Gwendy’s Final Task

10

OUTSIDE THE PORTHOLE NEAREST to Gwendy, the sky is now dark. More than dark. “Blacker than a raccoon’s asshole,” Ryan might have said. The cabin rotates further, her chair compensates, and all at once her three monitor screens are directly ahead of her instead of over her head. The roaring of the engines stops, and all at once Gwendy is floating against her five-point restraining harness. It reminds her of how it feels when a roller coaster car takes its first dive, only the feeling doesn’t stop.

“Crew, helmets can come off,” Sam says. “Unzip your suits if you want to but keep them on for now.”

Gwendy unlocks her helmet, takes it off … and watches it float, first in front of her and then lazily upward. She looks around and sees three other helmets floating. Gareth Winston snatches his down. “What the hell do I do with it?” He sounds shaky.

Gwendy remembers this, and Winston should; God knows they had enough dress rehearsals.

Reggie Black says, “Under your seat. Your compartment, remember?”

“Right,” Winston says, but doesn’t add a thank you; that doesn’t seem to be in his vocabulary.

Gwendy stows her helmet, opening the hatch by feel and waiting until she hears the small click as the helmet’s magnetized circle finds the corresponding circle on the side of her personal stowage area, which is surprisingly large. There’s also room for her pressure suit when the time comes, but for the time being the only thing she wants to put in there is the steel box with its dangerous cargo. She takes it from beneath her knee, places it in the compartment, and discovers she has to hold it down so it won’t float back up like a helium balloon.

Steel floats, she marvels. Holy God, I’m in a place where steel floats.

“Senator Peterson,” Kathy calls. “Gwendy. Come up here. I want to show you something. Do you remember how to move around?”

She doesn’t. It’s gone. It shouldn’t be, but it is.

Reggie Black, the mission physicist, bails her out. “One or two slow strokes,” he says. “Easy, so you—”

Now she remembers. “So I don’t bump my head on the DESTRUCT button.” A joke they learned in training.

“Exactly so,” Adesh says, beaming. “Must not bump that one, no!”

Winston says nothing. Gwendy can see he’s miffed not to have been invited up top first; he is, after all, the paying passenger. The guy may be worth an obscene amount of money, but with his lower lip stuck out the way it is now, he looks like a petulant child.

Gwendy unbuckles and laughs when she rises slowly from her seat. She pulls her knees up to her chest as she was taught during training and goes into a lazy forward roll. She extends her legs. She could be lying on her stomach in bed, except of course there is no bed. And she doesn’t have to stroke. Jafari closes his hand around her ankle and gives her a gentle push. Laughing, delighted, she floats toward the top of the cabin (only it’s now the front of the cabin), over the heads of Reggie, Bern, and Dr. Glen. It’s like being in a dream, she thinks.

She grabs the back of David Graves’s seat and pulls herself in between Kathy and her second in command, whose name has slipped her mind. It’s something about water, but she can’t remember what.

There are no portholes in the control area, but there’s a narrow slit window four feet long and six inches wide. “You can see this better on your center screen,” Kathy says quietly, “and of course on your tablet, but I thought you might like your first look this way. Since you’re part of the reason these missions are still flying.”

I had my own reason, Gwendy thinks. Space exploration, advancing human knowledge, sure. But now there’s something else.

For one horrifying moment she can’t remember what that something else is, even though it’s the biggest thing in her life. Then that concern is driven from her mind by what she’s seeing below her … and yes, it’s definitely below.

The home world hangs in the void, blue-green and wearing many scarves of white cloud. She has seen pictures, of course, but the reality, the first-hand reality, is staggering. Here, in all the black nothing of empty space, is a world teeming with improbable life, beautiful life, lovely life.

“That’s the Pacific Ocean,” the second in command says quietly, and now that she’s not trying, she can remember his name: Sam Drinkwater.

“How can America be gone so fast, Sam?”

“Speed will do that. Hawaii just passing below us. Japan coming up.”

She can see a whirlpool down there, white twisting away in the middle of the blue, and remembers the monsoon she saw while checking the weather dump on her computer early that morning when she couldn’t sleep. But this is no computer screen; this is a God’s eye view.

“Pure beauty is what it is,” she responds to Sam, and begins to cry. Her tears rise and hang above her, perfect floating diamonds.