by Nick Lake
a hand crosses in front of my eyes. “Leo, u with us?” it’s Libra, frowning, looking concerned now, which i suppose is better than looking sad.
“sorry,” i say. “just thinking.”
“about earth?”
“um,” i say. “yes.”
Libra leans forward & gives me a hug, & i tense, so she pulls away, still smiling tho. “soon,” she says.
yes. soon. soon the waves, soon the wind, soon all the things we have seen on vids but never felt. even just a big room: the acoustics of it. a full day, not 1 that swings around every 90 minutes. colors that are not metal gray, or plastic white. what it feels like to be pulled down to the ground—in the station there is no up & no down & no weight, we all just tumble around. even liquids, they turn into balls, into globules, & float in front of u—u can suck them up with a straw from the air.
the intercom: “Leo, u coming?”
i give Libra & Orion an apologetic look. “c u,” i say.
“Virginia need u?” says Libra.
“yeah, she wants some help with the cargo docking or something,” i say.
Libra smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “go on then,” she says. “work ur math magic.”
Orion nods at me & starts playing the flute again. his expression, like always, is hard to read. u can’t really c into him, he’s like a device screen in bright daylight. i c the muscles around his mouth tighten as he purses his lips; a short phrase of music falls like liquid from his flute, flows—not that i’ve ever seen anything falling, or flowing, except on a vid screen, but still.
when we were kids, we were close, me & Orion & Libra. u c that, on the vids of us crawling, of us walking. & we still come together sometimes, like for the aurora.
but now Libra is always studying. Orion is always…doing Orion things. if Orion disappeared & the authorities asked where he was, i’d say look for anyplace where there is poetry. or movies. or music.
anyplace where there are no people but there are things that people have made, to tell stories.
which makes it ironic, then, that i’m the 1 telling this 1.
i kick off & haul on a handrail & float up thru the hatch & thru another couple of modules & then i’m in the upper command module, right next to the solar wing, 1 of them anyway. Virginia looks back at me from the terminal where she’s working.
she’s young, Virginia. maybe 40. she’s not 1 of the hard ex-military astronauts like my mother. she & Lakshmi, who rotates with Virginia, are more the maternal kind, which is weird to say, since it’s my mother who’s the actual mother.
still, even tho my mother is dismissive about Virginia & her skills, Virginia is here because 1/ she’s a qualified air force pilot, just like my mother, & 2/ she has a doctorate in math from MIT & 3/ she’s getting those medical tests all the time to c what being up here for a long time does to someone who wasn’t born here & 4/ someone was needed to look after me & Orion & Libra. which is more than my mother has ever done.
of course, these days, we need very little babysitting. which means that the Company is using the regular rotation astronauts for more & more testing.
specifically, right now, Virginia is here because the day after tomorrow—shortly after my mother & some engineer guy called Brown arrive—there is going to be an unmanned cargo ship bringing long-term supplies & docking with the station. the idea is that, in the future, they can send stuff up here without using a rocket or any kind of piloted craft; they just fire off an unmanned vehicle & it takes care of everything.
& Virginia: Virginia helped to develop the program that’s going to handle the automated docking. she’s hardcore. sometimes i wonder if it bothers her, that she’s so qualified & yet she ended up spending years feeding us, making up games to get us to walk a little further on the treadmill, teaching us to read & write. but it’s not the kind of thing u can ask.
“hey, V,” i say.
“hey, u,” she says.
“hey, x,” i say.
“hey, q,” she says.
it’s a stupid game. a game from when i was a kid. but we still play it.
Virginia is the most beautiful person i have ever seen & that includes in movies. if she went missing & the authorities asked me to describe her, i would say she has green eyes & cheekbones that could cut you & she is so impossibly gorgeous that a person who didn’t know her would think song would come out of her mouth, instead of speech.
it doesn’t. actually her voice is kind of raspy. i think she smokes, down there on earth. not up here, of course. that would be a death risk in a whole other way.
Virginia’s hair is spiked & pink, & she has tattoos of snake scales over her neck & some of her jaw. she points at the screen with an olden-days pencil—my mother says they don’t really use them on earth anymore, but they’re useful up here. there’s a legend that the Russians spent millions developing a pen that would work in 0 g & then the Americans just took up pencils, but i don’t think it’s true. i think it was just a story to make us look clever during the space race, which is lame & also unnecessary, since we won.
won. well, that’s debatable, now.
Virginia, the point is, gestures at the screen in front of her with the pencil. i c she’s chewed the end of it to pulp. a small bubble of her spit floats between us, glinting in the sunlight coming thru from the earth side of the module.
“so i’m running the h-infinity model, & there’s a problem,” she says.
“now?” i say. “the docking is in 2 days.”
“yeah, well, when we designed this we were on the ground. now there’s…stuff we didn’t anticipate.”
“like?”
“like this thing”—she touches the side wall of the module—“is vibrating. u feel it? 1 of the gyroscopes is off. faulty bearing, i think.”
there are gyroscopes built into the 4 arms—it’s 1 of the things that keeps us in the right position, relative to earth. there are systems that are constantly measuring the angle of incidence of the sun, the height of the horizon, the position of the moon & stars, & a dozen other parameters, then instructing the gyroscopes to turn in their gimbals, absorbing undesired momentum, making sure we stay in a consistent orbit & orientation.
“&?” i say.
“& it’s screwing the outputs from our control system,” says Virginia. “the cargo container’s gonna fail to lock to the hatch & it’s going to crash into us.”
“hmm,” i say. “that wouldn’t be good.”
“ur talent for understatement continues, i c.”
i come & hover by the terminal next to her. “show me.”
she pulls up the g graph of the gyroscope vibration. i c where it’s spiking, when it should be flat.
“it’s under 0.2 g, so it’s not triggering the automated command to take it out of the steering law,” she says. “but it’s still upsetting the z output of my model. we need to swap it out really, & we have a spare gyro ready to go, but we can’t install it till Flight Officers Brown &…& ur mother are here to do the EVA.”
EVA: extra-vehicular activity. a space walk.
“i could do the EVA,” i say. “i already did 1 with Chang.” this is true. the Asian astronaut took me out of the loading bay for a 10-minute walk. it was the greatest experience of my life—the unbounded sky around me, the blue ball of the earth below, the stars jeweling the dark.
“for like 4 minutes & Chang’s gone now; no way u could do it alone. & i’m not doing my first EVA with a kid. no offense.”
fine. ok. 4 minutes.
but it felt like 10.
it felt like 100.
it felt like forever, like i’m still there in some way, floating in nothingness.
i frown. “so take the gyro out of the steering law manually & use the boosters instead.” we can adjust our attitude using rocket power, if the gyroscopes fail, or if they saturate because their combined momentum is smaller than the external torque on the station, say if u get hit by an asteroid & u’ve already got atmospheri
c drag & gravity gradient operating on the ship.
“i thought of that,” she says, “but the boosters aren’t fine-tuned enough; u can’t micromanage the orientation. the z output would get worse. plus, this thing uses single gimbal gyros because some genius figured they were simpler to maintain, which is true, but with only 3 running, there’s also a risk of getting a singularity & canceling out the gyros completely.”
“& then the cargo container crashes.”
“yes. & then the cargo container crashes.”
“u told Nevada?” i say.
“not yet. but they can c the vibration, i guess.”
i turn to another screen, where her program is running. “show me the outputs,” i say. she’s using an h-infinity model, which is basically a piece of genius that the Russians came up with decades ago, another thing that undermines the whole pen story. in essence, u envision the motors controlling the cargo ship not as a system intended to produce the right results but as a system intended to minimize the wrong results. the outputs from the system are ur undesirable results & u try to minimize them by feeding in the right data.
u make the whole program about stopping the cargo container from not docking; not about making it dock.
like i said, it is kind of brilliant.
i look at the outputs. the vibration of the ship is messing everything up, just like Virginia said. in the model, it’s making the cargo ship run off course by .08 of a degree & fail docking.
i think for a second. i think about docking, 2 bodies coming together in space. in my head, it’s Orion & Libra’s birthday again. Virginia carries a disk of a cake into the cupola, which she brought up here in a can. on it are 16 LED candles, & when the twins blow, she presses a hidden button somewhere & the candles switch off.
“for my 17th,” says Libra, “on earth, i’m having the whole deal. limo, restaurant, club.”
“i’m in for the restaurant part,” says Orion. “club: no.”
“we don’t need a club,” says Virginia, & she floats to a panel & presses a switch.
then music, & then dancing: me & Libra twirling each other around the glass module, spinning, Virginia laughing as she somersaults in the air. & at a certain moment, me, flipping over & reaching out to stop & my hands closing on Orion’s arms & for a moment we dance together, he & i, round & round, faster & faster, until we bump into the wall & are pressed together & Orion hugs me & grins—
& i feel something different, like Orion’s body that i have known since i was born, more or less, has been swapped for something else, something more…physical, something more present.
i pull away, & feel my face go hot, & he looks at me, & does he pull back a little? i wonder if he knows, if he feels uncomfortable now; unsettled.
or if he felt it too.
“um, earth to Leo?” says Virginia.
i snap back into the command module.
“harmonics,” i say.
“what?”
“take the g output from the faulty gyro & run it thru a Fourier transform & u’ve got the frequency of the vibration. then u just need to reverse that & feed it into the other gyros & a couple of boosters maybe & they can adjust the yaw & pitch of the ship rhythmically to cancel out the vibration. then the vibrations disappear from ur z output.”
she nods slowly. “huh,” she says. “complicated. but that could work.”
“yeah, but what if it doesn’t?”
she winks & taps my hand. “then u’re going home early. & most probably on fire.”
on Libra & Orion’s birthday, i hand Libra her gift. it’s a sunflower seed, set in a ring. Grandpa sent it up for me when Virginia rotated in.
she puts it on. “i love it,” she says.
then i give Orion his. a slim, leather-bound book: the poetry of e. e. cummings.
Orion stares at it. “wow. i never had a real book before.”
“it’s old,” i say stupidly.
“obviously. & i love cummings.”
“i know,” i say. “i mean, i remember u reciting 1 of the poems.”
“ ‘Space being (don’t forget to remember) Curved,’ ” he says. he pauses for a moment, looks around. “cummings really would have understood living up here, i think.”
he hugs me, & this time—thank god—i don’t feel anything but a body, next to mine, no strange & extra awareness.
“this is our last birthday up here,” says Libra.
“yeah,” says Orion. “next year we’ll have candles that are on fire.”
“we’ll burn up the dance floor,” i say. “instead of hovering above it.”
“i’ll…um…bring the heat with my moves,” says Libra.
Orion groans.
& then we’re laughing, the 3 of us, spinning & holding each other’s hands & laughing so hard.
later, Orion & Libra go to their quarters to give each other their gifts. i guess they don’t want me to c. i don’t know why. i guess that’s how it is with twins. sometimes they’re so close together, there’s no crack in between for anyone else to fit in.
i check my watch. it’s an Omega Speedmaster from the early 2000s that Grandpa wore on the international space station, the ISS. space is in my blood, in more ways than 1. i have an hour before our vidlink call, so i say bye to Virginia & torpedo to my quarters—my record is 1 minute 14 from the command module, & i do it in 1.20, which is not bad.
i strap into my bunk & close my eyes for a moment. when u do that in space u c stars, just like when u look out the porthole on the dark side of the station—bursts of light, flickers, meteors, from radiation particles hitting ur cornea. sometimes i worry about all that radiation we’ve been absorbing since we were born & i know the doctors down in Nevada worry about it too because they’re always asking on vid about whether we have any nausea & stuff, especially Dr. Stearns.
i get bored of lying there with my eyes closed, so i sit up & eat a freeze-dried cereal bar—everything i eat, pretty much, is freeze-dried; 1 of the things i’m looking forward to on earth is real food—& then i try to read. Walt Whitman. it’s an assignment from Mr. Obiekwe, the English teacher who vids us from Connecticut somewhere. Libra will get an A on it, i’ll get a B, like i generally do on anything that’s not math or science, & Orion will fail. Orion always fails. even tho he has read more books than Mr. Obiekwe, probably.
i stare at the page, try to follow the words, but it’s hard work—it mostly presupposes being in a body in a world with sky & ground & birds & fish & leaves on trees. & colors.
here, we’re more like ghosts in an attic. & everything is white or black or silver.
plus, there are a lot of distractions. like noise. sometimes little meteoroids—really tiny ones—hit the outside of the station & they ping & bang; it drives Orion mad when he’s listening to Bach or what have u. also there’s no gravity, so air doesn’t move or rise when it gets warm; it just sits there, & that means there are pumps whirring all the time & air-conditioning & cooling systems & the gyros turning & the net result equals a ton of creaking & hissing & grinding constantly.
also the view.
1 of the things they did when they built this place out of the ISS was to create these new modular units with more portholes so that people could c out more easily, which they figured might make those astronauts like my mother & Libra & Orion’s mother less likely to go stir-crazy & kill each other. instead they had a romantic view of the blue-green earth below, & Orion & Libra were conceived.
good for me, i suppose. it would be really lonely up here without my sort-of siblings.
the view of the earth is beautiful too. islands scattered on blue seas, cloud formations above swirling like milk in water, mountains rising up, snow. entire countries & continents swinging past, sometimes black & laced with lights, sometimes lit with sunshine. sometimes u get the aurora too—mostly it’s at the poles—& we only c it as a kind of halo, but every now & then it flames across the sea, the land, & then we always call each other, me & the twins, & we me
et up to c it.
i mean, short of studying & watching vids, there isn’t much else to do. we have screens but most of the internet, apart from encyclopedias, is blocked by some kind of super Company firewall. operational security. really the screens are just for films & vidlinks, & even those are limited to preapproved contacts.
i’m still looking out the porthole when Grandpa’s vidlink bongs into the module, bong bong bong. i reach over & take my screen & unroll it.
Grandpa’s face appears, against a wood-paneled wall that’s hung with rugs. it’s his living room. behind him is a window, which opens onto the ranch, tho all i can c is bright daylight, making a glare around the frame. i think how weird it must be to spend so long in daylight, a whole 12 hours or more. up here we’re orbiting at 17,500 miles an hour & the earth below goes dark every hour & a half.
“hey, Grandpa,” i say.
“hey, kid. 2 more moon orbits.”
“yeah. i can’t wait to c u. i mean, for real.”
he takes a breath. “then i get to hug u. would that be ok? if i hugged u. i mean…i’m ur grandpa & i’ve never…” he breaks off. “sorry, i’m rambling like an old man.”
i smile. “it’s ok with me,” i say. Grandpa’s not been up here since i was born—they say he’s too old, his body couldn’t deal with the forces. he’s a trained astronaut & has been in orbit before tho, of course. working in space: it’s pretty much the only thing his daughter, my mother, ever got from him.
she comes up, once a year.
but she is not interested in hugging.
“how’s the ranch?” i say.
Grandpa shrugs. “holding on. but they say the aquifer’s nearly dry. don’t know how long it will last.” he shakes his head, then looks up, smiling. “still be here when u come home tho.”
i smile back. it’s weird to think of Grandpa’s ranch as home, when i’ve never been there. but i am looking forward to seeing it. he has 5,000 acres in Sonoma County in California. cattle mostly, some feed crops. most of the ranchers have left, Grandpa says, because of the drought. but he’s still there, & a few others too.
