The Waiting Room

The message came in at 0640 ship time, and Xavier Freshwillow was awake to catch it because he'd taken to sleeping badly on the nights a transmission was due, some animal part of him apparently convinced that if he was unconscious when it arrived, he'd miss something that couldn't be gotten back.

It downloaded slow. Everything downloaded slow out here, the delay stretching by another handful of seconds with every day they pushed further out, but this one was worse than usual — the progress bar stuttering, hanging, crawling forward in increments that made him want to put his fist through the console just to make it go faster, as if that would have helped anything.

Priya Freshwillow — Personal — 00:03:41

Three minutes, forty-one seconds. Short, for her. She usually rambled — told him about her day in the wandering, unhurried way she'd talk if he were sitting across the table from her, no sense of the delay, no sense that every word was going to travel four hundred million kilometers before it reached him. He liked that about her messages. It made the distance feel smaller, pretending, for the length of a recording, that she was just talking, not transmitting.

He put his earpiece in and pressed play, and for the first eleven seconds it was fine — her voice, warm, a little tired, telling him about a leak under the kitchen sink that the building super still hadn't fixed — and then the audio dropped into a wall of static that didn't clear for almost twenty seconds, long enough that he checked the signal strength indicator twice, willing it back, and when her voice came back through it was mid-sentence, mid-thought, missing whatever had come before.

"—and I know I said I'd wait until I was sure, but I keep thinking about it, and I don't want you to hear it from me being weird and cagey for six months, so — " Static, a half-second, gone again before it cleared. "—the test again this morning and it's still — I don't know, Xavier, it's still faint, it's not nothing but it's not — I don't know what it is. I have an appointment next week. I'll know for real by the time you get this, probably, and I hate that. I hate that you're going to hear this not knowing, and by the time you answer I might already—"

The recording cut out entirely. Not static — a hard stop, the kind that meant the transmission window had simply closed mid-thought, some scheduling algorithm on Earth's side deciding three minutes and forty-one seconds was as much bandwidth as a personal message from an astronaut's wife was going to get today.

Xavier sat with the earpiece still in, listening to nothing, for a long moment.

I might already—

Already what. Know. Not know. Have lost it. Have told her mother. There were a dozen ways that sentence could have ended and he had no way of finding out which one it was, not for days, not until the next transmission window opened and whatever she recorded next either answered the question or, more likely, assumed he already understood something he didn't, because from where she was standing eleven days from now — the actual present, the one that was happening on Earth right now while he sat here holding a message that was already ancient by the time it reached him — this conversation had already moved on without him.

He was going to spend the next eleven days not knowing whether he was going to be a father, listening to a sentence that stopped in the middle, and there was nothing in any training manual, any mission briefing, any of the eighteen months of preparation that had gotten him onto this ship, that had told him what to do with that.

He found William in the equipment bay, elbow-deep in a panel that had been giving him trouble since day sixty, muttering at it in the low, affectionate way he muttered at machinery that was misbehaving but not, in his estimation, beyond saving.

"You look like a man who got bad news," William said, without looking up.

"I don't know what news I got."

"That's usually worse." William withdrew his arm from the panel, wiped his hand on his coveralls, and gave Xavier the particular attention he reserved for moments when someone actually needed it, which he disguised, always, as idle curiosity. "Go on, then."

Xavier told him — the static, the cut-off sentence, the appointment, the I might already that led nowhere. William listened without interrupting, which was rare for him, and when Xavier finished, he didn't say anything comforting, which was somehow the right call.

"You want my honest opinion?"

"Not really."

"Good, because I was going to give it anyway." William leaned back against the bulkhead. "You're going to spend the next however many days building a whole story in your head about what that sentence was going to say. You're going to build six different endings and by the third day you'll have convinced yourself it's the worst one. That's just what brains do when you starve them of information — they fill the gap with whatever's loudest." He shrugged. "I'd know. I've had eleven years of practice not knowing things about my sister, on account of she doesn't talk to me, and my brain fills that gap constantly, and it is never, not once, filled it in with something true."

"That's not comforting."

"Wasn't trying to comfort you. Was trying to tell you the truth, which is that you don't know yet, and there's not a single thing you can do about that from four hundred million kilometers away except make yourself miserable early instead of on schedule." He said it without unkindness, in the same tone he'd use to explain a torque spec, and somehow that made it land better than sympathy would have. "So. Don't do the thing where you spend eleven days pre-grieving something that might just be a woman telling you she's going to have a normal appointment next Tuesday. Wait for the actual news. It'll get here eventually. Everything does, out here. Just slow."

Xavier huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "You're surprisingly wise for a man who yells at panels."

"The panel deserved it. It's been lying to the pressure gauge for two weeks." William reached back into the equipment bay, then paused, glancing sideways. "For what it's worth — and I say this as someone who's never wanted the thing you're scared about not having — I think you'll be alright either way this goes. You've got the kind of face people trust with things. Kid or no kid. That's not nothing."

It wasn't much, as reassurance went. Xavier took it anyway, because it was the kind of thing William only said once, and only meant.

Darrell found him twenty minutes later in the galley, where Xavier had gone mostly to have somewhere to sit that wasn't the observation module, which felt too big right now, too full of stars that didn't care what was or wasn't happening in a kitchen four hundred million kilometers away.

"William told me," Darrell said, sliding into the seat across from him. "Hope that's alright. He wasn't gossiping, he was worried."

"It's fine."

"You don't look fine."

"I'm working on it."

Darrell didn't push, which was its own kind of pressure — the specific patience of a man who'd clearly decided he was going to sit there regardless of whether Xavier wanted company, and was giving him the dignity of pretending it was Xavier's choice. After a while he said, "Casey was a false alarm, first time. Mara thought she was pregnant for about three weeks before the test came back and said no. We'd already half-decorated a room."

"What'd you do with the room?"

"Left it half-decorated for about a year, if I'm honest. Neither of us wanted to be the one to undo it. Felt like giving up on something, even though there wasn't anything there to give up on yet." He shrugged, a small, private gesture. "Point is — you can build a whole life around a maybe, and sometimes the maybe doesn't pan out, and it still knocks you sideways when it doesn't, even though logically you know nothing was ever really there. Grief doesn't care much about logic. It just cares that you were hoping."

"That's supposed to help?"

"Not especially. Just wanted you to know somebody else has sat where you're sitting." Darrell reached across and clapped him once on the shoulder, brief, solid. "You're not doing this by yourself up here, whatever it turns out to be. I know it doesn't feel like it, four hundred million kilometers is a long way to be not-alone. But you're not."

Xavier nodded, throat tight, and didn't trust himself to say anything back that wouldn't come out wrong, so he didn't say anything, and Darrell let the silence be what it was, same as always. It was, Xavier was starting to understand, the specific gift of this crew — none of them fixed anything, not really, not the distance, not the delay, not the eleven days of not-knowing. They just made sure nobody sat with it by themselves.

The alert came through forty minutes later, cutting through the low ambient hum of the ship with a tone Xavier had heard exactly twice before in training simulations and never once for real — the observation module's automated flag, the one calibrated to notice exactly the kind of change they'd flown four hundred million kilometers to catch.

Rachel was already moving before the tone finished, out of her bunk and down the corridor in the particular controlled urgency of someone who has rehearsed this exact moment in her head more times than she'd admit to. Xavier followed, and William, and Darrell close behind, all four of them converging on the observation module within ninety seconds of the alert, which was, Xavier would think later, probably some kind of record.

"Talk to me," Darrell said.

Rachel didn't answer right away. She was staring through the wide window at a point of light that had, as far as Xavier's untrained eye could tell, not visibly changed at all — still just a star among a great many stars, bright but unremarkable, the kind of thing you'd walk past on a clear night without a second look.

"Rachel."

"It's starting," she said, and her voice had gone strange — not frightened, not yet, but stripped of everything except the pure, total focus of someone watching the exact thing she'd spent her whole career preparing to see. "The core's beginning to collapse. You can't see it yet, not really, not with the naked eye — the light we're getting right now is still just the star as it's been for millions of years. But the instruments are already reading the shift. It's happening. Right now, this second, four hundred million kilometers from us, the core of that star is starting to fall in on itself."

"How long," William said, quiet.

"Hours. Maybe a day, at the outside, before the rebound. Then—" She stopped, and for the first time since Xavier had known her, Rachel Trust seemed to run out of the right words for something, the astrophysicist's vocabulary failing against the actual, physical fact of what she was about to watch happen. "Then it's the loudest thing any of us will ever see."

They stood there together, all four of them, watching a point of light that looked exactly the same as it had every night for ninety days, knowing now that it was lying to them — that behind that steady, ordinary glow, something enormous and irreversible had already begun, and there was nothing left to do but wait, and watch, and let it come.

Xavier thought, unbidden, of the sentence that had cut off mid-thought eleven days and four hundred million kilometers away. I might already—

Everything out here was a waiting room, he thought. The star. Priya. Him. All of them just sitting in the same enormous silence, waiting to find out what the next thing was going to say.

He didn't look away from the window. None of them did.