Black Sky, Blue Earth

Jaime Gill 

One moment, Earth is dead — a vast, aching absence fringed by coldly glittering stars. The next, it is resurrected — sunlight rolling across the clouds and continents in a red-gold wave.

I look for anything new down there, a reason to hope, but the land’s bleak contours remain unchanged and the cloud cover is as grim and ungiving as before. Nothing dangles the prospect of recovery or a safe homecoming.

The first time we saw a sunrise from space, only a few hours into our journey to Mars, you called it a miracle. Though the scientist in me flinched from the M-word, I didn’t have a better one. But this is almost the 13,000th sunrise since we returned to Earth and Hanuman locked into this orbit. Repetition makes even miracles mundane.

On Earth, it would take thirty-five years to see so many sunrises. Here, 1,200 miles above its surface, it’s taken less than three.

My sense of time is unraveling. Nothing so exotic as time dilation, a negligible factor at this orbit and velocity. It’s much more humdrum — something countless prisoners in solitary confinement have experienced before me. Alone, inactive, and unmoored from circadian rhythms, my mind is crumbling. My past and present are collapsing into each other.

Breaking free from Earth’s atmosphere was more violent than the simulations had prepared me for. I feared my teeth would splinter from the shaking, and when gravity released its grip, I felt it in my ears — like breaking surface after a long dive.

Still strapped in, we watched Earth shrink through the observation window, from endless expanse to beach ball. It looked so calm and kind from a distance. It was difficult to believe that beneath those shreds of cloud superstorms raged, or that the crinkled khaki land was wracked by floods and wildfires. It didn’t look like a planet lurching into catastrophe.

“Yuri Gagarin was the first person to see this,” I said. We didn’t know each other well yet, or you’d have punched my arm and told me not to patronise you. “He said ‘the sky is very black, the Earth is very blue.’”

“‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,’” you replied, eyes still fixed on the world we’d left behind.

“Gagarin said that?”

“No, you heathen,” you laughed. “David Bowie did.”

My stomach hurts. I try to return my attention to the show I‘m watching — Seinfeld, an ancient comedy you loved — but pain ripples up from the bottom of my stomach, like an acid wave. It’s been nearly thirty-six hours since I last ate. That’s the longest I’ve gone yet, and my body is making sure I know it.

Back in those rushed final weeks of training before we left Earth, we were instructed to maintain a strict regimen of daily physical exercises for the entirety of our mission, an attempt to ward off the worst consequences of years with little to no gravity. I was more diligent about the workouts than you, until the time came when we faced bigger problems than loss of muscle and bone density. Activity became our enemy. It was harder to eliminate physical movement than I would have thought, but over the years I’ve turned it into an art form. Still Life Of Astronaut.

I wish you were here to tell me how bad that joke was.

Of course, mastery of mind over matter can only do so much when it's the brain that’s the real gas guzzler. Less than a fiftieth of our body weight, but it sucks up a fifth of our calories.

I try not to think too deeply, though that’s not about energy conservation. Thinking deeply hurts. Especially now, knowing what I have to do.

The show is confusing. My brain is slowing down, an emergency response to lack of nutrients. My thoughts are fuzzy and drift away from the now and into the then.

You laughed a lot. I was sensitive to laughter — a legacy of schoolyard bullying — so it took time to understand you weren’t laughing at me, or that, when you were, it wasn’t out of cruelty. All my life, people had said I was too serious and lived too much inside my head, but you were the first person who wouldn’t let me.

"It's ten months until we reach Mars and I'm not doing it in silence,” you said, when I told you I wasn’t much of a conversationalist. Then you lowered your voice. “I have ways of making you talk.”

I must have looked confused or alarmed because you sighed and explained the joke to me.

You filled our days with music and movies, things I’d spared little time for before. As long as I could remember, I’d thought the one true purpose of life was learning. I wanted to understand how the universe worked, the secret mechanics of it all. Surface details — jokes, songs, people — felt trivial in comparison, a waste of time.

“Why do you need there to be a true purpose to life?” you said, when I tried to explain this to you over a meal of tofu and spaghetti. “You just have to live it. And not finding any time for fun, that’s a waste too.”

If we’d been on Earth, you’d have been the one with your feet on the ground, and me the one with my head in the clouds. In space, neither metaphor worked. But, somehow, we did. NASA had run personality tests and psychological assessments before pairing us, but I still didn’t expect to find anyone so easy to be around. I hadn’t before, after all.

You were my first real friend, though I never dared tell you that.

The cabin is dimming around me. I don’t look down. I try not to watch the sunsets anymore. They feel like death.

A gentle buzz tells me it’s time to approve Hanuman’s regular systems check. Seinfeld dissolves and an array of numbers and summaries roll across the screen. I scan through the figures, mentally breaking them into three categories.

Reassuring: structural integrity, energy stores, orbit stability, oxygen converter functionality.

Not reassuring: water recycling integrity, radiation levels.

Doom: food stocks.

I tap to approve the report then return to New York in the 1990s. I try not to think about how every actor in this show, even the babies that sometimes appear, are surely long dead.

I could talk to Hanuman if I wanted to. I did for a while after you left, desperate to fill the empty space and time you had left behind.

First, I did what the old me would have done and tried to continue my studies. Hanuman’s scientific knowledge obviously outstripped my own, so I wrestled with some of the more arcane branches of chemistry, but my advances didn’t bring me the satisfaction they once would have. Next, I tried to get the ship to feed me new enthusiasms like you once did, but when it recommended movies or songs it didn’t have sea-blue eyes that lit up or a voice that slipped into squeaky excitement.

I eventually understood that Hanuman’s cool conversation didn’t distract me from the fact you’d left — it made the pain of your absence sharper and harder. I disabled the voice interface. Now I stay silent as a Quaker in prayer. I even laugh silently, on the rare occasions I do. Perhaps that can’t be called a laugh. This life of mine needs new words.

The journey to Mars was surprisingly noisy. It wasn’t just the music you played constantly, there were also video messages. In your daily reports to ground control, you used the same word in almost every one: uneventful. For me, those were the most eventful months of my life.

You messaged your wife, your brother, friends from college days or NASA. Once you were talking to some college friend and pointed at me in the background, saying, “That’s William, the guy keeping me sane.” I felt as proud as I had of any of my academic achievements or promotions.

I tried not to listen to the messages you received in return. They were full of jokes I didn’t get, reminders of the kind of life I’d never lived. You didn’t have kids — despite Government incentives that amounted to lavish bribery, few people wanted to bring kids into a world with a looming expiry date — but you had a dog which barked during your wife’s messages, as if it knew they were being sent to you. I didn’t fully understand my feelings, but I knew they were uncomfortable, and so — when the comms unit buzzed to let us know a new message had arrived — I put in headphones.

You offered me the same privacy when I left messages for my mother and she replied, once a week like clockwork. I was glad you didn’t hear us talking. I knew how stiff and formal you’d find us. I did, too, now I knew better.

There was never anything formal about you.

Before I met you, I’d heard NASA rumours of your achievements. Your courage had been credited with saving the lives of everyone on the International Space Station during the 2043 Kessler incident. That was back when the nations of the world were still co-operating enough to call the Station International.

Your reputation was such that I was anxious the night before we were to meet. I had conjured an image of some hypermasculine man of action — bold, brusque and brash. I half expected you to turn up, look into my eyes, and laugh mockingly before telling me — or, worse, everyone around us — that I wasn’t the right man for the job.

My nightmare almost came true. You did laugh when you saw me. “Is there even going to be room for you on the ship?” you said, grabbing my hand, clenching it once, then letting go. You took a step back and looked me up and down. I was also surprised at how much taller I was than you. A year ago I’d also been skinny, but NASA training had bulked me up. “Guess I’m not going to be challenging you to any arm wrestling matches.”

You did, actually, made me work out a pulley and cord system to make zero gravity arm wrestling work. I won.

On Seinfeld, George is eating a sandwich in bed, and whatever hold my mind had over my body breaks. A hunger pang strikes so hard I wince. I think of that horror movie you made me watch where tiny aliens burst out of human bodies and grew gargantuan within hours. I quibbled with the film on the grounds of physics, biology and chemistry — in that order. You rolled your eyes and told me science wasn’t always my best friend.

I try to regain control over myself and return my attention to the show, but then another stab of hunger hits, harder than the first. A thin moan slips through my lips. It’s the closest I’ve come to hearing my voice in a long while. It’s a terrible sound.

I can’t hold on much longer.

Things got eventful when we reached Mars. As we approached, Hanuman analysed the atmosphere and reported unusually fierce dust storms. I worked with the vessel to recalculate our entry trajectory, but the safest option was to wait in orbit for the storm to abate.

“How long?” you asked, brow furrowed.

“Impossible to say with any confidence.”

“Then say it without any confidence.”

“Probably a week, could be more.”

You said we needed to press ahead. The climate situation at home was too unpredictable to risk even the smallest delay. I tried to explain that your logic was false, and that the greater gamble would be to endanger the whole mission by landing recklessly.

You lost your temper with me for the first and only time, raising your voice. “You aren’t the only one who understands how risk works, you know.”

In fact, your assessment of the situation would turn out to be right, though it would take time to understand that and neither of us ever acknowledged it.

Our entry to Mars was turbulent, and did cause external damage to Hanuman’s shielding, but it was superficial. We tried to file a report to Earth, but the dust storm above made transmission impossible. Hanuman said we’d have to wait until we left orbit again before communications could be restored. If you were angry or upset, you didn’t show it. We had work to do, and you were the type of person who could cope with problems if there was something practical you could do to fix them. You adjusted our schedule so we could work harder and leave sooner.

We spent less than three weeks on Mars, just long enough for us to plant deep-drill rigs assessing the ice deposits that would be essential for the planned emergency colonization drive. Earlier attempts to send robots for the task had been stymied by the unpredictability of the Martian terrain. Human improvisation was the only solution, and so NASA had paired the two of us.

I think it was the second day when you sang “Life On Mars?” over our comms units as we worked. I squinted through the red dust and saw you at the far end of a ravine, waving from your drill unit. I waved back and joined in singing — I knew Bowie by then. Your voice cracked on the last note and I tried to hold it, showing off, until my suit struggled to feed me enough oxygen and I almost hyperventilated.

“Some scientist you are,” you cackled.

We could have spent longer on Mars if we had wanted to, explored a little. Hanuman had been overstocked with supplies to allow for unforeseen complications or delays. But we didn’t want to linger. A few weeks earlier, we’d been excited to walk on another planet after almost a year toiling through dead space, but Mars was dead too, for all its barren beauty. The further we got from Earth, the more I understood beauty, and the more I understood beauty the more I understood it was meaningless without life.

You’d known this all along, of course.

And you wanted to go home. You had a life to return to. A wife to return to.

As we prepared to leave, I could sense your mood lifting. Mine began to sink, though I tried to hide it. Our return journey would take months longer than the first, with the two planet’s orbital positions diverged. I wished the delay was longer.

Your good mood lasted until we got out of the Martian atmosphere. That was when we discovered that our comms wouldn’t reboot. Hanuman said there may have been more ionic damage than it had initially assessed when we entered the Martian atmosphere. The sensors were impaired and self-repair was beyond its capacities. We could land again for manual repairs, but that risked greater damage, and possible mission failure.

You lost your temper again, but this time with Hanuman and, even more, yourself.

For a week, you barely talked. I remembered what you’d told your friend, that it was me who kept you sane. I forced you to watch films with me, to listen to music like you once made me. I told you embarrassing school memories, things I could now see were funny, but never could have before.

I finally made you laugh by telling you the time I read a book at the school disco, eyes straining under the flashing lights, not understanding this was considered abnormal. When I realised you were laughing, really laughing and not just being polite, I had to turn away. I was about to cry and ruin the moment.

After that, the journey was easier. There were still movies to watch and music to listen to. There were still stories to tell each other about who we were and how we’d ended up inside this great chunk of metal, hurtling homewards through dead, empty space.

I wasn’t quite as happy on the return trip as I had been before, mostly because you weren’t as happy. You drifted sometimes into long silences that I struggled to pull you out of. I knew you were worried your wife would have assumed the worst after months without communications. I knew you worried about a lot of things. But though I knew your mind was often elsewhere, having half of you with me was better than having none of you.

I pause Seinfeld and unstrap, before carefully pulling myself up to reach the centrifuge control panel. I activate it, then sit to acclimatise to the subtle thrum of artificial gravity.

I barely even notice the show until the credits roll. My brain wandered somewhere else. I switch the screen off and catch my reflection in the screen’s empty blackness. I look like my grandfather in his last days, all flesh and fat sucked out of me, leaving waxy skin draped over a skeleton.

My muscles are so atrophied that my calves ache when I stand, even in this feeble gravity. I maneuver through the living quarters with painstaking care, grabbing onto the handrails to steady myself.

The only time you ever hugged me was when we saw Earth again.

We had the centrifuge on full power, now confident we had enough energy to get home. It was good to stand in close-to-normal gravity for the first time in almost two years. It was like a little appetiser of normality, before we got the main course back on Earth.

I tried to feel as happy about our return as you. We would stay friends, you had said.

It wouldn’t be the same, but it would be something.

For days we’d stared at the dot we knew was our destination, but it was too far away to feel familiar, and the sun’s glare too harsh to see through clearly.

And then, finally, we were close enough that Hanuman’s shielding blocked the sun and we could see it in all its vivid beauty. Colour in monochrome. A single blue flower blooming in a barren field. Home.

You turned to me with a huge grin, arms held out, and pulled me into you. I hadn’t hugged anyone since I was a child, and held on just a little too long. The heat of you, even through our uniforms, surprised me.

You stepped away and I let go. You gave me a big smile, but I thought I glimpsed a strange sadness. Perhaps it was just kindness.

“We should celebrate,” I said, turning and hurrying towards the logistics quadrant. You’d brought wine to celebrate the return home — champagne would have exploded with all the pressure fluctuations. While I searched for cups, my thoughts churned. I wanted to thank you for all you had done for me while I had the chance. You wouldn’t laugh, I knew that, and even if you did it wouldn’t be cruel.

I’ll never know if I would have had the guts. When I returned, all joy had drained from your face.

“What?”

“The land,” you said in a flat voice. “Something’s wrong.”

I put the wine down and stepped beside you, not too close, and looked at Earth. We were close enough to see an enormous and oddly textureless grey-blue cloud knotted north of the equator, spreading hazy tendrils across America. The US was barely visible, but enough to see its contours had been savaged. There was too much sea. Florida had dissolved, and with it our base.

I squinted at the globe’s shadowy edges, looking for the ice cap gleam. Nothing.

Planet Earth was blue and there was nothing we could do.

You mastered your shock quickly, commanding Hanuman to slow the approach and start scanning the atmosphere. Hanuman reported that it could detect no broadcasts, but there was something unusual — radioactive isotopes in the atmosphere. Vast quantities, elevated by a factor of thirty.

“Nukes,” you whispered.

Right here right now, I’m facing a smaller problem. A forgotten code.

I made it across the twenty metres of the living quarters, lungs struggling like I was mid-marathon, but there’s a five-digit code to get into the logistics quadrant. There’s a hole in my mind where it should be, like the hole in your gum when a tooth is pulled.

My brain really is crumbling.

I could ask Hanuman to open the door but I haven’t spoken in a year. I don’t want my first words in so long to be to a machine. I stand, stricken, until some veil parts and I almost laugh.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

When you set it, you were so pleased with yourself. I said it wasn’t a very secure code, and you said we weren’t going to get burgled in space. But we both knew what the codes were really for. You (and only you) could override them if something went wrong between us and you needed to contain me. Though our emotional stability and behavioural compatibility had been assessed, there had to be safeguards on a mission with so many variables.

You didn’t need them. You never needed to be protected from me.

I tap the numbers and the door slides open. I shiver — it’s even cooler here than in the living quarters, and I don’t have any fat left insulating me.

Holding the rails, I pull myself past the dry food store I emptied two days ago, then past the oxygen converters and water recyclers. I can hear the recyclers’ distress now I’m near, their filter systems’ thin whine. Doesn’t matter now.

When I reach the freezer unit, I have to rest. I take a deep, shuddering breath and try to summon whatever strength is left, but my body is mutinous. It doesn’t want to move and I know it’s not just fatigue.

I slump against the freezer door, sharp cold against my back.

My brain joins the mutiny, pushing me into a past I don’t want to remember.

After the nukes, you changed, and this time I couldn’t bring the old you back. After a few hours of rage, and tears that frightened me more, you regained control. But you were never again the same person I’d spent two years beside. You became drily practical, like the tough, hard-edged NASA legend I’d once expected you to be.

We spent days searching for ways to get to Earth safely, but all amounted to suicide. Without ground control to guide us, and with Hanuman’s navigation systems inoperable in the Earth’s current atmospheric radiation levels, safe landing would be impossible. Fuel levels were too low to take us anywhere else, not that there was anywhere to go. Our only option was to orbit and wait, hoping the radiation would drop or “some miracle” — my words — intervened.

You agreed, at last, body slumping in defeat.

Hanuman recommended locking into a high orbit, one requiring less fuel for orbital anti-gravity corrections. It calculated that with strict rationing, no use of centrifuge, and reduced heating, we could survive for five years.

“Out of the question,” you said. “Wouldn’t that place us out of the range of short-wave radio communications?”

“But there aren’t any—”

You cut me off. “There might be, and I’m not going to miss them sitting out in space while we starve and freeze. Also, we’ll be able to observe more clearly if we’re nearer.”

“Yes, that’s true.” But I guessed the real reason behind these rationalisations. You just wanted to be as close to Earth as you could. To your wife, if she was still there. We might be trapped in space’s dead emptiness, but at least we could look at life. There had to be people still alive down there.

I worked with Hanuman on the most fuel-efficient compromise, identifying a narrow zone between low and medium orbit. We stilled all centrifugal activities and lowered the temperature to 14 degrees Celsius.

And we waited. And watched.

When Earth was sunlit below us, it was nightmarish. Vast clouds wrapped around most of the planet, the legacy of whatever nuclear catastrophe had unfolded. When they parted, we named the countries we could see for sure had been swallowed by the sea. Bangladesh. The Netherlands. Vietnam.

Night-time was worse. With the cities now dark, Earth looked dead. Dead as space, dead as Mars. Sometimes it felt like we were the only living things in a dead universe.

You said your wife was smart, she’d have left Florida before the sea took it. She’d have gone inland or to her mother in Seoul.

Hanuman gathered data, confirming what I’d already worked out as the likeliest explanation. While we were absent, the climate catastrophe had entered the predicted doom loop, a decade earlier than even the most pessimistic models had predicted. Global warming had accelerated, thawing the methane-saturated permafrost, leading to further temperature acceleration, ice caps melting — and so on. Total climate collapse. The sea, tens of meters swollen, had mauled the land. The catastrophe had probably begun while we were still travelling to Mars. NASA would have censored any messages saying so. Too demoralising.

When the Earth was sunlit and the clouds parted, we could sometimes see cratered cities with our naked eyes. Our best guess was that total war had broken out over the possession of still-habitable land, places with life-tolerating temperatures and clean water sources. Siberia and Tibet, possibly.

Humanity had tried to act against climate change — we had been that act — but far too little and far too late. Now, we could only witness.

Hanuman couldn’t calculate the odds of civilizational survival, so we looked for signs with our own eyes.

None.

Instead, Indonesia disintegrated. China’s coast was devoured slowly. The continents continued to be whittled away, sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes in shocking surges. When the sunrise came that revealed a blue and white hole where Seoul had been, I said your wife would have already moved inland.

“She probably died before we left Mars,” you said, in a flat, dead voice.

We’d surely both known that for a long time, but you’d never said it out loud. I wanted to take your arm, but you weren’t looking at me and I was afraid to.

We fell into silence after that, and I don’t remember us talking again. We probably did, but I don’t remember a single conversation. I fell into old habits and thought about science a lot. You were right. It hadn’t been a friend.

With our days and nights splintered, we slept fitfully. Life took on the dislocated, stifling quality of a nightmare. You cried in your sleep and I didn’t know what to do so I pretended not to notice.

One day I woke, but you did not.

Enough. I get back to my feet slowly, like a man three times my age, and turn to the freezer unit. I tap it open, clouds of icy air billowing out as if to greet me.

When the clouds have cleared I can see the body is where I left it, propped up against the wall in a grotesque, stiff-legged sitting position.

I step into the cold and force myself to look. The skin, once so pink and full of life, has a silvery and smooth quality. It reminds me of a Roman statue, remote and cold. Those statues were painted once, though it’s impossible to imagine now. I wish it were impossible to imagine this body was once alive. That would make everything easier.

But I am a scientist. This body is not you. You are gone. This form you have left behind is a substantial source of preserved meat. It is survival.

And yet I’m afraid to look into the eyes. Instead, I inspect the wrist. Red wounds have now frozen into tiny black canyons.

They are so transformed, so alien, that I find the courage to look at the eyes.

Ice crystals have formed across them, like that cloud across Earth, but I glimpse sea-blue in the gaps.

I am not looking into those eyes for an explanation. You left me a note, written on paper with a pen. The note said you were sorry but you didn’t want to go home anymore. You said that with one less person on board, the food supplies would last longer and give me a chance.

The last paragraph was written in large letters, as if you were afraid of illegibility.

I am counting on you to be your rational self, if it comes to it. The data from Mars could still be of value to survivors when you get to Earth. Do what you have to do to stay alive and get home.

Remember the Andes. You promised. Your friend, Aaron.

With love.

Remember the Andes. That show about the plane crash survivors who ate their dead. We joked while we watched, debating whether we’d eat each other if we had to.

“Certainly,” I said. “Survival is survival. I might not wait for you to be dead if I was very hungry.”

You laughed. “Trust me, if I was alive, you’d be the dinner.” You prodded my chest. I was still muscular then, still keeping up my exercise routine. “God, you’d keep me alive for months.”

I pointed at your stomach, just a little flabbier than mine. “You know, fat is underrated as an energy source. Our bodies process fat faster than protein.”

“Process this,” you said, middle finger raised.

Those jokes don’t seem funny anymore.

I lean closer — frozen eyes reflect my movement. I was probably meant to close them when I found you dead. I can’t remember why I didn’t.

All of my memories of that time feel jagged and incomplete, like a smashed mirror. I only have pieces that don’t quite fit. Did I carry you to the freezer unit the same day? Or did I wait a little longer than I should have? I didn’t want to touch you, I remember that. After feeling the heat of you that time we hugged, I couldn’t bear the idea of feeling it gone.

At some point, I must have moved your body, obviously. It couldn’t have been long. Not long enough for there to be a smell. I’d remember that.

I think I lost my mind for a little while. I didn’t do anything wild. There was no tearing out my hair or screaming. But my mind… it just wasn’t really there.

I knew there was a possibility there were no humans left on Earth. It was unlikely — humans are a wily and numerous species, and some would surely have survived even the most catastrophic of nuclear wars and cruellest of temperatures — but not impossible. And if that were true, I was the last human alive. That wasn’t a thought I could keep in my head for long.

I must have kept functioning at some level. I checked the logs later and found that I had dutifully approved all daily systems checks. But what I did in between those checks… lost to me.

Eventually I returned to some sort of bleak normality. I tried and failed to make Hanuman my friend, then settled into my routine of watching the Earth’s death and rebirth, again and again and again. I cut my rations to bare minimum, enough to sustain me as long as possible. But the day was always coming when there would be no more.

I know what you would want me to do. I’d know even if you hadn’t left the note. You were, ultimately, a practical man. You’d tell me that if I don’t do what has to be done, there was no point in anything we’d done.

But I’m not just a scientist. You made me more than that and when I look at your face, even though it is silvered and lifeless as marble, it is still your face.

I squat opposite you. I don’t know why it seems important to look you in the eyes now, when you can’t look back.

“I wanted to say thank you.” My voice is a rusty ruin. “You did so much for me and I should have told you. But I can’t do what you asked. I’m taking us both home.”

Yuri Gagarin said something else about space. He said he couldn’t see any god up here.

I know I should move but I don’t want to leave you. It’s very cold, even with the door open and plumes of frozen air drifting out. Nearly all my strength is gone. If I sat down, I think I’d fall asleep quickly and wouldn’t wake. There would be no pain.

Why is it even important to take us home? My thoughts are sluggish, but a kind of answer comes. Because there must be some life left. Even if humans have wiped each other out, other creatures will have survived. I look again at your frozen skin, unnaturally preserved. Down there, it will do what dead bodies have always done. It will decay, and then feed other forms of life. Birth, death, rebirth. The heartbeat of existence.

Maybe that is God.

And if that’s God, it’s down there, not up here.

I force myself fully upright again, take one last look at you, and then drag myself through to the living quarters. Your seat is uncomfortable and I have to readjust the straps. I was once taller and wider than you. Now I’m only taller.

I override Hanuman’s safety-locks, and set a direct course for Earth. Hanuman flashes a warning signal. I reject it.

The acceleration adds nausea to the hunger in my stomach, and I close my eyes as if that might quell the urge to vomit. Would there be anything in me to throw up? Almost certainly not, but the exertion might make me black out.

Maybe that would be for the best.

But I want to stay awake. There’s still something to see or learn. I don’t know what, but I know there must be.

I hum a song we once sang together, though I can barely hear my cracked whimper over Hanuman’s shuddering as we tumble into gravity’s grasp. I open my eyes and am almost blinded by a sky that is now white, not black. I glimpse a sliver of browned land far below. What legs walk there now? Do any of them belong to creatures that look like us?

It doesn’t matter. Hanuman can’t land safely. This isn’t a return, it's an ending.

My starved body isn’t ready for re-entry’s hot, rattling ordeal. I’m shaken so hard I feel my brain concussing. Black spiderwebs creep across my vision.

At the sky’s edge, I hear a voice from the communications console, even over the cacophony.

“Respond. Anyone. Respond.”

A wishful hallucination. It has to be. The mind is a trickster in its final moments, will do all it can to shield us from pain. Drowners are said to feel a strange elation as they surrender and their lungs fill. People who freeze to death feel peaceful at the end and sometimes even undress. And then there are those who almost die and come back with tales of white lights greeting them. Hallucinations, that’s all. Kind lies.

The last of my vision eclipses. The land disappears.

How many times have I watched Earth die? Thousands and thousands and thousands. But it is always resurrected and will be again. I just won’t see it. That’s all.

My mind feeds me a few last crumbs of comfort as it dims. I swallow them gratefully. I remember the way you looked me up and down when you first saw me. The questions you asked about my life, and the furrow in your brow when I answered. That time I finally made you laugh on our way home. Your shameless chest-beating triumph whenever you beat me at chess. “With love” in large letters on paper. Your horrible singing voice.

I'm going home now. There is so much more in my heart than when I left.