“Wanna play something?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Maybe later.”
He sighed and waved her off, quickly distracted again by the glow of the screen. Sully got up and walked along the slope of the ring, through the kitchen area, to where Thebes and Harper sat reading, Harper on his tablet, Thebes with another one of the paperback books he had insisted on bringing—Asimov this time—despite the initial uproar over the amount of space they would take up. It wasn’t that much space, Thebes had argued, and because Thebes never argued about anything, the mission’s oversight committee stepped in and overrode the naysayers. The committee wrote off the extra cargo as psychologically necessary equipment. The crew had laughed about it at the time, but now, watching Thebes turn the page, Sully wondered about that phrase. Psychologically necessary equipment. The human mind had never been tested quite like this. Could they have been better prepared? Trained more extensively? What tools would help them now? It seemed ridiculous, but perhaps these books, sheaves of paper made from trees that had once grown on their home planet, full of made-up stories, were what kept Thebes so much more grounded than the rest of them.
Thebes and Harper both looked up as she slid onto the bench. “How is the comm. department faring?” Thebes asked.
She shrugged. “Fine,” she said. “Did you guys eat on schedule?”
They nodded. “I saved you some,” Harper said. “Would’ve radioed over that we were starting, but I figured you were wrapped up in something.”
Sully found the plate waiting for her on the range, a few strips of test tube beef, aeroponic kale, and a puddle of freeze-dried mashed potatoes. She couldn’t help but smile when she saw the dinner, carefully arranged on the plate, a few notches above the usual fare. “Wow, classy,” she said, bringing the plate back to the table. Thebes jerked his thumb toward Harper.
“All him,” he said. “The commander’s showing off tonight.”
Sully scooped up a forkful of mashed potato and speared a leaf of kale. “It shows.”
“Shucks.” Harper pretended to be embarrassed, or maybe he actually was—she couldn’t tell. He put down his tablet and raised his voice a little so Tal could hear him. “Anyone up for a round of cards?”
He was looking at Sully as he spoke—he knew she was the only one who would play. Tal declined, as did Thebes, and a muffled “No, thank you” came from inside Devi’s curtained bunk. “Whaddaya say, Sullivan?” Harper persisted.
“Yes, but in a minute,” she said, thinking of Devi’s listless reply. Sully walked to Devi’s bunk and rapped her knuckles on the side of the compartment. “Hey, can I come in?” She slipped inside without waiting for an invitation. Behind the curtain Devi lay curled around one of her pillows, holding it tightly against her chest, her nose buried in the top, her thighs locked on either side.
“Sure,” Devi whispered, belatedly, but she didn’t move.
“What did you do today?” Sully asked, sitting on the bed. Devi shrugged but said nothing. “Have you eaten anything?”
“Yeah,” she said, without elaborating. Then, after a minute: “Tell me something.”
Sully waited, but Devi was silent. That was it. Tell me something. Sully flopped onto her back and tucked her arms under her head, searching for something to tell. What was worth saying? After a moment she remembered passing through the greenhouse corridor that morning, and the day’s thoughts came tumbling out—an edited version, without any mention of Earth.
“You know that yellow tomato plant that hasn’t been yielding? I noticed a few flowers on it today, might do something yet. And Tal says we’re nearly through the asteroid belt, a few more weeks maybe.” Sully walked her feet up to the ceiling of Devi’s bunk and looked at her toes, shod in the rubber slip-ons they’d all been issued. They seemed strange from this angle, like alien hooves. She let her legs flop back down onto the bed.
“The Jovian probes are all still transmitting, but there’s so much data coming in sometimes I feel like I don’t have the heart to catalog it all. It’s hard to care.” She paused, suddenly afraid she’d veered into dangerous territory, but Devi didn’t say anything. Sully continued in a different direction, her voice low and confidential. “I ran into Ivanov coming out of the lavatory today, literally ran into him. He was a jerk about it—like it’s my fault this ship is so fucking small, you know? Like he would be so much better off without us, all alone out here, taking his shitty mood out on his rock samples.”
That worked. Devi turned over at least, and gave her a half smile. “He would never be angry at his rock samples,” she whispered.
They both laughed quietly, but the smile that flashed across Devi’s lips shriveled and died away almost immediately.
“I think he’s unkind because it’s easier to be angry than frightened,” Devi said. She paused, then pulled the pillow tighter against her chest. “I’m really tired, okay? Thanks for saying hi, though.”
Sully nodded. “Let me know if you need anything,” she said, and wriggled back out of the bunk. Harper was waiting for her at the table, shuffling a deck of cards, score sheet at hand.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Well, I’m ready to kick someone’s ass,” she joked. It felt hollow and forced after seeing Devi so low. “Might as well be yours.” Her plate was still half-full of dinner, which had been lukewarm to start with and had now grown cold. She didn’t mind, folding a leafy bite of kale into her mouth and wiping a smear of olive oil from her face. They played rummy, as always. Sully won the first hand, then the second. An hour later, Thebes wished them good night and retired to his bunk. Harper dealt a third hand, and when he laid down the deck and flipped over the ace of spades, Sully was reminded of learning to play solitaire when she was a little girl. The silver centrifuge of Little Earth melted away, and for just a second she was looking at her mother’s delicate, tapered fingers snapping down cards onto her imitation wood desk deep in the Mojave Desert.
Her mother had taught her one afternoon when she was about eight years old, when Jean worked long hours at the Deep Space Network’s Goldstone facility. The two of them, mother and daughter, lived in the desert. It was a boiling hot afternoon, and Jean—Sully had always called her mother by her first name—was stuck in signal processing meetings all afternoon. With no one to take care of Sully and no one to take her home, Jean borrowed a deck of cards from one of the interns. Between meetings, she took Sully into her office, barely more than a cubicle, really, sat her down and showed her how to lay the cards out. Sully fiddled with her mother’s plastic nameplate, Jean Sullivan, PhD, and pretended to pay close attention.
“So then it goes black on red, red on black, in order, until you can get all the suits sorted onto the aces. Understand, little bear?”
Sully had, in fact, known all along how to play. She’d learned from a babysitter. But when Jean asked if she wanted to learn she’d nodded vigorously. It was, if nothing else, a chance to earn an extra five minutes of her mother’s time. Sully didn’t mind being stuck at her mother’s office, she was used to it by now. As far as she was concerned, the closer she could be to Jean, the better. It had always been just the two of them, which was how Sully liked it. Sully didn’t question the absence of a father—she had nothing to compare it to.