Bradbury was suddenly in his face, helmets touching, the old man looking down at him through two thicknesses of clear plastic.
“You’re not giving up, Leroy. I won’t let you. Turn that big dish you’ve got up top and point it at them. Tell them you’re scuttling your ship and bailing out. See what they do. You’ve got nothing to lose.”
“I die quick or I die slow.”
“You get to look at Mars for another hour, son. Right up close.”
Johnson eased Bradbury aside and dabbed his way through the communications systems to turn the high-gain antenna at Mars. It wasn’t like he needed to be accurate with it, just aim it broadly in the right direction. When it had slewed around, he opened the microphone and said:
“My name is Commander Leroy Johnson of the space ship Pacific. My crew are dead and I am destroying my ship to prevent it from harming you. If you can hear me, I am abandoning ship. I will die shortly afterwards. If you want to pick me up, I’ll be right behind the big moon. If you’re longer than an hour, don’t bother.”
He pushed himself out of his seat and started back up the ladder, squeezing himself through the bulkhead. He bundled into the airlock, and Bradbury’s face appeared at the tiny window in the internal door.
“You’d better hurry. That moon’s coming up awful fast.”
Johnson slapped the external door switch with his hand. “This is not easy.”
The door swung open, and he gripped the edge of the airlock. He was facing Mars. Then he looked down the length of the ship, and there was Phobos.
If he thought Mars looked big, Phobos was bowel-emptyingly huge. Something the size of Delaware was about to ram the tiny, fragile Pacific and squash it like a summer bug on a windshield. His heart stopped and his fingers froze.
“Leroy. You got to jump. You got to jump now.”
He climbed out onto the hull, hooking one hand on the door frame so he could coil his feet under him, push his legs down as far as they’d go. The bone-grey moon started to swell, and he opened his hand.
For a moment, he crouched. Then he jumped, hard and straight and true. He closed his eyes, screwed them tight shut, because he was terrified. He’d rather not know that Phobos would hit him with all the casual effort of swatting a moth.
There was nothing. And nothing. And nothing.
“You did it,” shouted a jubilant voice in his helmet, “You made it, Leroy. God speed, you glorious man. Say hello to the a–”
He opened one eye. Mars. Big and red. He opened the other. To his right, Phobos ground on in its orbit, chemical fire stuttering to an end on its planetward limb. Dust twinkled in its path, and patted softly on Johnson’s space suit. As the moon receded, even that lessened, and he was left alone, face down over Elysium.
The two second tick had gone. And with it, Bradbury.
His own breathing. The pulse in his ears. The hum of fans and the hiss of air. That was going to be it from now on, until those failed and fell silent. Some time later, his orbit would decay, and he’d fall, a fiery Icarus to the land below. Parts of him would reach the surface, and the bacteria within him would spill out onto an alien and inhospitable environment, in turn to wither and die.
Or perhaps not.
A spark of light flashed at the edge of the ice cap, and rose towards him on a pillar of ragged smoke that dragged through the clear, pink Martian sky.
-
SAGA’S CHILDREN
E. J. SWIFT
You will have heard of our mother, the astronaut Saga Wärmedal. She is famous, and she is infamous. Her face, instantly recognizable, appears against lists of extraordinary feats, firsts and lasts and onlys. There are the pronounced cheekbones, the long jaw, that pale hair cropped close to the head. In formal portraits she looks enigmatic, but in images caught unaware◦– perhaps at some function, talking to the Administrator of the CSSA or the Moon Colony Premier; in situations, in fact, where we might imagine she would feel out of place◦– she is animated, smiling. In those pictures, it is possible to glimpse the feted adventurer who traversed the asteroid belt without navigational aid.
We knew her only once, on Ceres.
You will have heard of what happened on Ceres.
Ours is one of many versions of Saga’s story. Widely distributed are a number of official biographies, and you can easily find another few dozen from less reputable sources. She is the subject of documentaries and immersion, avatars and educational curricula. We were not consulted in their production. But then, we did not know her; we only knew her contradictions, of which there were many. One small but significant example: she renounced her European passport in order to gain Chinese citizenship, yet she gave each of us a traditionally Scandinavian name.
We can say for certain that Saga was born in Ümea, Sweden, where in winter the darkness lies low and thick and heavy and the snow crunches underfoot with that particular sound heard only on Earth. Ulla, the oldest of us, remembers Ümea snow. She remembers the flakes falling on her head and the cold tingling sensation as they melted through her hair into her scalp. At least, this is what she says, and so we agree that this is how it was.
We know that Saga grew up in Ümea with a single mother. The biographies depict her as an exceptionally clever child, excelling in the fields of science and mathematics. A solitary creature. Decisive. Sure. In some editions, Saga herself is quoted:
It was when I saw the lights for the first time, the Aurora Borealis. The most beautiful thing on Earth. But it wasn’t on Earth. That’s when I knew what I wanted to be.
So she did what every child who wishes to be an astronaut must do. Saga taught herself Mandarin.
By age sixteen she was fluent. She applied to the most prestigious university in Beijing to study astro-engineering, and graduated with the top marks in her year. She was promptly accepted as a trainee astronaut in the Chinese Solar System Administration, a move almost unheard of for Europeans, and especially at such a young age. From there her career took off in meteoric fashion. News of her escapades was celebrated across worlds. She mapped the Martian planet. She led the first missions to Jupiter’s moons.
The biographies are less interested in Saga’s domestic life, if we can refer to it as such, and even between us we are not entirely settled on the details. We were raised by our fathers and grandmother. We knew Saga only through occasional communications from the outer planets, and nothing of one another’s existence. She sent us the debris of space. In our bedrooms we stored asteroid crystals and jars of red dust from Mars. We dreamed of Saga sailing through the stars, tailed by comets.
In her transmissions, she would tell each of us the same thing.
She loved us.
We must work hard.
Seek wisely.
Dream deeply.
Her hologram, flickering gently the way we imagined ghosts might, would flood us with bewilderment. We wanted to touch her, but when we put our fingertips to hers, there was nothing but air.