2. Chapter 2
Rafe
Here is something they don’t tell you about achieving your life’s dream: at some point, you will have to act like this is normal.
Nothing to see here, just Dr. Rafael Vasquez, walking around with Carl Sagan tucked under his arm.
Carl and I have been through a lot together this morning.
He didn’t fit in the rental car. He tried to fly away twice in the parking lot, turtleneck flapping, like a man finally free.
A kid outside the harbor office asked me if he was a picture of my dad.
Honestly, in the ways that count, he kind of is.
The keynote bit is simple. I get to the podium, I set Carl up next to me, and I open with the line about how every astronomer is just a kid who never got over their first planetarium show, and then I introduce my co-speaker, who has been dead since 1996 but remains a better public speaker than most of the consortium.
It’ll kill. Scientists are an easy room. We never tire of our own jokes.
Ten years I’ve been waiting for this moment. Ten years of grant panels and budget hearings and engineering reviews. This week AETHER opens her eye to the sky for the first time, right after the inauguration on Sunday.
The dock is gorgeous this morning. Gulls everywhere. Lobster boats idling. And at the end of the row in white hull and navy trim, the Saltford Belle, my ride to the rest of my life.
“Now that,” says a voice to my left, “is a fella I ain’t seen in a while.”
The voice belongs to an older kraken lobsterman sitting on an overturned crate, mending a trap with hands like driftwood. His tentacle-beard is long and the tips wiggle lazily as he looks up at me. He nods at Carl Sagan.
“Cosmos,” he says. “Watched the whole thing on channel two, back when. Billions and billions.” He does the voice. It’s a terrible impression and it delights me completely.
“He never actually said ‘billions and billions,’” I say, easing Carl down for a rest. “That was Johnny Carson doing him. Sagan spent years being haunted by an impression of himself.”
“That so?” The kraken lobsterman lifts a brow and a tentacle lifts, reaching his earlobe.
“It’s my favorite fact in the world that isn’t about space.”
The lobsterman, whose name turns out to be Earl, has opinions about space, the government, and a documentary about black holes that kept him up two nights running.
I get comfortable, because this is my favorite kind of conversation, the kind where two complete strangers can just join minds and discuss freely for the pure joy of it.
We get through the rather complex politics of lobster fishing.
We get through whether the moon landing was real. It’s a good ten minutes.
Then Earl squints past me at the horizon, and his face does something I don’t like.
“You’re crossing today?” he says.
“This morning. Out to Marlin Island.”
“Hm,” says Earl.
There’s a whole novel in that hm. He works his jaw, looks at the sky to the southeast, which to me looks like sky, and goes back to his trap.
“The air pressure has been dropping since dawn,” he says, mostly to the trap. “Faster than the radio says.”
The forecast this morning said a storm system is coming through tonight, well after we’d all be toasting under AETHER’s dome, safe and sound. I checked it twice, once last night and once before getting in my car.
“The forecast said tonight,” I say.
“Ayuh,” Earl says, in the tone of a man who has outlived a great many forecasts. “My left knee is never wrong about that. I’d want to be somewhere with a roof by mid-afternoon, me. A storm’s coming in, no matter what those fancy people on the weather channel say.”
And that puts a little cold spot right between my shoulder blades, I’ll be honest. But we’ve got a ceremony to prepare, a boat with decades on this run, and a captain who does this for a living. I know the difference between caution and fearmongering. Mostly.
“I’ll ask the captain about it,” I tell Earl, and I mean it. I collect Carl and shake Earl’s hand and wish him a good day.
Captain Fergus Williamson is on the back deck of the Belle looking like a thundercloud that learned to coil rope.
He is a selkie, beige fur covering his skin, a belly he wears like cargo, and an expression that says the morning has personally wronged him.
The harbor office warned me he was, quote, “a miserable old seal.”
I’ve spent ten years befriending review committees. A miserable old seal is a Tuesday.
“Buenos días! You must be Captain Williamson. I love your boat.”
It takes three boat questions and one line about how a hull that wide must sit like a church in a swell, and then it happens, the magic point where a grump finally breaks out: the laugh.
It comes up out of him like something surfacing from very deep water, and it hits the whole harbor at once.
Gulls take off. Earl, a hundred yards away, doesn’t even look up.
“A church in a swell!” Fergus roars, thumping the rail. “Hah! I’m stealing that one. Aboard, then, come aboard. Mind Mr. Sagan on the gunwale.”
“He’s been through worse. We’ve been to Comic-Con.”
The laugh again. Good. I now have an ally. I hand Carl across and Fergus receives him like visiting royalty and lashes him to the wheelhouse.
I cast a glance at Earl, who’s now standing next to his cages.
“Fella down the dock says the pressure is dropping fast,” I say, keeping it light. “Says he’d want a roof by mid-afternoon. Anything to it?”
Fergus doesn’t even pause his knot.
“Earl’s famous left knee,” he says, with vast contempt for the knee in question.
“That knee’s been forecasting the end of the world since Reagan.
System comes through tonight, you’ll be sleeping under a solid roof long before.
I’ve run this water forty years, professor.
Crossed in worse than anything today’s got in it, and that’s a promise. ”
Forty years. A promise. The cold spot between my shoulders files a minority opinion, and I overrule it, because that is what you do when the person with four decades of local knowledge tells you things are safe. I’ve sat on enough panels to know you don’t overrule the expert in the room.
“Then I’ll stop worrying and start carrying,” I say, and hand my duffel across, and step aboard the boat.
And that’s when I see her.
She’s set up on the bench under the wheelhouse overhang, laptop open, garment bag laid over the seat beside her with the flat precision of a crime scene.
Turquoise hair, real turquoise, the color the Gulf Stream thinks about being on its best day, wound up into a bun so tight it looks structural.
Black blazer. Sensible shoes. She’s typing like the keyboard owes her data.
Dr. Nerissa Marsh. I know the name a lot better than the face, which tells you everything about what kind of chair I’ve been this year: her biosignature paper came through my desk with the inauguration program, and it was the best thing I read all spring.
Apparently in the same building I work in, some floors down, this amazing woman has been doing incredible research while I’ve been in budget meetings developing a personal relationship with a spreadsheet.
She’s on the program as our Future of the field speaker. Based on that paper, it’s an accurate billing of her competence.
I look at her the way you’d look at an encrypted signal, because that’s what she is.
Everything about her is closed. The bun is closed.
The blazer is closed. The posture says approaching me has consequences.
But her face is not closed at all. It’s doing something complicated at that laptop, worry and fierceness and something underneath I can’t name from here, all of it live, all of it visible, like watching lightning through a curtain.
A person who broadcasts everything, working that hard to jam the signal.
I have spent my whole life being told I make things look easy. Nobody who says it means I haven’t put in the work over a decade of panels, but fine, I know what they mean. Doors open when I lean on them. I smile, I make people laugh and things smooth over for me.
I am looking at someone who has clearly decided to become a battering ram instead of a sweet talker like me.
She looks up. One second. Two. Bright blue eyes, and I get the full voltage of whatever’s behind that curtain.
Say something normal, Vasquez. You’re her department chair. You’re a professional.
I find that I’ve been standing here holding my backpack for what is now definitely too long.
I go with the smile. The regular one, not the press one, just, hey, colleague, big day, we’re on a boat, the ocean is nice.
She reaches into her bag, takes out a pair of headphones, puts them on, and goes back to her screen.
Not earbuds. Headphones. The big ones. The kind you wear to signal to the entire world that you’re not available.
Fergus fires up the diesel, and the Belle shivers under my boots like something waking up. I stand there on the deck, freshly and thoroughly dismissed, grinning at the back of a laptop like an absolute fool.
Okay. Fair enough. Today’s about the telescope anyway.
Carl gazes at me from the wheelhouse with infinite cosmic compassion.
“Don’t say it,” I tell him.
Billions and billions of stars in this universe, and I get seated next to the one that doesn’t want contact.