The Fated Sky

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  And then he laughed maniacally. “Bwahahahaaha! Ha haaaaa! Ha!”

  While I doubled over, trying to keep my laughter inaudible, Terrazas floated smoothly to the microphone. “Tune in next time for more thrilling adventures of Flash Gordon!”

  Florence reached up and switched off the mic. “We’re out.”

  My laughter bounced around the comm module, carrying me with it like the “Laughing Gas” chapter in Mary Poppins. Wiping my eyes, I drifted over to kiss Rafael on top of his head. “You are going to be the death of me.”

  His ears went red. “I wasn’t menacing?” But he grinned and winked.

  “I was terrified for my life.” I wiped my tears away on my sleeve before they could spin out into the room. “See, I’m weeping.”

  The intership radio crackled. “Thanks, gang. That was swell.” It took me a moment to recognize the rasping voice as Ruby. “We all loved it.”

  Florence picked up the mic. “How are you all doing over there?”

  “Oh, we’re fine. Don’t you worry about us.” Somewhere behind her, someone was making a retching sound. “Gotta run. Thanks, though. Means a lot that you’re thinking of us.”

  The line went quiet.

  Florence sighed and restowed the mic in its usual spot. “I’ve never heard such a bald-faced lie.”

  “Never?” Leonard raised an eyebrow. “Not even the time I complimented that pie-thing you made?”

  “You hush.” She gave him a shove that sent him spinning up to the roof of the comm module. “It was a Japanese fruit pie. My mama’s recipe.”

  “Is your mama Japanese?”

  “You hush.” She looked back at the speaker as if she could see through it to the Pinta. “I don’t mind saying that I’m worried about them.”

  “Kamilah says that they should be just about over the worst of it.” I mean, I was worried too, but there really wasn’t anything we could do. Medicating E. coli made it worse, apparently, so it had to run its course.

  Drumming her fingers on her console, Florence gnawed her lower lip. “It just seems as if—”

  The ship intercom came on and Parker drawled, “If the band of Merry Players have finished with their derring-do, perhaps they would deign to return to duties.”

  Florence picked up the mic. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m right at my station.”

  The rest of us floated out the door, heading up the spindle. Ahead of me, Terrazas asked Rafael, “Do you think Parker listened?”

  “Of course.” He nudged Terrazas gently with his shoulder. “You did good.”

  * * *

  At dinner that night, Parker walked in holding a piece of teletype paper in his hand. We were all still laughing and a little giddy from the show. Like a switch, the laughter stopped.

  There is a face that accompanies news of death. As astronauts—as survivors of the Meteor—as veterans of World War II—all of us had seen it too often not to know what was coming.

  What we didn’t know was who.

  I set down the stack of plates I was holding. The air in the room seemed to stop circulating, even though the only sound was the high whir of the fan.

  Parker looked down at the page. “Ruby Donaldson is dead. She had a seizure. Mission Control believes that it was hemolytic uremic syndrome caused by the E. coli.”

  “Damn it.” Kamilah sat down and rested her forehead on her fists. “We should have gone over there.”

  “There’s nothing—”

  “That is a fucking lie.” She slapped her hands on the table. “Ruby was dosing herself with anti-diarrhea meds so she could keep helping the rest of the crew. You do that and the Shiga toxins don’t get flushed. Don’t flush the toxins, and they start causing clotting. That seizure wasn’t a byproduct of E. coli, it was a byproduct of our decision. We chose this.”

  The silence in the room echoed with that truth. It raised a cold shiver down the length of my spine, along with memories of all the contingency scenarios where an astronaut might have to choose to let a colleague die, because to try to save them would doom both people. Had that really been the case here? Would we have been so at risk if we had gone over to help?

  Parker broke the silence with an audible inhalation. He crossed the room and crouched in front of Kamilah. “I’m sorry. And you’re right.” He rested a hand on her shoulder. “It was still the correct call when Mission Control made it.”

  “I’m going over there.”

  Still clutching that paper in his hand, Parker drew a long, slow breath. “I’ll back you on that.” He wet his lips and looked at me. “York. You’ve had nursing training, right?”

  “Just field medicine in the war. And what I picked up from my mother.” Which made her sound like a hedge witch or something. “She was a doctor.”

  Parker nodded and shifted his weight, looking at the floor. “Are you willing to pilot the BusyBee over?”

  Terrazas stepped forward. “I can do that.”

  “I know you can.” Parker looked up and pursed his lips. He sighed again, squeezing Kamilah’s shoulder as he stood. “But the fact of the matter is that York and I can get away with bucking Mission Control’s orders in ways that none of you can. If the Lady Astronaut takes Shamoun on a mission of mercy, they won’t ground her when we get back.”

  “Well … there’s got to be something I’m good for.” I shrugged. “It’ll make good publicity. They’ll love that.”

  Parker gave a twisted smile. “And stay suited. I don’t want any of that coming back here or infecting either of you.”

  EIGHTEEN

  ANNOUNCER: The American Broadcasting Company presents Headline Edition with Taylor Grant. November 28th, 1962.

  GRANT: Aboard the First Mars Expedition, tragedy has struck with the death of Lt. Ruby Donaldson of Grand Haven, Michigan. Lt. Donaldson was a medic aboard the Pinta and succumbed to an infection introduced from a contaminated food supply. Flags around the world are being flown at half staff in recognition of her sacrifice.

  My breath hissed in my ears, surrounded by the hard shell of my Mars suit’s helmet. This was not a full EVA suit, just a pressure suit like the one I wore on my first launch. My hands in the stiff gloves were clumsy on the controls of the BusyBee. At my side, Kamilah sat encased in her own suit. We occupied the same space, by some definitions, and yet we did not breathe the same air.

  The docking hatch on the side of the Pinta stayed centered in the BusyBee’s viewfinder as I eased it in to dock. Even in the midst of all of this, a part of me was still thrilled that I was being allowed to dock solo. Absurd. And yet, when the nose of the BusyBee bumped against the hull of the Pinta and our automatic clamps grabbed hold, I looked at Kamilah as if she should be proud of me.

  She had already begun unbuckling her belt.

  I activated our between-suit comms. “Let me secure the BusyBee first.”

  “Do you need me for that?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then I’ll get going. We only have seven hours of air.” She pushed out of her seat, floating up over the back of it.

  “At least let me make sure that we’re docked securely.” My checklist still had half a dozen retro-thrusters to secure.

  “The delta-pressure gauge is at 4.9.” She had drifted back to the door.

  “Kamilah.” She knew better than this. Rushing was a sure way to get killed in space. “Let’s go through the checklist. Slow is fast.”

  “By all that’s holy, you sound like Parker.” But she slowed down and checked the indicators, and got visual confirmation through the windows.

  “Well, he and I did start going into space in the days where the rockets were held together with aluminum foil.” I switched bands to broadcast back to our ship. “Niña, BusyBee 1. We’ve docked and all systems are optimal.”

  “Make sure you get visual confirmation before you open that hatch.” Parker’s command caused Kamilah to look at me and smirk. “Slow is fast.”

  Trust him to recite that par
ticular mantra now. “Yes, sir. Kamilah is doing that right now.”

  “I’m glad one of you has sense.”

  I ground my teeth and hoped that the microphone picked it up. “Once I’ve finished securing the BusyBee, we’ll board.”

  “Don’t forget that you only have seven hours of oxygen.”

  Why do people like to say the obvious? “Yes, sir. We’ll keep an eye on the time and our indicators.”

  “You’ll need to allow enough time to get back here and be hosed down.”

  I am fairly certain that my sigh was audible. “Yes, sir. I’ll remind Kamilah of the time constraints. BusyBee 1 out.”

  By the time I had the BusyBee secured, Kamilah had unpacked her med kit and opened the port. On the other side, the Pinta’s airlock awaited us, a single light shining to indicate which way was “up” in the metal cube. The round window in the interior door showed a glow from the spindle beyond.

  In the early days, the hatches could only be opened from the inside, but they changed that after a sim in which EVA walkers had died because the crew inside was incapacitated. It’s funny how things can seem so obvious in hindsight. This was one of the positives about the IAC and all of their simulations: we can also gain hindsight from things that aren’t actually lethal.

  I picked up the second med kit that Kamilah had packed, and floated after her into the airlock. We had to wait while the pumps circulated, verifying that the pressure in the two spaces matched before we could open the door.

  It didn’t seem like the occasion for one of the airlock games, even if they usually made the time pass faster. What else was there to say? We’d worked the problem back on the Niña, and I knew what our game plan was. Reviewing it would just make me more like Parker, apparently.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t wrong. I cleared my throat. “Gym first?”

  “That’s where Ruby said they were bunking.” Kamilah glanced over at the indicator. “I swear this gets slower every time.”

  So maybe it was time for an airlock game. “We could try some mime?”

  Kamilah snorted. “Did you just make a rhyme?”

  “I don’t think it’s a crime.”

  “That’s a question of paradigm.”

  I gnawed my lower lip. “Paradigm” was a good one … “Well, some people think that a rhyme is sublime.”

  Inside her helmet, Kamilah nodded. “And some people think it’s—finally!” The delta-pressure gauge rose into the safe zone and she reached for the door. “About time!”

  That merited a laugh. Kamilah anchored herself with one of the rails and pushed the door open. We floated through, med kits in tow, into the spindle of the Pinta, about a quarter of the way up from the rear of the craft.

  The lights shone on the long white tunnel at full brilliance. Somehow, I’d expected everything to be gray and dim over here, but the electrical system worked perfectly. I looked up the length of the spindle toward the intersection where the ring supports met and gasped. A brown, lumpy, watery globe as large as my head spun slowly in an air current.

  Another smaller one hovered farther up the spindle. Now that I was looking for them, there were dozens of small globules littering the air. “My God. They need a Hoover, not a doctor.”

  “They need both.” Kamilah pushed the med kit in front of her and floated up the spindle. “I’ll head to the gym. You want to see if you can get this cleaned up?”

  And I thought the stopped-up toilet had been bad.

  * * *

  Even swathed in a suit designed to protect me from the harsh environment of Mars, I still had the urge to scrub my hands with lye. In truth, I did wash the gloves of the suit after I finished cleaning up the spindle. It took over half of my allotted five hours, and I hadn’t even gotten to the crew quarters yet. We slept in zero-g, and I was willing to bet that area was a nightmare. Ruby had been smart to move them all down to the gym, where the gravity would keep the diarrhea more contained.

  I slid down the ladder to the ring and clumped over to the gym module. The Mars suit wasn’t as heavy as a full EVA suit, but was still ungainly. I stopped in the bathroom to wash my hands again and recoiled at the sight of a brown streak down one wall. Someone had made an attempt to clean it up, but had really just smeared it further.

  What I wanted to do was to go back to the Niña, get all the bleach, and soak in it. Instead, I washed my gloves, then opened the supply cabinet to get out the Lysol, “Proud Sponsor of the Space Program” emblazoned on the side of the bottle. It took thirty seconds, maybe a minute to clean up that smear.

  Weird that the spinning globes of excrement didn’t say “illness” as much as this imperfectly cleaned smear did. Those might have just escaped from containment through a malfunction. This … this was an astronaut who had known that they needed to clean and who had been too sick to finish the job.

  I washed my gloves again and spritzed Lysol on them for good measure.

  Then I headed into the gym.

  Kamilah knelt by Benkoski, wiping his forehead with a damp cloth. I’d honestly half expected her to have taken off her suit in some sort of heroic measure of helping the sick, but she hadn’t. The tableau reminded me of exactly how far we had come since the Meteor struck. I know—you’d think that being in outer space would be enough, but it had become routine. In this context, the Mars suit stood out, and I saw it anew, all silver Mylar and white tubes and chrome and steel and plastic. We might have been something out of Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers.

  “What can I do?”

  “Give DeBeer an IV. He won’t let me touch him.” She looked at me, face framed by her helmet and—much like seeing the Mars suit out of context—I was reminded of how brown her skin was. It was not that I had forgotten that Kamilah was an Arab, but I had forgotten that DeBeer could see only that aspect of her. She indicated the med kit with a toss of her head. “You know how to administer an IV?”

  “I understand the principles, but I’ve never done it.” I walked over to the med kit, which sat on the weight bench, and knelt next to it. “He won’t let you touch him? Really?”

  “He’s delirious.” She stood and clomped over to join me. “I’m choosing to believe that.”

  “He’s slime. Of course, that’s just a rhyme.”

  “If I had a dime…” She opened the kit and pulled out one of the bags of saline she’d packed. “You’ll have to set him up with a subcutaneous drip, unless you feel like you can find a vein in these blasted gloves.”

  “I’ve never even done it without gloves.” What I find fascinating is that, while my heart rate had ticked up a notch, the idea of administering an IV was significantly less nerve-wracking than having Parker grill me about Yiddish. The brain makes absolutely no sense sometimes. My hands were steady as I took the IV from her. “Can you talk me through it?”

  She shrugged and grinned. “Since we aren’t going into a vein, you can basically stab him anywhere. It hurts more if you go into the hand, because there are more nerves there, and failing to let the alcohol swab dry is definitely painful because some of the alcohol enters the bloodstream with the needle. It produces a burning sensation—just as a point of information, as Parker says.”

  But despite her implied threats, she still bled the air from the line and followed me over to where DeBeer lay curled up on one of the wrestling mats. He was wrapped in a stained blanket. What skin I could see had taken on a yellowed papery texture and cracked at his lips.

  When I knelt by DeBeer, his eyes opened. Red veins spiderwebbed around the blue of his irises, and mucus clung to the corners of his lids. His tongue flicked out to wet his lips. “York.”

  He coughed once, then closed his eyes again. I watched his chest with an intentness usually reserved for a launch to make certain he was still breathing.

  How is it that I can simultaneously loathe someone and also not want them to die? Taking in a breath of recycled air, I slid the blanket down to expose his arms. His eyes snapped open again and he grabbed the blanket
.

  I nearly fumbled the needle and dropped it. Or stabbed myself.

  His breath hissed as he said something in Afrikaans.

  I’m not actually sure what he said, but from the way his gaze darted to Kamilah, I could make a fair guess. He wasn’t delirious, just a racist asshole. “What if I sit on him?”

  “I don’t want to risk him cracking your faceplate. Although…” Kamilah turned away from me. “Huh.”

  “What?” I shifted to follow her gaze, which was taking in the rest of the gym. With the exception of DeBeer, the rest of the crew had clean blankets and had been given at least a sponge bath. All of them had IVs going.

  “Well. It’s just that there are all of these weights.” She picked up a pair of ten kilogram dumbbells. “And he really is weak as a kitten. And he needs fluids.”

  “And a bath.”

  “Or face my wrath.”

  I stood, laughing as I understood her intention. We could put these on the blanket and pin him down that way. “I like this path.”

  The dumbbells seemed like they might roll, so I grabbed a flat weight for the barbells. Getting a good grip with the gloves meant I could only carry one, but Kamilah saw what I was doing and put the dumbbells down. She grabbed the matching weight and, like some sort of space Valkyries, we approached DeBeer from either side.

  His eyes were closed again, and he had the blanket conveniently pulled up to his neck with both arms inside, as if he were trying to cocoon himself. I plunked my weight down next to his right shoulder, capturing the blanket underneath it. Kamilah did the same thing on the other side, effectively pinning his chest. If he’d been at full strength, this would only have slowed him down, but, as it was, by the time he opened his eyes, I’d already straddled his legs, and had them held down beneath my full body weight.

  He thrashed and grunted, then abruptly stopped with a moan. One side of the blanket had been rucked up at his waist, and a pool of watery brown discharge crept across the wrestling mat.