The Fated Sky Read online

“I told Clemons I’d go.” I bit my lips. Well, crap. I’d planned on talking to him over dinner. “Sorry.”

  Nathaniel crossed the room and took my hands in his. Gently, he squeezed each of them, looking down as if they were something rare. He sighed, but a smile softened his cheekbones. “Well … I knew you were going to go.”

  “I’m sorry. There’s still time to back out.”

  “No. Elma…” He looked up and his eyes were wet. I went all over trembles. He brought my left hand up and kissed my ring finger. “I was pretty sure you wanted to go, but was waiting for you to come around to it on your own. In case I was wrong.”

  “But—”

  My husband shook his head, still smiling at me, even though his eyes were reddened. “I don’t want you stuck on Earth, wishing you were in the stars. That’s no sort of marriage.”

  * * *

  My time away from Nathaniel began almost immediately. The training that Helen had referred to was at the Adler Planetarium. I keep waiting for them to come up with something better than a sextant for navigating through space, but without a magnetic field, we are reliant upon the stars. Granted, we have the IMU—inertial measuring unit—but we still needed the stars as a reference, and since the IMU was just a bunch of gyroscopes, that required a human to look at the stars first. With a sextant.

  And … the IMU has to be reset periodically over the course of a long journey because gyroscopes wander off, so to restore it to precise stellar alignment, we again need to have an astronaut look at the stars. With a sextant.

  I knew how to use one, of course, because I used it whenever I did the moon–Lunetta transit, but the stars we would need for the Mars trip were different. I’d joined the navigator-computers and pilots to learn to recognize the Mars transit stars. With a sextant.

  The rest of the NavComps and pilots were already in Chicago at the Adler Planetarium, so I headed out to join them after a bare two weeks at home with Nathaniel. My preference would have been to fly a T-38 over, but taking a commercial flight meant that I could use the time studying the reams of documentation I needed to catch up on. While I was nowhere near up to speed, by the time I walked up the windswept stairs of Adler, I at least knew what questions to ask.

  Don’t let the dated Art Deco style of the Adler fool you. The marble might be thirty years out of style, but the planetarium itself is state of the art. Oh, but I do love a planetarium.

  This is ridiculous on the face of it, since I live half my life in space these days, but … we rarely see the stars on the moon. We’re buried in tubes, and even when we’re not, we have to be in the Earth’s shadow for the sky to be dark enough. Plus, planetariums can speed time up and rotate the sky to any orientation you want.

  I pushed open the door to the planetarium proper with a smile and a giant binder. Betty hopped up from her chair with a grin. “Elma! I thought they were kidding when they said you’d be joining the team.”

  I gave her a quick hug. “Clemons has you out here, huh?”

  Betty nodded and gestured to a photographer behind her. “Is Phil okay?”

  “Sure.” I nodded to the man and made an internal vow to ignore him, before turning to the rest of the team.

  Or, teams, really. We had an unmanned cargo ship, the Santa Maria, but the two crewed vessels were duplicates of each other, lovingly dubbed the Niña and the Pinta. Each had two pilots and two NavComps, because the IAC did love redundancy. All of them had their noses buried in the thick binders that the IAC had loaded us down with. They barely glanced up as I walked over to say hello.

  On the Pinta team, Derek Benkoski and Vanderbilt DeBeer were the pilots. The two men could have been twins, both coming out of the same military mold of square corners and chiseled jaws. The fact that one was Polish American and one was South African? It seemed trivial. Their NavComps were also white. Rumor had it that South Africa had threatened to withhold funding unless their people flew in an all-white crew.

  Whatever the reason, the Niña had the only Black members of the Mars team, though neither of them were pilots. For a pilot, we had Stetson Parker, who leaned back in his seat with his legs stretched out in front of him. He had a sextant out and was trying to balance the brass device on his palm.

  Our copilot, Estevan Terrazas, stood up, but his smile seemed slow and stiff. We’d gone to the moon together and I recognized that look. He was trying to be cheerful, while being upset. “Hey, York.”

  I shook his hand, exchanging pleasantries, and couldn’t ask him what was wrong because of Phil the photographer. All of us needed to be on best behavior when the press was around, even if it was in-house press.

  Florence Grey was also on the team. We’d met at a company party last year and we were both friends with Helen. Florence was a petite Black woman who had been a wireless codebreaker in the war, and had a reputation for ferocious speed as a NavComp.

  “Florence. How have you been?” I offered her my hand.

  She looked at it for a moment before sighing and shaking it. “Fine.” And then she turned back to her binder. That was … rude.

  I glanced around the room. “Where’s Helen?”

  Florence slammed her binder shut. “Seriously?” She got up and stalked out of the room.

  I stared after her, my mouth hanging slightly open, as Phil took photos. Trying not to grimace, I turned back to the rest of the team. For a brief moment, all of them were staring at me, then they snapped their gazes back down to their manuals.

  Except Parker, who wore a twisted smirk as he balanced that damn sextant on his palm. He stared at me, drew breath to speak and—

  Betty stepped between us. She gestured to Phil, who lowered his camera. Leaning in, she whispered, “Helen got bumped in order to make space for you.”

  The entire room went red and heat boiled off my skin. What. The. Hell.

  Apparently I said that out loud, because Parker laughed. “C’mon, York. You know the weight allowances … You think they could just add you?”

  “You know … I really don’t know why I thought that Clemons would be honest with me.” That’s what I got for believing him. “Well. I’ll let y’all get back to work.”

  My face was still burning, but I couldn’t tell you if it was anger or shame. I should have known. I should have known that they couldn’t just add me. Each ship had only seven people on it. Of course they couldn’t just add me and all the supplies for an additional mouth, not without taking something else off. And if they were adding a NavComp, of course they had to subtract one to keep the equations even.

  I took a step back, shaking, before I started out of the room. Goddamned Clemons. He should have told me.

  “Where you going, York?” A metal-on-metal squeak sounded from Parker’s seat as he stood.

  “I’m going to quit so Helen can have her spot back.”

  “Good. That’s the right thing to do.” His footsteps followed me up the carpeted aisle of the planetarium. “Want me to fly you back so our team can be restored faster?”

  He was just doing that to annoy me, but I stopped in the aisle and spun to face him. “Yes. Yes, I would.”

  * * *

  Parker and I … we still didn’t really get along, but after four years of working together, we had managed to achieve a professional respect for one another. By the time we got through the preflight checklist and were in the air, I’d calmed down enough to remember to try to be civil.

  Sitting in the backseat of the T-38, I had a view of Parker’s helmet and the sound of wind around me for company. He’d taken us up above the clouds into glorious clear blue skies. I let out a sigh loud enough to activate the vox and carry my voice over the mic to him. “Sorry. I should have known.”

  “Yeah. You should have.” Asshole. I mean, he was right, but he didn’t have to rub it in. His helmet turned as if he were going to look over his shoulder at me. “But Clemons should have said something. That was a shit move.”

  “I wouldn’t have said yes if I’d known.”
/>
  “I don’t doubt that.” Below us, the clouds rolled past in a sea of undulating white. “Honestly, I was surprised you would agree under any circumstances.”

  “Mars?”

  “You turned it down before.”

  I had. Back when the program was first being considered, I’d decided that I would be content with the moon and hadn’t wanted to be gone that long. “The funding cuts … Clemons wants to use me again.”

  Parker sighed and shook his head. “You know, it’d be nice if the space program were run by an actual scientist instead of PR flunkies and politicians.”

  “We are in agreement there.” On the other hand, I wasn’t sure what pulling out of the program would do. Nothing good, probably, but I wasn’t going to take this opportunity away from someone who had worked so long and so hard. Reynard would probably curse me for it, because getting back on the team would send Helen away. “How’s your wife taking the whole gone-for-three-years thing?”

  Ahead of me, sunlight gleamed off of Parker’s helmet. It didn’t so much as move from side to side. The air hissed around us, carrying his silence.

  Why did I think asking him a personal question was a good idea? We had professional respect for each other. That was it. “Never mind. Sorry. Shouldn’t have asked.”

  Parker cleared his throat, his helmet moving so that reflected sun danced along its curve. “She’s—” His voice broke. “She encouraged me to go.”

  There was clear love and pain in his voice. This baffled me, because he’d been having an affair with Betty for the past four years.

  * * *

  I half expected Parker to follow me into Clemons’s office to watch the show, but he peeled off and went up to the astronauts’ wing of the IAC. Channeling my mother’s poise and Southern cold fury, I walked into Clemons’s outer office like I was balancing a book on my head.

  Mrs. Kare looked up, smiling. “Dr. York! I thought you were in Chicago.” Beyond her, the inner office door was open, and Clemons had his feet up on his desk, reading a magazine.

  I spoke a little louder than strictly necessary, for his benefit. “I was, but something came up. Is the director available?”

  He lowered the magazine and swung his feet off the desk. “Come on in.”

  When I did, I shut the door behind me, just in case I found it necessary to raise my voice. Clemons raised his eyebrows and picked his cigar up from the ashtray. “Is Parker giving you trouble?”

  “No, sir.” I tucked my hands behind my back instead of shoving them into my flight suit’s pockets. “I’m here to offer my resignation.”

  Clemons fumbled his cigar and it plummeted to the ground, trailing smoke and ash like a dying rocket. “What the—” He snatched it off the floor. “What did Parker do?”

  “He’s not giving me trouble.” Although the fact that Clemons’s mind jumped there immediately did not bode well for the mission. “In fact, he offered to fly me back from Chicago, which I very much appreciated. My intention is to resign so that Helen Carmouche can be restored to the Mars Expedition.”

  If Clemons had ever paid any attention, he would know that the more formal and polite I became, the angrier I was.

  “Don’t be absurd.” He clearly had not been paying attention.

  “Absurd?” I strode forward and leaned my hands on his desk. The beautiful thing about planning to quit is that, for once, I didn’t care what he thought of me. “Helen Carmouche has been in training for this mission for over a year. She’s just as good of a computer as I am. What’s absurd is pulling her off a mission and replacing her with someone who will be playing catch-up the entire time.”

  Clemons stubbed out his cigar and held up both hands in supplication. “I would like to ask you to reconsider.”

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Carmouche agreed to the switch.” He stood, coming around the desk to where he could stare down at me. “Our agreement is that she and her husband will both be in the next colonist group, if she still wants to go. We need you on this mission.”

  “For publicity! In all other ways, I am a liability, because I am replacing a trained mission specialist.”

  “Yes.” Clemons buttoned his jacket, and then unbuttoned it again, shrugging. “I am aware of the risks, and yes, it will make a difference. It has already made a difference in which senators are willing to back the mission. Do you realize how many of them have daughters who are in Lady Astronaut clubs? Because of you?”

  That pit of dread opened up in the base of my stomach. “Is that really enough reason to jeopardize the expedition and all the people on it?”

  “You already said yes. You were willing to do the catch-up work.”

  “Because you failed to inform me that I would be replacing someone.” I shook my head, but it was impossible to get Helen’s excitement about this mission out of it. “This is not what I agreed to do.”

  “If you back out, it will look very bad—very bad indeed. We’ve already made announcements.” Clemons placed his hands on his hips, and even without the cloud of cigar smoke he loomed over me. “Think of what the press will say if the first woman astronaut quits the mission.”

  “Jacira was the first woman in space.”

  “You are the first American woman, and Jacira is leaving to get married.” He shook his head. “It’s the American Congress that we have to convince to stay with the program. If they pull their funding, the mission won’t happen. Period.”

  I clenched my jaw, as if that would allow me to bite down on my heart and stop its galloping pace. “This is wrong.”

  “It is necessary.”

  I hated him in that moment, because he made sense. Maybe it would be different if I didn’t have a brother who was a meteorologist, giving me all the latest information about Earth’s runaway greenhouse effect. Maybe it would be different if I hadn’t lived in space and seen the clouds and the great storms wreaking havoc on our coasts. “I am willing to do this much: I will delay my decision until I have spoken with Helen.”

  SIX

  ITALY SUFFERS IN HEAT WAVE

  ROME, Italy, Sept. 4, 1961—(AP)—Water is to be rationed in Rome, which is suffering through Italy’s worst heat wave and drought in 70 years. At least 21 deaths have been attributed to the heat, the accompanying storms, and the drowning of persons seeking relief.

  Scattered electrical storms yesterday brought respite from the heat to some areas, but not to Rome. Lightning killed several persons and dozens of farm animals and caused a number of fires. Rome’s water company announced a rotation rationing program that will deprive every home of water for most of one day next week.

  Clemons glared at the floor, the flesh of his neck turning a livid red where it rolled over his collar. He nodded decisively and turned to snatch his cigar and magazine off his desk. “Use my phone.”

  “I’ll go to her house and—”

  “Please.” His plea shocked me into silence. Clemons turned the magazine to face me so I could see the cover. Time magazine had a huge artist’s rendering of Mars, with a single word on it: WHY? “If you decide not to go, I need to know immediately because it’s going to take everything this agency has to keep that from being meteoric.”

  I swallowed and nodded, but I wasn’t going to back down. Once he was out of the room, I picked up his phone and called Helen at home. Curling the cord around my hand, I leaned against his desk, not quite able to sit in his chair. My sense of propriety is decidedly odd at times.

  The phone rang three times before Helen picked up. “Carmouche residence. This is Helen Carmouche speaking.”

  “Hi … It’s Elma.” I cleared my throat into the silence on the line. That slight crackle of static answered a world of questions. “I just found out that they bumped you … but Clemons said that you agreed with it? Are you … is that really okay?”

  “I get to spend more time with Reynard.”

  “But you’ve been working so hard.” I waited to give her time to respond, with only the fai
nt sounds of her breathing to let me know that the line was still open. “I told Clemons that I wouldn’t go unless you were okay with being bumped.”

  “Yes. Of course, Elma. You have my permission to go.” When Helen gets excited, her Taiwanese accent comes back. When she’s angry, she sounds like mid-Atlantic aristocracy. Right now, I was talking to the Katherine Hepburn of anger.

  “Look—if you’re not okay, I’ll back out. I mean, I already told him that.”

  “For God’s sake! I told you I was okay with it. I give you permission to go. You want me to say I’m happy? I’m not. You’re my friend, but you can’t ask me to lie to make you feel better.”

  “I—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I’ll tell him I won’t go.”

  “That would be sacrificing a piece for no good reason.” Helen sighed and some of the fury went out of her voice. “You’ve been in all the papers already. If you pull out and make a stink, that would remove support for the program. I understand the situation, but I am not ‘okay’ with it.”

  “We can spin it, I’m sure—point to the time you’ve been training and how you’re more qualified.”

  “Be realistic. This isn’t about training.” In her words, I heard the echo of Roy and the Earth Firsters. “I know where I stand in America, and in the space industry. If I acquiesce, then they will put me on the second wave of ships. If I had balked? He would have found an excuse to ground me permanently, and replaced me anyway. Of course I said yes, and smiled when doing so. It was the only intelligent move available.”

  “Then let’s use the fact that I’m apparently invaluable … I’ll tell Clemons that I won’t go unless you do.”

  Even as the words left my mouth, I knew all the reasons that idea wouldn’t fly—we both knew the allowances on the ships—but Helen voiced them for me. I could hear her disdain in her sniff. “They couldn’t add another team member because of the additional resources and weight that would require.”

  “But—” I stopped, unsure how to answer that. There had to be a way.

  “They would have to replace someone else and, thank you, but no. I do not want to be the person who got someone else kicked off the mission. That would leave the team with two people to hate.”