He struggled to imagine Iris’s future here, but it made him feel hopeless and useless and tired. And something else—angry. Angry that this responsibility had fallen to him, that he couldn’t leave it behind or pass it off to someone else. Angry because he did care, despite his best efforts not to. The mess of survival was so distasteful. He preferred not to think about it. Instead he admired the gradual slope of the sun’s path as it descended, then waited patiently as the stars emerged. A prick of silver, moving too quickly and shining too brightly to be a celestial body, rose from behind the mountains. Augie watched it climb forty degrees into the deepening blue. It took him a moment, but as it curved back down to the southwesterly skyline he realized it was the International Space Station, still orbiting, still reflecting the light of the sun down onto the darkened Earth.
TWO
SULLY’S CLOCK READ 0700 GMT—five hours ahead of Houston, four hours behind Moscow. Time means very little in deep space, but she roused herself anyway. The regimen that Mission Control had prescribed for the crew of the Aether spacecraft was precise, down to the minute, and although Mission Control was no longer available to enforce it, the astronauts continued to adhere for the most part. Sully touched the lone photograph pinned to the soft, upholstered wall of her sleeping compartment, a gesture of habit, and sat up. Running her fingers through her dark hair, uncut since the journey began more than a year ago, she began to braid it, savoring the dream that had just left her. Except for the persistent hum of the life support systems and the soft whir of the centrifuge, everything was quiet beyond her privacy curtain. Their ship: a vessel that had seemed so immense when she boarded it now felt like the tiniest of life rafts, lost at sea. Except it wasn’t lost. They knew exactly where they were going. Jupiter was mere days behind them, and Aether was finally headed home.
At 0705 she heard Devi rustling in the compartment next to her. Sully slipped into the dark blue jumpsuit tangled at the foot of her bed. She zipped it halfway, tied the arms around her waist, and tucked in the gray sleeveless shirt she’d slept in. The lights were just beginning to come on, brightening slowly to simulate the unhurried daybreak of Earth: a perfectly gradated white dawn. The slow illumination of the compartment was one of the few Earth-like experiences available. Sully made sure she saw it every morning. It was a shame the engineers hadn’t added a little pink, or a smudge of orange.
The dream clung to her. Her sleep had been full of Jupiter ever since the survey last week: that overwhelming, unstoppable girth; the swirling patterns of the atmosphere, dark belts and light stripes rolling in circular rivers of ammonia crystal clouds; every shade of orange in the spectrum, from soft, sand-colored regions to vivid streams of molten vermilion; the breathtaking speed of a ten-hour orbit, whipping around and around the planet like a spinning top; the opaque surface, simmering and roaring in century-old tempests. And the moons! The ancient, pockmarked skin of Callisto and the icy crust of Ganymede. The rusty cracks of Europa’s subterranean oceans. The volcanoes of Io, magma fireworks leaping up from the surface.
A wave of quiet reverence had overtaken the crew as they contemplated the four Galilean moons. A spiritual pause. The tension that had led them into deep space—the anxiety that perhaps the mission was beyond them, that they would fail and never be heard from again—evaporated. It was done. They had succeeded. Sully and her colleagues had become the first human beings to delve this deep into space, but more than that: Jupiter and her moons had changed them. Soothed them. Shown them how tiny, how exquisite, how inconsequential they really were. It was as though the six members of Aether’s crew had been awakened from the small, insignificant dreams that constituted life on Earth. They could no longer relate to their own history, their own memories. When they arrived at Jupiter, an unfamiliar layer of their consciousness overflowed. It was as if the light had been turned on in a dark room and revealed infinity, sitting naked and glorious beneath the swinging bulb.
Ivanov immediately began his work evaluating the moon rock samples they’d gathered on Ganymede and writing papers on the internal structures and surface processes they’d observed. He floated to and from meals or the exercise bike as if he were a man in love, his default frown softened into something almost inviting. Devi and Thebes nearly forgot their jobs of maintaining the ship, instead crowding into the cupola’s strong, clear dome to look out at the depths that surrounded them, whiling away hours, even days, at a time. They took in the view in companionable silence, young Devi with her long hair in a messy knot, eyes wide beneath thick eyebrows, and Thebes, his round black face split in two by an easy, gap-toothed smile. Thebes called their stargazing “having a big picture moment” in his smooth South African accent. Tal, the pilot of the mission and their physics specialist, was filled with kinetic energy after experiencing Jovian space. He took extra time on the fitness equipment, did zero-G acrobatics for anyone who would watch, and told dirty jokes nonstop. His joy was infectious. Harper, their commander, channeled his transformation inward. He made sketches of Jupiter’s stormy belts as seen from the surface of Ganymede, where he had stood just days before. He filled notebook after notebook and left faint smudges of pencil lead on everything he touched.
As for Sully, she turned her attention to the comm. pod. She let the telemetry flowing in from the probes they’d left behind on the Jovian moons consume her attention. It was all she could do to pull herself away from her work to eat or pedal through her allotted hours on the stationary bike, peevishly flipping her dark French braid over her shoulder as she checked her time, impatient to get back to the comm. pod. For the first time in years, she felt at peace with the sacrifices she had made to join the space program—the family she had left behind. The aching doubt of whether it had been worth it, whether she had made the right choices, fell away. She floated forward, unburdened, into the certainty that she was following the path she was meant to, that she was supposed to be here, that she was a tiny and intrinsic piece of a universe beyond her comprehension.
The night’s dream slipped away and her mind was already jumping ahead to the comm. pod. Pulling on a pair of socks, she wondered what mysteries had traveled along the RF waves and into her machines while she slept. Then an unwelcome thought intruded, crowding in from a dark periphery. The mission had been a success, but the truth was she had no one to share her discoveries with. None of them did. Mission Control had fallen silent just before the Jovian survey began. During their weeklong survey, Aether’s crew waited patiently and continued their work. There had been no sign-off from Mission Control, no warning of a comm. interruption. The Deep Space Network was made up of three main sites around the globe to account for the planet’s rotation. If the Goldstone facility in the Mojave Desert was offline, then Spain or Australia would pick up where they left off, but a full twenty-four hours passed and there was nothing. Then another day went by, and now almost two weeks. A break in contact could mean so many things, at first there was no sense in worrying. But as the silence lengthened, as their focus on Jupiter flagged and their anticipation of returning to Earth grew, it began to weigh more heavily on them. They were adrift in the silence. The magnitude of their experience, of the things they had learned and were continuing to uncover, demanded a wider audience. The crew of Aether had undertaken the journey not just for themselves, but for the entire world. The ambition that had fueled them on Earth was nothing more than flimsy vanity out here in the blackness.