The Cosmonaut Who Died Twice, part 3
In which Galina spends some time with her son, before leaving Earth.
You can order the full eBook right now, and it will arrive at the end of May.
(Paperback coming in Fall 2024, once I have the cash for new ISBN codes)
3. Viktor
Viktor pushed his Lego spaceship across the carpet. Since his last product demonstration he had added a gear to each axle, and another two gears at ninety-degree angles to those, so that the front of the car-ship-thing had a rotating drill, and the back of it had a turning satellite dish. These could be accessed by pulling off the front and back panels, which were loosely attached to a careful arrangement of studs sticking out between tiles.
Galina imagined EM might have some innocent but corrective points to make about the effectiveness of such a design, which reminded her they hadn’t had dinner together for a while. Galina had been quite antisocial. She supposed she was compensating for the intense closeness she would soon experience within the starship. After all, the entire crew lived on the same ‘street’ of staff houses. Everyone had a view of the lake, most of them had a dim glimpse of the towers, if they had telescopes in their upstairs bedrooms, which several did. Jeven had once used his to beam a toy laser into a spot on Clance’s wall for a prank, before calling him to say strange red lights had been spotted on campus. Naturally, Clance hung up when he saw the red dot above his television.
Galina watched the Lego dish change shape as Viktor unfolded something akin to flower petals out from its underside. She was amazed with his ingenuity.
“And what does that do?” Galina asked her son.
“It checks for aliens,” the little boy adjusted a hinge at the dish’s base. It broke off briefly, but he reattached it with only a small frown. Galina smiled, watched his careful movements, wondered if she’d spoken too much of work at home.
“How does it do that?”
“It uses the dish to listen, like a big ear.”
“It’s very nice,” Galina said. She went silent, hearing her words played back in her head. She didn’t believe herself. She sounded fake, distant. She looked over her son’s head, out the window, into the flickering sunset reflecting on the lake’s surface. It reminded her of the campus pond, of the conversations she had to keep away from the world, of Clance and EM and Jeven. She felt a dark tension inside her chest. How could she convey to her son that some nights mummy simply didn’t want to go to space? That sometimes all she wanted was to forget about the pyramid, to hold little Viktor and abandon the mission?
She looked back to her son, the ‘security risk’. No family could be told about the object, and many offers had been made for a permanent babysitter long before Galina was briefed on the reality of the mission, all of which she refused. They were separating them from the very beginning, plucking her from her baby just because some cluster of data analysers had decided she was not just a brilliant pilot and captain, but that she would get along with her crewmates for the extended mission.
Galina got up, walked to the bathroom, left Viktor alone for a moment. She looked at herself in the mirror, at the manic fear in her eyes. She dreaded sleeping. The pyramid had invaded every dream now, every idea, every memory. If only she could talk about it, it would stop looping through her mind.
The whole thing reminded her of Roswell and other UFO incidents. All those stories of knocks on the door at night. All those pale men with gaunt faces. All those warnings, so subtle as to dissolve in your ears as soon as they were whispered.
“Bad things happen in the desert. People go missing all the time,” Galina mouthed, remembering a documentary on UFOs Clance had shown her some weeks before. Like every other crewmember she had become preoccupied with finding some anchorage for the pyramid in media or folklore. Skinwalkers, Chupacabra, Moth men, none yielded anything remotely like the Pyramid. Even pyramids on Earth were quickly brushed off as unconnected, because unlike the tetrahedron out in space, each of these had four sides to its base.
Whatever the thing was, there was no precedent for it in fact or theory or fiction.
In every way possible, it was alien.
Galina washed her face and stepped back out of the bathroom. Viktor had barely noticed her vanishing act. He was preoccupied with taking off and replacing the wheels that drove the dishes and the sensors as he pushed the toy across the small carpet by the sliding doors. Galina drew the blinds closed, shutting off the universe, a rodent hiding from an asteroid in its burrow. But the future was hurtling in still, the lights atop the campus flickering dimly through the fabric blinds. She drew dark emerald curtains over these, another protective layer against infinity. The warm light of the fireplace felt brighter now. Galina composed herself.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at a long part of the Lego model.
“That’s the communications tower.”
“What’s that for?”
“It’s so you can call home.”
Galina sat back on the sofa, fidgeted.
“I’ll call as soon as I can,” she said unconvincingly. Her son, not knowing any better, accepted the answer. Galina watched as he repositioned dishes and antennae, pretending to make a direct phone call between the ship and mission control. Perhaps she had told him too much of the minutiae of space travel. Still, this childish version wasn’t so bad. Viktor picked up a little Lego phone and had one of his minifigures walk about outside the spaceship. Galina recognised their pacing as the pacing she did whenever she had a long phone call from family. She smiled, but somewhere deep within her mind she knew that she might not make those calls again. It was as if something would go horribly, inconceivably wrong out there in space. She wished she could stay here, in this perfect house on this perfect fringe of the finest campus she had ever stepped foot in. In many ways, this was as far as she’d ever really wanted to go. Space was just the magnet that dragged her here, physics just the job that paid the bills.
Viktor turned to his mother and removed a small spaceship from the side of his Lego machine. He passed it to his mother.
“What’s this?” she asked with genuine interest.
“The escape pod. It’s good luck!”
“It’s very nice. Is that me in there?”
“I couldn’t make it super big. But. I imagined everyone else fits too.”
“Everyone else does fit, you’re right.”
“Or everyone gets their own, and you can race home!”
“That would be fun!” Galina agreed. She zoomed the toy escape pod through the air, watching as little Viktor laughed. He would be a genius someday. He was already a genius, even if he didn’t realise it. Galina finished playing with the escape pod and passed it back to her son, who refused it.
“You should take it,” Viktor said. His mother bit her bottom lip.
“Why?”
“Silly! I said it’s good luck!”
“Well. In that case,” Galina smiled. “I suppose I have room for it.”
She put the spaceship down on the arm of the sofa and leaned forward, hugging her son. She wept softly and silently over his shoulders, another secret she would have to keep from him. When she sensed he had had enough hugging, she stood up and turned to the kitchen island, which was combined with this central room. As she walked she knocked the escape pod by accident, having forgotten about it.
The thing tumbled and smashed on the floor.
“Oh no! I’m so sorry Viktor!” Galina said, the tears almost starting again. She was worried he might see, but the little boy had already rushed to save the escape pod and had managed, somehow, to put the cockpit back on already.
“It’s only seven pieces,” he said happily, reassembling the thing.
“I’m so clumsy,” Galina said.
“It’s okay I can improve it!” Viktor had clearly seen this accident as a test of the craft’s robustness, and was quite happy to change things. Galina made her way around the kitchen island, putting away any thoughts of the pyramid and the mission.
“Who wants astronaut food?” she asked Viktor. Every aspect of their lives had been reshaped around the mission, even down to playful jokes at dinner time. Viktor put the reassembled escape pod on the kitchen counter and opened the cockpit, removing a minifigure from it. Galina spun the escape pod on its base, looking at the minifigure standing beside it. She wondered how long little Viktor had spent picking out the perfect face, the perfect hair. Somehow, these details always took him far longer than the complex planning and construction of entire spaceships, which seemed to come naturally to him.
“Macaroni and cheese?” he asked.
“I don’t know if we have any in,” Galina joked. She opened a top cupboard, revealing boxes upon boxes of the stuff. This would last them until launch day, at which point Viktor would receive a new shipment of his favourite meal, and an extended visit from his grandmother, the only babysitter Galina approved of.
Hi Phillip! I hope you’re enjoying your stay in USA!
I wanted to know how many pages did the book have, please? Thank you!
Have fun! 🧡🤗