Voyager 3 followed the elder Voyager’s path, through the theoretical Oort cloud, which was full of in utero comets and icy crystals, and eventually into another solar system. Someday it would fall into the gravitational pull of a celestial body—a planet or a sun or a black hole—but until then it would just keep drifting, solar system to solar system, wandering the Milky Way indefinitely. It was a chilling fate, and also a magical one. Sully tried to imagine how it would feel to have no destination. To just drift forever. There were other mechanical wanderers out there. Some were still active, others had gone silently into the void, but Voyager 3 was special. It reminded Sully of the moment she’d begun to understand just how vast the universe was. Even as a little girl the emptiness had called to her, and now she was a wanderer too. Remembering how her journey had begun distracted her from the uneasy question of how it might end.
THEY CALLED IT Little Earth: the ring-shaped centrifuge that spun round and round, rotating independently of the rest of the ship and simulating gravity by way of centrifugal force. The crew’s six sleeping compartments lined the ring, three roomy boxes on each side, with an aisle running down the middle. The bunks had thick curtains for privacy, shelves and drawers for clothes, and little reading lights for after the simulated sun had set. Farther along the ring a long table with two benches could be pulled out into the center of the aisle or pushed up against the wall, and beyond that there was a rudimentary kitchen. Coming full circle, there was a small fitness center with a stationary cycle, a treadmill, and a few weights beside the gaming console area, fitted with a futuristic gray couch. Between the couch and the bunk area was a small lavatory. There was another toilet in the zero-G section of the craft, but it was considerably less popular.
During their allotted recreation time Sully and Harper usually played cards. It was tiresome to feel the full weight of her body after spending all day floating in the comm. pod, but it was important to stay acclimated. The effects of gravity weren’t all bad. The cards stayed on the table, her food stayed on her plate, and her pencil stayed behind her ear. Sully could almost forget about the emptiness outside, about the millions upon billions of light-years of unexplored space surrounding them. She could almost pretend she was back on Earth, steps away from dirt and trees and a blue canopy of sky. Almost.
Harper slapped the jack of clubs down in disgust. Sully picked it up, then laid down a run of face cards in a fan.
“Thought I’d have to wait forever for that jack,” she said mildly, and discarded.
“Goddammit,” Harper said, “stop rigging the deck, willya!”
Rummy was their new favorite. The whole crew had played poker until their first pass through the asteroid belt, six months into the journey. Gradually the others had faded away, then the card games had stopped altogether during the distraction of the Jovian moon survey. Only now, as the uneasiness of the comm. blackout swept in, did they return to the game, but by then it was only Harper and Sully who wanted to play. So now the game was Rummy 500.
“You’re just making it really hard for me to lose,” she said, and laid down another run, smacking her last card facedown on the table. He covered his head with his arms and sighed.
“Chalk it up, cheater,” he said.
They counted their cards and Sully marked their scores down on her clipboard, beside some stray notes on Io’s radiation signature. As she did some quick math in her head, Harper watched her as if he were drawing her, his eyes skimming the curves of her face, observing the flush creeping up her neck and into her cheeks. It felt good to be seen, but also a little painful, as if her skin were burning beneath his gaze. She scribbled down their new running scores.
“Another?” she asked, keeping her eyes on the tallies. He shook his head.
“I still need to put in an hour on the bike. I’ll make my comeback tomorrow.”
“I’m really looking forward to that,” she said, sweeping up the cards and tucking them into their box. She stood up and pushed the table back against the wall. “Wear your brain next time, okay?”
“Watch that sass, Sullivan.”
It was late, nighttime in Aether’s time zone. In her bunk, Sully planned to go over her notes from the day, but when she saw the single photo stuck to the wall of her compartment she didn’t feel like working anymore. It was a picture of her daughter, taken when she was five or six years old, dressed as a firefly for Halloween. Jack had made the costume: a pair of black googly-eyes, antennae, a stuffed glow-in-the-dark abdomen, and wings made out of sheer black pantyhose and wire. Lucy would be nine by now, but when Sully was packing she hadn’t been able to find a more recent photo to bring with her. Jack had always been the one to take the pictures.
IVANOV KEPT TO his lab lately, working more, sleeping less. It occurred to Sully that she hadn’t seen him eat anything in days. One morning, she lingered in the greenhouse corridor and picked a handful of aeroponic cherry tomatoes for him.
“I brought you a snack,” she said as she maneuvered into Ivanov’s lab with her elbows, her hands cupped around the bright globes of red, yellow, and orange that floated in the space between her palms. He didn’t look up from his microscope.
“Not hungry,” he said, his forehead still pressed up against the eyepiece.
“Oh, come on, Ivanov, don’t be a grump,” she protested. “For later?” His hair became a ridiculous yellow bouffant in zero G and it made him look softer, more lighthearted than he actually was. For a moment she was fooled.
“Do I interrupt you while you’re working?” he snapped, fixing her with a gaze that unsettled her. His eyes burned with grief and rage, and flecks of spit escaped his lips as he spoke. “I do not,” he said, and turned back to the slide he’d been studying.
She ate the tomatoes herself in the comm. pod and fought back tears. They were all on edge; there had been no training for this. A seed of discord had sprouted among the astronauts. The harmony that the moon survey had brought to their tiny community had split open to reveal a volatile core. The regimen of Mission Control had gradually been abandoned and the crewmembers had become disconnected, not only from Earth but from one another. They’d stopped observing the schedules for sleeping and eating and relaxing and had begun to function as separate entities rather than a united team. Ivanov grew reclusive and temperamental, sequestering himself in his lab for hours at a time, but he wasn’t the only one hiding out. Tal retreated into the world of video games, and although he could be found sitting on the couch in Little Earth, his mind was elsewhere.
Tal had been overjoyed with the precise challenge of setting down the landing modules on Callisto and Ganymede, then the ship’s slingshot around Jupiter, but as their trajectory back to Earth evened out and the silence from Mission Control wore on, he became despondent and irritable. Without the periodic uplinks from his young family back in Houston, his mood deteriorated. He began to channel his distress into video games. The various controllers—the joysticks, gamepads, guns, steering wheels, flight simulators—took the brunt of his anguish. Games inevitably ended with some piece of plastic equipment flying across Little Earth and an unquenchable stream of curses, a mixture of Hebrew and English, echoing around the centrifuge.