OUTGOING
by Alex Wilson

Alex Wilson is a writer, actor, and comic-strip creator from northern Ohio. Now settled in Carrboro, North Carolina, he runs the online audiobook project Tell-tale Weekly. Alex is a 2006 graduate of the Clarion writing workshop. “Outgoing,” his tale of two unlikely astronauts headed for a fateful collision, is his first professional fiction sale. 

* * * *

TEN: THE SIDEWALKSPHERE
Tara Jones was nine when her father warned her how she could break if she wasn’t careful. He wasn’t yelling, he said. He sounded like he was yelling. He wasn’t angry, he said. He smelled like cigarettes.
On a Thursday afternoon, Tara and her best friend Caimile played marbles on the sidewalk outside the gray brick apartment building in Buffalo where Tara and her father lived. Caimile was the same age as Tara, and about the same size. Their dresses matched, except for the color.
Tara’s favorite marble looked like a little globe, with milky white oceans and continents painted blue. She liked to thumb Antarctica before shooting this marble across the sidewalksphere where all their little worlds settled into the porous texture of the concrete.
Their legs sore from squatting over the marbles, Tara and Caimile took standing breaks every few minutes and pretended they were animals. Caimile was a giraffe, and she tilted her head back as though this elongated her neck. Tara took her sandals off and tried to pick up a marble with her toes, which were now her talons. She squawked. She was a bird.
“What kind of a bird are you?” Caimile asked.
“A red one,” Tara said. Her dress was red. Caimile’s was green. Caimile was a green giraffe.
“Let’s play helicopter,” Caimile said. She took Tara’s hands in her own and sidestepped into a dance, then faster into a full spin.
Tara giggled as she tried to keep up with Caimile’s steps, first on the sidewalk, then spilling out onto the patches of dirt flanking the sidewalk. Tara bit her lip and watched her feet. She didn’t want to step on the broken lime-colored glass, all sprinkled and shiny on the dirt. She didn’t want Caimile to step on her feet. She heard then felt the beat of her box braids against the side of her head.
Then Tara stepped on a marble: her favorite marble, the one that looked like Earth. She felt it fling out from under her, behind her, as her foot kicked back into the air. She spun her head around both ways, trying to see which way the marble flew, but she was dizzy and off balance from all the spinning.
Tara’s other foot followed back and out, and then she was looking at Caimile, whose feet still danced on the ground. Caimile swung Tara like a purse. She swung Tara around her as she continued to turn. Tara would have been airborne if her friend were to let go. Tara would have been a bird.
And just when Tara thought Caimile would have to let go because the spin itself was pulling her away and into the air, she screamed, two parts terror, one part glee. She pulled herself in toward Caimile. They hugged each other as they stopped.
“You’re really strong,” Tara said, after getting control of her breath again.
“You’re really light,” Caimile said. “I bet I could throw you over Mrs. Nelson’s fence.”
“You could not,” Tara said. Mrs. Nelson was an angry old white woman who lived in a small house down the block. She was the only white person Tara knew by name. Sometimes Mrs. Nelson yelled at the kids in the neighborhood, so sometimes they threw stuff at her windows. But never a person. “I mean, could you?”
And, though Tara didn’t break anything—not a bone, not a window—on her first attempt over Mrs. Nelson’s chain link fence, Tara’s father told her it was just because she was lucky. He wasn’t yelling, he said as he swabbed her scraped knee with something from a brown plastic bottle. But she needed to be more careful. He wasn’t angry, he said. He was just concerned.
Tara’s bones were not like other people’s bones, her father told her. “All bones are light, but yours are really light. Fragile.”
“Like a bird’s?” Tara asked.
“No, not hollow like a bird’s,” her father said.
Tara’s eyes opened wide. A bird’s bones were hollow? This was her most favorite thing, ever.
“They’re just fragile,” her father said, not yelling, not angry. “You also have some baby teeth in your mouth, where no adult teeth grow under them. We didn’t have fluoride in the water when you were a baby, and we think...”
But Tara wasn’t listening. She was wondering about the bones of birds and all the neat stuff they could keep inside them. She wondered if she’d ever find her marble again, the one that looked like a milky Earth. And more than anything else she wondered whether she was light enough to fly over Mrs. Nelson’s fence.
Tomorrow she would have to find out.
* * * *
Chris Moser was thirteen when he shot his first object into space from Chatham County, North Carolina.
Moser—as he preferred to be called—had actually figured out how to do it when he was twelve, but it took another year to calculate the right trajectory and exact launch window that would put his rocket into proper orbit from where they lived. One morning, finally confident in his preparations, he brought an empty Cherrygale can to breakfast. He placed it neatly in the middle of his empty plate.
“You’re not having soda for breakfast,” his mother said.
“I know,” Moser said. “This can is going to be the first man-made object to go around the Sun.”
His father said, “Well, you still need to eat something.”
“In six months,” Moser said, “It will return to Earth. I wanted to put some recording device in it, but it was too heavy with the engine, and it probably wouldn’t survive anyway.”
“Six months?” His parents looked at each other the way they looked at each other when they thought they knew something Moser didn’t know. “You mean a year? It takes a year to go around the Sun, you know.”
“Yes, Dad,” Moser said slowly, patiently. “I know.”
“A year then,” his father said.
Moser sighed, looking at the hint of his own reflection in the rim of the Cherrygale can. It was vague enough that it could have been anyone’s reflection. He liked to think it was the reflection of Christopher Columbus.
“It takes a year for us,” Moser said. “And it takes a year for the can going in the opposite direction. In six months, we’ll meet again, on the other side of the Sun.”
His father made an exaggerated kissing noise as he sucked on his own bottom lip for a moment, and then: “I was just kidding you, Chris. Six months sounds about right. Good luck with that.”
“It’s going to be awesome,” Moser said.
Six months later, when the can didn’t come back down as predicted, his mother and father were very nice about it, even after begrudgingly driving him halfway across the state to the side of the lake where Moser thought it should return.
They even offered to wait a little longer, but Moser said there was no point. If he was off by a minute, he was off by hundreds of miles. More than likely the Cherrygale can never made it into orbit, if it even cleared the atmosphere in the first place.
“You got it off the ground, that’s something to be proud of,” his father said on the drive home.
“Maybe it burned up in the atmosphere,” his mother said. “Doesn’t that happen? Sometimes?”
His father suggested: “Extra wind? Something you didn’t calculate?”
“Maybe,” Moser said. He was only half-listening.
“An asteroid field? Like in your video game?”
“Mom, the chances of that...”
“We can’t know every variable, Chris. Just predicting the weather is a crapshoot.”
“Maybe it hit a bird,” his mother said.
* * * *
NINE: THE HOLLOW BONES OF THE BUDDHA
Tara was sixteen and had never left Buffalo when she lost her virginity in the flower shop owned by David’s parents. It was a life experience she figured she was ready to have. She was going to be a poet, like Rita Dove or Maya Angelou, both of whom had lots of life experience. It was late in the summer. She had a lot to do.
On the way into the flower shop, David told her how much he liked the thing she wrote for English class. “You know,” he said. “That thing about angels. You should totally publish it.”
“I will,” Tara said. “I’m going to be poet laureate.”
David had a hidden stash of marijuana in one of the few plastic plants toward the back of the shop. “They used to be real,” David said, “But Mom never waters anything she can’t sell, so they died.”
He and Tara sat on the tile floor behind the register, and there she got high for the first time. Tara wore shorts and a camisole. The tile was cold. She leaned against the refrigerated glass case, which was even colder.
Tara decided to tell David a secret. At first she thought she’d save it for herself, and put it in a poem. But there would be many secrets to come along that she could keep for herself. She planned on having lots of life experience. She planned on being mysterious.
“It feels like the smoke is in my bones,” Tara said.
“I know,” David said.
“No, I mean like it’s trapped in there.”
“Cool.”
Tara told him that her bones were hollow, which she knew wasn’t true. A bird’s bones were hollow but strong. Hers were just brittle, only about five pounds lighter than they should be. But it was important that she make it sound cooler than her father had made it sound when he had explained it to her. It was important that she focus.
“I’m not yelling,” she said. She couldn’t feel her lips moving when she spoke. It was like ventriloquism. Or telepathy.
David said, “Yeah, you’re like the reincarnated Buddha.”
All Tara knew about Buddhism was something about breathing and letting go. She asked: “Does the Buddha have hollow bones?”
“Probably,” David said. “Take off your shirt.”
Her eyes were puffy and her nose ran. She didn’t know whether it was the weed or whether she was allergic to one of the pretty flowers or whether this was just one of those moments when she would cry. There weren’t many so far, but there were some. All poets cried.
Surrounded by so much green, Tara felt like she was in a jungle and she never wanted to go home. She concentrated on her breathing. She wondered whether they’d ever let a reincarnated Buddha become poet laureate. She wondered whether David would somehow always be inside her, like the smoke.
“Don’t break me,” she said.
“Okay,” he said, his hand on her cheek.
* * * *
Moser excelled in physics and engineering while attending Akron University in northern Ohio. He excelled sometimes to the detriment of any social life.
His favorite professor seemed particularly encouraging and interested in Moser, so much so that Moser decided to tell her about the Cherrygale soda can he launched into space seven years earlier. He wanted to know her opinion about what went wrong, though he suspected it was a wind problem, that he would have needed to manually correct any minor disturbances in its trajectory. He did not brag when he told his professor about it. He wanted to brag, but he didn’t.
“This is a crazy notion,” she responded, suddenly more rigid and professional than he had seen her with even the most unruly of students. “And it sounds like a very dangerous experiment which you shouldn’t have tried.”
Shamed, Moser walked quickly back to his dorm room. To think he had wanted to brag to her about his experiment. His roommate Aaron got up from his bed and punched Moser in the arm playfully when he saw Moser’s dour look. He asked Moser what was wrong. He asked whether he’d eaten breakfast yet.
“Got chewed out by Reynolds. She really respected me, you know? I should have kept my mouth shut.”
Aaron made a farting noise, called Reynolds a jackass, and told Moser not to worry about it. Aaron was on the MBA track and probably had not met Moser’s favorite professor.
Moser listened with only half his brain. The other half quietly purged some of the more far-fetched ideas from his head. Becoming an astronaut. Developing new sustainable energy sources. These ideas were slow-acting poisons, he’d realized on the walk back to his dorm room, and he had wasted far too much time on them. He was twenty years old with twenty years wasted, twenty poisoned years he could never get back.
Moser picked up his notebook and ripped out page after page, tossing them at the trash. Aaron stood over his shoulder as he did so. Aaron smelled like cigarette smoke and stale beer, as though he hadn’t brushed his teeth or washed his face since his date of the previous night.
“What’s with all the triangles?” Aaron asked.
Moser had pages of them, simple illustrations of rounded-corner triangles with numbers scribbled in the margins. It was just an idea, and each triangle he’d designed and refined now represented a girl he could have hooked up with. Each one was a party he could have attended with Aaron. In the future, Moser would look for rounded triangles on all potentially poisonous ideas, just as he looked for the V-shaped heads to identify venomous snakes back home.
Moser didn’t want to explain anything, waste another breath on a silly project, but he felt he shouldn’t just close up the one time Aaron showed actual interest in what he was working on.
“It’s a mirror,” Moser said.
“Oh.”
Moser hesitated. Aaron probably wasn’t studied enough to laugh at him. Worst case scenario would be scaring Aaron into never asking him another question, and frankly Moser could use the alone-time. He decided to risk it.
“It’s a space mirror, light enough to launch into orbit inexpensively. If we ever terraform Mars into something habitable, a relatively small number of these mirrors orbiting Mars could help trap the Sun’s heat within the planet’s atmosphere.”
“Cool,” Aaron said, and then nodded blankly.
Moser considered whether he should explain what it meant to terraform Mars, how incredibly huge and important a task like that could be. Aaron wasn’t stupid, but sometimes he lost himself in his get-rich-quick schemes as surely as Moser probably lost himself in poisoned science and invention.
“Mars can suck it, man,” Aaron said finally. “I’m cold right now. Will this thing work on Akron?”
Moser didn’t know. He had never thought of that.
“Breakfast?”
* * * *
EIGHT: ADVENTURES IN ISOLATION
Tara was twenty-five when she told Bhuvana, her lover of two years, that she needed more privacy than she currently enjoyed in their Rochester, New York apartment.
Tara had realized and accepted in college that she was a lesbian. Later Tara accepted that she’d probably never be able to quit her receptionist job and write poetry full-time. But it took her longer to accept that part of her that was introverted.
Tara felt ashamed of her social anxiety, her sometimes-reluctance to go to parties with friends, her exhaustion and irritability after attending those parties, and the cloud corrupting her ability to think as clearly when anyone else—even Bhuvana, who she often loved to spend time with—was in the room. These were symptoms of a phobia (perhaps it was even a disease?) that Tara could never view as normal, at least not in the way she could view her sexuality. She had told her father she was a lesbian when she was a college junior; she could barely even admit to herself that she was an introvert.
But now she told Bhuvana, who looked at Tara exactly as Tara feared she would look at her: with a disappointed frown, a tightened brow, and remote eyes whose brown color faded into the black of their pupils. Bhuvana’s eyes told Tara that it was wrong to want to be alone, even for just an afternoon hour, and especially for an artist’s retreat, which was just plain selfish.
“I’m looking at a six week fellowship,” Tara said, after preparing her words in private. “Eight tops. You can come visit. I just need to get out of the cubicle for a while.”
Bhuvana said, “I’m not here for your life experience.” It was an argument for a different insecurity, but it stung Tara anyway.
So Tara said again how “it’s not about us.” She knew there was a better way to explain it, a way Bhuvana would understand, but Tara could not find it in the cloud of her lover’s presence. Tara had become an expert with words when she could prepare and revise them in isolation. But between work and Bhuvana, she did not get that isolation often enough anymore. And the consequences to her mental health were cumulative, like sleep deprivation. She needed the tiniest of vacations.
“I’m so sorry I ever got in your way,” Bhuvana said. “Good luck to you.”
After Bhuvana left their apartment for the last time, Tara found them, the words that might have convinced Bhuvana to stay. When Bhuvana had come out to her traditional Hindu family, they had responded that she would get used to living with a man if she would just find a husband, or even let them find her one. Asking Tara now to live a life always in front of others was like asking Bhuvana to live with a man and just get used to it.
Tara wrote the analogy down in her notebook, where it didn’t seem so trite and useless. Maybe tomorrow she’d work it into a poem that Bhuvana would someday read and understand and feel bad enough about to call her. Someday.
Today Tara wished she had an anagram to get through the first few hours alone. Bhuvana used to create anagrams for her when Tara donated blood or visited the gynecologist. Working out the anagram would keep Tara’s mind off the otherwise unsettling experiences. Her poet’s pride made her feel guilty about escaping into her mind rather than staying present and mindful at important life events. But she believed the alternative would be a poetry cluster about barf bags and cowardice. She hated confessional poems.
Now this was an anagram moment with no Bhuvana. So she opened a bottle of Shiraz before pulling out her manila folder of applications for fellowships, writer retreats, and artist colonies. She reordered them so that the ones closest to Rochester, which would have been closest to Bhuvana, were no longer at the top of her list. Now Tara wanted to get far away from Rochester, from Buffalo, from New York. Something in a jungle would be nice.
By the end of the night, she decided to apply to four: two on the West Coast, one in Louisiana, and one sponsored by NASA.
NASA wanted to put a poet in outer space. The application was the only one she’d ever seen that asked for her weight in addition to the usual bibliography and writing samples.
Tara couldn’t think of anywhere more isolated than outer space. And she was a little tipsy.
* * * *
For three years, Moser spent seven months out of twelve alone on Great Bear Lake in northwestern Canada, doing the hour-per-day upkeep at an off season resort. Twice per month he received delivery of groceries, mail, and books. Otherwise his only contact with the outside world was through his computer.
Moser spent most of his day doing research, learning conversational Spanish, training with free weights, and typing up patent applications and proposals. He emailed the proposals to Aaron, his former roommate and now a successful entrepreneur. Aaron found practical uses and unexpected implementations for Moser’s designs and ideas, which turned out to be not so poisonous after all. If anyone ever laughed at anything Moser came up with, Aaron never told him about it.
Aaron and Moser were both multi-millionaires, largely because of a pen-sized transmitter Moser had designed and patented. The device could block cell phone signals within a thirty-yard radius. Variations of the device could knock out wireless microphones and other transmitters as well. Moser liked to believe that spies counted on his device for espionage missions all over the world, but Aaron had told him that regional theaters made up the bulk of their clientele.
Moser handled everything through Aaron, except for a construction project he managed from afar. In fact, Aaron knew nothing about that project. Moser felt it was better this way. If Aaron had known where Moser was dumping his half of the fortune, the least Aaron would do was laugh.
So Moser spent seven months of each year in solitude, not because he liked the work or needed the money, but because he wanted the practice and needed to prepare.
During the five months he wasn’t at Great Bear Lake, Moser divided his time between his construction site and tedious meetings with Aaron’s investors who kept asking him to “come up with another pen,” meaning another device as successful as the pen-shaped transmitter, but not at all similar to it. They wanted him to come up with solutions to non-problems, which could make money. Which is why Aaron was better at this side of business than Moser ever could be.
Also in those five months, Moser spent a great deal of time at the bottom of swimming pools.
There, too, he was preparing.
* * * *
SEVEN: SPACEPOET
Tara was twenty-seven when NASA launched her into orbit.
The ten-month training was the antithesis of what she wanted in a writing retreat. When they weren’t poking her with one thing, they were pushing her into something else. She trained fourteen hours or more every day, with homework besides and not even a graduate degree at the end of the rainbow.
The constant engagement (the constant people!) had kept her mind off Bhuvana, but it also kept her from dealing with the breakup as deeply as she’d needed to. She found herself reaching out to strangers for company at moments when she would have much preferred solitude. And she feared that she’d written Bhuvana into every poem of the last year.
Not that Tara had written all that many poems in the past year. But she told herself it would be worth it in the end to spend some time away from the world, practically alone in the sky.
There was a moment, as two men had lifted Tara out of a G-forces simulator, when it had dawned on her that the prodding and attention could be just as bad in orbit, that the confined quarters of the International Space Station would lend themselves to even less privacy than she had had in training, and that constant watch from 220 miles below wouldn’t be much better than someone physically looking over her shoulder. She also felt nauseated from the simulator, and she thought about the slow stroke with which Bhuvana’s hands might massage her stomach after a heavy meal. “Effleurage,” Bhuvana had called it. Tara would never be so loved again.
The rough hands of these two men, yanking her out of the simulator by her armpits, were a poor substitute for Bhuvana’s, but Tara felt convinced that if she dropped out of the space program, she would never be touched by anyone again. Nobody was that introverted.
NASA had wanted a poet, because someone up high felt that all Americans, even non-readers, respected poetry. An administrator told Tara in confidence that no one trusted journalists to be independent anymore, and the fame of a well-known fiction writer would certainly eclipse the attention NASA wanted for itself. And if something went wrong? Well, how many living poets could the average American name anyway?
So they wanted a non-threatening poet to communicate to the masses the importance and adventure of space travel, and to capture experiences rather than tell fanciful or exploitative stories. In a perfect world, Tara might well become the most widely read poet of her generation (not that that was saying much), and NASA would gain renewed interest in the space program. And even if no one was interested in the end, Tara still got an eight-month vacation on the International Space Station out of the deal. Which, if Tara was lucky, could offer more privacy than her training had.
All throughout the preparation that didn’t agree with her, Tara had expected the poet-in-space program to be canceled. She was sure that they would realize that no one, not even those who bought rare editions of Reinaldo Arenas and Edna St. Vincent Millay to decorate their condominium end-tables, actually read poetry anymore. Or worse, they would find some controversial, explicit haiku she’d written in high school that wouldn’t test well with white America. It would be a glorious end to both poetry and space travel, an end that could only be eclipsed by an explosion on the launch pad.
But now she was on the launch pad (so far, so good), in the third most important seat of the shuttle. She sat back vertically, excessively strapped into an uncomfortable chair, facing up. She had endured the training, the invasion of her personal space, and now would come the big payoff. She wanted to throw up, but mostly in a good way.
Right on cue, Tara heard Mission Control in her headset, saying one of those things that made her want to throw up in a bad way:
“Are you ready to put poetry in space, Tara?”
Alistair, the astronaut in the chair above her, turned and offered her a thumbs-up and tongue-over-teeth smile. He was the type, Tara decided in training, who confused annoying with charming. He wore a “body spray,” which Tara gathered was a perfume for men. As long as he didn’t wear it on the space station, she didn’t care what it was.
Tara looked over at Pia, their captain, who weighed almost as little as Tara did. She was four-foot-two with normal bones, so far as Tara knew. Tara pleaded with her eyes (“don’t make me say it”), but Pia shook her head and went back to her checklist, as always too busy to deal with Tara’s little drama.
So Tara cringed and closed her eyes. Was she ready to put poetry in space?
“There’s always been poetry in space, Mission Control,” she said finally, each word deliberate and exaggerated. “I’m just here to bring some of it back to Earth.” She hoped that anyone she respected would hear the sarcasm in her voice. Why again did they want a poet if they were just going to script this bullshit for her to say? She tried to stroke her belly through her coveralls. “Effleurage,” she whispered.
The shuttle shook even before the countdown started. Tara reminded herself that this was probably normal. But what kind of shaking was atypical for a launch? In the simulators she could never even tell when exactly she was supposed to be airborne, which surely was a failure as an astronaut as well as a poet, whose job it was to observe things.
She felt herself sink back deeper into her seat. They must be in the air now. NASA had evaluated Tara’s bone structure and decided she should be fine for space travel. They had machines to help prevent bone mass deterioration, and she should be more vigilant about using them regularly. But if she hadn’t broken anything in a quarter century of living, a shuttle launch probably shouldn’t crush her or anything. Probably, they said. Or anything, they said.
Radio transmission was nil—even if they could have received transmissions, they wouldn’t have been able to hear anything on their headsets over the rumbling of the ship. This, Tara felt, must be what it would feel like to be truly unreachable. Not for the first time, Tara felt bad about being an introvert, sorry for not wanting to hear human voices every second of every day. She felt a sudden panic. Perhaps as punishment she would never hear a human voice again.
Tara had broken her characteristic introversion earlier in the week by asking Pia for an anagram to work on during the launch. Pia had said she was too busy—her usual response to anything involving Tara “The Space Tourist” Jones—but later Pia had cheerfully handed Tara a slip of paper with “SLOWED T BRIDE” written on it. She even told Tara a clue: “This is why you shouldn’t be scared that our well-designed equipment isn’t going to blow us all up during launch.”
But instead of the anagram, Tara thought of something a college girlfriend had mentioned after taking a world religions class: that the Buddha was what connected people to the earth. Tara didn’t know if he did, but she wondered what would happen if the reincarnated Buddha was launched into orbit. Would this doom the souls of mankind? Would everyone on Earth die?
Tara imagined a thousand Buddhist warriors discovering at the last minute that Tara was their reincarnated prophet, about to launch her not-quite-hollow bones into space. In order to save the world, they would have to stop her and destroy the shuttle. But it’s a sin to kill the Buddha, so first they would have to meditate on this conundrum.
This could be her first poem from space, Tara thought. And then NASA would replace her with a young pop-singer/model-type whose palatable lyrics wouldn’t challenge or offend. They could make the diva compete on a reality-TV show where she’d have to vote other anorexics off the shuttle.
Tara solved the anagram suddenly. “LOWEST BIDDER!” she yelled. She called Pia all the names she would not have been allowed to call her if the radio microphones or Pia could hear her. Tara would let those words be the last she screamed before leaving Earth’s atmosphere.
The sky faded to black in the window ahead of her. It took Tara a minute to realize that this was a good thing. When the radio in her headset came back on, signaling that they and the people of Earth were still alive, Pia said the hardest part was over. Tara did not have the hardest parts, but she was unbroken.
“How does it feel, Tara,” Mission Control asked in her headset, “being the first poet in space?”
“I’m not the Buddha,” Tara said.
She wanted to throw up. But her twenty-eighth birthday was next week and she still hadn’t broken a bone. In lieu of cake, she would be in orbit around the Earth, as isolated as currently scientifically possible.
She pretended her hand was Bhuvana’s.
“Effleurage,” she whispered.
* * * *
Just before leaving Canada, Moser sent a large, flat envelope to Aaron. The envelope contained a copy of his will, and a large advertisement to be placed in the New York Times and in several prominent science periodicals once it was all over. There was also a sticky-note with the words: “Gone out for Cherrygale.”
Moser sent a second envelope to NASA, containing a letter and a cashier’s check. He set up his mail and e-mail to forward to Aaron’s addresses. He forwarded his phone calls to Aaron’s voicemail. He disappeared.
* * * *
SIX: THE WEIGHT OF WORDS
Tara had been in outer space only a few weeks when she heard that Cuba had launched a missile at her. It did not bother her as much as she might have expected it would.
In orbit, within the International Space Station (or ISS; life was too short not to give everything an acronym), Tara felt more disconnected, more trapped than ever. The stars were a gated community, and she was quarantined just outside the airtight walls. Though she was now part of the night sky, she felt further away from it than ever before. Even the novelty of zero gravity lost its magic the second time she had to go to the bathroom.
Video cameras and Alistair kept Tara constantly under surveillance. Alistair had been on Tara-duty since they’d discovered some mishap caused by the previous ISS crew, which lost them a month’s worth of oxygen, and would cost far too much emergency fuel to repair.
Alistair didn’t suffer the babysitting of their little space tourist gladly, especially after she’d ignored his advances. For exactly three seconds, Tara wondered how bored, frustrated, or just plain curious about weightless sex she would have to be to accept an offer that reeked of body spray. She knew that straight men without alternatives might have sex with one another in prison. Would a gay woman ever take similar comfort in the arms of a man in space? Not this man, Tara decided. Not even if not doing so would get her kicked off the ISS.
And not that it would ever come up, but sex with Pia was also out of the question. Pia treated Tara with an impatience others might have reserved for an untrainable kitten. This sometimes made Tara wonder how a disciplinary squirt gun would behave in zero-G.
Tara, for her part, was just as paranoid as they were. The walls, ceilings, and floors (and with no absolute orientation, how could you tell which was which?) seemed cluttered with displays, vents, and lighted buttons she feared accidentally tripping or breaking, and thus somehow dooming them all. Tara thought this was what a bone parasite would feel like if it tried to live inside her brittle skeleton.
There were no secrets on the ISS. Sound seemed to travel impossible distances in the modular corridors of the station. It was as though, because sound couldn’t carry in the vacuum outside, every clank and whisper had no horizon to fade into, and chose instead to echo forever within their cramped cubicles.
Pia, Alistair, and Mission Control all knew the beats of Tara’s heart. They sent an electric pulse through her entire body once per day to measure her current body mass and muscle deterioration. They knew how often she ran the pressure-impact cushion on various parts of her body. The device used magnets to simulate Earth gravity, theoretically reminding her bones that just because they didn’t need to hold her body upright didn’t mean they could just go ahead and waste away. The device was loud enough that the others couldn’t not know when she used it.
They knew her body temperature at all times, something Tara had never before thought of as useful information. She considered asking for it every half hour, and seeing how many lines of a free verse poem she could write using only those numbers.
They knew what she read. They retrieved and archived wirelessly every word of every draft she wrote on her tablet. They hadn’t let her bring paper or books because of the cost in weight, and any paper the astronauts had brought was earmarked for scientific work. So she had a palmtop computer tablet with handwriting recognition and a hard drive full of digitized books and references. She found the selection limiting.
Of her books, she missed her unabridged dictionary the most. They’d told her it would cost less to hire an army to type every entry into her palmtop than it would be to launch the dead tree version into orbit. Of course they didn’t hire that army either. She’d offered to cut off the margins of the book, which should have been a savings of thousands of dollars in paper grams, but that hadn’t been enough.
Mission Control knew within seconds what words she looked up in the limited tablet-dictionary they had given her. If she searched for a word that wasn’t in the database, they knew about that, too. They didn’t upload the definition to her tablet either; they just kept a record of what she wanted to know. They were bastards. That was the only explanation.
She tried to write and revise poetry in her head, but her initial thoughts—which she was used to sorting through with private freewriting—were increasingly about nothing but how much she hated people, how much she missed her home library and her favorite bookstores in Rochester, and how God had tried to create her as a bird and failed miserably because it turned out he, too, was a bastard.
She considered giving up, just passively reading for the rest of the flight, and maybe asking Mission Control to upload some anagram games to her palmtop to keep her occupied. It wasn’t her fault she was blocked for the first time in her life. She was learning to create, to think, on her public stage, but it was slow going, like learning to write left-handed after a lifetime of right-handedness crunched to a halt by a broken wrist. There was a better analogy in there somewhere about drowning, but she couldn’t think clearly enough to see it through. So there.
Pia and Alistair had no use for her. They were busy with their own projects, science experiments that they didn’t have the time or patience to explain to Tara.
Tara wanted to do experiments of her own. She wanted to flip through those hefty pages of her unabridged dictionary in zero gravity. She wanted to be the first woman on the Moon, if only to piss off Pia or at least get away from her, but of course they were both stuck in orbit with the rest of the space program. She wanted to weightlessly sip Shiraz from a traditional wine glass. It would take forever and make a mess, but it could be fun with the right drinking buddy. Tara wished she could let Bhuvana feel how firm her breasts had gotten in zero-G. Sometimes she wrote: “Muscle deterioration, my ass” in her tablet over and over, without further explanation. She was more alone than ever, and never alone enough.
So when Alistair floated his head into her cabin and asked her to come to the command module “right now,” she thought she might be in trouble, that she’d forced them to find a way to send her home early. It was a good feeling, to be wanted somewhere.
After every movement, Tara still had to stop and allow her equilibrium to catch up with what she could see in front of her. Although there weren’t many compartments in the ISS, each one could seem foreign when what you expected to be above you was now on your right, when you had never had this or that LCD at your feet before, and when you hoped that the lever you’d just snapped wasn’t anything important. She took at least one wrong turn before finding a familiar orientation and following it to the command module.
“We don’t know why,” Pia said quietly when Tara finally joined them, “but Cuba has attacked us.”
Pia was upside down to Tara as she said this, and Tara could not help but think it was a scene that belonged in an L. Frank Baum book. Cubans attacking upside-down munchkins seemed very plausible in a place like Oz.
“Hey!” Alistair poked Tara in the shoulder with his finger, the invasive way he would when he wanted her attention. “Are you smiling?”
“Am I?” Tara asked.
She imagined that Alistair’s skeleton was half as brittle as her own, and how far she would like to bend his finger backward. If they were about to die, who was going to care about a few broken bones?
* * * *
Moser originally picked Cuba as a launch base partly because he could build his project there using relatively inexpensive parts and labor, but also because it was closer to an equatorial launch than anything he could find in the United States. With Moser’s revolutionary-but-limited engine, he needed to piggyback off as much of the Earth’s maximum rotational velocity as he could get if he was ever going to reach orbital speed. And, just as importantly, one’s launch determines one’s orbit. Since Florida travel agencies were notoriously stingy about handing out permission to launch home-made rockets from the Kennedy Space Center, Moser determined that this location was his second best chance for hitting his mark.
He knew it was possible that the launch could be interpreted as an attack on the United States (“International” Space Station? Who were they kidding?), but he figured that by the time anyone worked out his trajectory they would also note his deceleration and thus discover he was no threat to anyone.
It certainly wasn’t Moser’s intention to attack the ISS. In fact, he just wanted to stop by for a couple of hours.
Then he’d be on his way.
* * * *
FIVE: CUBAN EINSTEIN
When the “missile” launched from Cuba matched the speed of the ISS, and seemed more interested in joining than harming them, only Pia continued to view the object as a problem. She only seemed to enjoy the experiences that she’d already practiced in a simulator. To Tara it was the most interesting thing that had happened so far on the trip, even if it meant there would be another person that she’d have to interact with.
They still didn’t have a visual when the radio lit up and a deep male voice announced: “Saludos, Alpha.”
Alistair looked at Pia. “There’s no ship called ‘Saludos,’ is there?”
“It means ‘greetings,’” Tara said. “It’s Spanish.” She felt confident in saying it. She felt useful.
“You speak Spanish?” The question was to Alistair, not to Tara.
“Nope.”
Pia sighed, which is what she always did before forcing herself to talk directly to Tara. Tara was still playing the role of Pia’s kitten.
“Okay, Tara,” Pia said, not making much effort to hide her predetermined disappointment. “Time to be useful then.” She sighed again. Tara wondered if kittens could sense passive-aggressive behavior.
“I only speak a little, really,” Tara said. A few inappropriate words from high school popped into her mind, along with memories of how she couldn’t wait to drop the class. She’d read a great deal of Spanish language poetry, but only in translation. She had thought about uploading a foreign language reference to her palmtop tablet earlier, but it just hadn’t seemed important at the time. And, if she had, she probably would have chosen Hindi, not Spanish.
But Pia pulled Tara by the forearm toward the console anyway, pressed a button, and nodded at her. It wasn’t a request.
“Um.” As always with new people, Tara didn’t know what to say. When she got back to Earth, she planned on using the whole space thing as a conversation starter. Maybe now she should purr and at least make Pia happy. “Es usted Cubano?” she asked slowly.
“Si!” the voice came back. And then there was a quick jumble of words Tara didn’t understand.
Tara apologized to Pia, ashamed. She sucked at being a cat. She was better at pretending to be a bird. “I didn’t get any of that,” she said.
“Dock, please?” the voice on the radio said.
“I think he wants to dock!” Tara said excitedly.
“Yeah. Figured that one out, thanks.” Pia said. “Ask him how many people he’s got in there.”
Tara tried to focus, working backward toward remembering the language. She counted in Spanish in her head from one to six, couldn’t remember seven, and drew a blank when it came to asking the question. Maybe if Alistair and Pia went on an EVA and shut off their radios for a minute, she’d be able to think clearly enough to get it back. Instead she shook her head apologetically. She sucked at Spanish. She was a bilingual failure.
Pia grabbed the back of Tara’s T-shirt and pulled her away from the radio. Tara felt as though Pia were carrying her by the scruff of the neck as she floated backward from the lighted console.
“I don’t even want to think about the sicknesses they could be bringing up here,” Alistair said.
Pia raised her hand as if to slap him in the back of his head. This Tara could respect.
Alistair rolled his eyes. “God, no. I don’t mean because they’re Cuban. I mean: we were quarantined before launch. They probably weren’t.”
The radio squawked again. “Asylum, please?”
Alistair burst out laughing.
“Quiet,” Pia said.
“I’m sorry,” Alistair said. “But anybody builds a rocket instead of a boat to cross to the States, they’re gonna be the most valuable immigrant since Einstein. I guess I’ll risk a fever.” He laughed again.
Pia nodded, depressed the radio button, and then pressed an adjacent button. All the console buttons looked the same to Tara, with each cryptic acronym having more than one meaning she couldn’t remember. She sucked at being in space, too.
“Mission Control, we have some good news and bad news,” Pia said. She repeated the good news using much of Alistair’s phrasing. The bad news, she said, was that even a fourth person on the station would tear through their resources—already depleted by the previous crew’s accident—at an alarming rate. And it was still almost eight months before the next planned shuttle launch.
“If anything else goes wrong up here or anything delays the shuttle,” Pia said, “I don’t know how long we’ll be able to keep four or more people alive.”
Of the Cuban Einstein, two astronauts, and feline poet, Tara knew which was most expendable. Maybe they’d be kind enough to aim the airlock at the Moon before they pushed her out?
* * * *
The latch opened and Moser smiled at the three residents of the ISS. There was the small white woman and the skinny dark-haired man next to her, both trying to maintain formal posture in the weightlessness. Behind them, at the far entrance to the docking bay, was a taller black woman, smiling. Even if Moser hadn’t recognized them from the news photographs, it would have been easy to tell which one was the space tourist.
“He doesn’t look Cuban,” the space tourist said. She wore a T-shirt and cargo pants. Her arms were stretched above her head. She leaned forward at Moser, more curious than professional.
“Quiet, Tara,” said the little woman in front.
“Sorry, but didn’t we decide he doesn’t speak English?”
“Un poco,” Moser said. A little bit.
Moser pretended to struggle with broken English, and introduced himself as Esteban, a Cuban refugee seeking asylum. If the astronauts were impressed with his ingenuity, or with the way his rocket docked seamlessly with the ISS, they didn’t show it. He moved slowly. He was cautious, but not overly clumsy. He knew he mustn’t make them think he was capable of any harm to them or the ISS, even unintentional harm. The real difficulty, though, was in containing his excitement at having made it this far.
Moser carried a pen-shaped device in his pocket. Even now, after years of preparation, he had doubts about this part of the plan. If any idea was laced with poison, it was this one. Perhaps he could trust these astronauts. Perhaps he could tell them his intentions, and then no more deception would be necessary. Perhaps they would have their own ideas and solutions and they could work together for all mankind. They were all Americans, after all. They were all scientists, explorers. Except for the poet, these were his peers.
He remembered his joy when Aaron had unexpectedly embraced one of his dreams. But it was not this dream. No one shared this dream, though he hoped many would somehow benefit. He remembered his crushing disappointment when last he’d shared this dream with a person of science. He knew he was on his own.
Moser slipped his hand into his pocket and thumbed the pen-shaped device. A few minutes into his disjointed conversation with the astronauts, he activated it.
* * * *
FOUR: UNDER A PIRATE’S BREATH
“Shit,” Alistair said. “I think we just lost contact with Mission Control.” They were right outside the docking bay, attempting small talk with Esteban while Mission Control scrambled to get a Spanish translator on the line. Mission Control being in Texas, the astronauts hadn’t thought it would take so long.
Pia looked at Tara. “Keep an eye on our friend. Can you do that? See if he wants some water? Make sure he doesn’t touch anything?” She turned to Esteban and poked him in the shoulder, Alistair-style. “If you damaged my station with your little publicity stunt, I will kill you.”
Pia and Alistair floated back to the command module, leaving Esteban in Tara’s care. Tara had had nightmares like this: she was an ambassador and an international crisis depended upon her underdeveloped social skills. The world was doomed. She might as well start kicking buttons on the wall.
They smiled at each other cordially. Tara wondered if Esteban’s presence had anything to do with Mission Control’s silence. Had he broken something when he’d docked? In training they’d told her the ISS was pretty well armored against space debris and kamikaze satellites. Could Esteban be the reincarnated Buddha? Had his launch doomed the souls of mankind on Earth? Tara couldn’t remember the Spanish word for bones.
“Would you like something to drink?” she asked slowly, in English. She lifted her hand to her mouth, miming drinking from a glass. She wouldn’t know how to mime a bladder and straw.
Esteban turned away from her, seemingly more interested in the wall of clutter outside the docking bay. It was like enormous Velcro wallpaper, dense with tools, writing instruments, and lab equipment in a disordered array where everything was accessible, but nothing was easy to find. She watched Esteban reach out and touch it before turning back to her.
“No, thank you,” he said quietly in English.
His accent was not Cuban. It was American. Southern. Georgia maybe? Bhuvana was better at placing people. Tara should call her.
“What?” Tara said. “What’s going on?” She wanted to back away from him, but, floating as freely as she was, she didn’t have any kind of leverage by which to push herself. She was still new enough at this that she thought she could move by swimming.
Esteban, however, was grounded. Tara realized he had one foot hooked under a wall notch with the expertise she had seen demonstrated by Pia and Alistair. He moved faster than Tara thought possible in the weightlessness, and grabbed her by the arm.
He pulled Tara close, and then let go of her arm so he could cover her mouth with the same hand, all this before she could think to scream.
“Sorry about this,” Esteban said coolly. He kicked off the wall, flying them back into the docking bay.
Dear God, she thought. Where was he taking her?
* * * *
Moser felt as though he’d forgotten something. He knew the equipment and procedures of an EVA as well as anyone could know them from books and video. He had not had access to official NASA simulators or training gear, though training at the bottom of a swimming pool had certainly given him a movement advantage.
After rechecking everything both on the NASA suit and in the interior of the airlock, he opened the doors to outer space. If the astronauts were not panicking already, they would certainly fear the worst when they noted the doors opening. It was time to allay their fears.
He thought this just as he discovered a new fear of his own. He swallowed hard, looking at the Earth and the Earth’s sky from this angle. He could not stop thinking that an orbit was simply a perpetual fall. And it took a view like this one to show him he was afraid of heights. Perhaps everyone was acrophobic on a sliding scale, and he had just found his limit.
“Greetings, Alpha,” Moser said into his headset. “Can you hear me?”
The voice came back tentative. It was the male astronaut who answered. “Five by five. Please identify yourself. Are you with Esteban?” He sounded bitter, and Moser didn’t blame him.
Moser connected the hose from the ISS to his ship. The lever to unhook the hose from its dock was tighter than he’d expected, and Moser felt clumsy in the large gloves of his suit.
He tried to think ahead about how to improvise if he broke something. The early astronauts had used a ballpoint pen to fix launch equipment when stranded on the moon. With all his equipment, inventions, and million-dollar ingenuity, he was certain that a piece of plastic accidentally snapping would end his mission straightaway. But the hose and refueling switches gave with a little more push, and they did not break, nor did he let the effort’s equal and opposite reaction throw him away from the ISS.
He breathed hard in his suit. This was it. He’d been rehearsing these actions for years. He hoped the words would not come out poisonous, because there was no way even Aaron could talk him down from here.
“My name is Chris Moser,” he said. “I am a scientist and explorer and I mean you no harm. I have temporarily disabled all other radio communication to the ISS. I’m simply purchasing some of your reserve fuel.” He did not call himself an astronaut. But he thought it.
Moser’s greatest triumph and greatest failure was to find the sweet spot where he had just enough fuel and equipment to launch himself into orbit. A few kilograms more of fuel, and his rocket designs would have failed. A liter less of fuel and he would not have had enough power to reach even low Earth orbit.
But orbit of the Earth was not Moser’s final destination. He was still a fourteen-year-old, dreaming about Cherrygale. He still dreamed about the far side of the Sun.
“Under no circumstances,” Moser continued, “will I take so much fuel as to put you or your crew in any danger, and NASA will this week receive a generous donation, which should more than cover the expense of getting replacement fuel up here. But my mission itself is what will be of much greater benefit to the space program. It all depends on how NASA chooses to spin this once the situation is over.”
Moser listened to his own breathing. It was loud in his suit, and he worried that he wouldn’t be able to hear the response. He tried to limit his movement, to cut down all other noise. He tried to slow the sound of his breath, which just made it worse. First acrophobia, now asthma? All the more reason to move on quickly, if low Earth orbit was so bad for your health.
“You will restore communication immediately.” It was the commander now, the little person. She punctuated each word, probably even more angry than she was when she’d threatened to kill him outside the docking bay. “You are committing an act of international terrorism and it will be seen as such by every government of the free world.”
At least they weren’t laughing at him. Perhaps they had discovered their missing poet by now. He knew they would go to great lengths to protect their little tourist and avoid a public relations nightmare. He was counting on it.
“I am sorry about the methods,” Moser said. “But history books don’t tell us about what lengths Columbus likely had to go to sail around the world. Communication will be returned to you momentarily.”
* * * *
THREE: BROKEN BIRD IN THE WINDOW
Tara needed to think. Presently—perhaps understandably—she couldn’t get past the word “kidnapped.” It was as though she’d convinced herself that “kidnapped” was an anagram for something more pressing, and her mind wouldn’t stop racing until she identified it.
If she could have done her morning freewriting without the voyeurs at Mission Control poring over her every word, if her hands weren’t presently bound by cord behind her back, and if she weren’t imprisoned in the tiny excuse for the kidnapper’s spaceship, then perhaps she could have written the word a thousand times and found something out on the other side. Or at least she could have massaged her belly.
She tried variations of the word and her situation, tackling the problem in her mind as she might tackle a poem. Kidnapping. Catnapping. Trapping. Hostage-taking. Piracy. Spacepirate. Like a carjacker. Spacejacker. Starjacking. Bound in orbit. Suffocation. Drowning. Tricked. Trapped. And then right back to kidnapped. How about context? Could there be a known mental disease where patients impersonated Cubans in order to hijack space stations? Bhuvana might know. This was a good enough excuse to call her, wasn’t it?
The cord binding Tara’s hands behind her back was surprisingly nonabrasive, even soft. Her bonds were not loose enough to wriggle off, but she felt that if she worked at it she might be able to squeeze a hand free. She didn’t want to put this much stress on any of her limbs; she knew her bones were fragile enough that she was more likely to break herself than she was to pull herself free.
The radio had just lit up and she heard the kidnapper take credit for the station’s inability to communicate with Mission Control. He’d identified himself as “Chris Moser,” not Esteban. She wondered if that was a name she should know. She had heard Pia’s response, angrier than Tara would have expected, but who knew how much of it was posturing? Or could it be that Pia actually cared whether Tara lived or died?
She saw someone in a spacesuit fly by the window. The person’s sun-visor was down and she didn’t know whether it was Alistair or her kidnapper behind the dark glass. The suit was so loose and undefined, it could even have been Pia. Tara screamed “Help!” and then felt stupid for forgetting the one thing she actually knew about space before training began: a lesson taught to her by an old movie poster about sound and screams in a vacuum.
Tara felt herself flushing. She made a face that she hoped would look like and exemplify the word “help,” but she wasn’t sure Alistair, or whoever it was, had noticed her before the spacewalker floated past and his field of vision no longer included the porthole.
Screaming at the astronaut made her realize how quiet it was in the kidnapper’s ship. There was the whirring of machinery she couldn’t see, but it was no more disturbing than the white noise of a fan and, compared with the clanks and rumbling and chatter of the ISS, it was practically silent here.
Esteban (or Moser or whatever his name was) had stuck masking tape on many of the console buttons, detailing their function. Tara realized she could actually understand what each button did, a far cry from her reaction to the vague, acronym-littered panels of the ISS command module, designed to confuse and keep Tara a helpless tourist, no matter how much she’d trained for the mission. Strange that a holding cell would make her feel empowered about space travel for the first time.
Suddenly it occurred to her that there’d been no mention of her kidnapping on the radio. Did Pia or Alistair even realize she was missing? Did they even understand that Esteban and this Moser character were the same person? He hadn’t promised to return her to the ISS before going off on his “mission,” whatever that was.
Shit, Tara thought. What if he planned on taking her with him?
Tara pulled harder on her hand and started to think she wasn’t escaping fast enough. No one was coming for her. She realized what she had to do. She would have to break.
She took a few breaths to calm herself. Then she jackknifed off one wall as best she could with her arms tied behind her, and floated to the opposite wall only a few feet away. Before impact, she bent both legs and knees in a hunched-over squat, and, when she felt her feet flat on the wall again, she sprang backward toward the previous wall as fast as possible.
A bird needed her freedom. She hoped she would crush only one of her hands.
* * * *
Moser completely emptied the auxiliary tank from the ISS as planned, but the refueling finished far more quickly than he had expected. He rehooked the hose onto its base on the outside of the station, using more liberal force this time to attach it back into position. He used his hands to walk himself back to his ship and peered inside.
The tinted portholes were darker in the low Earth sky than he had expected them to be. He saw a hint of the lighted panel, but not the movement of the poet within the cabin. Moser had anticipated that he would need to see the fuel gauge from outside the craft, so he had created a small array of mirrors, illuminated and clear to anyone peering into the porthole.
There was a problem.
Moser had about 80 percent of the fuel he needed to break out of Earth’s orbit and reach the approximately one-hundred-thousand kilometers per hour he required to get into orbit around the Sun in the opposite direction. His current rotational speed would only take him so far.
He realized that they must have shut off his fuel from the inside; that was why it had stopped early! He had thought for certain the astronauts would be compliant, that they would not want to risk the life of their poet.
“Alpha! Did you block my refueling?”
“Negative, Moser,” the man’s voice said blandly, after a moment. “You’ve depleted our auxiliary tank.”
They were lying. Moser knew for a fact that they had more reserve fuel in that tank. Moser needed to be more assertive. He couldn’t let them stop him now. “Alpha, I cannot complete my mission without sufficient fuel. Please explain.”
“Explain what? You sure you don’t have a leak? Duct tape can only handle so much pressure, you know.”
Leak? Was someone out there with him, sabotaging everything? What did he mean, leak? “Alpha, what did you do to my vessel?”
“Not a damn thing. Our emergency fuel was low from repairs we had to do last week. Maybe if you stopped blocking our communication, our boys on the ground could help you with your little problem.”
Moser wanted to hit something. He couldn’t fail when he was this close.
He went over the numbers in his head. With the amount of fuel he had at his disposal, he would need to drop more than thirty pounds. But he’d already cut everything he could. Every food substance on the ship was even the maximum calorie-per-ounce. The few redundancies he’d allowed himself in emergency heat sources, paper, and oxygen candles amounted to barely five pounds.
And Moser dared not steal any of the space station’s primary fuel, for fear of dooming the astronauts on board. If he killed three innocent people it wouldn’t matter how important his mission was. No history book would forgive him. Would he be able to forgive himself ? Moser couldn’t imagine a joyride around the Sun, six months alone with just his guilt for a copilot. And NASA wouldn’t go out of their way to catch him when he returned to Earth’s atmosphere six months later.
As Moser made his way back to the airlock, he felt his pulse throbbing in his temple. He’d have thought such a rapid heartrate would come bundled with exhilaration rather than despair. He looked down between his feet so he could see the Earth, possibly for the last time as a free man.
But it wasn’t there. Moser’s body tightened up. He looked frantically left and right. His suit movement was too slow for his panic. He would suffocate and fall and fail in all other ways it was possible to fail.
Then he realized he was upside down. Or the Earth was. He looked up at the world above him, and in his head he felt its immensity crashing down upon him.
Perhaps it was not too late to ask for help. He had no alternatives, and he could still bargain with them. He had a hostage, as well as control over their ability to communicate. Perhaps they would find an error in his calculations, some metric-to-standard conversion he’d failed to make properly on his own. Perhaps he could work this out.
“I ... have an engineering problem, Alpha. I need to lose thirty nonessential pounds to complete my mission.”
“You tried cutting off your head, asshole?”
Moser turned himself around awkwardly to look back at his ship. A light was on in the cabin. He could see quite clearly into the porthole now.
He saw the poet’s middle finger pressed against the inside of the tinted glass. Her finger looked crooked, bent, but it might have just been light distorting through the glass. They were laughing at him.
Moser looked again at the enormous Earth above him. He was beneath it. He was in hell.
* * * *
TWO: A ROOM OF HER OWN
They locked the pirate outside the airlock while deciding what to do. Even with Tara free, this Chris Moser character insisted he wouldn’t restore communication with Mission Control until they helped him figure out how to launch his toy rocket around the Sun. He had a few hours of oxygen left to suck on while they let him reconsider.
Tara remembered a scene in a space film where stranded shuttle passengers communicated with Houston using Morse code and some long forgotten switch or another from a previous mission. Pia and Alistair stared at her blankly when she suggested this. “Well, if we knew about the switch,” Tara snapped, “then it wouldn’t be long forgotten, now would it?”
Tara’s left hand stung much less than she felt it should. All her life she had been scared of breaking a bone. Now she’d found that it wasn’t so bad. She’d only seriously injured a finger and a thumb, and Alistair had set and wrapped them for her. This experience, too, wasn’t so awful; in all the excitement, Alistair had forgotten to reapply his body spray.
She felt extroverted and elated after her kidnapping and escape, and the ISS felt less confined. She wasn’t going to be treated like a kitten anymore. She was a bird, damnit.
“Does it hurt when I do this?” Alistair asked, suddenly with a legitimate reason to poke her with his finger.
“No,” Tara said. “But I don’t think I’ll be flying again anytime soon.”
Tara realized that with communication down, Mission Control must not be monitoring her palmtop tablet. The realization was bittersweet. Now that she could finally write her poetry unobserved, there was an emergency that demanded her assistance. She stared at her tablet, thinking she would never get a chance to write another poem.
But if Moser had left a frequency open so he could communicate with the ISS, he couldn’t be blocking everything, right?
“Anyone down there still read poetry?” she wrote. She thought a moment about how they could respond to her. Upload a file maybe? She added, “Golly, I would love to read some D.H. Lawrence, if only someone somewhere knew how much I would.”
She refreshed her file browser every few seconds. After a minute, a new file appeared on her tablet called “DH.” She opened it and it said simply:
“Working on the Lawrence. You guys okay up there?”
They communicated this way for a few rounds. She shared with Mission Control the names “Esteban” and “Chris Moser.” Mission Control came back with some info about him. They’d already started an investigation because they’d received some sort of manifesto-letter in the mail, along with the biggest independent donation to NASA in decades.
Chris Moser was an inventor. He’d had a few publications in academic journals and they were trying to find copies. (Tara wondered if NASA had scrambled like this to read any of her more obscure publications.) But one of Moser’s more successful patents was a pen-sized transmitter that blocked cell phone signals within a short range. Could he have modified it to disrupt certain radio signals as well?
Tara remembered how her kidnapper had touched the wall of clutter outside the docking bay before taking her to his rocket. She told the astronauts to look for pens, somewhere in the middle of the wall, or maybe something that could contain a pen. Alistair scoured the Velcro wall and found the transmitter tucked in with a pouch full of pencils.
A push of a button restored communication to the station.
* * * *
Though Moser insisted he was no threat, the astronauts kept him tied up in a side chamber. He was fairly certain he could break free of his bonds if he so chose (if the poet could do it, then certainly he could), but he decided to stay submissive if only to keep from angering them more than he already had.
He wondered though if his inability to put their lives at further risk was a lack of drive, a lack of the kind of spirit that put great men in history books. Surely Columbus knew some of his own crew wouldn’t survive, even if they had followed him willingly.
The tourist—the poet—visited Moser regularly, which surprised him. Of all the three, he’d expected her to be the least forgiving. He had never wanted to hurt anyone, and he was thankful he had used a non-abrasive cord to bind her wrists. It hadn’t been an act of kindness to choose that particular cord; it was simply the lightest binding material he could find.
When he asked her why she came to talk to him, she showed him the stash of blank paper she’d stolen from his ship, now all scribbled over with sentence fragments that made little sense to him. She said she’d forgotten how wonderful rough drafts could be.
It was like talking to a child sometimes. Still, she seemed to like him. Maybe if his dream was truly over, it was time to start thinking about dating again. They had more than eight months to get to know each other, after all.
The poet asked him if it would be possible to modify his pen-shaped transmitter to block the signals coming from her tablet. It would have been easier to remove the internal antenna from the tablet itself, but he chose not to tell her this. He was in enough trouble as it was.
They hadn’t decided what to do about Moser yet. NASA hadn’t even gone public about his whole scheme yet, but he wasn’t so sure this was a good thing. The ISS commander said he would be tried and hanged for treason, terrorism, and even piracy if he ever made it back to Earth. But if they chose instead to sweep him under the rug, well, the rug was the airlock.
The cryptic advertisements Moser had asked Aaron to submit to the Times and the science journals might not be accepted at any price, and, if they were, they were likely to be dismissed as the ramblings of a crackpot, especially if NASA denied all knowledge and Moser’s body burned up in orbit.
In the meantime, the poet seemed to spend a lot of time on Moser’s ship. She said it was quiet in there, as private a place as she could find in orbit. She asked him for ways to add a small pressure-impact device to his ship’s chair. The device simulated Earth gravity’s effect on bone density and she had to spend at least a few minutes with it daily, probably to prevent osteoporosis. Bone mineral loss was a problem for men, too, in space, but it was an area he had deliberately sacrificed to the weight gods to get his ship off the ground.
The poet said that, if she had her way, she’d spend all her time on Moser’s ship, which was an interesting attitude to have about a former prison cell. She’d even asked Moser about his mission, and about how much less Moser would have had to weigh to succeed with the fuel he had.
“I don’t know,” Moser said in dismissal. He had been over it too many times in his head. He’d tried. He’d failed. That was all there was to it. “A hundred pounds? Probably closer to ninety.”
“Really?” she asked. She said something about it being time to check her vitals and pushed off away from him.
* * * *
ONE: AMBASSADOR
The only thing Tara knew about Cherrygale was something she’d accidentally stumbled across doing unrelated research: that someone came up with the cherry-sweetened soft drink in the South during the World War I sugar shortage. Tara didn’t know why or how she remembered this (having never tasted the drink—it wasn’t available in the North) or even whether the story was true. But it had stuck in her mind.
So when Moser told her, “Godspeed, Cherrygale,” between strapping her into his rocket ship and launching her into orbit around the Sun, Tara took it as a term of endearment.
She came to it with a poet’s mind and decided that Moser was sugar and Tara was cherry. When sugar was incapable of orbiting the Sun, cherry became an acceptable substitute. Either that or it meant that Moser thought every African American had a soft spot for fruit flavored soft drinks.
Later, over Tara’s regular check-ins on the radio—an hour, twice per day, no more—Moser shattered the analogy by telling her about a childhood experiment of launching a can of Cherrygale into orbit and losing it forever. Tara found this story much less endearing.
Moser also said the story about cherries probably wasn’t true. “They sweeten everything with corn syrup these days anyway.”
“That’s nice,” Tara said.
At first, Pia seemed mortified by Tara’s desertion and Moser’s participation in it, but, surprisingly, she quickly warmed up to the idea. Maybe she realized how great this could be for the space program or maybe Mission Control ordered her to play nice so they could take credit for the adventure. Tara figured it was more likely that Pia was just glad to be rid of her dead-weight tourist.
Or perhaps Pia was actually a Buddhist, practiced in the art of letting go, and Tara should have tried harder to like her. Seriously, would it have killed Tara to purr once in a while? Or at least do some actual research about Buddhism? NASA, for its part, seemed thankful that they hadn’t gone public and vilified Moser yet, because they still needed him around in case something went wrong with a rocket ship only he understood.
And, for a good three weeks, Tara enjoyed her retreat. She wrote and read, and at times just stared out into space. Moser’s ship rotated completely about once every eight hours, and the short, wide window viewing area was limited to not quite 180 degrees at any given time. Somehow in this smaller, more fragile vessel, she finally felt close enough to observe the universe around her, especially during those hours when Earth was out of view completely. Sure, at times she felt lonely, but it was usually a specific loneliness: an ache for her books, for more room to stretch, for Bhuvana, for effleurage, for chocolate, for music, for sex.
Her tablet’s limited wireless communication ability was beyond Earth’s reach within a week, so she read whatever she wanted to read as freely and anonymously as she would in a library. This privacy perk more than made up for her inability to receive title refreshes from Mission Control. Still, she preferred to write her rough ideas on paper, and then recite the final drafts of poems and other observations into the ship’s more powerful radio at what she called her “Extroverted Hour.”
Then Tara saw something new. Earth didn’t look quite like Earth. It was suddenly much farther away and whiter than she’d remembered. It seemed to be setting deeply behind the Sun. There was something else surreal about it that made Tara think she was only dreaming, but she could not quite pinpoint what it was that gave her that feeling.
Perhaps it was just a cloudy afternoon for this particular hemisphere. The world was milky, she thought, and she wrote down how she wasn’t sure whether she’d lost her marbles or finally found her favorite one. She decided not to report her observation just yet.
This different-looking Earth disappeared from her field of vision, and then reappeared as normal-looking Earth (at the proper apparent distance) less than an hour later. She wondered if it was just an optical illusion or a hallucination she had seen. Had the rotations of Moser’s ship increased? Was she spinning on a new axis? That would mean an engine misfired, wouldn’t it?
And then she realized what was really wrong with the different, milky Earth: it was on the wrong side of the Sun.
Maybe it was some sort of reflection. That could account for the discoloration, too. She should report it immediately, she thought. It could be an eye problem, a vitamin deficiency, or a sign of oxygen deprivation.
Or it could be a great big space mirror on the other side of the Sun. She tried to think like a scientist. But she still didn’t want to contact NASA with questions and no answers.
Four hours later, Tara was thankful they no longer monitored her heartbeat. She was going to be the most famous poet in the history of the world, and then some.
She debated how to tell NASA about it. She realized that whatever she said, those words might last forever. She was late for her Extroverted Hour, but she wanted to get it right. She felt the eyes of the world over her shoulder, even as she wrote in absolute isolation.
Oh what the hell, she thought. Shakespeare wrote his name into a psalm. The world would forgive her if she put hers in a haiku with much less subtlety. She wrote,
Other side of Sun:
Second earth in same orbit.
Not kidding! Tara.
It wasn’t exactly poetry, but that was all right. Tara was an astronaut now.
* * * *
Christopher Columbus had planned on going all the way around the world. Moser had planned on going all the way around the Sun. He should have suspected that history could repeat itself, that it could both disappoint and surprise. He should have considered the possibility that, however unlikely, another planet could be 182.6205 days behind the Earth, in equal rotation around the Sun, always hidden from Earth by the biggest barrier in the Solar System.
Or some astronomer should have detected the slight gravitational pull a second Earth half a year behind them would have on the Sun. Surely an astronomer with cursory understanding of physics should have detected an equal and opposite reaction, no matter how minute, such a mass would have on the other masses they did know about. Or one of the probes NASA launched further out into the Solar System should have caught it in a photo. Perhaps one did, Moser thought. And perhaps it was dismissed as a trick of light or a photographic negative accidentally reversed.
But there it was. Proof that coincidences did happen. Or that God was playing peekaboo. So what if it took a poet to find it. If Moser had been a poet, perhaps he wouldn’t have needed Tara.
Tara was two months away from reaching the new planet, her journey cut short from six months to three. But Moser could not help but feel the urgency of the situation. He had built a parachute into his ship for his own return to Earth. But, in truth, he had hoped to motivate NASA or another excited space program into rendezvousing with him before he hit Earth’s atmosphere. And even if the clouds on this second Earth meant the atmosphere was thick enough to catch Tara’s chute, what were the chances of the atmosphere also being breathable and nontoxic?
Best case scenario, if Tara survived the impact, would be her sitting there grounded in Moser’s ship until she suffocated or starved. And they wouldn’t even know what happened to her, since they wouldn’t be able to pick up radio signals all the way on the other side of the Sun. Sure, she said she loved her isolation. But that didn’t mean she wanted or deserved to die alone.
“Very funny, Moser,” Tara said suddenly over the radio. He had long given up trying to get her to address the ISS as “Alpha.”
It was now a few weeks after Tara’s universe-changing observation that Earth wasn’t the only Earth in the Solar System. She was early for her Extroverted Hour but generally Moser or Alistair monitored the radio in case of emergency. It was especially important now, as the radio signal became fainter, and its delay longer, the further away she flew.
“Come again, Tara?” Moser said and waited.
“I’d send you a postcard if I could,” Tara said. “How long have you been able to monitor it?”
“Monitor what?”
“My tablet. You guys boosted the signal or something?”
“What are you talking about, Tara? We haven’t been able to ping your tablet for a month.”
“Don’t be an ass. I saw the new file. ‘If found, please return to Christopher Moser.’ Is that really your address? I used to date someone from North Carolina.”
“Please return?” Moser said back to her. He didn’t know what else to say. That Tara’s Extroverted Hour was about to get a whole lot longer? For as long as he could remember, Moser had wanted to be a scientist, an astronaut, an explorer. He had wondered what happened to his Cherrygale can ever since he was thirteen. He’d dreamt that it had gotten swept out of trajectory by random wind, or that, at best, it had melted in the fires of the Sun. But never in his life had he considered that anyone anywhere could have found it, or that there would have been enough discernible text on that Cherrygale can—or on the note etched on the inside of its makeshift engine—to teach a new civilization the Roman alphabet. The note had been his mother’s idea.
Now that Tara’s survival depended less on his own invention and more on the know-how of an alien civilization at least advanced enough to communicate in binary, Moser’s thoughts turned to his own fleeting legacy. Who would remember the man in Tara’s wake, the man too heavy for his own carefully planned mission?
“Please return,” Moser mumbled again, and perhaps he even meant it. Because turning the ship around, as difficult as that might be, suddenly felt infinitely easier than telling an introvert she had just made first contact. Moser was never that good with people.
Copyright (c) 2006 Alex Wilson