When they got there, it looked like ground zero of a Scud missile attack. Cooper stepped over vehicle parts and long curling threads of metal and wood, toward the squeal of a lathe. A Polie in overalls and safety glasses stood hunched over the lathe, blue sparks flying from between her hands. Cooper recognized Marcy by her tangled blond hair. Sal walked around the machine so Marcy could see him, and she stopped working on the crankshaft she’d been repairing.
She pushed her safety glasses on top of her head and, using her sleeve, wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Jesus, you again? Get off my back, man. It’s done.” She grinned at Cooper. “This asshole has been on me like tie-dye on a hippie about the new Pole marker. Hold on, I’ll get it.” When Marcy disappeared into a small supply shed on the other side of the arch, Cooper turned to Sal. “What’s this about?”
“Marcy’s in charge of making the new Pole marker.”
“The one you designed,” Cooper said.
Sal nodded. “I want you to see it before the ceremony.”
“I thought the ceremony was supposed to happen on New Year’s Day.”
Sal grimaced. “Thanks to the war of bureaucratic attrition, the powers-that-be told us to reposition the marker closer to the end of the summer season, in mid-February.”
“Why?”
Sal shrugged. “It’s a directive from NSF. Some congressional committee wrote it into an appropriations bill. Arbitrary interference—just letting us know that they can control the operations down here. But if that’s all the interference we get from Washington this year, I’ll dirty-dance with Floyd in the galley.”
Marcy emerged from the shed carrying something bound up in a rag. She gestured toward one of the worktables and they gathered around it. A coughing forklift pulled into the garage and shuddered off. Marcy leaned back to look, and, seeing it was Bozer, called him over. “I’ve outdone myself, boss,” she said. “Come look.”
As they waited for Bozer to lumber over, Cooper wondered what Sal’s design would look like. She imagined it first as Viper, the coffee-filter telescope he had shown her. But that didn’t touch the history of the continent, which was important. Something more generally cosmic, perhaps—a constellation, the Milky Way. Cooper remembered Sal’s horrible drawing of the two branes colliding—the two pancakes—and stifled a laugh, imagining the sketch transformed into the Pole marker.
Bozer arrived and slapped his hands on the table expectantly. Marcy gathered the fabric between her fingers, then stopped and looked over at Sal. “I just want you to know that this was the hardest design I’ve ever worked from and that I’ve wished you dead pretty much constantly since you brought it to me. That being said, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done.”
Bozer told her to can it, and Marcy removed the rag.
The bright shop lights bounced off polished brass, creating white bursts in Cooper’s vision. Slowly, the marker’s shape became clear—the sinuous upslope of a bow, the sturdiness of two masts, and a web of rigging, like spun silk. Etched into its body were the words Terra Nova. Cooper realized she was trembling.
“That’s good shit, Marce,” Bozer growled, squeezing Marcy’s shoulder. “That’s very fine shit.”
Marcy pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the bib of her overalls and spread it out on the table. “Well, I had a good design. A fussy-as-hell design, but still, a good design.”
Cooper looked down at her sketch of the Terra Nova. Sal’s precise mathematician’s handwriting was all over it—numbers, and arrows, and measurements in centimeters and in millimeters. Instructions to Marcy, Cooper realized. Sal leaned over the marker, examining its intricacies, his face bright with happiness and admiration. When he turned to see what she thought, Cooper found she was unable to speak. She didn’t notice Marcy and Bozer quietly walk away.
“Well,” Sal laughed. “What do you think?”
Cooper could only shake her head and choke out, “Why?”
“This is me telling you that you belong here, Cooper.” He hesitated. “And this is me saying I think we should be together down here. I know I was a dick in your room that night, before you left for the Divide. It was just—when you were sitting on the edge of the bed like that, with your boots off, looking at me—” He looked away, frustrated. “Everything about that moment felt too important to be in my clumsy hands. I didn’t realize how important it was until I was touching you.” His brow furrowed. “This is hard to explain.” He walked over to the forklift and back again. “Okay,” he said, “I think I know how to say this to you. Math. It explains everything. There’s a moment when every geek comes upon a mathematical equation that almost destroys him. For Alek it’s the Mandelbrot set equation. For me it’s the Riemann hypothesis. Whatever a great poem means to a poet, that’s what understanding these things for the first time is to someone like me. I can’t explain it to you. All I can tell you is that your face that night, that night in your room, it was like seeing the Mandelbrot for the first time, the Riemann. Like starting a single-variable equation and watching it turn into differential calculus before your eyes. It was scary. I was scared. I didn’t know how to explain that to you, and I didn’t know what to do, either.” Sal reached for Cooper and drew her close. “Then when you left with Pavano, I got angry, because I wanted you to be with me, not him. I was angry that he had that time with you, and that’s when I realized: I can’t even be away from you for a day without feeling like every minute is an hour.”
These words created an incision in Cooper, which caused both pain and immense relief. She took his mitten in hers. “Come with me.”
They walked across the plateau in silence. Once they were in Cooper’s room in the Jamesway, she sat on her bed and lifted her feet toward him. Sal kneeled on the floor and took off her boots. He undressed her carefully, slowly easing the thick cuff of her parka over her injured hand. He eased her back onto the bed, and brushed the hair off her forehead. He peeled off his thermal sweatshirt, only taking his eyes of her as he pulled the shirt over his head. He slid one suspender off his shoulder, then the other, and once his base layer was off, Cooper saw his body was sinewy and muscular, and very pale. It seemed to Cooper at that moment the most beautiful, most desirable thing she’d ever seen, and her heartbeat pulsed in her ear. Her body wanted to disintegrate beneath his fingers.
He leaned over her and kissed her mouth, and he lay down on the bed next to her. Pulling her hair away from her face, he touched his dry lips to her throat, and told her to let go, so she did.
It was only later, long after Sal had reluctantly left her bed to return to the Dark Sector, that Cooper saw the vial on her desk. There was a note.
You don’t do this kind of shit alone. Do it with us standing beside you. Bozer here.
*