“Don’t torture me with your analysis. Ruth, why are you here?” he asked. “In this state, why did you come to me?”
“I am still employed by this university,” she said. “And my car was here.”
“You hate that car. You’re eighteen weeks pregnant.”
“Nineteen. I came to you, I think, because you’re the only other one. You’re like me, having a family is not your first priority, and you’re all I have to help me figure this out.”
“Nineteen weeks?” he said.
She nodded.
Van Raye got that helpless feeling of an approaching deadline. “Are you at a point when you can’t make a decision?” he said.
She flicked the cigarette out the door into the backyard.
“No. Not quite.”
“But you need to be making arrangements?”
“Stop,” she said, “okay, I get it. I’m not mother material. I know that.”
She came and crawled over him and pinned him down by the shoulders. She had one knee up against his crotch and looked down at him. “I’m not the most nurturing person on the planet,” she said.
Something like a bundle of wood clattered on the floor downstairs.
“I’m not the most nurturing person either,” he said.
“Exactly. What’s the matter with us?”
“Ruth, some people are here for other reasons. Some people have bigger reasons. We’ve been burdened with this task, not anything else.”
Her eyes were ringed with black construction dust; the dirt and grime surrounding her eyes had been smeared.
“Have you been crying?” he said.
“No.”
The dust covered everything in the house and it was probably on his skin too, and she was breathing it in.
“Why don’t you make arrangements, go somewhere?” he said.
She rolled off of him and on her back. She whispered while touching her stomach, “Because I hear something.”
“You what?”
She took a deep breath. “I know it’s not real, okay? I know what audio hallucinations are. But anyway, to me, I hear music.”
“You’re hearing the music from downstairs.”
“No,” she said. “It’s different music. It’s comes from inside me. I feel it too, like vibrations. Like music-box music.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, matching her quiet tone, “you have been through a lot.”
There was only the light coming through the curtains flapping in the breeze.
“You are hallucinating because your mind, well,” he said, “you’re overloaded. You’re struggling, and you have conflicting instincts. Your mind is looking for some way for there to be something that will make you feel better about having feelings for this. .” He waved his hand over her belly.
“Fetus?” she said.
The room was silent. The curtains still.
“Are you hearing it now?” he said.
“Maybe. I shouldn’t have told you.”
He said, “I can assure you that in reality, there is no music.” His ear was against her chest. “There’s no music.”
“How do you know? You’re on the outside.”
When Ruth had been aboard the spacecraft Infinity, and she’d found out she was pregnant — this was after she’d listened to the broadcast for Van Raye — she’d started packing to come back to Earth, stuffing personal items in her bag, and then grabbed the gain amplifier just in time because Cosmonaut X stuck his head in her quarters and asked what she was doing.
No one knew her condition, especially not him.
“Leaving,” she said, fanning away a group of monarchs fluttering about her cabin. Her sleeping bag was hung on the wall like a giant chrysalis itself, butterflies decorating its outside, hundreds of pulsing wings. It was nearly impossible not to occasionally smash a butterfly, and the crew was constantly vacuuming up carcasses, an experiment on growth and flight that had gotten out of control.
Ruth floated her duffle down the trans-tube, then followed it, and then Cosmonaut X followed her to the bay where orange monarchs were disturbed into confetti fluttering up, down, and sideways. She braced her feet on each side of the escape pod’s hatch and strained to open it.
Cosmonaut X went to the intercom and said, “We have a crew member loading her things into the emergency capsule.”
In seconds the other five crewmembers were watching her entering information on the computer.
“It’s been rough on everyone,” Jane said.
“I can’t do it again right now,” Ruth said, “I just can’t.”
The station began emerging from Earth’s shadow and the sunlight hit the station’s skin and began creaking.
Cosmonaut X floated in the high corner, arms folded. Ruth stuck her head in the escape capsule and scanned to make sure there were no butterflies there. What would butterflies born in zero gravity think of gravity?
“You volunteered for that walk,” Jane said. “You don’t have to go out anymore, okay? Don’t do this.”
Ruth’s hair floated like the Bride of Frankenstein. “It’s not that,” she said. “I’ve got other reasons.”
There was a loud pop as the sunlight intensity peaked on the space station’s exterior.
Ruth quickly gripped the handle and went into the capsule feet-first, stuck her head back out like an angry gopher. “There’s shit going on that none of you can imagine. I’m getting the hell out of here. There are two more seats on this thing, anyone else want out?”
No one spoke.
“Then start the sequence.” She reached to pull the hatch closed but the leverage was awkward.
“That is a big mass,” Cosmonaut X said, not uncrossing his arms, as if the hatch would stop her.
“You don’t know where you’ll come down,” Jane said. “Give us twenty to come up with trajectories.”
“And then I’ll have to wait for a window and have time to think about this? No.” She struggled with the heavy hatch but no one helped until finally Cosmonaut X pushed himself off the wall in a flutter of butterflies and grabbed the hatch. He touched her hand first. “Because of me?” he said.
“Jesus, don’t flatter yourself.” His flight suit was smeared with more black protoplasm than the others. “A port in a storm,” she whispered, looking around to see if anyone else heard or understood this slight of intimacy.
When the hatch was shut, through the round window she saw everyone exiting the airlock. In six minutes, after she was buckled in and the pressure had fallen inside the airlock, she watched through the porthole as the butterflies froze into unrecognizable specks, and when the pod separated from the station and the tiny boosters hissed, stabilizing her into a decaying orbit Earthward. The computers came up with an emergency-landing target, and she heard Uree over the com say, “How’s your Mongolian?” and the signal faded as Infinity continued over Earth’s horizon and Ruth’s pod fell behind like a dropped buoy and her porthole began to glow in the fire that separated space and Earth, and she felt the first g grab her in her center of mass where it always started, in her gut near where this thing lived inside her, and the pod began shaking, and Ruth began grunting, contracting the muscles in her stomach and legs. She had always grunted “monster” when reentering. Everyone had his or her own g-load word to grunt. She grunted “monster” to dam the blood flow in her head—“Mmmmmmm-onster. .” taking a quick breath and repeating, straining, “Mmm-onstersss.” She flinched when something fell out of the instrument panel, and she watched the cosmopolitan butterfly beat dying in the crook of her arm as she began to pass out.