Wherever Seeds May Fall (First Contact)

by Peter Cawdron

  Nolan doesn’t respond. He hasn’t said much of anything since they were in the elevator leading up the launch structure to the capsule.

  “And we have SECO.”

  Kath feels her arms drift slightly as the second stage burns out and falls away.

  “Iris, Houston. We have you in orbit with a perigee of 480 kilometers and an estimated apogee of just under 7,000 kilometers. Congratulations. You guys get the scenic tour.”

  “That we do, Houston,” Nikki says, laughing as she releases the straps holding her in her chair. “We’re sure looking forward to lighting that kick stage later today.”

  Nikki drifts forward. She swings her legs around, saying, “You can remove your helmets and move around.”

  Kath disconnects the hose exchanging her air. She disables her life-support. From here, she’ll breathe air from within the Orion. She raises her visor and releases her harness. To her delight, she’s floating an inch above her seat. The sensation is akin to the time she bathed in the Dead Sea. It feels as though she’s unusually buoyant.

  As long as Kath maintains roughly the same horizontal position, she can avoid nausea. In her mind, up has the couches below them and the hatch above. If she drifts in any other orientation, her inner ear riots. Having been seasick during a Caribbean cruise as a postgrad, she knows the telltale signs and rights herself.

  Staying busy is the key. Given too much time, her mind kicks in at a deeper level and starts sounding warning alarms. As it is, she feels as though she’s falling rather than floating. Stop to think about things too long and her heart seems to rise in her throat. Reaching out and taking a handhold, though, calms her. There’s something about holding onto the spacecraft that reassures her she’s going to be okay.

  Nolan releases his harness, but he grips the armrest, groaning.

  “Are you okay?” Kath asks, turning toward him. His face is pale. Their eyes meet and she knows. It’s the slightly bloated look in his cheeks, the way he’s holding his lips, the furrow on his brow. She’s about to say something when he heaves, vomiting within his helmet. Chunks of partially digested breakfast cling to the inside of his visor, hiding his face from view.

  Nikki reacts immediately.

  “Get his helmet off.” She’s already pulling a medical kit from beneath the seats. “If he gets that in his lungs.”

  Nothing more needs to be said.

  Kath’s helmet bounces around the Orion as she spins, twisting upside down. Within a fraction of a second, her legs are above her. She collides with the turret-like tunnel leading to the main hatch. Now she’s inverted, she grabs Nolan’s helmet and fiddles with the latch, trying to get the catch to release. Nolan panics. His arms lash out, but Kath’s above him and upside down, well clear of his gloved hands. He grabs at his own helmet but misses the latch.

  Kath’s got it. She twists the helmet, pressing her legs out against the sides of the tunnel so she can get some leverage.

  Nolan’s helmet comes loose. Vomit drifts through the air.

  Nikki is behind him. As Nolan’s still caught up in his harness, he’s still roughly in place. Had he been floating around the cabin it would have been impossible to help. Nikki pushes a wet wipe over his face, clearing vomit from his nose and eyes.

  “Easy,” Nikki says as Nolan splutters for breath, spitting vomit through the cabin.

  A pack of disposable wipes summersaults through the air.

  Kath grabs them, tearing out another one and handing it to Nikki.

  Nikki repeats her motion, pushing the cloth against his face. Kath shoves another wipe into Nolan’s gloved hand. He grabs it, spitting into it.

  “Goddamn it,” he manages to say.

  “It’s okay,” Nikki says. “Breathe.”

  “Breathe?” Nolan says, coughing and spluttering. “Trying.”

  “Slow things down,” Nikki says. “No rush. You’re okay. You’re going to be okay.”

  Somehow, he nods in agreement. If Kath had been drowning in vomit, she would have lashed out, but Nolan calms himself. Nikki wipes his forehead, cleaning his hair.

  Globules of sick float through the Orion like tiny planets.

  Nikki says, “Try to catch those.”

  “On it,” Kath replies.

  Due to the way surface tension works in space, most of the vomit remains within the helmet as it bounces around the capsule.

  Once Nolan’s face is cleaned up, Nikki holds up an injector, saying, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

  “Gimme the good news,” Nolan says, still looking green.

  “The good news is this puppy will make you feel a helluva lot better.”

  “And the bad?”

  “Sorry, bud. You’re gonna have to strip down. This thing needs to kiss your ass.”

  Kath laughs. Even Nolan finds it funny. Once he’s out of his suit, Nikki gives him an antiemetic injection to reduce his nausea. Kath does her best not to look. She focuses on cleaning the inside of his helmet, but spew has already soaked into the padding.

  “That’s not going to be pleasant to put on,” Nikki says, pointing at the helmet.

  “No spares, huh?” Nolan says, pulling his trousers back up.

  “Nope.”

  Nikki uses a bungee cord to position the helmet over the return vent to dry. She’s got the visor up, allowing air to swirl within as it’s drawn back into the scrubbers and recycled.

  “Iris, Houston.”

  “Go ahead, Houston,” Nikki says.

  “Looks like you guys are having fun up there.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Nolan says.

  His hair is matted down with spew. Kath uses a towel and some water to clean his face. To her delight, blobs of water form like tiny transparent planets. They could be balls of glass suspended by magic. As soon as they touch the towel, they’re sucked in, leaving the cloth soaking wet.

  The CapCom in Houston continues.

  “Mission Control has postponed the kick stage burn until tomorrow. We want to give you guys a bit more time to adjust. Your schedule is clear. Three hours downtime. Eight-hour sleep cycle. Then we’ll conduct the transit burn to send you out to Lagrange point four.”

  “Appreciate it,” Nikki says. “Iris, out.”

  “Houston, out.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Nolan says.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” Nikki replies. “Astronauts get sick all the time. Normally, they don’t paint the inside of their helmets, but you’re fine.”

  Nolan uses a cloth to wipe around his neck.

  Nikki busies herself, but she’s preoccupied. Given Houston has delayed their next burn, they can relax. Something’s bothering her. Something other than the launch and Nolan becoming sick.

  Kath asks, “What are you thinking?”

  “Oh, ah,” Nikki says. “Iris. It’s real now. I mean, it felt real down there, but now we’re up here—this is actually happening. We’re making contact.”

  “We are,” Kath replies, realizing something’s troubling the commander.

  “Just us,” Nikki says.

  Kath agrees. “Just the three of us on behalf of an entire planet.”

  Nolan finishes cleaning himself.

  “Does it bother you?” Nikki asks. “I mean, An̆duru. Does it bother you they haven’t said anything? They haven’t responded to us. Nothing. Not a peep.”

  “No,” Kath says. If there’s one thing An̆duru’s taught her over the past few months, it’s to be decisive. “This is kinda expected. When we send probes to Mars or Jupiter, we have what we call mission modes. There’s the interplanetary mode while we’re in flight. Most of our equipment is shut down. Then there’s the landing mode or the orbital insertion mode. A few more instruments come online. But it’s not until the observation phase begins that everything is switched on.”

  Nikki says, “And you think that’s what they’re doing?”

  “Yes,” Kath replies. “The amount of radiation produced when they skim through the atmosphere of a planet
would fry their electronics. They have to shield their equipment while in flight.”

  “So you think they’ll switch everything on once they get here?” Nolan asks.

  “It’s what I’d do.”

  Nikki’s quiet.

  “You don’t agree?” Kath asks.

  “It bothers me,” Nikki says.

  “Why?”

  “We’re too confident.”

  Now it’s time for Kath to remain quiet.

  “Confidence is the ace of spades,” Nikki says. She points at Nolan. “He knows what I mean.”

  Nolan explains. “It’s a saying in the Air Force. The ace is the highest or lowest card in the deck, depending on how you play it.”

  Kath gets it. “Play it wrong—”

  “—and you lose,” Nolan says.

  “Anyway,” Nikki says, shrugging off the conversation. “We’re supposed to be in a rest cycle. Time for some sightseeing.”

  She drifts over beside one of the windows.

  Kath comes up beside her and looks at an entire planet stretching out before them. She’d rather continue the discussion, but Nikki’s said her piece. For Kath, the issue is unresolved. To be fair to Nikki, it can’t be resolved until they make contact. If anything, the beauty of seeing Earth from space is a welcome distraction.

  Out beyond the thick glass, Earth is in shadow. A thin blue glow lights up the horizon. It’s iridescent, like the shell of a beetle. Clouds obscure a darkened Europe. Cities light up the night. A thin green line weaves its way through the atmosphere. Hints of red and pink are visible on the fringe.

  “What’s that?”

  “The auroras,” Nikki replies.

  “Wow,” Nolan says, drifting beside them.

  France and Italy are visible in a spiderweb of lights stretching around the coast. Golden silk threads reach across the land. Snow blankets the mountains. Dark patches reveal the deep waters of the Mediterranean.

  Kath whispers, “Beautiful.”

  Honesty

  Time is meaningless in space.

  What seemed like the adventure of a lifetime has become drudgery. Iris is a bitter, endurance marathon. The end is nowhere in sight.

  After twenty-seven days, Nolan is struggling within their tiny tin can. They’re adrift in the darkness. Mentally, he’s going downhill.

  Each day is the same.

  Each day is a lie.

  Each fake-morning, they wake in their sleeping bags, staring at the stars beyond the windows, only these aren’t the stars of his youth. There’s no vibrancy to them. Depth, yes, but they seem lifeless even though at least two of them aren’t. Sol and some other nameless star in Taurus have cradled life. Nolan never thought he’d miss twinkling stars. It’s strange to admit it, but the stars seem cold.

  Earth is both a distant orb and a vague memory.

  Their days are repetitive. When it finally comes, night falls with a flick of a switch. There are no sunrises or sunsets, just an electronic clock telling them it’s time for a rest cycle.

  Nolan finds it difficult to sleep. Often, he wakes with a start, responding to the sharp sensation of falling off a cliff. It’s a dream and yet it’s not. He is falling. He might as well be plunging headfirst down an elevator shaft. The concrete basement, though, never rushes up to kill him.

  Nolan’s heart pounds within his chest. Adrenalin surges through his veins. After waking in a sweat, it’s impossible to drift back to sleep. At night, hours pass like decades. A handful of emergency lights glow dimly in the dark. Starlight drifts within the cabin. Then another artificial day dawns automatically. The lights brighten over half an hour and the next fake-day begins.

  Their meals are meager, not only to conserve resources but because burning calories doesn’t come easy in space. Once their launch couches were folded away, Nikki set up an exercise bike at the rear of the capsule. Every day, they take turns working out, desperately trying to break the sweat that comes so easily at night. Then there are the elastic bands. Resistance training is important. They need to retain muscle mass. It’s impossible to lift weights in the weightlessness of space. Instead they slip thick bands beneath their legs and flex, working their thighs, calves, biceps, and triceps. It’s not pretty.

  Houston feeds them information about events on Earth, but Nolan has his doubts. They’re being told what NASA wants them to hear. Paranoid? Maybe. Maybe not.

  Perhaps the worst part of their journey is there’s no privacy.

  Each of them gets time to chat with their loved ones once a day over the radio. There’s no video, though, just a series of still images delivered at a frequency of about two per minute as they talk.

  Talking is a misnomer. With a time lag of a few seconds, talking is difficult. Nolan’s words have to traverse space and time. They bounce from the Orion to the Deep Space Network and on to Houston. From there, they take an electronic path to his home in Colorado. Delays are inevitable. Speech involves either awkward silence or talking over the top of each other. Jan has been awesome, but they end up tripping over each other’s words. They both apologize. Then they both wait for the other to start talking again. It would be comical if life within Iris weren’t so austere.

  Jan always has a smile. Sometimes it’s fake. Nolan doesn’t say anything about that. His smiles are real. For her, it might be arduous speaking to him every day, saying the same things about whatever mini-drama unfolded in Whole Foods or the escalating price of gasoline, but for him, it’s refreshing.

  Bathroom breaks are the only time they have any fun within the Orion. Oh, the actual act of going to the bathroom in front of the others is disconcerting. After almost a month, they’re used to someone quietly huddling by the return air vent and strapping themselves in. The unspoken protocol is to turn and either look at a computer tablet or gaze out the window. Number twos are particularly pungent—given the interior of the Orion is smaller than his bathroom in Colorado Springs, that’s hardly surprising. The fun part is when they flush the tanks after a day or so. Urine forms an instant constellation of stars released into the vacuum of space. Tiny crystals form, catching the sunlight. For a moment, there’s a tightly packed globular cluster slowly drifting into the shadows. That their urine dumps are beautiful is bizarre. No one cares.

  Usually, fecal matter is stored for the duration of a flight. On long hauls, though, it has to be dumped. Lumpy asteroids float away from the Orion. Perhaps one day, they’ll light up the night sky down on Earth. They’re big enough to blaze through the upper atmosphere for a few seconds, vaporizing in a ball of fire. Perhaps someone down there will look up with admiration and point. Little will they know that burst of light trailing through the darkness is astro-excrement.

  The orbit of the Orion is helical. Iris twists through space in a series of distorted S-curves and figure-eights. The spacecraft is following a gravitational manifold. It winds through the invisible gravitational ebbs and flows of both Earth and the Moon.

  Iris weaves its way between distant Lagrange points. Most of their time is spent out in the far reaches of Lagrange points four and five. From these gravitational hilltops, they’re almost as far from the Moon as anyone on Earth. Earth itself appears tiny. The blue planet is framed like a postcard in the window. Continents haven’t been discernible for weeks. Clouds swirl across a marble. Occasionally, there’s a slither of dirt on the edge of an ocean, but there’s no way to tell what they’re looking at. Australia? South America? Africa? Nolan never appreciated just how much water covers Earth until he began looking for land between the thick white clouds.

  At the moment, Earth is slowly slipping into the shadows, dissolving into the dark of night. Nolan assumed Earth would always look spherical, but like the Moon as seen from Colorado, Earth waxes and wanes. From out here, the planet seems to disappear.

  While they were down low, almost hugging the planet from space, Earth looked magnificent. Seeing their home beyond the windows was a delight. From deep space, it’s terrifying to see just how small Earth
is against the dark void.

  Nikki’s working on one of the main screens, checking the status of equipment on the probe. Kath looks bored.

  “Where did you grow up?” Nolan asks, surprising himself he hasn’t asked Kath that before now.

  Kath perks up.

  “On a farm outside of Billings, Montana. We grew corn, wheat, and sometimes squash.”

  “Oh, wow.”

  “Wow, what?” she asks.

  “I can’t imagine you as a farmer. I guess I always figured you as a city slicker.”

  Kath laughs. “Well, these days I am. At least, when I’m not in space. My folks still have two and a half thousand acres a couple of hours outside of Helena.”

  Nolan’s curious.

  “How does a young girl growing up on a farm in Montana end up with a Ph.D. in astrophysics?”

  “You get to see a lot of stars at night.”

  “Oh, I bet.”

  “My dad brought me my first telescope when I was fourteen. It was better for bird watching than stargazing, but that didn’t stop me from sitting on the back porch. I’d turn off the lights and stare into the sky. For me, the fuse was lit when I saw the moons of Jupiter.

  “Dad told me how Galileo once pointed a spyglass at Jupiter and saw four tiny stars in a line beside the planet. Over the next few nights, Galileo realized they were moons. They were just like Earth’s Moon. That realization changed our world forever.

  “I thought it was cool. There was Jupiter. Sitting high above Caribou Peak. Just a speck of light in the dark. Then I’d peer through my telescope and see her secret moons. It struck me as profound that Jupiter had always been there with her majestic moons. The Babylonians, Egyptians, and Greeks had all seen her, and yet they hadn’t. They’d dreamed of gods, but Jupiter was more wonderful than anything they could imagine. I felt as though I’d joined an exclusive club comprised of just me, Dad, and Galileo.”

  Nikki has stopped what she’s doing and is listening intently to Kath.

  “Granddad wasn’t impressed with me chasing stars at college. Our farm has been in the family since the 1800s and once spanned ten thousand acres. It’s been passed down to the oldest child for generations. He felt I should take that mantle. He did not want me running off to study at some fancy East Coast university. God, I love him, but he’s a relic from another era.”