How High We Go in the Dark(60)

“These are remarkable,” I said. I studied the portrait of a little girl with golden curls. If I squinted hard enough, I could just make out the outline of a roller coaster reflected in her eyes. I wondered what might be reflected in the eyes of those on the journey with us. As artists, we could transform the sterile walls of this ship into a home, preserve our journey for those who never woke up. I could hold on to our memories through the millennia. I could help us move on.

Dear Cliff,

Yumi looks peaceful in her chamber—they all do. Do you remember how we had to take turns reading her stories whenever Clara left on her research trips? Yumi loved origin myths, how the heavens were split from land and gods placed the moon and sun in the sky. I’m writing to you in our daughter’s journal, which you used as your own during your final months. It seemed fitting, after all. The Chronicle of a Family of Explorers. A book of regrets and goodbyes. The crew here have begun to find their footing—not being a scientist or military, I feel left out sometimes, but I join board game nights and I help prepare rations at mealtimes. I became an artist because I was terrible with people. Of course, they all know what I’ve lost, not that we haven’t all lost someone. I wish you were both still with me to witness all of this—the maelstrom of starlight outside the ship’s windows, the constant debates about probe telemetry of atmospheres and water and radiation. I could never have imagined the vastness of nothing between the stars, the invisible dark matter that connects everything in the universe like the branches of the nervous system. I’ve made a friend of sorts, perhaps more of a colleague, a woman the commander woke up just for me. We’ve begun painting murals on the walls to help make the ship feel less sterile, the journey less cold, whenever we’re awake—our ramshackle bungalow in Santa Monica, a water tower in Iowa, the commander’s hometown. My friend Dorrie even painted the City of Laughter, where she lost her son. I’ve been populating an imaginary town with the faces of those the crew has lost and plan to fill the skies with all the planets we find along the way that will be both beautiful and deadly, or simply not quite right for us. If I stare long enough at our paintings, I can almost forget that everything we remember about our time on Earth will soon be ancient history.





Stasis


Fusion rockets and antimatter boosters. Cryogenic suspension. Magnetosphere radiation shields and artificial gravity. Maybe on Star Trek or Star Wars, I thought. But few could fully appreciate the starship Yamato until they signed the government and Yamato-Musk Corporation waivers and walked on board. Named after Bryan Yamato, who solved the problem of harnessing Hawking radiation from microscopic black holes to fuel our main engine and helped us reach 10 percent the speed of light. Oddly, Bryan and his wife had elected to remain on Earth, even though Bryan’s teenage son joined the expedition under the supervision of the commander. They’re working on a solar shade project to cool the planet—trillions of basketball-sized satellites carrying reflective lenses the width of a human hair. End to end, the starship Yamato would span two football fields and can accommodate a crew of fifty out of stasis at one time. Reverse-engineered UFO technology, Area 51, the conspiracy theories from grocery store tabloids. Only a handful of the crew have the security clearance to know for certain whether those tabloid stories were true. But I like to believe we had otherworldly help. That someone or something gave Bryan Yamato a push when he needed it—an equation, a schematic, an a-ha! moment implanted into his brain. Maybe we’re on our way to find them—the constant engine rumble like the ocean surf makes it easy to lose yourself in these kinds of thoughts. Once, as we worked on a mural, I saw Dorrie painting her son, Fitch, in a small landing craft on its way to a planet covered with smiling green aliens, waving at the sky.

“He would have lost his mind if he’d lived long enough to know about the Yamato,” Dorrie said. “The last image I have of him is on that coaster—his arms raised high above his head. Maybe he thought he could fly. Maybe he wanted to get a little closer to the stars. He wanted to do so much when he grew up.”

“He sounds a lot like my Clara when she was little,” I said. “It’s like part of her belonged out here.”

Apart from our hours painting together, Dorrie and I rarely socialized. I’d see her in the mess hall, dining with some of the officers. She looked like she enjoyed their company. She laughed at their toilet humor, played poker with the crew, but between the jokes and royal flushes and gossip about who was fucking who and in what utility closet, she wore a faraway gaze, as if she could see through the bulkheads. Once, when I saw her alone, I asked if she wanted to grab a coffee, and she told me she was praying. She was curled up next to one of the circular observation windows. From afar she looked like a fish staring out from a bowl.

“Not like to God or anything like that,” she explained. “But maybe something that connects us . . . to wherever Fitch is, or your Clara. Lieutenant Johansson, the navigation officer, was telling me there’s an invisible web that ties the stars and planets and galaxies together. We don’t know what it is or how it works, but it’s out there, all around us.”

I’ve begun to pray, too, for the first time since I was a child. I don’t know what Dorrie prays for or if she asks for anything in particular. I think of Yumi dreaming for hundreds or thousands of years without a break, and wonder if she knows what’s real, worry that after so long in her own mind, the reality of being with me in a new world won’t be enough. I take long walks beyond the children’s stasis chambers and the nonessential economy-class lottery passengers, who’ll be awoken only once or twice during our journey. I tell myself that leaving was the right decision. When we arrived at the Centauri system, we received a decades-old message from Earth, informing us that a cure for the plague had been discovered—the comatose woke up and people began to rebuild their lives. Funerary corporations expanded to focus on climate projects, building seawalls around coastal cities, sponsoring the solar shade project until the end of the century. The message bid us good luck and farewell. You always have a home here, it said. On this world or on your new home, we’ll find each other again one day. Personal letters arrived, along with general messages to the crew, and for more than a week the ship was abuzz with news and condolences and statistics from revived sports teams, a snapshot of life on Earth for the past fifty years. The ship’s doctor organized daily sharing circles for those who wanted to celebrate or needed support or couldn’t quite articulate how they were supposed to feel.