Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  Evgeni said he dreamed of expensive cars and being on whaling ships and that he once dreamed he was his own wife, and when he’d woken up the printer had already spit out psych meds.

  The dusky seaside sparrow trilled, and Nedda’s IV self-ejected, sealing the mark it left with skin glue. Her back was sore at the puncture, but her headache had dulled. She lay strapped in, watching fuzzy-edged pixel waves. The lack of gravity was winning. She’d have to tell Marcanta.

  She had to fix Amadeus before she couldn’t see it.

  Marcanta didn’t take the news about Nedda’s eyes well. She swore and kicked out at the wall, only to propel herself directly into another.

  “You bought us a lot of time, Louisa,” Nedda said.

  “Patronizing only makes it worse, Papas. We’re fucked.”

  “We’re getting close on Amadeus, I promise.”

  “Has Singh come up with any options that don’t involve one of us taking a massive dose of radiation?”

  Nedda said nothing.

  “See? Fucked.”

  “But we knew that starting out. None of us planned on dying of old age.” The first stab at colonization was a guaranteed death sentence, but a noble one.

  “Agreed.” There was a flatness to Marcanta’s voice that hadn’t been there before. “Here’s hoping I dream up something better, and that Singh doesn’t fry us all.”

  Nedda checked messages. Nothing from Mission Control. Nothing saying that her mother had gotten anything. Had the message been screened? The printer hummed and plinked five capsules into its tray. Vitamin. Beta blocker. Water pill. Iron. Birth control. The iron pill looked larger than normal. She smacked the printer, which knew more about her than she did.

  When she passed by central systems control, Evgeni grinned beneath pressure goggles—a sweaty, friendly toad.

  “Good dreams?” he asked, speaking over the computer as it chirped air composition statistics.

  “A long vacation in the Maldives, swimming in phosphorescence.” She should come up with a different dream to make it sound more real, but she hadn’t dreamed of anything but Easter in years.

  “Always beaches for you. You don’t like the snow?”

  “Not warm enough for me.” She exaggerated a shiver. “We’ll be plenty cold when we get there. I guess my brain doesn’t feel the need to rush it. After? Feel free to teach me sledding or skiing.”

  “There won’t be snow or enough water to do much,” he said.

  The planet’s water was largely subterranean. The bots were constructing irrigation systems, reservoirs, piping, and receptacles for the water they’d make themselves, pulling from elements of the planet’s atmosphere. “And I doubt anyone programmed the terraformers to make you a sledding hill. Singh could mess with the codes, though.”

  “Who is to stop us when we get there? We will be our own society. Mountains, beaches, we will make whatever we want. Each our own country.” He spoke around a mouthful of protein bar; the berry-colored mush reddened his teeth, making him look cheerfully homicidal.

  “Neddaland is going to be a tropical island.” A tablet was Velcroed to his console, on it a schematic blown up almost beyond recognition. Amadeus. “What’s the latest plan?”

  “Jettison the water we’re using to cool Amadeus so we have direct access, then we use Chawla’s cargo arm. We can use the claw to put pressure on the outside of Amadeus, forcing the rod back into its original position and stopping the power spike.”

  That would leave them without water to use for a forced-steam-landing cushion. “Just jettison it?”

  “It’s already radioactive.”

  “Sure, but the winds on planet will disperse it. You’re suggesting hitting planet on our asses without padding.”

  “I am suggesting we try to land without a dead crew.”

  “So we squeeze Amadeus until the rod pops back in place? Brute force. Was it your idea or Singh’s?”

  “Mine.”

  Something struck her as wrong about it, not just flushing the water. “And you want to do this every time the power spikes? Because Chawla’s not meant to travel with her cargo arm hanging out. Do we know if the cargo arm can handle that kind of force? Not the weight—the crushing.”

  “It is Russian.”

  “No offense meant. But there’s got to be a way to do this where we don’t end up landing without putting our feet out first.”

  “I can do this, Nedda. I can fix this.”

  She was supposed to comfort him, but couldn’t. Ego demanded more space and time than Chawla had. “Then fix it.”

  Singh’s sister got married. The waking crew watched a video of what looked like an entire town dancing. The groom rode a white horse. Afterward, Singh spent the rest of the day in the control cabin, door closed. Nedda used scissors and a box of nitrile gloves to make a large purple carnation for him, then left it in his toiletry kit.

  She was harvesting tomato seeds when he found her.

  “Did you do this?” His beard obscured his mouth, making his expression difficult to read.

  “My mom taught me how to make them with crepe paper.” The flower’s pointy rubber petals stuck out like an explosion.

  “Isn’t your mother a chemist?”

  “Yes. And she makes the best crepe paper flowers and perfect cakes too. They’re not mutually exclusive. Anyway, we don’t have crepe paper, so I improvised.”

  “Why?”

  “I saw all the flowers. Roses and carnations aren’t exactly critical plants, but I miss them. Don’t you?”

  “I do.” Singh pulled himself forward, floating on his stomach in the hatch between Hydro and the main corridor. He crumpled the bloom in his palm then released it. The petals straightened, hovering inches from his nose.

  She started the centrifuge on her sweet potato samples. Later, she would look for subtle changes in their genetics. “Are you okay, Amit?”

  “Evgeni’s idea is shit. Amadeus puts out a barrier like a force field. The arm can’t crush the barrier. It’s even pushing the water away. All that cooling I thought we were getting? It’s not happening. The force field is keeping the water from reaching the drive.”

  “Have you told him it’s a bad idea?”

  “I’m coddling him.”

  “Don’t. He doesn’t need that.” None of them did.

  Singh rolled the ends of the glove flower between his fingers. “It’s just you and your mother, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You’d like her, I think. We’re a lot alike. I’ve been trying to set up a call with her. They analyze our emails, don’t they?”

  “Mission Control? Yes. Have you had any extra psych sessions scheduled? Dr. Stein likes to check in if you want more calls than usual.” He shrugged. “Who knows? Sunspots interfere with the message system. Storms. I’ve stopped trying to keep up on things like that, it’s pointless. Try sending your request again.”

  “It worries me. I always assume the worst.”

  “That’s natural. We’ve lost people,” he said.

  “There was so much upheaval, all the constant goodbyes—to everything. Maybe it’s not even worry, maybe it’s grieving? Does that make sense?”

  “Sure. I had lots of goodbyes. My stepfather is Irish and a shameless history buff,” he said, as though that clarified everything.

  “You lost me.”

  “He said that during the famines when someone left to go to Canada or America, you threw them a going-away party, but it was also a kind of funeral, because you’d never see them again. That person might as well be dead. My party was supposed to be like that. I think I was drunk for a week.”

  “Did you want that?”

  “Of course not,” he said. “I kick myself sometimes and wish I hadn’t drunk anything at all. Most of what I remember is just a few flashes of my friends, and most of that is spinning. Sometimes I hate all this and wish I’d gotten married instead. But those are the bad days. We can’t have bad days, can we?”

  “No, the printer m
akes sure of it.”

  He smiled. A dark, soft cloud of beard and man. “Watched. We’re always watched.”

  “I lost my dad,” she said. Lost, as though her father was misplaced, or he’d taken a wrong turn and wandered off. The enormity of it had never fit into speech—how much she missed him, what she’d had to do. Something about the flowers at the wedding, that Singh was aching for his family, had made her say it. Loss was loneliness’s best companion.

  Amit rolled over, gazing up at the ceiling. It was strange how many conversations they had without seeing each other’s eyes, because of location, lack of gravity. “My father died when I was very young, and it troubled me for years. It still does, from time to time. Was it the anomaly? Forgive me, I don’t remember the specifics.”

  She longed for so loose a grip on memory. She missed the word boluses of childhood and wished she could unwind the painful thread without pausing for breath. She settled for short. “He didn’t make it out with us.”

  Whirring from the centrifuge filled the silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  “I didn’t intend to be maudlin. I didn’t think the video would bring up such— Well, I put some new numbers in from Amadeus. I’ve almost got the pattern, I think. Would you look at them? I’m not sure I trust myself.”

  “Sure.”

  “Thank you for the flower, Nedda. Try your mother again. It’s bureaucracy or sunspots. They’re essentially the same.”

  Nedda reviewed Singh’s data by the common area window. The ship lights were dimmed to preserve what circadian rhythms they had left, and the glow from her screen tired her eyes quickly. She switched back to the schematic. Glass, Amadeus had so much glass.

  She closed her eyes and listened to a newscast. How many days old was it? There was a partial collapse at the Eiffel Tower, which overshadowed the North American grain shortage and a resurgence of Pan-Euro flu. The reality was likely worse. Briefings they received were highly filtered, only including major events to keep them tied to a sense of Earth. When Evgeni woke, Singh would update him, and let him know his cargo arm plan had been vetoed. Days were ruled by sleep timers, data on the builds, and sketching out ways to repair Amadeus.

  Marcanta came up behind her. “Honest truth time. I just did Genya’s tap, but I think it’s too late.”

  It wasn’t fair.

  “Gravity should fix some of it, won’t it?”

  Marcanta hummed, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. She’d called him Genya again, not Evgeni. Marcanta had definitely slept with him. Singh showed no interest in Marcanta’s advances and kept mostly to himself. But Evgeni and Marcanta needed touch. Singh and Nedda did not. Two extroverts to balance two introverts. The contact, the care, likely made watching Evgeni’s progression more painful. “He’s no good on any of the mechanical aspects now, and he’ll be useless on the ground for at least a month. If we get there. If he can get any sight back.”

  “We know how to cover for him,” Nedda said. “You’ll do some of my seed work, I’ll help you make sure we don’t drop dead, Amit works as Evgeni’s backup, and we all work logistics with Amit as lead. We’ll manage.”

  “You’ve run three-man scenarios.”

  Nedda turned off her screen. “It would be stupid not to. Besides, it’s weirdly calming.”

  “You’ve run one where you’re the missing man, haven’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You want to be the one to look at Amadeus,” Marcanta said.

  “It’ll be better if I do. If Singh got radiation sickness, his whining would drive you crazy. At least I’m a good patient.”

  Marcanta squeezed her shoulder and Nedda tried to lean into it, to give Marcanta what she needed. “How are your eyes doing with contacts? Is the printer keeping up?”

  “Fuzzy at the edges. Not terrible, but not what I used to see either.”

  “I want you to spend more time in the goggles. At night, and at least every other day when you’re not in sleep cycle. In sleep cycle, they’re on. That’s it. If you’re going to fix it, you need eyes. I’ll think of something else.”

  “It’s not just the CSF that’s doing it, is it?”

  “No. It’s the vitreous fluid in the eye too. It’s flattening your lenses. The pressure is wrong,” Marcanta said.

  “Ever see that old movie Scanners?” At Marcanta’s blank look, Nedda said, “Never mind.” In that moment, she missed Denny ferociously.

  “Evgeni’s interested in you, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. It doesn’t bother me, if you’re wondering.”

  “But you’ve slept with him?”

  “Sure, but I’m not territorial. It isn’t healthy in our situation. Comfort is as important as everything else we’re trying to do, maybe more so.” She pulled on the ends of her hair. “He’s nice. The sex is weird, not at all like in gravity. But what is? He’s considerate.” The clips on Marcanta’s suit clicked against the door.

  “I can’t right now,” Nedda said.

  “If not now, when? Sex is the one thing we don’t have to be serious about.”

  Serious. A thing that as a child she’d known that she was not supposed to be. She was supposed to be smiling, laughing, outgoing but also meek, a supporter of other people, a reader of fluffy things and a baker of sweet things, smart, but not too smart—enough to be witty, enough to be charming. “But I am serious. I like being serious.”

  “I meant that it’s healthy to have a few distractions. You’re very focused. That’s all. I don’t mean it in a bad way.”

  “I guess. But this is all I ever wanted from the time I was a kid. How old were you when you knew you wanted to be an astronaut?”

  “It’s different for me. I always wanted to be a doctor. Space didn’t come until later, probably after the droughts and the wheat blight.” When colonization became a must.

  “I wanted to be an astronaut more than I wanted to live. And there were less than a handful of women then, out of the entire United States. I watched one of them die.” She let her body relax, closing her eyes against the window’s light. “There are only two of us. We need to keep us alive.”

  “I’m only saying it wouldn’t hurt anyone if you took a little comfort.”

  “I know,” she said. Nedda tapped her fingers against the window glass. Thick, it had a satisfying thump, and the same feel Pyrex used to. Like the rocket windows she’d once dreamed of.

  “Okay.” In a softer voice Marcanta added, “You know, Dr. Stein told me to stop looking out the window all the time. It makes you homesick.”

  “Doesn’t apply to me.” She didn’t miss her house or bed, the grove, or the way the dark came alive with animals. She missed her mother and she was homesick for 1985.

  Evgeni stopped wearing the goggles. He navigated Chawla by feel and innate spatial awareness. He’d been at home in the swimming pools they’d trained for zero g in. Singh had called him Beluga. Nedda imagined Evgeni using sonar, his little clicks bouncing off Chawla’s walls.

  On morning call, he’d looked directly at the video screen and ran through his interpretation of the information from the terraformers and rovers.

  “The photovoltaic system on Dué is no longer producing to spec, due to a crack from debris. Un can repair it, I believe, without sacrificing much schedule time. It is preferable to have them both fully functional. Trio and Tessera maintain. Fiver can compensate, if deemed necessary.”

  “Mr. Sokolov, your medical data shows your eyesight has worsened significantly. Why aren’t you wearing your goggles?” This from Landon Chauncey, a public affairs officer, who had no business commenting on anyone’s health.

  “The strap was itching.” Evgeni’s voice was light, even cheerful. “Additionally, we discovered that the plutonium in the life support system is not, in fact, plutonium, but strontium. Would Mission Control inform us how to proceed? Or why such a decision was made?”

  Then followed a good ten
minutes of Chauncey and Evgeni yelling across the time delay, dancing around something no one could answer. Chauncey insisted there was no switch, that strontium had always been the intended isotope. Evgeni brought up the North Americans campaigning for control of Fortitude.

  “You are lying. All the data says you are. You will blame this mistake on Eurasia to bargain for more colonist slots. You are trying to buy your lives at the cost of ours.” Evgeni then switched to Russian and a vein popped out on Chauncey’s forehead. Evgeni’s fist pounded the wall. “You broke our life support.”

  Yours and ours. North America and Eurasia, or Earth and Chawla? Nedda and her crewmates were extraterrestrial. As time went on and colonies formed, different cultures would arise, different worlds, and ties to Earth would be broken by distance. If they survived.

  Chauncey spoke over Evgeni, “Mission Control is unaware of—”

  “I put in a request to speak with my mother,” Nedda shouted.

  “What was that?” Chauncey’s eyes snapped in her direction.

  “My mother. I’ve been emailing through the request system, and I’ve had no response. I need to speak with her. Why hasn’t there been any response?”

  “Unless there’s data in your message, the system sorts it into general request files. There’ve been staff overhauls, interference with Mars. Any number of things can result in a backlog.”

  Staff overhauls could be responsible for a change in isotopes, for failing to consider friction. They might be killed by staff overhauls. “Well, can you put it through? I have to talk to my mother.”

  Chauncey coughed. “I will. But in the future, please send any urgent personal requests to Dr. Stein.”

  Singh shifted the conversation to weather patterns and a sandstorm on planet that had shifted unexpectedly, indicating a nuance to the seasons initial probes had missed.

  Evgeni nudged their legs with his feet. They were on their own.

  They were splitting one of the few pouches of soju over dinner when Singh said, “Why would you do that, Evgeni?”

  “What? If they want to bother me about my eyes, I am within bounds to ask them about a mistake that will kill four people.”

  “You shouldn’t taunt them. They control our information flow.”