Good Morning, Midnight

FOURTEEN

THE WORK WAS a relief. Sully didn’t want to take a break and lose the single-minded concentration that was keeping her thoughts corralled, but she was so exhausted that her concentration was slipping anyway. Thebes had been working alongside her in the comm. pod for much of the morning. They hadn’t spoken about the spacewalk—they hadn’t spoken about anything except the task at hand. Sully was grateful for the silence. Getting the new comm. system online was all she could manage. She feared that the slightest empathetic gesture would undo her and she’d wind up back in her bunk, the curtain drawn, staring at her hands but seeing Devi, hidden beneath the bulk of her white suit, becoming smaller, smaller, and vanishing. Thebes was the one to suggest they break for lunch.

She watched him slip down the entry node ahead of her. For the first time she noticed that even in zero G the shape had gone out of his shoulders. Thebes seemed half-empty, like a tube of toothpaste that’s almost used up, and she realized she hadn’t given any thought to the rest of the crew. It wasn’t just her tragedy, it was theirs too. All of them had watched Devi float away: Sully might have been there in person, but the rest of them had seen it all through the helmet cams. The same moment was stuck on replay in everyone’s head, not just in hers. She had to remind herself that she wasn’t alone. She went down the entry node after Thebes and landed on Little Earth, feeling the weight of her body return to her.

The rest of the crew—Thebes and Harper, Tal and Ivanov—were sitting around the table waiting for her. She saw tears sliding down Ivanov’s cheeks and realized she was crying too—silently releasing the water that had been building behind her eyes since she woke up that morning. She licked a salty tear from her lip and sat down with them. They passed around the last tinfoil dish of shepherd’s pie, one of the premade meals they’d been saving for a special occasion. They ate in silence, passed the dish again, ate some more. When it was empty and the trays had been scraped clean, Ivanov took Tal’s and Harper’s hands, and the others followed his example. They bowed their heads together, chins tucked into their chests.

“Aether has lost her youngest daughter. Protect her,” Ivanov said.

They stayed like that for a long time, and when their necks began to tire, Thebes raised his head and added, “She was loved.” It wasn’t much, but it was true, and it helped. Their time aboard Aether had been long and difficult and beautiful, but through it all, Devi had been well loved by everyone at that table. Sully looked at her crewmates and it dawned on her that they were her family—that they had been all along.

THAT AFTERNOON, THEY received the first signal since the main comm. dish had broken away from the ship a week earlier. Sully spun the volume knob so that she and Thebes could revel in the static telemetry of their probe on Europa, alive to them once again, whispering through the speakers. Sully went around to all her machines, checking that they were receiving properly and saving everything to the hard drive. The spacewalks had accomplished their directive—at least the loss had been worth something instead of nothing. Sully thought of Devi fighting to stay conscious. Telling her it was too late. She could feel her clumsy grip on the mast, could see the mirrored glint of her friend’s visor. She felt again the helplessness as she clung to the antenna and watched Devi expire: unable to move, unable to fix the horrifying problem happening right in front of her, inches away. And she wondered, not for the first time, how Devi hadn’t noticed sooner—whether she’d seen the oxygen levels in her suit falling, sensed the problem, but not said anything. Sully would never know.

She turned back to the fuzziness coming out of the speakers and the wavering signal. There was still work to be done and she threw herself into it headfirst, moving from machine to machine, testing the gain, tinkering with the squelch settings. The signals grew slightly clearer, the feedback slightly softer. By the time the day was done, she and Thebes had calibrated the new comm. system as best they could. The reception was as good as it would ever be. If there was anyone out there trying to call them home, they would hear it.

Sully stayed to listen after Thebes left. She felt…connected wasn’t the right word, because there was nothing out there to link to, but she felt less alone. She’d done her part, she’d extended the electromagnetic red carpet. If no one took advantage, if their welcome was left hanging, unmet even after all this time and work and sacrifice, then it wouldn’t be her fault. She would have done her best. They would have done their best. She was moving beyond the turbulence of loss and isolation, into a quieter space—a space where Mission Control’s signal was already speeding toward them, where she was ready and willing to see what came next.

It was late by the time Sully returned to Little Earth. She found Tal in his usual place, his thumbs poised over a gaming controller, but with one notable difference: Ivanov sat beside him, with another controller in hand. She’d never seen them play together. Ivanov’s blond hair was combed back from his forehead, his ruddy cheeks glowing with competition, the usual stoniness in his features softened to a more manageable stiffness. Tal looked wild with excitement, his brown eyes wide, his teeth bared at the screen, the thick black beard that had taken over his face even bushier than usual, as if even his hair follicles were responding to the acute novelty of having a real live opponent, one he wanted very much to beat. The two men didn’t look up at her, immersed in the challenges of their avatars. Sully moved along the curve of the centrifuge toward the long kitchen table. Harper and Thebes sat across from each other playing five-card draw, betting nuts and bolts from Thebes’s toolbox. Sully sat down next to Thebes and watched.

“Thebes tells me we’re up and running again,” Harper said as he laid down a full house. Thebes whistled through the gap in his teeth and threw his hand down.

Sully nodded. “We’re back. Not much chatter out there, though.”

“Shall I deal you in?” Thebes asked her as he shuffled the deck with his elegant black hands, the pale pink of his fingernails skimming over the cards like tiny butterflies.

“No, thanks,” she said, “I think I’ll just watch.”

“We’re piggybacking Mars’s orbit any day now,” Thebes said as Harper cut the deck. “Then the slingshot back to Earth. I think we’ll have a better chance at picking up something faint as we get closer.”

She looked over at Ivanov and Tal, still intent on their game, united in concentration and competition, then back to Thebes and Harper. Harper noticed her still staring at Thebes’s hands as he looked at his cards, tilting them up without taking them off the table.

“Are you sure you don’t want to play?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I think I’m going to go back to the comm. pod for a minute. I forgot to do something.” She got up from the table.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything? We’ve all had dinner already,” Harper said. “Some lasagna thing. We saved you some.” Thebes let the edges of his cards snap back to the table. She took a serving of fruit leather from the kitchen and held it up for him to see before she put it in her pocket. She wasn’t planning to eat it, but Harper was appeased. As she left Little Earth she heard Ivanov shout with triumph, followed by a low groan from Tal.

She passed through the greenhouse corridor slowly, letting the vivid green of the aeroponic plants fill her. They pressed out the thoughts and refilled her mind with color, saturating the nooks and crannies of her brain—green, the color of home. She wondered if she might be able to sustain it, to make this verdant peace permanent, but no sooner had it occurred to her than all the rest of the thoughts came rushing back in and the blazing viridescence faded away. It was too much. She was just a tiny point of consciousness lost in an ocean of chaos, not unlike Aether. Tunneling through the vacuum of space, thin walls weakening beneath the violent forces of the cosmos, losing pieces of herself along the way, just like the ship they lived on.

Sully paused at the entrance to the control deck but didn’t go in. She stayed away from the swimming blackness just beyond the cupola. She turned and propelled herself to the comm. pod instead, raising the volume on the muted speakers and letting the sounds wash over her. It’s been silent in here for too long, she thought. After a few moments she began to scan, seeking out some of their fellow wanderers. She found an old robotic surveyor, still circling Mars. Then Cassini, one of Saturn’s first explorers. And then there it was, the wanderer she always hoped to hear: Voyager 3, heading toward the edge of the solar system, through the heliopause, into the Oort cloud and beyond, to interstellar space. The incoming telemetry was sparse and basic; since she’d last searched it out, some of Voyager’s functions had shut down. From the plasma readings she could guess that it had moved beyond their solar system—had crossed over into a new one.

She stayed in the comm. pod for hours, listening and watching her screens. When she returned to Little Earth the others were either asleep or concealed in their compartments, the glow of their reading lights shining against the curtains. Before she had a chance to shut herself in her bunk, Harper swept his curtain back. He was half inside his sleeping bag, propped up against the wall with his tablet illuminated on his lap.

“You’re back,” he said. “What did you forget?”

She couldn’t think of something credible, something that would have occupied her for this long. The truth was easier. “I didn’t forget anything. I just…wanted to listen for a while.”

He nodded. “But you’re all right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Just tired.” She caught hold of her curtain. “ ’Night,” she said, and drew it shut.

“Good night,” he murmured, and she heard the click of his light going off.

She lay in the dark for a long time, on her back with her eyes open, inspecting all the shadows in her compartment. At the foot of the bed, the craggy mountain of clothes she’d worn today and would wear again tomorrow. On the wall, the square of the photograph of Lucy. Above her, the dark round globe of her reading light. After a while she fell asleep and dreamed she was traveling in the other direction on Voyager 3, away from home instead of toward it. Her feelings in the dream were untroubled, tranquil. She was nestled into the cup of Voyager’s parabolic dish, curled up like a sleepy cat while she looked out into the blackness and realized she’d gone farther than she’d ever expected to. She realized she’d come to the end of the universe, and she was pleased.

THE FIVE OF them gathered at the long table for breakfast and a rundown of the next phase of their journey. Sully sipped orange juice through a straw and arranged a screen of attention onto her features while Tal spoke about the trajectory plan. While they were traveling past Mars, jumping on and off its orbit as if it were a celestial highway, they would be a relatively short way from Mars itself. Tal went on to explain the complexities of Mars’s orbit and how exactly they would use its gravity for their own purposes, but beyond that Sully lost track of what he was saying. She was contemplating the texture of the cabinet behind his head when she realized that she’d reached the end of the orange juice and was making a rude sucking noise with the straw. Tal had stopped talking and was looking at her. She froze in midslurp, and he continued.

“So I know we’ve been seeing Mars from a distance for some time, but if you’d like a better look, the next few days would be the ideal time.”

Her mind drifted out of focus once more. Harper took over and got everyone squared away on their tasks for this final leg of their journey, as Aether drew closer to Earth. Sully nodded in the right places, and when they were finally dismissed she went straight to the comm. pod. She had lost time to make up on the Jovian probes, and she wanted to be sure the incoming data was recorded and filed correctly. The straightforward labor of data entry soothed her, even if the conclusions she was drawing and the hypotheses she was forming still didn’t have an audience. It helped distract her from the unknowns of their journey. Sully was a few hours into her work before she realized she was ravenous and hadn’t eaten since yesterday. She remembered the fruit leather she’d tucked away in her pocket the night before and ripped into the package while she cataloged the telemetry.

She thought of Mars while she worked. She pictured its cratered red earth, orange dust, and dry, empty riverbeds. She thought of the plans for colonization—an American mission had already been there and back a few years ago, mostly to do a geological survey but also to look for potential habitat sites. Before Aether’s departure, a private space travel company had been entrenched in the logistics of building a permanent colony on Mars. It was supposedly only a few years from realization—too late, apparently.

She was excited to see the red planet so close. Their view on the way out almost two years ago had been fleeting and from a distance. They had been focused on other things—the pull of Jupiter, the planet no one had ever seen up close. Now Mars’s significance lay mainly in its proximity to Earth. The last signpost before their destination: nearly there. When Sully had done a few more hours of work with the Jovian telemetry, she changed her receiving frequency to Voyager 3, still thinking of her dream from last night. She alighted on the signal just in time to hear a shrill whistle, and then silence. She couldn’t get it back, no matter what she tried—found only empty sine waves where the signal had been just a moment before. It was late by the time she gave up. The probe was gone. Perhaps the power had finally quit, perhaps something else had malfunctioned and rendered its comm. system unusable, or perhaps it had traveled so far it was simply beyond their reach. It was possible that she would get it back another day, that something had blocked the signal—a planet in the way or even an asteroid—but she thought not. She floated in the silence of the comm. pod for a long while, remembering her dream. In the end she wished Voyager well and let it go, for good.

It was time to turn her attention back to Earth—not the Earth she’d left, the Earth she was returning to. The long months of retrospection and grief, thoughts of people she’d left, people she’d lost, were too heavy for her to carry anymore. She had been looking backward long enough. Now, finally, she gave herself permission to look forward. She didn’t feel hope, not yet, but she made room for it. Sully adjusted her wavelength and began to scan the frequencies: mostly listening, occasionally transmitting, but constantly searching, from one band to another. When she had scanned both the UHF and the VHF spectrums she began again, from the beginning. There had to be something out there. There had to be.