by Erika Swyler
“Our TV’s busted and I kind of want to see them again.”
“Weird. Our TV is broken too.”
“Yeah, and a bunch of our lights won’t go on. Pop said NASA must have fried some stuff.”
“Maybe.” Nedda pulled out her Tupperware of mission patches and spread them out across the rug. Mercury 6’s stitched Earth butted up against Gemini 5’s Conestoga wagon. Then the Apollos. They traced their fingers over names, through Skylab, Apollo-Suyoz, and the shuttles. Then there were no more patches, just drawings. She touched the apple on 51-L. The stupid apple.
“Do you think it hurt? I bet it was too fast,” he said.
It was stupid that anything could explode that quickly. Stupid that a whole ship and everyone inside it could be gone. Boom. “Yeah, it was too fast to hurt.”
“Good.” He held a patch up to the light. Mercury 6, John Glenn.
The warped board on the second stair creaked. They waited for Betheen to pass, but at the top of the stairs, she slowed.
Nedda shoved him toward the bed. “Hide.”
Denny scuttled under and pulled the bedskirt down. Nedda dangled her legs over the mattress.
When Betheen opened the door, there was something tucked under her arm, hidden in shadow. “Nedda, I did the wash this morning. There are fresh towels in the linen closet, sheets too. It’s time to change them out.”
“Yes, Mom.”
Betheen stayed half in, half out of the room.
They’d never been caught. Her father didn’t go to bed until the middle of the night, long after Denny was gone. Sometimes she would go down to his office and ask what he was working on and he’d tell her about molecules gliding against one another like dancers, how some dances were close like a waltz, and some were far apart like square dancing.
“All right,” Betheen said. She took the package from under her arm and tossed it to Nedda.
Cold burned her fingers. Frozen peas.
“Put it on his eye. It’s good for bruises,” she said. “Keep it down and don’t stay up too late. And don’t leave your patches out. You’ll lose them. Tomorrow we’ll try the champagne water cake, okay?”
Betheen closed the door behind her.
Denny’s breath was hot by her heels. “Are we in trouble?”
“No, just put these on your eye.” She dropped the bag on the floor and went to grab an armful of sheets and a blanket.
“Bossy,” he said, without any bite to it.
She should be in trouble, but Betheen had seemed almost nice. She was weird today. Maybe watching the shuttle had been bad for her too. Nedda gave Denny her second pillow; one always wound up kicked to the floor along with her socks anyway.
“It feels like my eyeball’s freezing out of my skull.” Denny kept the peas on it.
“Your eye is jelly inside, so it kind of is.”
“Cool.”
“You can take the bed if you want,” she said. “I don’t mind the floor. It’s better for seeing the ceiling stars.”
“Nah. The floor’s fine. Wake me up early though, okay? Pop gets pissed if we don’t have family breakfast.”
“Okay.” Desmond Prater had hands as big as baseball mitts and just as tough from years of grove work. The bruise was big enough. “I think they’re going to cancel shuttles for a while,” she said. “They did after Apollo 1.”
“That’s lame,” Denny said. He tossed the peas at Nedda’s arm. “I bet it won’t be too long, though. You can’t have a space center without space shuttles.”
“Right.”
“That’s the good thing about the grove. It just grows, and people always need oranges.”
It was true. Other groves on this part of the Indian River had been bought out by the government when the military and NASA moved in. Prater was the final holdout, surviving three killing frosts and a space boom. Denny was a Prater, leaving no question as to what he’d do. He was lucky that he liked the grove. There was something happy about the way it made your sweat smell like grapefruits.
They poked through the Freddy Krueger issue of Fangoria. With glue, paint, and spirit gum she could make the same skin effect, and it would be better than the rubber masks from a store, and next Halloween she and Denny could go as Freddy. This year all the girls in Easter went as cats, cheerleaders, or princesses, and Tricia Villaverde had been a fairy with wings her mother made from plastic wrap. Freddy was better.
“Two Freddys is weird,” Denny said.
“So you be Jason.” If it was her glue they were going to use, her paint, Nedda figured she could dress however she wanted.
“Jason’s dumb.”
“Well, it’s my glue.”
“It’s my magazine,” he said.
Nedda grinned and whacked his arm with it. “Not while I have it, it’s not.”
Denny leaned back against the bed. “So what’s your dad’s machine do? What’s it like?”
“It’s supposed to speed up or slow down entropy—time, I guess.”
He made a noise at the word entropy.
“I’ll show you. Grab me E.” The bookcase by her desk was filled with the bright red spines of the encyclopedia Betheen had bought two years earlier. She’d begun to read it when she couldn’t sleep, and found that she didn’t want to stop. She’d worked backward from Z and planned on finishing by the end of the school year.
Denny shoved the volume at Nedda. “You read,” he said. “My eye hurts.”
And it was easier for her. She sat beside him, book propped on her knees.
The encyclopedia had a version of what her father said, but she had to pause to figure out what to skip and what to explain. She grabbed her notebook and jotted down thermodynamics, just in case. At the bottom of the entry was a cross-reference. See also: Time, Arrow of. She grabbed T.
“It’s nice your mom got you an encyclopedia.”
“She only got it because I didn’t want an Easy-Bake.”
“Yeah, but you can get those at the mall. You’ve got to order an encyclopedia special. I bet it costs more too.”
“I guess.”
“It’s nice she’s letting me stay,” he said.
I’m letting you stay, Nedda thought. She could make him leave. She would never, but she could. She flipped through the volume. It had cost more than an Easy-Bake Oven. The encyclopedia had been too much, an embarrassing present that had the feel of an apology. You were supposed to like your mother. She liked Mrs. Prater. Betheen was just different. She was like a sugar flower, crisp and sweet, but not in a good way.
Her eye landed on a line.
As time progresses, the amount of disorder in a closed system increases, creating imbalance. Study of the imbalance and disorder in a system can be used to distinguish between past and present within that system.
Nedda sucked the end of her braid. Her father had said you’d be unable to tell between past and present in a perfect system.
“Got something?”
“Maybe,” she said. “What would you do if you could stop time?”
“That’s easy. Go to the fireworks store in Renlo and clean them out without getting caught. By the time anybody figured out it was us, we could have set them all off in the Mauna Kea.”
“It’d be cooler if we set them off in the tiki head.”
“Yeah, like it was breathing fire. Maybe it’d scare out the rest of the monkeys and they’d start ripping faces off.”
“I don’t think they do that. That little guy is way too small.”
“I guess,” Denny said. “But it would be cool if you could rewind time. Anytime you broke something you’d just rewind and it’d be back together again. You could take all sorts of stuff back and nobody would ever know but you, right? Challenger could be back together and everybody would be alive again.”
What if everything was pieced back together wrong, and people mixed with machine—a twisted mess of flesh, ceramic, and metal? “I don’t think it works that way,” she said.
“Why not? It
could.”
“It just doesn’t.” If you rewound and fast-forwarded a cassette enough the tape got thin or crinkled. A tight hurting spot like a star stuck in her throat, and she wished that Denny hadn’t come over at all. Which made her feel bad.
“My eye hurts. I’m gonna close it for a while.” He pulled his blanket up over his shoulders, nesting on the floor. “Can you pull your window shade down? It’s really bright out.”
It was bright. More sunset than full night, and the wrong color for January. She shivered and yanked down the shade. Cold came from everywhere; the roof, the windows, even leaking up through the floor, though cold wasn’t supposed to work that way. Winter wasn’t supposed to be like that here either. You weren’t supposed to want to sleep in a sweater, and it was rarely necessary to turn the heat on, but all month, everywhere had smelled like burning dust on radiators.
“My dad says you could use the machine to power deep space probes and stuff, but I’m pretty sure he wants to use it on his hands. He wants to make them better, or at least keep them from getting worse.”
“That’s cool,” Denny said. He’d never been frightened by her father’s hands, or the plaques when they were bad. He pressed the good side of his face into the pillow. “If the monkey isn’t dead, you can have it. I’ll give you the parrot cage.”
“Thanks.” She slipped the encyclopedias back into their slots.
Some nights she stared at the sagging edge of her sticker moon and wished on it—for bunk beds, for a brother she could share a room with. Maybe wishing on a sticker moon meant your best friend wound up on your floor with a black eye. Maybe it was like losing count before the two-minute mark.
She stared up and tried to pretend her ceiling stars were real, but she kept thinking of a cassette tape, pausing, rewinding, fast-forwarding, the tape stretching and thinning until it broke.
Aboard Chawla
Evgeni used the magnetic straps to lock himself to Nedda’s cabin wall, which gave him the odd appearance of sitting. The text on his reader was enlarged to the point where people on the ISS could probably read it.
“There is no excuse for the power spikes,” he said. “This isn’t new technology. An issue like this should have been fixed in prototype decades ago.”
“Shoddy craftsmanship, cost cutting. We shouldn’t even be on Chawla, we should be on a ship that has gravity and can take its sweet time getting there. Things change when you’re rushed. Things go wrong,” Nedda said. A ship with gravity would have helped their bodies hold up. Would have given them more years to establish crops on board. But the colony mission had a timeline: boots on planet by the end of the decade. Droughts, wildfires, and Manila sinking had served only to increase that pressure. Climate change had at last caught and surpassed the rate of technological advances.
“There. Tell me what that says.” Evgeni tapped at a word.
“ ‘Strontium.’ ”
He said something foul in Russian and smacked his leg. The force popped one strap free from the wall, leaving him struggling like an upended turtle. “It is supposed to be plutonium.”
Strontium was cheaper, easily available, but not what Amadeus was calibrated to work with. The radiation output, the heat, would be different. “Do we know how much we’re running on?”
“Going by mass, a similar amount. It shouldn’t have made a difference in getting there.”
“But it will once we’re on ground.” When Chawla would be their home, when the life support systems would be most crucial, when they were building their first colony structures.
“Exactly.”
“So what do the power spikes mean?”
“Possibly nothing, possibly that our life support system will shut down in deep space. One or the other.”
“Shit.” She rubbed her eyes, though it made nothing clearer. It bore the hallmark of a classic American “efficiency” scam, but a strontium swap had a certain Eastern European feel to it. “So was it your government or mine?”
“That doesn’t factor now. We don’t belong to either of them anymore. We’re a government of four people, which makes us effective. This is a mechanical problem. We. Can. Fix. Things.” He jabbed her shoulder.
“I’ll run numbers with Amit and see if we can figure out a model.”
Marcanta stuck her head in. “Hey, Papas. Just double-checking. Anything special I should know about Hydro while you’re out?”
“It’s all in the lab books,” she said. “But maybe keep an eye on the oat grass. I tweaked the nitrogen levels two weeks ago.” Grasses and grains required land, tolerant soil. Oat grass was a hope crop. Wishful botany.
“You, Vodka Veins, out of here. Time to put the old lady to sleep,” Marcanta said.
“You tease because you can’t live without me,” Evgeni said as he pulled himself into the corridor.
“Only because you keep the ventilation system going.”
Nedda strapped into the sleep sack and inflated the inside. “You don’t have to tuck me in, you know. But thanks.”
“I know. I just wouldn’t want him talking my ear off about failing life support systems right before I went to sleep. Singh will crunch numbers, Evgeni will work the logistics of a fix, and I’ll make sure we don’t die from our own mutated bacteria in the meantime. Oh. And fix our eyes. Easy as pie. Nothing to worry about.”
“Your bedside manner is amazing.”
“I know; I’m a born healer. Keep your legs straight. We don’t want your veins cramping up. There you go.”
The sleep sack moved body fluids from the extremities back to the center. At first the pressure was like crawling ants, but gradually the rhythmic pulsing had become as necessary to sleep as darkness. Sadly, it did little for sight. Evgeni’s vision loss was ahead of the curve, but Nedda had noticed a significant softening in her own world. The pressure suits, contacts, goggles, and sleep sacks were supposed to help, but the progressive astigmatism continued.
“When I’m up again, test my eyes, okay?”
“Sure thing.”
Sleep weeks were to slow vision loss and ease the passage of time, making a five-year trip feel like half that. Crew morale was supposed to benefit from them; less time awake with your crewmates meant less time to learn to dislike them, and less time to look out into the blackness of space, dissociating, dislocating.
“Feel like getting knocked out to anything special?”
Marcanta was good at little mothering touches, the sort of thing Nedda could never get a proper grasp on. “Yeah, actually. Do you think anyone can dig up the Beach Boys?” They were far too old for Marcanta’s music stash, far too old even for Nedda, but she wanted them nonetheless.
“I doubt I have it, but I bet I know who does. Evgeni loves weird stuff. I’ll be back.”
Weird stuff. Marcanta’s insult didn’t wound, perhaps because she smiled and seemed to mean it. Perhaps because she smiled with her teeth.
Marcanta returned a few minutes later and snapped a small black chip into the screen in Nedda’s cabin. “You’re good to go. Need anything else?”
“You’re being too nice to me. Do you need something?”
“You’re my backup; I should be nice to you, right? Also, I’m probably going to kill the oat grass.”
“It’s not that.”
“I get how you feel about the sleeping. The control thing. I thought I’d make it easier.”
“Thanks. Would you mind porting me in? I always bruise myself.”
“You do me next time. You need to learn anyway.” Somehow Marcanta’s hands hadn’t dried out. Her fingers were delicate, light, and Nedda barely felt it when her arm was hooked into the forced IV drip. “Sweet dreams.”
“Good night, Louisa.” Nedda closed her eyes. “Play Pet Sounds.”
After an instant of shuffling, the familiar harmony started, humming through each chamber of her heart. Wouldn’t it be nice?
NASA was aware that she’d prefer not to sleep. She told Dr. Stein that she’d already missed
enough time; any more was terrifying. Dr. Stein suggested that knowing a time lapse was coming might lessen the fear.
“I’m missing more of my life,” Nedda had told her. There was no way to explain what that loss was, the ache of it, or the anger when someone said they understood, someone who couldn’t begin to know. Dr. Stein frustrated her; her voice, her smooth features, that her age was hard to pin down—all of these things made Nedda hate her.
Dr. Stein had said, “Are you missing it or is your life simply not as linear as you expected?”
“Why do you ask questions that answer themselves?”
“Because you refuse to ask them.”
“You’re paid a lot of money to pick us apart.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’ll have to do the sleep cycles, won’t I?”
“Yes.”
She slept when scheduled, but refused to pretend she enjoyed it, that it was helpful, or that it did anything to affect crew relationships or anxiety. Science required her to submit to sleep weeks. She was a sample in a study and conditions must be the same across the study; others slept, so she had to sleep.
A low-dose paralytic. A hypnotic. A tranquilizer. Liquid nutrition.
The speakers in Nedda’s cabin hummed with the Beach Boys, while the tranquilizer gently eased her terror of losing time. Time was the reason behind everything, another subject she could not mention to Dr. Stein. Then the hypnotic mixed with the paralytic, leaving her floating, disembodied, and lost.
She dreamed and rebuilt the town she missed, the places she remembered, and what happened in between. As a child, she’d twisted embroidery floss around toothpicks, making something called a God’s Eye. The winding was to keep children quiet and calm. Forced dreams wound like that thread.
From above, she looked on a miniature town consumed by kudzu. Matchstick roads leading to Easter from Mims, from Titusville, vanished into forest. It left her uneasy. She neared the ground, traveling over whispers, bumping against the soundwaves of a trucker telling a friend he’d called into the McIntyre shop in Easter for a tow, but no one answered; voices from inland about dropped orders; from Gainesville about how no one had heard from Great-Aunt Ginny in a while.
