The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  When Judy called me in for a PicTel conference a day or two after my talk with Linda, I didn’t know what to expect. I was sick with anxiety, of course, though I wasn’t ready for the full extent of what was coming. More than five weeks had passed since the day I’d gone to Richard, everything in limbo, and as far as I knew my secret was still intact. There were only three of us in on it (plus Linda, who was sworn to secrecy, at least till I could sort things out on my own terms), I had unshakeable confidence in both Richard and Vodge, and certainly I hadn’t let anybody else know—and I definitely wasn’t showing, not yet. Not unless I stood in front of the mirror, naked—and I did, every morning—and felt the protrusion there, the little bump of a belly we’d all lost within a month of closure and I was now putting back on.

  What day was it? A Monday or Tuesday, I think, though it’s hard to pinpoint since our days were so much alike as to be interchangeable, but for Sundays, and it definitely wasn’t a Sunday. Call it a Tuesday, mid-April, Year Two of Closure. I’d got up earlier than usual, feeling steadier, as if I’d come through a storm at sea and now the decks had leveled out. The first sensation I felt was hunger, and no ordinary hunger, the hunger we all lived with day in and day out, but something more basic yet: a craving. Not for pickles and ice cream or chocolate fudge brownie batter straight from the mixing bowl (though that would have been just fine, all of it), but for meat, lobster, shrimp, the pepperoni pizza Johnny had teased me about so long ago, Chinese takeout hot from the carton, bratwurst buried in sauerkraut, the things I didn’t have and couldn’t have. I found myself out in the rain forest at first light, and yes, I picked a half-ripe banana and bolted it down, though it wasn’t right and wasn’t fair to the others, and after that I slipped on my shoes against the thorns and drifted into the savanna where our passion fruit vines had gone crazy, climbing right up over the canopy of the acacias. I devoured three passion fruits in quick succession, split them open and jammed them in my mouth, seeds and all, and still that didn’t satisfy me (pulp, sugar, potassium, iron, copper, magnesium and phosphorous, vitamins A and C and yet more beta-carotene), so I went back to the rain forest, barefoot again, and found a hideaway off the path where I could filch a handful of the monkey chow Gretchen put out for the galagos. It was grainy, like dog biscuit, and faintly sweet, and I didn’t know its analysis though it must have contained protein, but that hardly mattered—I chewed, I swallowed, it became part of me. Someone would have been on the cameras up in Mission Control, but there were a lot of cameras and if you had twenty people watching they couldn’t have picked up everything. Or so I told myself.

  Then there was the morning milking (and yes, though I hated myself for it, I took a sip—just one sip—out of each of the four tins, the milk warm in my throat and what was inside me crying out for more). I worked the IAB, sat down to breakfast like a prizefighter—or no, one of those huge-headed football players you see on TV—and was the first one finished and licking her plate. Which didn’t go unnoticed by Richard. Or Vodge. Though neither one commented on it, nor anyone else either. And me? What was I looking forward to? Lunch. It was my day to cook and the cook invariably snuck herself a little extra as the veggies gathered on the cutting board and the soup thickened in the pot. Beyond that, there was a void. Everything anybody said, every movement they made, crushed me, because nothing had changed, because there was life inside of me and it wasn’t going away and I could see my crewmates spinning out and away from me, growing more unreal by the day. They were ghosts. The living dead. It was all going to come thundering down—and it was my fault, mine and nobody else’s.

  The first thing Judy said when I sat down before the PicTel screen was, “You’re alone in the room, right?”

  I looked at her, at the bleached-out mask of her face, her no-nonsense hair swept back behind her ears, the sharp glare of her eerily lit eyes, and knew exactly what was coming. “I’m alone,” I whispered, the blood pounding in my ears.

  “What’s that? I can’t hear you! I said, ‘Are you alone?’”

  “Yes.”

  She paused, as if too worked up to go on. I watched her lick her lips, tug at an earring. Her eyes never left mine. “I hear we have a problem, is that the case? Because if it isn’t, you tell me now.”

  I felt ashamed, guilty, deeply guilty, but something else too: irritated. All the weight had been on me. I was the one who couldn’t sleep, who’d vomited through a whole month of mornings and lived in terror of this moment, but appearances to the contrary, I was no lab rat to be prodded, examined and dictated to. It came to me that I didn’t like Judy. That I’d never liked Judy. “Ask Richard. Or I guess you already did, right?”

  “I’m asking you. The rumor I hear is that somehow, despite everything, despite what all this means—to everybody concerned, Jeremiah especially—you’ve managed to go and get yourself knocked up, is that right?”

  I didn’t say anything, just held her gaze on the monitor, which was unsettling in itself, both of us electronically disembodied and contending over what was happening in the flesh, deep inside of me. Of me. Not her, not Jeremiah, not anybody but me. “That’s the way it looks,” I said, and felt the burden lift from me.

  Another pause. Her face, grainy, overlit, artificial, took on a pained look, as if she’d swallowed something unexpected, vinegar instead of water. “We are not breaking closure,” she said with slow deliberate emphasis.

  Before I could think, I said, “Agreed.”

  I watched her strain to process this—she’d clearly expected something else, opposition, entreaty, defiance—and now she had to back up and recalibrate. There were two possibilities only if you followed her logic: either Richard was induced (ordered) to do a second trimester “procedure” or I would come to term and deliver my baby inside. I wasn’t fooled, of course—she wasn’t offering a choice, just the opposite, but in that moment I began to see how right it was to go ahead with what my body was telling me no matter what anybody said. If Lana could give birth, if Penelope could produce a new litter of piglets and the frogs and lizards and all the rest regenerated their kind, then so could we, so could I—and wasn’t that the most natural thing in the world?

  “We’re not,” she repeated. “And no, I haven’t talked to Richard about it, but you can bet I will, because we need to come up with a solution here, do you understand me? ASAP. We can’t have you going around, what—showing—with all the tourists, the scientists, the press? That’s not going to happen. And we are not breaking closure—so you tell me.”

  “Tell you what? It seems like you’re doing all the telling here.”

  “Christ, how could you be so stupid! Aren’t you on the pill? Isn’t that what your contract specifies? And Ramsay!” She had to stop again. “What an idiot, what a fuck-up! Don’t you think, don’t you ever think? Any of you people?”

  At this point, I was no longer listening. All I felt, beyond the relief of finally getting it out in the open, was anger. Anger at Judy, yes, but even more at Linda, because if Judy hadn’t found out from Richard, then it had to have been either Linda or Vodge who’d gone behind my back, and I was as sure of Vodge as I was of myself, wasn’t I?

  Next morning, at breakfast meeting, Diane took up the banana and announced, “People, we have a problem here,” then slid it across the table to me. “E., maybe you want to tell us about it?”

  This was the moment I’d dreaded most—having to explain myself to my crewmates and let them know that we were no longer unified as a team, that I’d let them down and the mission too. Despite what Judy had said, her insistence on maintaining closure was just a bluff, a way of pressuring me to undergo the procedure she would pressure Richard to perform, and what she was really saying was that if I didn’t comply she and G.C. would have no recourse but to throw open the airlock and fatally compromise the mission. Which put it all on me. Not Vodge (who was sitting right beside me, slumped down in his chair, holding his head in his hands) or the life force or even the conditions under which E2 mold
ed the way we lived. I remember looking round at the expectant faces of my crewmates, counting off the ones who didn’t yet know—Gyro, Stevie, T.T. and Gretchen—and wondering just how to frame what I was going to say. I felt choked up. The moment hung there, huge and inflated, all eyes on me, and I didn’t think I could go through with it till Vodge sat back up, threw a glance round the table and took hold of my hand right there in front of everybody.

  “I’m pregnant,” I blurted. “Three and a half months. Or four, closer to four. I’m sorry. It’s the last thing I—” I had to stop to compose myself. I was sweating. My heart rate must have been off the charts. No one moved. They just sat there in shocked silence, Gyro hardening his jaw, Gretchen searing me with an incendiary look, Stevie and T.T. very nearly smirking, as if they’d expected nothing less, as if I was dirt, not to be trusted, and they’d known all along it would come to this. Or something like it. Which was absurd. And wrong. And showed me just how tenuous and artificial our relationship had been, which I think hurt me more than anything. “It’s Vodge,” I went on, “but you all know that. We’re in love. And we never in our wildest dreams—or nightmares, because that’s what this is—ever imagined anything like this.” I was giving a speech, nervous, rattled, the words pouring out of me like I’d lost control, and I would have gone on, would have tried to explain, but Gyro cut me off, though I still had possession of the banana.

  “So what does that mean?”

  “I don’t know.” My voice shrank down to nothing. I tried to hold myself perfectly still but I was trembling and there was nothing I could do about it. “I really . . . I don’t know.”

  “You’re not telling us you’re going to keep it?” He shot a look to Richard and now so did everybody else.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Stevie put in, and she had hold of Troy’s hand now, as if to make her own statement about who was in love with whom and just what it meant. “You’re four months’ gone and you wait till now to tell us about it? What did you think, it was just going to go away? Aren’t we supposed to be a team here?” Then, to Richard: “Well, what about you—how long have you known?”

  The seating arrangement that morning had Diane at the head of the table with me at the far end, Vodge, Gyro and Gretchen to my left, T.T., Stevie and Richard to my right. Overhead, the ceiling was canopied to give us shade, but an intense coruscating light streamed in from the orchard beyond, making the dust motes visible in the air. We could hear the technosphere breathing for us and circulating our vital fluids, while the usual sounds of the biomes chirped and honked and croaked in the near distance. I realized that in my distraction I was holding on to the banana and I slid it across the table to Richard, because that was the right thing to do—we had to maintain protocol, now more than ever. I dropped my eyes. Took a deep breath.

  Richard picked up the banana and gave it a long look, as if he’d never seen anything like it, then answered Stevie with a shrug.

  “Go ahead, Richard,” Diane said, though she was out of turn herself. “I’d really like to hear this.”

  Richard’s gaze went to me. His eyes were soft, calm, leached of color in the morning light. “Dawn?” he asked, lifting his eyebrows.

  “Yes,” I said, giving him permission. There was nothing to hide, not anymore.

  He set the banana down on the tabletop before him, gave it an idle twirl so that it spun like a pointer in a child’s game—and who did it point to, whether by accident or design? Vodge. “To answer your question, I guess I’d have to say something like four, five weeks now. As her physician,” he added.

  “But why?” Diane demanded, beyond protocol at this point. “Why didn’t you tell us—tell me, your team captain? Did you think nobody would notice?” She leveled a furious look on all of us, as if we were all equally to blame, but no one more than Richard. “You’re our medical officer, and you never thought to do anything about it? Were you going to just let her, what, get big as a house?”

  “Do what?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “That’s not my decision.”

  “Then whose is it?”

  “You want to take a vote? Christ, I didn’t sign on for this. And I am definitely not, let me emphasize, an obstetrician. Or a back-room abortionist either.”

  “We are not breaking closure,” Diane insisted, her voice cracking. This was hard for her, for all of us, and her insistence, just like Judy’s, rang hollow. “We all agreed to that right from the outset. We’re different from the Mission One crew, didn’t we say that? Didn’t we?”

  Gretchen’s hand shot up, as if we were in a classroom. “This isn’t like a severed finger, it’s totally different—that was an infection, that was life and death—”

  “That’s exactly what this is,” Stevie snapped, staring right into me. “Life and death. That’s what we’re talking about here, isn’t it?”

  I could feel Vodge beside me, tensing in his seat. He’d thought all this out beforehand—we both had, up past midnight the night before and sorting through all the possibilities over and over—and he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He made a sudden lunge for the banana and brandished it like a fetish. “Yes, we said that. Of course we did. And nothing has changed.”

  “Are you out of your fucking mind? She’s pregnant for Christ’s sake!” Gyro came up out of his chair, as angry as I’d ever seen him, and that anger was all about me—he’d made his declaration, the bag of M&M’s in hand, and I’d rejected it. He was all angles in that swelling light, thin, towering, ungainly, and I remembered we’d very nearly nicknamed him “Stork” before settling on “Gyro.” By one vote. Mine.

  Vodge, the banana in his left hand, his right entwined in mine, not budging an inch: “Christ had nothing to do with it. He came way after.”

  “What the fuck are you saying? After what?”

  A smile for the table. “Adam,” Vodge said, and then he gave up the banana.

  Everything was so strange in that period I can barely keep things straight even now. I thought I’d known what to expect, thought everything was on course, and suddenly it wasn’t. Take Johnny (and this was among the stranger things because I’d thought that was over for good). One evening, out of the blue, he showed up at the visitors’ window. This would have been before my secret was out, but how much before, I can’t say. A week? A month? I don’t know. I was in my room, I remember that much. I was alone, feeling cored out, angry, afraid of everything and everybody, Vodge acting like a shit and Richard’s news pinning me to the bed like a new form of gravity. Maybe I was crying. I probably was. I cried a lot then, though I hid that from everybody too. There would have been a knock at the door. Gyro. “E., there’s somebody here for you.”

  Despite myself, I felt a quick sharp flare of interest. “Who?”

  Gyro’s face would have hung there, fighting for a neutral expression when he wasn’t neutral at all. “That guy you used to go with—Johnny?”

  It was siesta time, early afternoon, the world ablaze outside the glass, and there he was, Johnny, without his leather jacket for once, trying to squeeze himself into the narrowing strip of shade cast by the side of the building. He was wearing his jeans and boots—no sandals or running shoes for him—and a black T-shirt featuring the logo of a band I’d never heard of. But then I hadn’t heard of much lately—they could have been the newest thing, number one on the charts, and I wouldn’t have known the difference. As soon as I picked up the phone, he winked and unfurled a mock bow. “How’s it, babe?” he rumbled, receiver to ear, one hand propping himself up against the glass. “You’re looking”—he hesitated—“good, real good. Considering.”

  “Considering what?” I was glad to see him, more than glad: he took me right out of myself. He’d always had that way about him, that insouciance, the ability to change my mood just by walking through the door, and though it was a pose I fell for it all over again.

  “Oh, I don’t know—the fact that you look like a survi
vor of something. That and your skin color. Which is just about midway between a peach and an orange. You working on that in there, in lieu of a tan, I mean?”

  “I was just saying, the first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here is go lay out in the sun—”

  “Careful what you wish for—radio said it was a hundred and eight. You’d fry up like a chicharrón out here. All in all? I wouldn’t advise it—not till ten minutes before sunset anyway. Or dawn. When you get out of there, let’s go do it at dawn, like that time we stayed up all night and went down to the river, remember that?”

  I remembered it. We’d stayed up smoking pot and drinking beer, then took a swim and made love on a towel with the sun just grazing the peaks of the mountains. The memory—the picture it gave me, outdoors, freedom, a river that didn’t need pumps to keep it flowing—filled me with longing. There was nothing I’d rather do—if I wasn’t in here. If I wasn’t with Vodge. If I wasn’t pregnant.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”

  Neither of us said anything for a moment, then he pushed back from the glass, rearranged himself so that his right shoulder was propping him up and he had to turn his head to look into my eyes. “You’re with Ramsay now,” he said, a flat statement of fact, not a question, though it had the flavor of hope in it.

  I nodded. “Uh-huh. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  He would have shrugged, but his shoulder was pinned there against the glass, holding him. up. “No harm in asking, right?”