Russ Franklin - Cosmic Hotel

“Here’s the irony,” she said and leaned back, the nylon of her jacket rubbing together, and she tried to wiggle her belly. “See this? This is what happens when you seek comfort by fucking a cosmonaut, which is what I did first thing after I came out of the terrors. Safety makes you want to procreate. That’s cruel because safety never lasts long.”

The two Union guards seemed to be frozen, sitting and leaning into their rifles.

Dubourg stubbed the cigarette on the crosstie.

“It doesn’t make sense that I had the instinct to procreate after what I’d experienced. I’m only producing something that will suffer and that will probably cause me more suffering, though, I’m sure, some pleasure too, right?”

She clapped her gloved hands so hard everyone jumped, then pointed over the battlefield. “Well, look who’s here.”

A tiny point of light rose over the mountains. The receiver on the ground beeped, servomotors on the dish began high-speed clicks, and Ruth squatted over the equipment, like the squat she’d done that very first day I saw her, vomiting onto the roof of the Grand Aerodrome.

In the sky a moving star grew brighter as it came away from the horizon.

“Right on time,” Van Raye said, hopping down to see the screen.

Ruth, arms over her knees, typed and hit “Enter.” Two sets of numbers on the screen rolled as the antenna whirred to track. “I don’t see how this is going to work,” Ruth said. “There’s no one to answer us up there.”

The point of light moved swifter than a terrestrial airliner, was clearly made up of a different kind of light from the stars, reflecting sunlight from the coming tomorrow.

Ruth said, “We’re tracking a dead space station, people. Nothing’s happening.”

Dubourg whispered, “Ruth? I’m sorry you had that experience.”

“Yeah, that really helps me,” she said.

The dish’s purring sounded warm, keeping pace with the station that hadn’t reached it zenith. I took off my glove to hold my phone, waiting for something to happen.

The station rose higher, luminosity making silver spikes.

“Ever wake up hungover in zero g?” Ruth said. “Realize what’s sticking in your hair is semen? Wake looking out the porthole at nothing? Then you’ll know what a fucking wasteland the universe is. What are the odds of getting pregnant anywhere? I was so skinny I missed like three periods. What are the fucking odds?”

We were all huddled around her now, staring at the screen. She kept touching the command “check run,” “check run,” but nothing happened. The star transited the zenith, us craning our necks as if to see little parachutes falling out of the sky or a beam of light, anything. Elizabeth’s face was lit by the screen, expression blank, the tops of her ears tucked into her Braves cap. “Wait,” Ruth said. “There’s incoming.”

READY SOURCE A

Ruth said, “Someone is asking us to open the line. There’s no way.”

She hit return and saw CONNECTED, and even she glanced at the sky. “Hey, everybody back up, away from the dish. Don’t jiggle it, okay?” The screen popped full of code and began scrolling. The light around her changed to yellow. “Oh shit, holy shit,” Ruth said, “ Capture, capture . . please.” There was a tiny sound as the light of the monitor flashed with more data.

“That’s it?” Van Raye said.

“Yeah, that’s it,” she said. “Yeah, that’s it. Okay, okay, it’s downloading. Un-fucking believable, okay?” Ruth put the keyboard down and then got up off the ground, Dubourg helping her up.

“Sandeep was right,” Elizabeth said.

I held up my dark phone.

Ruth had her head bent back to follow the track of the station, the moving star that was the space station now falling toward the other horizon. “There’s no way,” Ruth said. “My God, someone is sending that to us. Is someone really still alive?”

“No,” I said. “I’m afraid there’s no one up there. It’s whoever. .” I held up my phone, “. .whoever’s on the other end of this.”

Van Raye said, “Ruth, darling, there’s no one there. You really know that.”

“Fuck you,” she said.

Dubourg put his valise down on the picnic table and put his arm around Ruth. The station got dimmer as it went back toward the horizon, turned a deeper yellow, but the data was still scrolling on the screen. Ruth pushed Dubourg away. “I know there’s no one left, people. It means we have other problems we haven’t figure out yet. Is it finished downloading? Let’s hope we get all of it.” She watched the station changing to deep amber.

A window popped up on the computer screen. “There you go. Done.” Ruth touched the screen, checking the files, then shutting things down quickly and mechanically. “Somehow we got the software, and if someone asked me how we got it, honestly, I wouldn’t know what to tell them.” She looked around with her laptop under her arm. “You goddamn people, you have no idea what just happened, do you?”

The troops in the valley began their normal taunts and wild animal yells across the lines in the predawn light, ready for the reenacted horrors coming in the next day, oblivious to anything that happened in the skies, or dismayed by such witchcraft of it.

But this dark section can’t be over yet.

Dubourg helped Ruth into the shuttle and sat beside her. She seemed so groggy, I wasn’t sure she hadn’t taken something. Elizabeth got the engine going. We glanced at each other as if expecting the other to tell us what was wrong with Ruth.

As Elizabeth drove, I looked in the long mirror above the windshield and saw the shapes of everyone in back. Van Raye sat beside Ruth in the side seat, and Dubourg and Ursula bounced in the very back seat.

Elizabeth’s eyes concentrated to navigate the roads back home, shadows crossing her face, Braves hat on, no ball, and the way her eyes shifted from one thing to the other out the window, I could tell she was thinking, and as always was vigilant and keeping us safe.

“I don’t know how to explain it,” I said. “You do believe this person is contacting me?”

“Yes,” she said.

We passed an oasis of lighted gas stations with no one in them and there was a feeling of emptiness like we were the last people on Earth, and we drove county roads through one-stoplight junctions, and finally spiraled up and onto the desolate interstate south again. Ursula’s head was on Dubourg’s shoulder. Van Raye watched the night out the window, happy to have his software, so he could send some goddamn message to the planet and write a book about it.

Near the airport, we exited down from the interstate and then took Airport Loop South to the Boulevard of Desolation. When lights moved across Ruth, I saw her eyes closed, and she had the blank stare of the overmedicated. Her baseball cap had been taken off and her stubbly hair looked terrible. I had this sinking feeling this baby wasn’t going to make it, and that possibility seemed like the most horrible thing in the world.

The shuttle accelerated as if Elizabeth read my mind.

Dubourg glanced at Ruth and said, “We need to make sure that she’s healthy, stays healthy from now on. She’s working too hard. To hell with anything else. The baby is priority.”

“As soon as possible,” Van Raye said, though I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Yes,” Elizabeth said. The engine hummed louder and the automatic transmission downshifted, but the shuttle refused to go faster. Only the lateral rocking quickened the tempo of one squeaky shock. I had that last-day-in-a-hotel feeling, a feeling there was no water in the fish tank, no fish, and tomorrow could be a different time, a different place, if we just left this behind.