Life Among the Terranauts

by Caitlin Horrocks

  In the dining room there’s no food, only panic. Bhatnagar never came back from his Igor hunt, and now Park is missing too. In her unlocked room Campbell and Esparza find something brown and small and scaly balled up on the bed. It unrolls and sniffs at them. An armadillo.

  On the phone with Mission Command, Campbell starts to cry. It’s unsettling to see her get emotional. I bring her her blue-striped towel and she pulls it around her shoulders. Karpov’s people finally seem to feel her urgency, but it’s almost morning before there’s any kind of plan. One more day, they promise. Twenty-four hours for Karpov to get his press releases and PR people in order, ready to spin NovaTerra into something other than disastrous. We’ll be allowed to come out if we handle this in an “orderly fashion,” sign all their forms, take down our complaint posters. There’s even talk of consolation money, twenty-five thousand each for our distress. Someone just has to stand by in the command center for further instructions.

  I offer to stay. Campbell has pulled her towel so tightly around her that I can hear the fabric start to tear. Esparza’s been staring at the wall since his last unanswered phone call to his wife. No one’s in any shape to attempt a search-and-possible-rescue mission for Bhatnagar and Park, and the first documents the Karpov lawyers e-mail over are non-self-endangerment agreements. We don’t want this problem to get any bigger, they write, and we don’t want you coming out tomorrow in front of the cameras looking any worse than you already do.

  I tell Campbell and Esparza the two of them should try to get some sleep, and they walk down the short passageway to the habitat pod. At lunchtime Campbell brings me the last of the hummingbirds, a small group of them arrayed on the plate like plucked peanuts, and all I can think about is how beautiful they once were. I tidy the room, line up the cans of mud we’ve been writing with, watch the first ten minutes of six different movies on streaming video because I can’t concentrate. Every hour I receive some new Karpov demand and I agree, on behalf of the remaining Terranauts, to various nondisclosure statements, to the wardrobe choices for our first post-departure press conference.

  In the late afternoon Campbell knocks on the door. Her hair’s wet, her towel’s pinned around her neck like a superhero cape, and she’s holding a butcher knife. “Esparza’s missing. Not taken,” she adds before I can ask. “He spelled out GONE OCEAN with all the silverware while I was in the shower.”

  “It’s Friday. His wife.”

  “Hope springs eternal. I’m going after him. The last thing we need now is to find him belly-up.”

  “You’re sure that’s a good idea?” All of a sudden I’m terrified of being left alone, but I don’t want to show it. I don’t want to look afraid and I don’t want Campbell to cry again and I want us all back the way we were, pissed off and petty and safe.

  She gives me a long, appraising look. “What do you think is actually going on?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You knew him best.”

  “Esparza?”

  “Igor.” She runs her thumb against the edge of the butcher knife. There’s no blood, no cut, no line in her skin. All our blades are dull.

  “He’s a hard person to know,” I say.

  “So are you.”

  “I don’t try to be.”

  She looks at me with what might be sympathy, fingers the safety pin fastening the towel at her throat.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” I say. “I really don’t.”

  “He’s a scrawny, spacey little shit. Let him try something.” She whooshes the butcher knife in an arc, speeding toward an invisible neck, but when she stops the blade midair, her hand is trembling. “I’ll be back with Esparza before you know it,” she says, sure she can convince us both. The cape ripples as she strides down the hallway, ready to fight crime or fly away.

  That’s the last I see of her. Night falls. NovaTerra stays dark. I click the switches in the command center on and off. I click them in the hallway, the dorms, the kitchen. All the interior lights have been shut off. When I return to the command center, the computers are down. There’s no power anywhere in the habitat pod. I pick up a paring knife from the dining table, the last leg of the N in Esparza’s OCEAN.

  From the ridge, the desert sky outside the roof is an impossibility of stars. The ocean is a square of soft, lapping black. I can just make out the bobbing dinghy, spinning slowly like a clock hand. I climb down, carefully, to the beach. I don’t have a flashlight, but I know every inch of this world by now. The trail down the fake cliff is already smooth, eroded by footsteps. Then I go across the beach, into the sea grotto, and down the hallway to the electrical substation. I know this is probably a bad idea, but it doesn’t seem like there are any good ideas left. The paring knife is sweaty in my hand. I have no clue what I’m supposed to do with it.

  An orange light spills from a doorway at the end of the hall. I wait for my eyes to adjust and stand just beyond the light. “Hello?” I ask softly. To shout feels embarrassing, even though I know we should be far beyond embarrassment.

  At first there’s only silence, and I wonder if I’m wrong. Then Igor steps into the doorway. He’s naked, and I can’t help but notice that his torso and legs aren’t much paler than the rest of him, the parts that peek out of his jumpsuit. He’s been spending a lot of time like this, nothing between him and the sun that NovaTerra shares with Old Earth.

  “We’re leaving,” I announce. “Tomorrow morning. They’re letting us out.”

  Igor is expressionless—Illuminated—as if this news changes nothing, as if the decisions have already been made.

  I ask him where the others are.

  “I dug up all the beets for you.”

  “I never asked you to do anything for me. Where are Park and Bhatnagar? Campbell and Esparza?”

  “You’ve been hungry for a long time. Old Earth won’t fix it.”

  “June and Vikram and Elizabeth and Hector. Where are they?”

  “That’s why you came here. That’s who you are.” He looks up and raises his arms as if the ceiling, the dirt and fake rock and glass above us, might have an answer. “This wasn’t about the money for you either.”

  “You can tell yourself that if you want. You can believe anything you want to.”

  “This world can provide, given the chance. This world—”

  “This world is crap. The beets are dead, the lemurs are dead, the fish are dead. The hummingbirds are dead, the—”

  “The people are dead.”

  I can’t quite make out Igor’s face, can’t search it for sincerity or bluff. “We’re not dead,” I say automatically, as if this is an argument we can have, as if logic still has some purchase.

  “We’re Terranauts,” he says. “The only true ones.”

  “I don’t believe you.” My voice shakes. My right hand shakes so badly, the knife handle bounces against my thigh.

  He tilts his body in the doorway, and the orange emergency light floods across his profile. I realize I’ve never seen anything less than sincerity on his face, can’t even imagine what a lie might look like. He raises his hands again and this time I can see that they’re filthy—darkness jammed under the nails and smeared down his wrists and arms.

  “What did you do?”

  “The provisions room. You can look if you want.”

  “Please. I just want to leave.”

  He shakes his head, ducks back into the room, and there’s a whooshing, a high whine, and a sound like a balloon wheezing empty. For the first time in 566 days, everything is silent. No filter for the ocean, no scrubber for the air, no condensers drawing moisture from the savanna. His footsteps return to the hallway and the only sound is our breathing. I expect the flare of a flashlight. My fingers curve themselves involuntarily into shapes: a lemur, an armadillo. My grip becomes an open, blinking eye, and the knife clangs to the floor. When he steps toward me, I run.

  We’re the only two people who could do this, who know the tunnels well enough to race flat out in
the dark. I lead us aboveground, flying up the stairs to the North Desert fast enough to lock the door behind me before he catches up. I emerge into stars, the jagged, looming shapes of the mountains, the grid of bars. From the ridge, the boat is still visible, drifting. The waves have stopped. I call out but nobody answers.

  There’s a smell of smoke from the ventilation shaft. A coyote howls. Startled, I trip backward and cholla needles pierce my calf, rip my jumpsuit as I tear myself away. Blood runs down the back of my leg. The coyote howls again and sounds so close it’s as if he’s in here with me. The last lemur in the rain forest shrieks. Something is rising up the air shaft, a chink of metal against fake stone, an approaching slither. Nylon rope and crampons, or a pair of claws and a body that has shed its clothes.

  “Igor?” I whisper, because it seems useless to hope he won’t find me.

  “Eve,” I hear. “Eve.”

  I want to ask him if he’s getting what he wants, if this is what he’s believed in all along. I want to ask him how illumination comes, how certainty tastes and fills the body, heavier and happier than doubt. I want to know how fear feels when it stops.

  It is night on New Earth. It is a shift in the homeostasis. It is the beginning of whatever comes next.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the editors who originally published these stories and made them better in the process. Editing short stories is often a labor of love, and I have benefited from both the labor and the love. I have also benefited, as a reader and a writer, from the magazines and anthologies that help sustain and celebrate the short story. May they survive and thrive.

  The story “On the Oregon Trail” owes inspiration to the computer game The Oregon Trail, originally created by the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium. Other stories owe less obvious but profound debts to the friends and fellow writers who read various early versions, or accompanied me on visits to biospheres, arcologies, or backyards. I’m grateful for the company of those who wrote their own work alongside me, or who simply commiserated with me afterward. I’ve learned a great deal from all the writing communities I’ve been a part of, especially Grand Valley State University, the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, the Kenyon Review, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and Arizona State University.

  Enormous gratitude to Jim Rutman and Ben George, without whom this book wouldn’t exist. I am also pleased to be in the good hands of the entire team at Little, Brown, including Bruce Nichols, Craig Young, Pamela Brown, Evan Hansen-Bundy, Jayne Yaffe Kemp, Gregg Kulick, Gabrielle Leporati, Lena Little, Pamela Marshall, Marie Mundaca, and Tracy Roe.

  Thank you to my husband, W. Todd Kaneko, who makes all things possible. Thank you to Leo for the joy. Thank you to my sister and father and mother. And welcome to the two littlest terranauts, here at the beginning of whatever comes next.

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  About the Author

  CAITLIN HORROCKS is the author of the story collection This Is Not Your City and the novel The Vexations, a Wall Street Journal Top Ten Book of the Year. She is a recipient of the O. Henry Prize, the Pushcart Prize, and the Plimpton Prize. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Paris Review, Tin House, and One Story, among other magazines, and has been reprinted in The Best American Short Stories. She lives with her family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

  Also by Caitlin Horrocks

  This Is Not Your City

  The Vexations