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Page 15
He stopped walking. “So,” he said.
Airin stopped, too, turning to look at him. They were only a few houses away from their place.
“What?” she asked.
“The issue with WPW is abnormal electric pathways in the heart, right? And once that problem is solved, that’s it. Complete recovery. So why couldn’t you be an astronaut if you wanted to? What’s holding you back if it’s still something you’re interested in?”
She stared at him. Then she pulled her hand away from his and took a step back.
“Don’t be stupid.”
Her cheeks were red, and she looked almost angry.
“Why is that stupid?” he asked. “Things have changed since John Glenn and Alan Shepard went through NASA’s crazy testing program.”
She folded her arms. “Come on, Hunter. You know standards are still strict. They want the healthiest people they can find, people who can endure the rigors of space travel. They turn people down if they’ve ever had kidney stones. Even one.”
“You know why that is. In micro-g, calcium is leached out of your bones. That increases the risk of kidney stones. Those suck enough on Earth, but in space they could be fatal. Other things are a down-check, too. Some respiratory issues, for instance. But I broke my arm once and my collarbone twice and they didn’t turn me down.”
She turned away slightly, her body language defensive. “You know it’s not the same. Once a bone is healed, it’s no more or less likely to break than any other part of your body.”
“Well, you said your heart was recovered completely. You said—”
“Stop it.”
It was the second time she’d snapped at him.
“I didn’t mean to piss you off,” he said after a moment.
She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment, frowning down at the sidewalk. Then she looked up again.
“You didn’t. I mean . . . not really. It’s just that with a hundred thousand people wanting to go into space, you know they can find plenty of candidates who’ve never had a heart condition. The selection committees are risk averse, Hunter. You know they are. Why would they introduce any element of uncertainty into their program when there are already so many things they can’t control?”
“So you’ve thought about it, then.”
She stared at him for a moment, then turned away and started walking. “I don’t want to talk about this.”
He fell into step beside her. “Okay. Sorry.”
He didn’t say anything else, just walked at her side until they reached the house. He’d pushed her enough for tonight.
He missed the feel of her hand in his. He’d sacrificed the sweetness that had been building between them since he’d showed her the rainbow, and he didn’t know if it had been the right thing to do. Had bringing up her old dream helped her or hurt her?
In one way, though, it had definitely been a good thing. That sweetness could be dangerous to both of them. Addictive. Disorienting. The kind of thing that led to bad decisions and car crashes on the Pali Highway.
The kind of thing that changed lives.
They crossed the front yard and climbed the three steps that led up to the front door. He held it open for her, and Airin walked through.
She crossed to the foot of the stairs and turned to face him. “Thank you for showing me the rainbow. It was a lovely walk.”
She sounded polite, almost formal. Once again he missed the intimacy they fell into so easily, and once again he told himself it was better to avoid those moments. “You’re welcome. Is there anything in particular you want for Chinese food, or should I just get a bunch of stuff?”
“A bunch of stuff sounds good.”
She smiled a little stiffly, and then she turned away.
Chapter Fifteen
Airin replayed that last conversation as she climbed the stairs. She’d sounded like an eight-year-old thanking an adult for a birthday present.
Thank you for showing me the rainbow. It was a lovely walk.
Going into her room, she could feel the tension in her muscles. She decided that this time, even if there were cockroaches in the tub, she was going to run herself a hot bath. Her shoulders were up around her ears, her ribs were aching, and she felt discombobulated.
Her father had used that word once when she was little, and she’d loved the way it sounded. She’d asked him what it meant, and he told her to look it up, which had been his standard response to a request for a definition.
Confused or disconcerted, the dictionary had informed her.
She’d looked up disconcerted.
Perturbed.
She’d looked up perturbed.
Disturbed; confused; made uneasy or anxious.
“I feel uneasy and anxious,” she told her reflection in the bathroom mirror a few minutes later as the hot water splashed into the stoppered tub.
Astronaut candidates were often deliberately put into situations designed to make them uneasy or anxious. The ones who advanced to the next round of training were the ones who kept going in spite of it. The ones who could function while discombobulated.
A year and a half ago, when she was lying in the prep room before her last surgery, the thought had come to her that dealing with a heart condition was excellent preparation for a life in space. You had to cope with a lack of privacy, with being confined and restricted, with spending time indoors surrounded by metal and plastic and the omnipresence of machinery. You had to cope with fear and boredom, too—an astronaut’s constant companions in space.
The tub was full. She stepped out of her clothes and into the water, and God, it felt good. Of course heat wasn’t really the best thing for her type of injury—she’d make up for it by icing afterward—but that was counterbalanced by the good it was doing the rest of her.
She leaned her head back on the lip of the tub, closed her eyes, and sighed.
That was another problem being in a hospital shared with being in space. Most of the ways people had developed to de-stress weren’t available. You couldn’t take hot baths, you couldn’t meet someone for coffee, you couldn’t shop, you couldn’t have pets, you couldn’t down a fifth of vodka as a last resort.
But putting up with the confinement and the lack of privacy and a narrow world of metal and plastic, putting up with the fear and the boredom and the lack of de-stressing opportunities, would be worth it for the larger goal of going into space.
Especially going to Mars.
Enduring seven months of hardship and restriction in order to reach another world would be a million times better than enduring them for the dubious goal of saving one human life.
Even if that life was her own.
She opened her eyes.
She’d thought she’d given up on the old dream years ago. What was more pathetic than hanging on to a wish that would never come true?
And yet . . .
She’d studied Russian on her own as a teenager. She’d never told her mother or her tutors or anyone else. It was something she’d done just for herself.
And when she’d trained in the exercise room her mother had built for her or swam in the Olympic-length pool, she’d been aware of how many astronauts were distance runners or distance swimmers. The willpower and discipline needed to run a marathon was a lot like the willpower and discipline needed to become an astronaut.
She couldn’t get a pilot’s license, but she’d looked at the ground-school training videos online. And after the doctors had pronounced her fully recovered, she’d had them fill out the medical certificate she’d need to begin flight training.
But she’d never mentioned it to her mother, and she’d never followed up on it.
What do you want to do with your life? she’d been asking herself.
And all along, she’d known the answer.
How could she have been so blind?
She wanted to see things no human being had ever seen before. She wanted to walk on an alien world. Most of all, she wanted to be involved with some
thing that was bigger than she was, bigger than any one person.
Traveling to Mars would be a mission for the entire human race. Even if you died trying to get there or trying to survive there, your struggle and your efforts would teach the crew that came after you. They would build on what you had done, and the next generation would build on that. And on and on, until they finally made it work.
Until they had a self-sustaining community on Mars. A community of people free to explore, to innovate, to learn how to survive on a world they weren’t born for. Free to look for signs of alien life. Free to begin a process that would lead, someday, beyond the solar system.
She sat up in the tub, pulled out the stopper, and stepped out onto the mat as the water drained. She toweled off quickly and incompletely, leaving her hair still dripping down her back, and put on the robe she’d hung on the back of the door.
It was a beautiful robe, a birthday gift from one of her mother’s assistants a few years back. It was cream-colored chenille, like something you’d find in a spa, and while its cozy absorptiveness made it the perfect post-bath garment, it only occurred to her after she was standing in Hunter’s doorway that it wasn’t exactly a dignified thing to wear for a conversation.
But it was too late to think about that now.
Hunter was at his desk, running what looked like a flight simulator program on his computer. He paused the program when he heard her behind him and turned his chair around, taking her damp appearance in stride.
“Hey,” he said.
She took a deep breath.
“Did you know the first submariners underestimated how much they would miss the natural world, stuck in a tin can for months at a time? They had to come up with ways to address it. They gave crew members time to listen to whale songs and other ocean noises at the sonar station. They gave them periscope time so they could look at clouds and see birds, and so they could retain their distance-vision muscles. Those get screwed up in a submarine, where the farthest away you ever look is a few yards.”
Hunter looked at her for a moment. Then he leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. The movement made his triceps look particularly well defined, but she refused to be distracted by that.
“I sense you’re going somewhere with this,” he said.
“Astronauts say the ability to see Earth’s beauty is one of the best things about space travel. But the astronauts who go to Mars and the colonists who try to live there won’t have that. It’ll be the first time in history that human beings will see Mother Earth reduced to insignificance in the sky. It’ll get smaller and smaller until it’s the size of any other star, just another dot in the heavens. Scientists don’t know how humans will respond to that. They call it Earth-out-of-view syndrome, and they don’t know what the effects will be.”
Hunter nodded slowly. “Okay. And?”
“You love Hawaii, don’t you? I can see it in the way you look at the ocean. At the valley we’re living in. At the sky. At the rain.” She gestured toward the window. “The surface of Mars is as different from Hawaii as it’s possible to be. Cold, dry, barren. No liquid water. No plants. No animals. No soft air against your cheek. No scent of flowers, no sound of raindrops.”
He nodded again. “Is there a question coming?”
“Are you sure going to Mars is something you really want to do?”
He unclasped his hands from behind his head and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he grinned at her.
“Yeah.”
She wasn’t really surprised by his answer. She’d seen his commitment before now. But then, it wasn’t really him she was questioning.
“Just like that? Can you really be so sure?”
“Yeah.”
She leaned against the door frame. For a minute, maybe longer, they just looked at each other.
Then she took a deep breath.
“I want to go, too.”
Those hazel eyes were locked on hers. “I know,” he said.
Of course he did. Hunter was a flyboy, an astronaut, a human being willing to take unimaginable risks to go into thin air, into space, into places where people don’t belong. He knew exactly what that kind of insanity looked like in someone else.
“But I also know I won’t be going,” she said. “That’s why I don’t like to think about it. To talk about it.”
“I understand,” he said, and she could tell he really did. “But I don’t agree. You know that luck and desire play as big a role in getting chosen as any specific skill set. We’d all love to believe it’s a completely logical and straightforward process, but it’s not.”
“So you’re saying I might somehow get into space, but if so, it would be because logic and straightforwardness went out the window.”
He grinned again. “Exactly. But look at Apollo 13. Nothing those guys expected to happen happened. That’s life. And you’ve got something going for you that most people in space programs don’t have.”
“Really? What’s that?”
“Nepotism.”
Did he actually believe that was an advantage? The thought of sharing any of this with her mother made her slump against the door frame. But slumping hurt her ribs, so she stood up straight again.
“That’s just one more thing working against me. My mother would never let me be part of her Mars mission, and the other private companies would think I was a spy or something if I applied to their programs. And NASA would never pass me because of my medical history.”
“I don’t think any of that is necessarily true. But you don’t have to worry about it.”
She stared at him. “I don’t have to worry about it?”
“Nope. Because worrying about it won’t change a damn thing. You’re going to behave like any other aspiring astronaut. You’re going to get an advanced degree in something you enjoy that would also be useful on a manned mission to Mars. You’re going to stay in peak physical condition. In addition to your chosen field, you’re going to study planetary science and rocket design schematics and a hundred other things. You’re going to go through survival training and weightless training and g-force training and any other hellish scenario you can think of. Along the way you’ll apply to every program looking for candidates to go to Mars. You’ll deal with one problem at a time, like any good explorer does. And when you get your call to adventure, you’ll be ready.”
A strange feeling was flooding through her. As Hunter talked, what he was saying seemed almost . . . possible. Inevitable, even. As though all she had to do was put one foot in front of the other and eventually she’d end up on Mars.
The odds were against her. Astronomically so, in fact. They were for everyone who wanted to go into space. The question was, would she enjoy the journey even if she never reached her destination?
The answer was yes.
She started to smile, and Hunter was smiling back at her.
Then she noticed, suddenly, that her hair had begun to drip.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, backing out of his room and into the hallway. “I got water on your floor. I’ll get a towel and—”
“Come back in here,” Hunter said. “And close the door.”
She obeyed almost without thinking, crossing his threshold again as he rose to his feet and came toward her.
Something about the look in his eyes made her cinch her robe a little tighter at the waist and grab hold of the lapels with one hand. She leaned back against the door she’d just closed.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, her heart pounding.
He stopped less than a foot away from her. “Nothing.”
She swallowed. “Something is. You’re looking at me like . . .” She stopped.
Her cheeks were hot, her pulse crazy. It felt like she would never get used to how big Hunter was, how broad his shoulders were. It felt like there was no end to his strength, as though he were a stone wall or a mountain.
“Your hair is wet,” he said, his voice low and rough.
“I know.” Her voice was trembling, and she cleared her throat. “I told you I’m dripping on your floor. I was going to get a towel, but you . . . you said to come back in here.”
He stepped a little closer, and she didn’t have enough air to breathe.
God, his eyes were intense.
No one had ever looked at her like this. Like something inside her made him alive, somehow.
“Airin.” His voice was soft now, almost a whisper. “You’re so beautiful. So beautiful and so brave.”
Her heart was going to fly right out of her body.
“I’m not brave. If you only knew how scared I—”
But she didn’t get a chance to finish that sentence. He put his hands flat on the back of the door, caging her between his powerful arms.
Then he leaned in and kissed her.
His arms weren’t touching her. His chest wasn’t touching her. Only his mouth was on her mouth, and she knew that even in the grip of the intensity she’d seen in his eyes he was worried about her, afraid of hurting her ribs.
He tasted so good. Like a flavor she’d experienced once and would never forget, a flavor she could spend the rest of her life chasing.
His tongue stroked against hers like he had all the time in the world, and she was melting like chocolate in the sun. Her bones were turning to water, and it was sheer survival instinct that made her reach up and grab fistfuls of his T-shirt in her hands.
But the quick, desperate movement made her yelp in sudden pain, and before she could tell him It’s fine, keep going, don’t stop, he’d jerked his head away and was staring down at her like he’d driven a knife through her heart.
“Shit. I’m so sorry, Airin. Are you okay?”
Now she could say it. “I’m fine. Don’t stop.”
Her breath was short and shallow. Her hands gripped his shirt as though glued there by some electromagnetic force.
He covered her hands with his and slowly, inexorably, broke the connection between them.
“Are your ribs okay?”