That night we all slept for as long as we wanted, and by late morning everyone ended up in the galley hovering around the food compartments. We should eat something real, Rachel said. Eggs maybe. With what? Mushrooms and hot sauce? In a tortilla? She began rummaging through the dry goods compartment.
We hovered while Rachel assembled the food. You couldn’t really call it cooking; it was more like compiling different things from different drawers. But it was good, what she put together. The eggs were crumbly but actually tasted eggy. The hot sauce burned pleasantly on my tongue.
We should eat the apples too, Rachel said when everyone was done. Before they go bad—
Real apples? I asked.
Our lockers came in the last packet, Amelia said. Rachel’s dad sent apples.
Rachel floated out of the galley and came back with her locker, and mine and Simon’s too.
She tossed us each an apple; it was smooth and warm in my hand. I bit into it and it was wet and tart and firm. I ate it quickly, taking one bite after the other without stopping, until all that was left was the thinnest core. Rachel threw another in my direction and I reached in the air and caught it. I ate that one fast too, and so did everyone else, and the small room filled with the crunching of our teeth.
I wiped my mouth. My locker hovered near the ceiling. I’d packed it so long ago. Or, it felt that way. But it had been no more than a week. I tried to remember if I’d put anything in there I could share—
I undid the latch and the lid popped open and items began to float out. A pocket atlas, a container of iced tea mix, my favorite Candidate Group sweatshirt—red with white lettering across its front. Books and papers of my uncle’s I’d been carrying around since I left home. As I pushed the atlas and tea back in, New History of Energy bumped out, and sheets of paper with faded blue schematics dislodged from their folder. They separated and dispersed in the air. I pulled my sweatshirt from underneath the spray of papers and pushed everything else back inside.
But Amelia grabbed one sheet, held it up to the light, and frowned. It was a fuel cell schematic covered in writing—my uncle’s, Simon’s, James’s, Theresa’s, and her own. Reflected light from outside the porthole shined through the paper and made the writing appear darker than it really was.
Why do you have these? Her voice was strange.
I felt silly; I had only a five-kilogram allowance for personal items and I’d used it to carry my uncle’s old things.
I like having something of his with me, I said.
She slid the paper into the box.
I should have brought food or extra tools, I said. I shut the lid and slid the latch closed. Something useful.
It’s your locker. She looked at Simon; he was pushing apples from Rachel’s locker into one of the refrigerator bins. You can bring what you want.
28
Everything has a different weight and shape in space. Objects don’t behave the way you expect them to: an enormous container of supplies that appears impossible to haul is in fact easy, but a small sack of hardware is unwieldy, potentially dangerous. Things move in unpredictable ways, change shape, even disappear. Food floats away or disintegrates before you can eat it; tools you gripped tightly in your hand just seconds ago seem to vanish into thin air.
My body itself was different on the Sundew, the contours of my face almost unrecognizable in the mirror. My cheeks were wider, my eyes rounder. My shoulders took up more room than they did on Earth, my legs less. I didn’t move the same. Like everyone else on the station I developed my own unique way of getting from module to module, half swim, half climb. I didn’t even sound the same. When someone asked me a question and I answered, my voice—lower and raspier than on Earth—seemed to belong to someone else.
It wasn’t just tangible things that were different, things I could point to and say, That’s not the same as on Earth. Time and physical space were different. The span of a minute, an hour, a day. The directions, up and down, left and right. The perceived dimensions of something as large as a module or as small as a bolt. My senses were different. Sight, smell, taste, touch, sound. They could distort and change shape; they could be one thing at one moment and quite another thing the next.
I had to reorient myself to my surroundings constantly, be alert at all times. Even when I was tired, hungry, or hurting. Even when I slept.
I learned to distrust my sense of sight, to discount my sense of taste and smell (they were so dulled by the effects of zero gravity on my sinuses they were nearly useless). I relied more on my fingers, on my ears; instead of turning on lights when I needed to go to the toilet in the night I just felt my way there, listening instead of looking for anything amiss as I moved through silent and shadowy modules and locks.
I started to listen to the equipment and systems I was charged with maintaining and fixing. I got the idea from Simon who I found in Storage and Systems one morning, his ear pressed against the oxygenator. He was wearing a jumpsuit unbuttoned to his waist, a clean white T-shirt underneath. Rachel had just used the clippers on his hair and his scalp was pink.
I asked him what he was doing and he frowned and held up a hand. Hold on—
When he was done I pressed him to explain.
Every system has two sounds, he said. One when it’s working properly, one when it’s not. If you get to know them, you can stop a problem before it happens.
How do you know which is good and which is bad?
He drummed his thumb on the side of the oxygenator. Listen every day and you’ll learn.
At first I didn’t hear anything but a hum. Then I drew my limbs into my body and pressed my ear closer, the metal of the panel cold against my ear, and was able to differentiate three different noises: a dragging hum, a whoosh of air, and—every few seconds—a faint tick, tick.
I started listening to the electronics assembly, the heat rejection radiator, the space-to-ground antenna system. The water reclaimer and the thermal control system. At any odd moment, when I didn’t have anything else to do, I pressed my ear to things—panels, vents, equipment. I floated from one machine to the next.
It got to the point where my dreams weren’t about people anymore, or places, or things. They didn’t have pictures in them at all—only the sounds of the station. Hums and drips and scrapes; gentle scuffles and creaking rasps; jangling squeaks. Long stints of vibrating static. Rhythmic stretches of thumps.
One morning I woke with a full bladder and the swishing pops of the galley water pump in my ears. I wiggled out of my sleeping bag and swam to the toilet. It hadn’t been cleaned in a while and it smelled bad. I sat down gingerly, pressed the suction button, and felt the toilet pull hard on my bottom. My body tightened. I took a breath and relaxed my thighs, bladder, stomach. Finally I was able to go, and the urine was whisked out of my body in an instant.
A red light warned me the waste tanks were full and I groaned. The urine processing unit had broken three days ago and there hadn’t been time to fix it. I’d have to manually empty the tank before I could go back to bed. I got the tools I needed from Storage and Systems and powered everything down. Then I hovered over the unit to detach the electrical connectors, tape them temporarily to the wall with duct tape, and remove the tank, all while trying to avoid breathing through my nose. I started the pump and figured since I’d already taken the unit apart I might as well try to fix it.
I began to undo all the bolts on the broken part—a big metal drum that distilled water from urine through evaporation—and Amelia’s voice came from behind me. You’re up early. She floated into the module. She was eating a shriveled apple.