Now, years later, in the cold Arctic, Augustine remembered that basement as clearly as if he were still sitting down there, alone at his work table with the spools of wire, germanium transistors, rudimentary amps, oscillators, mixers, filters laid out before him. The soldering iron at his right elbow, plugged in and already warm, the schematics for his latest endeavor to his left: a smudged pencil sketch, little arrows and clumsy symbols to remind himself of the current’s flow. His father wasn’t welcome in these memories, but his voice intruded from time to time:
“What kind of an idiot can’t fix a transistor?”
“This looks like a two-year-old made it.”
At the observatory, in the control room, Augie double-checked the satellite phones and the broadband network to be sure he hadn’t overlooked something. Communication from the outpost had always been haphazard, mostly reliant on satellites, but without the satphone or broadband working, with no satellite connection to speak of, there was only ham radio. He hunted through the control tower and the outbuildings for anything that might be useful, but there wasn’t much. The equipment was there only for backup. The system in place was less than ideal, barely powerful enough to talk to the military base on the northern tip of the island, mostly used for communication with planes passing over. The power supply was weak and the antenna sensitivity even weaker; a signal would have to be very close, very powerful, or riding a lucky sky-wave to register. Assuming there was anyone out there to hear it in the first place.
It reminded him of his years in the basement, turning his machines on and transmitting the first CQ of the day. Simple, straightforward, with a single purpose. He was seeking anyone, it didn’t matter who. He’d collected QSL postcards—confirmations of radio communication between two ham operators—from his various contacts and filed them away. There were earnest cards with call signs scrawled over an outline of the operator’s home state, silly cards with cartoon sketches of the operators hanging from their antennae like monkeys or wet laundry, dirty cards with busty, half-naked women draped over radio equipment and murmuring into a handheld microphone. Augustine would sit down at his microphone in the basement and scan the empty ham frequencies, issuing his call as he moved through the dial, and whether it took him a minute or a few hours, someone would eventually respond to him.
A voice would fill his speakers and say, “KB1ZFI, this is so-and-so responding.” They would exchange locations and Augie would add up the miles on the atlas he kept nearby—the more distant the contact, the better. The QSL cards were just for fun—it was the contact itself that thrilled him most, the idea that he could send his signal out across the country, across the world, and make an immediate connection somewhere, anywhere. There was always someone at the other end—someone he didn’t know, someone he couldn’t picture and would never meet, but a voice all the same. He didn’t bother chatting over the airwaves after the initial contact. He just reached out to see if someone was there, and he was satisfied once he knew there was. After the initial connection had been made, he might go for two, three, half a dozen if the weather conditions were prime and the signals were traveling far. When he was finished with his CQs he’d turn off his equipment, address a few QSL cards of his own—a simple globe with a signal shooting off into space, scattered stars and his own call sign in block letters at the top—and then tinker with the electronics in the quiet solitude of the basement. These were his happiest moments as a child. Alone, without the cruelty of the other kids at school, without the volatility of his mother, without the belittling comments of his father. Just him, his equipment, and the hum of his own mind.
In the Arctic, he fine-tuned the equipment, and when he was finally satisfied he turned it all on. Iris had been watching him work with vague curiosity but didn’t say anything. She was outside wandering among the outbuildings when he began transmitting. Augie could see her from the window, her small shape dark against the snow. He picked up the handheld microphone, pressed the Transmit button, then let it go. He cleared his throat; pressed it again.
“CQ,” he said, “CQ, this is KB1ZFI, kilo-bravo-one-zulu-foxtrot-india, over. CQ. Anyone?”
SIX
SULLY DRIFTED THROUGH the comm. pod from one machine to the next. She kept her knees slightly bent, her ankles tucked around each other, and used her arms to propel her, like a swimmer. Her braid floated out behind her and the empty arms of her jumpsuit, tied at her waist, hovered in front of her stomach like extra limbs. Aether had traveled far enough into the belt that a lag in the transfer of data from the Jovian probes had developed. The information from Jupiter’s system was already old by the time it arrived in Sully’s receivers, and it got older each day as they moved a little farther away from Jupiter and a little closer to Earth. Lately she’d been neglecting her probes and scanning the radio frequencies of home instead. She swept the entire communication spectrum again and again, no longer content to monitor the designated DSN bands. There should be some noise pollution: satellite chatter, errant TV signals, very high or ultra high frequency transmissions that slipped through the ionosphere and out into space. There should be something, she thought. The silence was an anomaly, a result that shouldn’t, couldn’t, be correct.
Sully kept it to herself. There wasn’t much use in sharing empty sine waves with the rest of them, just confirmation of the same bad news, but at least the act of scanning helped her through the days, helped her to feel she was doing something. One way or another, the closer they got, the more she knew. It’s strange, she thought, how pointless the Jovian probes seemed now. She would trade them all, every byte of data they’d collected, every single thing they’d learned, for just one voice coming into her receiver. Just one. This wasn’t wistful bargaining, or hyperbole, just a fact. She had boarded Aether believing that nothing could be more important than the Jovian probes, and now—everything was more important. The whole purpose of their mission seemed insignificant, pointless. Day by day, there was nothing except the digital binary of mechanical wanderers and the cosmic rays from the stars and their planets.
Sully propelled herself back to Little Earth, floating through the twists and turns of the spacecraft: seemingly empty stretches padded with storage and electronics, Aether’s organs secreted behind her light gray tunnels. As Sully drifted headfirst down the greenhouse corridor, where the walls were lined with grow boxes for aeroponic vegetables, she untied the sleeves of her jumpsuit from her waist and shrugged into the top half. Approaching the entry node, she reached up and caught one of the rungs studding the padded walls, then flipped herself around to enter the node that connected the rest of the craft to Little Earth feetfirst. She dropped through a short tunnel, gravity gaining on her as she moved, and was deposited on the centrifuge’s landing pad with a thump, right between the couch and the exercise equipment. Sully’s feet were grabbed by the ground as if there were suction cups on the soles of her shoes, and she paused while her body recalibrated and found its balance. She zipped up the front of her suit and untucked her braid, which fell heavily on her shoulder like a length of rope. The centrifugal gravity made her feel instantly exhausted, as though she’d been running for hours, awake for days. As soon as she trusted her legs she walked over to the sofa and sat down next to Tal, disguising her fatigue by watching him finish a first-person shooter game. The two-year journey was taking its toll—she could feel her muscles weakening, her health waning. She’d been in the best physical shape of her life when they left, but not anymore. For a moment she wondered what it would be like reacclimating to Earth’s twenty-four-hour gravity, and then she cut the thought short. No point thinking about it now. Tal tossed the controller onto the floor and turned to her.