One minute to launch. Then, ignition. The capsule began to shake; my breath grew hot inside my helmet. Then a thundering came from below, a pent-up roar. The rocket swayed to the left, to the right, as if it would tip over. But it was all right. I’d read about it. My breath got hotter and hotter. We were tipping more and more.
Then—a lift, the loss of supports. A two-second delay—and a terrible spring into the air, like a crouching animal unchained. My body slammed against my seat, my visor fogged, and we were airborne. The second-stage rockets fired, and I was lifted up, my stomach and breasts straining against my harness as we separated from the rocket.
And then—a sudden quiet. The compartment cooled. My body was light. Out the porthole was an expanse of deep velvety black. The rocket’s white body slowly fell away, and it was the most singular thing I’d ever seen. We began our first orbit and the pilot deployed the solar arrays and antennae. Things floated through the compartment—dust, slips of fabric, a few bolts. I watched their uneven trajectories, the unexpected arcs they made. My head felt full, my eyeballs huge. But my limbs were like air, like dust.
The pilot floated by. He’d taken off his helmet and he gestured for me to do the same. His face was red—zero gravity had pushed all the blood into his head. He started calling out systems checks to mission control. I took off my helmet and the air was cold on my face. I unstrapped myself, held on to my seat with my hands, and hovered just above it. Then I let go and propelled myself like a fish across the compartment.
The Earth’s curved edge was hard and deep blue through the porthole. I remembered my uncle’s globe, a plaster sphere painted blue and brown and written all over with small script, held by an arc of metal engraved with the sun and moon and planets. One time he set the globe on the floor and spun it, and we climbed on top of his desk to watch. Its oceans and continents blurred, turning from hard to soft before our eyes.
This is what it’s like when you’re in orbit, my uncle said. All the world moves fast underneath you, and you feel like you’re a thousand feet tall.
Standing there with him, imagining myself in the kind of spacesuit I now wore, I did feel a thousand feet tall. But this wasn’t like that at all. There was nothing soft about the ball of blue and white in the porthole, no matter how quickly its stretches of land and sea raced past. I felt the planet’s size and force. It seemed to press against the darkness around it, against the porthole itself. Like it would keep pressing until it pushed the capsule out of orbit and sent us flying through open space.
I turned away from the porthole and my hands floated, my body drifted. The entry hatch was near my feet now, the seats at my head. I was upside down but felt I was right side up. My eyes swam around the room. I couldn’t seem to find a place for them to rest. Nausea moved over me, a hot and cold wave.
I climbed back to my seat and strapped myself in. My stomach calmed a little, but I still felt…what? Untethered. Adrift. More like a speck of dust than a person. I thought of my uncle and all the things he knew about the history of our universe, the history of space travel. About the machines that made living in space possible. But he’d never left Earth. As of this moment I’d gone farther into space than he had.
23
I blinked inside the dazzlingly white airlock outside the Sundew, the cargo station where I was posted for the next six months. My breath was loud inside my helmet; I held on to a handrail with one hand and my feet waved around below me. There was a long scrape and a pop as the capsule that had brought me disengaged from the Sundew and began to inch away. Some numbers on a screen counted down from one hundred, and when they hit zero, I took off my helmet and gloves. A hot metal smell—like my uncle’s soldering iron—filled my nose.
Out the porthole the capsule became smaller and smaller, and I had a strange feeling of being left behind. But three other people were on the other side of the interior hatch door, and I only had to press the button beside the door and it would open. I angled myself in that direction and pushed it, but nothing happened. I waited. My limbs drifted, my organs shifted inside my body. I tried to right myself, taking hold of a handrail with one hand and hugging my helmet to my chest with the other. I pedaled my feet.
A voice came from above, a woman’s. Hold on in there. There was static. Got a faulty seal. Give us a minute—
The airlock shifted to the left. I thought it was in my mind, because surely they weren’t going to rotate the airlock with me in it. But it really was moving, turning under my feet. A low whine filled the air.
Hey, I yelled. Hey!
I strained to keep my grip on the handrail and my helmet slipped from my hand and spiraled away. My hip hit the porthole, harder than I thought possible in zero gravity; my wrist twisted and I cried out and let go of the handrail. I bounced against one wall, and another. My helmet spun back at me, fast, and I batted it away.
Then all at once the rotation ceased. My helmet stopped too and hovered in the air like a balloon. I got hold of the handrail again, breathing hard. I rotated my wrist, felt tears at the corners of my eyes, and blinked them away.
All done, the voice said. And then the hatch door slid open.
Beyond it was a minimally lit gray module. The door slid shut behind me and my eyes adjusted to the dim. I smelled stale air, plastic, urine. Every surface was covered in panels and equipment, labeled in at least three languages; there was no ceiling, no floor. No differentiation between up, down, left, right.
I rubbed my twisted wrist. The air was warmer than I’d expected, slightly balmy even, and full of a low buzzing hum.
The woman’s voice returned, near my feet. Sorry about that.
There was a video intercom just under my left foot. But the screen showed only an empty seat, its restraints loose in the air.
It’s okay, I said. But it wasn’t okay. Focusing on the screen below made my stomach press against my skin. The buzzing in the air seemed to get louder, or nearer, or something. I tasted sour, and I clamped my mouth shut.
Compression seat’s to your left, the voice said, and I pulled myself in that direction as fast as I could, my teeth clenched against the rising vomit. By the time I got myself into the right module I was sweating. I struggled out of my suit, a torturous task without gravity, convinced I’d throw up inside it. The neck ring scraped my skin and pulled my hair; my wrist and hip smarted with every movement, and I was nearly weeping when I finally got free.
In my underclothes and socks I grabbed a bottle tethered to the wall and took a drink. When the liquid moved in the right direction, downward, I was grateful. I wiped my face with a wet towel from a box stuck to the wall, and it was cool against my throbbing head. I took another. I scrubbed my lips and found brown blood. In a square mirror next to the wipes my eyes were red like a rabbit’s. I opened my mouth. During liftoff I must have bit the tip of my tongue.
I strapped myself into the compression seat, secured its one-piece with elastic and Velcro, and pressed a button I thought was right. It filled with water, squeezing each of my limbs, starting at the top and working its way down. It pushed the blood from my head into my shoulders, and my ears cleared. The throbbing behind my eyes ceased. Then it pushed the blood from my shoulders into my torso, and my stomach calmed. Once it reached my legs I felt almost normal.