“Good night,” he murmured, and she heard the click of his light going off.
She lay in the dark for a long time, on her back with her eyes open, inspecting all the shadows in her compartment. At the foot of the bed, the craggy mountain of clothes she’d worn today and would wear again tomorrow. On the wall, the square of the photograph of Lucy. Above her, the dark round globe of her reading light. After a while she fell asleep and dreamed she was traveling in the other direction on Voyager 3, away from home instead of toward it. Her feelings in the dream were untroubled, tranquil. She was nestled into the cup of Voyager’s parabolic dish, curled up like a sleepy cat while she looked out into the blackness and realized she’d gone farther than she’d ever expected to. She realized she’d come to the end of the universe, and she was pleased.
THE FIVE OF them gathered at the long table for breakfast and a rundown of the next phase of their journey. Sully sipped orange juice through a straw and arranged a screen of attention onto her features while Tal spoke about the trajectory plan. While they were traveling past Mars, jumping on and off its orbit as if it were a celestial highway, they would be a relatively short way from Mars itself. Tal went on to explain the complexities of Mars’s orbit and how exactly they would use its gravity for their own purposes, but beyond that Sully lost track of what he was saying. She was contemplating the texture of the cabinet behind his head when she realized that she’d reached the end of the orange juice and was making a rude sucking noise with the straw. Tal had stopped talking and was looking at her. She froze in midslurp, and he continued.
“So I know we’ve been seeing Mars from a distance for some time, but if you’d like a better look, the next few days would be the ideal time.”
Her mind drifted out of focus once more. Harper took over and got everyone squared away on their tasks for this final leg of their journey, as Aether drew closer to Earth. Sully nodded in the right places, and when they were finally dismissed she went straight to the comm. pod. She had lost time to make up on the Jovian probes, and she wanted to be sure the incoming data was recorded and filed correctly. The straightforward labor of data entry soothed her, even if the conclusions she was drawing and the hypotheses she was forming still didn’t have an audience. It helped distract her from the unknowns of their journey. Sully was a few hours into her work before she realized she was ravenous and hadn’t eaten since yesterday. She remembered the fruit leather she’d tucked away in her pocket the night before and ripped into the package while she cataloged the telemetry.
She thought of Mars while she worked. She pictured its cratered red earth, orange dust, and dry, empty riverbeds. She thought of the plans for colonization—an American mission had already been there and back a few years ago, mostly to do a geological survey but also to look for potential habitat sites. Before Aether’s departure, a private space travel company had been entrenched in the logistics of building a permanent colony on Mars. It was supposedly only a few years from realization—too late, apparently.
She was excited to see the red planet so close. Their view on the way out almost two years ago had been fleeting and from a distance. They had been focused on other things—the pull of Jupiter, the planet no one had ever seen up close. Now Mars’s significance lay mainly in its proximity to Earth. The last signpost before their destination: nearly there. When Sully had done a few more hours of work with the Jovian telemetry, she changed her receiving frequency to Voyager 3, still thinking of her dream from last night. She alighted on the signal just in time to hear a shrill whistle, and then silence. She couldn’t get it back, no matter what she tried—found only empty sine waves where the signal had been just a moment before. It was late by the time she gave up. The probe was gone. Perhaps the power had finally quit, perhaps something else had malfunctioned and rendered its comm. system unusable, or perhaps it had traveled so far it was simply beyond their reach. It was possible that she would get it back another day, that something had blocked the signal—a planet in the way or even an asteroid—but she thought not. She floated in the silence of the comm. pod for a long while, remembering her dream. In the end she wished Voyager well and let it go, for good.
It was time to turn her attention back to Earth—not the Earth she’d left, the Earth she was returning to. The long months of retrospection and grief, thoughts of people she’d left, people she’d lost, were too heavy for her to carry anymore. She had been looking backward long enough. Now, finally, she gave herself permission to look forward. She didn’t feel hope, not yet, but she made room for it. Sully adjusted her wavelength and began to scan the frequencies: mostly listening, occasionally transmitting, but constantly searching, from one band to another. When she had scanned both the UHF and the VHF spectrums she began again, from the beginning. There had to be something out there. There had to be.
FIFTEEN
THEY BEGAN TO spend a lot of time in the little dinghy, out on Lake Hazen. Augustine would row them out, halfway to the island, and then they would take turns casting. It never took long—the lake was teeming with char that would snap at anything and the little orange spinner was too tempting to ignore. They would catch one, maybe two if they were smaller, pith and bleed them, then row back and gut them on the shore. Iris grew skilled at casting, and she was getting good at the gruesome parts, too, at severing the spine and removing the guts—she refused to leave the fish for Augie to clean.
The tiny wildflowers grew in thick, colorful carpets across the tundra. As mantles of color popped up among the new grass and the soft brown earth, Augie and Iris started to venture farther and farther from the camp to explore the unfamiliar abundance of summer. The surrounding hills and mountains were full of lemmings and Arctic hares and birds. The musk oxen and caribou kept to the tundra, eating all the tiny, rare botanical specimens like canapés at a fancy cocktail party. During one such hike, Augie rested on a boulder while Iris scrambled on ahead. A caribou approached and carefully snapped up the patch of marsh saxifrage that Augustine had been admiring, fitting its clumsy lips around the little yellow flowers and chomping off their stems at the root before sauntering off to sniff out more delicacies. Augie could see the whorl of fur in the center of its forehead, could hear its teeth clicking together, could smell the rich, musty odor of its breath. He’d never been so close to a wild animal—not a living one. It was enormous, with antlers that towered over him, so tall they seemed to disappear into the brightness of the sky, like the branches of a tree.
Augustine thought of the radio control building, as he often did. He still hadn’t gone inside, and as time passed he began to wonder why. What was he avoiding? He was curious to see what kind of equipment it might offer, what he might or might not hear, but everything else was so pleasant, it subsumed his curiosity. He didn’t want to disturb the tranquillity of their life at the lake. He didn’t know what he would find, and whether it was nothing or something, he was in no rush to risk the brand-new happiness they’d forged. For once, Augustine was content not to know. And yet—this search for another voice wasn’t about him. His own happiness wasn’t the most important thing to him anymore.
When they first arrived, he’d been fooled into thinking his health was improving—the calm of the lake, the relative warmth, the stillness of the wind made him feel stronger. But as time wore on, he came to understand that his days were as limited as ever. Comfort didn’t mean improvement. Life was easier here, but he was still growing older. The long night would come again, and when it did, the temperatures would plummet and his joints would seize and ache just as they had before. His heart would beat a little slower, his mind would not operate quite so nimbly. The polar night would seem to last forever. He both feared and hoped this year would be his last. He was old—wildflowers and gentle breezes would not make him young again. He looked up the incline to see Iris skidding back down, jumping from rock to rock like a mountain goat.