Dawn Chapman

People always asked about intimate things, body-function things, like how the toilet worked and whether we took vitamins (we did: vitamin D, because UV rays didn’t penetrate the glass panels) and what we women did about birth control and our monthly cycles. I got questions like these from journalists when it was my turn to sit for an interview via PicTel or at the visitors’ window and I got them from friends and from my own mother too. It wasn’t anything I looked forward to, but I wasn’t embarrassed—or tried not to be. Daily life at its most basic—exercise, respiration, caloric intake, personal hygiene—was the gold standard of E2, the way forward for any off-earth colony that was to follow us in the future. How do you do it?—that was what people wanted to know. How do you recycle waste, protect the environment and balance out natural processes in a closed-loop, bio-regenerative, self-sustaining system? Or, actually, how do you live without Safeway, Walmart and the CVS pharmacy?

As for birth control, we all had the pill, which Mission Control insisted on, though as far as I knew only Stevie was taking it. This was something Mission Control wanted to play down, of course, and initially they’d put out a couple of bland press releases couched in the language of a family planning brochure and emphasizing our status as scientists, as if to imply that scientists, interested only in their experiments and observations, were above expressing anything so primitive as sexual needs. Since we were all unmarried, there was endless speculation in the press about which of us might pair up, one rag even going so far as to post odds, while on the other side, the moral watchdogs hissed and blew and the Just-Abstain sect demonstrated out on the main road for the first month or two. Really, I think Mission Control would have been happier if we’d all been sterilized at the outset.

What Diane did, I never knew, but both Gretchen and I felt pretty strongly that we didn’t want to put anything artificial in our bodies—again, wouldn’t that be a violation of the compact we’d made with the ecosystem of E2? I did get fitted with a diaphragm—to be used as needed. Or not. But I went off the pill the day I stepped inside, and so did Gretchen. For their part, the men were supplied with condoms and Richard had a reserve supply, just in case, but everybody tiptoed around the whole issue, at least at first. Living this intimately was sticky enough as it was, and we all tried to keep a professional outlook, as if E2 wasn’t any different from a rooming house. Or a coed dorm, where you could keep your door shut for privacy or leave it open when you wanted company. The condoms, incidentally, were of biodegradable lambskin (lamb’s caecum, that is) and not plastic, which was strictly excluded from E2 in any of the myriad forms that study after study had shown to be degrading the earth’s ecosystems and working its way up the food chain so that animals as disparate as polar bears and Kemp’s ridley’s turtles harbored its by-products in their tissues. By the same token, tampons were banned and we had to use a silicone cup instead, reusable, disinfectible and non-polluting, but a pain for all that, and whoever said living under glass was going to be easy?

Every two months Richard gave each of us a thorough physical exam, including body measurements, blood and urine samples, pulse rate (both resting and after five minutes on the exercise bike), blood pressure and lung capacity. He did vaginal exams, checked our breasts for any sign of cysts or tumors and examined the men for hernias and prostate enlargement and/or cancer, concluding with a set of three full-body nude photos of each of us, front, side and rear. Why the thoroughness? Because, as G.C. explained at the outset, our bodies were laboratories in themselves, as invaluable to the project as anything either animate or inanimate in E2, and Mission Control was unwavering about our compliance here. To pick just one example out of many, during our mission it was shown that after six months our blood became flooded with lipophilic compounds (PCB, DDE and DDT) which had been released into our bloodstreams as we burned off the fat where they’d been stored, and there wasn’t one of us who wasn’t sobered by this evidence—evidence in the blood—of what was wrong out there in the world. None of us had been miners or worked in chemical plants or nuclear facilities. We’d lived normal American lives in the wealthiest country ever known and nonetheless wound up accumulating these toxins in our bodies just from having lived and breathed and consumed the food and swallowed the water in E1, and if that doesn’t tell you something, I don’t know what does. And that’s it, that’s it exactly—people were always criticizing us, asking Where’s the science? Well, here it was, right in your average American bloodstream.

I remember one physical in particular, at the end of June of the first year, and I think it stands out because it was the first time I really got a sense of who Richard was, beyond the aura that surrounded him as our physician and healer or the persona he took on as the team member who could always manage to see the dark side of things and make us laugh about it at the same time. Which was an act, a way of lightening his load, because deep down he was a very giving and caring person who was there for us 24/7 and really did try to stay impartial when things got contentious. Or that doesn’t sound right. Of course he was there 24/7—where else would he be? What I mean is, no matter what your problem you could always take it to him and he’d make you feel better, and I’m not just talking about medication—he saw me through some rough patches, and I owe him, I do. His crew nickname was Lancet, for the obvious reason, but because of his wit too, the way it cut and sliced and revealed what lay beneath the surface of any issue we might be batting around, and yet for some reason it never stuck and mostly we wound up calling him by his given name (for a while there Ramsay tried calling him “Doc” and then “Bones,” after Dr. McCoy on Star Trek, but neither stuck). So he was Richard. Plain Richard. The elder amongst us at forty-eight, with hair transitioning from charcoal to gray, a serious nose with a little bump at the bridge of it and eyes that might have been set too close together but could laser right in on you, especially if you said something fatuous or sanctimonious, which some people (think Stevie) seemed capable of doing about fifty percent of the time. If not more.

I was scheduled right after morning break, which happened at ten-forty-five punctually each day, and after I’d sat down with the handful of peanuts and mug of mint tea the chef du jour doled out, I followed Richard around the corner to his office.

He shut the door behind me, lifted his lab coat down from its hook and shrugged into it while I slid myself up onto the examining table and let my legs dangle over the side. The table was covered with a sheet of the standard antiseptic paper you saw in any physician’s office, with the difference that this one wouldn’t be going to a landfill—it would be packed up with the others Richard would use today, then shredded and fed to the goats, who would process it in their unique goaty way so that at least partially we’d be getting milk from medical waste, which I bet really didn’t happen all that much in the outside world.

I watched Richard’s back and the movement of his shoulders as he looped his stethoscope around his neck and pulled my chart from his filing cabinet, and if I was thinking about anything it was the uphill slope of the work I had to get through before lunch—weeding, mostly, and turning over the soil in the peanut plot we’d just harvested so we could plant it with a new crop of sweet potatoes—and wondering how much time this little interlude was going to cost me. I should have been relaxed, I know, but our schedules inside were infinitely more demanding than on the outside. We couldn’t just punch the clock, nine to five, and go home and forget about things—we had a whole world to prop up.

“So, how are we feeling, E.?” Richard asked, turning round to face me. “No complaints, no pulled muscles or back spasms?” This was a reference to the lower back issues I’d had a month or so ago after a couple of especially strenuous days, going from cutting back vegetation in the rain forest to climbing up with Stevie and Vodge to scrub the windows over the IAB, which had begun to sprout a brownish scrim of mold that was blocking enough of our sunlight to become a problem.

“I don’t know,” I said, “the usual. A few twinges maybe, right here?” I reached back to indicate the muscles just over my hips. “But nothing, really. Not like that first time.” (Which had laid me up in bed and cost two full workdays, much to the irritation of Little Jesus. And Judas.)

“Good,” he murmured, “good,” and he listened to my heart and lungs and checked my blood pressure, which, at 110 over 68, was in the range of what you’d expect from a long-distance runner, or so he told me. “You haven’t been competing in any marathons lately, have you, E.?”

“Not that I can remember.” I gave a little laugh. “Maybe in my dreams, does that count? But wait a minute, you’re wearing glasses.” He’d slipped a pair of standard-issue spectacles over the bump of his nose, black frames, rectangular lenses, the sort of thing you’d find on a rack at the drugstore. They made him look studious. And old. Or older anyway. “I didn’t know you wore glasses?”

“I don’t,” he said, ducking his head, and it might have been my imagination but he seemed to be blushing. “These are just for up-close, for reading—I picked up two pairs at Walgreens a week before closure, just in case. They’re an aid, that’s all. A tool.” He laughed. “It’s not like I’m getting old or anything.”

“No,” I said, “none of us are.”

“Uh-uh, not in here, no way. E2’s the fountain of youth.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Technically, Richard was old enough to be my father, though my actual father was eight years older than him.

He peered over the frames of his glasses like a lecturer looking up from his notes and he was Richard again, the Richard I knew. Or thought I knew. “Seriously, though, with our diet and work schedule and the purity of this place and no communicable diseases it’ll probably add ten years to our life span. I mean nobody’s going to need a flu shot. And I think I can confidently declare the common cold extinct in Ecosphere II.”

“Oh, I like that. That’s great. Tell you the truth, I hadn’t really thought of it—not in those terms. But it makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely.”

I looked at him and felt a whole new wave of appreciation rising in me. We were safe here, safer even than I’d imagined. Diseases had been driven to extinction in the larger world—smallpox for one and polio not far behind—but they’d never even existed in our world. We had only what we’d brought in with us. I’d say it was a humbling thought, but it was just the opposite—if ever I’d felt privileged, like one of the gods, like the original Eos spreading her rosy fingers across the horizon, it was in that moment. Everybody outside was vulnerable, even G.C., but not us. “Okay,” I said, even as another thought came to me, “I’ll grant you that—but how can you be sure? I mean, what about all that sneezing Diane was doing at breakfast this morning? That’s not a cold?”

“Allergies. Mold spores, pollen—that stuff’s going to be concentrated in an environment like this, even what we’ve got in the soil, what with the aerators. We’ve got to watch out for that, yes, but any communicable disease that didn’t come in with the crew isn’t going to show its face. We’re clean. We’re pure. World, get over it.”

Flu had twice stricken the Mission One crew, or so we’d been told—by G.C., as a sort of object lesson. They’d broken closure right at the beginning, as everyone knows, but during the second year they began to pass medical samples through a sleeve to the right of the airlock, and incredible as it might seem, the flu virus came in on the surface of the new test tubes sent in to replace the exported ones and everybody got sick. Another little parable about the corruption of the outside world and the need for an absolute unwavering commitment to material closure.

“All right, E.”—he handed me a paper hospital gown, which would also ultimately pass to the goats—“let’s get down to business.” He flashed a smile. “I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than sit here jawing with me—like growing us some more people fodder, and what’s it today? Beets?”

“Sweet potatoes.”

“More beta-carotene.”

“Good for the eyes,” I said.

I tried not to think about it as he inserted the speculum and examined me, telling myself it was strictly impersonal and necessary in terms of documentation, our bodies laboratories and such, but still it was different with Richard. I was young, in good health, and the few times I had gone in to see a gynecologist it was always a female, which just seemed to make sense. Though we’d had a male G.P. when I was growing up—Dr. Moskowitz—and that was as ordinary as the mumps and whooping cough he’d treated me for, and the doctor at the college health center was male too, which really didn’t seem to make a difference, though admittedly, he looked to be close to seventy and so haphazardly put together as to be all but genderless. Did it really matter who inserted the thermometer in your mouth or prescribed an antibiotic as long as they were sympathetic—and competent, of course? There was a compact between patient and physician that made gender considerations irrelevant as far as I was concerned. I was an adult. We were all adults here. Still, Richard was one of us, one of the team, and that made the impersonal shade ever so perceptibly into the intimate.

He kept up a soothing patter, his touch as warm as a compress, and I found myself relaxing, my gaze falling idly on a poster of the human skeletal system he’d tacked to the near wall, across the top of which someone (Ramsay, I later learned) had inked Dem Bones in a black Gothic script. If I felt anything it was that I was in good hands and that I was being cared for, pampered even, and that the mission and everybody concerned with it, from G.C. on down—Judy, even Judy—was benevolent and pure of motive. I was a Terranaut and that was a very special thing.

When he was finished, Richard set his instruments aside and went over to wash up at the sink. “You know, I hate to disappoint you, E.,” he said, turning round while drying his hands on a spotless white towel, “but I can’t find anything wrong with you. Congratulations. You’re a perfect physical specimen. A paragon.”

I was already up and off the table and reaching for my clothes when he reminded me that we weren’t done yet. “Measurements,” he intoned, going for the mock-pompous delivery he brought to bear when he assumed the voice of the narrator during rehearsals of the Wilder play, all puff and blow, and I realized this must have been difficult for him too. “And the photos, don’t forget the photos.”

So I stood there naked—and unembarrassed, or as unembarrassed as I could talk myself into being, considering that we’d been through this twice already and there were nine more sessions to look forward to after this one—while he took a tape measure to my upper arms and thighs, my breasts, waist and hips, then posed me (without reminding me to stand up straight because the slouch I was developing was an indicator of how close to depletion our diet and regimen were bringing me—and this not quite four months in).

“You know, you’ve lost nearly ten pounds,” he said as I perched on the edge of the examining table, reaching back to refasten my bra and pulling the T-shirt down over my head. “Overall, since closure. And half an inch at the waist and something just over that across the chest.”

My jeans had been loose, I knew that coming in, and I knew E2 was a natural weight-loss clinic that would have put Jenny Craig right out of business if we opened the airlock to all the women fighting their weight out there in the world, but still the news came as a shock. For just a moment, just as the words passed his lips, I felt something well up in me, a canker of fear and misgiving over the loss of who I was and what I’d been and a bigger fear of what I was becoming.

“I’m going to lose my figure, is that what you’re telling me?”

“Your figure’s fine, Dawn. You’re a beautiful woman. Be happy. It’s only adipose tissue—and it’ll come back the first two weeks of reentry, just as soon as you get your teeth around a nice filet mignon with a baked potato topped with what, sour cream, chives and bacon bits, with asparagus hollandaise on the side and a salad drenched in Roquefort dressing, with, uh, maybe crème brûlée for dessert—or would you prefer the white chocolate mousse, madame?”

“Richard, stop. That’s just mean to talk like that,” I said, but I was smiling. He was smiling too. A moment ticked by. “That it?” I said.

He nodded. “That’s it. Oh, wait, I almost forgot—one other thing.”

I stood there at the door, tugging at the bottom of my T-shirt where it had bunched up in back. “Yes?”

“We’re going to be doing a urinalysis to look into stress-hormone levels, so I’m telling everybody that as of tomorrow morning—and every day for the next month—I’m going to need a urine sample. First thing in the morning. Fasting.”

“Stress hormones?”

He shrugged. “It’s just routine. Are the levels going to be lower or higher than they’d be outside? If they’re higher, that tells us something about what the hidden costs of living in close confinement within a small group might be.”

“And if they’re lower?”

“All to the better.”

“Jesus.” Another intrusion, another inconvenience, pee in a cup. “I feel like a lab rat.”

Peering over the little black glasses, his eyebrows cocked in amusement: “If it’s any consolation, E., they don’t get paid either.”

“Thanks, doctor. That’s really reassuring.”

“No problem.”

“And thanks for the exam. I wouldn’t exactly call it fun, but you do make it entertaining, got to give you credit there.”

“No problem,” he said, his hand swinging the door open for me. “If you want to know the truth, it’s really not all that hard looking at naked women. For a living, I mean.”

The summer of that first year was one of the hottest on record, and when Linda came to the visitors’ window it seemed all she did was complain about the heat. She’d taken to bringing a folding chair with her and we’d improved things on our end by setting a stool by the phone and rigging a curtain behind us for privacy’s sake, in case—well, there was that one night with Johnny, which could have been potentially embarrassing if anyone had been around. And then Troy Turner had come up with a girlfriend no one even knew he had, a busty Latina with fire-red lips and stiletto heels who’d done a striptease outside the window for his birthday. After that, by a vote of 6–1, Ramsay opposed and Troy abstaining, we agreed on the curtain, which was actually just a pair of spare blankets drooped over a length of rope.

Linda had been coaching me on my lines and then we’d switch off and I’d coach her or at least rehearse her because I wasn’t exactly an expert at this—nobody would have mistaken me for an actress and the best I could hope was to hold my own onstage. You might think the whole thing trivial—certainly Linda did—but G.C. was right about this as he was right about so many things. The play gave us a chance to get outside of ourselves, to have fun and weight our lines with special meaning, making a throwaway line like “Have you milked the mammoth?” a kind of inside joke, especially coming from me, the E2 milkmaid tricked out like a 1940s housewife in the only dress I had (and a pair of hiking boots in place of heels or even flats). So this was funny. Very funny.

Anyway, on this particular evening, the low sun streaming across the lawn behind her, Linda came sweating to the window, unfolded her chair, set it in place, pushed the hair out of her face and picked up the phone. “You are so lucky,” she said, first thing.

“What do you mean?”

“To be in there. Obviously. Can you even imagine what it’s like out here? It’s what, eight o’clock at night and it’s still like a hundred.”

I hadn’t even thought of it, really. You don’t feel anybody else’s discomfort any more than you can feel their pain, everybody inside a bubble of their own making whether they like to admit it or not. “The heatwave,” I said. “Right?”

“Duh,” she said, making a face. “And the air-conditioning’s down in the Residences and nobody for all their technology here can seem to figure out what the problem is—and of course Dennis is reluctant to call in an outside contractor, like what’s wrong with the Yellow Pages, because one of the guys from the power plant can fix it just as easily. Not.” She gave me an exasperated look. “I wake up all sweaty—or no, I go to bed sweaty and wake up sweatier.”

I made a noise of sympathy, but what I was thinking was that I’d be happy to trade places with her. So what if she was hot? She could go anywhere she wanted. High up into the Santa Catalinas, where the pines spread their branches and rocked on a cool breeze—or into Tillman to sit at the bar in Alfano’s or El Caballero and let the air conditioner fan her hair and chill her bare arms so she had to put a sweater on just to keep her frozen margarita from giving her the shivers. A furlough, that was what I needed. A one-night furlough.

“I’ll trade with you,” I said.

“Very funny.”

“No, really. Come on in. Take my place, why don’t you? Tolerable enough in here.” I watched her wrinkle up her nose. “I’d just like a night on the town, that’s all. Scope out the bars, take a walk in the moonlight—”

“Very funny.”

“Come on, Linda, you know I’m only joking. I’m sorry it’s so hot. But remember that time in Australia, when we went out looking for that missing calf and the heat was like a sauna, or no, like wearing thermal underwear in a sauna?”

“Not a happy memory,” she said, making a face. We’d found the thing, dead of thirst, splayed out on the checkerboard of a dried-up watercourse, the buzzards hopping round it like big black fleas.

“You want hot,” I said, feeling oddly self-righteous, “—that was hot.”

She was silent a moment, then leaned in close so we were no more than a foot apart. “I just wanted to warn you,” she said, and threw a look over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching. Or listening. There was someone there—Roy Teggers, one of the security guards who patrolled the grounds to keep the crazies out and watched at the ocean window when Stevie was in the water, an extra set of eyes in case she got in trouble—but he was two hundred yards away and staring off in the opposite direction.

“About what?”

“Or not a warning, really, just a heads-up.”

“I’m listening.”

“I think they might be planning to give you a call—G.C. and Judas, I mean. Or maybe just G.C.”

“Me? For what?” I felt my stomach fall. It wasn’t as if Judy didn’t communicate her needs and requirements daily and G.C. almost as often, but usually—especially with G.C.—it was during a conference call with all of us, the speakerphone rumbling and squelching as if the connection were three hundred miles away instead of three hundred yards. “The play?” Suddenly I was angry—put upon—and I suppose my voice gave me away. “I’m trying my hardest and I’m not—I’m just exhausted all the time. Don’t they realize that?”

“It’s not that,” she said, “though you know G.C. and his standards. No, it’s just that I heard them talking—overheard them, really, when they didn’t realize I was in the room?—and it’s not about you, or I mean I don’t know what they’re going to ask. Or maybe I do. Maybe they want you to report to them. Or get your take on things—”

Now I was starting to feel uneasy. What was she talking about? Was it Johnny? He’d been back twice after that first week and we’d given something of a repeat performance at the window, though nobody was around and by then we’d hung the curtain, but Troy had been just as outrageous, as far as I knew, and some of the others had had their assignations at the glass too. Why single me out? Didn’t they think we had a right to our own lives? Was everything all about G.C. and Judas and the project?

“What things?”

Her eyes dodged away. She fanned her face with one hand. “Gyro,” she said.

“Gyro? What about him? What does that have to do with me?”

She shrugged. Behind her, in the distance, a pair of deer had appeared on the twilit lawn to take advantage of our little oasis of green. “I don’t know, exactly. But when you find out, let me know.”

She hesitated and I called her on it. “You’re not holding back on me, are you?”

“He’s been doing—I mean it’s nothing really and none of their business—but late at night, like last week?” And then she dropped her voice and told me all about it.

The next day work caught me up and I really didn’t have a whole lot of time to worry over what Linda had confided to me, but if I thought about it at all I was in agreement with her: what Gyro did on his own time was nobody’s business but his. And it was beyond intrusive that Mission Control should even know about it, let alone try to make it an issue. E2’s cameras were in place to record ecological changes over time—and for safety’s sake too, in the event anything went amiss with any of our tech systems, and to warn us of fire or a ruptured sprinkler head, but not to spy on us. It was shameful—not what Gyro had done, which really wasn’t much more than a matter of speculation anyway, given what the video feed showed (or didn’t show), but what the mission was doing in trying to control every aspect of our lives. For me, and I think for some of the others too, it was the beginning of resentment—I won’t say rebellion, because ultimately I went along with Mission Control’s agenda, or at least gave it lip service, but for the first time I said to myself, I mean really, who do they think they are?

I have to admit that at the breakfast meeting that morning, while we spooned up our porridge and sipped our mint tea and Diane and Vodge went on about assignments in the desert and marsh biomes and Stevie complained that she was falling behind on cleaning the scrubbers that kept the ocean from being overrun with algae and needed somebody to pitch in and help her, I couldn’t help sneaking a look at Gyro. There he was, all elbows and jutting angles, nose, ears, the hair he’d let grow out till it stood straight up on his head like a crown of feathers, bent over his bowl of porridge, looking glassy-eyed, and I wondered about that. But he always looked glassy-eyed, didn’t he? At six-five he was the tallest Terranaut, with a good four inches on Vodge and T.T. and maybe seven or eight on Richard. If his voice was a dull drone and he tended to go into just a bit more detail on the workings of the air handlers or one sensor or another than any reasonable person could possibly absorb (or want to), that was what we’d expected of him: he was our geek, our tech obsessive, and he fit the role so perfectly he might have been cast in it. (And if so, what about me? Giving it a cold hard look, I’d have to say I’d been cast as the buxom milkmaid in the larger theatricals G.C. had put together here, though I wasn’t so much buxom at this point as whittled down, the role player losing her adipose tissue in all the wrong places.)

At one point Gyro raised his hand to object to something Troy was saying about the rust that was bleeding through the paint on the struts over the ocean biome, but he was ignored because Diane hadn’t recognized him. Or, actually, because he didn’t have possession of the day’s banana (to keep everybody from chiming in at once we’d adopted the rule from Lord of the Flies that only the person in possession of the conch had the floor, but since our ocean didn’t contain any conch, we substituted a banana. Same principle, different device). I watched him nurse his disappointment a moment, then go glassy-eyed again, off in his own world, and I couldn’t help thinking of him out there in the rain forest, dropping his shorts and doing what Linda had said he’d done. He wasn’t my type—more Linda’s, really. But still, he was male and he was present, sitting right across the table. He had his urges, just like anybody else, why wouldn’t he? And here, locked in here, where was his outlet? You’d think Mission Control would give him a medal for taking care of business—or at least ask him to do what he was going to do in the privacy of his room. The thought of it—the picture I summoned, his leanness, the tensing of his muscles, his cock rigid and his hand pumping—made my breath come quick and I had to look away.

When Troy was done, Diane took up the banana and gave out the day’s assignments, pairing Gyro with Stevie on the algae scrubbers and putting Ramsay with me for the late-afternoon milking because she herself would be busy teleconferencing with a community college in Woodland Hills, California. Gretchen said a few words about how some of the rain forest trees were going to need bracing up, given that the lack of wind in E2 had weakened development of their trunks, then T.T. gave the weather report (O₂ at 19.1 percent, humidity at 72.3 percent), and that was it. The meeting concluded, and breakfast with it, and we all went out into the biomes to tick off our chores, one after the other. I scratched in the dirt, did my weeding and slopping out and all the rest, there was lunch, siesta, more scratching in the dirt, and then it was five-thirty in the afternoon and I found myself in the goat pen, leaning over the rail and talking softly to my wards, waiting for Ramsay to show up, because milking was a two-person job, definitely a two-person job.

Just to catch you up here, we had five goats at that point, the four does and a buck. The does had to be milked twice a day and they’d learned over time to have things their own way and they could be stubborn about the order of precedence going into the milking pen—or even going in at all. The ringleader—and best milk producer—was Goanna, Goanna Goat, named after the monitor lizards crawling all over the place on the ranch in Australia, but not so much for her looks or appetite but just because we—I—loved the way the name sounded. Especially when you paired it with Goat. Anyway, she was hard to lure into the milking pen unless she liked what you were offering as an inducement, peanut greens being at the top of the list, with beet greens not far behind.

I was lost in my thoughts, idly stroking Gerry the he-goat’s bony head, when Ramsay slipped up behind me, put his hands over my eyes like a sixth grader and whispered, “Guess who?”

That was all right. I didn’t mind. In fact, I kind of liked the attention he gave me, goofy humor and all. After that first night when neither of us could sleep and we’d sat chatting about nothing and everything till the night deepened around us and even the crickets gave it a rest I’d seen him in a new light. Like Richard, he put on a front, arming himself with a shield of cool because that was what was expected of men in society, or at least the society out there beyond the glass. Was it, as Linda would say, a guy thing? The horseplay, the towel-snapping mentality, boys in the locker room, boys on the field, boys trading round dirty jokes like collectors’ cards and never, absolutely never, growing up? I didn’t know. For all I knew, this was his personality, and, as I said, it could have its charms. Plus, the longer he was away from society and its expectations, the more genuine he became. He was Vodge. He was my teammate. And despite Linda—despite myself—I liked him.

“I don’t know,” I said, “feels like a thunderbolt to me.”

“Sizzling, huh?” he said, and maybe he leaned into me a beat too long before I turned around and we were face-to-face, as close as dance partners. (And no, I didn’t kiss him that night or have sex with him or with anybody else during the course of those four long months, and that was a burden I was carrying, or felt I had to carry. For Johnny. In memory of Johnny. For love. Or what felt like love the more I thought about it and the more I didn’t see him.)

I couldn’t think of anything to say, though I was considering making some sort of onomatopoeic sound, a sort of drawn-out buzz meant to convey lightning or maybe just a loose wire, but I didn’t. For an instant, I thought he was going to kiss me, but that didn’t happen either. What happened was Goanna. She let out a long jagged bleat of complaint, butted Gerry aside and glared up at us out of her slit amber eyes.

“Good news,” I said, dipping to the bucket at my feet, “—we’ve got peanut greens today, so she’s not going to give us any trouble.” (The worst that could happen, and it did happen if you weren’t attuned, was that she’d fight you and kick over the bucket—and this, of course, was a minor tragedy, because every precious drop counted, and would count even more when fall and winter came on and crop yields fell off from their peak, making calories all the harder to come by and our stomachs all the tighter.)

There was the stink of the goats—and of the pigs too, who looked on from their own pen with indifference. It was nothing to them. They weren’t getting milked. They would have liked the greens though, that was for sure. Or practically anything else they could get their teeth around. Ramsay had backed off a step. He was dressed in his usual outfit, shorts and tee, but he bore a three-day growth in defiance of Mission Control, which demanded clean-shaven Terranauts, and had tied a red bandanna round his head so that strands of his hair spilled over it and into his eyes. “Great,” he said. “No sense in fighting a goat that has its own agenda.”

“I hear you,” I said, and turned to give him a smile. “Should we get to it?”

He fed, I milked. We made use of a wooden platform to elevate the goats and make the task easier, an innovation of the Mission One crew, and Goanna sprang right up on it without hesitation, her crosscut jaws already working at the greens Vodge dumped in the manger. I don’t know how he felt about it, but for me this was a pleasant interlude, the sun high still, slicing through the glass and lighting everything like a stage, the day’s work trailing down to its end. We chattered away, gossiping about everybody who wasn’t present, which had almost become official Terranaut policy, but we stayed near the surface, no criticism really, nothing catty, though Ramsay did have a few less-than-complimentary things to say about Diane’s attempts at doing charcoal portraits of each of us and Gretchen’s taste in music (show tunes, The Phantom of the Opera, in particular, which she played on an endless repetitive loop till even the coquis and crickets must have been driven mad by it).

“If I hear ‘Think of Me’ one more time I’m going to become a phantom myself—look for me in the deepest, darkest, dirtiest nook of the basement,” he said. “The Phantom of the Ecosphere—why doesn’t Lloyd Webber write that one? It could have a goat chorus—and the frogs backing them up, what do you think? But Christ. I mean I’ve told Gretch she’s got to upgrade her taste in music, and I don’t necessarily mean she has to listen to that techno T.T.’s always playing, but what about a little Bach or Mozart? Or Philip Glass, what’s wrong with Philip Glass—?”

I just laughed. “Glass under glass?” I felt good, felt breezy. I was working but it didn’t feel like work. Goanna behaved herself. Garbo was next and she behaved herself too. We were silent a moment, my hands squeezing, the milk sizzling into the bucket. Then something came to me, an intuition that flared up in my brain like the answer to an equation I’d been puzzling over, and it had to do with the way he’d said Gretchen’s name, said “Gretch” instead of “Gretchen” or “Snowflake,” and the way he’d softened his voice when he said it. A whole slide show of fragmented scenes began to play before me, of him and Gretchen conferring in low voices two nights before out on the balcony, of his sitting beside her more often than not at meals, of the way I’d caught her stealing glances at him when she thought no one was looking. Could they be—?

I couldn’t complete the thought. Gretchen and Vodge? It was bad enough what Linda had told me about him and Judy, which I could believe, but not Gretchen. She was so—what?—inappropriate. So matronly, so old before her time. And dumpy, dumpy too. Not that it should matter, because truly there’s a mate for everyone out there and no accounting for taste, which was one reason why our species was so successful. That and the fact that for us sex had no season—if it did, if all the women of the world came into heat for a given period, say two months a year, we’d never have evolved a civilization. But here was my hunch, my intimation, buzzing round my brain, and the next thing I said was, “You hear anything more about Lola and Luna?”

He gave me a blank look and I rushed on, “Because of how you helped out that time? I just thought Gretchen would have—?”

This was the moment he chose to bend down, lift the bucket of greens and dump it into the feeding trough, and when he did turn round his face showed nothing. “No,” he said, “not really—beyond that one night when they were trying to kill each other, I don’t think it’s been that drastic, really. Not that I would know.” He paused. “Especially.”

Garbo was played out. I stood, wiped my hands on my jeans, opened the gate and ushered in the next goat. “So they’re all getting along just hunky-dory then?” I said, looking him in the eye. (Hunky-dory? Where had that come from?)

“Oh, yeah,” he said, and I could see he was making an effort to hold my gaze, if that meant anything. “Everything’s fine, the peaceable kingdom, right?”

“So, Dawn, we just wanted to know how things are going, how you’re feeling—everything okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Yeah. Couldn’t be better.”

It was past ten at night and what I wanted was to be asleep, but G.C. kept odd hours and when G.C. summoned you, you came, no matter the hour. So there I was, alone in the darkened command center, staring into the monitor while the camera captured my image and relayed it up the hill to Mission Control, where G.C. sat before his screen, also alone as far as I could tell (that is, I didn’t see Judy in the picture or hear her either; ditto Dennis). From where I was sitting I could gaze out the near window on the black vacancy of the desert and the star-strewn sky that drew down like a curtain to meet it. The room was still, no sound anywhere but the faint crackle of the microphone. The only light was the light of the screen.

“Great, that’s just what we want to hear,” G.C. said, his voice rolling out across the room, deep and vibrant, maybe not so deep as Johnny’s but richer somehow, more sustained and edged with a tremble of vibrato, as if every word he spoke was the most significant you’d ever hear. He was an actor. I knew that. But he inhabited his role fully and I was listening hard, wondering what was coming next—and yes, I was nervous, or tentative I suppose would be a better word, though really, what G.C. said or did once we were inside didn’t have anywhere near the weight it might have had before the final selection was made and the airlock clanked shut behind us. We were inside and he wasn’t and the chances were about zero that he’d ever break closure to remove any of us, no matter what we did, but still he was our authority and his will was our law and in a very real sense we lived to please him.

“So tell me, how about your teammates—everything okay with them, everybody adjusting?”

Again the affirmative—“Yes”—though my voice was softer, barely audible as it turned out, because he said, “What? I can’t hear you. For Christ’s sake, E., I know it’s late but speak up, will you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Great. Everybody’s great.”

He was silent a moment and I watched his face, G.C.’s face, the thin compress of his lips, the ascetic’s eyes, the skin that was so wrinkle-free I couldn’t help wondering if he’d had plastic surgery—and if so, when, since he’d hardly been out of our sight these past two years and more. Or maybe it was just the softening effect of the camera’s lighting, maybe that was it. I saw that he’d cut his hair, though it was still longish, or long enough to flow over his ears, but his beard looked as if it hadn’t been touched—if anything it was fuller and longer than ever, as if he was trying to live up to Michelangelo’s portrait of the Creator giving Adam the spark of life, a reproduction of which he kept on the wall behind his desk at Mission Control. Lest we should ever forget.

“Glad to hear it,” he said, “but what I mean is specifically. How’s Lark working out as crew chief—in your opinion, I mean?”

I shrugged. “Fine.”

“E.,” he said, his voice dropping an octave till the empty room quavered with it, “you’re not getting it. I’m asking you how she’s working out. ‘Fine’ doesn’t tell me anything. ‘Fine’ is like the weather report. Is she doing her job or is she not, that’s what I want to know.”

It was only later that I realized all this was by way of diversion. Yes, he did want the dirt on everybody, I’m sure, but that was being gathered voluminously and continuously and he hardly needed my take on things. “Well,” I said, treading cautiously, because the last thing I needed was to provoke the woman I worked most closely with and who even now was just across the hallway—asleep, most likely, but who knew? “She can be a little grouchy sometimes, abrupt, I mean. Like when I got distracted last week and Goanna let loose with a couple of pellets in the milk bucket? I was in the wrong, I know, but she really blew things out of proportion, yelling and everything. It was humiliating.”

“This isn’t a confessional. We’re not interested in venial sins, E., just the bigger picture. How is she holding up—mentally, I mean. Any cracks in the surface? As far as you can see?”

I have to admit I was puzzled. What was he getting at? Diane was as sane as anybody on the crew, saner, actually. She was a dedicated ecologist with the degrees to back it up and she was as good an on-site manager as we could have hoped for. Did she sometimes throw her weight around? Did she have her moods? Yes, sure, but then who didn’t? I felt like a prisoner in an interrogation cell, unwilling to give up any real information but ready to feed her inquisitor whatever tidbits might have even the slimmest chance of satisfying him. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I guess she’s fine.”

He grunted, whipped his hand across the screen in a swift white slash of disgust. “Don’t act like a moron!” he shouted, the rumble of his voice reverberating in the speakers. “And don’t you try to work me either. I couldn’t give a flying fuck what you guess or who’s fine and who’s not, I want substance here, I want an opinion, I want dirt. Talk to me!”

If ever I’d felt small, it was then. Small and powerless. And, let’s face it, abused, verbally abused by a man I probably had more respect for then than anybody else alive. I don’t cry easily. That’s for weak women. But I’ll tell you, I felt a scratch in my throat. I was worn thin. I wanted bed. And here was G.C. thundering at me out of some private agenda I couldn’t quite pin down, aside from his trying to provoke me to rat out my teammates. Was this a test? Was he going to call in the others, one by one, and shout J’accuse? I didn’t have a clue.

So it went on. G.C. queried me about each of my fellow Terranauts in succession and I did what I could to placate him, racking my brain to think up anything I could, no matter how trivial, while at the same time struggling to hide my true feelings (Stevie? She was a princess, so much into herself and her public image her head had swelled till it was bigger than both E2’s lungs combined; Ramsay? Her male counterpart; Diane? Bitchy). G.C. counted off the names like beads on a rosary and I fumbled and dropped clichés in his lap and couldn’t think of a thing to say to lighten the mood or get me off the hook.

It was ten-thirty. The sky held fast, but for the gradual dip of the constellations beyond the windows. G.C. was still there. I was still here. And then, finally, everything began to come clear.

“Gyro,” he said. “And how’s he doing? You notice anything about him?”

I shrugged.

“The reason I ask is because, well, Judy says he’s feeling lonely. Do you get that? Is he lonely?”

“No more than any of us,” I said, but here came Gyro’s anomalous behavior rising to the surface to illuminate the subtext. “Now that you mention it, though—”

I don’t know what I would have said next, how far I would have gone in trying to balance my loyalty to a fellow crewmember and a compulsion to placate the boss, because he cut me off. “What I want to know is, do you like him?”

“Sure.”

“Do you really like him?”

All at once I could see just where this was going, and as exhausted as I was, as cowed, I couldn’t help feeling the revulsion come up in me. It burned like acid in my throat, a waste product I needed to get rid of. Or no, swallow. Swallow right down. “Yes, Jeremiah,” I heard myself say, “I really like him,” and I didn’t bother to add the official tagline Just like all my crewmates, because it didn’t apply here, not now, not anymore.

“Good, E.,” G.C. said, and a smile flickered across the thin flaps of his lips. “That was what we were hoping to hear. We wouldn’t want any of our Terranauts to feel alienated from the others—or neglected by them—because that wouldn’t look good, would it? It wouldn’t show the world the esprit de corps that underlies everything we’re dedicated to here, agreed?”

I could just make out the vague image of my own face superimposed on the screen like an ethereal mask. The mask flickered and shifted and then G.C. was wearing it, his mouth right where mine was, his eyes staring out of my own. “Agreed,” I said.