Zach Powers - First Cosmic Velocity

“Faith is based on feelings for so many people, and so many people trust feelings. As if feelings were a thing, something you could pick up, like a smooth, white stone in the black dirt by a roadway. But science has shown us what feelings are. Chemicals in the brain. It feels good to believe, so people believe. It feels good to pray, so people pray. When someone says they feel God in their hearts, what they actually feel is a chemical in their brain.”

“Are you sure you are Bishop?”

“I have the outfit and everything.” The Bishop tugged at his collar. “My point is not that faith is bad, but that faith based only on emotion leads to an ignorant kind of faith. There is a term in English, blind faith . Too many people let the fact that belief feels right mean that it absolutely is right, but that kind of belief is what led to every terrible thing ever done in the name of religion. Crusades and pogroms and inquisitions.

“These people had faith without doubt. But doubt is strength, and not just for the individual, but for Christianity. Nothing here on Earth is perfect, not even a church. It’s our duty to God to try to be more perfect each day, to make the church more perfect each day. If we assume that we’re right, that we must be right and can’t be wrong, then it becomes impossible to improve. Feelings of belief must be coupled with a logical consideration of the faith. Feelings alone are not enough.”

“I have never seen a logical reason for faith,” said Leonid. “I am sorry. I do not mean to offend.”

“No, no. This is just the kind of conversation that I think should happen more often. Of course, a priest in the pulpit can’t tell his congregation to doubt everything he tells them, but we need more dialogue like this. You’re not wrong. The Bible is full of miracles, but when was the last time you witnessed one? But look who I’m talking to.” The Bishop made an exaggerated motion of tapping his forehead. “You’re a man who has traveled to the heavens themselves. A miracle, if there ever was one. But with blind faith, we never would have done it. Humanity would remain stuck to the ground. In both the literal and metaphorical sense. Do you know metaphor?”

“I do not know the word.”

“Flying in space is literal. Ascending to heaven is a metaphor.”

“I think I understand. Feelings, then, are… metaphor?”

“Yes, yes! I wish we had more time.” The Bishop pointed back toward the nave. “Your party is leaving without you.”

Leonid jumped up, narrowly avoiding another bash to his shin.

“Come, Bishop,” he said. “Let me introduce you to Nadya.”

The pair hurried down the center aisle, oblivious to the tourists they brushed past. Above them rushed the angels and saints. As if in orbit, Leonid thought.

The Bishop and Nadya shook hands, and the photographers’ flashes filled the whole cathedral.

DEPARTING THE CATHEDRAL, Ignatius walked with the tour guide, ahead of Leonid and Nadya. The photographers brought up the rear. The tour guide was a younger man, maybe thirty, with some portion of noble blood, an earl or a marquess or a viscount, a title bourgeois even by the standards of the West. He sported a wavy coif of brown hair that assumed a pleasing shape without seeming to require much effort at styling it. Ignatius said something that made the guide laugh. They walked closer than should have been comfortable. The guide glanced at Ignatius, then glanced away. Ignatius glanced back, then away, then back again.

“I think they’re flirting,” said Nadya.

“I never imagined Ignatius to be capable of such a thing.”

“What’s there to be capable of?”

“I used to flirt with your sister.”

Leonid had not meant to say it. The words just came out. After weeks of interviews in which every word had to be carefully chosen, it felt like utter freedom to actually share an uncensored thought. He looked at Nadya, but she did not seem to react.

“I wasn’t very good at it,” he said. “Yuri was much better. Even Mars.”

Nadya said, “Maybe that’s why Yuri is married and you’re not.”

“I’ve lived in a box for my entire adulthood. Who would I marry? One of the dogs?”

“Strelka does seem rather fond of you.”

“She’s too much of a barker. And was that a joke? Since when do you joke?”

“I thought we were flirting.”

“See? I told you I’m not very good at it.”

He did not add that Nadya was a poor flirt herself. Never once had her expression cracked, their exchange lacking the kind of mirth that passed between Ignatius and the guide. But he could not blame Nadya entirely. He had not meant to flirt with her. As close as he felt they had become, it seemed perverse to treat her the same way he had her sister. Despite appearances, no one who met them both could ever confuse the two Nadyas.

“Ignatius tried to convince me to marry one of the other cosmonauts,” said Nadya.

“Who would you choose?”

“You’re the only tolerable one.”

“Yuri always fancied you before he married. He, Mars, and Giorgi are all great men.”

“Great and tolerable are unrelated qualities.”

“I’m honored that you would rather spend time with me than marry a great man.”

“Why do you see yourself as so different from the others?” Nadya’s tone lost whatever little playfulness had tinged it before.

Leonid glanced back. The photographers raised their cameras. He smiled. Flashes. The photographers fiddled with their cameras, and Leonid turned back to the front. Ahead, Ignatius and the guide leaned their faces near to each other as if sharing a secret.

“I know we’re all pretending,” said Leonid, “but I feel the other twins could actually have done it. They could have been real cosmonauts. They understand the crowds as more than just faceless noise. Can they believe for even a moment they’re legitimate? That the praise belongs to them and not their departed siblings? Maybe they can. Maybe they’re more like their twins than I’m like Leonid. There’s a reason he was selected for flight and I was held in reserve, even though I’m older.”

“Older by minutes.”

“But shouldn’t those minutes have meant something? Shouldn’t I have recognized my mother’s frailty, and known, even by instinct, that it was my duty to protect my brother when his birth sapped the last of her strength? As Grandmother tells it, I came out wailing and my brother without a sound. The last thing my mother heard was my infant screech, the last thing she saw my scrunched face. And she never saw my brother’s face at all.”

“Fortunately, the face is the same.” It seemed like a joke, but Nadya’s tone did not change.

“Are we the same? Are any of the twins actually like the other? Talking to you isn’t like talking to your sister. I would never have said these things to Nadya. The other Nadya. I wouldn’t confuse the two of you if you’d ever been in the same place. And no one could confuse me for Leonid. He’s a hero, and I’m just his shadow.”

“Heroism is simply opportunity.”

“And I missed mine.”

“Since my launch, since I missed it, I’ve often thought of opportunity. I hope that it comes more than once in a lifetime.”

“Even though it came only once for our twins.”

The hotel loomed in front of them, a redbrick front with white stone trim, five stories high and several times as long. Posh Londoners came in and out of the lobby, greeted and wished well by bellhops in funny red uniforms. No funnier, Leonid supposed, than his own, though definitely redder. The sound of a train rumbled in the near distance.

Leonid and Nadya posed for a few final photographs, backdropped by the hotel’s great wooden doors. Leonid thanked the photographers in English. Several firm handshakes were exchanged, pats on shoulders. One of the photographers lingered near Nadya, spinning the rings on his lens back and forth, before drawing himself away. He turned back, raised the camera, and clicked off one final photo, this one of Nadya only. Her expression was less guarded, the usual stony set of her face relaxed, like Leonid saw her sometimes when they were alone together, and he remembered her sister, and thought then that maybe none of them were all that different from their twins, except in circumstance and the luck of survival. The photographer pressed his lips into a bashful smile, bowed his head, turned, and almost fled around the corner.