Iris was solemn but dry-eyed. As they walked she took up her usual song, low and desolate; Augustine was grateful for it. Anything to drown out the echo of her screams. They had covered the wolf’s body with snow and packed the bulging grave down as best they could, a glowing white mound streaked pink with blood. Iris had made a plow with her mittens and pushed the powder up over the corpse with vigorous thrusts. If it weren’t for the hollowed half moons beneath her eyes and the inconsolable quivering of her chin, he might have mistaken her for a child at play in her own backyard. He tried to imagine that this was the case, but there was no snowman when they were finished, only a swollen grave.
At the observatory, Iris went straight to their home on the third floor. Augustine stowed the gun in the armory cabinet in one of the outbuildings. The rifles were stored in an unheated building to keep the mechanisms from reacting to abrupt changes in temperature when they were used outside. He remembered learning when he first came to the outpost about the special Arctic lubricant used on the guns to keep the pieces fluid, and how little he cared at the time. The man who had showed him the guns had been a Marine before becoming a scientist, and the loving way he handled the firearms reminded Augustine of his father. Augie had told the man abruptly that he wouldn’t be using the armory while he was there.
When he reached the observatory and pushed open the door, his legs finally failed him. He fell into a chair on the first floor and waited for his muscles to respond to his brain’s commands. It took the better part of an hour for the cramps to fade. The warmth was just out of his reach, at the top of three flights of stairs. Augustine finally found the strength to haul himself up by the railing. When he burst into the heated control room, his chest heaving, he collapsed onto the nest of mattresses and sleeping bags on the floor. Piece by piece, and with great effort, he removed his boots, his parka, his hat and mittens. As he lay there he wondered why he hadn’t just chased it away, why he couldn’t have aimed high and let the crack of a warning shot send the wolf running back into the wilderness. A few minutes later he was asleep.
WHEN HE FINALLY woke, the sun was beginning to show, sending faint fingers of light in through the thick windows of the control room. The clock said it was noon. Augustine let himself lie there for a long time before he got up. The sun had already reached the zenith of its shortened day before he dragged himself to the window. He could see Iris sitting down the mountain a fair distance, past the outbuildings, watching the horizon. At first he was annoyed and wanted to tell her not to wander so far without him, but he realized he had no right to disturb her, nor to limit her movements. She understood the tundra better than he did. She was more at home here than he would ever be. And yet—it was his job to keep her safe, wasn’t it? There was no one else to do it. No one to help, no one to intervene if he was doing it wrong. No Internet, even, to ask for advice. Again, he was afraid, and again he pushed the emotion away, a feeling too strange, too unpleasant to sit with for long. He stared at his own reflection in the window, his skin crinkling around his features like a sheet of notebook paper balled up and then smoothed out again. He looked even older than he remembered, and more tired.
Augustine took a granola bar from their food stores and sat at the table Iris liked best while he ate it. The field guide he had given her was open and lay facedown, its spine cracked in a dozen different places. He picked it up and found himself looking at a photo of the Arctic wolf. He read and reread the section on the white wolf’s forty-two teeth and didn’t let his eyes wander to the picture of their pups. The Arctic wolf is generally unafraid of humans, as their habitat is so desolate they rarely come into contact with them. Augie snapped the book shut. Forty-two teeth.
IRIS WAS STILL out there, unmoving. When the sun had sunk behind the mountains for the day, Augie abandoned the old astrophysics journal he had been trying to distract himself with. By then, he’d read and reread every journal, every magazine, every book left in the control tower. He felt strange, as if his own mind was unfamiliar to him, stricken with a deep wave of emotions he couldn’t name, didn’t recognize, and was unwilling to look at head-on. Augustine closed his eyes and did what he always did: he imagined the blue dome of the planet as seen from the other side of the atmosphere, and the emptiness beyond it. He pictured the rest of the solar system, planet by planet, then the Milky Way, and on and on, waiting for the awestruck relief to wash over him—but it didn’t come. All he could see was his own haggard reflection in the window, the bright rim of his white hair and wiry beard, and the empty holes where his eyes should be. The dead wolf, and the little girl stretching out her bare hand to a snout bristling with teeth. Was it remorse, he wondered, or cowardice? Perhaps he was ill. He touched the back of his hand to his forehead and found it very warm. That was it. He was ill. He could feel a fever building beneath his skin, heating his blood to a simmer. A buzz filled his ears and a pressure began to throb behind his eyes, beating against the inside of his skull like timpani. Was this it, then? The end? He thought of the first aid kit, down in the director’s office on the first floor. Should he get it? Was it worth it? He thought of all the medicines that weren’t in it, all the anatomical knowledge he didn’t possess, all the diagnostic equipment he didn’t have and wouldn’t know how to use anyway. Augustine went back to bed and imagined that it was his deathbed. Just before he drifted off, he thought of Iris, still out there, all alone on the tundra. Sleep overtook him slowly, like a wave rolling up the length of his body, and just before it reached his brain he wondered if this was what it would feel like. He wondered what would become of Iris if he never woke up.
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.