The Calculating Stars (Lady Astronaut Universe #1)

by Mary Robinette Kowal

If I had known how long the stars were going to be hidden, I would have spent a lot more time outside with the telescope.

THE SUN HAD set in a vivid vermilion, with copper and streaks of dark gold. We might well have been transported to Mars based on the red sky arching over us. The ruddy light stained everything, so that even the white picket fence of Major Lindholm’s house looked as if it had been dipped in blood.

I realized, with a little bit of a shock, that I’d never been to the home of a black person before.

If I had to see another look of kindness, I would come completely apart.

What were all the other hundreds and thousands of people who were on the edges of the destruction to do?

For a little while longer, I wanted to be in the safety of the night.

It was like playing the fiddle while Rome burned around us.

But if I didn’t know, then I could still hope. And hope would kill me.

The custom against speaking to someone in mourning until they spoke first had never made so much sense.

the fate of the world depends on keeping my wife healthy and happy.” He kissed my forehead. “I’m not even sure it’s an exaggeration.”

Marriage, too, is a threshold between Before and After. We have many of these, every day, which we do not recognize. The threshold is not the question. There will always be Befores and Afters. The question is: what do you do after you cross that threshold?” I wiped under my eyes with the thumb of my glove, and it came away dark with mascara. “You live. You remember. This is what our people have always done.”

“Space sounded so romantic.”

panic and hysteria are two sides of the same coin?

Shoulders back. Head up. You’re a young lady, not a camel.

it left us standing in a darkness of my making.

Anyone looking at us would have thought that we were grieving, but it was the happiest I’d been in months.

There might be cousins out there somewhere, but between the Holocaust and the Meteor . . . ​it was just the two of us.

The bubbles lifted a scent that held the memory of summer warmth.

Someone had brought gin, and of course that meant we had to experiment with other cocktail variations. For science. Chemistry is a very important part of rocketry.

I stared at the screen, grinning so hard my cheeks hurt. The moon. Someday. Someday, I would go there. Someday, I would walk on the moon.

Was I really going to be content running calculations for someone else’s ideas? It would remove the immediate stress, true, and leave . . . ​what?

Those little girls thought I could do anything. They thought that women could go to the moon. And because of that, they thought that they could go to the moon, too. They were why I needed to continue, because when I was their age, I needed someone like me. A woman like me.

Lynn’s laugh hadn’t changed at all. It burst out of her like the sonic vibrations of a rocket.

I think they’ve just been put off by people who taught them to be afraid of numbers.” “That’s

It had been a rocket, not a meteorite. That gave no real comfort, not when death had still dropped from the sky.

On the horizon, the world burned.

“I can’t yell when I go out on the floor. I want to. I want to scream and gnash my teeth. So thank you for giving me a place where I can be awful, and find my way back again.”

But if we can limit the amount of greenhouse gases we generate, then we might—and I stress the word might—be able to keep the Earth habitable. Or at least habitable longer.”

TIME is the scarcest resource, and the most essential to humanity’s space efforts. Since there is no way to increase the supply of this resource, the only sane choice is to make the best use of the small and rapidly dwindling quantity available.

“You are amazing.” “I am in love. That’s an important distinction.” Nathaniel turned to kiss my forehead. “Without you, I’m just an average guy.”

If a woman tells him, he’ll have to either pretend he understands it, or admit that he’s not smart enough to be making a decision on this.”

Space seems . . . ​necessary. Or inevitable.

the idea of not going into space seems more impossible than anything else.

The murmur of the crowd rumbled through the curtains at a constant low-frequency hum.

I want to go to the moon for the same reason men want to go. Women can do a useful job in space. We aren’t in a contest to beat men in anything.”

But that was science, and science wasn’t what they wanted from me.

It was like the air had become liquid and flowed around us.

Above the canopy, the clouds sank toward us, changing from a featureless expanse of silver gray to crenellations of cotton. Parker took us up into them and the wisps brushed past, feathering away as we ripped through. The jet punched out of the upper level of clouds into blue sky.

It had been so long since I had seen clear blue . . . ​It ached, that blue. The unobscured sun flared across the clouds

​I don’t know how much of my anger was a desire to help the black cause, and how much was because I wanted to get Violette and Betty out of my way.

There are times when numbers paint pictures in my head. They intersected with my pilot’s brain and I could see the arc of the ship and the controls in my hand.

Here’s to the stars.”

The Artemis 9 steams in the morning sun like a living beast. Intellectually, I know it’s because of the super-chilled oxygen, but . . . ​my God, she is beautiful.

The grasslands have just begun to turn green after a too-short winter with barely any snow. A patch of pink shifts in the breeze as early wildflowers greet the dawn.

The hatch closes, taking away the last view of Earth. All I can see now is the silver sky above us.

We rip clear of the clouds into startling blue. Abruptly the ride smoothes out as we push through the sound barrier, and the thunder of the rocket falls away behind us faster than we are traveling.

The blue of the sky grows deeper, into a rich velvet, then darkens to black. It is so dark that it is not a color but an absence. Ink. Velvet. Dark. None of these give the sense of the depth of space.

Past our windows, the dark sky flares red and gold. Pieces of housing whip past, trailing sparks.

We slide into her shadow and then magic fills the sky. The stars come out. Millions of them in crisp, vivid splendor. These are not the stars that I remember from before the Meteor. These are clear and steady, without an atmosphere to make them twinkle.

In the 1950s a man with an advanced degree in mathematics was an engineer. A woman was a computer. There was a huge discrepancy in the pay rates for those two job titles, even though the women were the ones designing the algorithms that drove much of the space industry. Likewise, white workers were paid more for the same work. I wish that these historical battles did not still have to be fought, but neither of these two statistics has changed.