She takes a deep breath and can feel it filling her lungs and enriching her blood. The knock at the door sends waves of vibration across the room. It’s a V shape, Gwendy thinks. Like birds heading south for the winter.
“Gwendy?” Kathy asks. “Are you ready?”
“Just a second!” She puts the button box back in its bag and stows it in the closet wall safe, which is hidden behind her spare pressure suit. She thumbs the CLOSE button and hears the lock engage. She checks for her notebook in the pocket of her jumpsuit, then shuts the closet, bounce-walks to the door, and opens it.
“Ready,” she says.
29
THERE’S A SMALL CONFERENCE room in Spoke 1, next to the ops room. Present for Gwendy’s mental acuity test are Kathy Lundgren, Dr. Glen, and Sam Drinkwater. Sam doesn’t know that Gwendy has a special high-priority mission (unless Kathy has told him, that is), but he’s going to be her buddy on her Day 7 spacewalk, so Gwendy supposes he has a right to be here. It would be his responsibility, after all, if she became disoriented and freaked out while they were tethered together.
Doc Glen clears his throat. “Gwendy—Senator—I hope you understand that we have to—”
“To take every precaution,” she finishes. She knows she sounds impatient. She is impatient. No, more than that. She’s angry. Not at them, exactly, but at having to be here and having such a terrible responsibility thrust upon her. “I understand. Let’s get to it. I have emails to write and weather info to collate.”
They exchange looks. This isn’t the smiling, friendly woman they are used to.
“Er … fine,” Doc Glen says. He powers up his tablet, then takes an envelope from the breast pocket of his coverall. “It won’t take long, an hour max. I’ll give you a number of questions to answer and certain tasks to perform. Just relax and do the best you can. To begin with …”
He opens the envelope. Inside are eight metal squares. He puts them down in the center of the table on a magnetized rectangle, which he turns to face Gwendy. Words have been printed on the squares in Magic Marker.
go mother must store the to I for
“Can you arrange these to make a sentence?”
Gwendy moves the words around on the magnetized rectangle with no hesitation. She turns it to face the three crewmembers—my judges, she thinks resentfully—on the other side of the table. “Clever that there’s no capital letter,” Gwendy says. “Makes it a bit harder. Intentional, I suppose.”
They look at how she’s arranged the words. “Huh,” Sam says. “It’s a sentence all right, but not the one I would have made.”
“And if there’s a handbook that goes with this test,” Gwendy says, “it’s probably not what the people who made it expected. Which is a bit dumb, if you don’t mind me saying. You were expecting I must go to the store for mother, weren’t you?”
Sam and Doc nod. Kathy just looks at her with a small smile. Maybe it’s admiration, probably it is, but Gwendy doesn’t care. They brought her in here like a test animal and expected her to perform—hit the lever and get a piece of kibble. And so she has. Because she has to, and doesn’t that just suck?
Gwendy’s sentence reads, for mother I must go to the store.
She says, “I must go to the store for mother is the simple way to do it, but simple isn’t always best. It’s ambiguous. Does it mean ‘I have to go there because mother wants pasta and a quart of Ben & Jerry’s’ or does it mean ‘I have to go to the store because mother is there and she needs to be picked up.’ Some ambiguity is still there in my sentence, but it’s less because mother comes first. My sentence says it’s almost certainly an errand.” She gives them a hard smile without a shred of good humor in it. “Any questions?”
There are none, and although Doc goes through the rest of his questions and tasks, the test is effectively over with that little lesson in syntax. Gwendy finishes the whole thing in nineteen minutes and stands up, holding the edge of the table to keep her feet from floating off the floor.
“Are you satisfied?”
They look back at her uncomfortably. After a brief silence Kathy says, “You’re angry. I get that and I’m sorry, but we’re in an environment where there’s no room for error. And I think I speak for Sam and Doc when I say you’ve eased our minds considerably.”
“Completely eased mine,” Sam says. “I have no hesitation about suiting up with you and going outside.”
“I am angry,” Gwendy says, “but not at you guys. Your jobs are difficult, but so is mine. The difference is that mine is thankless. This damned country is so polarized that forty percent of the electorate in my home state thinks I’m a piece of shit no matter what I do.”
She surveys them and yes, she is angry at them, at this moment she almost hates them, but it won’t do to say so. Still, she has to vent. If she doesn’t, she’ll explode. Or go back to her room and do something stupid. Something that can’t be taken back.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve seen signs saying COMMIE BITCH waving at you from the back of your town hall meetings. On top of that, my husband is dead, half my fucking house burned down, and I had to come in here so you guys could make sure I don’t need to be fitted up with Pampers and a drool-cup.”
“That’s a little heavy,” Kathy says mildly.
“Yes, I suppose it is.” Gwendy lets out a sigh, thinking, You want heavy? Try living with what’s in my wall safe. That’s really heavy. “Can I go now? Got work to do. You guys probably do, too. Sorry about the mouth. It’s been building up.”
Doc Glen stands up. Floats, actually. He reaches a hand across the table to her. “No need to apologize on my behalf, Gwendy.” She’s glad he’s left her title behind and reverted to her name. “You’ve got some hard bark on you, and in your job that’s a requirement. Get some rest. I can’t give you an Ambien, but maybe a glass of warm milk before you turn in will help. Or a Melatonin. That I do have.”
“Thanks.” Gwendy takes his hand. There’s no flash, only a sense that he means well. She looks around and forces herself to say it. “Thank you all.”
She leaves and returns to her suite in great lolloping leaps, her hands opening and closing. I could fix this whole problem with the button box, she’s thinking. And you know what? It would be a pleasure.
Once inside she opens the closet door, moves the spare pressure suit aside, then makes herself stop. She wants to take the button box out—it wants me to take it out, she thinks—and in her current state of mind the buttons along the top would look too inviting. She had to eat the chocolates so she could pass their goddamn test, but now she’s faced with this anger, this fury, and it’s like a black doorway she dares not go through. What’s on the other side is monstrous.
How I hate it, Farris said. How I loathe it. If she never understood that before, she understands it now. But he said something else, and it resonates in her mind now: There is simply no one else I trust to do what needs to be done.
She understands, even in her current state, that if she takes the button box out now, that trust will almost certainly be broken. He gave it to her because she’s strong, but there are limits to her strength.