She was passed over year after year, despite her qualified status. Missions flew without her. The new shuttles began to go up two or three times a month, and astronauts began to record their second, fifth, twelfth flights, while Alice remained grounded. She never complained, but she was embarrassed. She thought often of the people who had given so much to help her make it so far—and how disappointed she was in herself for somehow failing them, for remaining Earthbound while her peers rocketed into the sky on columns of fire.
The caretaker offer came in her fourth year. She had wanted to turn it down, for Tess’s sake, but it was Tess who convinced her to go.
“I’ll always be here when you come home,” Tess had said. “And the months will pass like nothing. You’ll be having so much fun!”
The space station is quiet except for a faint, distant beep, beep.
Alice has fallen asleep on the floor of the water filtration closet. Eve disables the shipboard gravity so that Alice will sleep more comfortably. Alice’s body floats off of the floor and hangs suspended before the wide window and its portrait of a world smoldering and black.
Alice wakes, and immediately begins to cry again. Her tears swim over her face like gelatin, collecting in the hollows beneath her eyes and around the rings of her nostrils.
“Gravity,” she says. She rotates herself and points her feet at the floor, and drops when Eve activates the drive again. Alice’s tears cascade down her face in sheets, and she pushes her palms over her skin, clearing her eyes.
She turns around and looks down at Earth. The smoke and debris has begun to crawl high into the atmosphere, as if a dirty sock is being pulled over the planet. In a few hours the ground will be blotted from view, and Alice shudders when she imagines the people on the ground, staring up at the sun for the last time, watching it vanish behind the sullen sky.
“They’re all going to die,” she whispers to Eve. “Aren’t they?”
Eve says, “I observed more than three hundred distinct detonations in the United States alone. The odds of survival are infinitesimally small with only a fraction of those numbers.”
Alice nods. She can see her own reflection in the glass, laid over the darkening Earth.
“Tess,” she says again, too tired to cry. “My parents—I’m glad that they were dead. Before.”
Eve is quiet.
Alice notices the faint beeping sound. “What’s that?”
Eve says, “The communications link to Mission Control has been severed. It’s a standard alarm.”
“Disable, please.”
Eve does, and the station falls eerily silent.
Alice says, “We were going to have children next year. After we put some money aside.”
Eve doesn’t say anything.
“Tess wanted a boy,” Alice says. “She wanted to name him after her dad. Ricardo was his name.” She laughs, but it’s a tragic, bitter sound. “I hated that name. I thought it was such a cliché. I wanted a girl, but I didn’t know what I wanted to name her. I was going to sit with her under the stars and show her the constellations, and show her the Argus when it floated by, and tell her that’s where Mommy worked.”
A new tear slides soundlessly down Alice’s cheek.
“I’d have told that to Ricardo, too,” she says. “I’d have loved him even with that stupid name.”
Eve says, “Perhaps you should sleep again. I can prepare a sedative.”
Alice shakes her head. “Look at it,” she says. “It looks like an old rotten apple, doesn’t it?”
Eve says, “It does look something like that.”
Alice nods. “I’m glad you can fake it,” she says. “Conversation.”
Eve says, “I’m glad, too.”
Alice sleeps for nearly twenty hours. She barely moves, and wakes up stiff and creaky like a board. When she wakes, she gasps, then falls back onto her pillow and presses her palms against her eyes, and cries. She dreamed of Tess, that they were in their shared bed in Portland, talking about the day. Tess had wanted to drive to Sauvie Island for fresh strawberries.
But Tess is gone, and Alice is alone.
Except for Eve, who says, “Good morning, Alice.”
Alice blinks away the tears and swallows the deep cries that shift inside her like tectonic plates. You have to stop, she thinks. She’s dead. Everyone is dead. It can’t be changed. Mourning isn’t going to help now.
Eve says, “I’ve prepared coffee.”
“Thanks,” Alice says, grunting as she pushes herself upright on the cot. Then she blinks. “You did it.”
“What have I done?” Eve asks.
“You said ‘good morning.’”
“You seemed distraught,” Eve explains. “It seemed like it might help.”
Alice nods, then shakes her head to clear the beautiful nightmare. “Right,” she says, her voice a little thick. “Coffee.”
Over a shiny packet labeled Gallo Pinto and another packet labeled Coffee—Black, Alice says, “So. What do we do now, Eve?”
Eve says, “There are no protocols for this.”
“I can’t believe that,” Alice says. “Control thinks of everything.”
“There are related contingencies, but nothing for an extinction-level event,” Eve says. “The most closely related event with associated contingency planning is a nuclear detonation that ends communication with Mission Control.”
Alice puts the coffee down, the packet crumpled and empty. “Close enough,” she says. “So what’s the plan?”
“Maintain,” Eve says, simply.
Alice looks up and around. “Maintain,” she repeats. “Maintain?”
“Correct,” Eve says.
“Just soldier on, is that right? Keep tapping the gauges, keep clearing the clogs. That’s what we’re supposed to do?”
“Correct.”
“What’s supposed to happen then?” Alice asks, her voice rising. “We maintain, and then what? The white horse, the rescue party?”
“In ordinary circumstances, a rescue shuttle, that’s correct,” Eve says. “Each location is assigned a number, and they report their status constantly. If launch site 1 is unable to stage a rescue mission, then launch site 2 fulfills the mission.”
“How many launch sites are there?”
“There are twelve,” Eve says.
“And how many are reporting their status?” Alice asks, pushing her half-drained packet of rice and beans aside.
“Zero,” Eve says.
“So that contingency plan is out,” Alice says. “Clearly.”
“Correct,” Eve says again.
“Which means my original question still stands, Eve. What do we do now?”
Eve says, “Maintain.”
Alice does not want to go back to sleep, so she stays awake for nearly two days. She orders Eve to close the windows, and thin steel shutters crank into place all over the Argus. She has Eve dim the lights, and asks her to shut down the power and disable the gravity in any modules she isn’t using.
“I’ve already done so,” Eve says. “There are local aspects of the contingency plans which are still relevant. We are recycling oxygen on a six-day schedule, for example, and then we jettison forty percent and replace it with fresh stores.”
“I almost don’t want to ask,” Alice says. “But how long can we hold out up here?”
Eve says, almost apologetically, “I will remain active indefinitely, short of any physical damage to the memory core.”