The connection broke before she was ready, if she would ever have been ready. She stayed in the comm. pod for a long time afterward. She flicked off the speakers and listened to the hum of the ship itself, the faint murmurs of her crewmates on the control deck. He was all alone down there, tracking polar bears and listening to the howls of wolves. He was older, she guessed from the gravel in his voice, and would be disheveled after so much time on his own in the Arctic wilderness. Long hair, shaggy beard. She pictured his eyes, ethereal blue, she decided, the same color as ice lit by the sun. At first she had imagined saving him—setting down the Soyuz pod on Ellesmere Island and finding his isolated camp—but the fantasy ended there. There would be no way back to warmer climates, and a very good chance they would end up in the freezing ocean or on the frozen tundra and never find him at all. No, the Soyuz pod would be set down in a more forgiving region, a place where the crew could hope to survive. The last man on earth would remain trapped where he was, and she would never know for sure what he looked like. He would always be a disembodied voice, a spectral wanderer. He would die alone.
From the control deck she heard Tal shouting in excitement—they had the ISS in their sights. She dried her eyes on the sleeve of her jumpsuit and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She took a few deep breaths and rolled her jaw, shaking the grief-stricken grimace out of her face muscles. The ISS was good news. She tried on a smile and checked it in the silvery reflection of a transceiver casing. Good enough. Propelling herself out of the comm. pod and down the corridor to the control deck, she ran into Thebes, approaching from the direction of the centrifuge.
“You ready?” he asked.
“Ready for what?”
“Ready to go home.”
They drifted onto the control deck together, where Tal and Ivanov were already waiting. Tal had the docking controls ready and Ivanov floated in the cupola, watching the space station grow closer and closer through the window while Tal watched the port come closer and closer on his docking cam. The station’s solar arrays spread out from the silver maze at its center like huge, illuminated wings. The vivid blue of Earth’s oceans, swept with white ruffles of breakers and wisps of cloud, moved beneath it.
“I’m not sure,” she whispered to Thebes, but he didn’t hear her. Harper came in a moment later, and all five of them watched the two spacecrafts slowly approach, align, and then, miraculously, lock together and become one: a silver angel wandering in an empty heaven.
NINETEEN
AUGUSTINE STRUGGLED TO sit up. The flame of the kerosene lamp was burning low, the wick flickering inside the glass chimney. It seemed the tent was empty, but it was so dim he couldn’t be sure.
“Iris,” he called, and again, “Iris.”
He heard nothing but the low moan of a gentle wind outside, pushing up against the shell of the tent, the hiss of the oil stove, the sputter of the lamp’s flame. He tried to calculate how long it had been since he’d talked to the woman aboard Aether—had it been yesterday, the day before, perhaps the day before that? He couldn’t distinguish the passage of time from the blur of waking dreams he’d been caught up in. He wanted to talk to her again. He wanted to ask her more—about her mother and father, to learn how she’d grown up and where, if she’d ever had a family, children of her own. He wanted to know how she’d decided to become an astronaut, what it was about the loneliness of space that had made her leave everything behind. He wanted to tell her about his work, his achievements, but also his failures—to confess his sins, and to be forgiven. Here, at the very end of his life, he had so much to say and yet so little strength to say it. His head spun with the effort each time he raised it from the pillow.
He swung his feet to the floor and let his torso hang in his lap, head in hands, while the dizzying black clouds seeped away from his vision and he recovered his balance. He closed his eyes until his head stopped spinning and found a sense of stillness; when he opened them, Iris was in front of him, in the chair she had sat in throughout his illness, keeping watch over his fevered body. She blinked at him and didn’t say anything.
“Where did you come from?” he asked. “Have you been there long?”
She nodded and continued to look at him, a blank stare on a beautiful face. He struggled to understand what he had known all along. His head ached from it.
“Why are you here?” he whispered. Iris cocked her head and lifted her shoulders as if to say You tell me. Augustine pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, watching the dance of light and dark on the backs of his eyelids. He knew that when he opened them the chair would be empty. He opened them, and it was.
THERE WAS ONE night in Socorro that he hadn’t thought about in years. He’d gone to every effort never to think of it again, but it came to him then, his breath rattling inside his dying lungs. It was soon after Jean told him she was pregnant, after he demanded she get an abortion. It was late, he was uninvited, but she let him in anyway, into the little adobe guesthouse she rented near the facility where they both worked. It was full of books and reams of fresh printer paper. Her dissertation sat on the dining room table in piles, her purple felt pen uncapped, a splayed legal pad full of indecipherable notes and a cup of tea beside it. Augustine stumbled to the table and threw himself down in the chair. He was drunk. The tea spilled somehow, an errant elbow, an oversized gesture, and began to soak into her work, the purple ink running down the page like tearstained mascara. Jean wasn’t angry, she was—what? She was sad. She sat down next to him, righted the now-empty teacup, and threw a dish towel over the puddle as it traveled to the edge of the table and began to drip down onto the floor.
“Why are you here?” she asked him. He didn’t answer her, only stared at the ruined pages in front of him. She waited. “Augie,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
And then the most ridiculous thing happened: he began to cry. He went to the cupboard where she kept a few bottles of liquor, one of whiskey and one of gin, hoping she hadn’t seen the tears. He remembered that he’d finished the gin last week, so he took down the whiskey and poured two fingers into her empty teacup. She covered her face with her hands as he drank it in one gulp. They were both crying then.
“What do you want?” she said, and he understood suddenly that he shouldn’t be there. That she truly didn’t want to see him—a flash of empathy for her that fizzled immediately.
“I want to try,” he slurred. “Let’s try.”
She shook her head, slowly and firmly, and took the whiskey off the table. Put the bottle back in the cupboard.
“I want to fix it,” he protested.
She looked at him and made sure he met her eyes before she answered him.
“No,” she said. “Look at yourself.”
She herded him to the door and he did—he looked at himself in the mirror that hung above a table where she put her keys and her mail when she got home, where she kept a little cactus in an aquamarine pot. He saw the way his features hung slack, as though the elasticity in his skin had already lost its snap, the way his eyes were rimmed with red, the corneas bloodshot and yellow. There was blood on the collar of his shirt. He wasn’t sure who it belonged to or how it had gotten there. The man looking back at him was older than he expected—more broken and more lost than he’d ever allowed himself to acknowledge. The haze of a brain soaked in alcohol shimmered around his reflection like heat waves, and somehow, instead of seeing less, for once the haze let him see more. It sharpened the image. He saw that it was himself that needed fixing, and with crushing certainty he realized he didn’t have the tools for the job, or even the conviction to try. He saw what Jean saw, and he understood that she and their unborn child were better off without him.