The Lady Astronaut of Mars (2 page)

Of course.

Did he have trouble sleeping?

Yes.

Even, "How are you holding up?" was about him.  I didn't get it until Sheldon paused and pushed his rabbit burger aside, half-eaten, and asked point-blank. "Have they given him a date yet?"

A date. There was only one date that mattered in a string of other milestones on the path to death but I pretended he wasn't being clear, just to make him hurt a little. "You mean for paralyzation, hospice, or death?"

He didn't flinch. "Death."

"We think he's got about a year." I kept my face calm, the way you do when you're talking to Mission Control about a flight that's set to abort. The worse it got, the more even my voice became. "He can still work, if that's what you're asking."

"It's not."  Sheldon broke his gaze then, to my surprise, and looked down at his ice water, spinning the glass in its circle of condensation. "What I need to know is if
you
can still work."

In my intake of breath, I wanted to say that God, yes, I could work and that I would do anything he asked of me if he'd put me back into space. In my exhale, I thought of Nathaniel. I could not say yes. "That's why you asked for the physical."

"Yep."

"I'm sixty-three, Sheldon."

"I know."  He turned the glass again. "Did you see the news about LS-579?"

"The extrasolar planet. Yes." I was grounded, that didn't mean I stopped paying attention to the stars.

"Did you know we think it's habitable?"

I stopped with my mouth open as pieces started to tick like punch cards slotting through a machine. "You're mounting a mission."

"
If
we were, would you be interested in going?"

Back into space? My god, yes. But I couldn't. I couldn't. I-- that was why he wanted to know when my husband was going to die. I swallowed everything before speaking. My voice was passive. "I'm sixty-three." Which was my way of asking why he wanted
me
to go.

"It's three years in space."  He looked up now, not needing to explain why they wanted an old pilot. 

That long in space? It doesn't matter how much shielding you have against radiation, it's going to affect you. The chances of developing cancer within the next fifteen years were huge. You can't ask a young astronaut to do that. "I see."

"We have the resources to send a small craft there. It can't be unmanned because the programming is too complicated. I need an astronaut who can fit in the capsule."

"And you need someone who has a reason to not care about surviving the trip."

"No."  He grimaced. "PR tells me that I need an astronaut that the public will adore so that when we finally tell them that we've sent you, they will forgive us for hiding the mission from them." Sheldon cleared his throat and started briefing me on the Longevity Mission. 

Should I pause here and explain what the Longevity mission is? It's possible that you don't know.

There's a habitable planet. An extrasolar one and it's only few light years away. They've got a slingshot that can launch a ship up to near light speed. A small ship. Big enough for one person. 

But that isn't what makes the Longevity mission possible. That is the tesseract field. We can't go faster than light, but we can cut corners through the universe. The physicists described it to me like a subway tunnel. The tessaract will bend space and allow a ship to go to the next subway station. The only trick is that you need to get far enough away from a planet before you can bend space and … this is the harder part … you need a tesseract field at the other end.  Once that's up, you just need to get into orbit and the trip from Mars to LS-579  can be as short as three weeks. 

But you have to get someone to the planet to set up the other end of the tesseract.

And they wanted to hide the plan from the public, in case it failed.

So different from when the First Mars Expedition had happened. An asteroid had slammed into Washington D.C. and obliterated the capitol. It made the entire world realize how fragile our hold on Earth was. Nations banded together and when the Secretary of Agriculture, who found himself president through the line of succession, said that we needed to get off the planet, people listened. We rose to the stars. The potential loss of an astronaut was just part of the risk. Now? Now it has been long enough that people are starting to forget that the danger is still there. That the need to explore is necessary.

Sheldon finished talking and just watched me processing it. 

"I need to think about this."

"I know."

Then I closed my eyes and realized that I had to say no. It didn't matter how I felt about the trip or the chance to get back into space. The launch date he was talking about meant I'd have to go into training
now
. "I can't." I opened my eyes and stared at the wall where the publicity still of me and Nathaniel hung. "I have to turn it down."

"Talk to Nathaniel."

I grimaced. He would tell me to take it. "I can't."

#

I left Sheldon feeling more unsettled than I wanted to admit at the time. I stared out the window of the light rail, at the sepia sky. Rose tones were deepening near the horizon with sunset. It was dimmer and ruddier here, but with the dust, sunset could be just as glorious as on Earth. 

It's a hard thing to look at something you want and to know that the right choice is to turn it down. Understand me: I wanted to go. Another opportunity like this would never come up for me. I was too old for normal missions. I knew it. Sheldon knew it. And Nathaniel would know it, too. I wish he had been in some other industry so I could lie and talk about "later." He knew the space program too well to be fooled.

And he wouldn't believe me if I said I didn't want to go. He knew how much I missed the stars.

That's the thing that I think none of us were prepared for in coming to Mars. The natural night sky on Mars is spectacular, because the atmosphere is so thin. But where humans live, under the dome, all you can see are the lights of the town reflecting against the dark curve. You can almost believe that they're stars. Almost. If you don't know what you are missing or don't remember the way the sky looked at night on Earth before the asteroid hit.

I wonder if Dorothy remembers the stars. She's young enough that she might not. Children on Earth still look at clouds of dust and stars are just a myth. God. What a bleak sky.

When I got home, Genevieve greeted me with her usual friendly chatter. Nathaniel looked like he wanted to push her out of the house so he could quiz me. I know Genevieve said good bye, and that we chatted, but the details have vanished now. 

What I remember next is the rattle and thump of Nathaniel's walker as he pushed it into the kitchen. It slid forward. Stopped. He took two steps, steadied himself, and slid it forward again. Two steps. Steady. Slide. 

I pushed away from the counter and straightened. "Do you want to be in the kitchen or the living room?"

"Sit down, Elma."  He clenched the walker till the tendons stood out on the back of his hands, but they still trembled. "Tell me about the mission."

"What?" I froze.

"The mission." He stared at the ceiling, not at me. "That's why Sheldon called, right? So, tell me."

"I... All right." I pulled the tall stool out for him and waited until he eased onto it. Then I told him. He stared at the ceiling the whole time I talked. I spent the time watching him and memorizing the line of his cheek, and the shape of the small mole by the corner of his mouth.  

When I finished, he nodded. "You should take it."

"What makes you think I want to?"

He lowered his head then, eyes just as piercing as they had always been. "How long have we been married?"

"I can't."

Nathaniel snorted. "I called Dr. Williams while you were out, figuring it would be something like this. I asked for a date when we could get hospice." He held up his hand to stop the words forming on my lips. "She's not willing to tell me that. She did give me the date when the paralysis is likely to become total. Three months. Give or take a week."

We'd known this was coming, since he was diagnosed, but I still had to bite the inside of my lip to keep from sobbing. He didn't need to see me break down. 

"So... I think you should tell them yes."

"Three months is not a lot of time, they can--"

"They can what? Wait for me to die? Jesus Christ, Elma. We know that's coming." He scowled at the floor. "Go. For the love of God, just take the mission."

I wanted to. I wanted to get off the planet and back into space and not have to watch him die. Not have to watch him lose control of his body piece by piece. 

And I wanted to stay here and be with him and steal every moment left that he had breath in his body.

#

One of my favourite restaurants in Landing was Elmore's. The New Orleans style cafe sat tucked back behind Thompson's Grocers on a little rise that lifted the dining room just high enough to see out to the edge of town and the dome's wall. They had a crawfish etouffee that would make you think you were back on Earth. The crawfish were raised in a tank and a little bigger than the ones I'd grown up with, but the spices came all the way from Louisiana on the mail runs twice a year. 

Sheldon Spender knew it was my favorite and was taking ruthless advantage of that. And yet I came anyway. He sat across the table from me, with his back to the picture window that framed the view. His thinning  hair was almost invisible against the sky. He didn't say a word. Just watched me, as the fellow to my right talked.

Garrett Biggs. I'd seen him at the Bradbury Space Center, but we'd exchanged maybe five words before today. My work was mostly done before his time. They just trotted me out for the occasional holiday. Now, the man would not stop talking. He gestured with his fork as he spoke, punctuating the phrases he thought I needed to hear most. "Need some photos of you so we can exploit -- I know it sounds ugly but we're all friends here, right? We can be honest, right? So, we can exploit your sacrifice to get the public really behind the Longevity mission."

I watched the lettuce tremble on the end of his fork. It was pallid compared to my memory of lettuce on Earth. "I thought the public didn't know about the mission."

"They will. That's the key. Someone will leak it and we need to be ready."  He waved the lettuce at me. "And that's why you are a brilliant choice for pilot. Octogenarian Grandmother Paves Way for Humanity." 

"You can't pave the stars. I'm not a grandmother. And I'm sixty-three not eighty." 

"It's a figure of speech. The point is that you're a PR goldmine."

I had known that they asked me to helm this mission because of my age -- it would be a lot to ask of someone who had a full life ahead of them. Maybe I was naive to think that my experience in establishing the Mars colony was considered valuable. 

How can I explain the degree to which I resented being used for publicity? This wasn't a new thing by a long shot. My entire career has been about exploitation for publicity. I had known it, and exploited it too, once I'd realized the power of having my uniform tailored to show my shape a little more clearly. You think they would have sent me to Mars if it weren't intended to be a colony? I was there to show all the lady housewives that they could go to space too. Posing in my flight suit, with my lips painted red, I had smiled at more cameras than my colleagues. 

I stared Garrett Biggs and his fork. "For someone in PR, you are awfully blunt."

"I'm honest. To you. If you were the public, I'd have you spinning so fast you'd generate your own gravity."

Sheldon cleared his throat. "Elma, the fact is that we're getting some pressure from a group of senators. They want to cut the budget for the project and we need to take steps or it won't happen."

I looked down and separated the tail from one of my crawfish. "Why?"

"The usual nonsense. People arguing that if we just wait, then ships will become fast enough to render the mission pointless. That includes a couple of serious misunderstandings of physics, but, be that as it may..." Sheldon paused and tilted his head, looking at me. He changed what he was about to say and leaned forward.  "Is Nathaniel worse?" 

"He's not better."

He winced at the edge in my voice. "I'm sorry. I know I strong-armed you into it, but I can find someone else."

"He thinks I should go." My chest hurt even considering it. But I couldn't stop thinking about the mission. "He knows it's the only way I'll get back into space."

Garrett Biggs frowned like I'd said the sky was green, instead of the pale Martian amber. "You're in space."

"I'm on Mars. It's still a planet."

#

I woke out of half-sleep, aware that I must have heard Nathaniel's bell, without being able to actually recall it. I pulled myself to my feet, putting a hand against the nightstand until I was steady. My right hip had stiffened again in the night. Arthritis is not something I approve of.

Turning on the hall light, I made my way down the stairs. The door at the bottom stood open so I could hear Nathaniel if he called. I couldn't sleep with him anymore, for fear of breaking him.  

I went through into his room. It was full of grey shadows and the dark rectangle of his bed. In one corner, the silver arm of his walker caught the light.

"I'm sorry." [His voice cracked with sleep.]

"It's all right. I was awake anyway."

"Liar."

"Now, is that a nice thing to say?" I put my hand on the light switch. "Watch your eyes."

Every night we followed the same ritual and even though I knew the light would be painfully bright, I still winced as it came on. Squinting against the glare, I threw the covers back for him. The weight of them trapped him sometimes. He held his hands up, waiting for me to take them. I braced myself and let Nathaniel pull himself into a sitting position. On Earth, he'd have been bed-ridden long since. Of course, on Earth, his bone density would probably  not have deteriorated so fast.

As gently as I could, I swung his legs to the side of the bed. Even allowing for the gravity, I was appalled anew by how light he was. His legs were like kindling wrapped in tissue. Where his pajamas had ridden up, purple bruises mottled his calf.