“You must be Specialist Sullivan,” he said, before she’d had the chance to speak. “It’s a great pleasure to serve with you. I can’t wait to hear about your plans for the comm. pod.”
They shook hands and she noticed the watch strapped to the inside of his wrist. It had an antique gold face and a battered leather band. His hand felt large and warm and dry, his grip firm and gentle at the same time.
“Thank you, Commander,” she replied. “It’s an honor. Good to meet you.”
He released her hand. She’d always found the habit of clasping a watch face to the soft side of the wrist to be somehow intimate, as though by checking the time the wearer was flashing a private piece of themself: exposing the palm, baring the pulse. After a few moments, a whistle blew and the crew was moved into one of the conference rooms, where Commander Harper was formally introduced. The crew crowded around the long, polished conference table and listened as the director of the space program, a woman named Inger Klaus, who had led the committee that selected the crew for Aether, spoke about Harper’s qualifications. She spent at least fifteen minutes on his biography, listing honors and accomplishments until Harper was red in the face and everyone in the room longed for her to cede the podium. When she finally did, Harper stepped forward to shake her hand and address the entire crew for the first time. What was it he’d said? Sully struggled to remember. He had notecards, she recalled, and despite the easygoing chatter by the pool, he was nervous. “I’m honored to serve with you all,” he declared, “as we step forward into the unknown—as a team, as a species, as individuals.”
On Aether, even as the communication blackout continued, Harper was the ground, the tether that made his crew feel just a tiny bit closer to Earth. With Devi he requested tutorials on the mechanics of the ship, plying her with questions about life support and radiation shields and the centrifugal gravity of Little Earth, trying to draw her back to the present. He played videogames with Tal and listened diplomatically to Tal’s fount of gaming advice, pretending to take the games as seriously as Tal did. Even Ivanov became civil when Harper went into his lab, showing him the work he had been doing and explaining its significance in an only slightly condescending tone. The old friendship with Thebes grew ever deeper; Sully could see him drawing strength from the older man’s stoic calm, funneling it into his own body and channeling it back out to the rest of the crew. The two had been in space together before, more than once, and they had always survived. Between them, they were keeping everyone else sane.
With Sully, Harper listened to the probes in the comm. pod or played cards or sketched her profile while she went over Jovian data. He didn’t have to work as hard with her; she liked his company. Looked forward to it. They spent hours sitting across from each other at the kitchen table on Little Earth. Sometimes she read to him from dense scientific papers while he exercised, and with sweat glistening on his face he would poke fun at the stilted turns of phrase. She humored him, all the while suspecting that his questions about the research were for her benefit, not his. Sometimes they talked about home, about what they missed, but home was an uncertain and dangerous variable. It was the lead weight that tugged each hopeful feeling back to the cold, dark bottom of their consciousness.
Sully found herself thinking more and more about what Thebes had told her: how to survive as a broken vessel. Tal and Ivanov and Devi had begun to spin out of sync, to exist either in memories or in projections, never fully present when she spoke to them. Sully tried to stop herself from doing the same, tried to brush her teeth and think only of brushing her teeth, to stop reconstructing the house in Vancouver, the smell of Jack’s cologne, the sound of Lucy splashing in the bath down the hall while she filled her drawers with clean, poorly folded laundry. When she caught herself dwelling in another year, another place, she counted to ten and discovered herself back on Aether, still in the asteroid belt, still en route to the silent Earth. She would put down her notes for the day, turn off the sound on her machines, and propel herself back to the entry node of Little Earth. She would feel the strain of gravity returning to her muscles, the food in her stomach settling to the bottom, the tail of her braid slithering down her back. She would be home, the only home that mattered just then. If she was in luck, Harper would be there, at the table, shuffling a deck of cards.
“C’mere, Sully—this time, you’re going down,” he would say, and she would sit, and she would play.
FIVE
THE SUN CAME and went so quickly that it was hard for Augustine to tell how long he was laid out. Drifting in and out of dreams, his fever burning red hot, he would wake in the dark and struggle to sit up, thrashing in the tangle of sleeping bags like a fly caught in a web. At other times he opened his eyes to see Iris hovering above him, offering him water or a blue camping mug full of chicken broth—but he couldn’t raise his arms to take it, or even command his tongue to form the words that tumbled through his hot, heavy brain: Come closer or How long have I been here? or What time is it? He would close his eyes, and again he would sleep.
In his fevered dreams, he was a young man again. His legs were strong, his eyesight sharp, his hands smooth and tanned, with wide palms and long, straight fingers. His hair was black, and he was clean-shaven, the prick of dark stubble always just beginning to shadow his jawline. His limbs were responsive, fluid and nimble. He was in Hawaii, in Africa, in Australia. He wore a white linen shirt barely buttoned, pressed khakis turned up to his ankles. He was wooing pretty girls in bars, classrooms, observatories, or else he was in the dark, wrapped in an olive field coat, pockets bulging with snacks and gear and pieces of rough quartz or stones with pleasing shapes and colors, looking up into the starry night sky above whichever corner of the earth he was presently passing through. There were palm fronds, eucalyptus trees, fields of sawgrass. White sand next to clear water, yellow mesas punctuated with lonely baobab trees. There were long-legged birds with multicolored wings and curved bills, little gray lizards and big green ones, African wild dogs, dingoes, a stray mutt he used to feed. In his dreams, the world was big and wild and colorful again, and he was part of it. It was a thrill just to exist. There were control rooms full of humming equipment, enormous telescopes, endless arrays. There were beautiful women, college girls and townies and visiting scholars, and he would’ve slept with them all if he could have.
In his dreams he was a still-young man just beginning to fall in love with himself. He was growing more and more certain that he could, should, have whatever he wanted. He was smart, and ambitious, and destined for greatness. The papers he wrote were being published in the best journals. There were endless job offers. He was written up in Time magazine’s “young science” issue. A wave of praise and admiration followed, which he rode into his late thirties. His work was written about with unmistakable reverence. The word genius was tossed around. All the observatories wanted him to do his research there, all the universities were begging him to teach. He was in high demand. For a time.
But delirium wasn’t his friend. The sun began to fade, the stars to dim, and the clock ran backward: he was an awkward, spotted sixteen-year-old again, in the lobby of a mental hospital, watching two men escort his mother to the locked ward while his father signed forms at the front desk. He was alone with his father in an empty house, hunting in the woods with him, riding in the truck with him, living with his foot poised above a perpetual land mine. He was visiting his overmedicated mother at the hospital before he left for college, listening to her mumble about fixing dinner, her eyes half-closed, hands trembling in her lap. And he was at his father’s grave ten years later, spitting on the freshly laid turf, kicking the tombstone until his toe broke. Augustine watched himself from afar in these scenes. He saw his own face, over and over, from behind the eyes of women he’d abused, colleagues he’d cheated, servers and bellhops and assistants and lab techs he’d neglected, slighted, always too busy and ambitious to pay attention to anyone but himself. For the first time he saw the damage he had caused, the hurt and sadness and resentment. He felt shame, and deep inside the husk of his illness he named it.