Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

No water without the stale aftertaste of saline again. No drinking in the warm summer rain as the air crackled with the aftermath of a thunderstorm. She was going to die here, stuck deep beneath a barren, black and gray and white landscape that would never be home for all its lonely beauty.

Unless she was one of the three. Neta grasped at that grim, dangerous hope and choked down another drink of water.

“ Lo siento ,” she said, then realized she’d reverted to her childhood tongue. “I’m all right.” She pushed away from Shannon and crawled back into her chair.

“I did the same thing when we put it all together,” Shannon said softly, patting Neta’s knee before she rose and went back to her own seat. “Only with loads more screaming.”

“So,” Graham said. He looked around the semi-circle. “We discussed drawing straws. Anson? Neta?”

Three could go. Four would stay.

“Anson should go,” Kirill said. He held up one of his large hands as Anson started to protest. “He knows most about the shuttle. He has flown it before.”

“I can explain to someone else,” Anson said. “It should be a fair process.”

Neta choked back a laugh. Of course it should. They were men and women of science. They needed to find a way to handle this rationally. To make it as objective and fair as possible. Her chest hurt as her affection for these sometimes annoying, always brilliant, and often impossible people shoved its way through the anxiety.

“No, Anson should go,” Ray said. “I’ll take myself out of the draw.”

“Ray, you can’t!” Graham shook his head.

“What about Laney, Morgan, and James? Don’t you deserve a chance to go back to your family?” Neta asked him. He had children, a spouse. Same as she did. How could he not take a chance to go home?

“My kids are grown. Laney and I have discussed that something could happen. That I might not come home.”

So had Neta and Paul. She felt a twinge of guilt. She was one of the oldest here. Her daughter was in college, living on her own. Her husband knew the risks of letting his wife go live on the moon for months at a time. He’d been so proud of her.

“I, too,” Kirill said. “I have no woman, no children. My parents are gone, God rest them. If you will take message for my sister, I will stay.”

“So five of us will draw?” Graham asked, looking at Jie, then Neta, then Anson, and finally at Shannon. His gaze rested on Shannon and the young woman blushed. Shannon’s arms unconsciously curled around her abdomen.

Graham and Shannon’s unspoken exchange whipped the twinges of guilt inside Neta into a full assault. Neta and Shannon shared a tiny room, shared a bathroom. In such a small place, around each other all hours of the day and night, there were few secrets anyone could keep for long. She’d suspected Shannon was pregnant for a few weeks. Now though—now it mattered more.

“I’m out as long as Shannon is guaranteed a spot,” Neta heard herself saying.

“But—” Anson started to say, then he looked at Shannon’s blush and her posture.

“And I need to record messages,” Neta added, though she had no idea what she would say to Paul. To Lucita. All she seemed to be able to say to her daughter these days were angry things.

Jie stood up. “I must send messages also, but I will stay,” he said in his perfect, clipped English. “A baby should have parents.”

Shannon was married, as was Graham. Not to each other. But living in such close quarters, both of them young and attractive, Neta didn’t need a degree in sociology to see why they had gravitated into a relationship.

“Baby?” Kirill said. He looked at them all and then said, “Oh.”

Shannon’s blush deepened. She gave herself a little shake. “I’m not even sure I’m pregnant,” she said. “I think I might be. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think before, I mean…” She trailed off and looked at Graham.

“Graham is a bad boy of science,” Anson said with an attempt at a grin.

“Mohawk, that tiger tattoo—who could resist?” Neta added with her own try at a smile, shoving away the whirlwind of thoughts. She was staying. Her, Jie, Kirill, and Ray. These would be the last people she’d ever talk to. The people she would die with.

“So, we agree? Anson, Shannon, and Graham will go?” Ray looked around.

Everyone agreed. No straws would be drawn. The faces around Neta showing different degrees of acceptance. Or shock. She wasn’t sure what she was feeling and had no hope of reading those around her.

“Is one hour enough to record messages?” Graham asked. “We’ll take whatever you guys want to send.”

A plan finally decided, everyone moved at once, threading their way out of the common room and to wherever they could find the privacy to say last words to family and friends.

Neta went back to the tiny room she shared with Shannon. She pulled out her tablet and sat on the narrow, neatly-made bunk. Shannon’s empty, unmade bunk stared back at her, pictures taped up to the thick plastic walls. She had slept in this box for months, but now it felt foreign, too small, too sterile. Not the place she had envisioned spending her last day alive.

Nothing felt real to her. Neta touched the slightly rough blanket, watched as her face appeared on the tablet and the app told her it was ready to record. Someone else’s hand was touching the blanket. Someone else’s face looked back at her. She looked so old, her brown skin too pale from lack of fresh air and real sunlight, her eyes dark, her face with more lines on it than she remembered.

If this was your last day on Earth, what would you do? What would you say? The old clichéd question rattled in her mind. Neta found herself laughing, the sound thin and hollow as it echoed around the tiny plastic and metal room.

She wasn’t on Earth. The normal answers didn’t apply. What would she say to Paul? To Lucita? What could she say in a final message? Certainly none of the things she was thinking.

She forced herself to calm down, to breathe deep that stale, recycled air, to try to look hopeful and composed. When the stranger’s face on the tablet camera looked the way she wished, Neta touched start to record.

She said all the things she felt she was supposed to say. She told Paul she loved him. She talked about how much fun she’d had in Hawaii for their twenty-fifth anniversary and how she would cherish that week with him right to the end. She asked him to look after Lucita, their little light—and as she said it she imagined her daughter rolling her dark eyes. Lucita went by Lucy now, feeling Lucy Goodwin was a more American name, shoving away her mother’s Puerto Rican roots as she came into her age of fierce independence.

She told Lucita to follow her joy, even if that joy wasn’t in the sciences. She told her she was sorry they had argued so much and not to hold on to those memories. Neta called Lucita Lucy in her final goodbye to her, to Paul. It was her way of apologizing, of saying all the things she didn’t feel strong enough to say aloud. She could only pray it was enough.

It was only at the end that she broke down a little, her eyes burning with tears she refused to show to the camera.

“Love her, Paul,” she whispered. “Give our little light all the love I won’t be there to give. And don’t hang on to me. I want you both to live, to be happy.”

She shut off the tablet after marking the file. She would be long gone before her family saw the video. NASA and the government would have to review everything, but she trusted they would let the message through. It was the best she could do.

Neta made her way back to the common room. Ray was there with Graham, both of them looking as though they’d aged a decade in the last hour.