Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

The gates of the forest. The phrase comes immediately to mind, but Edwin’s not sure where he picked it up. It sounds like something from a book he might have read as a boy. The trees here are old, and enormous. It’s like stepping into a cathedral, except the underbrush is so thick that he has to fight his way through. He stops a few paces in. He sees a maple tree just ahead, large enough that it’s created its own clearing,

He turns, and there—as incongruous as an apparition—is a priest, standing no more than a dozen yards away. He’s older than Edwin, perhaps in his early thirties, and has very short black hair.

There’s something about his accent that eludes Edwin—it’s not quite British, but not quite anything else.

He has an impression of being in some vast interior, something like a train station or a cathedral, and there are notes of violin music, there are other people around him,

“It’s just, I’ve heard stories,” the priest says. “That is, one hears stories.” This clumsy amendment strikes Edwin as a kind of camouflage, Roberts changing his patterns of speech to sound more English. More like Edwin. There’s a wrongness about the man that Edwin can’t entirely pinpoint.

his sister had walked with her camera along a faint forest path, toward an old-growth maple tree. She stepped under the branches and angled her camera upward, into green leaves flashing in the sunlight, in the breeze, and the music stopped so abruptly that the silence seemed like the next beat. The beat after that was darkness: the screen went black, just for a second, and there was a brief confusion of overlapping sounds—a few notes of a violin, a dim cacophony like the interior of a metropolitan train station, a strange kind of whoosh that suggested hydraulic pressure—then in a heartbeat the moment was over, the tree was back, and there was some chaotic camerawork as the composer’s sister seemingly looked around wildly, forgetting that she had the camera in her hand.

Only one other person waited with her: a man of about her own age, mid-thirties, in jeans and a nondescript blazer. His clothes were too big.

“Fomites aren’t a major mode of transmission with Covid-19,” Gaspery said. Fomites? Covid-19? Mirella had never heard either term, and the other two were frowning too. “Oh, right,” Gaspery said, seemingly to himself, “it’s only January.”

“So your sister, Vincent, she’s the one who filmed that strange video in your performance tonight?” This was Gaspery, his name memorable because she hadn’t heard it before.

Gaspery inclined his head. “You’re from British Columbia, aren’t you?” “Yeah. Tiny little place called Caiette, northern Vancouver Island.” “Oh, near Prince Edward Island,” the fedora said confidently.

Gaspery seemed foreign in a way that she couldn’t quite parse.

“What happened to her?” “No one really knows,” Paul said. “She just disappeared from the ship. Seems like it was an accident. No body.”

neighborhood. “Who are you?” Mirella asked. “I’m a kind of investigator,” Gaspery said. “You’ll think I’m crazy if I get into the details.” There was something familiar about him, it seemed to her now, something about his profile that rang a distant bell, but she couldn’t quite place him.

“I think I’ve seen you before,” Mirella said. She was looking at his face in profile in the dim light. He turned to look at her, and she was certain of it. “In Ohio.” “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She rose from the bench. “You were under the overpass,” she said. “In Ohio, when I was a kid. That was you, wasn’t it?” He frowned. “I think you’re mistaking me for someone.” “No, I think it was you. You were under the overpass. Right before the police came, before you were arrested. You said my name.”

He stared at the gun in his hand, as if unsure how it had arrived there, then he turned his head, and looked directly at the girls. “Mirella,” he said.

But all these years later, in the back of a Manhattan-bound taxi, safe in another life, here was a certainty she couldn’t shake: the man in the tunnel was Gaspery Roberts.

Gaspery Roberts couldn’t possibly have been the man under the overpass, now that she thought about it, because that was decades ago and he hadn’t aged.

“But of course,” she said, “there’s always a beginning. Before smallpox could be brought from Europe to the Americas, smallpox had to arrive in Europe.”

“Is this your first time staying with us?” a woman at a reception desk for the third or fourth hotel said to her, and Olive wasn’t sure how to answer, because if you’ve stayed in one Marriott, haven’t you stayed in all of them?

“This explanation might seem a little silly to us now, but they were grasping wildly for an explanation for the nightmare that had befallen them, and I think that in its outlandishness, the explanation touches upon the root of our fear: illness still carries a terrible mystery.”

for all our technological advances, all our scientific knowledge of illness, we still don’t always know why one person gets sick and another doesn’t, or why one patient survives and another dies. Illness frightens us because it’s chaotic. There’s an awful randomness about it.”

Research teams had been working on time travel for decades, both on Earth and in the colonies. In that context, a university for the study of physics, with an underground passageway to the police headquarters and countless literal back doors into government, made perfect sense. What is time travel if not a security problem?

“I was just trying to write an interesting book,” Olive said. “There’s no message.” “Are you sure?” the interviewer asked.

“Will you sign a used book?” a woman asked, in a signing line. “Of course, I’d be happy to.” “Also,” the woman said, “is this your handwriting?” Someone, not Olive, had already written in this woman’s copy of Marienbad: Harold: I enjoyed last night. xoxoxoxo Olive Llewellyn. Olive stared at the message and felt just a touch of vertigo. “No,” she said, “I don’t know who wrote that.”

The last interview of the tour was the following afternoon in Philadelphia, where Olive met a man in a dark suit who was her age or a little younger, in a beautiful meeting room at a hotel.

“Olive, this is Gaspery Roberts, Contingencies Magazine. I have to make a couple of quick calls, so I’ll leave you two.” She receded. Olive and the interviewer sat in matching green velvet chairs. “Thank you for meeting with me,” the man said. “My pleasure. Do you mind if I ask about your name? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Gaspery.” “I’ll tell you something even stranger,” he said. “My first name is actually Gaspery-Jacques.” “Seriously? I thought I’d made up the name for that character in Marienbad.”

He had a gentle way of speaking that Olive liked, and a faint accent that she couldn’t quite place.

“The scene in the spaceport,” he said. “Where your character Willis hears the violin and he’s…transported.” “It’s an odd passage,” Olive said. “I get a lot of questions about it.” “I’d like to ask you something.” Gaspery hesitated. “This might seem a bit—I don’t mean to pry. But is there an element of—I’m wondering if that bit of the book was inspired by a personal experience.”

“But if the star dies,” I said to Zoey, “obviously the Earth’s moon goes with it.” “Sure,” she said, “but we’re just the prototype, Gaspery. We’re just proof of concept. The Far Colonies have been populated for a hundred and eighty years.”

I grew up in the Night City. My walk to school took me past the childhood home of Olive Llewellyn, an author who’d walked those same streets two hundred years ago, not too far out from the moon’s first settlers.

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.

The video had been shot in a forest on Earth. The quality was a little jerky; the videographer had been walking on a forest path, toward an enormous leafy tree, some Earth species that didn’t grow in the colonies. The music stopped, and the man looked up at the screen above him. The screen went dark. There was a strange cacophony of noise—notes of a violin, the indistinct murmur of a crowd, the hydraulic whoosh of an airship taking off—and then it was over, the forest was back, and for a moment the image was dizzying, as if the videographer had forgotten that they were holding a camera. The forest faded out, but the music continued.

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

Our anxiety is warranted, and it’s not unreasonable to suggest that we might channel that anxiety into fiction, but the problem with that theory is, our anxiety is nothing new. When have we ever believed that the world wasn’t ending? “I had a fascinating conversation with my mother once, where she talked about the guilt she and her friends had felt about bringing children into the universe.

This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.