I UNZIPPED THE WOMB and made my way to Corridor 2, where the dreaded treadmill awaited. I didn’t hear the creature moving around in any of the corridors, and thought that perhaps I had really slept it off. Central required that I exercise two hours a day to slow down bone loss, but lately I had been devoting less and less time to the hamster wheel, preferring to spend it in the lab. I pulled at the harness attached to the wall and slid the straps around my shoulders, grounding myself on the small gray pad underneath my feet. That was the sole benefit of the machine—it made me feel as though I was walking on Earth’s sidewalks again. I started with a warm-up walk, then adjusted the speed. Strain cut into my weakened calves, and I breathed out loudly so that I would no longer ponder the creature, the disappeared hallucination. I sprinted to the point of nausea so that I wouldn’t think of Lenka, so that I couldn’t recall the exact shape of her nose. I ran for an hour and removed the harness. My eyes stung from the sweat, and my sweat reeked of whiskey. I made my way back to the Sleeping Chamber to wash off and change.
The creature was there, accompanied by the unusual odor. My clothing hung around its legs, as if it were a living coatrack; its face and one leg were buried in my closet, rummaging through, scratching.
“Stop,” I said.
It turned around, its lips closed, eyes fidgeting between me and the contraband on its legs. The creature put my shirts and sweatpants back into the closet.
“I became so enthralled by the search that I forgot to monitor your movement. I am ashamed, skinny human.”
“I thought you were gone. Cured by sleep.”
“Do you intend for me to depart?”
“I don’t know. What are you doing?”
“I am looking for it. The ash of your ancestor.”
“You were… studying me again. I felt it.”
“I apologize. I could not help myself. A researcher cannot escape his subject, can we agree? But I’d like your permission, skinny human. Permission to study you.”
“What’s in here doesn’t belong to you. I don’t want you to do it anymore.”
Petr’s voice sounded through the intercom. “We need to talk,” he said with some distress.
I muttered gratitude for the interruption and left the creature behind, floating into the Lounge and strapping myself down in front of the Flat. I picked up Petr’s call.
“Hey,” he said, “people from PR are miffed about you canceling the video session. Lot of civilians lined up to talk to you.”
“I couldn’t do it. Not today.”
“I told them I’d take the hit for it. With Lenka, and all. But there’s something else—the air filters are detecting a foreign substance. Unable to determine what it is. Do you see anything unusual in Corridor 3? Or anywhere else?”
I glanced toward the filter shaft in the corridor, then at the creature floating toward the kitchen.
“Nope,” I said.
“Okay, well, we’re going to purify, as a safety measure. You know the drill.”
I made my way to the lab. To avoid contamination of the samples, the room ran on a separate filter, and thus provided a safe haven during emergency cleansings. I passed the kitchen and saw the creature’s face buried in the freezer, rifling through Popsicle packets. I considered whether I should give it a warning. Didn’t it already know what was about to happen?
I closed the lab door and ran the filter analysis on my e-tablet. No foreign substances found. I pulled up the call with Petr on the screen.
“Can I ask you for a favor?” I said.
“We’re sealing you off. Cleaning in two. What?”
“Can you have someone track her down? I want to know she is safe.”
“Minute and a half. Listen, I don’t think that’s such a good idea. She needs some time.”
“Hell, I can’t just not know where she is, what she’s doing. She couldn’t even stand to talk to me, Petr.”
“Thirty seconds. I don’t know, Jakub. Give it some time. Once we start poking around, people will talk. Before you know it, this is a scandal on the front pages of gutter magazines.”
He was right, but being humiliated by the nation’s notorious gossip rags seemed worth knowing how Lenka was doing. Why in the hell she had left me to wonder and agonize.
“I can’t be up here without knowing anything. You need to figure something out for me.”
I looked around the lab. On the left wall, drawers of Space dust particles already analyzed and cataloged, brought for comparison to the new dust gathered from Chopra. Highly processed pieces of the cosmos, containing H2, magnesium, silicon, iron, carbon, silicon carbide, often mixed with asteroid and cometary dust, the latter always carrying hope, as comets are the universe’s dumpster divers, vagrants pushing their carts of intergalactic junk tirelessly over the centuries. It was in those carts that we were most likely to discover new organic particles hinting at traces of other life within the universe, substances that would clarify the formation of planets and the structures of other solar systems, perhaps even a touch of what had occurred during the Big Bang. But all of these samples were old news, offered no stimuli for my imagination. On the right side of the room awaited empty glass and titanium containers, sterile, expertly shined, ready to be filled with the pieces of interstellar dust that had come to us from the unknown.
“Let me sleep on it,” Petr said. “I can probably get the interior ministry on it. You need to regain your focus. You’re flying on some serious currency. And the people are watching.”
The familiar mist shot out of the filter vents, a slightly yellow substance. Bomba!, a revolution in home cleaning and mission sponsor. No more antibacterial wipes, no more Lysol. Once a week, the good housekeeper could place the blue square of Bomba! in the middle of his or her household. Activate, depart the house for five minutes. Meanwhile, the mist would spread around the house and eradicate 99.99993 percent of all bacteria, a ruthlessly efficient genocide. Afterward, the substance would transform itself into harmless nitrogen particles, leaving behind a pleasant citrus scent. Together with the creators of Bomba!, SPCR engineers had developed a new version of the substance to combat any known harmful particle an astronaut might encounter. Bomba!, the commercials cheered. Now in Space! I wondered whether the creature would be affected, whether I would find its dead body and drag it back to Earth. The mist grew thinner.
“All clear,” Petr said. “No trace of foreign substances.”
Behind me, a soft tap on the door.
“Great. Can I get off the grid?” I said.
“I need you stable, Kubo.”
Kubo. What my mother used to call me.
“I get it. I’ll pull it together. Just give me a break and try to find my wife.”
Pause.