is reduction of our overall immune system resistance. I’m beginning to suspect that our long-term life expectancy is academic. It’s ironic, I suppose, that it’s our very distance from home that has probably saved us, but I can’t bring myself to feel grateful about that.
We knew the risks, Rick keeps telling me, his blank game face having survived intact. And he’s right, of course. They told us that we had at least a twenty percent chance of experiencing a fatal SEP event and nearly a fifty percent chance of experiencing the kind of flare that would kill fifty percent of us in fifty days. I remember Rick laughing at that one: ‘wonder which one of us will be the fifty percent?’ I’m also pretty certain that there’s been some damage to the ship; there are still occasional alarms and Rick spends much of his time hunched over his computer, looking at endless streams of data. I don’t understand most of it – not that Rick likes me to look at all, though I know the password – but what I do understand I don’t like.
‘We’re not slowing down.’
Rick doesn’t look up from the table, doesn’t answer, just goes on chewing his bloody dinner like he’s enjoying it.
‘Rick, we’re not slowing down and even I know that we should be. The photons’ pressure on the sails should be working against us now, but they’re not. If anything, we’re going faster.’ My voice drops to a whisper that nearly acknowledges how shit scared I am; that nearly lets me imagine our tiny capsule hurtling into black, starless oblivion. When Rick doesn’t even stop chewing, I scream high and loud, hard enough to hurt my throat. ‘We’re going fucking faster!’
Rick swallows, and then silently plucks my uneaten bar from my hands. ‘Are you gonna eat that, sweetcheeks?’
I swallow my fear, I swallow my fury, and the effort is so great that I can’t answer him. After a mute second, he unwraps it and starts to eat.
‘Where are we, Rick?’ I’m a biologist and a mathematician. I have two PhDs and my research into hypokinetic and metabolic disorders associated with prolonged zero gravity had Astro Infinity offer me first a five and then six figure salary ten years ago, but all of my work was theoretical, the minutiae of space travel – not sailing ships and solar flares and walls of my own crap. Never once during those ten years spent in the Astro labs was I afraid of them – those men with no faces in boardroom suits. Not once did it occur to me that they would lie. They told Rick that this was his only chance and they told him th
at I was part of the deal, and I spent so long trying to get out of going, trying to convince Rick that it was a bad idea that I never once stopped to consider the offer itself. Why us. Non compos mentos.
‘We’re in the Kuiper Belt, aren’t we?’
Rick chews, chews, chews.
‘Please, Rick, just tell me.’ My fingers pull into tight, white fists. ‘I already know we are, so just fucking tell me. We never turned around at all, did we?’
Rick looks at me with his grey-blue eyes. ‘I’ve sent them a message.’
My heart momentarily stills. ‘You have?’
He nods, offering me the kind of smile that used to make everything better, but before I can ask him what was in the message, what he asked them, what he hopefully demanded of them, his smile grows teeth and he leans closer across the table. ‘But if I were you, baby doll, I’d be more worried about the things in the walls.’
My heart stutters, stalls, stutters again. I think the word what, but I don’t say it because I’m suddenly more afraid of Rick than I am of men with no faces in boardroom suits or even of where we are.
He winks, unstraps himself from the table and then deposits his empty wrappers inside the disposal system. ‘We’re in the pipe, five by five.’
I shudder as he drifts past me on the way to our cabin. He chuckles, but I notice him cast a quick glance like a tic towards the storage hatch, his forehead briefly furrowing. When he looks back at me, his smile has teeth again. ‘Ready when you are, sweetcheeks. Boy, are you gonna be sore tomorrow.’
The bile rushes into my throat as he disappears from view. I’m shaking, shaking, but as all my attention is focussed on not being sick, I hardly notice. When the worst of it passes, I unstrap myself and get up. I pull my body towards the viewing window because I can’t bear the thought of being near this Rick, of letting him touch me and fuck me, of letting him make me pretend along with him.