Some of it she doesn’t need yet, but she’s read enough about what’s wrong with her to know she will as the mental rot in her brain advances. 1223 Carbine Street. Her address. Pippa, the name of her father’s ageing dachshund. Homeland Cemetery, where her mother is buried. A list of her medications, presumably now stored in her tiny cabin along with the scant wardrobe she was allowed to bring. No telephone numbers, her iPhone won’t work up here (although Eileen Braddock assured her such service was only a year or two away), but a complete list of her phone’s functions, plus a list of her duties as Eagle’s Weather Officer. That may be a make-work job, but she intends to do it well.
The most important thing in her memory book (that’s how she thinks of it) is halfway through, written in red ink and boxed: 1512253. It’s the code that opens the otherwise unopenable steel case. The idea of forgetting that number, and thus find herself unable to get to the button box inside, fills Gwendy with horror.
Adesh has pulled himself over to look out of Winston’s porthole, and Jafari Bankole is looking over his shoulder. There’s currently no Earth to look at from that one, but Dr. Glen has pulled himself down to look out the other side. “Amazing. Amazing. It’s not like looking at photos, or even film footage, is it?”
Gwendy agrees and opens her notebook to the crew page, because she has forgotten the doc’s first name. Also, Reggie Black—what’s his job? She knew only minutes ago, but it’s slipped away.
A feather floats up from her book. Winston, now swimming his way back, reaches for it.
“Don’t touch that,” Gwendy says sharply.
He pays no attention, simply plucks it out of the air, looks at it curiously, then hands it to her. “What is it?”
“A feather,” Gwendy says, and keeps herself from adding, Are you blind? She has to live with this man, after all, and his support of the space program is vital. If they find signs of life in the solar system—or beyond—that might not be the case, but for now it is. “I use it as a bookmark.”
“Lucky charm, perhaps?”
The shrewdness of this startles her and makes her a little uneasy. “How did you guess?”
He smiles. “You have the same feather tattooed on your ankle. Saw it in the gym while you were on the treadmill.”
“Let’s just say I like it.”
Winston nods, seeming to lose interest. “Gentlemen? May I have my seat back? And my porthole?” He puts a slight but unmistakable emphasis on my.
Adesh and Jafari move out of his way, a couple of swimming trout making way for an overfed seal.
“It’s marvelous,” Adesh murmurs to Gwendy. She nods.
Once she’s got some clear space to maneuver, Gwendy releases her harness again and takes off her pressure suit. She does an involuntary forward roll in the process and thinks that weightlessness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Once the suit is stowed under her seat, folded on top of the steel case, she descends to the next and last level down, which will be the passenger common room on later orbital flights … and perhaps on flights to the moon. Such an amenity is brand new, and it won’t be there on craft that go directly to the MF station. This is its maiden run.
The area is shaped like a great big Contac capsule and surprisingly roomy. There are two large viewscreens set into the floor, one showing empty black space and the other featuring the vast shoulder of Mother Earth with its gauze of atmosphere (faintly dirty, Gwendy can’t help but notice). Two of the cabins are on the port side, the other and the head on the starboard. The shiny white doors can’t help but remind her of morgue lockers on some of the TV crime shows she enjoys. A sign on the toilet says ALWAYS REVIEW PROCEDURE BEFORE OPERATING.
Gwendy doesn’t need the john yet, so she gives a lazy kick of her feet and floats to the cabin with SEN. PETERSON on the door. The latch is like the one on a refrigerator. She pulls it and uses the grip over the door to yank herself inside. The cabin—actually more of a nook—is also in the shape of a cold capsule, but much smaller. Claustrophobic, really. This time she’s reminded of the crew quarters in World War II submarine films. There’s a bunk with a harness to keep the sleeper from floating up to the curved ceiling a foot or so above, a miniscule fridge big enough for three or four bottles of juice or soda (maybe a sandwich, if you really crammed), and—of all things—a Keurig coffee maker. Coffee in your cabin, she thinks. The height of space travel luxury.
On top of the tiny fridge, held in place by a magnet, is a steel-framed photograph of Gwendy and Ryan and her parents, the four of them on the beach at Reid State Park, laughing with their arms around each other.
Gwendy will soon start her weather duties, but for now she needs to mentally refocus and review the crew information. She lies down on her bunk and buckles herself in. Servos are humming somewhere, but otherwise her little cold capsule is eerily silent. They may be circling the planet at thousands of miles an hour, but there’s no sense of movement. She opens her red notebook and finds the crew pages. Names and thumbnail bios. Reggie Black is the physicist, of course he is. And Dr. Glen’s first name is Dale. Easy-peasy, clear as a freshly washed window … but it could be gone again in an hour, maybe just fifteen minutes.
I’m crazy to be here, she thinks. Crazy to be covering up what’s wrong with me. But he gave me no choice. It has to be you, Gwendy, he said. I have no one else. So I agreed. In fact, I was sort of excited by the prospect. Only …
“Only then I was all right,” Gwendy whispers. “At least I thought I was. Oh God, please get me through this.”
Here in the up-above, after what she has seen below her—Earth so fragile and beautiful in the black—it’s easier to think He or She might really be there.
13
“WHAT—” GWENDY BEGAN, MEANING to finish with either are you doing here or is wrong with you, she didn’t know which, and Farris didn’t give her time.
He put a finger to his lips and whispered: “Hush.” He lifted his eyes toward the ceiling. “Don’t wake your husband. Outside.”
He struggled to his feet, swayed, and for a moment she was sure he was going to fall. Then he caught his balance, breathing hard. Inside his cracked lips—and were those fever blisters on them?—she saw yellowish teeth. Plus gaps where some were missing.
“Under the table. Take it. Hurry. Not much time.”
Under the table was a canvas bag. She hadn’t seen that bag since she was twelve, forty-five years ago, but she recognized it immediately. She bent down and picked it up by the drawstring top. Farris walked unsteadily to the kitchen door. There was a cane leaning beside it. She would have expected such a fabulous being—someone straight out of a fairy tale—to have a fabulous walking stick, maybe topped with a silver wolf’s head, but it was just an ordinary cane with a curved handle and a scuffed rubber bicycle grip over the base. He leaned on it, fumbled for the doorknob, and almost fell again. Black suitcoat, black jeans, white shirt: those garments, which had once fitted him with casual perfection, now bagged on him like cast-off duds on a cornfield scarecrow.
She took his arm (so thin under the coat!) to steady him and opened the door herself. That door and all the others were locked when she and Ryan left, and the burglar alarm was set, but now the knob turned easily and the alarm panel on the wall was dark, not even the message WAITING in its window.
They went out on the screened back porch, where the wicker furniture hadn’t yet been taken in for the cold season. Richard Farris tried to lower himself into one of the chairs, but his legs wouldn’t cooperate and instead he just dropped, letting out a pained little grunt when his butt hit the cushion. He gasped a couple of times, stifled a cough with his sleeve (which was caked with the residue of many previous coughs), then looked at her. His eyes were the same, at least. So was his little smile.