Lily Brooks-Dalton - Good Morning, Midnight

“Thebes tells me we’re up and running again,” Harper said as he laid down a full house. Thebes whistled through the gap in his teeth and threw his hand down.

Sully nodded. “We’re back. Not much chatter out there, though.”

“Shall I deal you in?” Thebes asked her as he shuffled the deck with his elegant black hands, the pale pink of his fingernails skimming over the cards like tiny butterflies.

“No, thanks,” she said, “I think I’ll just watch.”

“We’re piggybacking Mars’s orbit any day now,” Thebes said as Harper cut the deck. “Then the slingshot back to Earth. I think we’ll have a better chance at picking up something faint as we get closer.”

She looked over at Ivanov and Tal, still intent on their game, united in concentration and competition, then back to Thebes and Harper. Harper noticed her still staring at Thebes’s hands as he looked at his cards, tilting them up without taking them off the table.

“Are you sure you don’t want to play?” he asked.

“I’m sure,” she said. “I think I’m going to go back to the comm. pod for a minute. I forgot to do something.” She got up from the table.

“Aren’t you going to eat anything? We’ve all had dinner already,” Harper said. “Some lasagna thing. We saved you some.” Thebes let the edges of his cards snap back to the table. She took a serving of fruit leather from the kitchen and held it up for him to see before she put it in her pocket. She wasn’t planning to eat it, but Harper was appeased. As she left Little Earth she heard Ivanov shout with triumph, followed by a low groan from Tal.

She passed through the greenhouse corridor slowly, letting the vivid green of the aeroponic plants fill her. They pressed out the thoughts and refilled her mind with color, saturating the nooks and crannies of her brain—green, the color of home. She wondered if she might be able to sustain it, to make this verdant peace permanent, but no sooner had it occurred to her than all the rest of the thoughts came rushing back in and the blazing viridescence faded away. It was too much. She was just a tiny point of consciousness lost in an ocean of chaos, not unlike Aether. Tunneling through the vacuum of space, thin walls weakening beneath the violent forces of the cosmos, losing pieces of herself along the way, just like the ship they lived on.

Sully paused at the entrance to the control deck but didn’t go in. She stayed away from the swimming blackness just beyond the cupola. She turned and propelled herself to the comm. pod instead, raising the volume on the muted speakers and letting the sounds wash over her. It’s been silent in here for too long, she thought. After a few moments she began to scan, seeking out some of their fellow wanderers. She found an old robotic surveyor, still circling Mars. Then Cassini, one of Saturn’s first explorers. And then there it was, the wanderer she always hoped to hear: Voyager 3, heading toward the edge of the solar system, through the heliopause, into the Oort cloud and beyond, to interstellar space. The incoming telemetry was sparse and basic; since she’d last searched it out, some of Voyager ’s functions had shut down. From the plasma readings she could guess that it had moved beyond their solar system—had crossed over into a new one.

She stayed in the comm. pod for hours, listening and watching her screens. When she returned to Little Earth the others were either asleep or concealed in their compartments, the glow of their reading lights shining against the curtains. Before she had a chance to shut herself in her bunk, Harper swept his curtain back. He was half inside his sleeping bag, propped up against the wall with his tablet illuminated on his lap.

“You’re back,” he said. “What did you forget?”

She couldn’t think of something credible, something that would have occupied her for this long. The truth was easier. “I didn’t forget anything. I just…wanted to listen for a while.”

He nodded. “But you’re all right?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Just tired.” She caught hold of her curtain. “ ’Night,” she said, and drew it shut.

“Good night,” he murmured, and she heard the click of his light going off.

She lay in the dark for a long time, on her back with her eyes open, inspecting all the shadows in her compartment. At the foot of the bed, the craggy mountain of clothes she’d worn today and would wear again tomorrow. On the wall, the square of the photograph of Lucy. Above her, the dark round globe of her reading light. After a while she fell asleep and dreamed she was traveling in the other direction on Voyager 3, away from home instead of toward it. Her feelings in the dream were untroubled, tranquil. She was nestled into the cup of Voyager ’s parabolic dish, curled up like a sleepy cat while she looked out into the blackness and realized she’d gone farther than she’d ever expected to. She realized she’d come to the end of the universe, and she was pleased.

THE FIVE OF them gathered at the long table for breakfast and a rundown of the next phase of their journey. Sully sipped orange juice through a straw and arranged a screen of attention onto her features while Tal spoke about the trajectory plan. While they were traveling past Mars, jumping on and off its orbit as if it were a celestial highway, they would be a relatively short way from Mars itself. Tal went on to explain the complexities of Mars’s orbit and how exactly they would use its gravity for their own purposes, but beyond that Sully lost track of what he was saying. She was contemplating the texture of the cabinet behind his head when she realized that she’d reached the end of the orange juice and was making a rude sucking noise with the straw. Tal had stopped talking and was looking at her. She froze in midslurp, and he continued.

“So I know we’ve been seeing Mars from a distance for some time, but if you’d like a better look, the next few days would be the ideal time.”

Her mind drifted out of focus once more. Harper took over and got everyone squared away on their tasks for this final leg of their journey, as Aether drew closer to Earth. Sully nodded in the right places, and when they were finally dismissed she went straight to the comm. pod. She had lost time to make up on the Jovian probes, and she wanted to be sure the incoming data was recorded and filed correctly. The straightforward labor of data entry soothed her, even if the conclusions she was drawing and the hypotheses she was forming still didn’t have an audience. It helped distract her from the unknowns of their journey. Sully was a few hours into her work before she realized she was ravenous and hadn’t eaten since yesterday. She remembered the fruit leather she’d tucked away in her pocket the night before and ripped into the package while she cataloged the telemetry.

She thought of Mars while she worked. She pictured its cratered red earth, orange dust, and dry, empty riverbeds. She thought of the plans for colonization—an American mission had already been there and back a few years ago, mostly to do a geological survey but also to look for potential habitat sites. Before Aether ’s departure, a private space travel company had been entrenched in the logistics of building a permanent colony on Mars. It was supposedly only a few years from realization—too late, apparently.

She was excited to see the red planet so close. Their view on the way out almost two years ago had been fleeting and from a distance. They had been focused on other things—the pull of Jupiter, the planet no one had ever seen up close. Now Mars’s significance lay mainly in its proximity to Earth. The last signpost before their destination: nearly there. When Sully had done a few more hours of work with the Jovian telemetry, she changed her receiving frequency to Voyager 3, still thinking of her dream from last night. She alighted on the signal just in time to hear a shrill whistle, and then silence. She couldn’t get it back, no matter what she tried—found only empty sine waves where the signal had been just a moment before. It was late by the time she gave up. The probe was gone. Perhaps the power had finally quit, perhaps something else had malfunctioned and rendered its comm. system unusable, or perhaps it had traveled so far it was simply beyond their reach. It was possible that she would get it back another day, that something had blocked the signal—a planet in the way or even an asteroid—but she thought not. She floated in the silence of the comm. pod for a long while, remembering her dream. In the end she wished Voyager well and let it go, for good.