Stephani stands in the middle of the crowded mess hall and watches the projection.
The screen shows the two main continents on Teridabe and the thin strip of land connecting them. On top of the map are three blinking green dots. Three living surveyors. One dot, labeled Mikhail, moves slowly upward to the ice continent that spreads over the top third of the planet. Another, labeled Lorena, moves down. The continent she’s heading toward is green on the map, an optimistic flourish. The third dot—Ariadne’s dot—remains where the three of them landed.
Across the bottom of the screen, the three surveyors’ internal data are listed in neat, colorful tables along with other information about the mission; the hours Mikhail slept last night (6.5) is in warm yellow next to the number of kilometers he’s traveled since the landing (284) in a mild blue. A dozen other metrics create a haphazard rainbow beneath his name.
Stephani could watch on the screen in her bunk, but she feels she ought to be here, standing in the biggest room on the ship, tilting her chin up and sideways to see the screen around the tall person with a messy bun in front of her. She recognizes them—she knew everyone on the ship, once—but doesn’t remember their name. Yael would have known it.
Every so often, audio crackles through the room, too loud, and the crowd stills and quiets as one. Stephani knows that they are all like her, waiting, waiting, waiting to find out how this mission will fail, hoping it will be a small thing with no ripples, praying they won’t have to hear it, knowing they will listen if a surveyor’s last words are broadcast across the ship.
Months before Guiding Light even settled into orbit around Teridabe, before they were faced with another planet landing, Stephani worried. In the viewing room, she watched the planet through the window and curled her hands into fists and imagined seas of acid, plunging temperatures, noxious gases. Teridabe loomed nearer every time she entered the room, three times a week after her exercise slot, the saccharine purple-pink of the clouds swirling over blue water and grey-brown land. Stephani examined the colors and considered heating tubes and sealed boots, clasps and hand-sewn canvas layers. Around her, other crew members murmured to each other and pointed at the planet, and Stephani listened and tried to judge from their voices how much hope they held onto.
Ariadne’s schedule must have been similar to Stephani’s because she was there almost every time Stephani was. Stephani found herself watching the surveyor, averting her eyes only when it seemed Ariadne might look back at her.
Ariadne was tall, with dark brown skin that shimmered red in the low light of the viewing room. Every time Stephani saw her there, Ariadne leaned against the wall on the right side of the room, one arm and shoulder bracing her entire body, looked out the window, and didn’t speak. She had an abundance of loose curls which settled themselves around her cheekbones and brushed the nape of her neck. She jutted her chin out when she looked at the planet and kept her eyes half-closed.
Stephani gravitated to the back of the viewing room in order to keep both Ariadne and the planet in sight. On days when the clouds over Teridabe were dull and still, Stephani turned her eyes to the surveyor instead of the window. From nearly fifteen years on the same ship, she knew all the basics: that Ariadne had come with her brother, who had been one of the first to die of the fever on Civers; that she was four years younger than Stephani and one of the youngest people on the ship; that she generally shunned conversation.
It was the rest that Stephani wanted to know, the late-night exhausted questions that she had nobody to ask anymore. Did Ariadne miss Noralon, the cold moon they’d departed years ago? Did she still remember the faces of those she’d left behind? Did she think some other ship had succeeded where Guiding Light had not, setting up a colony and returning to lead Noralon’s inhabitants to a welcoming planet?
When had she realized their mission was doomed?
Two months before they would start orbiting Teridabe, Stephani entered her workroom to a message from the bridge with three sets of measurements. She stared for a moment at her screen, mind blank with unearned shock. They were really going to do it. They were going to sacrifice three of the remaining seven surveyors to the skeletal idea of a mission that might not mean anything anymore.
Stephani took inventory of what they had left and made notes on potential adjustments. For planet entry and discovery, they would all need independent filtration and pressure systems, no umbilical cords, no shared power sources. She had two unused pressure systems and one good set of temperature tubes. There were a lot of parts of filtration systems and only one whole one.
Stephani had a lot of parts of a lot of things. She didn’t have the room to lay them out at her desk, and she didn’t want to invade Shruti’s abandoned office or Yael’s nook, identical to hers except for its emptiness. Not yet. So she read the notes and swiped through the pictures on the screen, taken when the suit components were last sealed and stored.
The more she read, the worse it looked.
There was a time when Stephani would have taken her screen to Shruti and let the other woman talk her out of her anxiety and tell her exactly how it was all going to work out. Yael would come behind them unbidden and point to tiny improvements they could make, would have the measurements memorized after a single scan of the document, would have simulations running by the time Stephani was back to believing anything was possible after all.
The three of them had approached their initial target planet, Civers, with optimism. The first surveyors had sent pictures and descriptions of plants around the large planet’s lush midsection. Shruti, who had tried for years to keep a tiny tray of herbs alive under the steady glare of a sunlamp, had volunteered to be part of the ground team when they expanded the living quarters on-planet. The whole ship was unfolding and unlocking all its resources, taking out the planetsuits and the pods and the colony building blocks. They sent them down freely and generously, happy and confident that they would leave a settlement on the planet and take good news back to Noralon.
And then someone got sick. They still didn’t know where it came from—plant matter leaking through gloves, maybe, or a breach in the decontamination zone—but the fever was everywhere before they could identify it. Shruti, on the ground, had gone first, just another name on the list on Stephani’s screen.
And then Yael, clutching Stephani’s hand through a plastic sheet.
Stephani often wondered which of the three of them had signed off on the suit that brought in the pathogen, if it was due to a suit malfunction at all. It could have been user error, but that was never the possibility that kept Stephani awake, staring at her screen, at night.
During the fever, the ship had been divided into strict rotations, groups of people who didn’t meet, just until they disinfected, they’d said. The bridge presented the rest of the ship with the plan: they would go to Teridabe, the next planet in the same star system. They would collect samples and collect readings on the planet surface. And then they would return to Noralon, their mission over.
By the time they approached Teridabe, nearly three years later, the regimented schedule of off-cycle travel had relaxed into recommendation, but Stephani found herself bound by routine. There was no one she wanted to talk to, no one she wanted to see but those who were gone.
Staring at the inventory of broken and disinfected parts, Stephani didn’t have to wonder what would happen if Yael or Shruti had lived—they would do better than her. She scheduled a meeting on the bridge.
Five days after the landing, Mikhail sends his first set of data back to Guiding Light. The bridge turns off the displays in the ship and stops broadcasting the audio communication for twenty whole minutes while they converse with him.
Stephani is back in her bunk this time, alone with her thoughts. The screen above her bed flashes suggestions for what to do while the display is down—would she like to watch a video from Noralon? Would she like to complete some memory-retention puzzles? Would she like to look at pictures from the first landing? The last one includes a preview of the pictures—Stephani, dark hair long over her chest, arms around Yael. Shruti stands to one side of them, a hand on Yael’s shoulder, a smile on one side of her mouth. Behind the three of them, their office is a mess. Yael’s computer nook has a stack of empty caffeine pods. There are layers and layers of canvas, plastic, and thin tubing across Stephani’s desk.
It’s hard to believe that was only five years ago. They look so stupidly young.
Stephani stares at the preview photo and does not click on the option to see more.
When the display from the bridge comes back, it’s a relief. Except, when Stephani looks at the numbers, the temperature readings on the inside of Mikhail’s suit are dropping. Not surging down, just ticking slowly downward by a tenth of a degree or so every few minutes.
Stephani’s breath catches, and her fingers hesitate just below the screen. Maybe this is the kind of thing she should message someone on the bridge about, but she knows they’ll have seen it by now. Everyone on the ship, more or less, is staring at these numbers.
He’ll sleep in the pod tonight, and that might keep his temperature up, but he can’t travel in the pod. He’s 350 kilometers from Ariadne and the lander. Stephani thinks about constructing his planetsuit, remembers the inner layer laid out on her worktable, thinks about the thermometers stitched in at the throat, at the chest, at the hip. She thinks about the web of tiny tubes, the generator to heat the water, the layers and layers of plastic and canvas to protect the inner workings from dust and ice.
The failure could be in any part of the suit; the display doesn’t say. They might tell her, if they manage to retrieve the data, but they also might not. There won’t be any future missions. She won’t be able to use the knowledge.
Stephani turns off the display but keeps the audio broadcast on. She listens to Mikhail notify the bridge that he’s going to attempt to rejoin Ariadne and the lander.
Fifty kilometers later, Mikhail’s vehicle gets stuck. When Stephani switches the display back on, she sees that his suit has dropped fifteen degrees.
Mikhail asks to speak to his wife. The audio broadcast goes silent.
When Stephani wakes, the display shows one red dot, 293 kilometers from the lander, and two sets of stats.
Six weeks before the planned landing on Teridabe, Stephani got her meeting on the bridge. She recognized the person she met with, Officer Dadre; they’d been a backup satellite setter when she joined. They were like her, someone woefully underqualified thrust into a position meant for a dead superior. This was no comfort to her as she unspooled her list of concerns about the mission. It all boiled down to one main point: after the damage to the planetsuits from disinfectants on Civers, Stephani didn’t think she could adequately outfit two people, let alone three.
The officer clasped their hands in front of them the entire time Stephani spoke, their knuckles white. The little speech she had prepared seemed to pass over and through them.
“What assistance can I provide?” they asked when Stephani finally sat back, out of breath. “Can any materials from the inside of the ship be repurposed? Do you require an assistant? We’re understaffed, um, everywhere, but the priority of your office would be enough to…”
“We don’t have enough materials to properly outfit the surveyors,” Stephani said again, trying to sound pleasant. “I don’t think we should send them down.”
“Perhaps materials can be gathered from elsewhere in the ship,” Officer Dadre suggested. “We do have much more space per person than we did when we set out.”
“You can’t loot the inside of a ship for planetsuits,” Stephani told them. “I need heating tubes and seals and filters, and you don’t have those.” She swallowed. “We should turn around now and go back to Noralon.”
Officer Dadre blinked. “It’s another fifteen years back at least, and we’re already so close. Noralon is dying. We can’t declare mission failure now.”
Stephani leaned forward. “Noralon has decades, maybe even a century. On Teridabe, the surveyors will have a few weeks at the most. The mission has already failed. If we go back now we’ll have more people alive than we do if we send them down.” And that, she thought, was as much of a success as they could hope for.
The officer straightened their back. They were taller than Stephani, and they stared down their nose at her. “The bridge is decided. This mission must be carried out, Outfitter.”
Heat gathered in Stephani’s throat and nose and eyes. She looked behind the officer’s shoulder, at the faded spot on the smooth plastic wall where a picture used to hang. She put her forearms on the table. “What if I refuse to build the suits?”
Officer Dadre’s mouth was a grim line. They sat in silence for a moment, staring at the table, at Stephani’s terribly fake show of decision.
“Someone on the ship would fulfil your duties,” they said eventually. “The mission would continue.”
“Nobody on this ship cou—”
“Dismissed, Outfitter.”
After that, the bridge didn’t grant her any more meetings.
Stephani went straight to the viewing chamber after her meeting with Officer Dadre, already a little late for her slot in the unofficial rotation. She could tell something was different even before she took her now-usual position in the back of the room and watched Ariadne.
The surveyor wasn’t leaning against the wall. Instead she was standing training-stiff, feet shoulder-width apart, hands clasped behind her back. She went unnoticed in the gentle eddy of people, but Stephani looked at Ariadne—at the set of her jaw, the way she stared down the planet through the window—and she thought of the measurements on her screen back in the office and she knew.
Stephani closed her eyes when the feeling hit her chest. Another loss to look forward to, and this one would be her fault.
In the week after Mikhail’s death, Stephani stands in the mess hall with a small crowd whenever she’s free and looks for abnormalities in Lorena’s stats. It’s the eleventh day of the mission when she sees the fluctuations in Lorena’s pressure reading. For a moment, it feels like a spotlight is shining on the numbers, that everyone will turn to see that this is her fault, that she, Stephani, created this impossible situation.
But then Stephani takes another breath. She looks at the map. The atmosphere of the planet isn’t so bad, not terribly oppressive in any direction. Lorena is now 543 kilometers from Ariadne and very close to the point where she will take samples from the water on one edge of the continent before she turns around and heads back to the lander. She’s already sent the bridge three rounds of data on the soil and atmosphere, none of which has been shared with the rest of the ship. Stephani doesn’t know what that means. She doesn’t really care. After Civers, they don’t have the materials to set up a real base; they’re going to turn back to Noralon soon enough.
The transportations team has done a better job than Stephani of scrounging parts and putting them together; Lorena’s vehicles have all kept pace with each other remarkably well. She reports on some vegetation, sparse and brown-green, and every half hour or so the screen plays her pictures of the plants.
On Civers, the presence of plants was seen as a huge success, a sign of life, an indication that they might be able to build something on the planet and bring hope back with them to Noralon.
Now, Stephani and the people around her have new associations. The woman with brown hair and a blue scarf who stands next to her—Minerva—stiffens when the pictures come on screen. There’s nothing inherently dangerous about the plants, with their long, flat leaves and soft, bulging stems, but they seem to ooze menace instead of sap. Stephani looks around her when the pictures come up again. Minerva is tense, and the tall person with a bun to her left—Shayne, Stephani thinks—keeps rubbing their face.
Stephani looks at Lorena’s stats, at the tiny fluctuations, and at Ariadne’s steady numbers, and she hopes the women will live.
After her horrible meeting with Officer Dadre, communication with the bridge was a one-way flood of information—details about the planet, updates to the mission, specifications for the suits. Stephani tried to temper expectations, sending pictures of broken chest plates and corroded heating tubes, but there was no response. She had known it was hopeless, anyway; they would send the surveyors down in plastic supply bags if that was all they had. Anything to fulfil the mission.
Stephani learned that Mikhail and Lorena would each take a pod as well as several of the leggy planet-crawling robots and set off for one of the two continents. Their suits would need to be durable and flexible, structured enough for long-term wear but light enough to allow for travel—an endless list of oxymoronic requirements. Ariadne would stay with the lander and start to set up a more structured living pod for the remaining four surveyors, in the hopes that they would be able to join her. That this was a functional impossibility was completely ignored. Ariadne’s suit wouldn’t need as much flexibility, the bridge told Stephani, even less durability. She was less likely to be exposed to extreme conditions.
Stephani matched parts in the inventory to the sketches she made on her screen and opened Yael and Shruti’s office space. She unboxed parts, trying to cover her old boss’s desk in plastic and metal before she could look at the rings Shruti’s water bottle had left on the surface. As she unpacked, Stephani let her fingers rest on cold metal helmets, on rough accordioned tubes, on layers and layers of plastic and canvas. She would have to cut outlines out of these layers, fit them to the surveyors, sew them into their coffins.
That night, flat in her bunk, Stephani turned off her overhead screen and turned her speakers up, letting music sink through her skin. She kept turning the same puzzle over and over in her mind: what still mattered?
If the surveyors died quickly, if Teridabe turned out to hold a fraction of the disappointments of its sibling, Guiding Light would turn back to Noralon. Everyone on the ship would be a failure, but they’d be going home.
Home was a fragile concept. There had been a time, before Civers, when she’d thought the office late at night, with Yael humming to hirself and Shruti trying not to cluck at either of them, was home enough for her. They would override the ship’s 24-hour cycle and let the lights shine orange on their metal countertops while they worked, busy and happy and together. They didn’t always have so much to do in the years leading up to Civers, but they planned for all the scenarios Yael could dream up—a lush, green, loving place, a brittle ice planet, a water landing. They’d believed they were prepared for everything.
But now, Stephani longed for a bed she could sink into with gravity instead of magnets. She missed the view of the sky she’d had from the towers of Noralon, where the stars had looked like hope. Where it hadn’t been her job to see everything as a threat and herself as the first and last line of defense.
Still in her bunk, Stephani closed her eyes and thought of her materials. She had enough plastic and canvas, though perhaps not enough time to properly test and fit them. There was one good set of heating tubes, and one passable set. Filters…there would have to be filters somewhere. Hopefully there was a set they hadn’t even opened before Civers and the slow, disintegrating pressure of disinfectants that had seemed necessary at the time.
Now, it seemed there might be material for one good suit. One suit that Stephani could be relatively proud of. One suit to pin her hopes on.
It wasn’t really a question who it would go to. Stephani had nothing against Mikhail or Lorena, but they would be moving, putting their suits under more stress, and, well, it was Stephani’s decision. Stephani wanted to nurture the spark she saw in the curve of Ariadne’s cheek in the viewing room. She wanted to let that warm her for the long journey home.
Lorena dies in one fatal instant.
It’s not the pressure system that does it; it’s her boots. Her green dot blinks at the very edge of the landmass on the crudely colored map, and she narrates back and forth with the bridge—she’s taking the water samples.
“Do we want a second vial?” she asks, and her voice comes through the speakers in the mess hall crackling and fuzzy.
“Yes,” someone from the bridge says.
“Should I test this one first?”
“No.”
“Alrighty,” Lorena says, a trace of humor in her tone. “Then it’s just this last one, and I’ll start the baselines.”
The microphones are internal to her suit, so they don’t hear her bending over, don’t hear her slip on the rocks of the shore.
“Oh, shit,” she says, and then her stats go crazy.
The mess hall goes perfect silent for a long, horrified moment. Then a faint crackling comes over the speakers in a gentle pattern, and Stephani realizes that it’s the sound of the water, of waves lapping at the microphone inside the suit. She wonders if the data in the last few seconds of Lorena’s life will make up for the vials of water that will never make it to the ship, if her stats will lay out the story of her death for the chemists on the bridge. She wonders if they’ll let Ariadne come back up now.
To one side of her, Shayne, bun messy and lopsided, bends to talk to a blond man. Stephani blinks and tries to breathe. All at once, she notices again the thinness of the crowd—the places where they aren’t touching each other, the spaces the dead left behind—and feels suddenly, dizzyingly lonely. The crowd begins to trickle out the door in pairs and trios, groups of people murmuring to each other in hushed voices, closing the gaps, laying hands on each other’s shoulders and arms. Stephani is untethered, weightless, gasping with it. She wants someone to pat her on the back, to smile at her in understanding, to see her in the moment. But for someone to be so close, they might recognize her, might know enough to blame her for what she has done and what she has failed to do.
It is better to stay as she is, untouched.
The week before the surveyors’ first fitting, Stephani tore out the tubing from Mikhail’s suit because it was the best. She relined the inner layer of Ariadne’s suit twice and submerged the whole suit in water three times to check the seal, until it came out perfectly dry on the inside. She had to request the testing water specially each time; she tested Mikhail and Lorena’s suits too, in the second and third tanks, and patched up the obvious leaks. But after the third time, the thigh of Lorena’s suit was still slightly damp. Stephani thought about contagion, about breaks in the seal and the endless capacity of a pathogen given the smallest bit of space, and she didn’t ask for more water. She didn’t have the time. And Ariadne’s suit was watertight.
At the fitting, Stephani couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. Mikhail and Lorena entered together. Ariadne was several steps behind them. Her eyes widened for the tiniest moment when she saw Stephani, but she sat to wait while Stephani fitted the others without a second glance.
The surveyors all wore stress in their shoulders. It couldn’t be easy, Stephani thought, helping them into their garments. Everyone must be always watching them. With hope, perhaps, but also with guilt.
Stephani made the surveyors bend and walk and stretch, taking notes on her screen. Lorena was older, with greying black hair and a polite smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Mikhail was too tall for any of the pre-made inner suits. Maybe that was why he hadn’t been sent down earlier. Stephani wondered if he resented his legs or thanked them. She didn’t look him or Lorena in the eye when she snipped the loose stitches she’d sewn them in with, her silver scissors freeing them from their outer layers.
Mikhail and Lorena left together when Stephani was done with the two of them, not waiting for Ariadne. Stephani turned to Ariadne, the question clear on her face.
“They have more to prepare for than I do. More meetings and trainings and simulations.” Ariadne shrugged. “It’s hard to begrudge them the time they have.”
“Yes,” Stephani said, kneeling to check the fit on Ariadne’s boots. “I can understand that.”
“What would you do, Outfitter, if you had two weeks left?”
“I don’t know,” Stephani said, pressing carefully against the seal at the ankle, listening for a hiss of air.
“I think you would look at me,” the surveyor said. “I think you would just look at me and look at me until your time was up.”
Stephani froze, her hand halfway to her screen. Even in that moment, she wanted to turn her head up, to see Ariadne’s face, to know whether her mouth went flat in anger, whether her eyes went cold, but she kept her eyes on the woman’s boot.
After a moment, Stephani felt Ariadne’s hand on the top of her head, a gentle weight.
“It’s a tangible feeling, you know,” the surveyor said. “Being watched.” She laughed. “When I saw you were the outfitter, it was the first moment of hope I had.”
Stephani leaned back onto her arms to look at Ariadne. “Why is that?”
Ariadne’s forehead was smooth, her cheeks soft, her lips full and open. Her face was pristine as she whispered her guilty secret. “I want to live.”
Stephani looked up at her and swallowed. Ariadne was in the bottom half of her suit alone; the pants gaped at the waist and left her torso fragile and defenseless, the stem of a flower a head above the rest. She was beautiful and terrified. Stephani could not make her any promises.
The day after Lorena dies, two things happen. Guiding Light’s orbit takes it to the other side of the planet from Ariadne, and an ice storm sweeps over her. Communication between the ship and the planet shuts down.
Stephani sits in the mess hall staring at the gray screen long after dinner has ended, mostly alone. She didn’t realize, before, that she found the crowd as comforting as it was alienating, that Minerva’s blue scarf and Shayne’s messy bun were tiny anchors holding Stephani to the rest of the ship. She thinks she probably should have tried to make other friends after Yael and Shruti, that silent staring might not be the sole cure to loneliness. Even if Ariadne is somehow alive at the end of this, Stephani needs to build herself into her own person again.
Stephani sits very still, as if that will stop disaster from touching her. She thinks about Yael’s simulations—wind speed and hail size and pressure levels—and about the suit.
When she suited the three of them up, before they entered the lander, Lorena and Mikhail wanted to go last, so they could hug their friends and family a moment longer. Ariadne nodded once, sharp, and said that was fine, that she’d go first.
Stephani dressed her slowly and deliberately, stitching up the last open gaps in the outer layer, murmuring notes about the suit the entire time. When Stephani went to adjust the tubing on Ariadne’s side, the surveyor blinked at her, a slow sweep of dark eyelashes, and squeezed her hand.
“Stay alive,” Stephani said.
“Thank you,” Ariadne whispered, and the soft, hushed words echoed in Stephani’s head until the lander left the ship.
Seventeen hours after they lose contact, twenty-three hours after Stephani last slept, the screen starts updating again. Stephani’s in her bunk, but when she sees the flicker of movement on her screen, she jumps up and runs to the mess hall.
“Guiding Light to Teridabe,” says an even voice over the speakers. “Teridabe, do you hear us?”
Silence.
Stephani is almost at the entrance to the mess hall now, and the corridor is filled with other people too, all heading in the same direction. It’s already crowded toward the front. As she enters, Stephani realizes she’s looking for brown hair against blue and Shayne’s messy bun. She settles into a spot in the space between several circles of people, just behind Minerva and her blue scarf. Minerva turns and smiles at her, brief, and turns her attention back to the screen.
“Guiding Light to Teridabe,” the voice repeats, louder. “Ariadne, can you hear us?”
“Teridabe to Guiding Light. I’m here.” The sound is fuzzy and imperfect, but it’s Ariadne’s voice. The whole mess hall erupts in cheers, Stephani along with them, only to go silent again when Ariadne continues speaking.
“Permission to prepare the lander for return?” Ariadne’s voice sounds rough even through the crackle of the speakers. Stephani wonders if she’s been crying. She hopes she’ll be able to ask, someday.
The answering pause feels like a lifetime. Stephani doesn’t breathe. Her cynicism fills in the blanks: Ariadne isn’t done with the useless living pod; Ariadne’s samples may have been compromised by the storm; Ariadne’s part in the mission may not be over.
The person on the broadcast sniffs once. “Permission granted.”
Everyone is cheering again, and Stephani screams along with them. Her eyes are wet, and someone’s arms are around her—Shayne’s, she thinks—and that’s fine, that’s wonderful, because everybody is hugging everybody.
In a few minutes, when her throat is raw and sore, when she’s hugged every person whose face she recognizes, Stephani will go to the viewing room and watch the lander shoot up from the planet’s surface, gleaming silver against the purple and pink of Teridabe’s clouds.
After that, she will take herself and her tiny silver scissors to the return bay, just past the decontamination zone, and she will cut Ariadne out of her suit and welcome her home.
(Editors’ Note: “The Coffin Maker” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 54B.)
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© 2023 AnaMaria Curtis
