Gwendy’s Final Task

12

WHEN GWENDY TURNS AROUND to stroke her way back from officer country to the crew’s launch area, she almost bumps heads with Gareth Winston, who is floating just behind her. “Make way for the big fella, Senator.”

Gwendy turns on her side, grabs a handhold, and pulls herself back to her seat while Winston crams between Graves and Drinkwater. He peers out through the slit for a few moments, then says, “Huh. View’s better from the porthole.”

“Enjoy it, then,” Kathy says. “Suggest you let those who don’t have a porthole come up and have a peek.”

Dave Graves is checking a run of computer figures and murmuring with Sam, but he takes a moment to give Gwendy a look, eyebrows waggling. Gwendy isn’t sure he’s communicating Three weeks with this guy should be fun, but she’s pretty sure that’s what it is. Gwendy has met plenty of rich people in Washington, they are attracted to power like bugs to a bug-light, and most of them are pretty much okay; they want to be liked. She thinks Gareth is an exception to the general rule.

She grabs her seatback, does a neat little twist (in zero-g her sixty-four-year-old body feels forty again), and settles in. She buckles her harness and unzips her suit to the waist. She takes her notebook from the elasticized pocket of her red Eagle jumpsuit, not because she needs it at this moment but just to verify it’s there. The book is crammed with names, categories, and information.

Some of it she doesn’t need yet, but she’s read enough about what’s wrong with her to know she will as the mental rot in her brain advances. 1223 Carbine Street. Her address. Pippa, the name of her father’s ageing dachshund. Homeland Cemetery, where her mother is buried. A list of her medications, presumably now stored in her tiny cabin along with the scant wardrobe she was allowed to bring. No telephone numbers, her iPhone won’t work up here (although Eileen Braddock assured her such service was only a year or two away), but a complete list of her phone’s functions, plus a list of her duties as Eagle’s Weather Officer. That may be a make-work job, but she intends to do it well.

The most important thing in her memory book (that’s how she thinks of it) is halfway through, written in red ink and boxed: 1512253. It’s the code that opens the otherwise unopenable steel case. The idea of forgetting that number, and thus find herself unable to get to the button box inside, fills Gwendy with horror.

Adesh has pulled himself over to look out of Winston’s porthole, and Jafari Bankole is looking over his shoulder. There’s currently no Earth to look at from that one, but Dr. Glen has pulled himself down to look out the other side. “Amazing. Amazing. It’s not like looking at photos, or even film footage, is it?”

Gwendy agrees and opens her notebook to the crew page, because she has forgotten the doc’s first name. Also, Reggie Black—what’s his job? She knew only minutes ago, but it’s slipped away.

A feather floats up from her book. Winston, now swimming his way back, reaches for it.

“Don’t touch that,” Gwendy says sharply.

He pays no attention, simply plucks it out of the air, looks at it curiously, then hands it to her. “What is it?”

“A feather,” Gwendy says, and keeps herself from adding, Are you blind? She has to live with this man, after all, and his support of the space program is vital. If they find signs of life in the solar system—or beyond—that might not be the case, but for now it is. “I use it as a bookmark.”

“Lucky charm, perhaps?”

The shrewdness of this startles her and makes her a little uneasy. “How did you guess?”

He smiles. “You have the same feather tattooed on your ankle. Saw it in the gym while you were on the treadmill.”

“Let’s just say I like it.”

Winston nods, seeming to lose interest. “Gentlemen? May I have my seat back? And my porthole?” He puts a slight but unmistakable emphasis on my.

Adesh and Jafari move out of his way, a couple of swimming trout making way for an overfed seal.

“It’s marvelous,” Adesh murmurs to Gwendy. She nods.

Once she’s got some clear space to maneuver, Gwendy releases her harness again and takes off her pressure suit. She does an involuntary forward roll in the process and thinks that weightlessness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Once the suit is stowed under her seat, folded on top of the steel case, she descends to the next and last level down, which will be the passenger common room on later orbital flights … and perhaps on flights to the moon. Such an amenity is brand new, and it won’t be there on craft that go directly to the MF station. This is its maiden run.

The area is shaped like a great big Contac capsule and surprisingly roomy. There are two large viewscreens set into the floor, one showing empty black space and the other featuring the vast shoulder of Mother Earth with its gauze of atmosphere (faintly dirty, Gwendy can’t help but notice). Two of the cabins are on the port side, the other and the head on the starboard. The shiny white doors can’t help but remind her of morgue lockers on some of the TV crime shows she enjoys. A sign on the toilet says ALWAYS REVIEW PROCEDURE BEFORE OPERATING.

Gwendy doesn’t need the john yet, so she gives a lazy kick of her feet and floats to the cabin with SEN. PETERSON on the door. The latch is like the one on a refrigerator. She pulls it and uses the grip over the door to yank herself inside. The cabin—actually more of a nook—is also in the shape of a cold capsule, but much smaller. Claustrophobic, really. This time she’s reminded of the crew quarters in World War II submarine films. There’s a bunk with a harness to keep the sleeper from floating up to the curved ceiling a foot or so above, a miniscule fridge big enough for three or four bottles of juice or soda (maybe a sandwich, if you really crammed), and—of all things—a Keurig coffee maker. Coffee in your cabin, she thinks. The height of space travel luxury.

On top of the tiny fridge, held in place by a magnet, is a steel-framed photograph of Gwendy and Ryan and her parents, the four of them on the beach at Reid State Park, laughing with their arms around each other.

Gwendy will soon start her weather duties, but for now she needs to mentally refocus and review the crew information. She lies down on her bunk and buckles herself in. Servos are humming somewhere, but otherwise her little cold capsule is eerily silent. They may be circling the planet at thousands of miles an hour, but there’s no sense of movement. She opens her red notebook and finds the crew pages. Names and thumbnail bios. Reggie Black is the physicist, of course he is. And Dr. Glen’s first name is Dale. Easy-peasy, clear as a freshly washed window … but it could be gone again in an hour, maybe just fifteen minutes.

I’m crazy to be here, she thinks. Crazy to be covering up what’s wrong with me. But he gave me no choice. It has to be you, Gwendy, he said. I have no one else. So I agreed. In fact, I was sort of excited by the prospect. Only …

“Only then I was all right,” Gwendy whispers. “At least I thought I was. Oh God, please get me through this.”

Here in the up-above, after what she has seen below her—Earth so fragile and beautiful in the black—it’s easier to think He or She might really be there.