Life Among the Terranauts

by Caitlin Horrocks

  That night Igor and I sneak off to the North Lung, even though I promised myself I’d stop. The air in NovaTerra expands and contracts with the temperature, and the lungs give the air an escape route; they keep us from exploding into a supernova of glass and metal over the desert. The lungs themselves are the only part of NovaTerra not made of glass; they’re concrete, two gray domes rising out of the scrub. The boobs of the desert, Campbell says, although since the biomes and the habitat pod sit right between them, from the air, NovaTerra wouldn’t look like a woman, or like anything else. Just a straight line with a circle on either end and a bunch of glinting squares in the middle, a blacktop parking lot to one side.

  Igor’s brought a flashlight and we shine shadow pictures on the dome walls. When we first came, we made elephants, giraffes, the easiest things. Now we make lemurs, scorpions—the creatures of our current world. Igor makes an armadillo, lumpy knuckles and his thumb a winking eye. “I saw one today,” he says, “after the monsoon.”

  “An armadillo? We don’t have any. They weren’t on the list.”

  “I know. But I saw one.”

  “It wasn’t, like—” I try to think of things in NovaTerra that can look like other things. We have a limited stable of objects. “A potato?”

  “We don’t even have potatoes anymore.”

  “I know. But we don’t have armadillos either.”

  Igor and I made sense together the first year not because we were ever perfect, but because we were the youngest, because we were about the same level of attractive in our jumpsuits, and because there are only so many combinations six people can make. Because he didn’t like beets either, and we passed funny notes to each other in staff meetings before the paper shortage, and because he told me that he saw in me, even though I was really just NovaTerra’s mechanic, a seriousness of belief. “This place means something to you,” he once told me. I don’t know if it’s still true.

  It’s been a long time since we came to the lung, and I forgot to bring a blanket. We lie down and I can feel every vertebra pressing against the concrete. Igor pulls my head onto his shoulder. The flashlight is on the floor, still lit; from my angle it looks like light breaking over a horizon, the beginning of a sunrise across Igor’s bony chest.

  “Eve,” he says.

  “That’s not my name.”

  “Eve of the Terranauts.”

  “I’m not going to say what you want me to say.” I sit up and push my hand into his chest. I can feel his heart beat against his sternum, his lungs fill.

  “Eve.”

  The longing of it echoes, and I’m sad not only because Igor wants me to be something I’m not but because even if I tried, I wouldn’t be able to be her, this person he imagines. He wants me to call him Adam. He’s wanted this for the last 394 days, and I won’t.

  “E—”

  “Gor.” I zip my jumpsuit back up, stand over him in the cold. We still have nothing decent to eat, we still have 187 days to go, I haven’t used toilet paper in eighteen months, and I don’t have any friends here except him. I don’t think I have the energy to try and fit all over again with anyone else. I don’t think there’s anyone else to fit with. So I lie back down and put my hand over his mouth. “Just lie here with me,” I say, and he switches off the flashlight.

  I interviewed for this job with Karpov himself. He had slicked-back hair and white French cuffs fastened with little planet Earth cuff links, blue and green enamel with gold backings. He twisted them open and shut, slowly and deliberately, while I talked; he was a man too sure of everything in his life to fidget. “I’m a better match for this project than you can possibly guess,” I told him. When we shook hands my fingers disappeared into his grip, his fingers so soft and large they felt swollen.

  I know all about new worlds and I know what it is to be one of something, part of a small and righteous tribe, and I know what it is to have a door crack open in front of you and be able to walk through and become something else. At the time Karpov was worried about reentry, thought that NovaTerra might be so successful we’d have trouble leaving. We’ve all laughed at that since, everyone except Igor.

  “You’d never eat me, right?” I whisper, my hand still over his mouth. But if there’s an answer on his face, I can’t see it in the dark.

  On day 550, Park radios us to the lab and makes us sit to hear the news. There are only three chairs, but she stands with her arms crossed until Igor and I sit on the floor. “Ants,” she says, and then waits until we realize she wants us to say “Ants?” or “Ants!” or maybe “Ants!?”

  “What about them?” Campbell says, and this is as good a response as Park’s going to get.

  She’s discovered an infestation, some native desert ant that isn’t supposed to be here. It’s replaced the NovaTerra ants and is crowding out all the other insect life. We can’t grow crops in overrun dirt. “There’s no way we’ll make it six more months,” Park concludes.

  “This is not the end of the Terranauts,” Igor pronounces.

  “Fuck Terranauts,” Park says, and I think of the bathroom wall. I wonder how long she’s known about the ants.

  Campbell dismisses us, says she wants to go over the lab reports with Park privately. Igor stomps off by himself, then comes back to tell Esparza that his wife’s outside the ocean, trying to flag someone down.

  “What do you think?” I ask Igor as we stand on the chaparral ridge and watch Esparza untie the boat. It’s like one of us is already leaving.

  “About what?”

  “About going home.”

  “I think we are home,” Igor says. “Terranauts don’t need beets. Terranauts don’t need any of this bullshit.”

  I stare at him, trying to think of the right thing to say, trying so hard that when my mouth finally opens all that spills out is “I really want a cheeseburger.”

  Igor gives me a look of disgust and disappears down a ladder shaft.

  I decide to work through the day’s task list, even if we may be leaving. I lift a scythe to cut the savanna grass and think, This is the last time I’ll ever do this, but I can’t get nostalgic. In truth I feel only relief. For the first time in a long time the labor feels good. I feel lean and strong. When I’m out of here, I’ll find my parents and they’ll be proud of my strength, of this body stripped to its essentials.

  I drop the scythe when I hear strange sloshing noises coming from the ocean. Esparza’s waving his arms wildly, rocking the dinghy. Two years, his wife is mouthing, two years, enunciating so powerfully I can read her from the savanna. I’m sorry! she shouts. I’m sorry. She holds a letter to the glass and a picture of her with another man. Esparza points at his wrist, holds his thumb and index finger together: A little more time, maybe? Just a little and he might be out. No, she mouths, her eyebrows sideways tilts of apology. Esparza kneels in the boat. Finally he points at the dog. His wife shakes her head. He won’t get the dog either when he returns to Old Earth. Esparza howls and his wife walks away through the desert.

  That night we have to fish Esparza out of the ocean, untie the fiberglass rocks from his ankles, and wrap him in what blankets we have. We put him to sleep on the dining-room table so we can take turns watching him. His skin is the flat pale brown of a cardboard box and his hair smells like the mildew in the ocean-filtration system. There are cameras in the infirmary, and we know Karpov still cares about appearances.

  Day 551: At the morning staff meeting we talk about Esparza. We talk about the ants. Campbell confirms Park’s report. We talk about the lack of food and how life in NovaTerra is one long lack of everything that made our lives on Old Earth worthwhile.

  “I want to leave,” Park finally says, and it feels like my voice, like I’m saying it alongside her.

  Esparza curls into a ball. Campbell has laid her blue-striped beach towel over him; it’s the tenderest thing we’ve ever seen her do. “And he needs to,” she says. “That’s two. Anyone else?”

  I raise my hand. I can’t speak, not with Igor loo
king at me. Bhatnagar raises his. Campbell announces a majority and tells us to pack up; she’ll prepare a press release and we’ll input the codes for the air lock.

  “You didn’t ask for my vote,” Igor says. “The decision to leave needs to be unanimous.”

  “We can’t do this anymore. It’s not worth it,” Park says.

  “All new societies demand sacrifice.”

  “It’s not easy, giving up the money,” Bhatnagar offers, trying to commiserate.

  “The money?” Igor asks.

  “A million is a lot,” Bhatnagar says. “But we don’t have much choice.”

  “You’re being paid?” Igor asks, shocked.

  “You aren’t?” Park asks, but the answer’s already on Igor’s face.

  He looks at me and I shake my head but I don’t know what I’m really saying: Yes, I was being paid too. No, I would not have been sorry to take the money. No, I didn’t know you weren’t being paid, but also Yes, if I’d thought about it, I could have guessed. And finally: No, I’m not on your side, whatever that side is.

  Igor stands with his fists clenched. He steps onto a chair like this is the papaya fight all over again, like there’s something he can still say to rally us. A betrayal of faith is a betrayal of the self, my parents whisper. The motives of the faithful are pure, and light fills the righteous. Igor is silent, looking at us one by one with disgust. I feel like a child again at service with my parents. The Apostle looks down at me and I am convinced that whatever he sees he does not like.

  “You’re traitors,” Igor says. “You’re all traitors.”

  “To what?” Campbell asks.

  But I know. I understood and I betrayed it anyway. Igor looks at me with rage and disappointment. The truly Illuminated cannot contain their own righteousness. Their light spills forth. I imagine myself in the North Lung, standing in a blast of flashlight. I am my own shadow picture, small and frail and guilty.

  Igor spits on the ground, jumps off the chair, and walks out the door. Bhatnagar stands to limp after him, but Campbell grabs his elbow. “Mission Command can come and pull Igor out their own damn selves,” she says.

  But they won’t.

  Day 552: “Did you even read your contracts?” Karpov asks on the command center’s screens. He’s so close to his webcam, his face is warped like an image in a fun-house mirror, giant nose and piglet eyes. “Six people, six codes,” he booms. “You all agreed.”

  “There has to be a way,” Park insists. “You can’t just leave us in here.” She’s written Freedom Now on a bunch of giant philodendron leaves and stuck them to the visitor windows, facing out. She used piñon pitch from the desert for glue and white chalk from the lab for the writing, and now there’s no more chalk.

  “We need to brainstorm,” Campbell says. “How are we supposed to brainstorm when there’s no chalk?”

  Park makes another sign, No Work Without Dry-Erase Markers, and when Karpov logs off in frustration, she props the leaf up in front of the webcam streaming live. We watch the media lot slowly fill with more vans than we’ve seen since the sealing-in ceremony. It doesn’t do any good. Six people, six codes, or no air-lock release.

  At first we consider striking, but our work is the only thing keeping us alive. I go swimming for a day instead of monitoring oxygen levels, fall asleep on the beach, and wake up with a buzzing feeling in my ears. I reel through the sea cave down into the ocean basement. There’s a glass wall onto the dead coral reef. The water is cloudy. The scrubber below the swamp is quiet, shut down completely. A few standby lights glow yellow in the dark; I trip over something and fall full-length on what it takes me a moment to realize is Igor. I’m worried something’s happened to him until he speaks.

  “What were you going to spend yours on?”

  I sit beside him cross-legged, my knee just touching his shoulder. He doesn’t move away. “My parents,” I say. “They don’t belong there, with those people.”

  “Just because you don’t feel what they feel doesn’t mean they don’t get to choose. It doesn’t mean they’re wrong. It doesn’t mean they’re going to drink the Kool-Aid or put bags over their heads.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Neither do you. Maybe you don’t get to be the hero. Maybe you don’t get to rescue them.”

  “Because they don’t need rescuing, I know. I know how you feel about it. But I just want to go home.”

  “Where is that?” he says, and he knows I don’t have an answer. The Gaia hypothesis, he explains. The ants, Esparza’s wife; they don’t end the experiment, they just change it. We are a self-balancing system. “Maybe NovaTerra was never meant to support so many people. Maybe there should only ever have been two. Two of us, to start things over.”

  “I don’t want to start a new world with you, Igor. I just want to get back out into the one everybody else already lives in.”

  “You’ve never lived there. You can eat the food and speak the language but you’ve never even been.”

  I climb over him and turn the lights and CO2 scrubber back on. I take deep breaths as the scrubber wheezes back to life, as if it could already be making a difference, as if there’s pure air to be had.

  “We’re already home,” he says. “I can make you see that.”

  I expect him to try to stop me from leaving the room, but he just watches me go.

  We suspend farmwork and eat all our seeds. We set a trap for the lemurs and grill one on an open fire. Smoke blackens the roof of the habitat pod. We don’t see a trace of Igor, and no one knows what he’s eating. Bhatnagar gets the diving equipment out and nets endangered reef fish. Our plates shimmer with blue and yellow scales. One night it’s my turn to cook, but there’s a pot already simmering on the stove. It smells good, some kind of soup, bits of tangled white noodles burbling in a clear broth. I think Park’s trying to be nice to me for once, or Campbell found something left in the provisions room, but when we sit at the table it turns out none of us cooked the soup.

  “Igor?” Bhatnagar asks me.

  I shrug. It has to be, but I don’t know if the soup is for my benefit or everyone else’s. “This might be poisoned or something,” I caution.

  We stare down into our bowls and begin to eat. We’re too hungry to care, maybe even hopeful that if we start to die all at once instead of slowly, they’ll have to let us out.

  “Shit,” Park says a few spoonfuls in because the noodles aren’t noodles, they’re roots.

  “Beets,” Campbell announces, examining the white strings hanging off her spoon. “The taproots.”

  We polish it all off before we look at the farm. The beet patch is nothing but a morass of ants swarming freshly turned dirt.

  “Well,” Campbell says. “No more beets.”

  Inside, I have to cheer.

  Day 565: Esparza has been talking to his wife for hours, trying to get her to reconsider, and in the slivers of phone time he leaves everybody else, we organize a lawsuit: wrongful imprisonment. We watch on the webcam as the papers get served. Karpov’s lawyers call later in the day and make it clear that this won’t be a speedy solution.

  Before dinner that night Bhatnagar plays logic games with Mission Command. “What if there was a flu epidemic that wiped out everyone on Old Earth and left us sealed inside?”

  “Old Earth?” Mission Command asks, and I think despite myself how proud Igor would be that even Bhatnagar was using his vocabulary, accepting this distinction.

  “What about an earthquake? A natural disaster? What would be the protocol then? What if one of us died?” Bhatnagar asks, and there’s a pause. He’s onto something. “What if one of us died? What happens then?”

  “If we see a body…” they say. “If one of you dies we can input the missing code.”

  “Then Igor’s dead,” Bhatnagar says. “He left us root soup and died.”

  “We need to see the body.”

  “He drowned. In the ocean. You’ll just have to trust us.”

  “Your oc
ean’s not that deep. You can fish him out.”

  “Okay,” Bhatnagar says. “Fine. I’ll bring you a body. I’ll fish his body right on out.” He stalks from the room, a hunting look in his eye.

  “Someone should warn Igor,” Park says, and everyone turns to me.

  He isn’t in the desert or the savanna or the ocean or the beach or the rain forest. I check the North and South Lung. I walk all the tunnels: filtration, air monitoring, storage. I check the provisions room, the squat grain bins, and the dangling chain nets that were supposed to hold bananas, coconuts, papayas. They’ve been empty for a year. The chains rustle as I walk beneath them.

  I climb a ladder up a fake armadillo burrow as the sun sets, a halo of light above the desert. The stars come out behind the beams that gird our sky. We’ve complained about the graph-paper view, about being guinea pigs in a cage, but tonight it makes me feel safe. If we’re leaving soon, I can allow myself to love this little disaster of a world. Maybe even love my fellow Terranauts. Tonight we’re special, in our beautiful glass box beneath the galaxy. I sit on a real boulder, not fiberglass, and wonder if this is what my parents feel, if this is illumination. If I could feel this all the time on any Earth, Old or New, I’d go there. I’d go to Idaho and eat mine tailings. I’d go to Romania and swim in the cyanide-laced Danube. I’d stay in NovaTerra. I wonder if this is what Igor feels, why he’s so frantic at the thought of leaving. But eventually hunger howls in me, rises up and gnashes its coyote teeth. I climb back down the ladder to walk to the habitat pod. If you still had God, my parents whisper, hunger would find no purchase.