Ramsay Roothoorp

It was dark, I couldn’t really see all that clearly, and if I had second thoughts about spying on one of my crewmates, I stifled them. The whole thing was almost innocent, if you want to know the truth, because I’d gone down to check on the water flows in the fish ponds maybe ten minutes after Troy announced that E. had a visitor, which I’d forgotten entirely about because the conversation had veered off in some other direction altogether, and I was just strolling along minding my own business when I saw movement off to my right and there she was at the window, her shoulders bare and her back too, bare down to the waist. She seemed to be rotating her hips, gyrating against the glass, and I could make out the shifting form of her boyfriend—Johnny, his name was—looming in and out of the weak sepia light like a big fluttering vampire bat in one of the Dracula movies. It took me a minute to realize what was happening, and it wasn’t as if I hadn’t seen E. topless before—bottomless, for that matter—through the course of one team skinny-dipping episode or another, but this was different, this was E. like I’d never seen her, doing what? Simulating sex with a man who might or might not have had his penis in his hand while the shadows elongated and fell back again and E.’s hips went in and out and up and down in sync with his. It gave me a jolt. It did. And if I eased off my shoes and slipped in along the side of the animal pens so I could get a better look, I really had no choice in the matter. Call me a voyeur, but anybody in my position would have done the same.

Case in point: I’d had a call from my college roommate a week or so before closure. Jason. Jason Fourier. We’d kept in touch sporadically over the years, but he was calling now to reconnect because he’d seen my face on TV or maybe in the newspaper, and the first thing he said over the line, before even identifying himself, was You’re like a pig in shit. And I said, Jason? And he said, You’re not fooling anybody, you dog. The blonde is hot. And that redhead, wow, scorching, man, just scorching.

I can’t say whether Jason’s reaction was in any way representative of the larger response, but I have to give G.C., Judy and Dennis credit because here came the hook again, the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass. That was all the public cared about. Living arrangements. Bedrooms. Terranauts going at it like fauns and satyrs splayed out in the high grass under a mango tree. I was caught up in it too—how could I not be? Yes, we were doing science, yes, we were committed, but the human factor had to be front and center no matter what anybody says. You want a space colony? You can fill it with all the species you can manage to net, trap or dig up and you can balance out the O₂/CO₂ ratio to a nice clean earth-friendly 20.9 percent to .03 percent, but if the humans don’t mate, don’t reproduce, what good is it? The Bible might be sketchy on all this, Adam and Eve hunkering down to generate two sons and then another son to replace the murdered one, two more sons after that and a pair of daughters as well, leaving open the question of where the sons’ wives had come from (unless God approved of incest or they found some other bright-eyed scampering hominid to trade genes with), but in the worlds we were projecting, sex and genetic diversity were key, for our species and all the others too. If E2’s raft of creatures failed to reproduce, then the whole thing was a bust.

I’m not trying to justify what I did that night. I’m just saying that if you put yourself in an overheated environment with a girl like E. and then witness something like that you’d have to be beyond all hope not to find it at least interesting. I don’t know how long I stood there watching, hard as a brick, my shorts damp with pre-ejaculate and the breath catching in my throat, but the mosquitoes brought me back to earth, or E2’s earth, and I slunk away feeling guilty, feeling tainted, but wasn’t that the way it always was when you watched porno?

There were some two thousand sensors distributed throughout E2, gauging everything from soil respiration to ocean salinity levels and systems functions, and cameras just about everywhere. Beyond that—and this was especially true in those first few months—every time you glanced up you were staring into the face of a family of tourists, Dad, Mom, Junior and Sis, clicking away with their Kodak Fun Savers. Or a journalist riffling through his notebook. Girl Scouts, Trekkies, bird-watchers or one clutch or another of non-specified enthusiasts who fixated on the Terranaut narrative as if it was the sole path in life. That first Halloween a whole mob of people appeared outside the airlock dressed as scientists, galagos, cockroaches and Terranauts, one group of eight tricked out in crimson jumpsuits and featuring a girl with her right hand bandaged in commemoration of the accident that brought down Mission One. But I’m getting ahead of myself. The point is, there was precious little privacy under the glass unless you knew where to look—and you had to be aware not only of your surroundings but also of the eyes fixed on you pretty much all the time.

An example. Just days after I’d happened to observe Dawn in her private moment there at the visitors’ window, I was in the pigpen with her performing my morning’s ag duty, thinking of nothing beyond going through the motions at hand and getting on with my day, which was to include a PicTel conference with an auditorium full of high-schoolers from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Yoopers, they call themselves, in case you’re interested), maintenance on the fish ponds and settling tanks and a video hookup with G.C., Judy and Dennis to take instruction and reveal, as discreetly as possible, any quirks or deviant tendencies—actual or in potentia—arising among my fellow Terranauts (for which, in time, I would be labeled a spy, a snitch, a traitor and worse). Anyway, there we were, Dawn and I, equipped with shovels, buckets and brooms, our bodies decaffeinated and already on the way to being undernourished, slinging shit. We chatted collegially as we bent to it, our conversation peppered with in-jokes, gossip about the six of us who didn’t happen to be present, work-related issues, that sort of thing.

E.’s hair had broken free of the ponytail she’d been wearing earlier and now it was a wild sweat-slicked mass obscuring her face every time she leaned into the shovel. Her arms were bare, flecked with mud. It came to me that she was totally at home here, and for some reason I flashed on Thomas Hardy, though I hadn’t given him a thought or glanced at a single line of his since college. What came to me was the pivotal scene in Jude the Obscure in which Arabella Donn, the lusty farmer’s daughter, attracts Jude Fawley’s attention by flinging a pig’s genitalia at him. And, if I was remembering rightly, scoring a strike right down the middle of the plate.

“You know what you remind me of?” I glanced up from the bucket I was steadying with both hands as she made a wide slashing deposit in its depths.

“No, what?”

“I mean who, who you remind me of?”

She shrugged, the shovel backing away from the mouth of the bucket to rasp against the concrete floor. Behind her, the pigs—two sows, a boar and a pair of piglets—poked their snouts through the gate separating the back portion of the pen from the front, which we crewmates were in the process of slopping out. “I don’t know, who?”

The smell—that perfume pigs create as their highest achievement, a mix of sour milk, putrefying blood, shit, urine, vomit and some other unidentifiable element that binds it all together so it hits you like a club, over and over—had us breathing shallowly and through our mouths only. “Arabella Donn,” I said.

She stopped what she was doing, put one hand on her hip. She was amused, I could see that. “Who?”

“From Jude the Obscure? She was the farm girl, the pig girl, actually.”

“I wouldn’t know—you were the lit major, not me. I remember the movie Tess, though—”

“Polanski. What did you think?”

“It was all right. I guess I didn’t know they wore so much eye shadow then, back on the farm, I mean—”

“Right, me either.”

“But that’s what I’ve been reduced to, huh? The pig girl? Or wench. Wouldn’t they have called her a wench?”

“You’re more than that to me, E., a whole lot more. You’re the goat girl too, and what—the eggmonger. The shit-slinger, the—”

“Very funny,” she said, and made a playful gesture, as if to snatch up a handful of that very substance and fling it at me, but of course I don’t have to tell you how slippery this medium is, how quickly it can shift underfoot so that someone clowning around in a pair of pink rubber galoshes while standing ankle-deep in it can lose her balance in a heartbeat. Which was just what happened. Looking surprised—and apologetic, that too—she went down hard on her backside, right in the thick of it, and what did I do? What could I do? I laughed.

The pigs, incidentally, were a semi-domesticated variety shipped in from Ossabaw Island, off the Georgia coast. This was a population bred out of a feral remnant stocked on the island by Spanish explorers in the early sixteenth century and they’d evolved to suit their limited environment through the dwarfism many island species exhibit, as E.O. Wilson, whom I mentioned earlier, theorized in positing some of the principles of island biogeography back in the 1970s. As a dwarf variety, Ossabaw hogs were perfect for our purposes, the boar no taller than maybe twenty inches at the shoulder and weighing in at well under two hundred pounds. The idea here was to provide meat, of course, as on any farm, but the complicating factor, as the Mission One crew discovered the hard way, was in finding enough fodder to keep the animals growing into the promise of their chops, hams and spare ribs. (Initially, G.C. had proposed using Vietnamese potbellied pigs, but word got out to the public and there was a howl of protest from hundreds of people who kept them as pets, because if you recall, it was around then that they were, very briefly, all the rage. I remember one overwrought newspaper editorial comparing us to dog eaters, as in, Would you slaughter, skin and bake the family dog? No, I said—privately, of course—we wouldn’t. We’d fricassee it.)

So I laughed. And E., down there in the muck, caught me unaware, scissoring her legs to knock me off my feet and bring me down with her, which ordinarily I wouldn’t have found all that funny—who would? Think about it. You can live as close to the earth as you want, but you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. The thing was, despite the smell, I couldn’t help noticing the way E.’s shirt clung to her, as if this were wet T-shirt night down at the local bar—with the obvious limitation that what her shirt was marinated in wasn’t anything so innocuous as water. Or beer. It was a moment. And there I was, on my hands and knees, in the thick of it, and I suppose I reacted instinctively, grabbing at her ankle as she tried to get to her feet so that she pitched forward and went down all over again.

It was childish. It was embarrassing. And it was nothing I’d ever had even an inkling of doing in all my life to this point, but what made it worse was that even as we were staggering to our feet like drunken mud-wrestlers the flashbulbs went off and we looked up to see a dozen visitors pressed to the glass and high-fiving each other. Worse yet, there was Judy, tour guide du jour, standing amongst them with a face of stone.

“You know, really, Ramsay, I don’t care what you do—or who you fuck—but when you descend to this kind of thing—”

“Crap, you mean. Call it crap.”

“—it just hurts the mission, that’s all. I wanted to say ‘reflects badly on it,’ but that doesn’t even come close, does it?”

I was in our office cum command center, sitting before the video monitor, watching Judy’s angry face snap at me like a chameleon’s (the roll of the eyes, the recoil of the tongue). It was early afternoon and I was scheduled to entertain, instruct and inform the Yoopers in ten minutes, but Judy had summoned me and here we were. I’d had a shower and changed into a clean T-shirt and shorts, though I suppose I still carried a whiff of the pigpen about me, which was inevitable when you were forced to shower with scentless soap and shampoo. Not that it would have mattered to Judy—or the Yoopers, for that matter. The technology didn’t transfer body odor, or not yet anyway. As far as the rest of it was concerned, my teeth gleamed and the haircut I’d gotten just before closure was holding up fairly well, though I’d had to do a quick trim of the sideburns. What I said was, “I’m not fucking anybody, though I suppose it would be bootless to tell you that—”

“Bootless? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Useless. You know, as in Shakespeare? ‘I all alone beweep my outcast state/And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries.’”

She clenched her jaw. Her face seemed to expand till it took up the entire screen. “Listen,” she said finally, and then she appended my name, her voice lower now, as if she were fighting to keep it under control. “We’re not playing games here. Those people today? That was a biology class from the School of Life Sciences at U.A. We need their support—we need all the support we can get. And what do they see? You and Dawn up to your ears in shit. Or what—playing in it? Playing in shit.”

I shrugged. Looked into the camera. “You try shoveling that stuff and see how clean you wind up. Or your precious biology class—take them on a field trip to the nearest pig farm. Or better yet, the slaughterhouse. You live in a real world, you get dirty, okay?”

“But that was disgusting, just disgusting. And you know what I told them? I told them it was part of an experiment to see how even the dirtiest wash would affect the wastewater systems, as if it was some commercial for Tide or something—”

I began to feel an edge of remorse. I’d acted like an adolescent, like some hormone-challenged teenager, and in the process I’d made the mission look bad. I wanted to apologize, wanted to say Sorry, Judy, and move on, but I didn’t like her tone, didn’t like her bulging eyes and the tight unforgiving slash of her mouth or the psychic cost of what we’d been doing in the executive washroom before we were interrupted or what she expected from me now. “And they bought that?” I said.

She just shook her head and maybe she clucked her tongue too, though the audio wasn’t fine-tuned enough to pick it up. “There’s another thing,” she said, “and then I’ll let you go so you can do your conference with the high school kids. It’s the play. Jeremiah’s anxious to get it off the ground, meaning you’ve had a week and a half to adjust and it’s time to get down to business. Like in rehearsals, which really haven’t amounted to much yet, have they?”

“Yeah, fine,” I said, “okay. But why don’t you tell Diane—she’s team captain.”

A pause. I watched the screen waver, a pattern of individual pixels blurring Judy’s face before the resolution came back. She was disembodied, what I knew of her from that last night and all the times before invisible to me now, inaccessible, as if I’d never stripped her clothes off or climbed atop her or watched her as she clung to me till she stiffened and went slack again. Her eyes held steady, only her lips moving. “Because I’m telling you,” she said.

Our first crisis came within a month of closure, and while it wasn’t even in the ballpark with Mission One’s dilemma over Roberta Brownlow and her severed fingertip, it affected us all nonetheless, and me in particular. It was in early April, the days lengthening imperceptibly and the vegetation responding nicely with a burst of new growth (and O₂). We were all adjusting to our diet of roughly 1,500 calories a day, our muscles tightening and whatever beginner’s paunches we might have come in with all but gone, and we fell into our roles without any strain or undue tension. We’d all just sat down to dinner one night, feeling companionable and looking forward to Troy’s first vintage of banana wine, of which we were each promised at least one glass and possibly more, when one of the galagos let out with a high riveting call—a screech, really—we hadn’t heard before.

“Jesus, what was that?” Stevie said, and we all turned to Gretchen.

“I don’t know,” she said, setting down her wineglass. She looked stricken. “I’ve never heard anything like it—have you, any of you?”

We hadn’t. To this point the animals had almost exclusively confined themselves to an ascending series of hoots or the sort of soft whining cry you’d expect from a baby in a cradle, hence their popular name, bush babies. For a long moment we all sat there poised over our plates, listening.

Richard said, “Sounds like somebody died,” and Gretchen said, “Don’t say that.”

Dinner that night was Troy’s responsibility, and if we hadn’t been overworked and underfed none of us would have been particularly enthusiastic about what we found on our plates—mashed yams and rice topped with a runny peanut/banana sauce and a side dish of borscht featuring some sort of unidentifiable greens floating atop it. Hands down, Troy was the worst cook among the crew, the kind of clueless bachelor who’d subsisted on fast food and Velveeta sandwiches before coming to the project. The wine, which he’d fermented in his chem lab from a banana mash, peels and all, was presented as a peace offering.

By this time, incidentally, we’d graduated from helping ourselves from the communal pot to having the day’s chef portion out our meals on eight separate plates, assuring that everyone received his fair share, and the first thing we did before digging in was assess the wine. It was young, no question about that, and its color ran from the bright aniline yellow of antifreeze on top to a dark sludgy amber at the bottom of the glass. Its nose, as you might expect, was banana-heavy, and that killed any subtlety the vintner may have been striving for. As for palate, it lingered like mouthwash and gave you the same impression of chemical rigor. Still, and credit the winemaker here, it had tested out at nearly twenty percent ABV, and that, as far as we were concerned, lifted it into the realm of fine wine.

“Eco-cru!” Richard cried, hoisting his glass. “Way to go, T.T.!”

That was when the shriek echoed through the biomes and we all froze, glasses in hand, and Stevie looked to Gretchen and Gretchen set her glass down. This was her province—the rain forest and its creatures—and she spent every waking moment obsessing over it. It was she who’d reported that one species of ant—Nylanderia fulva, the crazy ant—was taking over, wiping out the insect fauna not only of the rain forest but the savanna, marsh and desert as well and she’d made the discovery, pre-closure, that the failure of Mission One’s bee colonies was due to the cockroaches swarming them at night when the bees were at rest and all but defenseless. Which led us to restock the colonies and attempt measures to keep the cockroaches out of them, with mixed results. As for the ants, one of Nylanderia’s survival strategies is to breed multiple queens, so though we eradicated nests wherever we could, it was essentially a losing battle. Chalk it up to experience—you can bet the next generation Ecosphere won’t include any species of crazy ant, not Nylanderia or Paratrechina longicornis either.

The shriek came again. And then again. And in the next moment two of the galagos burst into view, hurtling through the fruit trees below us and scrambling up the steel struts of the spaceframe till they were overhead, biting and clawing at each other all the while. Fur flew, literally, and the tiny canines came into play. “What are they doing, fighting?” Gyro asked, his thin beaky face turned upward, and I couldn’t help thinking what a stupid question it was.

“It’s Lola,” Gretchen said, jumping up so precipitously she knocked her chair over. “And”—she was at the rail now, peering out into the darkness—“Luna. That’s Luna, I’m sure of it.” She turned to us, to me, even as the cat-sized creatures shot across the spaceframe and disappeared into the rain forest beyond, still shrieking. “I was afraid of this. It’s the alpha female going after the beta, and that’s inevitable, I suppose, but I was hoping—”

“They’d all get along?” Richard gave her a smile, raising his glass again. “Let’s toast to prosimian harmony.”

“Sip it, sip it,” Troy coached. “Don’t just throw it down—”

But Richard wasn’t listening. He took a good healthy swallow of the swirling amber liquid and made a face. “Holy shit—it’s like setting your socks on fire.”

In the next moment we all raised our glasses solemnly to our lips, hoping—or no, praying—that Troy’s libation was the answer to what was already becoming something of a slog, all work and no play, one month down and twenty-three to go. I liked to drink, one of the vices I’d always indulged, and not just in the rush to closure. We all needed intoxicants, as a crew and as a species too, something to lift us out of the ordinary, and if there ever were to be a space colony, the colonists would need their intoxicants same as anybody or risk going quietly mad. I flashed on half a dozen bar scenes, the vodka I’d kept in my freezer, the Flor de Caña rum I loved on the rocks with a splash of Coke, the taste of pinot noir on Rhonda Ronson’s lips when we shared a bottle in bed, then I closed my eyes and took a hopeful swallow of our first vintage under glass.

I didn’t spit it out. And I didn’t gag either, though I had to fight the reflex. Judging from the faces of my fellow Ecospherians, we were all in agreement. All but Gretchen, who hadn’t touched hers—or her meal either. She was at the rail still, listening for further signs of strife, while we sipped and chatted and lifted our forks to our mouths. Troy—he wore his sandy hair long so that it covered his all but perpendicular ears—smacked his lips thoughtfully and looked round the table. “It’s almost there,” he said, “really. It just needs maybe a bit more aging.”

“A bit more than what—a week?” Richard said, and we were all laughing now, or most of us anyway, the alcohol running through our veins and loosening the cords that still bound us to the outside and whatever commitments we’d left behind. We were having a party, our first true and veritable party. Even the food, bland as it was, began to taste better.

“Come on, Gretchen,” Richard called out. “Worry about that later—we’re having a party here.”

Gretchen was leaning over the rail, propped on her elbows and staring off into the distance where the artificial mountain and dominant trees of the rain forest rose against the starry screen of the superstructure. The night pulsed with the calls of the smaller creatures and the intermittent roar of the big vacuum pumps sucking water into the wave machine, a roar that blurred the distinction between artificial and natural so thoroughly I sometimes thought I was hearing whales and walruses blowing in open water (though the biggest thing in our sea was a two-foot parrotfish, if you discount Stevie, who measured five-seven and weighed in at one hundred and twenty-four beautifully proportioned pounds). Gretchen seemed hesitant, but there was her food, getting cold, and her wine—we were all eyeing it—sitting there untouched. In the next moment she was at the table, righting her upended chair and sliding in between E. and Gyro, her face pasty and her glasses catching the light so you couldn’t see her eyes. She was looking old, or older, the worry over the galago scuffle and god knew what else—ants—sitting heavily in her jowls. She was only four years older than me, but carried herself like someone much older, and maybe that was an effect of her total absorption in her work and the humorlessness that underpinned it. I’m not saying she wasn’t fit—she could outwork practically anybody, except maybe E.—it was just that she seemed distracted and didn’t much bother about her appearance, beyond the occasions that is when Judy demanded we all clean up and face the cameras. What am I trying to say? She was unstylish, unhip, frumpy. That’s the word. Frumpy.

“You think it’s anything serious?” E. asked, turning to her. “They wouldn’t really hurt each other, would they? They don’t go to war in nature or anything like that, do they?”

“That’s reserved for our species,” I said, and Richard, leering from across the table, said, “I second that.”

“And ants,” Diane put in from the other end of the table. “Don’t forget ants.”

Gretchen—hardly anyone used her nickname, Snowflake, which we’d shortened to “Snow,” though I thought “Flake” would have suited her better—let out a sigh, brought the wineglass to her nose, sniffed, and set it down again. “Who can say? In their native habitat, in equatorial Africa, they’ve got space and sanctuary, so a beta female can go off and if she’s lucky hook up with a beta male cast out of another troop—but here, in an enclosure, anything goes.” She lifted the glass again and again put it down. “That’s what we’re doing here, right? Finding out. And I really hope they’ll respond and adjust to their environment, but there’s no telling—”

That was when the shrieks started up again, as if the beta female, Luna, had found a hiding place and now, suddenly and spookily, Lola had found it too. And here they came again, the same pair (Jimbo, the male, and Lana, the other female, nowhere to be seen). Again they went from the branches to the superstructure, rocketing overhead as if they’d been shot from an air gun, and again they closed in a blur of teeth and claws and whirling limbs, only this time, in desperation, Luna made a leap for the railing right in front of us and just barely made it, bunching like a cat and emitting a low hiss of distress, her eyes trembling and huge.

This couldn’t have happened during the Mission One closure, by the way, as the original structure of the Human Habitat was glassed in to prevent just such an intrusion, not to mention keeping out the mosquitoes that bred in any errant puddle and the no-see-ums that would rise up out of the marsh come May. We’d voted as a team (seven to one, Troy the lone holdout) to remove the glass during the transition phase from Mission One reentry to Mission Two closure, seeking a more authentic experience. We were here to be one with nature, after all, not separated from it—wasn’t it enough that there was glass everywhere we looked? So we took the panels down and left ourselves open to everything, snakes, lizards, beetles, butterflies and birds—and now this, the galago, our “companion primate,” crouched on the railing just feet from us while her antagonist chittered curses from above.

“Oh, my god,” E. said. “She’s bleeding.”

And so she was. We all saw it. A gash over the flexor of one hip, the fur there gone a brilliant saturate red, and the left ear torn. (If you don’t have any experience of galagos, picture a furball with a fluffed-up tail, oversized ears and big night-seeing eyes, the sort of thing Disney would put front and center if one day the Magic Kingdom should devise its own ecosphere.)

“We’ve got to treat that,” Gretchen said, and Richard, our source of sutures, anesthetic and antibiotic salve, made as if to rise from his chair. “No, no—shhh!” Gretchen hissed. “Nobody move.”

I looked to E. Her face was white (not yet orange, as all our faces would eventually be, due to an excess of beta-carotene in our diet) and she sat there rigid, her shoulders clenched and her hands suspended over her plate. I could see she was thinking the same thing I was—that is, how in Christ’s name were we ever going to catch the thing before it either bled out or the other one got hold of it and killed it? Not that it would be an insurmountable loss—this was the way of nature—but the well-being of these things, of all the creatures and plants under this roof, was our responsibility, and the loss of Luna would carry a symbolic weight the media would gleefully take up and strap to our backs. So here it was, our first failure—or potential failure—staring us in the face. Only problem was, what to do about it? Any sort of trap would have to be fabricated in the shop and whatever netting we had was in one of the storage rooms in the basement. Making a grab for the thing—and I thought of it, briefly, before dismissing the idea—would be futile. Besides, they did bite, didn’t they?

In the event, the decision was taken out of our hands. Suddenly—so suddenly none of us actually saw Lola suspended in mid-air as she made a leap every bit as desperate as her victim’s—there were two galagos on the rail and just as suddenly there were none. Why was this? Again—we were moving in human time and they were moving in prosimian time—it took us a moment to understand that they’d now been transposed as if in some magic trick to the space beneath the table, where they snarled and hissed and spat while we sprang up in something approaching collective panic—what would they do to bare legs?—and finally became spectators to the violence that was as elemental as life itself.

Later, after Gretchen had separated the combatants with a timely thrust of the kitchen broom and they disappeared in opposite directions, we were more or less able to take up where we left off, though the interruption seemed to have put a damper on things. The wine helped. As it turned out there was enough for a second round for the four of us who wanted it (Troy, Richard, Stevie and me) and we wound up draining the beaker to the last precious alcohol-infused drop. After which I sat down to a game of five-card draw with Troy and Richard while the others went off to their rooms—except for Gretchen, that is, who when last seen was stalking the rain forest with a butterfly net that might or might not have had sufficient tensile strength to contain a wounded and no doubt thoroughly riled galago.

Everything was quiet—no one even had a radio going—and the game so absorbed me I lost all track of time. I was a pretty good poker player (a champion bluffer, certainly), but Richard was good too and he usually wound up winning the biggest pots, no small thing when you consider that we were playing for peanuts, literal peanuts, hoarded from the handful Diane doled out each day for our mid-morning snack—and beyond that, that we were so hungry we ate them shells and all. What I’m saying is that to lose in the outside world, while it’s always disappointing, hurtful even, isn’t so much a matter of survival as a drain on the income, but here, inside, it went much deeper. To see Richard—or Troy—rake in a big pot made you ache in the deepest, hollowest, emptiest crevice of your alimentary canal. Those peanuts, and the essential oils they contained, not to mention protein, were the cornerstone of our diet. Losing was beyond tragic. In the long run—and I don’t mean to overdramatize here, but indulge me—it could be fatal.

Happily, on this particular night, I was the one raking in the biggest pot, nailing Richard on the last hand, my three queens beating his two pair, and when I bade them farewell—I who had come to the table with thirty-two peanuts—I went off to my room in possession of a hoard of sixty-seven, and I have to say I was feeling as good as I’d felt since the exhilaration of that first heady day of closure. The night was a fine and welcoming thing, same as it always was, temperature in the seventy-eight-to-eighty-two-degree range, humidity high, O₂ levels dropping fractionally as photosynthesis shut down during the hours of darkness. I closed my door, and not simply to keep beetles, moths and mosquitoes from sailing in to bat variously around the lamp or feast on my exposed flesh, but because I had a hoard to watch over. Sixty-seven peanuts. A fortune by any measure.

For a long while I lay spread-eagled on my bed, one hand in my shorts, idly massaging myself so that I went hard and soft and hard again (if E2 was a cyclotron of the life sciences, it was a hormonal accelerator too, a kind of perpetual steamy night of the adolescent soul, clothes a nuisance, shoes even, every pore open wide), while the other sifted through the comforting mound of my winnings. I was chewing idly—again, shells and all: to this day I can’t imagine eating a shelled peanut and wasting even that scant bit of nutrition—and letting my mind drift until everything went still.

It was late when I woke and after I got up to use the bathroom I found I couldn’t get back to sleep. I won’t say I’m an erratic sleeper—most nights I sleep right through—but every once in a while, whether I’m stressed or not, I wind up tossing and turning, sometimes for hours. I definitely wasn’t stressed on this particular night—I’d won at cards, I had a belly full of peanuts, Judy had retracted her claws and in any case couldn’t physically get to me, and as far as I knew G.C. was in the dark about what had gone on between us—but I just couldn’t seem to drift off. Eventually, I found myself slipping out of bed and padding out into the darkness, thinking maybe I’d sit by the ocean a while or maybe even take a swim.

Snakes—did I mention snakes? Snakes were not a worry. Outside, beyond the glass, the Sonoran Desert hosted something like seven or eight species of venomous reptile, including the Gila monster, the sidewinder and coral snake, but ours was the kind of paradise in which the serpent was represented by two species only—the garter snake and the slug-eating snake, both harmless enough and essential too, the garter snakes dwelling in the stream and ponds and feeding on excess frogs and mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis), the slug-eaters doing what their name suggests. Ours was an innoxious paradise, built to serve our needs and sustain itself in perpetuity, a working example of what NASA labeled CELSS, for Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems. If I came across any of our snakes, so much the better.

By now it was just past three in the morning, moonless, the superstructure admitting a soft washed-out sheen of starlight that glowed like pale fire on every leaf and branch. My toes read the soft trucked-in earth like braille. Life seeped into my lungs. Outside, beyond the grid of interlocking windows, I could just make out the dark gap of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the east and the big wheeling strip of stars rising out of it. I’d never been much of a stargazer—never had the time, frankly—and I didn’t recognize a whole lot beyond the Dippers, Orion’s Belt and the tiny glowing ember of Mars, but as I made my way down to the beach and stretched out in the sand, I found myself studying the night sky in a whole new way. It might have been humid inside—we had enough condensation from the air handlers alone to provide our supply of drinking water—but outside, in the desert, where the air was thin and light pollution unheard of, you could see right up into the back molars of the universe.

That thought occupied me a while, tranquilized me, actually, until one of the stars separated itself and began to hump across the dome of the sky, vanishing and reappearing as the struts of the spaceframe erased it and brought it back again. It was a satellite, maybe the space shuttle itself, and I thought of how strange that must be—a moving star—to the aboriginal tribes of Australia or New Guinea who’d built their cosmogony on the original stars, the ones that moved only with the progress of the night. What did they think—that a new god had appeared? That the end had come or at least been foretold? Or no, their shamans or medicine men or whatever they called them would have worked it into the received narrative the way any priest or rabbi would. What choice did they have? The whole wobbly construct of gods and hexes and celestial divination would have come crashing down around them if they didn’t. Right. And then they’d be out of a job. (Of course, our civilization is different only by degree, so let’s not pat ourselves on the back here. We send up our shuttles, satellites and probes, but we have no clearer idea of ultimate purpose than the aborigines. To say that the universe originated as a single atom or that space is infinite is to indulge in a belief system that doesn’t do much more than apply labels to the unknown and unknowable.)

Some time passed, the thump of the vacuum pumps as regular as a giant’s heartbeat, and then I got up, shucked my shorts and took a swim in the placid people-friendly aquarium that was our ocean (no stingrays here, no sharks or barracudas or jellyfish, no crosscurrents, no undertow). When I got out, back at the beach, I realized I’d forgotten a towel, and, improvising, I began patting myself down with my shorts. That was when I became aware of a low-threshold sound—a kind of wheezing or rustling—emanating from the wall of bamboo that separated the rain forest from the ocean and the other biomes. And what was it? One of the lizards? A frog? A snake? I moved closer, curious in the way I’d been trained to be—as a naturalist in a state of nature, the sand muffling my footsteps. There was a shadow there, a dense clump of darkness against the deep green cane that had gone black in this light, and the shadow was breathing—or no, snoring. It took me a moment, my eyes homing in on it, to realize that I was staring down at one of the galagos—a very specific one, its shadowy ear torn and a black crescent of dried blood defining its left rear leg.

Again, my first thought was to grab it, pin it to me and take it to Gretchen, but again I resisted—Gretchen had a pair of elbow-length leather gloves to employ in situations like this, and beyond that, she knew what she was doing and I didn’t. Very carefully, so as not to awaken it, I backed away, stepped into my shorts and went off to fetch her. I found the Habitat deserted but for the cockroaches, everybody asleep at this hour, and went down the hallway to Gretchen’s room, which was right next door to mine. The door was shut and I knocked softly a moment, chary of waking the others—how would I explain being outside Gretchen’s door, dead of night, in a pair of wet shorts? There was no answer. I tried again, a touch more forcefully. Still nothing. A mosquito buzzed in for the kill and died in the effort. I pushed open the door and stepped into the room, calling softly, “Gretchen. Gretchen, are you awake?”

There was a stirring above. Gretchen’s voice drifted down, hoarse with sleep: “What is it? Who’s there?”

“It’s me,” I said. “Vodge. I found Luna—down by the ocean?”

“What time is it?”

“I don’t know—three, three-thirty. She’s just lying there, asleep, I think. She snores, did you know that?”

There was a moment of silence, then the bedsprings played a little tune, a light flicked on above and Gretchen, in her nightgown and sans glasses, was staring myopically down at me. “Is she all right? Does she look hurt? I mean, why should she be sleeping now, unless, I don’t know. Where’d you say she was?”

So we made an expedition, just the two of us, Gretchen in her nightgown (which was filmy, but not see-through, and long enough to trail behind her like a wafting mist) and me in my shorts. She carried the flashlight and the leather gloves, I the cage we dug out of the storeroom. Things were quiet—or as quiet as they got in E2, what with the racketing of the coquis, the hum of the fans and the belch of the wave machine, but the creatures were as still as if they were locked in suspended animation, and our fellow Terranauts, as far as we knew, were busy negotiating the terra incognita of their dreams. We talked in whispers. When we entered the ocean area we fell silent, communicating by hand gestures only.

I took Gretchen’s arm, led her across the strip of sand and pointed to the knot of shadow where the animal lay sleeping. She had her glasses on now—she was all but blind without them, or so she said—and she bent close to make sure this was Luna and not one of the others, but that should have been obvious since the animals are active at night and this one wasn’t. Once she was satisfied, she backed off a few paces, worked her hands and forearms into the leather gauntlets and stalked forward again, step by step. My instructions, agreed upon in the hurried moments in her room while she slipped into a pair of flip-flops and extracted the leather gloves from a drawer in her oak entertainment center that was the exact duplicate of my own oak entertainment center, were to flick on the flashlight when she gave the signal and have the cage open and ready to receive the animal. Once she got hold of it, that is—and there was the trick.

“Now!” Gretchen said into the darkness and I switched on the flashlight in the very instant Luna came hissing to life, springing up so fast she might have been hot-wired, but Gretchen was there and Gretchen had her and in the next moment she was in the cage and the latch had been latched. By me. “Now what?” I asked, and I will say that my pulse would have registered above normal right about then.

Gretchen just stared at me, looking, I don’t know, un-Gretchen-like, in the diffused light at the margins of the beam, which I was training on the cage now. “What do you think? We take her back to my room and treat her wounds before they get infected.” And then she added, gratuitously (and, I think, because we’d just watched The Godfather, Part II, as our team movie the previous Saturday), “Capiche?”

I have to admit she was more than capable, our own veterinarian, though she wasn’t a veterinarian in any sense the outside world would have recognized—she was a Ph.D., not a D.V.M., and that was a huge distinction, apples and oranges, out there beyond the glass. I set the cage down on the coffee table in her sitting room, Luna chittering and clawing at the mesh—and shitting, that too, shitting out her disappointment and fury—and in the next moment Gretchen had a syringe in her hand and in the moment after that the animal was lying inert on the floor of the cage.

I stayed there for the whole thing, lending moral support, I suppose, because I was all but useless as far as medical procedures were concerned. Gretchen patiently wiped the animal clean, then tended its wounds—the dilapidated ear, the big gash—first with hydrogen peroxide, then Neosporin, all the while thinking aloud. “Bandage? No. She’d just chew it off. Or it would make her even more of a target. What do you think, Vodge?”

I’d gone into something of a trance, watching her hands roam over the gray-brown fur of the thing in her lap while her hair fell free to soften her face. And what was I thinking? That age is relative. She was four years older than I, but what was four years? Nothing. Nothing at all. When I was younger, just out of college and teaching at a high school in suburban New York, I was callow enough to see everything in terms of age, and a gap of four years seemed insurmountable to me, impossible, a kind of temporal mountain I couldn’t imagine scaling. The school was a good one, devotedly academic, and we had a big English department, twenty-eight of us, more or less evenly divided between the older teachers and those of us in our early twenties. In my second year, a new teacher joined the faculty—Mary Watts, a blonde with a sad face and an exciting physique. I was twenty-two, she was twenty-six. Word had it that her sadness derived from what had happened to her in her previous position, a sorry affair—a cliché—in which she fell for one of her colleagues, a man in his fifties who was firmly and immovably married and who strung her along for a couple of years before dumping her and getting her fired into the bargain. Mary Watts. Twenty-six years old. I studied her face and saw the lines etched at the corners of her eyes, crow’s-feet, battle scars, and thought how very, very old she was.

So what am I saying? I looked at Gretchen now and Gretchen was totally different from the Gretchen I knew—or had compartmentalized in my mind. She was softer somehow, younger, her arms smooth and muscular in just the right proportion—shapely—and her legs too. Her feet. Her hands. She dipped her head to fasten the latch on the cage, all done with her doctoring now, and her hair fell away to expose one ear and a tiny red jewel pinned in her earlobe and glowing like the one planet I recognized when I looked up into the night sky, like Mars, Mars in miniature and caught right there in the isolated lobe of Gretchen Frost’s warm pink ear.

She turned to look up at me. “It’s late,” she said.

I agreed, but I didn’t rise from the chair I’d been sunk into for the past twenty minutes.

“Real late,” she said, and her smile, slow and soft and sweet, transformed her face.

“Yeah,” I said, and appended a little laugh.

“I don’t know how you feel,” she said, “but after our little adventure, I’m not tired at all, not a bit. I mean, my heart—here, come here, put your hand here, yeah, here, right on my heart. Feel that? It’s still pounding.”

“I hear you helped Gretchen out the other night. With the galago? Which one was it?”

“Luna.”

“Right. You think it’s going to be okay?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. It’s in a cage now—in her room—almost like it’s a pet or something.”

“Any idea when she’s going to release it, because I’ve got a reporter from the Los Angeles Times—Albert Cooney?—who wants details. We’re trying to talk him into a series on the situation, you know, work the preservation angle and the cuteness thing too, maybe get the school kids involved—”

“Yeah, great, and if he wants to talk to me—”

“He does. I’ve already set it up. Tomorrow, three p.m., visitors’ window.”

“I’ll have to check my social calendar.”

Judy and I were on the phone this time because it was cheaper—and more private—than videoconferencing, so I couldn’t gauge how this had gone over until she let out a little laugh and said, “Yeah, right. What’s tonight—movie night?”

“We voted six to two for Alien, my nomination. Thing is, I’m starting to feel like I’m pregnant with something—something with claws and all these cascading sets of teeth—”

“And spit, don’t forget the spit. Hydrofluoric acid, n’est-ce pas?”

“Scary proposition, Jude—it could burst right out of me, gobble up E., Stevie and Lark and then drool right on down through the stainless-steel tub that keeps this ship afloat. And then where would we be?”

She was silent a moment. Then, in another voice altogether: “You miss me?”

The question took me by surprise. It had been more than a month and I knew her now mainly as a distant face on the PicTel monitor and a voice on the telephone. “That goes without saying.”

“Is that all? Is that as passionate as you can get? I would have thought, locked away like that . . .” She trailed off. “Don’t you want to fuck me? Don’t you want me to suck you and put you inside me?”

I admitted that I did.

“Well, come on,” she said. “Tell me about it. In detail.”

I told her, though I wasn’t all that good at this sort of thing—I was more a doer than a talker when it came to sex—and then she gave me her version and the whole business, I have to admit, was pretty stimulating. Finally, after two or three minutes of this, I said, “Even the inmates at the penitentiary get conjugal visits.”

“And you don’t. Pity, huh?”

“You seeing anybody?”

“Are you?”

“What do you think?” I said, putting some emphasis into it. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

“Jeremiah,” she said. “Just Jeremiah.”

Why I was jealous, why I was even having this conversation, was beyond me. She was going to do what she was going to do and I was going to do what I was going to do. I was picturing G.C.—her and G.C.—going at it, and then a thought came to me, a nightmare of a thought that made the image vanish in a puff of smoke as if in some X-rated cartoon. “This line is secure, isn’t it? I mean, nobody’s listening in, right?”

“It’s secure when I want it to be,” she said. “And that’s how I want it now. Obviously. But you never answered my question—”

“What question?”

“When’s Gretchen going to let Lola—or is it Luna? Luna, right? When’s she going to let Luna back out into the rain forest? It’d be a great photo op, you know what I’m saying?”

“Why don’t you ask Gretchen?”

“Believe me, I intend to, but as long as I’ve got you on the line, I thought I’d get your take on it. Especially if Lola’s going to attack her again or even, god forbid, if she should kill her . . .”

I took a moment, gazing out into the middle distance where a dark mass of bees struggled against one of the glass panels, disoriented by the hard edge they’d come up against. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “It’s a jungle out there.”