“Is my wife there, senator?”
“She is not, Jakub. I’m sure she’s thinking of you. She will be there when I declare you the nation’s hero. She will be there when I establish a holiday in your name, along with scholarships for brilliant young scientists.” His words were interrupted now and then by echoes, scratching, an occasional mute pause. “I will make sure these people don’t forget your name for the next thousand years, Jakub. Tell me what it’s like up there. Pretend I’m a friend and you’re telling me about a dream you can’t forget.”
T?ma’s voice was terribly nice, I decided. Like silk wrapped around a stone. A soothing timbre that could break empires. Not bad to die to. Yes, the word at last came out. Die die die die, I whispered. T?ma ignored it.
I made my way to the observation window. In front of the purple core floated a torso of fur and sagging legs. Like a worshipper kneeling at the stairs of a shrine, begging for entry. He looked back at me, all thirty-four eyes glowing. His irises did not change when illuminated by the flashlight.
“It reminds me of a time I almost drowned,” I said. “I looked up through the murky water and saw the sun. And I thought, I am drowning, and yet the star of light and warmth is burning itself up to keep me alive. Now I’m thinking the sun too looked purple back then. But who knows?”
“That sounds good, Jakub. I’ll tell it to all the people outside who wish they could hear from you.”
“Tell it to Lenka. Tell her how glad I am that I didn’t drown back then. So I could go on living and meet her in the square.”
“Go to… Sleeping Chamber. I need… give… thing,” the senator said. The transmission was so weak now that I could hear only every other word.
I floated into the Sleeping Chamber, wound up the flashlight lever, and shone it into the corners, expecting to find something new.
“… emove… sleep… small hook…”
I removed the sleeping bag from its hinges and let it float away. I would not be in need of sleep anymore. There, just as T?ma had said, a seemingly random hook was placed in the midst of the sleek wall, an apparent design flaw. I pulled at it, and a book-size box slid out.
“… bite down… immediate…” T?ma said.
I opened the box. A clear packet containing two black pills entered free zero gravity space, along with a small printed leaflet issuing a stern warning: Consumption strictly forbidden without permission from Central.
I gave a loud exaggerated laugh to ensure T?ma heard me. “Thank you, senator. I have a better way.”
The communication stream faded. I wasn’t sure whether T?ma had heard my last words. Outside the Sleeping Chamber, Hanu? awaited, his eyes turned toward me in anticipation. Yes, there was a better way. I would have to breathe pure oxygen for another hour to eliminate all nitrogen in my body. I imagined the gas bubbles inside of me dissolving like a sodium tablet in a glass of water. After the hour, I would join Hanu? in Deep Space, and hand the ashes of my grandfather over to the cosmos before I too would be consumed. I floated to the kitchen, removed the last remaining jar of Nutella, and put it inside my pocket. The hour would be long. I waited, thinking of the first days at the Space Institute, the weight loss, the constant chewing of gum, the pain.
These faint memories of spacewalk training brought back my old sour stomach, like a fingernail probing its way around my abdomen. My body trapped by a heavy underwater suit, my mouth stuffed with an oxygen propellant, the training pool stinking of bleach and illuminated by azure bulbs. Along its one-mile circumference paced men who recorded my progress in yellow notepads. The first time I retched, the mask slipped out of my mouth and I released bile and peanuts into the water, immediately gasping for breath and receiving in exchange a liter of pool water in my throat. Coming up for air felt like rock climbing, muscles and veins fat with blood, the surface concealed by the play of shadows.
We tried many things—antinausea medication, different masks, relaxation exercises, a multitude of diets—but every training session had the same ending. It wasn’t that I feared enclosed spaces. Mine was a unique breed of claustrophobia. The training pool wasn’t a dark closet, it was thousands of dark closets lined up, with no door one could open to escape. I could only swim, and swim, and swim, with every foot the same silence and loneliness, the same sense of abandonment. I couldn’t take it. Or, perhaps, I got sick simply because of the physical strain of diving. We couldn’t be sure. In the end, after rapid weight loss and a decrease in my cardio performance, we ended the spacewalk training a week early. It was extremely unlikely that I would go outside anyway, they said. I was okay with it.
I wondered now why I still feared these endless closets, the vacuum outside that would remind me of those bleached diving pools. It was all to end there. But no one was watching anymore, no one would think worse of me. The end was up to me, and yet the nausea held on.
Hanu? interrupted these thoughts. “You are to join me soon,” he said.
“It looks that way.”
“Your tribe has abandoned you.”
“Something like that.”
“Do not worry, skinny human. I am an accomplished explorer. Together we shall explore the Beginning.”
I let go of the flashlight and floated to the air lock door, located below Corridor 4. I did this slowly, patting the walls of JanHus1, memorizing its dead, lightless crevices and feeling guilt, as if I had somehow drained the life out of this spacecraft entrusted to me. The incubator that had carried me and kept me warm, fed, clean, and entertained for four months was now a shell of useless materials. An overpriced casket. But it had gotten me to Chopra and I could not fault it for failing against the unknowable forces of other worlds. I closed the compression door behind me. I opened the hatch leading into the universe.