End of the Road (15 page)

Forty five minute’s
rotation later, with a flash of light the Earth returned, crashing
through space beneath him.
Oh God don’t
look down.
Riley resisted pulling his feet
up higher, and another forty-five minutes saw the light zipped up
and peace returned. They floated in the womb of the universe
again.

Closing the second of three panels, feeling
tired, they swapped out each other’s carbon dioxide scrubbers for
another five hours of air, and moved on to the final repairs.

“
It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
said Yuri, opening the panel. “I try not to look, but it slaps you
in the face, no?”

Riley couldn’t think of any better way to
put it.

“
From up here,” said Yuri,
“it’s not simply pieces of land. This land, that land, your land,
my land, it’s more than that … it’s the sweet
mamochka
, the mother of us all. Every
time she comes round I give her a big kiss on her wide cheeks and
wish to never leave home again.”

Riley smiled at the thought. It was only
after a few moments had passed that he realized he hadn’t spoken.
“Wide cheeks is right,” he said.

Though his part of the EVA was mostly to
float next to Yuri for a few hours, his muscles ached and he was
feeling the limpness of dehydration fatigue. The suit was hot, and
hard on a body. He felt like he’d just swam across the English
channel.

Except that would be cold.
How about … swam across the English channel if it were hot like a
cup of tea.
Everybody seemed to have these
wonderful comparisons. That would be his.

But the more he thought about it, the more
he saw it wasn’t actually very good.

“
You know,” said Yuri,
cutting into his reverie. “I’ve been thinking of coming to your
piece of our
mamochka
. I hear you have many very beautiful places.”

“
That’s right,” said Riley,
spooling up the inner tour guide, “we have the Grand Canyon, we
have … um—”

“
No, no,” said Yuri calmly,
still focused on the task at hand, “I don’t want to see your
biggest hole in the ground. I want to see the interesting things. I
want to see the world’s biggest ball of hair in your Indiana. I
want to see the biggest bird feeder in Maine. New Jersey has the
world’s biggest tooth. Have you been to the biggest bottle of hair
tonic in Tulsa? It is huge, the size of a rocket. I have always
wondered: is Tulsa near Indiana? Near the biggest ball of hair? Is
that why they have the biggest ball of hair, because of the biggest
bottle of tonic?”

Riley smiled, pretty sure Yuri was having
fun with him again, but not quite confident enough to laugh. That,
probably, was the real joke.

“
I don’t know,” he said,
“but there are many nice things to see. My parents took me to
Yellowstone Park once. We saw Old Faithful.”

“
There are many water
spouts,” said Yuri seriously, “but in the world only one very big
ceramic snowman who is fishing, in California....”

Riley shrugged inside his suit. “Yuri,” he
said, “Sometimes I don’t know if you’re just fooling with me or
not. I’ll figure you out eventually. I have four months, I
guess.”

“
Everything I say is true,”
said Yuri, happily. Mouths don’t make words foolish; words are made
foolish by the ears.”

Yuri had a point, though Riley didn’t think
a tour of the States was a good idea at the moment. Tensions had
been high between their countries ever since Insula Nova, as the
island had been dubbed, had risen from the Pacific near the Bering
Strait. But he supposed he shouldn’t condemn too quickly. If those
Russian fishermen hadn’t gotten drunk and announced they were going
to sail out and plant their own version of the red, white, and
blue, it might have been years before he got into space.

One overzealous Alaskan coast guard captain
had taken it upon himself to stop them. “For liberty,” the man had
said. Somehow, shots had been fired; one Russian sailor was dead —
drowned by most accounts, having fallen overboard — and Riley had
been moved up in the schedule to coincide with the Russians as a
minor gesture of goodwill. A French anthropologist had been slotted
to be where he was right now, studying the effects of
weightlessness on the lattices of bone formation.

And all because of a steaming hunk of barren
rock no larger than a football field.

He hoped his presence would help, but didn’t
harbor any illusion that the International Space Agency had any
real international pull. Meanwhile, it had worked out great for
him. He would get results on his research years ahead of
schedule.

In the darkness of the Earth’s shadow, a
light flickering on Yuri’s helmet caught Riley’s eye. A reflection.
He looked down to where he knew the Earth floated somewhere below
and saw a tiny red blossom moving against the black, growing
steadily larger and slipping slowly away as the planet rotated in
the opposite direction. A second red flower soon unfolded near it,
and another. In an instant, red blossoms of flame were flaring
across a wide swath of the darkness like sunlight prickling on the
surface of a lake.

“
Yuri,” he said, without
thinking, needing someone else to see it. “Yuri, look.”

Riley knew that Yuri had
turned when he heard a string of Russian swears. In there somewhere
he heard
mamochka.

So it was true, not just phosphenes in his
eyes, not a strange borealis. He knew what horror he was seeing but
didn’t want to speak the word aloud and make it real.

“
Missiles,” said Yuri.
“Nuclear….”

As if Yuri had called them into existence,
the next instant a second wave of red blossoms sparked below, more
than he could count; the darkness bloomed with them as if a veil
had been whisked away. These were quickly swept away in the current
of the Earth’s motion the same as the first, following the curve of
night until, after a few minutes, only the blackness remained,
unmarred; the Earth had vanished and they were alone in the
infinity of the ether again, only the shush of their breathing to
comfort them.

“
Nicolas,” said Yuri,
“Nicolas, confirm. Are you seeing this?”

“
No,” said Nicolas,
“No—”

“
Nicolas, ra—“

“
No contact with mission
control,” interrupted Nicolas in a ghostly voice. “I have tried
four times.”

All three coms were left open and their
breathing became as loud as the wind.

None of them had to speak, thinking of
people they knew and the lives they had led. Even if those people
were alive, they might not see them again. Mission Control was
their umbilical to Earth, and if Mission Control were gone, they no
longer had a ride home.

Riley began, “How do we …” but he never
finished the thought, and knew it wasn’t necessary.

Yuri sounded resolute, “Doesn’t matter,” he
said, as if each word were an effort. “We have work to do.”

Nicolas was desperate. He had little control
over the tremolo in his voice. “Yuri—”

“
We finish! It will take
twenty minutes to complete the last panel. We have one hundred
twenty minutes remaining on our scrubbers….”

And it takes thirty minutes
for a missile to fly from the U.S. to Russia and vice
versa
, thought Riley.
About thirty-seven minutes ‘til sunrise again. And if that was
Russia firing east … about sixty-six minutes until we’re over the
east coast of the States.

The war would be ended by
the time the Earth rose again —
Hell, it’s
over now
— the station would probably be
above Europe or the Atlantic. They would have to wait to inspect …
they would have to wait and see.

Riley had no wife, no girlfriend, few
friends. His parents had died within a few months of each other
only a few years before, and since then he’d regretted that he
hadn’t got into space earlier, while they were still alive. All
those years he’d trained to be selected for a mission … he should
have worked harder.

“
We finish the panel,” he
agreed. “That’s our job.” He’d let go of the umbilical for his
toolkit and tugged it to bring it back to him, then he and Yuri
helped each other move back to the open final panel, and tried to
concentrate on the task at hand.

On the com, Nicolas was making no effort to
stifle his sobs.

~*~

Let there be light.

Even under the threat of such … even under
such threat, Earthrise was beautiful. Photos couldn’t capture the
orange of the deserts, the red and yellow and green of the forests,
or the kaleidoscope of scars that man had left on the planet, not
all at once. The iridescent mines, the brown drained lakes, even
those were stunning when seen from above.

Sunlight splashed across Europe and Yuri
swore into the com, getting an idea of how long they would still
have to wait. Clouds, quite ordinary ones, were covering the coast
of Spain and Portugal and the bulk of the Atlantic. Riley wished he
could sweep them away and peer beneath.

The further west they traveled, the darker
the clouds became, until they were impenetrable. Five minutes
later, when the coast of North America should have been swinging
into view, they could see nothing of it, but that in itself was
telltale; they knew what that meant.

Dust was blackening the sky beneath them.
Whole forests were burning, sending tons of ash into the air. The
oil sands of Alberta and half of Lone Star Texas would be ablaze
with furious geysers of flame, no one left alive nearby to concern
themselves with pollution, smog, the price of gas. Already the jet
stream was carrying the immense ash cloud towards the United
Kingdom and northern France.

In silence, they hoped for a break in the
cloud cover, until Riley knew they had to be nearing the Pacific.
For a moment they could see the blue of the water and the spatter
of the Hawaii islands, but soon the sky darkened there too, fingers
of dust and ash reaching out over the water from the north, looming
over China, already grasping for Japan.

Both sides had won. Or
lost. It was all the same.
Both sides got
what they wanted.
A thumbed nose to their
counterparts.

At least Korea looked okay, as did Thailand,
Singapore. It wasn’t like the worst days of the cold war, when
annihilation had been assured. In this very small way they had
matured. Bomb yields had been dialed back, thousands of missiles
had been decommissioned. Where once seventy thousand nuclear
warheads had been the gun pointing indiscriminately at the rest of
the world, only a few thousand were now … only a few thousand had
been … in active service.

Destruction was no longer
assured for
all
,
but reserved
primarily
for themselves.

The Middle East seemed
unscathed, Africa was orange and idyllic under a cloudless sky.
People would survive. The Earth would turn. Life would go on. But
it would go on without
their
peoples.

The com had been quiet for twenty minutes
while they observed every mound and crevice over the face of the
land. Nicolas’ voice had vanished. Soon the Earth would slide back
into shadow. Nick checked the time. They had little less than an
hour on their carbon dioxide scrubbers. They would soon have to
head back inside.

“
Riley,” said Yuri, softly.
Then he said it again when Riley couldn’t make words to answer.
“Riley? This is your first mission,
nyet?
”

Riley nodded, and forced himself to speak.
“Yeah,” he said. “My first.” His words broke to pieces.

“
Come with me,” said Yuri,
pulling himself back towards the airlock by his
umbilical.

Riley hesitated. Technically, Yuri was now
his enemy.

“
Come,” said Yuri, turning
back. “I have something to show you.”

Riley followed, expecting they would cycle
the airlock and go inside, but Yuri pushed past the airlock and
away from the station towards the emptiness of space. Reluctantly,
Riley did the same, until he and Yuri were side by side at the end
of their tethers. Riley took one last look at the Earth, now behind
them, diminishing.

“
I do this every time I
come out here,” said Yuri. “Because each time I come … I do not
know if it will be my last … and it is beautiful, you will see. I
had planned on showing you because it was your first time. I don’t
see why I should not. Now watch,” he said, indicating toward the
stars.

The last of the light lining the Earth
narrowed to a point, and again in its shadow they became nothing,
facing the immensity of the galaxy.

“
Look at it,” said Yuri.
“Take it in you.”

At first Riley wasn’t sure what he meant,
but soon he felt the great silence of the universe washing over
him, winds of it around his face and his fingers. Briefly he
wondered if his eyes were closed, but then the stars stood out
brightly against the black, defiant in the silence, his breath
sympathizing with their light.

“
Relax,” said Yuri
sleepily.

And Riley relaxed in his muscles, tense and
tired, and from the shimmering lament in his soul, facing the void
of creation. A tumult from afar still looks like peace. He looked
back to where the Earth would be and put his arm on Yuri’s
shoulder. Yuri’s eyes were closed, content in the cradle. Riley
then braced, and disconnected Yuri’s umbilical.