Lily Brooks-Dalton - Good Morning, Midnight

For the first time since it had begun, Sully didn’t push the thought of the blackout away. She, like the rest of them, had been trained to compartmentalize, to lock away the realities that threatened their work, their ability to function on this long, uncertain voyage. They’d had bigger things afoot. But now, letting the thought linger, a wave of panic crashed through her and swept away the serenity Jovian space had instilled in her. She was suddenly awake from the dreamy stupor of Jupiter. The chill of empty, inhospitable space fell over her like a shadow. The silence had gone on too long. Devi and Thebes checked and rechecked the ship’s equipment and Sully had conducted her own thorough examination of the comm. pod, only to find nothing amiss. The receivers were picking up the murmurs of space all around them, from celestial bodies millions of light-years away—it was only Earth that wasn’t saying anything.

THE RAW DATA spilled across her computer screen while Sully scribbled notes with a stubby pencil on the clipboard she always kept with her. It was warm in the comm. pod and the radio equipment was humming, enveloping her in a familiar cocoon of white noise. She stopped and let the pencil float in front of her as she rotated her wrist and shook loose the cricks in her fingers, then plucked it from the air again. A droplet of sweat dislodged from her skin and hovered in front of her. The heat was stifling. She wondered if the temperature program was malfunctioning. She’d have to remember to mention it to Devi or Thebes—the last thing they needed was for the receivers to overheat. It felt as though her skin was melting into the air, the boundaries between body and environment blurring into one heated mass. There was a squawk of static from one of the receivers built into the pod’s wall and Sully looked to see what frequency it had stuttered on. She’d set the receivers to scan all the usual communication channels after they lost contact with Mission Control, but so far there had been nothing. She knew immediately from the tone that the waves weren’t from Earth. It was a signal from one of the probes they had left behind on Jupiter’s moons. She continued to scan and let the signal play.

A noise storm between Jupiter and one of her moons, Io, filled the pod—a deep hum overlaid with a sound like crashing waves, or whales, or wind passing through the trees, echoes of things they used to hear back on Earth. The storm died down after a few minutes, giving way to the underlying buzz of the interstellar medium and the sharp crackle of the sun. Everything was so much clearer in space: stars, sounds, the entire electromagnetic spectrum coming alive all around her, like seeing fireflies dance in a dark meadow for the first time. Without the interference of Earth everything seemed different. Sharper. More dangerous, more violent, and also more beautiful.

With each passing day, their separation from Earth became more acute. Now, after two weeks of silence, it was beginning to feel like an emergency. Without the tether of Mission Control rippling through the vacuum, they were truly alone. Even though they had begun the long journey home, gradually closing the yearlong gap instead of lengthening it, the crew was feeling farther from Earth than ever. All six of them were coming to terms with the silence, and with what it might mean—for them, and for those they’d left behind on the now-mute planet.

Sully watched the visual readout of the storm pulse on the screen in front of her. Io’s magnetic field and the effect it had on Jupiter had been part of her dissertation. If only she’d had data like this at university, twenty years ago. She looped the audio back to the beginning of the storm while she worked and listened to it again. She couldn’t help but imagine Jupiter as a mother calling to her children, pulling her many moons against her atmospheric bosom to soothe their various cries, then eventually letting them spin back out into the darkness to roll through the void free and alone. Sully was fond of Io in particular, the closest satellite but also the most stubborn, the loudest, a willful cannonball riddled with volcanoes and radiation. The cacophony demanded her attention and for a moment she forgot about her notes. The pencil floated free again. Watching the waves of energy pulsing between celestial bodies on the graph, the magnetic fields dancing across Jupiter’s poles like an aurora, she jumped when Harper, floating into the pod behind her, cleared his throat.

“Sully,” Harper said, and then stopped, as if he wasn’t sure what to say next. Sully looked up in time to snatch her pencil back before it drifted away. She was suddenly self-conscious with Harper looking at her, aware of the sweat stains beneath her arms and the loose strands of hair that had come undone from her braid, streaming away from her head like sun rays.

Harper had a slow midwestern accent that seemed to wax and wane: in Houston it had been slight, but here, hundreds of millions of miles away from Earth, it grew more noticeable. She sometimes wondered how a man so grounded made his home in the sky. He had been in space more times than anyone else, a world record—ten spaceflights, Sully thought, or was it eleven? She could never remember. In the cockpit of the shuttle that had taken them to Aether, where the craft orbited the Earth, awaiting its crew, he had been perfect as their commander, blasting them straight through the atmosphere with Tal by his side. There was no one else like him. But Sully could see on his face that the post-Jovian mission tranquillity had passed for him, just as it had for her. He wandered from pod to pod, checking in with each member of the crew, struggling to keep them all connected. The Jovian honeymoon was over, while the effects of the communication blackout and the long journey home had only just begun.

“Commander Harper,” she said in greeting. He shook his head, smiling. The titles became more ludicrous the more time they spent adrift.

“Mission Specialist Sullivan,” he replied. Out of habit she smoothed the loose strands of hair down, pressing them against her head—a futile gesture in zero gravity. He propelled himself farther into the pod to get a closer look at the graphs of the noise storm.

“Io?” he asked.

She nodded. “It’s a big one. The volcanoes don’t ever seem to stop. Probe might not survive out there much longer.” They watched the colors crackle, pulses of energy flitting between the two celestial bodies.

“Nothing lasts, I guess,” he said with a shrug. Neither of them said anything else. There wasn’t much to say.

SULLY SPENT THE rest of her day in the comm. pod, monitoring the incoming telemetry from the probes and scanning the S, X, and Ka radio frequency bands just to be sure, all designated for deep space use. Aether ’s assigned receiving frequency was constantly open, ready and waiting for an uplink from Earth, but that had begun to seem less and less likely. They had taken it for granted in the beginning, when communication was as easy as picking up the phone and calling a room full of engineers and astronomers. As the ship had traveled farther into space, a time lapse formed and then widened, but even so, Mission Control had been there, waiting, on the other end of the radio waves. Before, there was always someone keeping watch over them. Now there was no one.

Occasionally Sully would catch a stream of information coming from a probe born of another project. There were only a handful of them out there, but there was one in particular that she liked tracking: Voyager 3, the third man-made object to travel beyond the solar system and into interstellar space, launched more than thirty years ago by another generation of astronauts. It was dying by then, its signal terribly faint, but when she tuned her receiver to 2296.48 MHz she could sometimes catch a wheeze or two of information, like words gasped by a man on his deathbed. She could still remember when NASA announced that its predecessor, Voyager 1, had finally gone silent, leeched of its power supply and no longer able to communicate with its handlers back on Earth. She was a little girl at the time, sitting at the kitchen table in Pasadena, and her mother had read the headline to her while she ate raisin bran before school: Humanity’s First Envoy to Interstellar Space Says So Long.