Ronnie
Day two, four in the morning, and everybody on the ship is asleep except me and a dead man.
The other four are strapped into their sleeping bags along the curve of the cabin like bats, zipped to the chin, arms floating up in front of them like they're sleepwalking toward a fridge. The fans hum. There's a pump somewhere behind the panel that ticks like an oven cooling down after Thanksgiving. Every so often the Sun moves across the hull and the whole ship creaks, one long creak, like a house settling, and Otis says "Lord" in his sleep and doesn't wake up.
And I've got one earbud in my right ear, plugged into the tablet on my knee, and I'm listening to Mack Tolliver leave messages for his wife.
Della sent the folder before launch. Thirty-one voicemails, pulled off the backup of Bette's phone. "For the cadence," she said. "You're doing a family call on Thursday. You need to sound like a man talking to his wife, not a man talking to a camera." Bette never played them. Della told me that too, flat, like she was telling me the time.
So I listen. I listen the way I'd listen to anybody I had to do: not to the words, to everything under them.
"Bet, it's me. We're out of the good bread. Not the brown one. The good one." Click.
"Bet. Running late. Don't wait on dinner. Don't feed the dog my dinner, either, I know what you do." Click.
He sounds nothing like the posters. That's the first thing. On the posters, at every birthday I ever did him at, he's warm and slow with the laugh starting under it. On these he's quicker. He doesn't wait for the laugh. Half the time he doesn't finish his sentences, because she'd know the end of them anyway. He calls her Bet, one syllable, like a coin going down on a counter.
I do it, quietly, into the dark. "Bet. We're out of the good bread." It's closer. It's not there.
"Bet, I'm stuck at Rafe's dinner." That's one from March. There's a big room behind him, a hotel ballroom, I can hear the plates and the clapping and a microphone with too much echo, somebody at a podium going on about courage. "The speeches are killing me. Home by ten." And under it, right on nine o'clock by the time stamp, a little electronic chirp. Somebody's watch doing the hour. Not his. His is on my wrist, and it's been off for years. A ballroom full of Rafe's people and Mack's people, and one of them's still got their beep on. I go on to the next one.
The next one's the last one.
"Bet. I'm outside. Come down when you're up. I've got something to say before we fly." Click.
Eight minutes to midnight. The night he died.
I take the earbud out. It floats there, the little wire curling up toward the ceiling. I don't put it back in.
"You there?"
In my left ear, after a second: "Unfortunately."
Della. She sounds like she's lying down.
"You sound like you're in a car."
"I'm in a car park in Titusville. It's four in the morning. Why are you awake?"
"Homework." I don't tell her about the last one. I don't know how to say it in a way that isn't a bit. "Can I ask you something?"
"You're going to anyway."
"Are you there the whole time? Like, all eight days, I say 'you there' and you're there?"
"Mostly." Something crinkles, like a wrapper. "There's one bit I'm not. Saturday evening, you go round the back of the Moon. About forty minutes nobody on Earth can hear you or talk to you. Not me, not Sully, nobody. Then you come out the other side and I'm back."
"So the one time I need you, you're on the other side of a rock."
"A very big rock."
"Still a rock."
She makes the noise. Through the nose. I've got her doing it twice a day now and she hates me for every one.
"Go to sleep, Commander," she says. That's what she calls me on here. Parrot rules. "Tomorrow you just sit there. It's a quiet day. There's a little engine nudge in the afternoon, the autopilot does it on its own, you sleep through it. That's all tomorrow is."
That's all today is.
At breakfast I host a cooking show.
I don't mean to. I want you to know I woke up meaning to be quiet. Sit on your hands. But Tess has had her camera on me since I opened my eyes, the little red light right in my face, and she's whispering to chat about how the commander eats, does the commander eat like a normal person, chat, look, he's opening a tortilla, and a tortilla in space doesn't want to be opened, it wants to leave, and something in me just goes. Click. On.
"Good morning," I say, in Mack's voice, "and welcome back to Burrito in Orbit."
Otis laughs so hard he spins.
"Today we're making a classic. The breakfast burrito. You'll need one tortilla, which as you can see is attempting to escape. You'll need one pouch of eggs, which are technically eggs. And you'll need salsa." I hold up the salsa pouch like a trophy. "Now, folks, at home you'd use a spoon. In orbit, we use confidence."
I squeeze the pouch. And the salsa comes out, not in a line, in a ball, a wobbling red ball the size of a golf ball, and it doesn't land on the tortilla because nothing lands on anything, it just drifts off toward Boyd at about walking pace, turning slowly, catching the light.
"And the salsa," I say, "has left the studio."
Hazel puts out one hand and catches it in a wet wipe without looking up from her book. Tess screams with laughter. Chat, apparently, is losing its mind. Boyd watches the salsa go past his nose and then he watches me.
He's been watching me all morning. He floats over in the middle of the clean-up, big and silver in his flight jacket with the patches on it, and he puts one hand on the back of my seat.
"Commander," says Boyd, low, all Texas and all friendly. "Mind if I just look at the stick? Never seen one of these up close. I'll keep my hands in my lap."
The joystick. By my right hand, with a little flip-up lid next to it over a switch.
"Boyd," I say, as Mack, slow, the grin, "you can look at anything you like, buddy. Just don't touch my burrito."
He laughs. He looks at the stick for a long time.
All day Otis asks about noises. He's a bus mechanic, so every noise is a part. "That tick? That a pump? That sounds like a fuel pump on a seventy-two passenger with a bad relay." "Is that creak supposed to make that creak?" And I tell him what Della told me, in Mack's voice, slow: "That's the Sun, Otis. Sun hits one side of the ship, it warms up and stretches, and it creaks. She's just saying good morning." I have no idea if that's right. Della had no idea if that's right. Otis nods and says, "Okay. Okay, good morning," to the wall.
At four o'clock in the afternoon, the autopilot does its little nudge.
They tell us it's coming. Sully, on the loop, in both ears, his voice coming in a half-second late like it's been somewhere first: "Constance, Flight. Course correction in two minutes. Six-second burn. You'll feel a bump. Sit tight." That's all. Boyd straps in. Hazel holds her book against her chest. Tess turns the camera round onto her own face to tell chat that something exciting is about to happen, probably. Otis checks his straps three times.
I'm supposed to sleep through it. I don't. I count, because that's a show thing, you always count in your head so you know when to come in.
The ship shakes. Not a lot. A shiver, like a big dog that's seen something you haven't.
One. Two. Six seconds, they said. Five. Six.
Seven.
Eight.
Otis says, "Is that six? That's not six."
Ten. Twelve. The shiver's still going, a steady push from somewhere behind and under us, and the window is moving. Not shaking. Moving. The stars are sliding very slowly to the left, all together, like somebody's turning the sky.
Fourteen. Boyd says nothing, which is new. Sixteen. Hazel says, quite calmly, "That is longer than six seconds."
Nineteen.
It stops.
And the stopping is worse. The stopping is so much worse. Because now it's just the fans again, the same fans as before, and the stars aren't where they were, and in both ears the loop goes strange. It doesn't go quiet, it goes crowded: a lot of voices at once on the ground, numbers, somebody saying "say again," somebody else saying "no, the other one," and then Sully, over all of them, clipped, gravel:
"Constance, Flight. We see it. Stand by."
That's all. Stand by. Like we're a pizza.
And in my left ear, Della says nothing at all.
Otis starts screaming. Not words. Just high, from the back, by the hatch, one long noise like a kettle, and his hands are on the straps, pulling, and Tess is shouting "Otis, Otis, Otis," and the camera's swinging on its arm, and Hazel's got her hand out toward him and can't reach.
So I do Mack.
Not the party Mack. Not the grin. The other one, the one from the news the night of the Recovery, when he talked to the cameras like he was ordering coffee. The calm one. I've done it maybe twice in eleven years because nobody books you for calm. I turn round in my seat as far as the straps let me and I find Otis's eyes and I put it on him, slow and low and warm, with no laugh in it at all.
"Otis. Look at me. Otis. Look at me, son."
He looks at me.
"That was the ship talking. It talks. Flight heard it. Flight's got it. You and me, all we've got to do right now is breathe. In. That's it. Out. That's it. You're a mechanic. You've heard a bus make a noise it shouldn't. What did you do?"
"Pulled over," says Otis. He's not screaming. His face is wet and floating off him in little beads. "Pulled over and listened."
"That's what we're doing. We're pulled over. We're listening."
Otis breathes. In. Out. The kettle noise is gone. Hazel takes his hand. And Tess, behind her camera, very quietly, says to chat, "Okay, the commander's got it. The commander's got it."
The commander has not got it, folks. The commander's hands are shaking so badly he has to sit on them. Which, technically, is following the rules.
"Ronnie."
Left ear. Della.
It's the first time she's said it. Not Commander. Not Lark. Ronnie. And it's not her phone voice. It's lower. It's got Atlanta in it from end to end.
"Ronnie, listen to me. Don't say anything, just listen. The nudge ran long. It ran nineteen seconds instead of six, and it pushed you off your path home. Are you listening?"
I make a noise. It's a yes.
"There's going to have to be a burn. The engine, once, at the Moon. To put you back. And the ship." She stops. I can hear the room behind her, a lot of people talking at once. "The ship's handed the engine to the commander's seat. The commander does it."
I look at the joystick by my right hand. At the little lid over the switch.
The commander does it.
And then, quieter, not to me, to herself, like she doesn't know the channel's still open: "Day two. Of course it's day two."
I don't know what that means. I don't ask. Somebody on the ground near her says something with a number in it, and she says it back, to me, slowly, the way you'd read a number off a sign you can't quite see.
"Seventy-four hours. Kip says seventy-four hours."
On the loop, in both ears, Sully: "Constance, Flight. The correction ran long. You're off your return path. Plan is a burn at the Moon, flown from the commander's station. More to follow. Commander, acknowledge."
And four heads turn to look at me.
Boyd's first. Boyd's always first. He unclips his straps, all four, click click click click, and pushes himself up out of his seat so he's floating over me, big, the patches on his jacket right in front of my face.
"Well, now," says Boyd. His voice is loud and warm and Texas from top to bottom, and he's smiling. "A burn by hand. That's flying. Son, I was flying jets when you were wetting the bed. Slide over. I'll take it from here."
Otis looks at me. Tess's camera looks at me. Hazel looks at me over her glasses, and I can't read her at all.
And I hear myself say it. In my own voice. Not Mack's. It just comes out, like the yes in the diner, before the rest of me can get there and stop it.
"No," I say. "I'm the commander."
Boyd doesn't move. He floats there, over me, smiling. Then he reaches down past my right hand, slow and easy, and rests two fingers on the little lid over the switch that fires the engine, and he leaves them there, and he keeps smiling at me.