and so half the time that Tekla was asleep Dinah could look right out her window and see her suspended there, all but naked, floating in the Luk like a fetus in its bubble of amniotic fluid.
Dinah watched Tekla go through this routine for about a week, and found it all inordinately distracting. She brought Ivy, and later Rhys, into the chop shop to behold the sleeping Tekla through the window. They talked of Tekla and emailed each other pictures of Tekla that they had dug up on the Internet.
“That could be you or me, honey,” Dinah said to Ivy.
“It is us,” Ivy said, “it’s just a matter of degree.”
“Do you think we’re going to end up like that?”
Ivy thought about it, shook her head. “Look, the way she’s living isn’t sustainable.”
“You think it’s a suicide mission?”
“I think it’s a gulag,” Ivy said, “a little gulag right outside your window.”
“You think she’s in some kind of trouble?”
“I think we’re all in some kind of trouble,” Ivy reminded her.
“Oh yeah, I forgot.”
“She’s lucky, remember?” Meaning that Tekla had at least found a way off the planet.
“She doesn’t look lucky,” Dinah said. “I’ve never seen anyone so isolated. Does she talk to someone on that tablet? Or is she just surfing?”
“I can ask Spencer, if you want,” Ivy said. “I’m sure he’s logging all the packets.”
Dinah knew that Ivy was only kidding, but she answered, “Nah. She deserves that much privacy at least.”
Rhys’s reaction was to become aroused. He was reasonably discreet about it. But the elapsed time between his seeing Tekla and having sex with Dinah was, generously estimating, perhaps half an hour. Not that Rhys really needed a lot of help to start his motor. And not that Dinah did either. She had always known they were going to do it.
She had known this based on the way he smelled, at least when he was not in the middle of being sick. In other times and places, the way he smelled would not have been enough. They’d have dated first, or something. There’d have been complications having to do with existing relationships, incompatible lifestyles, fraternization policies. But here it was just automatic. And it was tremendous.
Based on what she was hearing from Internet buzz from the ground, it was also pretty universal. The human race might be about to disappear, but not before putting on a two-year frenzy of recreational sex.
Actually sleeping together was another matter. Rhys didn’t seem to mind it in principle. But it was difficult logistically. Astronauts generally slept in bags that kept them from floating about at random while they were unconscious. The bags were designed for one person. NASA hadn’t gotten around to manufacturing two-person bags yet, so if they felt drowsy afterward, they would improvise, swaddling themselves together with whatever they could cobble up. But it never lasted more than a few minutes. Then he would go back to his duties, and if she felt like a nap, she would climb into a bag that she kept in her shop, sometimes peeking out the window, guiltily, at poor Tekla.
One day, after Tekla had left for work, Dinah took one of the chocolate bars she had brought up from Earth, wrote her email address on the wrapper, and handed it off to a Grabb, which she then put out the airlock. She piloted the Grabb across Amalthea’s surface to the mooring point where Tekla’s Vestibyul was cabled in place, then made it climb along the cable (which was easy, it had an algorithm for that) and clamber into the Vestibyul, where it took up position and waited, holding the chocolate bar out in a free claw.
When Tekla came back at the end of her shift, Dinah got the satisfaction of watching her unwrap the bar and eat the chocolate. She held up one hand and sort of waved through the plastic. Dinah couldn’t resolve her facial expression.
The Grabb was still in the Vestibyul, and would remain trapped there until Tekla’s next departure. Seeing Tekla float over in that direction, Dinah turned to her computer and switched on the video feed from the Grabb. She was fascinated to see Tekla’s face, clearly resolved, float into the frame.
She didn’t look that bad. Dinah had been expecting someone who looked like a concentration camp survivor. But she appeared to be getting enough food.
Of course, she could not see Dinah. And there was no audio hookup. Since there was no sound in a vacuum, space robots didn’t come with microphones or speakers.
Tekla was just staring at the Grabb, impassive, perhaps wondering whether it could see her.
Dinah slipped her hand into the data glove, did the thing that made it connect to the Grabb’s free claw, and waved.
Tekla’s green eyes flicked down in their sockets as she observed this. Still no emotion.
Dinah was mildly offended. Was the Grabb not adorably cute, in its ugly mechanical way? Was the wave not an amusing gesture?
Tekla held up the candy bar wrapper. On it, beneath Dinah’s email address, she had written NO EMAIL.
What did that mean? That she lacked an email address? That her tablet couldn’t receive it?
Or was she imploring Dinah not to communicate with her that way?
The Grabb had a headlamp, a high-powered white LED that she could switch on by hitting a key on her keyboard. Dinah turned it on, saw the glow on Tekla’s face, the highlights on the lenses of her eyes.
Did the Russians even use the same Morse code as Americans?
Tekla had to know it. She was a pilot.
Dinah made the light flash with the dots and dashes for M O R S E.
Tekla nodded, and Dinah could see her mouth making the word “Da.”
Dinah signaled:
DO YOU NEED ANYTHING?
The faintest trace of a smile came over Tekla’s lips. It was not a warm kind of smile. More bemused.
She held up what was left of the chocolate bar, and pointed to it.
Dinah returned:
TOMORROW
Tekla nodded. Then she turned away, her buzz-cut blond hair glinting in the light of the LEDs, and drifted back into the middle of her onion.
“FIVE PERCENT” WAS HOW IVY BEGAN THE NEXT MEETING IN THE Banana.
It was full to capacity: the original twelve-person crew of Izzy, the five who had come up on the Soyuz on A+0.17, and Igor, the Scout who had come in from the cold when his suit had failed. He, Marco, and Jibran had prepped for the meeting by jury-rigging some fans to blow more air through the space, so it wouldn’t fill up with carbon dioxide. This had prompted Dinah to joke that perhaps all meetings should take place in hermetically sealed rooms, so that they could only go on for so long. No one, with the possible exception of Rhys, had seen it as funny. Anyway, the roar of ventilation was even louder than it usually was in space, and so Ivy had
