Lily Brooks-Dalton - Good Morning, Midnight

“I’m sorry about before,” she said without looking at him. She heard the snap of a card being laid down.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, but it wasn’t a tone she was used to hearing from him. It was detached, as if he was issuing commands to a computer. As if he wasn’t even speaking to a human being. She understood that she’d hurt him—that this was her penance. Losing a man who was still right in front of her.

“Okay. Well, good night,” she said, and waited. He didn’t respond. After a moment she drew her curtain and lay down. She would’ve wept if she’d had any tears left, but her eyes were red and dry. She turned out the light.

“Good night,” he finally called, and he sounded like himself again.

She laid her cool palms against the pulsing heat of her eyelids. She would’ve smiled, but she didn’t have any of those left either.

THE PLANET LOOKED the same as it had when they’d left it—no cloud of dust choking the atmosphere and obscuring the continents, no smoke billowing from the surface. An enormous round oasis in the midst of a parched black desert. It wasn’t until they were nearly in orbit that Sully realized what was wrong. When they faced the dark side of the planet it was indeed dark—no illuminated cities, no tapestry of twinkling lights. The sickening apprehension that had been growing since the receivers went dark, since before Jupiter, grew larger still. All the lights in all the cities, extinguished. How could that be?

She kept scanning the frequencies, kept listening for something, anything, that might indicate the remains of humankind. She began to transmit when she thought the rest of the crew wouldn’t hear her. Her transmissions weren’t exactly professional. They were prayers—not to God, who she’d never liked the sound of, just to the universe, or to the earth itself. Please, please, just one voice. One answer. Anybody, anything. There was nothing. Just a dark, silent planet circled by space trash and dead satellites and the ISS. They crept closer. Still nothing.

It wasn’t until they passed the moon that she heard it. It was early in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, and she’d been murmuring into the microphone almost without realizing it, talking to herself. She was the only person she had much to say to these days. And then she heard it: so faint, so distorted she thought it was just atmospheric disturbance whistling into her receiver. She transmitted again, a cautious Hello. When the voice responded she almost screamed. She thought she must be crazy, delusional. It was like sitting down to a séance she didn’t believe in day after day and finally feeling a presence. But no, there it was again, clearer this time, a man’s voice, scratchy and old and unused. But a voice. A connection, reaching out to her. She brought the microphone right up to her lips. She pressed the Transmit button. Contact.

IT LASTED BARELY two minutes before the signal cut out, but during that brief exchange, clouded with atmospheric disturbance, Augustine learned quite a bit. The woman on the other end of the signal told him she was on board a spacecraft called Aether, an ambitious deep space exploration project he remembered hearing about while it was being built in Earth’s orbit some years ago, before he went north. She told him they were a little less than two hundred thousand miles from Earth, that they were headed home and had lost contact with their Mission Control team more than a year ago. He was the only radio contact they’d been able to make since then.

Augie told her he was at a research facility 81 degrees north, on the Canadian Arctic archipelago, that he’d been there for some time and had little information regarding the state of the world beyond his icebound island. He told her there had been murmurs of war, then an evacuation that he’d chosen to forgo, and then—nothing. Only silence and isolation. He wanted to tell her everything: how it felt to leave the observatory and cross the tundra, to make a new home for himself beside the lake, how it felt to kill the wolf and bury it in the snow, to take care of Iris, to feed her and teach her how to fish, to worry about her, to feel the stirrings of love; how it felt to watch the snow and the ice melt, to bathe in the light of the midnight sun and then watch it slip away. He wanted to tell her about these feelings—these overwhelming, disconcerting, glorious feelings that weren’t always good, were often very bad, but which were always so vivid, so immediate, so new to him.

He had so much to say. He wanted to ask about her journey, to hear how it felt to be among the stars as opposed to looking up at them. He wanted to ask how Earth looked from out there, how long she’d been gone—but the connection faltered and then slipped away. Given the vast distance the signal had to travel, the rotation of the earth and the fluctuation of the atmosphere, it wasn’t surprising. He saved the frequency and planned to monitor it for however long it took to regain the connection.

Over the next twelve hours he left the radio shed only once, to walk back to the tent and make himself a thermos of heavily sugared coffee. Iris was reading on one of the cots when he arrived, and Augustine told her everything that had happened—the woman, the spacecraft full of astronauts. She didn’t seem to care. He tried to get her to accompany him back to the radio shed, but she declined and kept reading. She seemed happy for him but utterly uninterested in the development. He wondered whether she understood the significance of it. He shrugged and shuffled back to the little building, thermos in hand, trying to imagine why Iris hadn’t leaped at the chance to hear a voice other than his, to talk to a woman not of this world.

Back in front of the equipment, his receivers trained on the correct wavelength and his ears pricked for anything unusual hiding amid the white noise, he leaned back in his chair and tried not to fall asleep.

IT TOOK HIM a moment to realize that he was hearing her voice again, emerging from a foggy dream and into the freezing shed. When he did he bolted upright and let the empty thermos fall to the floor. He scrambled for the microphone.

“I’m here,” he said, “KB1ZFI confirming receipt.” He held the Transmit button down a second or two longer, wondering where to begin—what to ask, what to tell. He told himself to be patient. Let her respond. “Over.”

A man’s voice arrived in his headphones a moment later, gravelly and distorted by the distance it was traveling.

“KB1ZFI, this is Aether ’s commander, Gordon Harper. I can’t tell you how glad we are to speak with you. I’m here with Specialist Sullivan, whom you already know. Sully here tells me you’re as confused as we are about what’s happened. Confirm?”

“Confirmed,” Augie said. “A pleasure to speak with you also, welcome home. I’m only sorry it’s not under better circumstances. The truth is it’s been a long time since I’ve heard anything over the waves. Over a year since the evac. I’m guessing you have more information than I do, considering your vantage point. Over.”

There was a long pause and Augie worried he’d lost the connection, but then the commander spoke again.

“It’s too soon to tell. But we’ll do our best to keep you informed. How are you faring on your own? Over.”

“Surprisingly well. These research outposts are stocked to the gills. Not sure if things went nuclear or chemical warfare or what, but the effects in this part of the world are indiscernible, whatever happened. Wildlife is healthy, no sign of radiation poisoning. Over.”