He was quiet for a minute. She said it was hubris. That we weren’t meant to be here. Maybe we’re not.
I thought of Earth and the people I’d left behind there. My aunt sitting in her bedroom surrounded by soft and beautiful things. Lion diving into one of the neutral buoyancy tanks in his wet suit, falling fast, surrounded by shining bubbles. Carla and Nico standing together inside a cold hangar, preparing a rocket for a test launch, their breath making clouds in the air.
Just because Theresa didn’t belong here doesn’t mean we don’t. I picked up the next board in the pile. You sort, I’ll tighten, I said, and pulled my seat close to his.
50
At the Gateway we took off our suits just inside the cargo bay airlock and I recalled the first time I saw James in this corridor, a dark shape behind a bright light. His broad chest and wild hair. Now his suit bagged around his thin frame. His face was gray with exhaustion, his T-shirt stained with sweat. He limped toward his room and I wanted to follow, to help him change his clothes and rebandage his eye. I wanted to help him into bed. But he gave no indication he wanted company; he moved slowly down the dim corridor and disappeared into the darkness.
In the galley I made coffee and ate a bowl of oatmeal. Then I took my mug and went looking for Amelia in the control room; only Simon was there, typing fast on a computer. I guessed he was writing to Anu so I left him alone. The corridors were familiar again. The runner lights glowed blue at my feet. The temperature fluctuated as I walked through them, from cold to warm to cold. I opened doors to bunks. Amelia and Rachel were in the room opposite to my own. Amelia lay on top of the covers still in her jumpsuit, her good hand hanging off the side of the bed and her prosthetic hugged to her chest. She was already asleep and snoring. Rachel was curled next to her, wrapped in a blanket, her hair spread across the pillow.
I should have been tired but I wasn’t. In my bunk my old locker was still under the bed. I rummaged through it for a change of clothes, grabbed a shirt and tights and a pair of wool socks. I shook out my old Candidate Group sweatshirt and a spray of papers fell to the floor—my uncle’s fuel cell schematics. I pulled the sweatshirt over my head and spread the schematics out on the bed. They were curled at the edges and smelled of dust and, ever so faintly, of pen ink. Paging through them, as I had done as a child, I watched the evolution of the cell from inception to near completion. I was taken again by the brilliance and daring of its design. The notes in the margins were faded slightly but still legible—five scripts belonging to my uncle, James, Theresa, Amelia, and Simon.
But when I began reading I saw something I hadn’t recognized before, a kind of arrogance in their exchange. I paged ahead and it seemed to me that the people who wrote these words were playing at something. Their dialogue read like a game, but the scenarios they described were real. And the horror the Inquiry crew would face if any of these things happened to them was real also. Simon was the only one who seemed to fully grasp how multiple and inscrutable the dangers could be—I could tell because he was the only one of the five who sounded scared.
I got to the part where James and Theresa argued about the benefits of open versus closed stacks. Theresa wanted an open modular casing, James a closed one.
Lose less power this way, he wrote next to a drawing of the proposed case.
What if something goes wrong? Much harder to fix, Theresa answered.
Do you want someone messing with what we’ve built? he asked.
Simon’s neat print joined the other two. Something always goes wrong.
This was where my twelve-year-old handwriting joined theirs. I read my responses, my clumsy attempts to describe what was in my mind. Some of it was intelligible; a lot of it wasn’t, and I felt an overwhelming urge to get a pen and correct what I’d written. To answer my uncle’s questions again and to make sense of what had only partly made sense before.
When I looked up James stood in the doorway. He appeared to have slept, although it couldn’t have been for more than an hour or two. His hair was flat on one side, and a slight indentation lined his left cheek, below the bandage on his eye.
What are you reading? he asked.
I gathered the papers into a pile. The original schematics for my uncle’s cell.
He came closer, his body tilting slightly to the left, and picked up the top page. He squinted at it and smiled. He paged forward and then back and began reading. We thought we knew it all.
It was a revolutionary design, I said.
With a fatal flaw.
It didn’t have to be fatal.
He didn’t answer; he was engrossed in a particular page. There’s something here I don’t remember, he said. This is your handwriting. Or very like it.
It is mine.
This is where we argue about open versus closed stacks, he said. Theresa’s argument is convincing. He rubbed his good eye. But my case for a closed system is strong too. He pointed to the middle of the page. Here’s where I bring her over to my side. He paused for a second, reading.
But I didn’t convince you, he said. You disagree. You say Theresa and Simon are right, and you explain why.
Yes.
When did you write this?
I was twelve.
There was a curious expression on his face. He bent his head to the page again. You say, We’re humans, not machines. We have to adapt ourselves to space. Not it to us.
That part I wrote just now.
He set the page down. I was wrong, he said. Theresa and Simon were right. You were right—
No. We’ve decided. We’re sticking with closed stacks.
It’s just the casing. He began moving to the door. We can change it—
You were adamantly against this, I said. And you convinced me. We give up power in an open system. We give up control—
I’m going to start now.
Stop, I said. A wave of exhaustion moved through my body, and a dull ache began to radiate at the back of my jaw, where my molar used to be. You’re injured. You need rest. So do I.
I gathered the schematics into a pile and set them on the floor.
We can make the changes, I said. I stood up and pulled him to the bed. In the morning.
His shoulders loosened.
I took the blanket from the bottom of the bed—it smelled of wool and salt. He laid his head down on the pillow, and I did too, and I drew the blanket around us both.
51
Every day in the workshop James and I sat close and worked and talked, and even laughed. He was more forthcoming than he’d ever been about lots of things. My uncle—what he was like as a teacher and a mentor. His training after Peter Reed. Even Theresa and what the Gateway was like when they first came here to work on the cell. One day we were easy with each other like this all afternoon, but as the sun went down and the workshop filled with a rosy glow, he turned quiet and taciturn. He finished what he was doing and got up from the table and moved at a slight tilt to the door.
I’m going to bed, he said, and waited in the doorway.
I put away what I was working on. Then I looped my arm through his. You don’t really want to be alone.
No, he said. I don’t.
Every minute I wasn’t working with James I spent in the station’s gym. My first morning the equipment was covered in dust and I started by wiping everything down, all the machines and weights and mats, and the chlorine smell of the cleaner filled the room. Simon came in, and Rachel too. Eventually Amelia showed up also, and we made a circuit, together, of all the machines.
We went on like this for a week, then two. Supplies arrived, and people. NSP officials took over and the station filled up with workers. In the control room a team of engineers upgraded all the equipment and ran launch sequences and communications models. In consultation with Simon and Amelia, a group of specialists from Earth worked to finish rehabbing Endurance and to outfit it for its mission.