I was thinking of those rides at amusement parks that lift you terrifyingly high and then drop you in a rush of butterflies and squeals. My body kept expecting the drop. A ribbon of carbon nano-tubes had sounded so sciencey cool. Now climbing a string into space was the most ludicrous thing I could imagine. I shut my eyes. I hugged my chest. I wondered if I was about to die.
Then everything turned off. The whole world, as if someone had hit the switch. I felt strange. Lifted. Out the window the sky was changing from summer noon to midnight.
“Really?” I whispered. “Really?”
My stomach tingled in the middle of my body. My toes curled up in my boots. I watched my knees rise.
Beside me, Mi-sun smiled at a lock of her black hair that had escaped her helmet and was floating in front of her face. Jacques was shaking. Wilder was looking out his window, his face turned away.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Howell, “welcome to space. It’s a long trip to our anchoring asteroid, Big Barda, so today we’ll only go as far as Midway Station. Remain in your seats with seat belts fastened and tray tables up …” She broke off, giggling.
“What is she talking about?” Mi-sun asked.
“That we’re not going all the way up.” I was proud of the lack of emotion in my voice, but I couldn’t seem to shut up. “Most humanspace activity takes place at two hundred and twenty kilometers, but at that level, a satellite orbits the Earth in ninety minutes. The physics of the space elevator require the anchoring end of the tether to be in geostationary orbit, so it moves at the same rate as the Earth itself and remains straight above its equatorial platform. So the ribbon extends thirty-six thousand kilometers to the asteroid Big Barda, which is about ten percent of the distance to the moon. If it were any closer—”
“Enough, Maisie,” said Jacques. “I don’t like heights.”
“Yeah, I think you mentioned that,” I said. “Or screamed it.”
“So stop rattling off those big numbers or I’m going to bleep this bleeping diaper.”
Dragon and Howell floated past us, doing astronaut stuff. Without gravity to tame her frizzy hair, it looked like a clown wig.
Jacques started to undo his harness.
“Hey!” Dragon’s voice seemed to shake the whole craft. “If I snap your neck out here, no one will hear you scream.”
Jacques did his harness back up. I suspect that sometime during our trip, he made use of his allotted diaper.
I spent most of the trip staring at the planet and its misty cloak, all those gas molecules drawn to Earth’s gravity. Around its curve, we saw the white glow of sunlight, no atmosphere to trap the light and trick us into thinking the sun was yellow. No atmosphere to soak up and scatter the blue light, fill the heavens with that safe, robin-egg hue. No tricks. Black space, white light. A place without ambiguity.
I’d never understood before so clearly that we don’t live in a Ziploc bag that kept the air in and the freezing vacuum of space out. It made the world seem vulnerable. Precious.
I wish I could explain better. NASA’s next urgent mission should be to send good poets into space so they can describe what it’s really like.
“‘Stars, hide your fires,’” Jacques said, looking not down at the Earth but out. “‘Let not light see my black and deep desires.’”
He was quoting Macbeth, I was pretty sure.
While keeping our gazes on the spectacular Out There, we chatted and played “Name That Tune.” Jacques was unbeatable.
“Trivia is my pattycake,” he said.
Ruth snorted. “‘Trivia is my pattycake’? What does that—”
“Just think about it,” Jacques said.
“That doesn’t even mean anything,” she said.
Jacques spouted something in French. All French sounds vaguely insulting to me, so I told him in Spanish to watch his tongue. Mi-sun spoke a sequence of crisp Korean. Wilder said something obviously crude in Russian. Ruth spoke two hard words in German.
“We’re all bilingual?” I said. The way they spoke, it wasn’t Foreign Language 101. It was raised-from-birth.
Chatter on the headset silenced us, the Midway crew communicating with Howell. The pod sealed to the station, and the hatch opened. When Dragon unlatched my straps, they hung in the air as if underwater. I was so distracted by them, Dragon had to lift me by my sleeve and pull me toward the airlock. There were three station crew members wearing shorts and T-shirts, and they helped me strip down to my orange jumpsuit.
“Go ahead and find your space legs,” said Howell. “Just don’t push any big red buttons.”
I grabbed the handle along the narrow corridor and pulled myself up, kicking my legs before reminding myself that I wasn’t swimming. I emerged into an open chamber, caught another handle, and hung in the air.
My head was dizzy as if I were spinning, and my stomach rolled with mild nausea. I was still but felt as if I were rising through the ceiling and into space. My arms flailed, my legs thrashed. I felt like I was suffocating, my brain confusing little gravity with little oxygen.
I remembered our training and focused on breathing in, breathing out. I calmed. Looked. Lifted my arm, turned slowly, and let go.
It didn’t feel like flying did in my dreams. The universe was just holding me up. Gravity had been chaining me for my whole life. But here I was everything I could be. I was Maisie Danger Brown.
Jacques was tumbling, Mi-sun was doing spiral spins as she launched herself between this chamber and the next. Ruth pushed off and let herself zoom down the passage, her red hair streaking like flames. Her high laugh sparked one in my own chest.
Wilder eased himself into the chamber until he was suspended in the center, touching nothing. My ponytail snaked around my neck, tickling me unexpectedly and pulling out goose bumps.
“Isn’t this it?” I was so happy, I didn’t want to remember that he had turned into evil zombie Wilder. “You said we’d find it here. This is a start, isn’t it?”
I laughed and spun around.
He smiled just enough that it touched his eyes, and he said, “You’re beautiful.”
He said it like he hadn’t meant to, like it just slipped out. Which, I believe, is the very best way to say those words to anyone. I felt as if all the oxygen in the module had been sucked out into space. There was an enormous moon out the window just over his shoulder, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Wilder.
He looked around. Mi-sun was gone, Jacques was spinning into the next chamber, and Ruth was staring at the moon, so for a few seconds, we were alone.
I reached out my left hand. Wilder took it. I flew into him. His arms were around me. I closed my eyes while we hung there, spinning, kissing. I didn’t count. It all seemed part of the same long, tingling kiss. His lips were cool, but mine seemed to burn. I didn’t want to take it slowly—it felt like any moment it would end and never come back. I held him tighter, and I heard him inhale sharply. His arms circled my waist, our knees touching, our feet too. Weightless, we were upright and lying down at the same time.
Compatible, I thought. We were negatively and positively charged ions, irresistibly attracted to each other. It was simple physics.
We hit the wall, propelled by the impact of me flying into his arms. We pressed there for just a moment, kiss paused, lips still touching, and then he let go, pushing against a wall to flee into the next module. Jacques floated back in, Ruth turned around, Mi-sun called out that she’d discovered the astronaut ice cream, all of them oblivious to the fact that my world had just cracked open. I hovered where he’d left me, spinning just a little, my arms floating at my sides. I didn’t flex a muscle. I held my breath. I wanted to remember that moment.
Through a porthole I could see the Earth turning, very slowly, just like me. Green and blue, brown and white, big fat gorgeous Earth. My whole body tingled. At that moment, I truly believed that the rest of my life would be glorious and happy and easy as sipping soda through a straw because I’d gone to space, witnessed the whole
world, and Wilder had kissed me again.
Chapter 9
“Now this is what I call astronaut boot camp!” Howell shouted.
“Yeah!” said Ruth. Space had greatly improved her mood.
Howell gave us a tour of Midway Station. Module 2 was the crew’s living quarters with workout machine and kitchen. Module 3 was storage, where bags of food and water floated, tethered to walls, and rows of drawers held tools and supplies.
“It’s cheaper to send water from the asteroid to Midway than from Earth,” said Howell. “Big Barda is unusually rich in both precious metals and ice. We mine ice from the asteroid, and a machine melts water for drinking and cleaning as well as breaking it down into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel.”
“How is the asteroid yours?” said Ruth. “Did you buy it?”
“I got to it first,” said Howell. “Finders keepers. Astronomers thought Big Barda would pass us by, but she got caught in Earth’s gravitation pull and entered orbit. At the time, my craft the Space Beetle was already prepped for the first private-sector mission to the moon, but we changed our destination and got to Big Barda first. I can tell you, several countries and corporations were P.O.’d, but, you know, losers weepers.”
And back to Module 1, which was the lab. Howell showed us how they unfolded tabletops from the walls and stuck things to them with Velcro. We novices were all trying to maintain ourselves vertically while the crew hung horizontally or upside down. Of course, all those designations were meaningless now.
“Without gravity, everything we do is ten times more challenging,” one of the crew was saying. “Really, an astronaut needs four hands.”
Ruth and Jacques glanced at me, and I became keenly aware of Ms. Pincher, dead plastic floating on the end of my arm.
We used the restroom (peeing into a vacuum hose—weird but effective) and ate, sucking chicken noodle soup out of bags. I was floating near Howell, reaching for a bag of juice, when I heard her whisper to Dragon, “Should I show them?”
Dragon shook his head.
“Show us what?” I said.
“Nothing,” said Dragon.
Everyone went silent. I hadn’t noticed before how noisy the station was—the whir of fans, creaks and clanks and ticks. All that equipment working to keep us warm and breathing and safe from the freezing vacuum on the other side of the curved wall.
“What is it?” Mi-sun asked.
“Well, now you have to show us,” said Ruth.
Howell’s fingers strummed the air with eagerness. “Come now, Dragon, we’ve been planning to reveal them soon anyway,” she said. “Why not let the kiddies take the first peek? They were brave enough to climb the Beanstalk. They deserve a treat.”
Dragon didn’t protest again. The five of us gathered closer to Howell. My feet felt cold.
“As lucrative as mining Big Barda has been,” she said, “we uncovered something inside the asteroid even more valuable than platinum: a container, undoubtedly crafted by an intelligent species.”
I snorted. This was clearly a joke. “The container held several items of different shape but similar substance,” said Howell.
“They are the first proof of alien life ever discovered. And you are about to become five of only about thirty human beings to see them and touch them.”
Howell handed small wooden boxes to the other four adults, keeping one for herself.
Dragon hovered near me. I noticed he was balding on top, but he shaved his whole head down to its shine. Dad would look better like that.
“What’s really in the box,” I whispered. “Pez dispenser? Star Wars action figure?”
He shook his head and returned his attention to Howell.
“Go ahead,” Howell said, opening her own box. Dragon lifted the lid, tilting his box and moving it down so the thing hung in the air between him and me. It was pale and about as long and thick as my index finger, curved without a definitive shape.
What a shame, I thought. They could have planned something genuinely funny.
Howell picked up her item and showed it to Wilder.
“Unusual, isn’t it? Unlike any other matter I’ve encountered.”
Dragon plucked his out of the air, holding it to his palm with his thumb.
“We call them tokens, for lack of a better signifier,” Howell said. “They are cool against the skin and tingle a little. Go ahead, you can touch them.”
“It isn’t dangerous?” Ruth asked, eyeing the token in her astronaut’s hand.
“My team and I have been holding and studying these for years,” said Howell. “As you can see, we’re perfectly fine.”
That might be a matter of opinion, I thought.
Dragon offered the token to me between his thumb and forefinger. It was like liquid that could hold form. I pinched it between my fingers, and it brightened as if turning on.
“This is not a Pez dispenser,” I whispered. The token felt crazy cold. I was leaning in to get a closer look when it slid, settling into my palm. The lack of gravity should have made that impossible.
I started to ask Dragon, “What is this really?” But then the pain struck.
White-hot cold piercing my hand, stealing my breath. I heard someone scream and someone else say, “Owie, owie, owie …,” but I couldn’t look away from the token thing submerging as if my palm were water. I clawed at it with Ms. Pincher’s plastic fingers.
The ripping pain stabbed into my wrist and crawled up my arm, tearing through my shoulder and thudding into my chest, where it flared to a point of agony that killed every thought from my head.
The torture lasted seconds that felt like hours, and then the pain just ended.
I became conscious of myself again. I seemed to be upside down from where I’d been, huddled against the ceiling in the corridor outside the lab, my knees against my chest, my hand pressed to my heart. Dragon was holding me, one arm around my back, his other under my knees, as if I were a baby.
“Are you okay, are you okay?” he was asking over and over again.
“No,” I said. My voice was cracked from screaming. I touched my palm. There was no mark. “I saw that thing go into my hand. Did I hallucinate it? Am I crazy?”
“You’re not crazy,” said Dragon. “Don’t worry, we’ll figure this out.”
The way he held me reminded me again of my dad, and a pang of homesickness twitched in my chest. When you’re a thousand kilometers above Earth and an alien sausage burrows into your arm, all you really want is Mommy and Daddy.
“Dragon—I’m just going to call you Dragon, okay?” I figured the whole alien torture-token thing had earned me a first-name basis. He nodded. “Dragon, did something lethally bad just happen?”
He was taking my pulse. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”
In the lab, the others looked as bad as I felt, crouched against walls, shuddering. Ruth was yelling at Howell.
“You just infected us with an alien parasite! Are you insane?”
“But it’s not a parasite. It’s … it’s technology. Of some sort,” Howell said. Beads of sweat shivered on her brow, no gravity to slide them down.
Dragon checked my pupils and fit me with a blood pressure cuff.
“His blood pressure is a little high,” said the astronaut checking out Jacques, “but that’s normal, considering …”
Was there something on Wilder’s chest? Pale brown, peering over the V-neck of his jumpsuit. I pushed off to him so hard, we crashed and spun while I held his collar and investigated the tattoo-like mark. A circle with four squiggles, two sticking out of the circle, two sticking in.
“Whoa, Maisie,” he said.
Technically I had been rubbing his chest. I let go and looked at the same spot on my own chest. Starting four finger-widths from the hollow of my throat, a deep-brown crooked X. The others loosened their collars—Jacques’s mark was as dark as mine. Ruth’s and Mi-sun’s were henna brown, each shape unique, reminding me a little of Arabic symbols
.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” said Mi-sun. “That thing that went into my palm. It’s still inside me.”
“Why did it attack me but not you?” Ruth asked her astronaut.
“I don’t know.” She was a dark-haired woman, petite with large, scared eyes.
“Mine got brighter when I held it,” I said.
“So did mine,” said Jacques.
“You affected these tokens differently than we did.” Howell held onto a wall and bobbed up and down, as if wishing she could pace. “Was this the first time five people touched the tokens all at the same time? Are they linked to act together? Were there environmental factors? Or do you all have something in common that we lacked—genetics or age?”
“You should have known,” I said. My arm burned with the memory of pain. “We’re minors, and you just threw us into space and assailed us with unknown alien technology!”
“How could I have known?” A drop of sweat lifted from Howell’s brow and floated in the air. “I couldn’t have known. I … I …”
“You’re reckless and crazy and you’re going to get us killed!” I yelled.
“I told you it was alien. No one made you touch it.”
The talking went on. There were lots of “What’s happening?” followed by “I don’t know” in various forms. It’s amazing how often people will repeat the same opinions in case no one heard them the first three times.
Howell said we’d find out more back at HAL, where they could do tests, but that we wouldn’t risk the trip till she was sure we were stable. Mi-sun started in with a dry wail. Ruth locked herself in the toilet closet. If the token was sucking my life away and would leave me an empty husk, there wasn’t anything I could do about it, so I decided there was no reason to waste the few hours I had left in space.
I helped Dragon unload supplies from the pod, tossing around huge bags of food as if they were feather pillows. When Wilder joined us, I opened my mouth to ask him why he’d been so weird before, but the words melted on my tongue. Nothing seemed to matter compared with the things in our chests.