The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Actually,” he said, gesturing to the seat in front of the desk, which I dutifully slid into just like any other patient with medical issues on his mind, “it’s probably the still you’re smelling. Got to have our arak, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Couldn’t do without that.”

  We were silent a moment. He was watching me carefully in that way he had, as if he were back in med school laying a corpse out for dissection. I took in the scale, the examining table, the diagram of the human skeleton across the top of which I’d written “Dem Bones” in black Magic Marker the first time I’d been here to submit to my bimonthly probing. Richard was our doctor, our man of healing, and he knew me as minutely as anybody did. What he said now, tenting his fingers and staring right down into the depths of me, was, “So we’ve got a little problem here—”

  I felt like a condemned man at the moment the hood is drawn over his face. A black coil of despair settled in my stomach. I wanted to deny everything. “Are you sure? I mean, could it be anything else? Dietary?” And here I trotted out the term she’d given me: “Hypothalamic amenorrhea?”

  “That’s ‘A-menorrhea,’ long a, like in ape.”

  “All right, yeah, thanks for the lesson, but what about it?”

  “Nothing’s a hundred percent—and it won’t be till she starts showing. And I’m not an obstetrician, mind you. But—” He paused.

  “But what?”

  “What’s a nice small fraction you can subtract from a hundred percent—without getting into decimal points? Let’s say maybe an eighth of one percent, just for the sake of argument. That leaves me ninety-nine and seven-eighths sure. Okay? That good enough for you?”

  “Oh, come on, Richard. Shit. You don’t have to get sarcastic on me—I feel bad enough as it is—”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and I swear he hadn’t blinked his eyes since we’d sat down. “And so does Dawn. Believe me.” And then he reached down to pull out the bottom drawer, extract a packet of Naturalamb condoms and slide them across the desk, wordlessly.

  “Yeah, thanks. If you want to know if I feel like an idiot, the answer is yes. If I’d known this was going to happen I would’ve come in here and had you cut my dick off, but I thought she was on the pill, I mean, wasn’t that the understanding, the requirement, for shit’s sake, that all the women had to be on it?”

  “Even the pill’s not infallible. Or an IUD or a diaphragm either. The only thing that’s infallible is no sex, no intromission of the phallus in the vagina, period.”

  “Very funny. You got any sex-ed pamphlets back there?” I was glaring at him now, all my wheels spinning. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

  He took his time, pulling a pair of reading glasses out of his shirt pocket, breathing on the lenses and polishing them on the cuff of his sleeve before putting them back again, unused. He held out his palms, gave an elaborate shrug that could have meant anything from It’s your problem, not mine to Go ask G.C., pausing long enough for me to recall just what side he’d been on when the electricity went down. “Nothing much,” he said finally, looking glum. “Unless she spontaneously aborts—has a miscarriage, that is.”

  “What are the chances of that?”

  “Up to the thirteenth week it’s something like fifteen to twenty percent, so you never know. But after that it goes way down—”

  I was leaning forward in the chair now, my hands resting on the edge of the desk. The smells, whatever they were, seemed stronger than ever. Fifteen to twenty percent. Long odds. I was sweating. My shorts were stuck to my crotch. I felt sick to my stomach, sicker than Dawn, sicker than anybody. “Couldn’t you—?” I didn’t know quite how to put it. “Do something?”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I don’t know—couldn’t you, like, give her an abortion?”

  It took him a minute, his face hardening until he was wearing the same inflexible look he’d worn the day he announced we were going to have to break closure or risk dying of heatstroke. “And what, take the fetus and feed it to the pig?” He let that hang between us, then dug out the glasses again and fixed them over the bump of his nose, though we both knew they were just a prop. “You know, Vodge,” and he put an emphasis on it I didn’t like, not one bit, “we may be crewmates and we may be locked in here together, but you’re just beyond the pale. You’re not even human. Untermensch—you know what that means?”

  “Fuck you,” I snarled, pushing violently up from the chair. “You talk about me? What about you? You pretend to support the mission but at the first sign of a problem you just what, abandon ship—hey, let’s just throw open the airlock, right? This is the end, you know that, don’t you? Because they’re never going to let her—”

  He leaned back in his chair, very carefully lifted one leg, then the other, and crossed his feet on the desk. “Yeah,” he said, “and fuck you too. Vodge.”

  Rachel Carson said, “In nature nothing exists alone,” and what she meant was that every ecosystem is interconnected and interdependent, a community of organisms working inscrutably to sustain its own existence. Ours was no different: what affected the individual affected the whole. Various species might have gone extinct during the first mission and others—nuisance species, like the morning glory—had flourished and crowded out more useful things, but that was by way of natural selection and as minders and keepers we could tweak the process one way or the other to suit our own needs. Tear out the morning glories and increase the sunfall available to the crops and the understory of the rain forest; run the ocean water through a series of algae scrubbers by way of filtering out the excess nutrients that otherwise would make pea soup out of it and spell slow death for our corals. Accident claims a galago? A shame. But if we were lucky the others would reproduce and the cycle would go on. Pigs consuming too much? Slaughter them. Tilapia aren’t breeding up fast enough? Tighten your belt. But this—E.’s situation—was something else altogether.

  We were a team, each of us an essential cog. We were working ourselves to the point of no return as it was—how could the mission possibly go forward without any one of us? Eight wasn’t just ideal, eight was necessary. I saw that now. E. was our MDA. Without her, we’d lose the biggest factor in food production, not simply in terms of the animals—milk, cheese, meat—but as a full-time field hand too. Diane could fill in, sure, but she’d need help, a whole lot of help that would cost us all in time, effort and calories and drive a stake into our own projects and specialties. When Mission Control found out (if they didn’t know already; news travels fast in a fishbowl like this), they would cut her loose in a heartbeat. G.C. wasn’t part of our team—or Judy or Dennis either—and they couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like. They weren’t inside. They didn’t have to starve themselves, didn’t have to work till their muscles were tight as wire and their backs aching every minute of every day. If somebody on their team lost it or got cancer or took a maternity leave, they could just hire somebody else. There were millions of replacements out there, billions—but not in here. Here there were only eight of us.

  But what if they did decide on a substitution? A new MDA? If they were going to break closure for the five seconds it would take to expel Dawn, then why not shove somebody else in through the airlock since the mission was compromised anyway? And who would it be, who was next in line? Linda Ryu. Linda Fucking Ryu. The thought came to me as I was making my way through the tunnel to the south lung, where I was planning to check on the settling tank, though I’d checked it twice that day already, and it stopped me right there in the passageway as if I’d been hit in the face by a two-by-four. Linda Ryu. Linda Ryu in place of E.? No, it wasn’t going to happen. We weren’t going to break closure, no matter what anybody said, whether it was G.C. or G.F. or the governor himself. I’d kill first.

  So where did that leave me? I’d slammed out of Richard’s office not twenty minutes ago and still I hadn’t gone to E. It was eight-thirty in the evening. There was a wind rushing
up through the tunnel as the big aluminum saucer in the lung below descended in the cool of the evening and the pressure began to equalize. I was in this tube, the long narrow underground gut of E2 that might have been lifted wholesale from the set of a sci-fi movie, a place that seemed suddenly alien, eerie, so confined you couldn’t even stand up straight without banging your head, and I was contemplating violence—or extreme measures anyway—because I had a world to protect and nothing short of an asteroid strike would make me back down. To hell with Richard. To hell with Judy and G.C. and all the rest of them. There was no putting it off any longer: I had to go to Dawn, get things out in the open, think—in concert, as team members, lovers and whatever else we were—because there was no way I was going to let this fall apart. She was the key. She was the one. It was on her, not me. Anything can be negotiated—wasn’t that the basis of civilization?

  I went to her room first, but she wasn’t there. The kitchen and dining room were deserted, ditto the balcony. I heard music coming from Troy’s room, but the door was shut and she wouldn’t have been in there anyway, so I went on down the hall, thinking maybe I’d go up and check the library. Gretchen’s door was open, and I noted it absently, almost casually, as I passed by, but I had no intention of letting her in on any of this—or even asking if she’d seen Dawn. Fortunately, Gretchen wasn’t there, or at least not in her sitting room, where she liked to lurk like a big gray spider, looking for somebody to draw into her web, but that somebody wasn’t me, not anymore, not ever again. Dawn wasn’t in the library, but Richard was. With Diane. I cracked the door and there they were, sitting side by side in a pair of easy chairs. Did that give me pause? Did that make my heart rate jump? They looked awfully chummy, their faces soft and composed, and what they might have been discussing, what confidences they might have exchanged, what gossip, rumor, fact, I could only imagine. I tried to back quietly out the door but in that moment they both glanced up.

  “Oh, hi,” I said. “Richard. Diane.” It was all I could do to keep from screaming What about patient/physician confidentiality! but I controlled myself. Nothing had happened. You could see from Diane’s face that the poison hadn’t entered her system. Yet. And maybe it didn’t have to, maybe there was some way out of this still. “Anybody seen E.?”

  Richard just stared. Diane murmured, “Hi, Vodge,” and set down the book she’d been pretending to read. “She isn’t in her room?”

  “I already checked.”

  “What about the animal pens?”

  “Oh, yeah, good idea. Though it’s late—” I had a picture of E. then, crouched in the pen with her goats, stroking their ears, murmuring to them in her softest whisper of a breath, the goats more comfort to her than I was, and what did that say about me?

  “She sometimes goes down there, just to check on the animals before bed,” Diane said. “But you know that already, don’t you?” And here was the insinuation, the link, the presumption that if we weren’t busy screwing in bed we’d be going at it out in the biomes or down there amongst the goats.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said. “I’ll go have a look.”

  I was just turning to make my exit when Diane said, “Vodge, what was that business with the tourist today? In the rain forest?”

  “I don’t know—what tourist?”

  “He’s some retired science teacher from somewhere in Georgia, or that’s what they’re saying over at Mission Control. He put in a complaint—said you gave him the finger, is that right? Beat on the glass. Used the F-word? Is that right?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was already pivoting on my heels, heading for the door.

  “Just to let you know,” she called, “Judy’s on the warpath.”

  I found E. in the animal pens, the only illumination what little light managed to leach down from the floor above—that and what the stars provided. There were the usual smells, homey smells, the natural funk we’d all gotten used to and which made Richard’s office and T.T.’s chem lab seem so alien to our reprogrammed olfactory lobes (or maybe I should say “rewilded,” because that was what we were doing here, rewilding ourselves in the way of the circus animals released back into the game parks of India and Africa or the pet wolves let go on the tundra). At this point, after a year inside, this was what I expected the world to smell like. I drew in a deep breath. All was still. A soft drawn-out bleat escaped one of the goats, followed by the matter-of-fact rattle of its pellets hitting the ground. The pig—alone now—snuffled from the dark confines of her pen. “E.,” I called softly, and it was like a replay of the scene in the rain forest, only this time I was going to stay calm and see things through, clearly, reasonably. “You there?”

  “Vodge?” She rose from where she’d been sitting on one of the rails of the pen, the pallor of her face and bare arms reflecting the light so faintly I had to look away and back again to be sure she was there.

  “Yeah, hi,” I said.

  Very softly: “Hi.”

  “You look ectoplasmic rising up there out of the pen, you know that?”

  “Look what?”

  “Like a ghost.”

  She let out a laugh, a good sign, bury the hatchet, get on with it. “No, I can assure you I’m flesh and blood.” A beat. “Though I wish I wasn’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and the smell—the stink, the muck and the shit and all the rest of it—flowered till it was like a bouquet. “I acted like a jerk. I am a jerk. But come here, let’s go sit someplace and talk this out, okay? Sound like a plan?”

  A moment of silence. The goat, the pig, a shuffling there in the pen. In the distance, the mewl of the galagos—the bush babies—grieving over something in the night. “What’s there to talk out? Unless you’ve got a time machine and we could go back to that first night and do it all over again, I’m screwed. You know that—” Her voice caught and she couldn’t go on, and let me tell you, that was about the saddest moment of my life, because it wasn’t on her—I saw it then—it was on me.

  “It’s not over yet—we’ll work it out, you’ll see.”

  “How?” she said, but it wasn’t a demand, wasn’t harsh and accusatory, just a question.

  “Here, take my hand,” I murmured, and she reached out and we were touching, skin to skin, for the first time since all this came down. “You want to go to the beach? Let’s go to the beach and just sit for a while, okay?”

  She didn’t say anything, but in the next moment she was climbing out of the pen and I had her by the hand still, bracing her, guiding her forward, up the stairs, through the deserted Habitat and down along the side of the cliff to where the beach sat glistening in the starlight and the miniature waves rolled in to reconfigure G.C.’s trucked-in sand. We walked out to the edge of the beach and sat in the sand with our feet in the water and I told her I was sorry again, that I was there for her now and would be there for her no matter what happened, and if I didn’t get to give the speech I’d intended (she was going to have to go to Richard and ask him—beg him—to terminate the pregnancy because of course he wouldn’t listen to me when it was her decision and her decision only) it was because she put her arm around me and gave me her lips and leaned into me with all the inescapable weight of her heat and sadness and beauty and I found I could support her, after all.

  “So, look, I know you’re under a lot of pressure in there but there’s no excuse for this kind of thing. None. Zero. Zilch. We’re selling something to the public here, Ramsay, which you, as Communications Officer, should be aware of even more than anybody else, right? And I don’t want excuses, there are no excuses, so don’t start giving me your patented line of crap—”

  It had been a while since I’d talked to Judy about anything other than whatever matter was at hand—the First Anniversary Celebration, most recently—and it took me a moment to acclimate myself to her tone, to the whole tenor of what had been to this point a one-sided conversation. What I was getting was a dressing-down, well deserved and a long time coming, at least
in her estimation. And I was getting it face-to-face, at the visitors’ window, because she wanted me to see her in the flesh, it was that earth-shattering, that huge, and so she could underline her points with her eyes, her mouth, her breasts and her legs. She was wearing her business attire, jacket, blouse, skirt cut at the knee, stockings, heels. Heels. I hadn’t seen a woman in heels in a year and I have to admit the sight of them and the way they sculpted her calves and brought out the sweet articulation of the bones of her ankles really moved me in a way anything she had to say couldn’t have begun to.

  “I’m talking to you—Ramsay? This is no joke. What in Christ’s name were you thinking—or were you thinking at all?”

  “No, I wasn’t thinking, just reacting. Like an animal in a cage.” I held her eyes. “Which is just what I am. You know something? Why don’t you put up some signs, like DON’T MOLEST THE ANIMALS, NO TAPPING ON THE GLASS, that sort of thing. And what about FUCK OFF, will that work?”

  “Everything’s a joke, right? We’re out here busting our butts and waving the banners, trying anything, giveaways, press junkets, anything to raise awareness. And dollars. That man you gave the finger to? He paid his admission fee, ate at the snack bar, rented a motel room in town—dollars and cents, Ramsay. That’s the bottom line here. And you don’t—ever—let anything like this happen again, you hear me?”

  This little interlude was colored, of course, by what had gone on between us and no longer was going on—and wouldn’t go on after reentry either. Or at least I didn’t think it would. I had E. I’d always have E. But the way Judy was looking, the umbrage in her turquoise eyes, the way she bit her underlip and how full it was, those ankles, those heels, made me lose my concentration.

  “And what was this I heard about Dawn being there? Was it some kind of argument you two were having? Or what, a lover’s spat? Was that it? The two of you going at it like rabbits in there?”