He said the name twice. The first attempt came out stiff, in the tone people use for reading official notices at weddings and funerals, and he stopped and began again. “Mohammad jan.” After that it was easier. He told the man who he was and roughly where he was, that there were four of them, and that the eleven seconds of tone reaching Herat every Friday had been sent by a machine that had not been allowed to say anything else. He said: we heard you. He said nothing about the three skeletons floating in restraints down the tunnel. When he let go of the key a figure appeared in the corner of the panel, small and green: thirty-one minutes, eleven seconds. A reply, if there was one, would need as long again.
“He transmits on Fridays,” Saver said. “In his city it is Tuesday.”
“I know what day it is.”
“Then you know he may not be listening.” A pause. “His antenna has been pointed at me for nine years. I do not know whether anyone stands beside it on the other days.” Another pause, longer. “That was the first thing I have sent on his frequency that was not the tone. Voice traffic requires a crew member at the panel. You are at the panel.”
Kaius unhooked the headset and held it against his chest, the cable drifting out in a slow curl. He was still there, three hours later, when Maya put her head through the hatch to tell him Rook was in the airlock.
Rook had crossed at 0400 ship time with the sample kit clipped to his chest and a bag of spares towed behind him on a lanyard. He said nothing funny all the way through the airlock. At the habitation module he paused just long enough to see the profile inside one of the three suits before asking to be shown the rest of the station. In the chamber at the end of the short tunnel he paused at the threshold, looking into the enclosure without a word, while the traces on the bulkhead monitor went on rising and falling. Kaius had expected an argument—had half-rehearsed his side of it on the way down the tunnel.
“I had a whole speech ready,” Rook said finally. “About how we leave it. Burn our own course and let the station carry it home or not.” He leaned closer to the glass. “Say something to it.”
“Me?”
“Anybody.”
Maya said, quietly, “Hello.” On the monitor the lines tightened, three or four quick peaks, then eased back into their slow rhythm.
Rook watched until they settled. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Forget the speech.”
Maya’s samples ran through the morning. She tested the air in all six modules, swabbed the restraints and the lockers and the inside of the dead laboratory’s glove box, and incubated everything under the little heat lamp she had brought across. Six hours later not one of the plates had grown anything. “Whatever took them wasn’t alive,” she told Seline over the channel, “or it isn’t anymore.” That afternoon, for the first time, they unsealed their helmets. The station’s air was cold and very dry. It smelled of paper left in a drawer for years, with a faint sweetness underneath that Kaius eventually traced to the locker of honey jars. Rook inhaled with the same grave suspicion he gave to anything that Maya grew in the greenhouse, then he pronounced the station inhabitable.
It was Rook who brought up the question of where to sleep. The station had one habitation module and three sleeping restraints, and all three were taken.
“We document them where they are,” he said. He had plainly been thinking about it since he first put his head into the module that morning. “Photographs from every side, positions logged, then we seal the module and leave it alone. That’s what a board of inquiry would want. Somebody in Houston or Moscow is going to ask how we found them, and I’d like the answer to be: exactly like this. We sleep in the core module. We tie ourselves to the wall. It’s fine.”
“For the whole way home?” Maya said.
“If that’s what it takes.”
“They died in their beds, Rook. We’re not leaving them there for another year so somebody at a desk can confirm the pictures.” She did not raise her voice. “My avó would have had the whole family in that room with a basin of water by now.”
Kaius had not meant to say anything. He heard himself say, “She’s right.”
Rook gave him a long look, the one he had been giving on and off since Kaius had recovered from his spell on Jupiter, like he was checking a gauge he no longer trusted. “Of course she is.” He said it as a statement, but neither of fact nor agreement. He keyed the channel to Odyssey. “Sel. Help me out. Tell her about chain of custody.”
The channel stayed open. Behind it they could hear the faint fans of Odyssey’s command module.
“Sel?”
“I’m here, Rook,” Seline said, and nothing else.
Rook let go of the key. After a while he said, “Photographs first. All of it. Before anybody touches anything.”
“Photographs first,” Maya said.
“And nobody’s burning incense on a space station.”
“Nobody’s burning anything.”
They slept in the core module that night after all, three bags clipped to the bulkhead like coats on hooks. The moving would be done in the morning, and no one wanted to lie down in that room before then.
Kaius did not sleep. Around the second hour of the sleep period he gave up trying and drifted back along the tunnel to the habitation module, because there was a job he had left undone there on the day they first came aboard, and it had been pressing on him ever since. He had read one name patch and let the other two be. In the morning they would be moved, and he wanted to know who they were before anyone laid a hand on them.
The second patch belonged to a woman. The photographs on the bulkhead showed men and women in the old flight suits, and after a minute he picked her out among them, a round face under a fur hat, laughing at whoever stood outside the frame. VOLKOVA, in both alphabets. He brushed the dust from the third patch with two fingers and the Latin letters surfaced first: NURIYEV. The Cyrillic sat beside it, НУРИЕВ. The two names agreed with each other and told him nothing at all. He was turning away when he saw that at some point the lower corner of the patch had been unpicked, then sewn back down, the second stitching coarser than the factory’s. He worked the corner up with a fingernail. On the cloth beneath it, in dark thread, the stitches uneven, ran a third line. Kaius knew the script before he read the letters. نوری. “Noori.” A man’s name. No dust had ever reached it. The loops were clean. He stayed there a while with his hand on the restraint, and afterward went looking for the logs.
It took most of the night. The handwriting in the second-year volume was the commander’s, Orlov’s, cramped and quick, and Kaius’s Russian slowed the deeper he went. In the entry for the eleventh week he found the flask. It had arrived with the spring cargo, on the same flight that brought Nuriyev up, packed in a foam cradle, and the commander had noted its temperature and its number and then, underneath, in a looser hand, as if he had been laughing when he wrote it: “Nuriyev says he is now the first man to be in two places at once. He asks if the other one will have to do his exercise hours.”
Kaius read it three times before asking Saver for the donor number.
“Seven, one, one, four.”
He returned to the third suit and found the medical tag inside the collar, where the flight surgeons always put it. 7-114. “Saver,” he said. “Where was Nuriyev born?”
“Crew file. Nuriyev, Abdul Vakhidovich. Born 1931, Kushka, Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. Soviet citizen. Member of the Party.” It gave the file in the voice it used for coolant pressure. “The crew of this station was Soviet. All three.”
“What language did he speak aboard?”
“Russian. English, with the ground, when he had to.”
“Always?”
“Yes.”
Kaius turned the tag over in his fingers. They had even cut his name in two to fit it on their form: Abdul for a first name, Wahid made over into a father he had never had, and Noori transformed into Nuriyev, a surname the personnel office in Moscow could read without looking up. Kushka had been the last Soviet town before the Afghan border, a garrison at the end of a railway line, close enough to Herat that on a decent road you could have driven there by lunch. Whoever had written the file had put Noori as near to home as the lie would stretch and not a kilometer nearer. The Soviet crew was chosen in Moscow, and Moscow, in those years, only flew Soviets. For an Afghan to wear that patch he would have had to stop being one—in his papers first, then in his vowels, then in every room that had a microphone in it, until nobody listening could tell the difference. Two years of cabin audio and not a word of Dari. Noori had kept his language in the one place the station had no ears: in thread, under his name, where it would only be found by someone undoing the collar, someone who knew Dari. Kaius opened his mouth to tell Saver about the stitching, and closed it again.
When Maya woke, Kaius told her about the flask that brought the Continuant and the tag identifying Nuriyev as the source, and she did not ask whether he was sure. He told her that Nuriyev was Noori. Before they moved anyone she scraped a few flakes of skin from the lining of Noori’s left glove—the cold had kept them better than anything on the station—working slowly, she got her sample; twice she had to stop and flatten her hand against the bulkhead and breathe before going on. She set the flakes to run against fluid Saver drew for her from the enclosure. The kit could compare twenty markers. It needed four hours to come up with results.
They spent those four hours attending to the dead. Rook took his photographs, as he had said he would, from every side, with a ruler held against each restraint for scale, and read the positions into the log in a voice flatter than Saver’s. Then he put the camera away and finished entering his notes for the site report.
Maya had suited up and gone back along the tether to Odyssey, and now she returned through the airlock with a squeeze bottle of water that had a handful of leaves from the greenhouse crushed into it, rosemary and basil, and a white sheet folded under her arm, one of the linens they had brought from Earth. “Before anybody asks, this is not the real thing,” she said. “The real thing needs people with a lifetime of doing it, and I’m not one of them. My grandmother took me to a terreiro in São Paulo a few times when I was small. That’s all I’ve got. I remember the water, and I remember everybody in white.” She turned the bottle in her hand. “She used to say the dead don’t know to leave the place where they died. Somebody has to show them the door, or they just keep waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” Rook said.
“For someone to come.”
Now someone had come. It had taken forty-nine years.
The restraint latches had not been opened since 1974, and Saver could release only one of them. The other two had frozen in their housings, and Rook worked them free by hand, a millimeter at a time, so as not to jar what was inside. While he worked, Maya asked Saver when they had died, and Saver told her without a pause, as if the dates had been kept at the front where it could reach them. Commander Orlov on the ninth of March, 1974. Volkova on the eleventh. Nuriyev on the sixteenth, five days after the others, alone. Rook wrote each date on a strip of tape and pressed it flat with his thumb.
They left the three of them in their suits. There was no better way, and nobody wanted to find out what the suits were holding together. Each one was wrapped in the station’s own sleeping bag and then, over the top, covered in a length of Maya’s white sheet. She went ahead of them through the core module and forward, with the bottle, wetting her fingers and touching the frame of each hatch as they passed through it, speaking under her breath in Portuguese. Kaius didn’t know the language, but he recognized the rhythm: a list, the same few words over and over, the way his mother used to count off the names of the dead.
The equipment module at the forward end of the station was the coldest place aboard; Saver had kept it just above freezing for half a century because nothing in it needed to be warm. They strapped the three bundles to the empty racks there, the tapes with the dates facing out. Maya put her palm flat on each one. Then she said, in English, so that everyone would hear it, “We’re taking you home. All of you. We promise.” Rook felt moved, against his will. Here was a duty. He checked the straps, then checked them again. He did not say amen, but he didn’t leave until she did.
By the time they came back, the test was completed. Twenty of twenty matched. From Noori’s cells, Saver had grown the Continuant.
Back in the habitation module Rook began unpinning the photographs from the bulkhead for the archive bag. Kaius put a hand on his arm. “Leave them.”
“They’re evidence.”
“They were put there,” Kaius said. “Leave them up.”
Rook looked at the woman in the fur hat for some time, and pinned her back where she had been. They left the rest alone, too: the calendar with the days crossed off through the middle of March, the pencil on its string, a list in the commander’s hand of things to be fixed that no one would fix. That night the three of them slept in the restraints that had been made for other people, under the other people’s photographs. Kaius, sleeping in Noori’s restraints, lasted six hours without once waking up.
Kaius spent the next day with the Herat transmissions. Saver had kept every one of them, sorted by date, each logged the same way—voice traffic, language unidentified—and Kaius went straight to the earliest. When he found what he was looking for he went to fetch Maya from the laboratory module, and without explaining he held out her helmet. She looked at him for a second, then put it on as he put on his. He switched them both to suit-to-suit, the short-range channel that ran from one helmet to the other and through nothing of Saver’s.
“Listen,” he said, then he played the recording into the channel. The speaker was younger than the man on the recent Fridays, higher voiced, reading from a page, and for the whole of that first year he opened the same way, until he grew comfortable enough to be less formal. Kaius translated as it ran. “This is Mohammad Noori, of Herat. I am calling Abdul Wahid Noori, the father of my grandfather. If you can hear me, please answer.”
Maya looked through the hatch toward the tunnel for a long moment. “He’s calling his great-grandfather,” she said.
“That’s right. He’s calling Noori.”
“Noori’s dead, and he’s calling him anyway.”
“Because Saver has been answering.”
Maya looked at Kaius through two visors. “Why are we wearing helmets?”
He told her about Kushka, the lie that Noori had to live, and the seven hundred and forty-one days on a Russian space crew. “He was Afghan. He hid it from everybody,” Kaius said. “Only Russians were trusted with this mission. He had to become Russian—for his crew, his commander, Moscow, and for Saver. Two years, and he never slipped. We can’t tell this to a Soviet computer. Saver is Moscow. Saver thinks we’re bringing home Russians. How can we tell it otherwise?”
Maya flinched dismissively. “But there’s no such thing as a Soviet computer anymore. There isn’t a Soviet anything.” Her voice was very close in his ear.
“Saver’s been up here alone for forty-nine years, Maya. In Saver’s world everything there is is Soviet. That’s the world that its umbilical cord—its programming—has been feeding it, and nothing has arrived to contradict it.”
“Well, we’ve arrived.” Maya watched Kaius work out the implications, then she went ahead and stated them. “The mission is now ours and Saver’s. That umbilical cord was cut as soon as we stepped on board. You can’t carry out a mission by keeping secrets.”
“You think we can trust Saver?” Kaius asked.
“I think we can’t carry out our mission if we don’t trust Saver.”
It took only a few moments. Kaius worked through the options until he knew she was right. But he had a protocol to add. “Don’t tell it yet,” he said. “Let me ask something first.” Maya nodded yes as Kaius unlatched his helmet and pulled it off; after a moment she did the same.
He went to the panel. The traces on the bulkhead monitor were rising and falling at the end of the tunnel, and he found he was talking to them as much as to anything else. “Saver. If I told you something about the crew that isn’t in your files, what would you do with it?”
“My standing instructions are to maintain the station, the crew and the Continuant, and to report to Zarya.”
“And if it were something Zarya wouldn’t want to hear?” The pause was long enough that Maya looked up at the speaker.
“No one has asked me for a report since 1974,” Saver said. “Are you asking whether I would give him away?”
Kaius had not said “him.”
“He wasn’t from Kushka,” Kaius said. “He was from Herat, and the name in your file is what Moscow made up for him. Nuriyev, 7-114, was Noori. His family is still in Herat. The man who calls you on Fridays is his great-grandson. The language he speaks is Dari. It was 7-114’s language too, and he made sure you never heard a word of it.” Down the tunnel, the traces above the Continuant went on undisturbed. Saver said nothing for eleven seconds. Kaius counted them without meaning to.
“Noori,” Saver said. “That word occurs in the Herat transmissions eight hundred and thirty-two times.” It added: “Too many to be an anomaly. I logged each one as a coincidence. It is a syllable away from the name in my file, and both are common in that region. My file says crew member 7-114 was a Soviet citizen of Kushka with no family abroad.” It was quiet again. “Then how does a man in Herat come to have my frequency?”
“His early messages talk about a letter,” Kaius said. “From Noori—from 7-114.” The traces fluttered, rising and falling. “I haven’t heard all of it yet.”
“The frequency he uses was assigned to this station in 1970. It was never published. Only the mission knew it: the crew and Zarya. I have answered on it every time he called.” In the long silence, Kaius and Maya could feel Saver’s thinking sink deeper into the flesh that it tended, the spine and head floating in a fluid of 4.1 degrees, as if the important answers would be found there. “Noori gave them a way to reach me. I will not report it. There is no one to report it to.” Then, more slowly: “If there were, I would not, Kaius. He entrusted his great-grandson’s messages to me for nine years. I have not understood one word of it until you told me the name, but I have understood what it means to them. Please, tell me all of what the great-grandson said.”
Friday arrived. By that morning the whole crew knew the name, and they knew Noori’s story. Rook, Maya, and Kaius waited together in the core module, with Seline patched in from Odyssey and the sound set on the main speaker so nobody had to share headsets. The signal rose out of the static at exactly the minute Saver had logged. A man’s voice broke in, Mohammad, speaking very fast, too fast for Kaius to follow, stopping, starting over, stopping again. They heard a breath drawn in close to the microphone. When he resumed he spoke slowly, spacing the words, as if for a foreigner. Saver recorded and Kaius translated it a few sentences behind, stopping the playback when he needed to.
“Sadaye shoma ra shenidam.”
“He heard us,” Kaius reported. “‘I have heard you,’ is what he said.”
After that Mohammad talked for a long time, and Kaius stopped the recording whenever he fell behind. Here is how Kaius put Mohammad’s story into English for the others:
I found your message on Wednesday morning. The receiver records everything. I have played it more times than I can count. I wanted to answer the same hour, but the generator on the hill only has fuel for Fridays. Yesterday I sold my motorbike. This morning I carried the fuel up the hill. From now on it has fuel for every day. I played your message for my grandfather. His name is Aziz. He was six when his father went to Moscow.
In 1972 two men in suits came to our house with a certificate and a sealed coffin. They said there had been a training accident at Baikonur, and that the coffin was not to be opened. My great-grandmother helped carry it in from the road. For the rest of her life she said that it had been too light for a man.
Rook was looking forward, toward the cold module and the three strips of tape. “They buried him,” he said quietly, “but it was two years before he died.”
Eleven months after the funeral a letter came to the house. A Soviet engineer who worked at the airport brought it himself and would not say how he came to have it. It was in my great-grandfather’s hand. It gave a frequency, and a time of day, Friday after the noon prayer, and one sentence: if a radio in Herat ever becomes good enough, I will be listening.
“Nobody in that family owned a radio good enough,” Kaius said. “Not for forty years.”
My grandfather kept the letter, and he kept the frequency in his head. As a kid, he built a small transmitter from pieces of a radio, and he’d take that to a hill behind the houses, thinking that from there it could reach the sky. He had no understanding of radios, but he had faith and he did this every Friday after prayers for fifty years. My mother was born when he was eighteen, and I was born when she was twenty. He never let my mother touch the set. He said the calling belonged to the son of the house, and there was no son, only a grandson. He kept doing it until I was old enough to see that his transmitter wasn’t capable of reaching anything.
I studied electronics because of what my grandfather was doing. I knew there must be a way to solve this and I wanted to figure out how. I wanted to help my grandfather. These days, I run the workshop at the university, or I did until this week. On the hill behind the airport there is a Soviet tracking dish that has stood abandoned since before I was born, and everyone in the city took it for dead. It cost me two years and most of my savings to bring it back, and to get its transmitter working. My grandfather, Aziz, would come with me. For a year I called into the sky every Friday and heard nothing, because the receiver was still dead. The first Friday it could listen, the tone came back. Eleven seconds. I was nineteen. I sat down on the concrete. For a long time I could not stand.
What came next made Kaius stop the playback, run it back and listen to it again before he would say it aloud, and when he did, Maya took hold of his sleeve: “Under the tone there is another sound. Very low. It goes up and down, once every few seconds, like…” On the recording Mohammad searched for a word and did not find it. Kaius heard his own heartbeat in the silence.
It is never the same from one week to the next. In winter it is slower. When I say his name, it goes faster. I have recorded all of it. I have sent it to Moscow, to Houston, to Paris. Paris never answered. Houston sent me a form. Moscow wrote that there is no object at these coordinates, and that I must stop using a frequency I have no license for.
On the speaker, a short laugh, without much in it. Kaius let it finish before he translated the last line: “Machines do not accelerate when you say a man’s name.” The transmission ended. The speaker hissed. Rook rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.
Maya said it first. “That sound under the tone is the Continuant,” she said. “Saver—has Mohammad been listening to its heartbeat?”
“He has,” Saver said. “Every Friday I answer him with the identification tone. Underneath the tone the same signal carries eight lines of housekeeping, as it was built to do in 1970: the cabin pressure, the power, the temperature of the chamber, and the rise and fall of the Continuant. It is a status report for a flight control that stopped listening fifty years ago.” A pause. “I did not know that anyone on the ground could hear that far into the signal.”
“And he never knew what it was,” Rook said. He was looking down the tunnel toward the enclosure. “Eight years of Fridays listening to that thing’s heart go up and down, and not one of the people he wrote to would tell him what he was hearing.”
Afterward, when the others had scattered to their work, Maya stayed at the panel with Kaius. “At Jupiter you told me you knew that voice,” she said. “You said it was somebody you’d met. You never told me how.”
“I’ve been trying to get it in order ever since,” Kaius said. “It came back the way the language did. In pieces, and never the ones I asked for.”
Then he told her about Herat, to which his family had returned after the years in Kabul. He told her about the house on the lane, near to his family’s house, with the mulberry tree in the courtyard. An old woman had lived in it whom the whole quarter knew, because she had helped carry her husband’s coffin in from the road and said for the rest of her life, to anyone who would listen, that it had been too light for a man. “Her son went up the hill behind the houses on Fridays, with a radio set strapped to the carrier of his bicycle. We used to follow him there, and laugh at him,” Kaius said. “Four or five of us, Hamza always in front, hanging back far enough that he wouldn’t turn round. He’d sit in the dust under that dead dish with the set on his knees and say a name into it. Then: ‘if you can hear me, answer.’ The same words in the same order, every Friday, into the sky.”
Maya had gone very still. “Aziz. Mohammad’s grandfather.”
Kaius shook his head. “It is hard to think of him as a grandfather. When I knew him he was the young man with the bicycle, and we were the children laughing at him.” Kaius turned the headset over in his hands.
Maya smiled, imagining the child Kaius had been. “And now you’ve got a child of your own.”
Kaius nodded, happy to be reminded of home, daydreaming. “I hope I live to have a grandson like Mohammad, some day.”
Maya left a silence, then asked, “Is Mohammad using the same sentence?”
“Yes. Precisely the same words, in the same order, with the pause in the same place. It was the cadence that I recognized, when I told you I had met him before. What I had met was the calling, like a call to prayer. The music of it. I’d heard it a hundred times before I was ten, from behind a wall, back when I thought it was something to laugh at.”
“You were a child,” Maya said.
“I was one of the boys who never answered.” He said it without any weight on it, like something he had already finished arguing about with himself. “Whatever happened at Jupiter opened something in me, and it all came back again, Kabul and then Herat. The soil, I could smell it. A street, a ball made out of wrapped cloth, my mother calling me in and me pretending I couldn’t hear her. And I can see that hill, Aziz saying a name at the sky, and the rest of us behind the wall, not answering.” He looked at the panel, where the counter stood waiting for the next Friday. “Somebody in that family has been sending a message for fifty years, and I had to come all the way out here to finally hear it.”
Before the reply went anywhere, Rook raised the question that had been sitting in the room since they came aboard, and he raised it bluntly. “You’ve already sent one message on that transmitter,” he pointed out. “I’m not complaining; I would’ve done the same. But we’ve got to act as a crew now, based on the mission. We have a working transmitter for the first time since Jupiter. Does the next message go to Herat, or does it go to Houston? I want to hear from each of you.”
“Houston,” Seline said. “I’ll say it plainly: I want it on the record. I have fourteen months of logs that no one has received. Saver can put the whole of it where it was meant to be—on a desk in Texas.”
“Texas isn’t exactly waiting on pins and needles for a reply,” Maya said.”The man in Herat has been calling the same frequency for nine years, and now he knows someone is up here with whatever is left of his great grandfather. That’s a conversation we can’t just put on hold.”
“Houston has the same concerns,” Seline pointed out. “As far as they know we’re dead or dying, and that means our families, anyone who cares about has no clue that we’re alive.”
Maya nodded. “I understand your point. At least Mohammad already knows that his…well, that something has survived. We should give our families the same relief, and soon.”
“Saver,” Kaius said. “Can you reach Houston?”
“Yes. I’ll need the frequency and the coordinates, but nothing more.”
“Then I will speak my piece,” Rook said. “Herat first, and not for sentiment. When Houston hears where we are, somebody there is going to tell us to stop all external transmissions until they can assess this equipment and Saver. Which won’t happen until we manage to land this thing. The man in Herat won’t be sending up orders. Send to him now, while we’re still the ones deciding.”
“That’s my view as well,” Kaius said. “Herat today, and as needed. Houston only after as we know how to tell them where we are and not get shut down by their security concerns.” He looked at the speaker. “Sel, we’ll send them your logs the same minute we open a channel to Houston. All of it, unedited. But we’re not opening that channel until we can explain why the transmissions with Mohammad need to continue.”
“Agreed,” Seline said. “And the dates stay in it. Fourteen months of them.”
Kaius’s reply to Mohammad took two hours to compose and four minutes to send. Rook, and later Seline, wanted him to say nothing about the chamber and the Continuant. “You can’t tell a man standing on a roof that his great-grandfather is a brain in a jar,” Rook said. Seline offered a gentler version of the same.
Maya disagreed. “He found it before we did,” she said. “He’s been listening to his great-grandfather’s heartbeat for eight years. He deserves the truth more than Houston does.” In the end Kaius told Mohammad everything, in the plainest words he could find: that Abdul Wahid Noori had died aboard the station on the sixteenth of March, 1974, the last of his crew, with his name sewn under his patch in his own alphabet; that the station had been kept alive afterward by an artificial intelligence that sent the tones to Mohammad; that a thing grown from his great-grandfather’s cells had survived all of that, in a small warm room at the end of a tunnel, in fluid kept at four point one degrees by the artificial intelligence, which also shared consciousness with the thing grown from these cells, and that the slow wave under the tone belonged to this thing, whatever it was. It had a heartbeat. It seemed capable of thought, and when people spoke near it, the artificial intelligence answered.
The reply arrived sixty-three minutes later. For the first half-minute there were no words at all, only the open channel and whatever surrounded the microphone in Herat: wind across concrete, a far off the call to prayer. After it, an old man, close and hoarse, spoke a single sentence. “Padaram sardesh ast?”
Mohammad took the microphone back to explain what Kaius had already understood. “My grandfather, Aziz, asks if his father is cold.”
Saver said nothing. It was Kaius who keyed the microphone. “Four point one degrees,” he told the man in Herat. “It has been four point one since 1974.”
Herat sent one more message that night, not a question this time. Mohammad explained that his grandfather wanted the message to be played in the room with the glass enclosure, and he asked, with great politeness, whether that was possible. Saver said it was. Kaius carried a handheld speaker down the tunnel and wedged it into the frame of the enclosure. Then Maya joined him, and after a while so did Rook. The recording was short, Aziz clearing his throat, then speaking slowly, as he might to someone lying in a hospital bed who could not be expected to reply. Kaius did not translate it. He heard Aziz speak of a courtyard and the mulberry tree; he heard some names that he recognized from childhood, and he understood that the rest was not his to repeat. No one asked him to. On the monitor the Continuant’s traces lengthened and grew more regular, the way breathing does in sleep, and they stayed that way for a quarter of an hour after the voice had stopped.
“Saver,” Maya said at last. “Has it done that before?”
“No,” Saver said. “I have logged it.”
The days that followed were consumed with work, and there was more of it than anyone had estimated. On Saturday, Rook spent the better part of two shifts out on the station’s mast, fitting the spare high-gain dish from Odyssey’s stores to a bracket that had lost its own dish in 1974. Until then everything to Herat had gone out on the station’s low-gain antenna, which was good enough for eleven seconds of tone and a voice half-buried in static once a week, and not much more. The old bolts had Soviet threads that none of his tools would fit, so he printed adapters on Odyssey’s fabricator and carried them across in a thigh pocket. Seline talked him through the alignment from her console. Between shifts he finished the docking adapter he had been printing all week. Once the dish was live, Mohammad stopped being someone they waited all week for, and became someone they could reach nearly every day, whenever the turning Earth carried his hill round to face them. Every exchange still crawled—half an hour out, half an hour back—so they learned to talk the way people used to write letters, saying everything at once. Mohammad relayed Aziz’s questions and Kaius sent answers. What did the station look like? Were there windows? Had his father kept a diary? Was there anything to bring home? In the evenings Kaius read aloud to Herat from Noori’s crew notes, putting the Russian into Dari as he went: the Hindu Kush seen from orbit, the snow on it in October, a line about the color of the Hari River in spring that Noori had written down with no explanation, as though it could have been anybody’s river.
On Sunday Seline brought Odyssey in. Once Saver had run the numbers with both vessels joined, the arithmetic was blunt—the fuel it had hoarded for forty-nine years would move the station alone, but not the station with Odyssey hanging off its side. Nobody wanted to cut Odyssey loose; they needed both ships. There was a second sum, and Maya had done that one herself: Odyssey’s packaged stores would not stretch to the end of the trip; the station held honey and fifty-year-old tins nobody was going to open; built in 1970, it had never had so much as a window box. Odyssey’s greenhouse had to make up the difference. Odyssey would dock, and in tandem they would make their way home on the station’s flight path.
Seline flew Odyssey the final forty meters by hand, Saver matching her from the other side, and the docking adapter Rook had built took the load with a single heavy clunk that everyone on both vessels felt in their teeth. Afterward she shut down all that she could and paused most of Odyssey’s systems. She went through the ship module by module, the way she had on the first morning after launch, touching the panels as she passed them. At the greenhouse hatch she stopped. The lamps were on and the pumps were ticking. The beans had put out new leaves since Maya had last been in. She checked the power feed to the racks twice and left it exactly as it was. For a while she stayed in the command module that had been hers since launch, earbuds in and nothing playing. Then she went back the way she had come, putting out the lights module by module, until the only current still running in the ship fed the lamps and the pumps in the greenhouse and the passage that led to it. When she floated through the hatch to the station, Rook put a hand on her shoulder.
“We’re parking her,” he said.
“That’s right,” Seline said. “She’s a garden now.”
Her sleep restraints came across that evening with everything else. The four of them slept on the station after that, filling the room the old crew had used, and no one went back through the adapter except to tend the beans.
For Saver, the garden was now part of the station, and it asked for a camera to be installed the first evening, and to have access to all monitoring. “That’s mostly just me,” Maya explained, “and I’m happy to keep you in the loop. It’ll be nice having someone interested in gardening.” Saver was. Its data base included the sealed-cabin experiments at Krasnoyarsk—algae tanks, wheat under lamps, men shut in for months breathing what they grew—and it turned out to have opinions. Saver thought Maya’s tomatoes were too wet. It wanted to know why she was growing basil when basil did nothing for the air. Maya explained, trying to describe its taste and its odor, and what it felt like to be reminded of home. By the third day Saver was sharing humidity readings from the tomato trays when Maya woke. She had begun, without noticing it, to say good morning to Saver’s camera every time she crossed over into the greenhouse.
Water was ported to the station in soft bladders, two hundred liters at a time, hand over hand along the tether. So was the food, the medical stores, and last of all their personal things—Kaius carried a crayon drawing of Odyssey folded into quarters, and pinned it to the bulkhead of the habitation module beside the photographs of the dead crew. He didn’t need to explain it to anyone. That night he recorded a message home to Laura and Emma. It was shorter than anything he had sent to Herat, and it took him longer.
The propellant was more difficult to transfer. It ran from Odyssey into the station’s lines which hadn’t been pressure-tested since before any of them were born. They fed it across in stages: a few kilograms at a time, and then a halt while Saver tested for leaks, then a few more kilos. It took four days. When the last of it was transferred, Rook closed the valve and stayed outside longer than he needed to, looking at the two hulls joined in the sunlight, listening to the silence.
The correction burn fell on a Thursday, the tenth day, with one day of the window still open. They strapped into the core module’s old couches side by side. The station’s old crew were stored in their white wrappings in the cold module forward, strapped down more times than necessary. The Continuant sat in its warm room at the end of the tunnel. Seline and Saver ran the numbers together one final time: the station’s mass; Odyssey’s mass docked alongside; the dead outer array that Saver had kept only because its weight was written into every figure it had calculated for forty-nine years.
“Ignition in ten,” Saver said. Kaius had sent Herat the time the day before. Mohammad opened his channel early and left it open, so that what reached the station’s speaker was the sounds from the roof as it had been half an hour ago—wind, and a man breathing close to the microphone, and an older man coughing somewhere behind him.
The engine lit. It was rougher than Odyssey’s, older, and the whole station groaned around them in a register none had heard before. Twenty seconds in, something outside let go with a crack that ran through the hull and into their spines. The station yawed. Alarms Kaius was unfamiliar with went off in two languages.
“The outer array,” Saver said, calmly. “The hinge has failed. It is gone.”
Seline was already working. “Mass just dropped. We’re over-accelerating. If we run the burn as planned we’ll overshoot the return corridor.”
“I am recalculating,” Saver said. “Six seconds shorter. Seline, confirm.”
She took four seconds. Kaius counted them. “Confirmed. Cut at six short.”
The engine stopped. The hull ticked as it cooled. On the speaker, half an hour behind, Aziz was saying something to his grandson too softly to make out. Seline ran the new trajectory twice. Saver ran it once and waited for her. “We’re inside the corridor,” she said at last. “Fourteen months to home.”
Rook unbuckled, pushed off across the module and thumped the bulkhead with the flat of his hand, hard, twice. Through the viewport they could see the pale length of the array that had hung beside the station for half a century, tumbling away now, flashing each time it turned in the sun.
That evening Rook made his way to the storage locker and returned with a jar of the honey. No one told him not to. He broke the seal, and the smell filled the module at once, warm and heavy, like a kitchen in late summer. They each took a little on a fingertip. It tasted of flowers none of them could name. Maya took a second jar out of the locker, wrapped it in a spare shirt, and wrote on the tape across the lid in careful block capitals: HERAT.
