There are no portholes in the control area, but there’s a narrow slit window four feet long and six inches wide. “You can see this better on your center screen,” Kathy says quietly, “and of course on your tablet, but I thought you might like your first look this way. Since you’re part of the reason these missions are still flying.”
I had my own reason, Gwendy thinks. Space exploration, advancing human knowledge, sure. But now there’s something else.
For one horrifying moment she can’t remember what that something else is, even though it’s the biggest thing in her life. Then that concern is driven from her mind by what she’s seeing below her … and yes, it’s definitely below.
The home world hangs in the void, blue-green and wearing many scarves of white cloud. She has seen pictures, of course, but the reality, the first-hand reality, is staggering. Here, in all the black nothing of empty space, is a world teeming with improbable life, beautiful life, lovely life.
“That’s the Pacific Ocean,” the second in command says quietly, and now that she’s not trying, she can remember his name: Sam Drinkwater.
“How can America be gone so fast, Sam?”
“Speed will do that. Hawaii just passing below us. Japan coming up.”
She can see a whirlpool down there, white twisting away in the middle of the blue, and remembers the monsoon she saw while checking the weather dump on her computer early that morning when she couldn’t sleep. But this is no computer screen; this is a God’s eye view.
“Pure beauty is what it is,” she responds to Sam, and begins to cry. Her tears rise and hang above her, perfect floating diamonds.
11
OF COURSE THE OPPOSITION was laying for her.
They could do that, because Gwendy was the only viable candidate for the Democratic nomination. She announced her intentions in August of 2019, with her husband by her side. She spoke from the Castle Rock bandstand on the Town Common, where she’d announced her candidacy for the House of Representatives each time she ran. There were reporters and camera crews from all the Maine television stations in attendance, plus bloggers and even a national guy, who probably just happened to be in the area: Miguel Almaguer, from NBC News. There was also an excellent turnout of locals, who cheered their fannies off. Gwendy even spotted some homemade signs. Her favorite, waved by her old friend Brigette Desjardin, read HEY, MAINE! SENDY GWENDY!
The coverage of her speech was good (local NPR stations ran the whole ten minutes that night). Paul Magowan’s comment on the late news was typically condescending: “Welcome to the race, little lady—at least you’ll have your books to fall back on when it’s over.”
The Magowan campaign would hold most of its advertising for another full year, because Mainers don’t really get interested in the local races until three or four months before the election, but they fired an opening salvo on August 27th, the day after Gwendy’s announcement. Full-page newspaper advertisements and sixty-second TV spots began with the statement that “Maine’s Favorite Writer is Running for the United States Senate!”
Printed below it in the newspaper ads and narrated on TV for the reading challenged, was a selection from Bramble Rose, published in 2013 by Viking. Gwendy was sourly amused by the portentous tones of the narrator in the TV ad.
“Andrew embraced her from behind with one hand planted firmly on her bare midriff. With his other he stroked her bleep until she began to breathe hard.
“’I want you to bleep me now,’ she said, ‘and don’t stop until I bleep.’
He carried her to the bedroom and threw her down on the four-poster. Panting, she turned on her side and grasped his bleep, breathing, “Now, Andy. I can’t wait any longer.”
Below this in the print ads, and across an especially unflattering picture of Gwendy in the TV ads (mouth open, eyes squeezed half shut, looking mentally disabled), was a question: ISN’T THERE ALREADY ENOUGH PORNOGRAPHY IN WASHINGTON?
Gwendy was amused by the sheer scurrilousness of this attack. Her husband was not. “You ought to sue them for defamation of character!” Ryan said, throwing down the Portland Current in disgust.
“Oh, they’d love me to get down in the dirt with them,” Gwendy said. She picked up the newspaper and read the excerpt. “Do you know what this proves?”
“That Magowan will stoop to anything?” Ryan was still fuming. “That he’s low enough to put on a tall hat and crawl under a rattlesnake?”
“That’s good, but not what I was thinking of. It proves that context is everything. Bramble Rose is a better book than this suggests. Maybe not a lot, but still.”
When asked about the so-called pornography in the weeks that followed, Gwendy responded with a smile. “Based on Senator Magowan’s voting record, I’m not sure he could tell you the difference between porn and politics. And since we’re on the subject of porn, you might want to ask him about his pal Donald Trump’s romance with Stormy Daniels. See what he’s got to say about that.”
What Magowan had to say about Stormy Daniels, it turned out, was not much, and eventually the whole issue blew away, as teapot tempests have a way of doing. Both campaigns dozed as the autumn of 2019 burned away Indian Summer and brought on the first cold snap. Magowan might bring back the carefully culled passage from her book when the election run started in earnest, but based on her sharply worded retort, he might not.
Gwendy and Ryan helped serve Thanksgiving dinner that year to a hundred homeless people at the Oxford Street shelter in Portland. They got back to Castle Rock late and Ryan went right to bed. Gwendy put on her pajamas, almost got in beside him, then realized she was too wired to sleep. She decided to go downstairs and have a juice glass of wine—just two or three swallows to calm the post-event jitters she still felt even after years in the public eye.
Richard Farris was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for her.
Same clothes, same round black hat, but otherwise how he’d changed. He was old.
And sick.
12
WHEN GWENDY TURNS AROUND to stroke her way back from officer country to the crew’s launch area, she almost bumps heads with Gareth Winston, who is floating just behind her. “Make way for the big fella, Senator.”
Gwendy turns on her side, grabs a handhold, and pulls herself back to her seat while Winston crams between Graves and Drinkwater. He peers out through the slit for a few moments, then says, “Huh. View’s better from the porthole.”
“Enjoy it, then,” Kathy says. “Suggest you let those who don’t have a porthole come up and have a peek.”
Dave Graves is checking a run of computer figures and murmuring with Sam, but he takes a moment to give Gwendy a look, eyebrows waggling. Gwendy isn’t sure he’s communicating Three weeks with this guy should be fun, but she’s pretty sure that’s what it is. Gwendy has met plenty of rich people in Washington, they are attracted to power like bugs to a bug-light, and most of them are pretty much okay; they want to be liked. She thinks Gareth is an exception to the general rule.
She grabs her seatback, does a neat little twist (in zero-g her sixty-four-year-old body feels forty again), and settles in. She buckles her harness and unzips her suit to the waist. She takes her notebook from the elasticized pocket of her red Eagle jumpsuit, not because she needs it at this moment but just to verify it’s there. The book is crammed with names, categories, and information.