Page 56 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH BY THE LIGHT OF JUPITER

Nadia sat on her bed, waiting for me. Most of her candy was gone. She had said, several times now, that I should ask Allison for my box already. Maybe my mother had filled it with candy? Or wine we wouldn’t have to ferment ourselves? I was sure she hadn’t.

Nadia talked me through practical solutions for planet-ending catastrophes. Between us, in the vast open area of green duvet, was an open plastic packet of peanut butter crackers. (My contribution, from lunch.)

“You’re not listening,” Nadia said.

“I am! You want our great-great-great-great-grandchildren to take on this massive space engineering project so that in one million years their descendants have somewhere to live.” I recited this quickly, hoping for praise.

“I’m serious, though. We’ll still be here in a hundred million years. Way past a million.”

“Nadia,” I said, “we’ll be dead.”

She didn’t laugh. She was a pure and hopeful person disguised in sharp edges.

Too smart for me. Too tender. I wanted to tuck her into her blankets and say goodnight, even knowing she was stronger than I was.

I knew her better than I’d known anyone new in a long time.

Maybe since the physicist, who had mostly shared what I wanted to hear.

Nadia, unlike me, had been a city kid. Her parents had met as teenagers during a protest against the Vietnam War, after a police officer chained them together and threw them in the back of a van.

All four immigrant grandparents were horrified, both by the interfaith relationship and by jail.

The young couple held a listening session for their parents’ concerns, eloped in an atheist ceremony at a friend’s apartment, got arrested for disturbing the peace three more times, and had Nadia by accident ten years later.

By age four, Nadia was infamous at preschool for yelling things like “Believe nothing!” and “Question everything!” on the playground.

Nadia took another cracker from the plate between us on the bed. She talked about terraforming Jupiter’s moons. It was her favorite (impossible) project, a preempt to any (possible, if not inevitable) mass extinction event. Our species had to be multi-planetary.

I told Nadia that when I’d explained this concept to my mother, she’d laughed and said, “Guess you can’t put all your eggs in one basket!”

In response to this, Nadia did an impression of her own mother, who’d been furious with her as a newly religious teen. “Human life is insignificant and inconsequential!”

“Are you still that?” I said.

“What, religious?” She looked surprised that I’d asked.

I nodded.

“Ohh,” she said, “this is about last night.”

The night before, we’d talked about our lives and friendships outside the mission.

Nadia had framed the question as being about “our communities,” a phrase I might have judged as somewhat meaningless if my sister had used it.

But I understood what Nadia meant. She was part of a mostly New York–based group of queer Muslims and had been since college.

Even after her move to Houston, she still planned to fly “pretty often” to see them.

“I’m not part of that group because I feel super religious,” she said now. “We have an experience in common, and we look out for each other. I don’t feel like we have to be fully aligned in our every belief, when like, who is?”

I nodded and tried to sit with this. Nadia went, very suddenly, back to terraforming.

Nadia said if it were up to her— it definitely wouldn’t be , is something I didn’t say—the people of the future would invest in black hole seeding. Why not have two homes to rely on—two star-warmed, terraformed, livable homes—rather than one?

A hundred million years , I thought, is a long time for earthlings to hope for the best. But I didn’t say that. Nadia looked too revved up and happy, and maybe inclined to kiss me? This was solely based on her position on the bed, about a foot closer to me than usual.

The best candidate for stellification in our solar system—for us! creating a star! out of a planet!— was, “obviously,” Jupiter. Jupiter was already a gas giant. If we could make Jupiter a star, we’d be free to live on its moons.

To do this, Nadia explained, the future-people would need to locate a black hole in our solar system.

“A microscopic one.” I shook my head at that, at how confident Nadia was in our future competence.

And then they’d “drag it on over” to Jupiter ( apparently, we’d know how to do this ) and “push it” into orbit.

This process, just the orbit stuff, would take about a century.

Our president had just sealed a deal with Iran to curb its nuclear arms program, and in just three months we’d elect or not elect the candidate who’d called this the “worst deal ever.” I had my doubts about our world in consensus for one hundred years.

I smiled and said something like “hmm.” I was tired and a little anxious, still trying to read her.

Nadia talked about the Eddington limit. Gas from Jupiter would be pulled into the black hole.

The heat and energy pushing outward would become equal and opposite to the gravitational pull inward.

Somehow, the black hole would not swallow the body of Jupiter.

Instead, over a few million years ( lol!

I did not say), it would raise Jupiter’s average temperature to over 1,000 kelvins—creating a dull, red star.

“Cool,” I whispered.

“Tell me what’s next.” She was teasing me. She knew my attention was not on Jupiter.

“The moons,” I said, too fast. “Then they’ll be hot enough. Habitable. People on moons.”

“People on Jupiter’s moons, in fewer than a hundred million years,” Nadia whispered. “And whoever’s still on Earth? They could read books at night. Outside by the light of Jupiter, which would be red.”

“I don’t know, Nadia.”

“What don’t you know?”

“A hundred million years is too long,” I said. “I’m less interested in making stars. We have no control over what people will do in the time it takes to make that happen. Better to plop some people down on Mars, stat.”

Something flared up in her. She moved quickly to my side of the bed. Warmth came off her like my own star , I thought, like a dummy.

“We need both,” she said. “We need everything we can possibly manage for survival. Even if it isn’t here, or on Mars—you’re telling me you don’t agree with that?”

“Uh, yeah I agree,” I said. “I’m trying to be an astronaut.”

“Don’t you care about the world?”

“Yes?”

“This one,” she said. “Not the Mars colony we’ll be dead for.”

“I know that,” I said. Defensively. It was strange to argue with her about something so abstract, so impossible for either of us to have a say in. It was strange to argue with anyone, to be challenged by someone who wasn’t my sister. There was a buzzing in me.

“Steph, be real with me. We eat snacks, I talk, and you sit here giving me nothing, like you’re in the witness protection program.”

She wasn’t whispering anymore. It was well after midnight. “What’s the point in being alive,” she said, “if you’re just trying to prove yourself? If you can’t even, I don’t know”—she swung her arm out—“open your stupid care package from your mom?”

I took her hand.

In the air between us I held it tight, and Nadia didn’t fight me. My hand shook, but she didn’t laugh.

She watched me. Slowly, and so afraid, I moved her arm gently down to her lap. I kissed her, like a question, on the cheek.

When had I ever been so soft, so careful with another person?

The kiss was light, a brush of my lips, like at any moment she could say no and I could say I’m sorry, I’d only fallen into her.

But I fell again, and again; finally I pressed my mouth to hers.

With the tips of my fingers I touched her neck.

Nadia was in my lap, straddling me, taking my hand from her face. She kissed me, harder than I had. Her fingers moved fast under my neck, the undoing of many buttons and then cool air on my chest. She pulled my shirt off over my shoulders, scratching my arm with her nails by mistake. No apology.

Her hands were gentle on my breasts with the soft part of her fingers, like she intended to coax me open. I gasped.

Nadia lowered me onto the bed, carefully, her hand behind my head. A finger to her lips. I was under her, trapped between her legs, at her mercy in a way that was unfamiliar. She took my breast into her mouth. The flick of her tongue. A small sound fell out of me.

I swung out from under her. Her neck was bright under the lamp, exposed. I kissed it, sucked it, bit it—the bite came from shame at the sound I’d made.

“Keep going,” Nadia said, her voice lower than before. “While I talk.”

I came up for air, and the start of a laugh. “No more terraforming,” I said. “Nothing farther than five minutes from the present mo—”

Abruptly, she opened her eyes. She looked almost angry, though I couldn’t think why.

“I wanted to tell you I checked the handbook,” she said. “It’s pretty clear. ‘NASA expects its astronauts to maintain a high level of professionalism while on duty…’?”

“Oh my God, Nadia, please ,” I said. My wrists hung uselessly from her waistband. I’d been waiting for permission to take off her pants.

“?‘ … Astronauts are highly trained professionals who must focus on the mission at hand, and any romantic relationships should not interfere with their ability to perform their duties .’?”

“Are we role-playing HR Rep versus Bad Ascan?” I asked. “Is that what this is?”

“I’m setting expectations.”

“We aren’t astronauts,” I said. “And relationships, if they don’t interfere with duties, are allowed.”

“Is that what you’re saying, Steph? That this is a relationship?”

I laughed. Never, in all my sexually active life, had I been asked before orgasm to define the relationship.

“And there’s my answer,” she said.

“Wait, Nadia,” I said. What was happening?

Nadia sat up and carefully buttoned her shirt. She tied the drawstring on her pajama pants into a perfect bow. There was more control in her, even just in her gestures, than I felt I’d ever be capable of.

“Please,” I said. “Can we talk this through?”

“No,” she said. “And I’m not mad. But with where I’m at in my life, with these stakes?” She moved her arm in a long arc, maybe like a spaceship or the hab we lived in. “I’m not interested in something casual.”