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“Men could not part us with their worldly jars, Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend; Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars: And, heaven being rolled between us at the end, We should but vow the faster for the stars.” —Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The night sky is so clear—spilled ink speckled with stars. Naomi always said no matter how dark the night is, you can never mistake a planetside sky for the true black of space. I’ll start at the beginning, like she wants.
They had come to this corner of the world in the dead of night two weeks ago. Locked themselves in a makeshift quarantine, done each and every step to ready themselves for launch. Startling at every sound, as the robots crawled along the surface of a rocket. They had to put their entire trust in machines, for humans could too easily betray them. Right up until the end, she was afraid someone would come. Turn off the robots, disrupt the launch sequence. Pull open the hatch and drag them from the craft just as they were about to finally escape. Naomi held her breath.
They’d willingly strapped themselves to a bomb and lit the fuse. Engines roared.
crushed against her seat, as if a demon crouched on her chest.
So much had been stolen from them. From all women. Naomi and her conspirators were stealing something back. Conservative politicians and their sock puppets in the media would accuse Dr. Valerie Black, CEO of Hawthorne, and her crew of stealing a spaceship. But the people on the surface were wrong. The women were stealing a planet. They were stealing a future.
It hadn’t happened in a moment, but a series of moments, as slow and insidious as the melting of the ice caps. Women had been ushered out of the workplace, so subtly that few noticed until it was too late. There had been no grand lowering of an iron curtain, with passports voided and bank accounts emptied. There had been a few men in sharp suits quoting scripture with silver tongues, but it was cursory, just enough to wrangle part of the Christian vote. Really, they were afraid of women. Or hated them. Wasn’t that much the same thing? The country saw those angry men as a fringe movement right
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They’d managed to fish out most of the Great Pacific garbage patch, at least, though even if they hadn’t, it might not have been visible from orbit.
Earth was such a little, vulnerable thing in the
grand scope of the ...
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Down on the surface, those mountains were larger than life, but from the ship they were only a ripple. The world she’d known was nothing but a suspended, lonely rock. It’d keep itself alive, in the end, but that didn’t mean large animal life would do the same. Humans were finally confronted with their fragility. Within a generation, they could all be gone. They’d outgrown this world, drained it dry. They needed a new one.
human centric
“We spent so long thinking about getting off the planet, it’s easy to forget this is only the beginning,”
Valerie had always loved birthdays and Christmases. A chance to watch others light up with joy and then grow bashful at her extravagance no one else could meet.
“If you could do anything just now, anything—what would it be?” Valerie had that intensity about her that had never failed to draw Naomi in. “You know what it’d be. Get up there.” A glance at the window. The moon, the stars. Valerie tilted her head, lips quirking at the corners. “I have a job for you that might help with that.”
Naomi felt something bright and white and hot as a young sun deep in her chest.
barkeep—a dour man with a face like a walnut—
tom the leaky cauldron
The UKSA hadn’t followed suit, but deep down, she’d known for months they’d never let her on one of those rockets she saw every day. For her own safety, so the men in power claimed, as piece by piece they eroded women’s abilities to feel safe.
No one else will do.
The clouds were too thick to see the stars, but Naomi let herself imagine being up there, the whole world spread below. She’d wanted a shot at this since she was a child, and even the odd space shuttle blowing up as she watched the live broadcasts hadn’t dissuaded her.
There were a thousand ways the project could go wrong. A million obstacles before them. That night, as the moon blurred the clouds silver, and the whisky made them both warm, Naomi vowed she wouldn’t let anything stand in their way.
Valerie leaned her forehead against Naomi’s. “Happy birthday, Nomi,” she said, the closest she’d come to an apology, and then she was gone.
Naomi always thought calling it an Extravehicular Mobile Unit sounded too technical and uninspired. But scientists veered from naming things poetically—drawing from myth and legend—to incredibly factual, with letters and numbers or baldly stating the obvious. Naomi had burst out laughing when as a child she’d learned they were naming the new telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile the Very Large Telescope. It was, at that.
Floating out there was a little like standing at the shore, looking out to the sea, beautiful but cruel. The currents would pull you under and would not care. In that moment, Naomi fully understood the meaning of the word “awestruck.” The word “sublime.”
Lebedeva whispered something in Russian Naomi couldn’t quite catch. An exclamation of wonder. A prayer. They were nearly the same thing.
They allowed themselves half a minute of drinking in the swirling clouds—including the spiral of a hurricane above the blue of the ocean. It
They didn’t scream this time. It was different to leaving the Earth in the capsule. Quieter, smoother, and so much more final. Soon the planet beneath them would be nothing more than a memory. Naomi locked eyes with Valerie, who held her head up. Beatific as a saint, she smiled. “It’s time to find our world.”
Naomi’s new quarters had all the personality of a hospital room. A tiny bunk, only big enough for one. Hart and Hixon had two adjoining cabins and turned one into a bedroom, both the mattresses side by side on the floor. Each cabin had a few cupboards for storage. A miniature sink. A teeny desk and chair. Everything white, pale blue or grey. Naomi had lived in some bare studios in her time, but this was like living on a boat.
you don't even know
Even if there were no signs of animal life larger than a few cells—and who’s to say they weren’t just better at hiding from probes and scans than they’d thought?—life was stubborn. The panspermia theory postulated that interstellar dust, meteors, and comets throughout the universe could pepper organic matter on other planets. Perhaps the same dust that helped Earth on its way had scattered across the surface of Cavendish.
The complex feedback loops that make up a planet could easily be knocked into a configuration that could threaten human life rather than support it. If the last hundred years should have taught humanity anything, it was that planets were more delicate than most people thought.
But humanity’s arrival meant their survival.
Naomi pushed off the ground, swimming through the air and making her way to the storage bay.
endor's game
Their second dinner on board the Atalanta, the five women had gathered at the round table of the canteen to properly discuss the backup crew, all a little green around the gills. Seasickness was one thing—space sickness quite another. It’d taken most of the first day for gravity on the corridor ring to activate, and longer for the crew to acclimatise. Hart had been the worst affected, followed by Naomi, who had thrown up into waste bags, hoping the plastic held. Hixon and Lebedeva had stomachs of steel, evidently, and Naomi suspected Valerie had felt queasy but would never show it.
He was one of those men that harkened back to the early days of astronauts, those Mercury boys with their swagger and machismo, who would drag race down freeways in the desert after half a bottle of Jack just to prove they could. A man’s man, a little too familiar. He’d kept trying to flirt with Naomi and been very confused when she proved immune to his charms.
He had a face Naomi could only describe as mobile—always on the verge of a laugh, a smirk, a frown. She had never seen him still.
“I aim to help those in the here and now,” Valerie continued. “But my vision has always been to the future. Fixing a root cause rather than slapping a band-aid over the symptom.”
“Cavendish. Our new world. Our frontier.” Years ago, they’d found a gas giant, Aegir, named after Ran’s husband, the god of the ocean. Aegir was too large for life—akin to Jupiter. The smaller planet was hidden behind it in the Goldilocks zone, or the circumstellar habitable zone. Not too hot, not too cold. The right temperature for water to be liquid on the surface given the right atmospheric pressure. For life to potentially grow.
The planet was brilliant blue and green, covered with swirls of clouds. Yet instead of grand continents, there were a few just big enough to be deserving of the name. Smatterings of smaller islands dotted the oceans, though plenty of them were at least the size of Great Britain. A planet of archipelagos. Its moon was even a similar size, creating tides in those alien seas. It had oxygen and rich biodiversity in the early stages of life, well enough established to have stable elemental cycles that could sustain agriculture. Humans could theoretically live there.
Earthsea
The plants hadn’t fared much better. The soil and seeds from Cavendish had arrived still viable—a highlight of Naomi’s career a few years ago, when she’d last worked at Hawthorne. Yet they would need Earth plants to survive on Cavendish as it had no food crops. Every experiment they conducted with soil and light that mirrored Cavendish levels had failed. For months, the seedling kept dying.
the martian
“The maths and the physics check out,” Valerie continued. “We’ve done all the testing, but time keeps relentlessly ticking along—we haven’t cracked time travel yet.” A grin, a pause for a few chuckles. “With your assistance, your shared vision of this future, we can finish the construction on the Atalanta. We can go to Cavendish within three to five years. Imagine—within a decade, all of humanity could have a fresh start. No more refugees. Just a world where we all thrive.” More murmurings. Valerie held her palms up, placating. “Naturally, I’m not suggesting we abandon Earth or Mars entirely.
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manifest destiny
As if countless think pieces hadn’t called her little more than a pop-science feminist talking head. A woman with more money than sense. They said she was wasting a fortune on far-off possibilities rather than making a difference to the people on this rock.
Naomi felt a brief pain, dulled by two years. Something like yearning, like relief. Naomi was not the woman she thought she would be when she married Cole. She was someone else. Not better, not worse. Different.
Naomi had long since started calling them her goth plants.
The GMO strains of spirulina were coming along nicely. She walked through the thin, purple corridor of reinforced glass tubes, checking the readings, taking down the segments with mature culture and putting them into the harvester machine that would turn them into pellets or powder. Mostly it created gummy nutriblocks the size and texture of Turkish delight but even more foul.
Over the years, Naomi had soaked up anything that would make her a viable astronaut candidate, but from early on, she’d loved plants the best. She was bringing life to the inhospitable environment of space. This wasn’t the first biome she’d created, but she knew the challenges of closed environments.
Biosphere 2 and the challenges they’d faced in the early- to mid-nineties. A crew had volunteered to try and survive in a dome under the hot desert sun. At first, things had gone well enough. Then the bees died. Roaches appeared. A few times, those in charge of the project had had to pump oxygen into the enclosure, which was technically cheating, to stop those within from suffocating. Everyone inside grew too thin, too hungry, bones stark against skin as they lost weight; chemicals that had been stored in their fat from pesticides they’d eaten had poisoned the air. They’d begun fighting.
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the house of the scorpion (sequel?)
This type of long-scale isolation was called overwintering, named after long-term missions in the Antarctic. It’d been one of the main reasons Naomi had been so determined to go on her trip to the South Pole the summer before she graduated. She wanted to prove she’d be able to cope with that detachment from the rest of humanity. She’d found the cold and the dark draining, as anyone would, and she mourned the fact that penguins could only be found in zoos. She’d also discovered pockets of pleasure.
With her short hair and bare face, she looked younger, almost vulnerable. But she’d seemed happy, these last few weeks. Space agreed with her.
Hart had taken her wife’s hand, and Naomi had felt a pang at their intertwined fingers. Not jealousy, not quite, but a yearning for something as simple as touch, or falling asleep next to someone and letting the cadence of their breath lull her to sleep.
They’d been experimenting on the vaccine for Seventh Disease, or erythema varicella. It was a new childhood disease, a mutation of the same virus that caused chickenpox and shingles, that affected children intensely but barely touched adults. It had only taken a few years to engineer a new vaccine.
The crew of the Atalanta were only five women out of all of humanity, but they could still found a whole new place for humans to flourish. Sometimes you only need one tiny proportion of the population to enact change.
