Dr Nyanggodai “Terry” Mang woke himself up in the middle of the night by scratching his face with his own ragged fingernails. He groaned and massaged the weals he’d left. A plague of mites infested the entire Farnsær station, and they had a great thirst for mammal blood. Dr Mang had sworn up and down while creating the station that no unwanted life forms were going to be present. He had insisted on strict control of all DNA that came onto the station, living or dead. And despite his efforts, a race of tiny cone-shaped mites swarmed through every crevice of the entire structure after just four months in orbit.
They grazed mainly on the flecks and flakes of human hair and skin that shed continuously off the bodies of Dr Mang and his colleague, Thomas Thornfall. Air filters gathered these bits and pieces up and shunted them to collectors below the gardens. Neither Dr Mang nor Tom cared to poke around in the dust ducts, so the colony of mites grew to huge numbers of individuals, each about a third of a millimeter long. As their population swelled beyond the capacity of the Dr and Tom’s skinslough, they sought other nutrition.
Some of them began to burrow into the tough, chewy ropes that made up the walls of the corridor, and had emerged through microscopic tunnels into other quarters of the ship. They were small enough to escape immediate detection at first, and feasted on the film of food-oils on badly-cleaned plates, and the slurry of finger oil and skin cells that coated the keyboards and buttons. Soon they colonized the two humans, and lived surreptitiously in their eyebrows, heads, armpits and pubes.
A few days ago Dr Mang had scraped his cheek while testing the antimagnetic inertiabsorber – a minor wound which should have healed up almost overnight. Instead, it became a paradise of mites, who could reproduce at astronomic rates in the soft tissues of Dr Mang’s dermis. Twelve hours later, he was sitting at breakfast listening to one of Tom’s interminable monologues, and he could not stop rubbing his cheek. It itched through the morning, and began to produce tiny granules of translucent pink crust. Under Dr Mang’s magnifying goggles, the granules were rough, slightly asymmetrical octahedrons. Tom watched blandly as Dr Mang assembled the gold spatterer for the electron microscope, which had been sitting unused in its case for two months. Dr Mang was jumpy and frantic because he sensed an intrusive presence in his cheek, and it riled him all the more to see Tom, immobile as a pudding, observing him through half-closed eyes that looked like two monkeyfistfuls of gray jelly.
Dr Mang used the dull side of a scalpel to scrape some of the crust on a slide. He slid the slide into the newly-assembled device, which was about the size and shape of two beer steins stacked atop each other, with handles jutting out on opposite sides. At the bottom was a tripod, and on the top was a set of goggles that one leaned into to see the image. Dr Mang did so and was frankly horrified to see that each octahedron was made up of hundreds of mites, clutching each other with short, scaly legs. Each mite secreted a thick fluid that crystallized into the eight-sided granules. As Dr Mang watched, the little pebble of crystal began to shatter as the mites broke out of their shells and began to explore the inside of the microscope. There were at least a couple dozen in the single granule Dr Mang focused on.
He was disgusted to be parasitized, and what is more, he had an honest emotional outrage that such a creature was even on the station. His protocols had been foolproof in test trials in Wenatchee. A quick examination revealed he was entirely covered with mites from head to toe, and so was Tom. They took turns in the vacuum shower and used proteolytic shampoo. Then the cleaning robot doused every surface on the station with radioactive water while the humans huddled inside the lead-lined, antimagnet-shielded escape pod. It took twenty hours for the radiation levels to drop back down, and the cramped little chamber was the perfect venue for Tom to start talking about his book. It was a novel about a gambler and seemed to have no real chronological narrative flow, as far as Dr Mang could discern. It was painfully obvious that Tom had never gambled in his life; in fact, one of the reasons Tom had been selected for the assignment was his steadfast devotion to not taking risks. Tom’s sweaty custard of a face never seemed to change expression as he recited events from the gambler’s story. Dr Mang could not screen them out because Tom was right next to him.
The last four months had been a series of daily challenges as to how to screen Tom out, even within the relatively large area of the station. Tom was a single child, home-schooled, and had never had a meaningful relationship with any other human besides his parents. They had listened to his every utterance with utmost attention, and Tom never tired of uttering his life’s narration as he lived it. He was a prodigiously good scientist, and garnered the respect of his peers, but never their affection. He was slow to realize that other people were not as good at listening as his parents, and he was rarely invited to social occasions. Eventually he realized that people treated each other differently than they treated him, and he was gravely affronted. He began to only speak with a kind of sullen caution, which evolved into a mealy blandness of expression.
There was no denying his technical expertise and his ability to juggle hundreds of variables when applying himself to science and technology, which trait had attracted Dr Mang and Tuan Kudah. His math skills were almost supernatural.
Three of them came up, originally, but the third astronaut, “Mycorhizal” Michael Reiser, had returned to his home in Oregon after the superstructure of the station had been grown. Since then, Tom had grown to feel a bit too familiar with Dr Mang, and his loquaciousness returned like a tide. The worthy doctor had many relatives who liked to ramble on, so he had a fairly thick callus on his eardrum against the boredom that comes from listing to a person have an endless conversation with himself. He had therefore not made an effort to stave off Tom’s logorrhea when it first began to flow, and by the time Dr Mang’s hackles began to rise, Tom was well-habituated to having an ear in the vicinity of his mouth. Dr Mang had not anticipated the proximity that Tom was able to maintain within the closed corridors and chambers of Farnsær. Nor had he been able to foresee the double-stupefaction engendered by Tom’s near monotony and his plain-yogurt diatribes.
Despite the deep cleaning, the mites returned. Dr Mang fretted about how to combat them. Ranatra, on Earth, could not identify them from the pictures he took. They seemed to always return from somewhere. Dr Mang had begun to prowl the corridors with a spray-bottle of bleach, walking at a slow shuffle and chewing his fingernails as he examined every square centimeter of wall and floor. Tom ambled behind him, sharing uncomfortably intimate information about his main character.
Dr Mang soon had to accept that the mites could not be eradicated. He returned to the real work of the station, perfecting the Znepdrive through numerous iterations of experiment. When the two of them were busy, Tom was less apt to talk, and often Dr Mang would push the work until they were both exhausted. Then, one night, he dreamt that the mites were emanating from Tom’s nose and ears, perhaps from inside his head. In the dream the mites were trailing through the station in floating, unbroken streams, like strands of spiderweb, and Dr Mang accidentally brushed into one that had formed in his personal quarters. He tried to snatch it off his cheek, and his sleeping hand had done the same. The jagged, torn nails snagged into his cheek and scored two thin welts into his skin. He woke up with a groan.
Even in sleep, Tom intruded. He had a flabby moist snore, like bubbles through porridge, that found its way into the vents. Dr Mang listened to it for several minutes and found he could not fall back asleep.
He rose and toured the gardens and the reefs. Surprisingly, none of them had shown any sign of mites whatsoever. All the sea urchins were in rosy good health, and all the plants looked bright and vigorous. Dr Mang chewed a stem of basil and stared out into space. The other astronauts were arriving this morning. Tom would stay at the station and the rest of them would go to Quaoar. Dr Mang was immensely relieved by this prospect, but he wondered whether any of the other four astronauts would be as hard to suffer as Tom. The Ambria was smaller than Farnsær, and personalities would be amplified that much more. What if the problem was in Dr Mang, and not Tom? What if his problem was simply that he had a problem, and Tom was only a peripheral player, a mere mirror for Dr Mang’s psychic malaise? His mind reeled and wheeled like a shark chasing its own tail inside a giant washing machine that was rolling down the side of a mountain. Somehow, with that stem of basil in his mouth, time got the better of him and he was surprised by the jolt that ran through the station as the shuttle arrived from Earth. He spat out the stem, hurriedly donned his yellow jumpsuit, and ran to greet his friends.
Monday, May 11, 2009
IV BLASTOFF
The morning of the launch was surprisingly free of fanfare. The four astronauts gathered at an airfield in the vast volcanic wasteland of Eastern Washington, outside of Tonasket. They uttered a few words to journalists, and then boarded an unassuming, rather ugly aircraft that had begun life as a medium-sized passenger jet but was now covered with overlapping scales of heat-armor. Once on, the astronauts were examined by a military official who firmly instructed Oleg not to activate the escape drive until they were in international airspace, and any failure to do so would lead to an immediate grounding order from the United States Air Force. Oleg had been in the Navy for a long time and knew that appropriate solemnity was called for, but he was unable to totally mask a Slavic expression of cold disdain that crept over his features. Both he and the military man knew that once the escape drive was activated, this plane would be completely and totally out of reach of anything the Air Force could muster.
The four travelers were crammed into the foremost part of the plane. Ranatra sat beside Oleg in the cockpit, and Howard and Emily faced each other directly behind them. All their belongings were already in orbit, along with the mission leader, Dr Terry Mang. This vehicle was designed only to shuttle them up to Farnsær, the orbiting platform; afterwards, it would fall into the atmosphere and burn up.
The vast majority of the jet’s volume was taken up by a huge cylinder studded with wires, batteries, and tanks of fluid. This was the escape drive, reverse-engineered from alien technology found in Antarctica. It had been successfully employed several times to carry materials and materiel up to Farnsær. Typically it fell into the ocean and was recovered, but this time, the shielding had been stripped off so it would incinerate during re-entry. Dr Mang was no longer going to be able to supervise its recovery, and he had no wish whatsoever for it to fall into the hands of any military.
They lifted off, and the cracked yellow-and-black landscape sunk beneath them. Ranatra had still been on an airplane less times than she had fingers on her hands, and the giddy, sickening thrill still seized her. She looked out at the innumerable miles of sere, rocky terrain, and reflected on how little it looked like the Earth she knew. They climbed into the sky, so dizzyingly high that all clouds were below them. Above, a depthless dark blue, free of feature or blemish. By the time they were over the green and fertile western edge of the continent, clouds blanketed the entire landscape, save for the snowy cones of volcanoes that emerged like islands from the cottony mat of moisture. Then, soon, they were over the Pacific, and the entire visible world was rumpled, fluffy white clouds and deep blue sky.
“Ten minutes to escape,” Oleg announced. Emily and Howard were already asleep, sagging against their safety restraints. Ranatra looked at the array of buttons and instruments in front of her.
“How does the escape drive work?” she asked.
“We go up to 49000 feet, increase to maximum speed with the normal engines, then I press this blue button,” Oleg said.
“And?” Ranatra prompted.
“And we accelerate to eight miles per second,” he said. She looked at him and slowly raised her eyebrows. “To tell you the truth,” he admitted, “I don’t know exactly how it works. There is a tank full of sea urchins in the very middle, and a big steel propeller that unfolds out of the back of the plane. Power goes into the sea urchins, and something comes out that I don’t understand, and that turns the propeller. I do know that Dr Mang had to get help from a team of Japanese metallurgists to build a propeller that wouldn’t burst into flames because it was turning so fast.”
“What about the sea urchins?” Ranatra asked, “Will they fall down with the rest of the plane?”
“No, they are our little friends, we bring them with us,” Oleg said. “We need the water, too. We’ll take everything apart when we get to Farnsær, then we let the spare parts turn into shooting stars.”
Ranatra thought about the hundreds of creatures, spineless and brainless but still animate and motile, crawling about on their tube feet and wiggling their spines. They had come so very, very close to extinction on Earth, down to a few dozen juvenile individuals, all of them together small enough to be held in her cupped hand. Now they were setting out for another planet.
She shifted her gaze to Oleg, dressed in a jumpsuit. He had seemed very intimidating for a long time, with his great height and bearlike physique, his cool efficiency and relentless resolve. But now they had spent months together, and she’d glimpsed a light of warmth and humor flickering inside the granite façade. Her eyes traced over the planes and angles of his face, the wide cheekbones and the protruding flat forehead, the strongly-bridged nose, the slightly-pointed ears. How different he looked from the men in her world.
He turned and looked at her, his gray eyes flickering under the heavy brow. A hint of a smile played around his mouth. She reminded him of the new students who showed up in his childhood classes, whose parents had moved into the city from the Siberian wilderness. Besides being dark of eye and hair like her, these new students bore themselves with a quiet pride and bravery, even though they were clearly uneasy to find themselves in these new surroundings. Oleg recognized the marks of hard work and difficulty on Ranatra’s soul, had seen the pain in the depths of her black eyes, eyes so dark the pupil was indistinguishable from the iris. Despite all that, there was an undeniable joy of existence and discovery in her being, that no sadness would ever completely overwhelm.
The plane could climb no higher with its earthly powers. Oleg quickly unstrapped himself and moved through the cockpit, checking everyone’s safety straps. He unlatched Emily’s chair and swung it around so it was facing forward. She opened an eye and squinted at him.
“Time for blast-off?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Oleg, rotating the still-unconscious Howard ninety degrees and locking him in place. Then he returned to his seat, cast an eye over Ranatra’s buckles, and put on his reflective sunglasses. “Here we go,” he said, and pressed the blue button.
There came a heavy, shuddering mechanical noise that they heard as well as felt, as large parts slid into place somewhere behind them. Then they heard a high-pitched electric whine, accompanied by a tingling sensation in their ears and noses. There was a bass thrumming they felt in the deepest part of their chests, and the airplane leapt forward and upward. The breath was crushed out of them, and they labored to inhale. Their eyeballs were compressed and the cockpit became blurry, and their organs began to ache inside their bodies. It was as if huge sheets of elastic were being stretched tighter and tighter over them. But, soon enough, the elastic relaxed and the deep blue of the sky gave way to the black of space, and stars spread out in front of them. They could not see the earth from this angle, but its radiance made the front window glow blue around its margins.
The four of them panted and wheezed as the air and life returned to their bodies. As they recovered, Farnsær hove into view before them. It looked like nothing more than a colossal fried egg, slightly convex on the yoke side. The “white” of the egg was made of tangles and braids of some kind of ropy green-gray fiber, and the “yolk” was a huge hemisphere of opalescent material pointed away from the sun. They circled around the yolk side and approached from the rear. They saw the vast tangled mat was covered with dark globes about three meters across. Oleg maneuvered the plane around to a cavernous chamber that yawned open on the rear side of the station, and the passengers felt a great heaving force as they were drawn into the hangar.
The plane settled into a mat of the green-gray fibers, and they waited as the hangar was flooded with warmth and oxygen. Then they saw a round door open and a figure in a yellow jumpsuit hurried toward them.
The four travelers were crammed into the foremost part of the plane. Ranatra sat beside Oleg in the cockpit, and Howard and Emily faced each other directly behind them. All their belongings were already in orbit, along with the mission leader, Dr Terry Mang. This vehicle was designed only to shuttle them up to Farnsær, the orbiting platform; afterwards, it would fall into the atmosphere and burn up.
The vast majority of the jet’s volume was taken up by a huge cylinder studded with wires, batteries, and tanks of fluid. This was the escape drive, reverse-engineered from alien technology found in Antarctica. It had been successfully employed several times to carry materials and materiel up to Farnsær. Typically it fell into the ocean and was recovered, but this time, the shielding had been stripped off so it would incinerate during re-entry. Dr Mang was no longer going to be able to supervise its recovery, and he had no wish whatsoever for it to fall into the hands of any military.
They lifted off, and the cracked yellow-and-black landscape sunk beneath them. Ranatra had still been on an airplane less times than she had fingers on her hands, and the giddy, sickening thrill still seized her. She looked out at the innumerable miles of sere, rocky terrain, and reflected on how little it looked like the Earth she knew. They climbed into the sky, so dizzyingly high that all clouds were below them. Above, a depthless dark blue, free of feature or blemish. By the time they were over the green and fertile western edge of the continent, clouds blanketed the entire landscape, save for the snowy cones of volcanoes that emerged like islands from the cottony mat of moisture. Then, soon, they were over the Pacific, and the entire visible world was rumpled, fluffy white clouds and deep blue sky.
“Ten minutes to escape,” Oleg announced. Emily and Howard were already asleep, sagging against their safety restraints. Ranatra looked at the array of buttons and instruments in front of her.
“How does the escape drive work?” she asked.
“We go up to 49000 feet, increase to maximum speed with the normal engines, then I press this blue button,” Oleg said.
“And?” Ranatra prompted.
“And we accelerate to eight miles per second,” he said. She looked at him and slowly raised her eyebrows. “To tell you the truth,” he admitted, “I don’t know exactly how it works. There is a tank full of sea urchins in the very middle, and a big steel propeller that unfolds out of the back of the plane. Power goes into the sea urchins, and something comes out that I don’t understand, and that turns the propeller. I do know that Dr Mang had to get help from a team of Japanese metallurgists to build a propeller that wouldn’t burst into flames because it was turning so fast.”
“What about the sea urchins?” Ranatra asked, “Will they fall down with the rest of the plane?”
“No, they are our little friends, we bring them with us,” Oleg said. “We need the water, too. We’ll take everything apart when we get to Farnsær, then we let the spare parts turn into shooting stars.”
Ranatra thought about the hundreds of creatures, spineless and brainless but still animate and motile, crawling about on their tube feet and wiggling their spines. They had come so very, very close to extinction on Earth, down to a few dozen juvenile individuals, all of them together small enough to be held in her cupped hand. Now they were setting out for another planet.
She shifted her gaze to Oleg, dressed in a jumpsuit. He had seemed very intimidating for a long time, with his great height and bearlike physique, his cool efficiency and relentless resolve. But now they had spent months together, and she’d glimpsed a light of warmth and humor flickering inside the granite façade. Her eyes traced over the planes and angles of his face, the wide cheekbones and the protruding flat forehead, the strongly-bridged nose, the slightly-pointed ears. How different he looked from the men in her world.
He turned and looked at her, his gray eyes flickering under the heavy brow. A hint of a smile played around his mouth. She reminded him of the new students who showed up in his childhood classes, whose parents had moved into the city from the Siberian wilderness. Besides being dark of eye and hair like her, these new students bore themselves with a quiet pride and bravery, even though they were clearly uneasy to find themselves in these new surroundings. Oleg recognized the marks of hard work and difficulty on Ranatra’s soul, had seen the pain in the depths of her black eyes, eyes so dark the pupil was indistinguishable from the iris. Despite all that, there was an undeniable joy of existence and discovery in her being, that no sadness would ever completely overwhelm.
The plane could climb no higher with its earthly powers. Oleg quickly unstrapped himself and moved through the cockpit, checking everyone’s safety straps. He unlatched Emily’s chair and swung it around so it was facing forward. She opened an eye and squinted at him.
“Time for blast-off?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Oleg, rotating the still-unconscious Howard ninety degrees and locking him in place. Then he returned to his seat, cast an eye over Ranatra’s buckles, and put on his reflective sunglasses. “Here we go,” he said, and pressed the blue button.
There came a heavy, shuddering mechanical noise that they heard as well as felt, as large parts slid into place somewhere behind them. Then they heard a high-pitched electric whine, accompanied by a tingling sensation in their ears and noses. There was a bass thrumming they felt in the deepest part of their chests, and the airplane leapt forward and upward. The breath was crushed out of them, and they labored to inhale. Their eyeballs were compressed and the cockpit became blurry, and their organs began to ache inside their bodies. It was as if huge sheets of elastic were being stretched tighter and tighter over them. But, soon enough, the elastic relaxed and the deep blue of the sky gave way to the black of space, and stars spread out in front of them. They could not see the earth from this angle, but its radiance made the front window glow blue around its margins.
The four of them panted and wheezed as the air and life returned to their bodies. As they recovered, Farnsær hove into view before them. It looked like nothing more than a colossal fried egg, slightly convex on the yoke side. The “white” of the egg was made of tangles and braids of some kind of ropy green-gray fiber, and the “yolk” was a huge hemisphere of opalescent material pointed away from the sun. They circled around the yolk side and approached from the rear. They saw the vast tangled mat was covered with dark globes about three meters across. Oleg maneuvered the plane around to a cavernous chamber that yawned open on the rear side of the station, and the passengers felt a great heaving force as they were drawn into the hangar.
The plane settled into a mat of the green-gray fibers, and they waited as the hangar was flooded with warmth and oxygen. Then they saw a round door open and a figure in a yellow jumpsuit hurried toward them.
III Howard and Emily
The western sky had a few creamy translucent bands of dull-colored light perched on its horizon: a vaguely opalescent blend of a deep-pink-but-now-very-dim sunset, the glow-might of Seattle and Everett, and the moonlight painting the roof of low clouds over the Pacific.
Five-halves-score and eight eyes watched wide in wonder. Five-halves-dozen mouths sagged. Twenty-nine selves were sated well beyond satisfaction, on food, drink, love and smoke. A bright bonfire crackled and made sharp sausage-greasy sticks sparkle. Bloated, ashy corpses of sacrificial marshmallows, intended and impromptu, shimmered in the margins of cooling coals.
The selves had reveled in each others’ company, new friends and old friends meeting, playing drums, telling stories and poems, howling the moon up over Spokane. It had been a noisy, joyous evening that had mellowed into a sublimely beautiful night. Howard’s happy, reedy voice had just finished an informative monologue on the proper manufacture of an Oreo loogie, to be hucked as high as ever possible onto a school wall, and the hilarity died pleasantly down to a moment of perfect comfortable quiet, and the eyes had settled on the lovely western sky. Then, as if on some cosmic cue, a shooting star appeared, soaring over their heads like a fiery softball batted out of the Wenatchee High School athletic field at supersonic velocities and only now succumbing to gravity. Its tail traced several degrees of whitish-green arc behind it, so bright it left flashing slashes in the blinks of the eyes that followed it. And now they gaped in ape-awe. The meteor had been the perfect punctuation, an exclamation mark that made them all exclaim. Even blind Brendan felt the thrill.
Then the moment was broken by a shift of wind. The group was on an exposed ledge on Blewett Pass, in the high steppe of the Eastern Cascades, and it was chilly. The wind pushed the smoke from the bonfire straight into the faces of everyone sitting on the West side. They became instantly frantic, waving their hands and leaping up as their lungs creaked on hot carbon dioxide. This sudden motion knocked several empty bottles together, an alarmingly-loud clinking and chinkering that promised broken glass and cut feet. But the good spirit who protects hedonists from themselves was thankfully present, and alarum was joined with laughter, and the moment passed.
Emily Epsom sat on a double-chair under a blanket with Melanie Wealden. Melanie had made the blanket as a going-away present, stitching for untold hours. It was Navajo wool with a black-and-oxblood border around a rectangle of rich green. Melanie, a botanist, had embroidered one hundred and sixty-three plants overlapping each other like a rampant jungle garden. Trees, shrubs, and grasses were all drawn at like scale, so tiny arctic poppies were the same size as sequoias. One for each week they had been together. “I had to think a while whether I should tear seventeen of them off, because I finished it before we, uh, had our talk,” said Melanie, her voice hoarse with emotion. She arrived only a couple hours ago after ignoring all invitations, and presented Emily with the blanket and a warm heart to take with her into space. Then there had been tears and hugs, followed by apologies, acknowledgement of wrongs done on both sides, then more hugs and laughs and genuine elation at being in each others’ arms again.
It had been a hard year for both of them, with regards to each other. The announcement of the trip in February had resulted in a discussion that had maundered painfully for days while the two of them wrangled about who loved the other more, who would give up more for the other, and hundreds of increasingly-theoretical hypothetical situations and what-ifs. The sad hardness was that Emily wanted to go, and Melanie wanted her to stay. There was an inevitable sense of betrayal, which calved glacial chills in the emotional weather in their house, that in their turn coalesced into an exploding firestorm, the eruption of Mount Melanie, an outpouring of hot bitterness and acid accusation that would have made Haphaestos shade his face.
The catalyst of this colossal reaction was Howard, who in his innocent cheerful friendliness had been telling ridiculous stories to make Emily laugh. No slouch of a storyteller herself, Emily had emended the end of a story to great humorous effect, and the two of them had shared a long, paralytic, wheezing-giggling laugh that was greatly satisfying to both of them. Then they had locked eyes, cheeks flushed, and shared a smile of such brightness and spirit that it seemed to warm them both to the marrow. Melanie had come into the laboratory through the rear door and observed the end of the episode.
There was already tension about Howard because he had become good friends with Emily during the last year, and they had shared experiences that Melanie was quite naturally envious of. Howard was Going, and Melanie was Staying Here. Real or imagined, the signs had grown in Melanie’s mind, tumors of pre-aggrievance, and she had convinced herself that Something Was Going On by virtue of the strength of her own emotions. How could she feel this strongly if there wasn’t Something Going On?
Howard noticed her first, in the lab that evening, after the long laugh and sweet smile. He was looking straight into Emily’s eyes, when suddenly he felt a frost emanating from the back of the lab, a cold burning on the back of his neck that made his kidneys shiver. He turned and saw Melanie, a pillar of fiery frigidity, like a statue made of dry ice.
He began to stammer out a greeting, but she cut him off with a gesture that telegraphed her willingness to try to chop him in two with the edge of her bare palm. Then her eyes flicked a grim saccade over to Emily, whose smile had wilted somewhat. Howard slithered toward the door and hovered there, unsure of his expected role in the gathering storm. He soon decided there were safer rooms to be in.
Whether Melanie actually believed her suspicions were confirmed was irrelevant, because her heart had needed to relieve this pressure for a long time, and she flayed Emily with her feelings. Unkind words were spoken on both sides. All the flaws that they had been willing to overlook in each other for the sake of the relationship were highlighted in the most unflattering ways. This kind of hot ventilation made a breakup seem more correct, more inevitable. Finally, at crux and climax, Emily wanted to go into space more than she wanted to stay on Earth, even if Earth meant Melanie. So that was that. There was grief and loss, and eventually personal resolution for both of them, but they hadn’t communicated much at all since then. Tonight they were close again – not as close as before, of course, but definitely not alienated and distant.
Howard and Emily had decided to have their going-away party together – not as any declaration of emotional solidarity, but merely because they had a lot of mutual friends. Howard made friends easily, and maintained good connections with people even when he didn’t see them for months or years. Some of his oldest friends were there tonight, on account of Blewett Pass being quite close to his hometown of Wenatchee.
Howard had endured a spectacularly painful breakup the year before he met Emily, and had only been able to maintain sporadic and saltatory relationships since. The breakup had cost him in spirit and innocence, and he was now very wary about forming such bonds. Tonight, however, he was in such high spirits that he would have gladly flirted with a sulphurous harpy, had she presented herself. He celebrated with abandon even when there was little reason to celebrate, but tonight he had cause to pull out all the stops.
His various friends had come bearing food and intoxicating substances, and Howard eagerly set himself to both. A gentleman from Seattle named Dave brought a bag of butcher-paper bundles which contained unspecified cuts of “discount meat.” A woman from Tacoma named Charlotte had a colossal salad-bowl filled with guacamole, and great grips of chips. Chris from Wenatchee carried three milk-crates full of homebrew in mismatched bottles. Erica from Olympia dug buckets of geoducks, and Jason from Leavenworth had decocted, especially for this occasion, absinthe laudanum. Heidi from Bellingham harvested a great tussocky marijuana plant out of her herbal garden, and brought a cavernous narghile to help process it.
Howard had thrown himself into the party, as if possessed by the spirit of the occasion. He was genuinely happy to see each person who arrived, and no offer of intoxicant or nourishment was refused. Howard’s gift of impromptu grandiosity was in generous flower, and his relentless cheerful energy had elevated a simple campfire gathering into something very great and memorable indeed.
By now, just after the shooting star, the bright sparky energy of the evening had collapsed into something more akin to warm coals. Howard felt a strange panic setting in, the realization that this was his last night on Earth for an unspecified amount of time, eighteen months at the very least. The thought that he might never return barely intruded into his reality. He tried to push himself to keep it up, to drink one more beer, to pull one more lungful of sweet skunky smoke through the gurgling culvert-like waterpipe. He recognized that his friends were already beyond their capacity for added enjoyment, and he felt the black-mittened fingers of stupefaction stroking his brain stem. He tried to move around the circle and cajole everyone like a teammate, giving Blind Brendan a brisk shoulder-rub, offering to fetch Heidi a refill. His feet clinked against empty bottles and clamshells, and he nearly lost his balance, swaying dangerously close to the fire. Several pairs of reassuring hands gripped him and guided him back to his chair. His eyes swam for a moment and then he focused on the face of Reid, a very old friend from home.
“Hey Reid,” he said, “remember that time we tried to drink a whole hogshead of beer? We invited EVERYBODY, even the jocks and the dicks, and tried to put that thing away.”
“Our efforts were feeble,” Reid said, laughing. “And the bar wanted the kegs back on Monday, so we had to rally and fill every available container with stale, flat beer. My favorite was the giant cafeteria mustard-dispenser.”
“Hey Erica,” said Howard, “remember when we tried to distill that cough syrup with lighter fluid?”
“To this day, I have still never felt sicker,” Erica said with a flicked dreadlock.
“Hey Emily,” Howard continued, but a spear of ice from Melanie’s eyes managed to penetrate his sodden awareness, and he found himself at a loss for coherency. Two of his oldest friends, Jason and Reid, stepped up to save him from himself.
“Howard,” said Jason, offering him a mug, “how would you like another drink of this absinthe laudanum?”
“Thank you Jason,” said Howard, drawing himself up with uncanny dignity and accepting the mug. “I’d like that very much.” After that, Howard was more easily susceptible to the suggestion that he call it a night, and accepted Reid’s assistance in finding his tent in the darkness. Nobody wanted to see Howard hurt or embarrass himself.
The greater part of the party followed Howard into slumberland, but a few of the women stayed up. Emily and her friends had not indulged as deeply as the others, and so they fed the fire and warmed themselves with good companionship until the sky began to pale in the East.
“Well,” said Melanie finally, “I’m afraid I’m a normal Earth girl with an Earth job, so I better get rolling.” Emily walked her to the car. They embraced with a mix of tenderness and ferocity, faith and love and wounds unhealed. They looked into each others’ eyes for a long moment. They’d already said all they could say to each other. The moment might have been longer if the morning was of more clement element, but they both noticed the bitter chill of the morning now that they were away from the fire, and they both began to shiver. Melanie leaned forward and gave Emily a kiss, then she got into her car and drove away. Emily watched her go West, pursued by the slanting orange fingers of the rising sun.
Five-halves-score and eight eyes watched wide in wonder. Five-halves-dozen mouths sagged. Twenty-nine selves were sated well beyond satisfaction, on food, drink, love and smoke. A bright bonfire crackled and made sharp sausage-greasy sticks sparkle. Bloated, ashy corpses of sacrificial marshmallows, intended and impromptu, shimmered in the margins of cooling coals.
The selves had reveled in each others’ company, new friends and old friends meeting, playing drums, telling stories and poems, howling the moon up over Spokane. It had been a noisy, joyous evening that had mellowed into a sublimely beautiful night. Howard’s happy, reedy voice had just finished an informative monologue on the proper manufacture of an Oreo loogie, to be hucked as high as ever possible onto a school wall, and the hilarity died pleasantly down to a moment of perfect comfortable quiet, and the eyes had settled on the lovely western sky. Then, as if on some cosmic cue, a shooting star appeared, soaring over their heads like a fiery softball batted out of the Wenatchee High School athletic field at supersonic velocities and only now succumbing to gravity. Its tail traced several degrees of whitish-green arc behind it, so bright it left flashing slashes in the blinks of the eyes that followed it. And now they gaped in ape-awe. The meteor had been the perfect punctuation, an exclamation mark that made them all exclaim. Even blind Brendan felt the thrill.
Then the moment was broken by a shift of wind. The group was on an exposed ledge on Blewett Pass, in the high steppe of the Eastern Cascades, and it was chilly. The wind pushed the smoke from the bonfire straight into the faces of everyone sitting on the West side. They became instantly frantic, waving their hands and leaping up as their lungs creaked on hot carbon dioxide. This sudden motion knocked several empty bottles together, an alarmingly-loud clinking and chinkering that promised broken glass and cut feet. But the good spirit who protects hedonists from themselves was thankfully present, and alarum was joined with laughter, and the moment passed.
Emily Epsom sat on a double-chair under a blanket with Melanie Wealden. Melanie had made the blanket as a going-away present, stitching for untold hours. It was Navajo wool with a black-and-oxblood border around a rectangle of rich green. Melanie, a botanist, had embroidered one hundred and sixty-three plants overlapping each other like a rampant jungle garden. Trees, shrubs, and grasses were all drawn at like scale, so tiny arctic poppies were the same size as sequoias. One for each week they had been together. “I had to think a while whether I should tear seventeen of them off, because I finished it before we, uh, had our talk,” said Melanie, her voice hoarse with emotion. She arrived only a couple hours ago after ignoring all invitations, and presented Emily with the blanket and a warm heart to take with her into space. Then there had been tears and hugs, followed by apologies, acknowledgement of wrongs done on both sides, then more hugs and laughs and genuine elation at being in each others’ arms again.
It had been a hard year for both of them, with regards to each other. The announcement of the trip in February had resulted in a discussion that had maundered painfully for days while the two of them wrangled about who loved the other more, who would give up more for the other, and hundreds of increasingly-theoretical hypothetical situations and what-ifs. The sad hardness was that Emily wanted to go, and Melanie wanted her to stay. There was an inevitable sense of betrayal, which calved glacial chills in the emotional weather in their house, that in their turn coalesced into an exploding firestorm, the eruption of Mount Melanie, an outpouring of hot bitterness and acid accusation that would have made Haphaestos shade his face.
The catalyst of this colossal reaction was Howard, who in his innocent cheerful friendliness had been telling ridiculous stories to make Emily laugh. No slouch of a storyteller herself, Emily had emended the end of a story to great humorous effect, and the two of them had shared a long, paralytic, wheezing-giggling laugh that was greatly satisfying to both of them. Then they had locked eyes, cheeks flushed, and shared a smile of such brightness and spirit that it seemed to warm them both to the marrow. Melanie had come into the laboratory through the rear door and observed the end of the episode.
There was already tension about Howard because he had become good friends with Emily during the last year, and they had shared experiences that Melanie was quite naturally envious of. Howard was Going, and Melanie was Staying Here. Real or imagined, the signs had grown in Melanie’s mind, tumors of pre-aggrievance, and she had convinced herself that Something Was Going On by virtue of the strength of her own emotions. How could she feel this strongly if there wasn’t Something Going On?
Howard noticed her first, in the lab that evening, after the long laugh and sweet smile. He was looking straight into Emily’s eyes, when suddenly he felt a frost emanating from the back of the lab, a cold burning on the back of his neck that made his kidneys shiver. He turned and saw Melanie, a pillar of fiery frigidity, like a statue made of dry ice.
He began to stammer out a greeting, but she cut him off with a gesture that telegraphed her willingness to try to chop him in two with the edge of her bare palm. Then her eyes flicked a grim saccade over to Emily, whose smile had wilted somewhat. Howard slithered toward the door and hovered there, unsure of his expected role in the gathering storm. He soon decided there were safer rooms to be in.
Whether Melanie actually believed her suspicions were confirmed was irrelevant, because her heart had needed to relieve this pressure for a long time, and she flayed Emily with her feelings. Unkind words were spoken on both sides. All the flaws that they had been willing to overlook in each other for the sake of the relationship were highlighted in the most unflattering ways. This kind of hot ventilation made a breakup seem more correct, more inevitable. Finally, at crux and climax, Emily wanted to go into space more than she wanted to stay on Earth, even if Earth meant Melanie. So that was that. There was grief and loss, and eventually personal resolution for both of them, but they hadn’t communicated much at all since then. Tonight they were close again – not as close as before, of course, but definitely not alienated and distant.
Howard and Emily had decided to have their going-away party together – not as any declaration of emotional solidarity, but merely because they had a lot of mutual friends. Howard made friends easily, and maintained good connections with people even when he didn’t see them for months or years. Some of his oldest friends were there tonight, on account of Blewett Pass being quite close to his hometown of Wenatchee.
Howard had endured a spectacularly painful breakup the year before he met Emily, and had only been able to maintain sporadic and saltatory relationships since. The breakup had cost him in spirit and innocence, and he was now very wary about forming such bonds. Tonight, however, he was in such high spirits that he would have gladly flirted with a sulphurous harpy, had she presented herself. He celebrated with abandon even when there was little reason to celebrate, but tonight he had cause to pull out all the stops.
His various friends had come bearing food and intoxicating substances, and Howard eagerly set himself to both. A gentleman from Seattle named Dave brought a bag of butcher-paper bundles which contained unspecified cuts of “discount meat.” A woman from Tacoma named Charlotte had a colossal salad-bowl filled with guacamole, and great grips of chips. Chris from Wenatchee carried three milk-crates full of homebrew in mismatched bottles. Erica from Olympia dug buckets of geoducks, and Jason from Leavenworth had decocted, especially for this occasion, absinthe laudanum. Heidi from Bellingham harvested a great tussocky marijuana plant out of her herbal garden, and brought a cavernous narghile to help process it.
Howard had thrown himself into the party, as if possessed by the spirit of the occasion. He was genuinely happy to see each person who arrived, and no offer of intoxicant or nourishment was refused. Howard’s gift of impromptu grandiosity was in generous flower, and his relentless cheerful energy had elevated a simple campfire gathering into something very great and memorable indeed.
By now, just after the shooting star, the bright sparky energy of the evening had collapsed into something more akin to warm coals. Howard felt a strange panic setting in, the realization that this was his last night on Earth for an unspecified amount of time, eighteen months at the very least. The thought that he might never return barely intruded into his reality. He tried to push himself to keep it up, to drink one more beer, to pull one more lungful of sweet skunky smoke through the gurgling culvert-like waterpipe. He recognized that his friends were already beyond their capacity for added enjoyment, and he felt the black-mittened fingers of stupefaction stroking his brain stem. He tried to move around the circle and cajole everyone like a teammate, giving Blind Brendan a brisk shoulder-rub, offering to fetch Heidi a refill. His feet clinked against empty bottles and clamshells, and he nearly lost his balance, swaying dangerously close to the fire. Several pairs of reassuring hands gripped him and guided him back to his chair. His eyes swam for a moment and then he focused on the face of Reid, a very old friend from home.
“Hey Reid,” he said, “remember that time we tried to drink a whole hogshead of beer? We invited EVERYBODY, even the jocks and the dicks, and tried to put that thing away.”
“Our efforts were feeble,” Reid said, laughing. “And the bar wanted the kegs back on Monday, so we had to rally and fill every available container with stale, flat beer. My favorite was the giant cafeteria mustard-dispenser.”
“Hey Erica,” said Howard, “remember when we tried to distill that cough syrup with lighter fluid?”
“To this day, I have still never felt sicker,” Erica said with a flicked dreadlock.
“Hey Emily,” Howard continued, but a spear of ice from Melanie’s eyes managed to penetrate his sodden awareness, and he found himself at a loss for coherency. Two of his oldest friends, Jason and Reid, stepped up to save him from himself.
“Howard,” said Jason, offering him a mug, “how would you like another drink of this absinthe laudanum?”
“Thank you Jason,” said Howard, drawing himself up with uncanny dignity and accepting the mug. “I’d like that very much.” After that, Howard was more easily susceptible to the suggestion that he call it a night, and accepted Reid’s assistance in finding his tent in the darkness. Nobody wanted to see Howard hurt or embarrass himself.
The greater part of the party followed Howard into slumberland, but a few of the women stayed up. Emily and her friends had not indulged as deeply as the others, and so they fed the fire and warmed themselves with good companionship until the sky began to pale in the East.
“Well,” said Melanie finally, “I’m afraid I’m a normal Earth girl with an Earth job, so I better get rolling.” Emily walked her to the car. They embraced with a mix of tenderness and ferocity, faith and love and wounds unhealed. They looked into each others’ eyes for a long moment. They’d already said all they could say to each other. The moment might have been longer if the morning was of more clement element, but they both noticed the bitter chill of the morning now that they were away from the fire, and they both began to shiver. Melanie leaned forward and gave Emily a kiss, then she got into her car and drove away. Emily watched her go West, pursued by the slanting orange fingers of the rising sun.
II Ranatra's Party
The sun touched the horizon somewhere on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula. From the west-facing Seattle apartment window, Ranatra Badak observed it through smoked glass. It looked unreal somehow. The window had not been designed to open, though she looked a long time for a latch or a lever. She sighed and turned back to the gathering of people inside.
There were about twenty-five, a mix of men and women, all well-dressed, well-fed, and smiling. They gathered around long tables of food and drink: great piles of tropical fruit, pots of simmering spicy soups and curries, fluffy white rice, sticky black rice, lime-pickled shrimp with whole cloves of red garlic, spinach leaves in peanut sauce, roast fish, tender slow-cooked goat, and many other delicacies. A big broad red-and-white Indonesian flag decorated one wall, and there were other symbols of Indonesia: Javanese shadow puppets, Balinese masks, wooden figures from the Celebes.
Ranatra had become a celebrity and a symbol for the island nation. They were only now beginning to re-emerge from the devastation wrought by a tremendous volcanic explosion two years ago. Everyone knew someone who had perished in that explosion; some islands were completely depopulated by the poisonous ash-fall and tsunamis that followed. But now, the restive Earth had stabilized, and a shaky hope was building. That a woman from one of the poorest islands in the country was now an international hero destined to travel into space was a beacon that the people of Indonesia eagerly looked to.
She did not look to herself for this role, though. It had come to her without her seeking it out. She had been struggling to do the right thing, to repair her family, to ease the suffering in her village, and to earn a better life for her young son. She had never seen herself as a hero, only as a mother, a daughter, and a sister. She often questioned the peculiarity of fate that had led her here, and she often wondered if this was the right course.
She looked at the group who had gathered to honor her. They were mostly Javanese, all of them wealthy, and few of them had been at home when the disaster struck. These people were well-fed and big-boned, and did not know want. Their teeth had never been loose in the gums, their sores healed quickly, they had slept in beds or at least had the option to do so, every night of their lives. They were well-acquainted with dentists and doctors, lawyers and bankers. She told herself that she did not resent them, but she could not help feeling a little bit jealous of their riches and opportunities, and a little bit contemptuous of how easily they took it all for granted.
There was nobody here from her island, Sumbawa, which had been one of the hardest-hit by the disaster. She had sent repeated messages to her village, and had finally travelled there herself, but had found only an alien landscape of death and wreckage, and no sign of her family. Nor had she seen any person she recognized, nor any structure, plant, tree, rock outcropping, or any familiar landmark. The devastation was absolute.
Her son, Kuriktas, was supposed to have been on the island of Tanimbar, further away from the epicenter, but still in the path of fury. There was no word from him or any of the people he was supposed to be with. Ranatra’s entire blood-network had been wiped from the face of the planet in a few minutes. She had escaped harm, barely, and blamed herself for it.
Until that day, her life had balanced at the intersection of a variety of threads: she was a scientist, a long-absent daughter, an unredeemed mother who still held out hope for a family life. But now all the threads had snapped, except one, and this one connected her to wonders beyond imagining. What scientist does not dream of exploring the stars? Her luck, for good or bad, had brought her to this juncture with nothing to hold her back, and she was ready to leap.
Still, her inner voice, and the memory of her mother’s and grandmother’s voices, whispered to her in quiet moments. What if? What if Kuriktas was still alive? What if he needs you? Tuan Kudah, the financier who was bankrolling the space expedition, had guaranteed a life of ease for all the astronauts’ families. Should Kuriktas ever emerge alive from the ruins of Tanimbar, he would be free of monetary anxiety for the rest of his days. Ranatra, who had been very poor for the vast majority of her twenty-five years, was practical enough to draw comfort from this guarantee, but still she wondered how he would fare without a mother’s love.
Glowing, beaming faces pressed toward her, full of adulation. Perhaps she was not so different from these people. Everyone had known loss, everyone was asking the same questions of themselves and each other, holding out hope that some loved one might surface in a refugee camp or on some distant island. Ranatra realized that her journey into space was something these people could count on, a defined platform they could rest their optimism against, and she did not want to deny them that. She allowed herself to be drawn into the bright bustle of faces and food and laughter.
There were about twenty-five, a mix of men and women, all well-dressed, well-fed, and smiling. They gathered around long tables of food and drink: great piles of tropical fruit, pots of simmering spicy soups and curries, fluffy white rice, sticky black rice, lime-pickled shrimp with whole cloves of red garlic, spinach leaves in peanut sauce, roast fish, tender slow-cooked goat, and many other delicacies. A big broad red-and-white Indonesian flag decorated one wall, and there were other symbols of Indonesia: Javanese shadow puppets, Balinese masks, wooden figures from the Celebes.
Ranatra had become a celebrity and a symbol for the island nation. They were only now beginning to re-emerge from the devastation wrought by a tremendous volcanic explosion two years ago. Everyone knew someone who had perished in that explosion; some islands were completely depopulated by the poisonous ash-fall and tsunamis that followed. But now, the restive Earth had stabilized, and a shaky hope was building. That a woman from one of the poorest islands in the country was now an international hero destined to travel into space was a beacon that the people of Indonesia eagerly looked to.
She did not look to herself for this role, though. It had come to her without her seeking it out. She had been struggling to do the right thing, to repair her family, to ease the suffering in her village, and to earn a better life for her young son. She had never seen herself as a hero, only as a mother, a daughter, and a sister. She often questioned the peculiarity of fate that had led her here, and she often wondered if this was the right course.
She looked at the group who had gathered to honor her. They were mostly Javanese, all of them wealthy, and few of them had been at home when the disaster struck. These people were well-fed and big-boned, and did not know want. Their teeth had never been loose in the gums, their sores healed quickly, they had slept in beds or at least had the option to do so, every night of their lives. They were well-acquainted with dentists and doctors, lawyers and bankers. She told herself that she did not resent them, but she could not help feeling a little bit jealous of their riches and opportunities, and a little bit contemptuous of how easily they took it all for granted.
There was nobody here from her island, Sumbawa, which had been one of the hardest-hit by the disaster. She had sent repeated messages to her village, and had finally travelled there herself, but had found only an alien landscape of death and wreckage, and no sign of her family. Nor had she seen any person she recognized, nor any structure, plant, tree, rock outcropping, or any familiar landmark. The devastation was absolute.
Her son, Kuriktas, was supposed to have been on the island of Tanimbar, further away from the epicenter, but still in the path of fury. There was no word from him or any of the people he was supposed to be with. Ranatra’s entire blood-network had been wiped from the face of the planet in a few minutes. She had escaped harm, barely, and blamed herself for it.
Until that day, her life had balanced at the intersection of a variety of threads: she was a scientist, a long-absent daughter, an unredeemed mother who still held out hope for a family life. But now all the threads had snapped, except one, and this one connected her to wonders beyond imagining. What scientist does not dream of exploring the stars? Her luck, for good or bad, had brought her to this juncture with nothing to hold her back, and she was ready to leap.
Still, her inner voice, and the memory of her mother’s and grandmother’s voices, whispered to her in quiet moments. What if? What if Kuriktas was still alive? What if he needs you? Tuan Kudah, the financier who was bankrolling the space expedition, had guaranteed a life of ease for all the astronauts’ families. Should Kuriktas ever emerge alive from the ruins of Tanimbar, he would be free of monetary anxiety for the rest of his days. Ranatra, who had been very poor for the vast majority of her twenty-five years, was practical enough to draw comfort from this guarantee, but still she wondered how he would fare without a mother’s love.
Glowing, beaming faces pressed toward her, full of adulation. Perhaps she was not so different from these people. Everyone had known loss, everyone was asking the same questions of themselves and each other, holding out hope that some loved one might surface in a refugee camp or on some distant island. Ranatra realized that her journey into space was something these people could count on, a defined platform they could rest their optimism against, and she did not want to deny them that. She allowed herself to be drawn into the bright bustle of faces and food and laughter.
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