Good Morning, Midnight

TWENTY

ON BOARD THE International Space Station it looked as though the other astronauts had just stepped out for a moment: machines still turned on, half-empty food packets floating in the kitchen area. The only things missing were the Soyuz reentry pods—two of the three were gone. The equipment in the space station was archaic compared to Aether’s facilities, but the crew was already familiar with it, all of them having lived on the ISS at one point or another. Sully inspected its comm. station with curiosity, comparing the silence to that on Aether. Both stations were hearing the same signals—that is, none at all. She clung to the frequency where she’d found the man in the Arctic, but he wasn’t there, and eventually she had to move on, scanning for other survivors. She wondered if she’d ever find him again.

After sweeping the station for habitants and clues, and finding neither, Aether’s crew came together near the remaining reentry pod. The last pod held three seats. Three of them would descend and two would remain on the ISS, circling Earth indefinitely. The options were murky: without a ground team to collect them, there was the potentially fatal possibility of landing in an ocean or a desert. The state of the planet below them was unknowable. Perhaps the dirt and the air and the water were poisoned, perhaps they weren’t. Perhaps there were survivors, perhaps there weren’t. In space, a finite amount of resources were available and it was unclear how long they would last. Neither choice was certain, and neither was safe. But they weren’t ready to decide yet. They huddled together and talked about the docking procedure, the supplies, the equipment—anything but the question of who would go and who would stay. Anything but that.

THEY SLEPT ON Aether that night, grasping at inane small talk over dinner. After two years of wandering the solar system they were home—almost. After two years, some of them would make the last leg of the journey and some wouldn’t. All the waiting, the torturous uncertainty, had led to an impossible but still-unspoken divide. Sully lay awake in her bunk, and she guessed the others did as well, weighing the options and arriving at the same solution over and over: none. She turned from one side to the other, flopped onto her back, then onto her stomach, burying her arms under the pillow, laying them at her sides, throwing them over her face. Sleep was impossible. She thought of her daughter and touched the photograph pinned to the wall, just a dim square in the dark, but she could see Lucy’s face anyway, her costume, the wavy dirty-blond hair—the curve of her smile burned into Sully’s brain like a beacon.

And if the worst had happened? If her daughter was nothing more than hot ash floating in a bright sky, or even more horrible, a heap of decomposing remains returning to the dirt? She tried not to think these things, and yet—she had abandoned her entire family, she couldn’t think about anything else. If only she had been a better mother, a better wife, a better person, then someone else would be lying in this bunk right now, replaying her own regrets. She would have stayed in Canada, she never would have applied for the space program or gone to Houston. The raspberry-red door in Vancouver would still be hers, and the copper pans that hung above the stove, and the task of folding her daughter’s miniature T-shirts. There would be no divorce, no separation, no trouble finding a more recent photograph of Lucy when she wanted one. This picture of how her life could have been seemed so perfect, lying there in the dark, but it was pointless. She wasn’t built for that life. She’d never been the woman Jack wanted, the woman he needed, she had never loved Lucy in the right way—she wasn’t even sure what the right way was, only that the other mothers did it differently, that she could never seem to say the right things or do the right things or be the right person around either of them. The truth was, having her family had been even harder than losing them. There had always been something missing, and only now, after all this time and all these miles, could she begin to understand what it was: a warmth, an opening. The roots of something that had never been given the chance to grow.

LITTLE EARTH HAD begun to seem very small now that the actual Earth was filling the view from the cupola with its big blue girth. But they felt safe on the centrifuge, spinning inside their own familiar little world. They knew what to expect here, while their home planet had become a mystery in the time that they’d been away. After traversing the unknown, they’d only returned to more of the same. The mood over vacuum-sealed oatmeal and hot coffee was somber. It was time to discuss reentry.

“It’ll have to be random,” Harper said finally. “A lottery, drawing straws. Something like that. I’m not sure how else to go about it.”

The rest of them nodded assent.

Harper made eye contact with each of them, gauging their support for the idea, then returned his gaze to the table, licked his lips, and swallowed. Sully watched the nub of his Adam’s apple dip and rise in his throat, moving sluggishly, as if the effort pained him. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s bear in mind that we don’t know what we’re going to find down there. We might not even make it, but if we do, who’s to say we won’t be able to launch another Soyuz? So. Straws, I think. Might as well get on with it.”

There was a stockpile of straws in the kitchen; Harper rounded up five of them and Thebes shortened two with his utility knife. Harper swept them off the table and into his fist. Short straws for a life sentence in space. Long for an uncertain descent.

“Okay,” he said again. “Who’s first?”

There was a pause and then Tal reached out across the table. He plucked a straw from Harper’s hand and let out the breath he’d been holding when he saw that it was full length. He laid it down in front of him. Thebes, to his right, went next and drew another long straw, which he examined with an indecipherable expression. Ivanov chose, and it was short. The others gasped involuntarily and tensed, waiting for his reaction, but after a long moment of stunned silence he smiled. Gloomy Ivanov, smiling, like a marble statue suddenly altering its pose.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I think I’m relieved.”

Thebes laid his broad hand on Ivanov’s shoulder. Harper swallowed again and offered the two remaining straws to Sully. She drew. It was short.

THEY SCHEDULED THE reentry sequence for two days after the drawing. Tal needed time to figure out the trajectory of the pod, the angle at which they would enter the atmosphere, and the coordinates where they hoped to end up, all of which were incredibly complex without the assistance of a ground team. The crew decided to aim the pod for the Great Plains of Texas, where the weather would be temperate, the open space would be considerable, and they hoped to find some kind of answer from Houston. It seemed like their best chance—but for the first time in two years, the they had become fractured. Three would descend, two would remain. Their futures were suddenly divided.

After the meeting, Sully went to Aether’s cupola and peered through the swirling layer of feathery clouds as they zipped over the rich green of Central America, the deep, rippling blue of the Atlantic, the tawny deserts of northern Africa. She stayed there for a long time, watching the continents fly by—long enough to see the sun rise and set along the hazy rim of the planet’s atmosphere a few times over. Maybe staying up here was for the best. Maybe she didn’t belong on the surface anymore. She thought of Lucy, her glowing beam of know-it-all sunshine; she thought of Jack, the way he was before the divorce—mischievous, brooding, brilliant, and in love with her. She thought of Jean, pointing to the sky when Sully was little, the stars, the desert, introducing her to the electromagnetic spectrum and all of its magic. Her family. She watched the sun rise and set, rise and set, rise and set. As she watched the fourth sunrise flood the darkened planet with light, she let go. Somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, wisps of pink cloud moving over blue water, she released her memories and her plans for the future—she let them float out through the cupola and down to the atmosphere, where they sizzled against the hazy blue shell of a planet she would never return to.

That night, Sully returned to the centrifuge long after the others had closed their curtains and turned out their lights. She felt lighter than she had in years. She brushed her teeth and padded along the curve to her bunk, her feet whispering against the floor. As she passed Harper’s compartment she heard him turn over inside, the rustle of his bedding and the frustrated sigh unmistakably his. She stopped short. Sully stood still for a moment, not thinking, just pausing, then adjusted her direction. Her feet moved and she followed them, climbing into his bunk before her brain had a chance to object. His face was barely visible in the dark, but it didn’t matter. She didn’t need to see his features to know what he was thinking. This connection had unsettled her before, had kept her away, but not anymore—not now that it was her last chance to be near him. He moved over and she lay down next to him. She could smell him: the musk of sleep, Old Spice deodorant over stale sweat, antibacterial soap, tomato plant sap, and another scent, one she couldn’t name or describe, but that she recognized as his.

“Hi,” she whispered.

“Hi.” He put his hand on the curve of her waist and she laid her head beside his. They looked at each other in the dark, unseeing. She understood: everything, even the failure, even the loneliness, had led her here—it had prepared her and taught her and guided her to this. She felt a warmth rising, beginning in her toes and flooding up through her body, like a thousand doors swinging open all at once. She thought fleetingly of the house in Montana she had imagined for them, with his dog, Bess, waiting on the porch, and then she let it go, along with everything else. There was only the warmth, the opening in her chest, the unfurling of a quiet intuition, a reservoir of love that had never been touched. She moved closer until her mouth was against his prickly throat and she felt the throb of his pulse on her lips, the ridge of his jugular. They didn’t speak or sleep or move, they just melted into the combined warmth of their bodies, the sum of their life force.

IN THE MORNING, just before the artificial sunrise, Sully slipped back to her bunk and slept. She heard the murmurs of activity as she drifted in and out of her dreams, but she kept her eyes closed and didn’t get up until Thebes pulled back her curtain and laid his hand on her shoulder.

“There is something we must discuss,” he said. “About the lottery.”

Sully rubbed her hand across her eyes. “What’s there to discuss?”

“Much,” he replied. “Will you come?”

“Let me get dressed.”

When she climbed out of her bunk she was surprised to find the other four already assembled, waiting silently at the table. She was confused.

“I don’t understand,” she said, and sat down with them. “What’s this all about?”

Thebes clasped his fingers together and rested his chin on his entwined knuckles. “I’m staying here,” he said. “On Aether. On the space station.”

She looked around the table and saw the others watching her. They already knew. She looked at Harper. He nodded.

“So you want me to go instead?” she asked. “But, Ivanov?”

Ivanov shrugged. “I will stay also,” he said. “I have decided.”

“But why?” she said. “Your family—you want to go back more than any of us.”

He shook his head. “I want things as they were. This is not our choice. We know only one thing about what lies below: it is not what we left behind. Everything has changed. My family is not waiting for me—this is no time for half-truths. Thebes and I, we are the oldest. We are tired. We are—how do you say? Old dogs.”

Sully opened her mouth to speak and nothing came out. Thebes put his arm around her.

“We have a lot to do today,” Harper said. “Thebes, if you could check the Soyuz pod’s seal. Tal, I know you have your hands full with plotting our course, so Ivanov, perhaps you could help? Let’s run a landing simulation before the end of the day, then another in the morning before we launch. I’m going to check out the survival gear in the Soyuz, and Sully—could you give the comm.s one last try? Am I forgetting anything?”

“I don’t think so,” Tal said. “Let’s get to it.”

Sully remained at the table after they had gone, letting her thoughts, which whirled through her head like a dust storm, settle. She knew she should eat but couldn’t manage it. She put a protein bar in her pocket for later and left the empty centrifuge. When she floated through the node into the greenhouse corridor she found Harper there, pretending to inspect the plants while he waited for her.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. “Just surprised. A little…scared, I think.”

“Of what?”

“Of what’s down there, I guess. I was all set to power down, you know, just eat and sleep and watch fifteen sunrises a day, but now—now it’s all going to change.”

He touched her arm, cupping her elbow in his hand. Again, the warmth: a thousand doors opening a little wider. He turned his wrist up to glance at his watch, and that simple gesture almost undid her. She eyed the thick blue veins in his arm, just beneath the skin, and imagined that she could feel his pulse again.

“I should go,” he said. “Lots to do.”

She nodded, her head whirling. “Of course,” she said, and he moved off down the corridor. She stayed in front of the tomato plants for a while, thinking. She picked one of the yellow ones and it tasted like sunshine.

In the comm. pod, she set the receivers to scan. As she listened to the rise and fall of the static, the whistling of atmospheric disturbances, she thought about how by this time tomorrow she would either be en route to Earth or already on its surface—if all went well, she reminded herself. The levity she’d felt yesterday, the liberation of releasing everything that had come before, the choices she’d made, people she’d loved—that was gone, and heaviness crept back into her limbs like the return of gravity. The future, which just hours ago had seemed so beautifully empty, became crowded with unknown possibility. Her monotonous spacebound destiny disappeared like a fluid, shadowy creature. She thought of Harper, and the way the bittersweet finality of the previous night had suddenly cracked open into a beginning—an unknowable, untenable dynamic.

She kept scanning, hoping the man in the Arctic would hear her, but their frequency had been empty for days now. There had been something about talking to him—something that thawed her, just a little, a softening of the part of her that had been icebound since the launch. Or maybe even before: since she realized she’d lost her family, that they’d never been hers to begin with. That tenuous connection with the man in the Arctic, across such an incredible distance, had reminded her that even the fleeting things were worth their weight in sadness. Even a few words could mean something. The receivers caught nothing but atmospheric disturbances and white noise. Eventually she shut it all down and floated back to Little Earth one last time.

The crew ate a subdued dinner together. No one was in the mood for talking. Sully went to bed early while Harper and Thebes went back to the ISS to run a landing simulation sequence. Tal and Ivanov played videogames together one last time. She turned out the light in her bunk and lay awake for a long time, thinking. On the other side of the curtain she heard her crewmates getting ready for bed: the opening and closing of the lavatory door, the whisper of curtains being drawn, the rustle of bedclothes. Thebes cleared his throat; Tal coughed; Ivanov wept quietly; Harper scribbled in his journal. It was easy to tell which sounds belonged to whom, and where they were in the centrifuge. She knew her crewmates and their home through and through—but not for much longer, she reminded herself.

In her dreams that night, she was floating above Earth, no spacesuit, no propulsion pack, just wearing her navy blue jumpsuit, the arms tied around the waist, her gray T-shirt tucked in. She looked over her shoulder at the space station and saw a crowd of faces watching her from the cupola, waving to her. Saying goodbye. She saw Devi there, smiling, her brown palm flat against the glass. She saw Lucy, sitting on Jack’s shoulders. She saw her mother, Jean. Everyone was happy for her, everyone wishing her well. Sully turned and dived toward Earth, speeding through the vacuum, her arms above her head, her toes pointed, ready to plow through the atmosphere like a diver piercing the water’s surface. Her body became warm, then hot, then suddenly she realized she was on fire, hurtling through the atmosphere like a comet streaming across the sky. She woke up before she hit the ground. Her mouth was dry, her neck ached. She looked at her clock. It was time.

THE FIVE CREWMEMBERS of Aether crowded around the entrance to the remaining Soyuz pod. They all hugged one another and lingered in the doorway a few minutes longer than necessary. Finally Tal announced they had better get going with the undocking sequence if they wanted to make their reentry window. He dropped down into the pod and began strapping himself in. Harper gave Thebes and Ivanov one last handshake and whispered something into each of their ears. Sully hesitated. She gave Ivanov a hug, the third one in the last five minutes, and he kissed her on both cheeks. Droplets of water floated between them—tears, she wasn’t sure whose. She turned to Thebes.

“Are you sure?” she whispered in his ear as he embraced her again.

“Positive,” he whispered back, and then gave her a gentle push into the pod.

“Safe travels, my friends,” Thebes said. Ivanov waved, and together they pulled the door shut.

Sully strapped herself into the remaining seat, on Harper’s left. They heard the seal being winched shut on the other side of the door, then nothing. Just the sounds of their own bodies: anxious breath and restless limbs. Tal began clicking on the pod’s systems. He took out the reentry sequence manual and tucked it between his legs while he adjusted the instruments. He took his time, until finally he decided everything was ready. Tal slid down his visor.

“Here we go,” Tal said. He pushed a button and Sully felt the Soyuz slip away from the docking port, a gentle release, ending one journey and beginning another. Tal fired up the engine for a short burn, to move them away from the space station and set them on a parallel orbit. Then he initiated a longer burn, to take them around the planet and distance themselves farther from the station, sinking lower and lower until finally they hit the atmosphere at a sloping angle. It all took place more slowly than Sully remembered, and she kept looking out the small window to make sure they were in fact moving. Finally Tal shed the orbital module and instrument panel components of the Soyuz. From within the descent pod they could feel the bolts exploding above and below them, sending the other pieces of the Soyuz spinning away. A few minutes later they began to pass through the denser layers of the atmosphere. Outside the window a molten stream of plasma covered the glass, and the heat darkened the window. Gravity took hold of them, slowly at first, then exerting a greater and greater force as they plummeted through the atmosphere. Sully began to worry that they wouldn’t make it—that the Soyuz had sat unused for too long, that the heat shield was faulty, that the parachute wouldn’t open. She wanted to make it so badly, wanted to see what came next. Without thinking she reached out and grabbed Harper’s arm. Tal was concentrating on keeping the descent pod on target, but Harper was watching her. He flipped open his visor and put his gloved hand over hers.

“Are you all right?” he asked. The first parachute opened and the violence of it jerked the little pod back and forth. After the silence of space, the sound of the wind shrieking around them was deafening. By then the pull of gravity had grown so strong she could barely nod. After a moment the turbulence evened out and the second parachute opened, a gentler tug and a smoother descent. She felt held, nestled in the cup of an immense cosmic palm as they plummeted toward the surface of the earth. The sound of the wind abated as they descended through the layers of the atmosphere, and the terror finally seeped from her muscles. She was ready to survive—to hit the ground and open the pod—and even though she had no idea what kind of world they were arriving in, she was ready to find out. The pod kept falling, and through the mostly blackened window she glimpsed a piece of sky, clear and blue. Even if this was the end, even if they had come all this way only to die now, that piece of sky made everything worth it. They were home. She looked over at Harper, who was still watching her, and in that second she loved him more than she would have thought was possible. A thousand doors, wide open now.

“Iris,” he said. No one had called her that in a long time, but she liked the way it sounded when he said it. “I’m glad you came.”

She closed her eyes and prepared for impact, hoping there would be time to hear him say it again. But even if there wasn’t—

“Me too.”