The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (8 page)

First came the Orion Block IV, a squat cone mounted on four stumps. This would be our ride to Europa, he explained, a capsule built to pierce the Night Glass and turn circles around Earth. A connected payload stage would contain two other vehicles and a mobile home of sorts. He walked us around a buglike garbage truck with twelve wheels. The Space Exploration Vehicle. Faron was assured he would get a chance to drive her soon enough.

Suspended above the SEV hung a dull gray form that looked like an enormous plumb bob or an upside-down teardrop. Part diving bell, part drill, Nguyen said the Astronomers called this machine the Penguin. At the business end was a thermal probe powered by “advanced Stirling radioisotope generators”—nonsense words that the Reades registered with satisfaction. “My engineers tell me the Penguin can penetrate a kilometer of ice per hour. Once the saline ocean is breached, it becomes a fully functioning submersible that can support a two-person crew for up to four days.”

Next he showed us the Deep-Space Habitat, a moon cabin with a rotunda as big as a grain silo. It doubled in size by deploying an inflatable loft. Nguyen handed around a stack of photos. There it was, pitched beside an arroyo way out west. With the pneumatic loft raised it looked like a tinfoil popcorn skillet, so we took to calling our future home the Popper. In the pictures, two men in those white fat suits stood around it with pickaxes. They were migrant workers, same as us, but their lean-to was considerably fancier than any the Van Zandts had ever slept in.

Mae Reade was not impressed.

“It's antiques.” She rapped the Orion with her fist. It sounded solid enough to me. “You dig this coffin out of the ground and expect me and Bill to fly it? Do you have no respect for human life?”

“To answer your first question: yes. I do expect you to fly it.” Nguyen was already heading back to the Tyvek tunnel. Our tour had ended. “I will point out that no one studied flying like the Astronomers. If you're saying you don't have the skills to execute our plan, we can certainly review the terms of your contract.”

Umma shared her worries a different way, by sitting down on the steel floor to hug her knees. “Miss Van Zandt,” Nguyen said, “this bunker has not been compromised for centuries. Not a fire ant passed through its hermetic walls until that front loader fell through. My engineers assure me this equipment, though old, is in pristine condition. And we know how to use it.”

This was true. At the end of their run the Astronomers anticipated a brief exile before Gunt rule was restored. They buried the Orion until such time as it could be safely retrieved. In the case, however, that their learning did not survive the intervening age, they left behind detailed instructions. They prefabbed every piece of hardware and automated the guidance system so that even barbarians like ourselves could use their antiques. It was, as they wrote, turnkey technology.

“Sounds like a solid deal to me!” Good old Pop. He stroked my mother's hair. “See, Umma,” he said. “It's space ships!” I loved my father, he meant well, but he had more spirit than brains.

“Sounds like they thought of everything but one,” said Bill. “What happens when that module of yours smacks the Night Glass?”

“That—” said Terry Nguyen; he stooped down to kill the generator. The tunnel went dark. “—is what I have invited you here to discover.”

 

7.

Back at the motor homes Terry handed around sharpie pens and had us write our names in block letters on the backs of our coveralls. He said to take good care of them and they would see us through ten-plus months of training.

Pop tailored his to fit the frame of a giant. He cut slits up the sides and down the backs of the legs for his muscles, taking delight in the mutilation of a uniform that reminded him of the Cuba Pens. To Umma he said, “These might have been made in your old Pap's factory, eh?” In her jumpsuit she looked like a bundle of rods in a broke-down tent. It did not improve her disposition to recall her father.

Me and Sylvia wore our jumpsuits like juvies on turkey vulture duty. For their petty crimes these poor kids were court-ordered to collect dead birds for incineration. After a cull, they could be seen making the rounds of the Gables. Faron liked to tease them, but I felt bad. When I saw the juvies pushing bins of vulture carcasses, all I could think of was Pop cranking the handle on a sugarcane press.

Faron was the only one who resembled a proper spaceman in his jumpsuit. “My, my, Little Brother,” Sylvia said to me. (Somehow she couldn't get that we were twins.) “Look at flyboy here.” Sylvia could scarcely take her eyes off him, but it was my neck her arm was slung around.

We would wear those jumpsuits every day for close to a year, washing them infrequently in the pond, until they were stiff with salt. Some nights, after a brutal day of training, we even slept in them. Seven days a week we endured the same routine: school in the morning, gym midday, and a sweaty long afternoon of games designed to simulate conditions on the Orion or Europa. Analogs, they were called.

In the classroom Nguyen read flatly from the stack of wirebound notebooks that comprised
The Constellation Flight and Survival Manual
. We memorized every knob and toggle on mass spectrometers, seismometers, magnetometers, microscopes, and cameras. He thought it went without saying, but we were forbidden to share any classroom learning with an outsider. Terry urged us to review the nondisclosure clause in our contracts.

Bill Reade said, “Who the shit would we disclose to?”

On a tiny screen we watched ancient training videos in which dead scholars taught us the rudiments of Astronomy, the tangled mechanics of space flight. It was too much to learn, and they did not deliver it slowly. They hurried through the most arcane subjects, as if someone might arrive at any minute to unplug their cameras. We learned how to air-clean a pressurized suit, how to mend a broken cleat, how to reconstitute tuna salad with a spigot.

This delicacy was not a salad at all but a gray paste extracted from a long-vanished ocean fish. Food was one thing that did not survive in the pit. In space we'd be growing our own. Three mornings a week we studied hydroponics and rabbit husbandry. Yams were farmed in a fibrous substrate that looked like previously owned wigs. We tried to grow water spinach in plastic tubs. But the spinach rotted and the sweet potatoes drew flies. The rabbits, in defiance of their nature, refused to multiply.

Much attention was given to the pleasures and perils of Gravity. Terry said the Astronomers described this force as a mystical fiber that binds the Wanderers to our Sun. Like desire only larger. But to hear Dr. Padma Ridley of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory talk of gravity on those ancient training videos, there was nothing magic about it. Gravity's tether, she said in her Gunt-inflected English, drew tighter as you approached a planetary body. In the vast blanks between, however, it had no claim on you. Like family, gravity was one of those things that you never miss until it's gone.

To prove it, Terry loaded us on a KC-135 cargo jet, the interior of which had been padded with stained futons. The pilot would fly to 32,000 feet and then dive straight down. For twenty-five breathless seconds we would float about, dizzy as chicken feathers from a busted duvet. It felt like the least fun bouncy castle you ever set foot in. Then, just before striking the ground, the KC would level out and gravity would grab you by the skin. I learned to position myself underneath Sylvia. I wanted to soften her fall, to be the object that drew her down.

Training mostly concerned abstinence. Doing without: food, fresh air, human-scale toilets, elbow room. Gravity wasn't the only thing we would leave behind. Europa is a world without warmth. The Reades hailed from Canaday and declared themselves impervious to cold, but having never traveled farther north than Sparkle Town, I thought ice was a substance developed by food engineers for the purpose of sno-cones.

Terry wanted to prepare us for the hardships of a distant icy world, so he took us to an abandoned skating rink. When Bill peeled the plywood off the front door I gasped. I had seen such a place only in picture books like
Blade Palace
and
Skate, Sister, Skate!
A gust of cold rolled over my feet. I smelled teen funk, sparkly vinyl flashed in the dark. We clawed our way across the rink on steel crampons. Terry flipped a switch and colored lights crawled over the ice, over our jumpsuits, over Sylvia's face like the every-flavor sno-cone kids called a suicide.

In the center of the rink Mae stood grasping the handles of a Heat Poke. This implement is a thermal cousin to the jackhammer, engineered to penetrate solid ice. As she drove in the bit, the rink began to boil and steam. The heat was so intense, it baked my legs like a campfire. Suddenly there came a thud and Umma disappeared under a multicolored fog. Pop crawled across the rink on hands and knees, rising at last with my mother slung over one shoulder. I was sure she was dying, the ice had killed her, the colored lights.

In the snack bar Pop elbowed a chip warmer onto the floor and laid her across the counter. Faron located a jug of ammonia, which Pop tipped onto a rag. “Quit it,” she said, shoving him off. “I didn't pass out. I only wanted to touch the ice. I just wanted to lie down and know how it will feel.”

I assumed she meant Europa. At the thinnest places its ice shield is said to be seven kilometers. It would take the Penguin, our diving bell and thermal probe, that many hours to boil through to the ocean below, seven more to resurface. Add a few hours for exploration, and at minimum we would deploy inside the Penguin for seventeen-hour tours.

To inure us to the dark, the pressure, the cramped quarters, and silence, we got a simulated taste of those deathly conditions. We were taken in pairs by fishing boat to the middle of Indian River. A two-person deepwater diving bell hung from a winch off the stern. It looked like a snakehead with a pair of glass domes for eyes, and it opened like a jaw to receive its passengers. The red-upholstered cabin made it seem hungry. Early one Saturday morning it was our turn to be swallowed. Me and Sylvia.

She stepped aboard without hesitation and slipped into the pilot's seat, but I stood at the railing, paralyzed with fear. A line of clouds was penciled across the horizon; I watched it grow into a smudge to conceal the terminal cranes at Coco Beach. The submersible rose and fell on the chop, and the cable pulsed like a guitar string.

Nguyen asked what I was waiting for, and I did not want to tell him the truth. That I was waiting to be less like me, more like Faron. Sylvia said give him a second. She offered me a sad smile. Not much in the way of reassurance, but it got me off the stern and into the cockpit beside her. As the first drops exploded on the glass, Nguyen swung the hatch closed. His features melted in the rain. The world dissolved and the cabin became all there was. To give my brain a thing to work on, I considered the plight of the raindrop, how it was torn from the water by a warm sun, how it stirred among the clouds, cold and lonesome until falling back to reunite with the happy constituency of the sea.

The submersible jolted as Terry detached the cable. Sylvia spun a dial on the dash and threw a column of switches. I heard a pump whirr behind my head as we descended.

To my mind claustrophobia is not only the fear of being buried alive. It's worse, a reminder that you are alone in life as well, an aberration surrounded by everything that is not you. The grave is a symbol of our main situation: solitude. I don't recall screaming and probably didn't. All the noise at these moments is inside my head. Sylvia's hand found mine. I shook her off and, rising on the balls of my feet, pressed my face against the glass.

Inside my chest, a second pump kept pace with the machinery. I had hyperventilated before—it is an unappealing sight—but I never did it in the presence of a cute girl. Her tough little arm hooked around my neck. She drew me in so that my head pressed against the slope of her breast. My eardrums popped, my lungs went slack.

After a while, I felt calm enough to look around. The floodlights showed a copper-colored world, mineral and dead. Is this what we would find under the ice in Europa? Would we travel so many miles only to discover the suffocated bottom of a Floriday lagoon?

Sylvia had fallen asleep. I watched her and thought this would be enough; if she was all I found on Europa, I would have everything I needed.

She choked, sputtered, and sat up so fast, she slammed her head into the edge of the dome.

“Smooth,” I said.

Sylvia was not amused. “Don't watch me when I sleep.”

“Okay.”

“Because it makes me really upset when people do that.”

“What people?”

She drew me back to her chest. It occurred to me that I knew nothing about Sylvia's life before Cape Cannibal. It occurred to me that she'd had one. For much of our seventeen hours I lay there listening to the sound of blood making its rounds through her body.

*   *   *

We surfaced at midnight. The skies had cleared and the Moon was up. Nguyen drove us back to the trailers, where I found Umma in bed. She said Faron had gone down with Pop to the stream hoping to catch a duck. I climbed up to the loft but was too stirred up to sleep. I was fifteen, when stirred up meant something.

After so many hours underwater, Nguyen had let us swim in the shallows of the lagoon. Even with the moonlight it was too dark for Sylvia to get a view of my clingy Y-fronts, not that she didn't try. She flung her brassiere onto the deck of the boat. “Shit was chafing my tits,” she said, falling onto her back to float. “You don't care, right, Little Brother?”

I stretched out in the loft with that image emblazoned on my brain: brown Sylvia afloat on the gray lagoon. My skin was tight all over from the brackish water, but after some adjustments I slept without much effort. I wanted to dream of her; instead I found myself descending those bowlegged ladders to the bottom of the pit. I followed the bright Tyvek tunnel into the clean room, where I found the Orange Tan standing underneath the Orion capsule. He wore a shower cap and booties and looked slightly ashamed.