Then, within a few months, Maigny, the engineer, began showing signs of dementia. As they watched the planet disappear behind a black, octopus-ink-like cloud of polluted atmosphere, he rapidly lost faith and began speaking in strange voices. Thalia fought to maintain her own sanity in part by attempting to restore his and believed she was making real progress, until she caught a reflection of him making bizarre faces when he thought she could not see him. That night, as she pretended to sleep, spinning slowly inside the tight cabin space with her eyes half-closed, she watched in gravity-free horror as Maigny quietly unpacked the survival kit located between two of the three seats. He removed the three-barreled pistol from inside, more like a shotgun than a simple handgun. Some years ago, a Russian space capsule had, upon reentry and descent, crash-landed in the Siberian wilderness. It was hours before they were located, during which time the cosmonauts had to fight off wolves with little more than stones and tree branches. Since that episode, the specially made oversized gun—complete with a machete inside its detachable buttstock—had been included as standard mission equipment inside the “
She watched him feel up the barrel of the weapon, exploring the trigger with his finger. He removed the machete and spun it in the air, watching the blade go around and around and catching a glint of the distant sun. She felt the blade pass near her and saw, like the glint of the sun, a hint of pleasure in his eyes.
She knew then what she would have to do in order to save herself. She continued to pursue her amateur therapy so as not to alert Maigny to her concern, all the while preparing for the inevitable. She did not like to think of it, even now.
Occasionally, depending on the rotation of the ISS, his corpse floated into view through the door to the station, like a macabre Jehovah’s Witness making a house call.
Again—one fewer person to consume food rations. One fewer set of lungs.
And more time endured trapped alone inside this incapacitated space can.
“Don’t tempt me,” she muttered. The voice was male, indistinct. Familiar, but she could not place it.
Not her husband. Not her late father. But somebody she knew…
She did feel something, a presence with her inside the
She looked out through the windows as the ISS again crossed into sunlight.
As she stared out the window at the dawning sun, she saw colors come into the sky. She called it “the sky,” but it was not the sky up there; nor was it “night.” It was the universe and it wasn’t “black” either; it was absent of light. It was void. The purest nothingness. Except…
There it was again: colors. A spray of red and a burst of orange, just outside her peripheral vision. Something like the bright explosions one sees in one’s tightly shut eyes.
She tried this, shutting her eyes, pressing her lids with her dry, cracked thumbs. Again, an absence of light. The void of the inside of her head. A fountain of undulating colors and stars came into the nothingness—and then she opened her eyes again.
Blue brightened and disappeared in the distance. Then, in another area, a spray of green. And violet!
Signs. Even if they were purely fictions created in her mind, they were signs. Of something.
“Dearie?” Nobody ever called her “dearie.” Never her husband, not any of her teachers, nor the astronaut program administrators, nor her parents or grandparents.
Still, she didn’t question the voice’s identity too strongly. She was happy for the company. She was happy for the counsel.
“Why?” she asked.
No answer. The voice never answered on request. And yet she kept expecting that someday it would.
“How?” she asked.
No answer again, but as she drifted through the bell-shaped cabin, her boot caught on the survival kit between the seats.
“Really?” she said, addressing the kit itself as though it were the source of the voice.
She hadn’t touched the thing since she had last used it. She pulled it out now, opening the kit, the combination lock unclasped. (Had she left it that way?) She lifted out the TP-82, the long-barreled handgun. The machete was gone; she had tossed it out with Maigny. She raised the weapon to eye level, as though aiming it at the window… and then released it, watching it twist and float before her like a word or an idea hanging in the air.
She inventoried the rest of the kit. Twenty rifle rounds. Twenty flares. Ten shotgun shells.
“Tell me why,” she said, wiping away a rogue teardrop, watching the speck of moisture sail away. “After all this time—why now?”
She held still, her body barely rotating. She was certain an answer was going to come. A reason. An explanation.
