Good Morning, Midnight

FOUR

AETHER’S CREW STRUGGLED with time. There was so much of it—the hours in each day and the hours in each night, again and again. Weeks, then months to fill. Without knowing what was waiting for them on Earth the prescribed tasks and routines became empty. Pointless. If they would never feel Earth’s gravity again, then why bother with all the medication and exercise to remind their bodies of its weight? If they would never share their discoveries from the Galilean moon survey, then why continue the research? If their planet and everyone they had ever known was burnt or frozen or vaporized or diseased or some other equally unpleasant version of extinction, then what did it matter if they became careless and depressed? Who were they trying to make it home for? What did it matter if they overslept and overate, or underslept and underate—wasn’t despair appropriate? Didn’t it fit their situation?

Everything seemed to move more slowly. A tense apprehension settled over the crew: the weight of the unknown, of creeping futility. Sully found herself typing more slowly, writing more slowly, moving less, thinking less. At first the crew’s collective curiosity burned brightly, as they struggled to understand what had happened, but soon it gave way to a hopeless surrender. There was no way to know, no data to study except the lack of data. Their silent Earth was still ten months away, a long journey to an uncertain home. Nostalgia crept up on her—on all of them. They missed the people, the places, the objects they’d left behind—things they were beginning to think they would never see again. Sully thought of her daughter, Lucy, exuberant and high-pitched, a little blond-haired, brown-eyed cyclone that spun through Sully’s memory the same way she’d spun through their small house. She wished that she had brought more pictures, that she had had a whole thumb drive full of them—more than just the one, which was out of date even when they left. What kind of mother wouldn’t have brought at least a dozen, she thought. And on a two-year trip, when her daughter was turning into a young woman? Sully hadn’t received video uplinks from anyone except work colleagues the entire time she’d been on Aether. She would have treasured them, replayed them over and over, but there was nothing from Lucy, and definitely nothing from Jack. The estrangement of her family hadn’t broken her heart until she left the atmosphere—then all of a sudden it felt like a tragedy that had just recently befallen her, even though it had been that way for years. She tried to re-create the missing photos in her mind, the Christmases and birthdays and that time Lucy and Jack and Sully went whitewater rafting in Colorado, before the divorce. The scenery was easy to fill in—a lopsided blue spruce tree hung with silver tinsel, that green plaid sofa from their old apartment, chili pepper lights in the kitchen, the row of potted plants behind the sink, the red Land Rover packed for a road trip—but it was their faces that were hard to recall.

Jack, her husband for ten years, her ex for five. She started by picturing his hair, which he always kept shorter than she liked it, and then she tried to fill in the features one by one: eyes, green and fringed with thick lashes, shadowed by dark eyebrows; nose, a little bent, broken one too many times; mouth, dimples on either side, thin lips, good teeth. She thought about the day they met, the day she married him, the day she left him, trying to account for every minute, every word. She re-created the scenery of their life together: that tiny apartment in Toronto they shared when she was pregnant for the first time, while she was finishing her dissertation and he was teaching particle physics to undergrads, and then the brick loft with big windows they moved to after the miscarriage. He’d been so disappointed when she told him that the baby they’d only just learned about was lost—it was early, only six weeks in, and Sully’d barely had time to settle into the idea. When she felt the cramping she knew it was over, and when she saw the blood soaking through her underwear she was relieved. She cleaned it up, took four ibuprofen tablets, and wondered how to tell Jack. That afternoon she cradled his head in her lap and tried to feel the sadness she could see written on his face. But she couldn’t feel anything. The light had faded from the big windows in the living room, but still they sat, the curtains undrawn, the glass darkening to tall black eyes—looking in, or looking out, she couldn’t tell.

Their wedding a year later, at city hall, with the gray tiled corridors and the dark polished wood benches that lined them, other couples sitting and waiting their turn. The birth of Lucy, four years after that, in a minty green hospital room. The unquenchable joy on Jack’s face when he held her, the unmistakable fear in Sully’s chest when he handed the baby back to her. Lucy’s first steps, on the linoleum kitchen floor, first words, Daddy, no, when they tried to leave her with a babysitter. Sully thought of the day the space program invited her to join the new class of astronaut candidates, the day she left Jack and five-year-old Lucy behind and went to Houston. At first she remembered the milestone moments, the days that changed everything, but as time wore on she began to think more about the little things.

Lucy’s hair, how it looked like spun gold when she was small, then darkened as she grew. The veins pulsing beneath her translucent skin just after she was born. Jack’s broad torso, the way he left the top button undone and rolled up his sleeves, never wore a tie and rarely bothered with a jacket. The lines of his clavicle, the hint of chest hair, the inevitable smudge of blackboard chalk on his shirt. The copper saucepans that hung above the gas stove in the Vancouver house where they moved after Sully got her PhD; the color of the front door, raspberry red; the sheets Lucy liked best, midnight blue, scattered with yellow stars.

Everyone on Aether was lost in a private past, each bunk like a bubble of memory. The absorption with things gone by was visible on all of their faces when they weren’t exchanging terse, necessary words with one another, struggling through the grim demands of the present. Sometimes Sully watched the others, imagining what they were thinking about. The crew had been training together in Houston for almost two years before the launch; they’d grown close, but the things you tell your colleagues when you’re practicing simulated disasters and the things you think about when the world ends while you’re far away are so very different.

IN HOUSTON, ABOUT a year before the mission launched, Sully recognized the Ivanov family having an early dinner at an outdoor café in the city. She was parking on the other side of the street and watched them while she slotted change into the meter. She thought about crossing to say hello but stayed where she was. They were all lit up and sun-gold, five heads of white-blond hair illuminated like dandelion puffs. She saw Ivanov lean over to cut up his youngest daughter’s dinner. His wife was animated, gesticulating wildly with silverware in her hands, her husband and children laughing with open, food-filled mouths.

A waiter stopped at their table with a ramekin, and when he set it down next to Ivanov’s elbow a chorus of thank-yous erupted from the children. Sully could hear it from across the street. Arms loaded down with half-empty plates, the waiter was beaming when he left the table. Sully’s gaze rested on Ivanov’s wife—now waving a salad-loaded fork while she talked. Sully wondered if she’d ever looked so joyful with her own family, or so present. Sully lingered at the meter until she felt that she was trespassing on a moment that didn’t belong to her, then moved off down the street to a small greengrocer’s where she bought her produce. Ivanov seemed chronically serious at work, but not tonight, not with his family. She selected peaches, and as she cupped the warm heaviness of the fruit and felt the delicate fuzz against her palm, she was reminded of the weight of her daughter’s head when she was born.

SIX WEEKS INTO the communication blackout, Ivanov returned to Little Earth late, after a few of the others had eaten dinner together. He went straight to his bunk and snapped the curtain shut behind him. Thebes considered the drawn curtain for a moment and knocked on the side of his compartment.

“There is a stew if you’re interested, Ivanov,” he said to the gray partition.

Tal, from his usual place in front of the gaming console, snorted. “He won’t come out,” he said, with a taunting edge in his voice. “He’s probably too busy crying himself to sleep.”

Sully froze in her bunk, where she had been making notes on a telemetry readout. So she hadn’t imagined it. There was a beat of silence, then Ivanov ripped his curtain back and charged across the centrifuge toward Tal. He had his fists buried in the fabric of Tal’s jumpsuit and had yanked him to his feet before Tal even saw him coming. Tal snarled in Hebrew and broke Ivanov’s grip with a blow to his wrists, and then Thebes was on them both, dragging Tal back toward the sofa while Ivanov spat on the floor. Ivanov’s face was a vivid red, and he stalked back to the zero-G section of the ship. Harper arrived just as Tal kicked his game controller across the room. The centrifuge was suddenly quiet. Sully sat on her bunk, unsure what to do, whether to say anything. Harper and Thebes conferred in low tones. They came to some sort of conclusion and Thebes left Little Earth, presumably to speak with Ivanov. Harper absentmindedly massaged the muscles of his jaw with the heel of his hand, then he went to Tal’s bunk. Sully drew her own curtain, not wanting to eavesdrop.

In the beginning, when communication with Earth was clear and easy and uninterrupted, Tal would spend hours talking to his wife and sons. The boys were eight and eleven years old when Aether launched. There had been a little party at a training facility in Houston for them before the launch, their birthdays only a week apart. Tal’s sons played the same video games back in Texas, and on board the spacecraft Tal kept his high scores handy for when he video-chatted with his family, so that he and the boys could compare. Later, even when the time lapse became unwieldy and they could only send one-sided messages, the competition continued. A few days ago, Sully had watched Tal beat his sons’ record for one of the racing games. His triumphant fist shot into the air, but then his face crumpled, his breath became shallow, and the plastic controller fell from his hands. Sully went to sit with him, cautiously placing a hand on his back, and he pressed his face into her shoulder, something he’d never done before. It was the most vulnerable she’d ever seen him.

“I’m winning,” he said into the mesh sleeve of her jumpsuit, and they sat in silence as the victory music looped over and over, shrill trumpets over a steady, hollow beat.

AS THE LAST few weeks of training in Houston had trickled away and the launch neared, the crew’s excitement began to build, their camaraderie to intensify. After a long Friday full of Jovian lunar landing simulations, they all went out for drinks at a local bar. Thebes flipped through the jukebox songs with a fistful of quarters while Devi drank cranberry juice through a straw beside him and contemplated the machine itself. At the bar, Tal, Ivanov, and Harper lined up shots of tequila, Tal insisting that they drink one for every Galilean moon—four apiece. Sully was late arriving and she scanned the scene from the doorway. The bartender was doling out wedges of lime as Thebes’s first selection from the jukebox began to play. Harper called her over and ordered her a shot.

“You’re playing catch-up,” he said, and slid the glass in front of her. “This one’s for Callisto.” She tossed it back and waved away the lime he offered her.

Tal grinned wickedly. “Excellent,” he said. “Another!”

Ivanov pounded the bar with his shot glass. “Hear, hear,” he said, his face a luminous shade of rose. Tal was buoyant, bouncing on his bar stool as he counted down a Galilean moon for every shot the astronauts downed.

“Ganymede!” he shouted.

Sully slammed another glass back down on the table. “That sweet, sweet magnetosphere,” she shouted back. Ivanov nodded, solemn, but excited in his own way. They all were.

Over at the jukebox, Thebes and Devi took up the cry of “Ganymede,” to the confusion of the other patrons. It was still early then, the bar relatively quiet, but the next time Sully took stock of their surroundings a few hours later she realized the room was full and she was drunk. Devi and Harper were dancing near the jukebox. Devi bounced her knees and swirled her arms around her head while Harper did some version of the twist, mixed with an occasional raise-the-roof gesture. Tal, Sully, Ivanov, and Thebes were crowded around the bar. Tal snorted a mouthful of beer out of his nose, laughing at one of his own jokes, and Ivanov swayed next to Sully, his forearm resting on her shoulder.

“Who’s Yuri?” Ivanov was asking, looking perplexed. Sully and Thebes glanced at each other, not sure whether to laugh or to change the subject. They had heard Tal speak of Yuri before, but never in Ivanov’s presence.

“You know—that bug living up your ass,” Tal said, laughing so hard he could barely get the words out. “Yuri Gagarin. How’s he doing?”

Ivanov swayed, his arm still on Sully for balance, a pensive frown etched in his face. There was a long pause. “He’s good,” Ivanov finally said, his voice booming and jovial, “but he’d be better if he didn’t have to look at your ugly face every day.”

Harper tapped Sully on the shoulder and she turned to see his face, shiny with sweat. Devi was a few feet behind him, beckoning to her. “Dance with us?” he said. “It’s our song.”

She nodded. He meant all of theirs, but for a minute, as Sully slid off her bar stool and moved toward the crush of bodies, jerking and swaying and twirling in time with “Space Oddity,” she thought he meant just the two of them. Our song. David Bowie’s voice filled the bar and Harper led her onto the dance floor, toward Devi, who was still waving. He reached back to make sure she was following and took her hand, pulling her forward, into the center of the crowd.

TWO WEEKS AFTER Ivanov and Tal’s fight, while they were still passing through the asteroid belt, Sully awoke to hear Devi whispering to her in the darkness.

“Are you awake?” she asked, from the other side of the privacy curtain.

Sully rubbed the sleep from her eyes and pulled back the curtain, motioning for Devi to climb in. They lay there in the dark, side by side, letting each other’s body heat soothe their frayed nerves, which sparked like live wires as soon as the lights went out and there was nothing left to do but obsess over an unknown future or dwell in the past. Devi was close enough that Sully could feel the quiver of a suppressed sob. She ached to reach out, to wrap her crewmate in her arms and tell her that everything would be all right—but she couldn’t lie, and she wasn’t sure how to connect with a woman so disconnected. Devi had grown quieter and quieter as the weeks passed. These days, she said barely anything. Sully lay still and let her foot collapse sideways to gently brush against Devi’s. Sully had almost fallen asleep again when Devi began to talk.

“I keep having this dream,” she murmured. “It starts with the colors and smells of my mother’s kitchen in Kolkata, just blurriness and spices. Then my brothers come into focus, sitting across from me, jabbing each other with their elbows, scooping up rice and dal with their fingers…and I see my parents at the head of the table, sipping chai, smiling, watching all three of us. It’s always the same, over and over. We are just sitting and eating and it seems to last for hours. But then eventually it fades away. Suddenly I know that they are gone, that I am alone. And I wake up.” Devi heaved a long, slow sigh. “It starts out so beautifully,” she whispered, “but then I am awake and I’m here and I know I’ll never see them again. How can a dream hurt so much?”

Eventually the two women drifted off to sleep, and in the night they overlapped, knotting their limbs together as if it might make them stronger. When Sully woke she saw tears running down Devi’s face in silence, pooling against the side of her nose, wetting the pillow. Sully thought of what it felt like to have Lucy climb into her bed after a nightmare. The small, warm body, encased in flannel pajamas, the hot, wet face, the shuddering of her breath inside her lungs. Sully tried to remember what she used to say to Lucy, how she used to comfort her—but she couldn’t. It had always been Jack who took her back to her own bed. Sully moved closer to Devi, and she wept, too.

SULLY HAD LOVED Devi almost immediately when they met in Houston.

Devi was a quiet woman; her small stature and large, dark eyes made her seem innocent, young, even confused—at odds with the deeply analytical mind moving beneath the surface. At the beginning of their underwater training in Houston, Sully came upon Devi standing below one of the overhead cranes used to haul the astronauts in and out of the pool, staring up at the hoist with a pensive look. Tal and Thebes were finishing up an extravehicular activity simulation, an EVA, below the surface while the two women waited their turn to be hoisted into the water. Finally Devi let out an amused laugh and looked away from the crane, back to the pool.

“Fantastic,” Devi murmured.

“What is?” Sully asked.

“My father has the same machine in his warehouse,” she said. “The same exact one. I will have to tell him, he’ll be very proud for choosing it.”

The surface of the pool rippled and a cluster of bubbles frothed near their feet. Below the water, an enormous mock-up of the Aether craft shimmered, illuminated by floodlights. Reflections of the flags that crowded the walls of the facility lined the edge of the water, lapping at the edge of the pool in gentle waves, the vivid colors of the different nations swirling together and then separating, over and over. Sully peered into the depths of the pool and saw one of the astronauts beginning to rise. Two divers hooked the astronaut’s bulky white suit to the hoist and the crane’s gears above their heads began to whir. Devi looked up at the crane once more, but Sully kept her eyes on the rising astronaut.

“Fantastic,” Devi said again.

The white shell of Tal’s helmet broke free of the water and Sully let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.

AS THEY DRIFTED through the asteroid belt, still months from home, they began to lose themselves. Everyone except Thebes: he patiently guided Devi through her work, even as she slept less and her attention wandered more. He could occasionally coax Tal away from the gaming console and into the greenhouse corridor, to harvest vegetables. He visited Ivanov in the lab to see what he was working on, asked him kind and attentive questions, and set aside leftovers for him. Sully watched Thebes doing all this, curious, observant. He would sit and talk with Harper in quiet tones and afterward Harper’s face seemed softer, his head held a little higher. Thebes was strong and hopeful, but he was only one out of six. He couldn’t save them from themselves, could only try to make things a little easier. He understood what was happening better than the rest of them.

One morning, just after the sunrise had crept over Little Earth, Sully drank lukewarm coffee across from Thebes at the kitchen table. He was reading—if he wasn’t working, he was reading. The rest of the crew was either sleeping or working in the zero-G section of the ship. They were alone, and Little Earth was quiet, but even so, when she asked him how his family had died, she whispered. She already knew the answer, but it wasn’t the gruesome details of the car accident she wanted to hear about—it was something else, something she didn’t have words for. Thebes dog-eared his page in The Left Hand of Darkness and closed the book. Set it on the table.

“Why do you want to know?” he asked patiently.

“I’m just trying to understand,” she said. She tried to swallow the shrill note of desperation that had crept into her voice, grinding her teeth together to keep her tone steady. “How you’re still here. How you kept it together—why you didn’t go to pieces.”

Thebes considered her for a long moment. He ran his hands over his closely cropped hair, his thumbs skimming his ears. The gray in his hair was creeping up past his temples, toward the crown of his head, like ivy climbing an old brick wall. It had spread since she’d met him, now threatening to consume his scalp. But his cheeks were smooth—the other men had given up on shaving, letting themselves become scruffy and unkempt, but not Thebes. The Thebes of the present was remarkably similar to the Thebes of old—the others had changed, had become diminished and dark and more severe. But Thebes was just as he was when the journey first began. He smiled at her, showing the gap between his front teeth.

“I’m still here because I have nowhere else to go,” he said. “I’ve had a long time to come to terms with that. Understand, I am in pieces just like you, but I keep them separate. I’m not sure how else to explain—one piece at a time. You will learn, I think.”

“And if I—if we don’t learn?”

“Then you don’t.” He shrugged. His voice was a smooth, low rumble that harmonized with the hum of the centrifuge, his South African accent round and seamless, syllables falling together in his mouth like a melody. “These things are different for everyone. But I see you learning—you are far away and then suddenly you are here again. Asking me these questions. Do you know what I do? I brush my teeth and think only of brushing my teeth. I replace the air filter and think only of replacing the air filter. I start a conversation with one of the others when I feel lonely, and it helps both of us. This moment, Sully, this is where we must live. We can’t help anyone on Earth by thinking about them.”

She sighed, dissatisfied.

“Not what you wanted to hear?” he asked, mouth curved in a wistful smile, sadness lurking in the shadows beneath his eyes.

“It’s not that. I just—it’s hard.”

He nodded. “I know,” he said. “But you are a scientist. You understand how this works. We study the universe in order to know, yet in the end the only thing we truly know is that all things end—all but death and time. It’s difficult to be reminded of that”—he patted her hand where it lay on the table—“but it’s harder to forget.”

GORDON HARPER HAD been the last crewmember to arrive at the training facility in Houston, a week after the others. He’d had his own separate orientation in Florida, isolated from the crew, conditioned for command. By the time he arrived, the bond between the others was solid. He’d been a commander before, at least half a dozen times, but this was different. Harper joined them halfway through a rigorous morning in their spacesuits in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, taking turns getting dunked in the pool and practicing EVA repairs on the mock-up of Aether. Sully and Devi were underwater when he arrived, and when they surfaced he was already standing with the others, smiling at Tal’s jokes, asking Ivanov about an astrogeology article he’d written, greeting his old friend Thebes.

Sully was facing the little knot of Aether men while they extracted her, first from the pool and then from the suit, a drawn-out process, and she watched Harper with curiosity and some apprehension. She decided she had a good feeling about him. He seemed to be listening more than he was talking, and the conversation was spread evenly across the men standing with him. All of them were smiling, except Ivanov, which didn’t really indicate anything. They seemed to be enjoying themselves. She could tell that Harper was putting them all at ease.

She’d seen pictures of him before, floating on the ISS, or on the tarmac in his orange launch suit, but he was older now, his face more angular, his tan deeper. He was bigger than she’d expected, easily taller than the other three men: an inch or two over Ivanov, a few more over Thebes, with nearly a foot on Tal.

“How is the training so far?” he was asking the other men. “Smooth sailing?”

Ivanov and Thebes nodded, while Tal cracked a joke Sully couldn’t quite hear. The four of them laughed and Sully strained against her suit, impatient for the tech assistant to finish unhooking her from the hoist so she could join the circle.

Harper was wearing the bright blue jumpsuit they all wore to training, with a big American flag sewn onto his left shoulder and an even bigger U.S. Air Forces patch over his heart. He had his hands in his pockets, his sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His sandy hair was short, his tan paler around the nape of his neck and his jawline, as though he’d recently had a haircut and a shave, uncovering skin that had been shaded from the sun.

When she was finally freed from her suit, Sully walked over to introduce herself. Despite her impatience to meet him, she felt suddenly shy. She held his blue-gray gaze as long as she could, but she was the first to look away—something in his eyes made her nervous, as if he were seeing beneath her skin, straight into the quickened muscle of her heart thudding inside her rib cage.

“You must be Specialist Sullivan,” he said, before she’d had the chance to speak. “It’s a great pleasure to serve with you. I can’t wait to hear about your plans for the comm. pod.”

They shook hands and she noticed the watch strapped to the inside of his wrist. It had an antique gold face and a battered leather band. His hand felt large and warm and dry, his grip firm and gentle at the same time.

“Thank you, Commander,” she replied. “It’s an honor. Good to meet you.”

He released her hand. She’d always found the habit of clasping a watch face to the soft side of the wrist to be somehow intimate, as though by checking the time the wearer was flashing a private piece of themself: exposing the palm, baring the pulse. After a few moments, a whistle blew and the crew was moved into one of the conference rooms, where Commander Harper was formally introduced. The crew crowded around the long, polished conference table and listened as the director of the space program, a woman named Inger Klaus, who had led the committee that selected the crew for Aether, spoke about Harper’s qualifications. She spent at least fifteen minutes on his biography, listing honors and accomplishments until Harper was red in the face and everyone in the room longed for her to cede the podium. When she finally did, Harper stepped forward to shake her hand and address the entire crew for the first time. What was it he’d said? Sully struggled to remember. He had notecards, she recalled, and despite the easygoing chatter by the pool, he was nervous. “I’m honored to serve with you all,” he declared, “as we step forward into the unknown—as a team, as a species, as individuals.”

On Aether, even as the communication blackout continued, Harper was the ground, the tether that made his crew feel just a tiny bit closer to Earth. With Devi he requested tutorials on the mechanics of the ship, plying her with questions about life support and radiation shields and the centrifugal gravity of Little Earth, trying to draw her back to the present. He played videogames with Tal and listened diplomatically to Tal’s fount of gaming advice, pretending to take the games as seriously as Tal did. Even Ivanov became civil when Harper went into his lab, showing him the work he had been doing and explaining its significance in an only slightly condescending tone. The old friendship with Thebes grew ever deeper; Sully could see him drawing strength from the older man’s stoic calm, funneling it into his own body and channeling it back out to the rest of the crew. The two had been in space together before, more than once, and they had always survived. Between them, they were keeping everyone else sane.

With Sully, Harper listened to the probes in the comm. pod or played cards or sketched her profile while she went over Jovian data. He didn’t have to work as hard with her; she liked his company. Looked forward to it. They spent hours sitting across from each other at the kitchen table on Little Earth. Sometimes she read to him from dense scientific papers while he exercised, and with sweat glistening on his face he would poke fun at the stilted turns of phrase. She humored him, all the while suspecting that his questions about the research were for her benefit, not his. Sometimes they talked about home, about what they missed, but home was an uncertain and dangerous variable. It was the lead weight that tugged each hopeful feeling back to the cold, dark bottom of their consciousness.

Sully found herself thinking more and more about what Thebes had told her: how to survive as a broken vessel. Tal and Ivanov and Devi had begun to spin out of sync, to exist either in memories or in projections, never fully present when she spoke to them. Sully tried to stop herself from doing the same, tried to brush her teeth and think only of brushing her teeth, to stop reconstructing the house in Vancouver, the smell of Jack’s cologne, the sound of Lucy splashing in the bath down the hall while she filled her drawers with clean, poorly folded laundry. When she caught herself dwelling in another year, another place, she counted to ten and discovered herself back on Aether, still in the asteroid belt, still en route to the silent Earth. She would put down her notes for the day, turn off the sound on her machines, and propel herself back to the entry node of Little Earth. She would feel the strain of gravity returning to her muscles, the food in her stomach settling to the bottom, the tail of her braid slithering down her back. She would be home, the only home that mattered just then. If she was in luck, Harper would be there, at the table, shuffling a deck of cards.

“C’mere, Sully—this time, you’re going down,” he would say, and she would sit, and she would play.