“What is?” Sully asked.
“My father has the same machine in his warehouse,” she said. “The same exact one. I will have to tell him, he’ll be very proud for choosing it.”
The surface of the pool rippled and a cluster of bubbles frothed near their feet. Below the water, an enormous mock-up of the Aether craft shimmered, illuminated by floodlights. Reflections of the flags that crowded the walls of the facility lined the edge of the water, lapping at the edge of the pool in gentle waves, the vivid colors of the different nations swirling together and then separating, over and over. Sully peered into the depths of the pool and saw one of the astronauts beginning to rise. Two divers hooked the astronaut’s bulky white suit to the hoist and the crane’s gears above their heads began to whir. Devi looked up at the crane once more, but Sully kept her eyes on the rising astronaut.
“Fantastic,” Devi said again.
The white shell of Tal’s helmet broke free of the water and Sully let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
AS THEY DRIFTED through the asteroid belt, still months from home, they began to lose themselves. Everyone except Thebes: he patiently guided Devi through her work, even as she slept less and her attention wandered more. He could occasionally coax Tal away from the gaming console and into the greenhouse corridor, to harvest vegetables. He visited Ivanov in the lab to see what he was working on, asked him kind and attentive questions, and set aside leftovers for him. Sully watched Thebes doing all this, curious, observant. He would sit and talk with Harper in quiet tones and afterward Harper’s face seemed softer, his head held a little higher. Thebes was strong and hopeful, but he was only one out of six. He couldn’t save them from themselves, could only try to make things a little easier. He understood what was happening better than the rest of them.
One morning, just after the sunrise had crept over Little Earth, Sully drank lukewarm coffee across from Thebes at the kitchen table. He was reading—if he wasn’t working, he was reading. The rest of the crew was either sleeping or working in the zero-G section of the ship. They were alone, and Little Earth was quiet, but even so, when she asked him how his family had died, she whispered. She already knew the answer, but it wasn’t the gruesome details of the car accident she wanted to hear about—it was something else, something she didn’t have words for. Thebes dog-eared his page in The Left Hand of Darkness and closed the book. Set it on the table.
“Why do you want to know?” he asked patiently.
“I’m just trying to understand,” she said. She tried to swallow the shrill note of desperation that had crept into her voice, grinding her teeth together to keep her tone steady. “How you’re still here. How you kept it together—why you didn’t go to pieces.”
Thebes considered her for a long moment. He ran his hands over his closely cropped hair, his thumbs skimming his ears. The gray in his hair was creeping up past his temples, toward the crown of his head, like ivy climbing an old brick wall. It had spread since she’d met him, now threatening to consume his scalp. But his cheeks were smooth—the other men had given up on shaving, letting themselves become scruffy and unkempt, but not Thebes. The Thebes of the present was remarkably similar to the Thebes of old—the others had changed, had become diminished and dark and more severe. But Thebes was just as he was when the journey first began. He smiled at her, showing the gap between his front teeth.
“I’m still here because I have nowhere else to go,” he said. “I’ve had a long time to come to terms with that. Understand, I am in pieces just like you, but I keep them separate. I’m not sure how else to explain—one piece at a time. You will learn, I think.”
“And if I—if we don’t learn?”
“Then you don’t.” He shrugged. His voice was a smooth, low rumble that harmonized with the hum of the centrifuge, his South African accent round and seamless, syllables falling together in his mouth like a melody. “These things are different for everyone. But I see you learning—you are far away and then suddenly you are here again. Asking me these questions. Do you know what I do? I brush my teeth and think only of brushing my teeth. I replace the air filter and think only of replacing the air filter. I start a conversation with one of the others when I feel lonely, and it helps both of us. This moment, Sully, this is where we must live. We can’t help anyone on Earth by thinking about them.”
She sighed, dissatisfied.
“Not what you wanted to hear?” he asked, mouth curved in a wistful smile, sadness lurking in the shadows beneath his eyes.
“It’s not that. I just—it’s hard.”
He nodded. “I know,” he said. “But you are a scientist. You understand how this works. We study the universe in order to know, yet in the end the only thing we truly know is that all things end—all but death and time. It’s difficult to be reminded of that”—he patted her hand where it lay on the table—“but it’s harder to forget.”
GORDON HARPER HAD been the last crewmember to arrive at the training facility in Houston, a week after the others. He’d had his own separate orientation in Florida, isolated from the crew, conditioned for command. By the time he arrived, the bond between the others was solid. He’d been a commander before, at least half a dozen times, but this was different. Harper joined them halfway through a rigorous morning in their spacesuits in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, taking turns getting dunked in the pool and practicing EVA repairs on the mock-up of Aether. Sully and Devi were underwater when he arrived, and when they surfaced he was already standing with the others, smiling at Tal’s jokes, asking Ivanov about an astrogeology article he’d written, greeting his old friend Thebes.
Sully was facing the little knot of Aether men while they extracted her, first from the pool and then from the suit, a drawn-out process, and she watched Harper with curiosity and some apprehension. She decided she had a good feeling about him. He seemed to be listening more than he was talking, and the conversation was spread evenly across the men standing with him. All of them were smiling, except Ivanov, which didn’t really indicate anything. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. She could tell that Harper was putting them all at ease.
She’d seen pictures of him before, floating on the ISS, or on the tarmac in his orange launch suit, but he was older now, his face more angular, his tan deeper. He was bigger than she’d expected, easily taller than the other three men: an inch or two over Ivanov, a few more over Thebes, with nearly a foot on Tal.
“How is the training so far?” he was asking the other men. “Smooth sailing?”
Ivanov and Thebes nodded, while Tal cracked a joke Sully couldn’t quite hear. The four of them laughed and Sully strained against her suit, impatient for the tech assistant to finish unhooking her from the hoist so she could join the circle.
Harper was wearing the bright blue jumpsuit they all wore to training, with a big American flag sewn onto his left shoulder and an even bigger U.S. Air Forces patch over his heart. He had his hands in his pockets, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His sandy hair was short, his tan paler around the nape of his neck and his jawline, as though he’d recently had a haircut and a shave, uncovering skin that had been shaded from the sun.
When she was finally freed from her suit, Sully walked over to introduce herself. Despite her impatience to meet him, she felt suddenly shy. She held his blue-gray gaze as long as she could, but she was the first to look away—something in his eyes made her nervous, as if he were seeing beneath her skin, straight into the quickened muscle of her heart thudding inside her rib cage.