Everyone had retreated to a separate corner of the ship. There was only Tal left on Little Earth, looking at a radar tablet showing the local activity in the asteroid belt. The belt was in fact sparsely populated, millions of asteroids spread out across such an incredible distance that they’d be lucky to see even one on their way through. Their passage through the belt had been scheduled around a particularly inactive window, a Kirkwood gap, when all the larger asteroids were swept up into the orbital resonance created by Jupiter’s massive gravity. The chances of colliding with an asteroid were infinitesimal, but it was Tal’s job to make sure they didn’t beat the odds.
“Clear skies?” Sully asked as she took a protein bar from a cabinet in the kitchen area.
“The clearest,” Tal said, looking up from the smudged tablet screen. “Nothing but dust and pebbles for a couple thousand miles.”
Sully peeled back the wrapper from the bar like the skin of a banana and leaned over Tal’s shoulder. “I’d hate to get creamed by Ceres.”
Tal snorted. “Yeah, me too. But—not to worry, I’ll keep an eye on things. Anyway, I think we’re two weeks or so away from Mars’s orbit—so, getting there.”
She put a hand on his shoulder for a moment and then left Little Earth, climbing up the exit node’s ladder, her protein bar clamped between her teeth. After a few rungs she felt the weight slip from her body and she let go, kicking off to float the rest of the way. A few crumbs detached from the bar and drifted in front of her. She snapped them up like a hungry fish and propelled herself down the greenhouse corridor. She grabbed an overhead rung to stop herself in front of one of the tomato plants, where she rubbed a few leaves between her fingers, releasing the smell into the air, and then checked the late bloomer she had told Devi about yesterday. She noticed that the little flowers were gone, replaced by tiny green nubs, and she immediately began looking forward to sharing her observation with Devi—looking forward to anything had become so rare. She continued past the entry to Ivanov’s lab, where all the rock samples were being categorized. Through the doorway she glimpsed him peering into the enormous microscope built into the wall, pulling one piece of rock from the viewing drawer and replacing it with another. He spent most of his time in there these days.
Before turning into the comm. pod, Sully drifted straight ahead, onto the command deck, where she hovered in front of the clear cupola for a moment. The view had lost its novelty, but not its magnificence. The deep black of space, studded with bright pinpoints of light: burning steady red, or pulsing blue, or faintly glimmering like the wink of a coquettish eye from beneath the dark lashes of space and time. Sully could smell the sticky sap of the tomato plant on the pad of her thumb as she gazed out into the void, breathing in the earthy smell of photosynthesis to quiet the accelerated beat of her heart as she took in the overwhelming, infinite space that surrounded her. No beginning, no end, just this, forever. From here, the idea of Earth seemed like an illusion. How could something so verdant, so diverse and beautiful and sheltered, exist among all this emptiness? When she pulled herself away from the cupola she spotted Thebes working behind her, a tablet in one hand and one of the engineering apertures open in front of him, a hive of knobs and wires and switches.
“Hey, Thebes,” she said, and he looked up from the circuit map.
“Morning, Sully,” he said. “Just doing a systems check. I noticed the temperature programming in the comm. pod is off quite a bit, actually, running hot—did you reset it?”
“No,” she said, “I didn’t. But I’ve noticed it’s really warm in there lately. Isn’t the environmental system one of Devi’s projects?”
Thebes sighed. “It is,” he said, “but she’s finally getting a little sleep this morning, and it’s no trouble.”
She lingered on the command deck, watching him tweak the controls.
“Is she…doing any better?” Sully asked hesitantly, already knowing that she wasn’t but wanting so badly to hear that she was. Thebes shrugged, unable to give Sully what she wanted. They looked at each other for a moment, in a shared, knowing silence.
Finally Thebes announced, “All set. Seventy degrees on the dot.”
As he fitted the aperture cover back into place, Sully continued on to the comm. pod, suddenly consumed with worry. How much longer before one of Devi’s mistakes proved fatal? Before Ivanov and Tal came to serious blows? Before their precarious routine fell apart completely and something went really wrong? And if everything went right, if they somehow made it home without mutiny or casualty, what then? What would be waiting for them? What kind of life?
In the comm. pod, Sully gently collided with the only surface not occupied by some sort of equipment, a padded storage compartment opposite the entryway. After steadying herself and making her initial rounds, checking in with the receivers’ memory banks, taking stock of the probe uplinks, then sending a few commands back to the Jovian system, she settled into the daily task of scanning the airwaves for remnants of Earth’s noise pollution. It was tedious, and so far unrewarding, but she kept at it. To stop would be to give up—to inhabit the bleak possibilities that had been lurking at the edge of her thoughts for months—and that she would not do. Every now and then she picked up the handheld microphone and transmitted something, quietly, so that none of her colleagues would hear her talking. The faith that there was someone left to answer her kept smoldering. The odds for making contact would only increase the closer they came to Earth, and so even in the silent emptiness of space she felt hope grow as the days passed and the distance shrank. The crackle of the empty sine waves filled the pod and the data backlog from the Jovian probes kept stacking up, raw and unprocessed, but she didn’t care. Hours passed. It wasn’t until she began to think about going back to the centrifuge for something to eat that she heard it. A cacophonous bang, and then, nothing—not even static. She hurried to reboot the machines, checking all the connections and the stored telemetry as they restarted. All was well in the pod. She didn’t understand.
In the sudden, ominous silence she propelled herself out of the comm. pod, through the corridor and onto the command deck, where she looked out the cupola. A small cry escaped her. What appeared to be their main communications dish floated past, drifting playfully in a gust of solar wind, a severed arm waving goodbye as it receded into the darkness.
SEVEN
ONE MORNING AUGUSTINE woke later than usual. The sun was already high, the snow’s blinding albedo shining in through the windows like a floodlight. Augie lifted his head from the pillow and squinted at the tangled bedding beside him, gently poking it until he established that Iris was no longer there. The sleeping bags were cold, despite his own body heat, the bright sun shining in through the windows, and the sturdy furnace. The cloud of his breath bloomed above his face. He sat up and looked around for her, first to the table where she sat with her books, then to the chair where he sat with the radio equipment, then to each of the windowsills where she sometimes perched. She was in none of these places. She had been with him constantly since his illness, and Augustine realized it had been weeks since he hadn’t been able to find her. The incessant hiding he’d become accustomed to in their earlier days had ceased.
He got to his feet and began wrapping himself in clothes in preparation for the search. Having slept in woolen socks and a full suit of long underwear, he layered a flannel shirt, a fleece-lined sweater, and an insulated vest over his winter silks, then jammed his legs into a pair of flannel-lined work pants. Next came the scarves, two of them, and the parka and the unwieldy mittens, which he put on prematurely in his rush to get outside, then had to remove again in order to get his boots on. In the stairwell, a blast of cold air ruffled his white hair. He cursed and trudged back to the desk to snatch his hat from where it lay draped over the backrest of the chair. Getting dressed for the Arctic outdoors, even in spring, was an ordeal. And then, as he pulled the hat down over his ears, he looked out the window and saw her. He took the stairs as quickly as he could, the sounds of his haste reverberating in the empty stairwelclass="underline" the waxed canvas of his pant legs rasping, the thud of his boots landing heavily on each stair tread, the whiz of his mittens skidding down the handrail, the throb of his breath pounding inside his eardrums.