1 #2
Picture Marlowe behind the podium, thirty-four years old now, awake against all odds after twenty hours without sleep.
Still in trouble, but in a different way.
She concentrated on breathing and clutched the podium with both hands.
The audience was a dark void but she sensed their presence, all these souls gathered from so far away.
Can you hold the room? An old question from the beginning of her academic career, and there was victory in the answer: I can hold the room.
Internal call-and-response, trying to steady herself.
Panic is an ocean. She gazed out into the auditorium and imagined a ship sailing toward her through the dark.
“I think we should begin,” she said, in a faux-conversational tone that she’d been perfecting for some years now, “with some fundamental definitions. What is transport?” She paused, as if anyone were going to answer that, then answered herself: “It’s the movement of matter through time and space. Incidentally, that’s also life.”
Was that line pretentious? She worried it was pretentious. There was a murmur of appreciation from the audience, which was reassuring. But now a text message appeared on the periphery of her vision. Her brother, Samir:
Marlowe call me it’s urgent
Marlowe took a deep breath.
“What we have to consider, whether we’re talking about goods or people, is the impact of those variables—” But, and if she hadn’t been so tired she would have remembered to switch off messaging, another text from Samir had appeared:
Dad is drying
“The impact of those variables,” Marlowe said, “time and space, on—”
*dying
Marlowe fell silent. My father holding my hand when I was four, on a steep climb up a grassy hill. My father baking cookies when I was seven, carefully distributing an equal number of chocolate chips. My father playing the piano, my father eating ice cream—
Another text from Samir:
There isn’t much time
—my father applauding in the front row of my school play, my father driving me to college. My father last year on my roof deck, lying back in a lounge chair, staring up at the night sky like he’d never seen stars. Another text from Samir:
I’m sorry to tell you via text but we both know you won’t call me back
The audience was stirring now, making inquiring noises. Someone coughed.
“I’m sorry,” Marlowe said to the audience. “I have a personal emergency to attend to.” And then, because she was delivering this lecture via holograph, she disappeared into thin air.
4
Ibari had attended several of Marlowe’s lectures, because her closest friend—actually, her only friend—was Marlowe’s father, and she’d known Marlowe and her brother since their early childhoods.
Ibari knew Marlowe wouldn’t vanish unless it was a true emergency.
She waited a moment in the VR room, watching the empty stage to see if Marlowe would return.
Then a text appeared in her field of vision, from one of her informants:
Kareem is dying.
Ibari removed her headset—the auditorium and the floating text disappeared—and sank back into her office chair.
She’d known this moment was coming for a long time, and her own grief was surprising to her.
You have so much time until you don’t, that was the thing she kept thinking, and she knew that was nonsensical but the thought ran on a loop in her head.
She rose and went back to the window, hoping to steady herself.
The kite was still there, between towers.
Strange to realize how little time had passed, when the entire calculus of the world had just shifted.
What she longed for in that moment was to talk to Nico, but of course no one had seen Nico in over thirty years.
5
Samir was on the moon when Ibari called.
He’d worked on and off in Colony One since college and held a job that on paper should have been ideal.
But what he hadn’t understood, when he’d started out as an architect, was that excelling in his field would mean less and less time actually designing buildings and their interior spaces, and more and more time in client meetings.
He’d advanced to a high position in the premier architectural and engineering firm for off-world development, and his least favourite clients, who by some horrible luck were currently his only clients, were seated across from him.
One of his colleagues was presenting an engineering report that Samir had already read, so it seemed reasonable to take Ibari’s call.
He rose and stepped away from the table.
“I just spoke with your father’s doctor,” Ibari said.
“Yeah,” Samir said, “he called me a half-hour ago. I have to get through this meeting, then I’m headed back to Earth. Do you know if Marlowe knows that we’re close to the end?”
“You should be the one to tell her.”
“Samir,” someone said, behind him.
“I’ll call you back,” Samir said. When he turned back to the table, everyone was staring.
“Forgive me,” he said, “just dealing with a, a personal—I’m sorry.”
“Quite all right,” his colleague said. They hadn’t worked together for very long, but had already developed some rudimentary telepathic communication. His colleague was giving him the look that meant The client is an idiot. “Our client was just asking a question about surface development.”
“I . . . what? I’m sorry,” Samir said, “say that again.”
The client smiled. His teeth were unnaturally white. When he leaned forward, several of his staffers leaned forward too, unconsciously.
“Well,” the client said. “It’s just, I’ve been hearing all about these underground dwellings, right?”
Samir nodded. “That’s the only way to build on Proxima Centauri B, unfortunately.” Under the table, he was texting Marlowe:
Marlowe call me it’s urgent
“Sure,” the client said, “okay, I hear you, but are we being too timid here?”
“Too timid?” It was difficult to concentrate on the meeting now.
There was no scenario where Marlowe was going to call him back.
They weren’t particularly close. Something was off about Marlowe and had been for some time, but the exact parameters of the problem were confusing to him.
She’d told him something vague about PTSD but hadn’t really gotten into specifics, and he didn’t entirely understand what had happened to her.
“We are pioneers,” the client continued, “are we not?” His staffers nodded. Yes. Pioneers. “Pioneers are bold. Pioneers take risks. Let’s build on the surface.”
“We can’t build on the surface,” Samir said. Everyone at the table looked nervous. Several of the client’s staffers frowned. Marlowe hadn’t texted him back, so he texted her again:
Dad is drying
“Okay,” the client said, “but Proxima Centauri B, that’s in the Goldilocks zone, am I right?”
*dying
The client’s second-in-command flashed her most helpful smile. “Not too hot, not too cold.”
“Right,” the client said. “Neither too far from nor too close to its nearest star.”
“Between the two of you, you just said the same thing three times,” Samir said. He sent another fast text under the table:
There isn’t much time
“Which makes me think,” the client said, as if Samir hadn’t spoken, “we’re not thinking big enough. Let’s think bigger. Let’s build on the surface. Let’s make this work.”
“We can’t make this work,” Samir said.
“Can’t? I’m sorry,” the client said, with a business-school smile, “that word’s not in my vocabulary.”
“We cannot build on the surface of this planet, because there are gale-force winds one hundred percent of the time. It’s hard on structures.
You have to have a structure, a dome, because we can’t breathe the air there.
” Samir was working very hard to keep his voice steady.
Why hadn’t he gone home more often? He couldn’t have asked for a better father.
“Well,” someone said, “but there’s no atmosphere on the moon, bro, and here we are.” Someone laughed. “Home sweet home on Moon Colony One.”
“You’re right,” Samir said. “The moon has no atmosphere. But you know what else the moon doesn’t have? Permanent fucking gale-force winds.”
Everyone was staring at him, but all his thoughts were of his father. How could Marlowe not have responded? He texted her again, not bothering to conceal it this time:
I’m sorry to tell you via text but we both know you won’t call me back
“Hey, Samir,” his colleague said. “Let’s maybe just—”
“What I am asking for,” the client said, very slowly and clearly, “is simply—Samir, where are you going?”
Samir himself wasn’t sure, but he did know that he was leaving the room.
6
PTSD is timeline corruption. The past interrupts the present.
Marlowe had waited too long to leave her marriage, and the price was that she could no longer sleep.
Some nights she woke at two a.m. and there was a feeling almost of clockwork, of gears engaging; her thoughts began to whirr and once that mechanism was in motion it was difficult to stop.
It was sometimes possible to fall asleep around dawn, but she only knew she’d slept when she realized she was thinking of a recent nightmare.
She tried sleeping pills but they made her feel like a ghost.
In the dazed weeks after her divorce was finalized, when the panic attacks were just beginning to surface, she visited a therapist who diagnosed her with PTSD and talked about emotional abuse and domestic violence support groups.
But was violence exactly what had happened?
She had doubts about the terminology because there were gaps in her memory, and because she had doubts about everything.
She had doubts about everything because her husband had worked very hard, over a long period of time, to ensure that she doubted herself.
She had undergone something subtle and profound, a kind of rewiring.
It was hard to fully grasp what had happened to her, which left her perpetually in search of evidence.