Shine Shine Shine (24 page)

As she moved through the rooms like boxes all stacked over the foundation, she pressed the walls out into their usual shape, lifted the ceilings above her, nailed down the floor with every step. This beautiful house, this sacred temple of her life, built on everything that was normal and expected, and purely good. A sanctuary for their lives, to guard against the intrusion of the weird, the lapping waves of the past. This was her old life, this was the way it was before, everything in its place. The house a manor, a statement, an edifice, instead of just another elaborate cap for another sewage pipe, like every other sewage-pipe cap down the street.

Under the chandelier in the foyer, she paused. Her shoulders were paralyzed under the weight of trying to put it all back together. She could barely move to answer the door, but there was something there. Someone stood out on the step. It was Rache.

“Hello, Rache,” said Sunny, swinging the door open. Her voice was intended to sound like it always sounded, saying those words. Rache was holding Sunny’s bowl, which she had left at the party. The bowl that held the braided honey loaf, constructed in such a stupid fit of optimism. Rache’s face twisted when she saw the wig.

“Sunny? What are you doing?” Rache swept into the house, slammed the bowl down on the kitchen counter, and whirled around to face Sunny. “Why is that wig back on your head?”

“I … you heard?” Sunny began.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” said Rache. “You’re not putting on a wig, okay? That’s not happening.”

There was nothing to say. Rache looked like she might come at Sunny across the room, rip the wig off her head, give Sunny a slap on the mouth. But the wig sat on her head, doing its job, keeping the roof up, keeping the stars up, keeping the planets aligned.

“Do you think we give two shits about your bald head?” Rache asked. “We don’t. We—we don’t care. There’s not one of us hasn’t—”

Rache put her hand against her mouth. Sunny felt her throat closing up.

“We don’t care. We don’t want you to wear it.”

“I know,” Sunny said. “It’s fine. It’s not you. It’s not for you, it’s just for me, and for, my life.”

“Putting that thing on your head is not going to put the rocket back on course. It’s not going to unkill anyone. And it’s not going to even work: we all know.”

Rache paused. She reached out and put her slender fingers around Sunny’s wrist.

“Sunny, you have to understand that you are not so special. I know it’s been rough, but you are not the only person in this world. You’re not even the only bald person.”

“You’re not bald,” said Sunny.

Rache pulled at her own blond hair. “Who do you think is under here, Sunny? What is here? Under this hair? Did you—do you know that I fucked her husband? I fucked him, I fucked Jenny’s husband.” Rache was talking in a whisper now, her mouth pulled down at the corners, her voice rasping over her tongue. “Jenny’s husband, and she’s so nice, she might as well be a basket of kittens. Are we in love? No. But I fucked him anyway.”

Rache took a handful of her hair in each fist. “Bald,” she said. “And the rest of them. Bald. Trust me.”

“But they never killed anyone,” said Sunny. She coughed and choked. “You never—”

“Neither did you, Sunny,” said Rache. “You didn’t kill her. You didn’t.”

Sunny pulled off the wig. She put it in Rache’s hand. She’d earned it. It was nice of her to make a gesture of friendliness. Nice of her to return the bowl. And talk about her own terrible head.
But you’re wrong,
she wanted to say.
It’s all my fault. I killed him, I killed her, and I’ve killed Maxon now. All my fault. And the wig doesn’t matter. Because my house is already in ruin.

20

Up in the rocket, Maxon heard his own breathing inside the helmet. He heard the voices of the pilots talking to each other, quieter now, less frantic. He felt the rocket shifting effortlessly through space. It all felt okay, it felt normal. His pulse was elevated, but his bones were not broken. He had not been smashed to pulp. He had not exploded into fragments.

He tried his voice. “Phillips, what’s the status?”

“Uh, Genius, we’re going to need you to sit tight,” came the voice.

“What happened? Was it an explosion?”

“Think we got hit, brother,” said Fred Phillips. He was miles away by radio wave in the headset, but he was right next to Maxon, so close he could have reached over and patted the man’s gloved hand.

Conrad’s arms were moving frantically, his fingers tapping at a keyboard. Maxon wondered if he should help.

“It is, ah, a bad outcome here? Did the meteor damage us?”

“Yeah, Genius, any meteor that hits you is a bad outcome, okay?” Phillips’s voice was raised higher than normal, which Maxon knew from his notebook indicated tension and lack of patience. Maxon frowned.

“We are going to restore communications first,” Gompers put in. “Then we can assess the damage and take action.”

“Are we on course?” Maxon asked. “Are we going to rendezvous with the cargo piece as scheduled?”

“Maxon, we’re kinda working on making sure we have airlock and oxygen right now,” said Phillips. “There’s a process to these things, a process we have to follow fucking meticulously, or we are all fucked to hell, okay?”

“Relax, Phillips,” barked Gompers.

“But are we on course? What is the status of our course? Have we deviated?”

“Listen, brother, if we don’t establish communication with Houston soon, and with our satellites soon, and with the entire fucking world of electronics outside this rocket real soon, we’re not going to be able to work out shit for a course, okay?”

“Phillips!” barked Gompers. “You will control yourself. Another outburst like that and you’re in quarters.”

A blue ink pen floated past Maxon’s face. He clicked the release to let his arms free from the chair, reached up, and unclipped his face mask, letting the shield up. He took a deep breath.

“We have oxygen,” Maxon said. “Now how the fuck about our course? We were looking for orbital insertion, Phillips, do we have it or do we not? Do we have engines? Do we have power to the engines? We need to fire rocket two at sixty throttle for eight seconds. That was the last order. Did you execute?”

Phillips slammed his hand down on the keyboard inside its white glove but also unclipped his helmet and took in a deep breath. His face was moist, and Maxon knew that meant he was nervous. He turned his head, now six inches away from the end of Maxon’s nose, as they were shoulder-to-shoulder in their seats in the rocket. His words came out with a little spray of spit from his tongue, clipped and bitter.

“I appreciate your interest in our progress. I appreciate you are on a mission here too. But until I tell you otherwise, you are only allowed to sit there. Do not take off your suit. Do not shit your pants. Do not ask me again about the fucking container.”

“Can I say ‘Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!’ until you fix it?” Maxon asked, unblinking. Gompers began to laugh.

“You are a jackass,” said Phillips. “A true jackass.”

He turned his face back to the controls in front of him, and Maxon sighed. He did not like waiting for information. He did not like standing aside while others did the thinking and the work. He did not like to delegate, ever. He felt if he could switch places with Phillips and sit at the green and black screen, he would be able to perceive all of Phillips’s errors, communication could be reestablished, and they could rendezvous with the container as planned.

However, communication could not be reestablished. The satellite fixture had simply been sheared away by the meteor and was not functional. No tapping on buttons, no words and numbers on the green and black screen could bring it back. It would take a space walk to reach the place where it had been, and even if they got to it, and stared hard at the twisted metal and shattered fiberglass that was the only remnant of the place where the satellite fixture had been, they would not be able to bring it back. Without it, they were without comms, and they were undeniably off course, falling directly into the moon and out of orbit, if Maxon was not mistaken, and he never ever was.

Phillips and Gompers became more and more intense, while Conrad stayed cool, his face ashen. They kept running checks, they ran checks on everything, everything checked out, except the communications, which were completely down. Without the ability to talk to Houston, without the resources at their disposal at Mission Control, the mission was over, and there was no getting home. While contingencies could be planned for, those contingencies did not include being knocked off course by a meteor and the resulting adjustments. Those could not be made by the astronauts in a rocket with no comms. They needed a way to get a link home, and nothing else would do. Maxon sat in his chair, crossing and uncrossing his fingers, steepling and unsteepling them, his eyes focused inward, trying to be patient, for the sake of Phillips and Gompers.

“If we could get our position,” mumbled Phillips, “if we could get a triangulation…”

“Without our numbers, we have nothing,” said Gompers. “We are decaying right now. We are going to land very hard, very fast. We are not even equipped to land, in this thing, you realize? This thing lands, that’s where she’s going to stay. We need orbit. We’re going to fire the rockets.”

“Wait, in what direction? You think you can just fly it blind? We need Houston, we need information. We can’t even see properly up here.”

“I have an idea,” said Maxon firmly. His voice cut through the close, dry air. He had been so calm through the whole ordeal that the other men were beginning to wonder if he was actually aware of the situation they found themselves in.

“Whatcha got, doc?” asked Gompers.

“We know where the container pod was, right? We know where it was and what its orbit was. If we parallel its speed and its trajectory, we should be able to safely establish a solid orbit. Once that has been accomplished, I can go over to it, and get one of the Hera models to build us a phone.”

“Go over to it? In what, your car?”

“There’s a jetpack suit in Cargo B,” said Conrad.

“I know,” said Maxon. “I’ll wear the jetpack and go over to the container.”

“Do you understand the severity of this situation, sir?”

“No,” he said, “but I’m about to Google it, and by the time we get there, I’ll be well informed.”

Conrad blinked and then slowly began to chuckle. But Phillips reached over and punched him in the arm.

“Jackass!” he repeated. “Look, we can do this. With the software we have on board. We can repurpose the navigational software to function as a GPS. By radio, by radio if we have to.”

“But then what, how,” Gompers began, “how do we get Mission Control access to our numbers?”

“I promise you,” said Maxon blankly, “that I can fix you a way to talk to Houston, if you just get me over to that cargo container. One of the machines the robot Heras are going to build on the moon is a comm center. We only need a Hera. And I need silicon, titanium, iron.”

George and Phillips looked at each other. “Moon metals,” said Phillips. “We need moon metals.”

“Yes, those are minerals found on the moon, among others,” Maxon told them. “The robots are made to extract their own materials from the moon’s environment, can’t be shipping them plastics and aluminum from Earth all the time.”

“Well, where are we going to get silicon and titanium?”

“You can break down some of the equipment in Cargo A,” said Conrad.

“Will there be enough?” asked Phillips.

“I don’t need much,” Maxon said.

While Phillips plotted a course to intercept, Gompers and Maxon sifted through the rest of the rocket, looking for pieces that could be used as raw materials for the Hera to make a phone.

“Thanks,” Maxon told Gompers. “This will cover it. Now, Phillips, can you get us in line with that container?”

“Simple math, my friend. Simple math,” Phillips reassured him. “I gotta say, Genius, you came up with a good one this time.”

It took him two hours to put on the suit they used for space walks. It was a bulky contraption with a glass helmet, gloves, boots, heart monitor, brain scan, and a bodily fluid collector. There were layers and layers to install on himself, and he didn’t quite fit it, being too tall for the legs. The jumpsuit inside felt tight, like he was squeezing into a second skin. The sturdy exoskeleton fit over him and shut. He moved like a monster inside it, like a fifty-foot lizard, motions slow and deliberate, knocking over stuff in Cargo B, sending bits of equipment spinning across the room. The jetpack was operated by controls under his fingers, and with a few short instructions, Maxon was able to understand.

By the time he was ready to go, Phillips and Conrad had worked out the orbit of the container module, had mapped it, and had pulled up alongside it. “Godspeed, Dr. Mann,” said Phillips forlornly. “You have about six hours of working time in that suit. We’ll be in communication with you via the radio.” He went into the airlock. He could see Gompers and Phillips back in the rocket, looking in at him. Then there was a hiss, and the bay opened out onto space.

Without hesitation, he pushed himself off the door to the rocket, and went spinning outward. Did he worry about the jetpack? If it would fire when he pushed the button, if it would function properly? No. Maxon believed in machines. Believed they would do what they were built to do. It was like walking around with a kidney, or a lung.
We all do this all the time,
Maxon thought.
We think nothing of depending on a lump of muscle to keep us living, a lump of biological matter that pulses moment by moment, day by day, on and on in the dark, without respite, without refreshment, and even when we starve it, or stifle it, or overdo it, that lump of pink continues to contract, contract, contract, without a will of its own, without a rest. Without the knowledge of its own sacrifice.

“You are already a robot,” he had once told a roomful of graduate students at a conference in Maine. “The most advanced robot ever created.” The heart pumps without awareness, and that’s why it pumps. Unless there is a mechanical failure, it continues to pump, and who can plan for that? You build your organs out of the best material available. You build them while you are still in the womb. While you are still on Earth, you build your jetpack that will take you out into space, and when you get out there to use it, you just have to trust that you built it right.