Sequence Six: Summer Suns

It was the autumn equinox, but we lived in an exurb of Sausalito so the night was by no means cold. Still, I could almost imagine a trace of chill as we walked slowly through the neighborhood. Or maybe it was nerves: I knew what Tom was thinking, had known it for days, ever since my birthday the Wednesday before, the day they made the announcement. Or maybe it was a frisson that came from the beauty of that night, deep and majestic. The stars blazed overhead in an exceptionally clear sky; everything in the heavens seemed closer to the earth.

When we arrived at the recreation grounds Tom made his way to the adult-sized swing set, as he always did. But rather than swinging he sat, hung back, and stared upwards.

"Looking for comet Bechel-Franck?" I asked him. "It won't be visible until next month. By New Year's it'll be spectacular."

"Yeah, Paul... I heard about that," he said, distracted.

I knew what my husband was really looking for: Not a comet, but a way to ask permission. I didn't want to give it to him, but I knew that I would.

I sat on the swing next to Tom's. Reaching out, I invited his hand; absently, he slipped it into mine. We both gazed up at the night, and the dark, and the constellations.

"Go ahead, Tom," I urged him gently.

He looked at me sidelong.

"Go ahead and apply," I said.

"What do you mean?" he asked, unconvincingly. Coy, cagey Tom. He smiled bashfully, and met me halfway. "Are you talking about the Colony Project?"

"You're dying to see if they'd accept you," I said. "Aren't you?"

He didn't deny it. He pushed off lightly with one foot, pulling me along, and we swung together, out of phase until I leaned into the arc a little bit and brought us into sync.

"Well, yeah," he said at length. "Sure. But, I mean, there's you, and there's the company... And let's say I did apply. What if they said no?" He hesitated. "What if they said yes?"

"Of course they'd say yes," I told him. "They'd be crazy not to. A bright, good-looking guy like you? Young and strong? A Harvard graduate, a Ph.D. candidate and entrepreneurial pioneer in chloro-energy?"

"And married," Tom pointed out.

"What, they won't take married guys?"

"As a matter of fact, they won't. Did you read about the family stipulations?"

I shook my head no.

"Married people can apply, but unless both spouses are accepted... and then they both actually board the ship for the prelaunch training... they have to get divorced. Otherwise, the applicant won't qualify."

"That sucks," I said, though I could see the sense in it. Inside, my heart was sinking.

"I wouldn't want to leave you," Tom said. I could almost hear him summoning himself up in the long moment that followed. "Maybe you'd be willing to apply along with me?"

"Hell, no!"

I surprised both of us; the words came out harsher than I had intended. Tom retreated into pensive silence, and I looked for a way to revive the conversation. "Tom... lover... look. There's not one good reason they'd reject your application. It's what comes after they accept you that we'd have to worry about."

"There are lots of reasons why they would turn me down," Tom ruminated. "I might fail the medical."

"You're in great shape!"

"What concerns me is the genetic screening," Tom said. "My aunt Clara died of ovarian cancer, and my cousin had melanoma."

I tried to make light. "It's a journey of, what, eighteen light years? And no one even knows if any of the planets will be fit for human occupation... and the ship's life-support technology is untested... and so is that huge ion drive. And you're worried about cancer?"

Tom half-shrugged, half-grinned. At six-three, built like the athlete he was, olive-skinned and rugged, it was hard for him to look awkward and shy -- but he managed it sometimes. It tugged at my heart.

"Cancer's a real concern," he said. "It's going to take more than a year and a half for the Aditi to get out of the solar system, and the ship's electromagnetic shielding won't keep out all the cosmic rays and other radiation. Then there's more radiation waiting when we get there. A lot more, because 70 Ophiuchi is a binary star system. Anyway, the thing is, why haul someone that far across the galaxy only for him to get cancer a few years later?"

He hesitated, the pedant in him struggling for release. "And by the way, it's more like sixteen and a half light years," he corrected me, almost apologetically. "And only two of those planets are likely to be Earth-like terrestrial types. The third is a small gas planet, a 'mini-Jupiter' instead of a 'super-Earth.' "

He reigned himself in and gave me his adorable Bad Puppy look. Seeing it, I remembered why I could deny him nothing, not even permission to leave me for the stars. With luck, it wouldn't come to that... but then again, I thought to myself, what kind of luck would it be if they turned him down? Good? Or bad?

Good for me, maybe. Bad for him – and I knew it. He was born for just this sort of expedition. I had known it from the minute they'd made the announcement.

"Happy equinox," I offered, as the silence grew long again. It seemed cosmic and a propos.

"Huh? Oh... It's one more point in the endless cycle," Tom said, his thoughts still elsewhere. "In three months it'll be the winter solstice. Three months after that, it's the vernal equinox. Then it's the summer solstice. Then we're right back here again... I'm sorry," he said, pulling himself back to planet Earth and to me. "Thanks for the equinox greeting." He squeezed my hand, and we rose from the swings.

We walked onward, making our accustomed loop through the neighborhood and heading back toward home. The stars gleamed in their multitudes.

***

Tom and I met during my last year in college, at a Seder hosted by mutual friends. He was already well into grad school, and about to spend a year at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.

Somehow – through optimism, or lust, or blind faith – we managed to forge a connection, then keep it strong and thriving. Our carbon footprints grew along with our PCD bills, given all the trans-Atlantic travel we did and all the hours we spent video chatting, but we found that we hated to be apart. We breathed a sigh of relief when his year abroad was over and he returned to Kentucky.

Things got complicated again when I was accepted to Harvard for grad school. Tom had attended Harvard as an undergrad, and though he'd hated winter in Massachusetts, he'd loved his years at the school. He welcomed the chance to return to Cambridge for our frequent, if brief, reunions. In the middle of my grad school tenure, he relocated from Kentucky to Sausalito to get his chloro-energy startup going.

Sometimes the travel and the distance and the general stress of trying to balance our lives got to be exhausting. When that happened, he'd make a special trip and we'd spend a long weekend ignoring our PCDs and refusing to check our mail, shutting out the world, reconnecting and recharging with each another.

"This is crazy. It'll never work," I'd fret.

"It's fine," he'd soothe me. "It's not crazy. It's just as it's supposed to be."

I wasn't sure I believed, as he did, in the idea that the universe had a proper shape and every person's journey led to the proper outcome. But he'd smile and melt my doubts, saying, "Some day, this will all make sense."

"All the sense I need is for you to tell me that some day we won't have to be separated," I'd request.

He'd kiss my hand gently and smile at me. "Never," he'd say. "We're never separated, lover. Distance doesn't matter."

That was sweet, and I understood what he was saying, but from a practical standpoint it wasn't quite true. Distance did matter. For one thing, I never felt quite at ease, or even complete, with him so far away.

Finally, I finished my masters degree and we were able to set up house together in a leafy, quiet neighborhood in Sausalito. The first thing we did was get married; the second thing was renovate the upstairs bedroom and bath. Then we settled into domestic bliss. We'd had six years to enjoy a shared existence that was comfortable, easy, almost sleepy – like the kindness of youth, or the generosity of summer. But seasons end, and those measly six years passed by in a snap. Now here we were, contemplating separation again, this time across light years. This time forever.

Whatever the colonists found at the end of their long journey, the Aditi was never coming back.

***

Tom found the essay to be the hardest part of the application process. The essay was due November 1, and, as weeks rolled by, his anxiety mounted into near panic.

"Paul," he'd moan, looking up from his DataGlas, "this is impossible."

"Just write down, as simply as you can, what you really think and feel," I'd tell him.

"Everything I've written is so cliché – it's all so boilerplate!"

I had to laugh. Tom never had a mundane or unoriginal thought in his head, much less one that belonged to a boilerplate – whatever the hell that might be.

"So tell me why you want to go," I prompted him. "What excites you about the idea?"

He looked at me with a gleam in his eyes, his breath a little faster. "Everything! The mystery. The possibilities. Doing something human beings have never done before."

"Be more specific," I urged, curious – understandably, I think – about what he'd say.

"What if this... or something, I mean anything, like this... what if it's the reason for our existence?" he asked. "What I mean is, human beings have been around for a couple of hundred thousand years... but evolving to our current state isn't an end in itself. Even now, so much human activity relates, directly or indirectly, to perpetuation: Humans making more humans, the cycles of birth and time and death going on and on. Are we capable of anything more? I'd like to think so. Maybe this effort to colonize the stars is it. Maybe this is a way off the existential treadmill. Finally, finally we've reached a point where we can do something that amounts to more than just carrying on for the sake of carrying on." He looked at me, wondering if I understood him.

I did. The endless cycle seemed enough in itself for me, but I knew my husband and I knew that, for him, there needed to be something more.

"We used to look at the stars and make up stories," Tom said. "Now we can go to the stars and explore our environment in its largest sense... we can participate in a story larger than our own tiny, repetitious history."

"And?" I asked. "Why does it have to be you who goes? Not some other young, talented genius?"

He didn't even hesitate. "It's who I am. My ancestors were some of the first to come to America. They climbed Everest, they explored the Mariana and Calabrian deep-sea trenches. They mapped cave systems. My uncle Jared was an alternate for the manned Mars mission. Why wouldn't I want to be one of the first explorers to set foot on a planet in another star system?"

Because your husband doesn't want to leave Earth, I thought. I didn't mean to let the sentiment show, but it must have been written across my face.

"Oh my god, I'm sorry," Tom said. "I don't mean I want to leave you. I just... I have to know I asked the question."

I don't come from explorers and adventurers the way he does. My family were all farmers, teachers, administrators... there were even a few ditch-diggers in my lineage. My however-many-greats grandfather and his brothers helped excavate America's oldest subway, in Boston.

"I can't imagine leaving the Earth," I told him. "I would never want to forsake its green fields, its blue skies, sculpted deserts, shimmering seascapes. I don't think I could ever adjust to life in an alien environment. This Earth-type planet they're aiming for, it circles a red star? I don't think I'd like that."

"70 Ophiuchi B is an orange star," Tom said, with his bashful grin. "Does that make you feel better? I mean, back in Kentucky, you were always crazy for it in autumn when the leaves turned orange. You wear orange sweaters. You even have those god-awful orange tennis shoes. You love the color orange."

It was a clever joke as far as inside jokes go, but all I could offer was a faint smile. A moment later, seeing me choked up, he took my hand. "Lover," he murmured, and gave me a squeeze.

I squeezed back. "Husband," I managed.

"Always," he said.

***

The essay made Tom miserable, but the weeklong physical exam and psych profile (the "P and P," in Space Agency speak) were no picnic. For all that it worried him, Tom passed the genetic screening with flying colors. He took the tests in early January at a local healthcare office, and then the real fun began: Tom had to fly to Utah just after New Year's for all sorts of stress tests, scans, and samples.

Even as this was going on, the space agency's outreach personnel were conducting the usual background checks, as well as deep-background interviews. They contacted me, too, of course, and I gave Tom my highest recommendation – not because I wanted him to go, but because I wanted him to have the best chance of being able to accept their verdict, whatever it was, without regret or second-guessing.

After that, we heard nothing for months... until March, in fact. As I recall, it was the day of the vernal equinox, but that might simply be memory playing tricks, creating symmetries. In any case, I was preparing dinner when Tom padded into the kitchen, clutching his DataGlas. "They sent me a letter," he announced.

"What did they say?"

"They say that to see the result of my application, I have to log in at the official candidates' site. They send the address, the ID code, and the password."

"They couldn't just tell you?"

Tom half-shrugged, half-grinned. He tried to come off as calm, but he was clearly wound up, almost beside himself. "Bureaucrats," he said.

"Okay." I put down the knife, rinsed my hands, picked up a dishtowel. Tom and I sat down at the table. He logged onto the site, entered his password, and read.

"They accepted me," he said.

A moment went by.

"I'm going!" he shouted, leaping up.

I leaped up with him, grabbed him, and held on. "Of course you are," I said, not sure he heard me over his wild laughter.

***

The launch was scheduled for eighteen months later. Tom had a lot to do, between training for his new life and separating from his old one. Tom was going to be boarding the Aditi – still being readied in orbit – a month before launch, to acclimate and complete the shipboard portion of his training.

They advised Tom to approach his departure the same way he would approach the end of his life. In many ways, the two prospects were similar: He wasn't taking anything with him. His property had to be legally reassigned. He needed to visit relatives and close friends and say his goodbyes. If he wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, or any other terrestrial destination, now was the time to do it.

And he – I mean, we – had to decide on the date our marriage would dissolve. Unless I was accepted as a member of the colony, our legal ties had to end. The people in charge didn't want anybody dealing with the mother of all long-distance relationships. Besides, it would promote social stability if Tom were free to form new romantic attachments.

The night of the vernal equinox, a few hours after he got word of his acceptance, we lay in bed side by side and read the provisions of his contract aloud. When we got to the part about the marriage dissolution we both fell into a funk, even though we'd known about it from the start.

We were both acutely conscious of the hard-fought civil rights battles that had finally led to marriage for monogender couples a century and a half earlier. And now here we were: The state was telling us our marriage had to end. Granted, this was a completely different situation than the one that had existed in the bad old days; for one thing, the same regulation applied to heterosexual and same-sex couples alike, so we weren't being singled out. But the cultural memory of how the law had once treated same-sex families made this particular aspect of the contract that much more onerous. It was plenty onerous to begin with.

Tom set the Glas aside and gathered me up. We lay spooned together in silence. I think that was the first time it really hit Tom what leaving Earth would mean.

Tom reached to touch my hand. His finger traced my wedding band.

"All the gold in the universe was created by stars much larger than our sun," he said. "Primordial suns, burning an eternity before our solar system formed. Stars so big that when they died, the shockwave of their collapse blew their outer layers away in gigantic explosions, enriching the cosmos with complex molecules. Carbon. Gold. Us."

I knew this. "Yes, a supernova," I said. "When seen from Earth, they're brighter than whole galaxies."

"The universe evolves," he said. "Young suns ignite, fresh planets coalesce. Life emerges, gold laces new worlds. Precious metal that once didn't exist now signifies our bond."

"In the form of a circle," I said. "Like all of human existence."

If I hoped he would arrive at some new, kinder conclusion about cycles and the repetitions of history, I was in for a disappointment. My Tom was all about straight lines: Progress, the marking of moments and milestones that would never be repeated. His linear mind galloped right past.

"Now we have to think about exchanging the gold of that ancient sunlight for the silver of the stars," Tom murmured softly. We both stayed quiet for a long while after that. Finally he sighed, and I knew the question was coming.

"Is there any way you'd reconsider applying?" he asked me. There were still several months before admissions to the Colony Project would be closed. "If you were accepted, it wouldn't be a problem. We'd go together as a married couple. And if not, I could tell them thanks, but no thanks."

"Absolutely not," I said.

"You wouldn't apply? Even just to see?"

"No, I mean, absolutely you are not telling them, 'No thanks.' You have to go, Tom. You had to apply, or else wonder for the rest of your life; well, now you know: They accepted you. You're only of a tiny fraction of humanity that they're willing to invest in for this amazing project. But you can't leave it at that. You have to follow through and join the colony, or you'll always regret it. How can you possibly say no to the greatest adventure in human history?"

"Marriage to you is the greatest adventure," he offered. "Leaving you is something I'd regret."

I squeezed his hand. "That's sweet, but I think this is something a whole lot bigger than you, or me, or the two of us together. And I think you need to be part of it. It's who you are, Tom. It's your destiny."

"Oh my god," he muttered. "Drama queen."

I couldn't answer right away. Ahurewa Aoatea's recording of "Chants D'Auvergne" was on the house audio system, a tender and melancholy backdrop to our conversation. At that precise moment she was singing "La Delaissado":

"Lusiguèt l'estela, que marca la nuèit,
E la paura pastoreleta
Demorèt a plorar."

That bastard Marie-Joseph Canteloube. The music he'd written more than two hundred years earlier just about undid me. Tom calling me a drama queen was too on the nose: I tried to contain myself, but tears were dropping onto the pillow.

"Sugar plum." Tom held me tight.

Moments went by and the song came to an end.

"I did apply," I told him.

"You what?"

"I applied. They rejected me."

"You applied?"

"They made their minds up pretty quick. I got the rejection notice the same day I did genetic screening. I never even did the P and P."

"When did all this happen?"

"When you were in Colorado last month, hiking and white water rafting with Emory and Jones? About a month after you had your P and P? That's when I applied. I wanted to surprise you... but then I washed out."

"No one contacted me about it," Tom said. "Didn't they talk to you about my application? Why didn't they get in touch with me when you applied? Why didn't I know about this?"

"I don't think they got that far. Once I flunked the genetic screening, there was no reason they'd conduct interviews."

Tom took this in. "So it was the cancer thing," he sighed.

"Pretty ironic, isn't it?" I noted. "After you were so scared of that test, and you did fine. But it's very common... they told me that something like seventy percent of applicants wash out because of a genetic predisposition to cancer."

"Lover... sweetheart... " He kissed me. "You did that for me? What about all that stuff about never leaving the bosom of Mother Earth?"

"No offense, but you'd better leave the poetry to me."

We laughed. Tom breathed into my ear, nuzzling and tickling me.

We lay still for a long time. I felt him tremble against me. Then I felt him sigh deeply, and settle. I wanted to ask him how he could bear the thought of leaving; I wanted to ask how he could lack all terror at the thought that the ship might arrive after decades of travel and find nothing, nothing they could use, nothing to sustain them. I thought of the human need to venture forth, of Polynesian ocean-farers setting out and hoping to find dry land. How many of them perished far from shore? How few the lucky ones who found land...

I thought of our own Earth that offered so much, and how our race had damaged the planet's ecosystem before waking up and correcting course. If one day we left en masse for some new world, would it be an abandonment of Mother Earth? Or would our home world, like a mother, take pride in our having launched ourselves into an expansive new life? If a planet could have feelings, of course. If the Earth even took notice of us.

I thought about our own golden sun, presiding over our origins, our cycles of civilization and collapse, our eventual disappearance, which must one day come. A sun ageless and charitable, a sun of unending summer that could also turn cruel and that would, one day, scorch the planet lifeless. These thoughts slid into fitful dreams. I threaded in and out of sleep, and so did Tom, his occasional jolts waking me. Finally, he reached to turn out the light. Darkness swaddled us, infinite and comforting, and our dreams sparked and shimmered like stars.

***

Tom swore many times over the following year and a half that he was going to chuck the whole thing. Even for him, the math whiz, the advanced classes they wanted him to take were too taxing, or so he said. They had some idea that he was going to be an anchor of their nascent scientific community. Piled on top of that was exhausting preparation for decades of space travel... only about nine years shipboard time, given the expected relativistic effects, but still, that was a long stretch. They were drilling him hard in zero-G physical education to alleviate, to some degree, the loss of muscle tone and bone density that would result from extended time in free-fall.

Most of his travel time would be spent super-chilled in a cryotube, and that would arrest the physical deterioration caused by zero-G, but no one knew what nine years in cold storage would do to a person. The medical bigwigs advised no more than two or three years of cryo at a time, with a year of normal activity to allow the body to recover. It would take a couple of months just to flush the naturally-derived antifreeze out of his system.

Tom recoiled at the thought of being kept in sub-zero suspended animation. He much preferred warmth, and could never abide a chill. Plus, he kept waking up in a panic, dreaming about being sealed in a cryotube. It seemed that a latent case of claustrophobia was surfacing.

But daily life went on, and for weeks on end we could almost forget the ever-approaching launch date. The cold, close confines of the cryotube lay in the future. Until then, Tom had research to oversee, grants to secure, new ideas to refine, patents to nail down. He also had clusters of training days and online classes... plus, he had to contend with the personal turmoil of separating from his life as he'd known it. His business partners were cursing his name, certain that without his dual degrees in biophysics and biofuel engineering (not to mention the benefit of his handsome face and winning Southern charm), the company would founder. Worse, his parents and sisters were giving him the resentful silent treatment for choosing, as they put it, to turn his back on them.

Meantime, I had work to do, too. My associate professorship wasn't going to tend itself. I published a novel and readied a collection of stories. A sensortium company expressed interest in the outline for my next book, which I then had to rush into writing.

Those were only some of the projects I needed to complete. The colony mission's psych personnel had designed a morale-boosting program in which they encouraged Earth-bound friends and family to keep "our colonists" well supplied with updates and messages of support. Some of this would consist of transmissions to the ship, especially during the early months of the voyage; some of it would be a matter of pre-recorded messages and greetings uploaded to the Aditi's mainframe before the ship even left orbit, and parceled out on special occasions. I didn't have enough time with my husband in the here and now as it was, and I needed to take hours – sneak hours, in some cases – to be ready for a future I was dreading.

The guidelines they provided sometimes seemed absurd, and sometimes bleakly pertinent. There were different sorts of special themed messages they wanted: "Good Morning" greetings, holiday and birthday best wishes, "Catch You Up" missives in which we Earthbound ones were supposed to talk about our lives, current events, trends and fads.

Seeing Tom off thus became a project for a great number of people who loved him. Emory took charge and coordinated with Tom's circle of relatives and friends, making sure that we were all diligent about creating the recordings. Tom would emerge from his first stint in cryo to a slew of greetings from his parents and sisters, and all his friends, and me, too. As years passed, as occasions for greetings stacked up, a different sort of time dilation would take place. For Tom, it would be like watching history kick into high gear – years skipping by in fast-forward. He'd see me, his family, Emory and Jones, all of us aging from message to message, swaths of time compressed into a precious few minutes. When I sat in front of the Glas' pinpoint camera to record the "Good Morning" greeting, I thought about the guidelines the agency had supplied, and spoke plainly, casually, but also frankly. I told Tom I loved him and missed him, but emphasized that we had both made the right choice.

I made six such messages before the Aditi launched, and I planned to record more over the years for transmission to the ship.

I'd be seventy-six when the colonists arrived at the most likely candidate, a so-called "super-Earth" about half again the size of our home world but not as dense, meaning gravity there would be only a little stronger. That would be a challenge for people who'd spent so long in space. The comparative planetologists knew the atmosphere contained acceptable levels of oxygen, and they knew there was surface water. Was life already present? Was the planet geologically stable? Did its lesser density mean there was no nickel-iron planetary core to generate a natural magnetic field and deflect cosmic rays? Was there an ozone layer to filter out ultraviolet radiation?

Any of those factors could have meant the planet was unsuitable for human occupation. But orbital telescopes could only determine so much; for many critical questions the only way to get answers was to go out there and see. Physics being what they were, the trip would consume all the fuel the Aditi could haul. We were sending ship and crew into an airless desert of hard radiation and hoping their point of arrival would prove to be an oasis. If not, that would be that: Nothing could save them.

I focused on happier possibilities. When Tom came out of cryo for the last time he'd have yet another greeting from me waiting for him, along with plenty of other congratulatory mail – the colonists were reportedly getting millions of gigabytes of fan mail from perfect strangers. Tom might send a video back, and I might even be alive to see it when it arrived after a lag of sixteen and a half years. I hoped the news would be good, and so would his health and his frame of mind. That would be a treat: Seeing him still youthful, at home on an alien world, a place I imagined as impossibly odd. Surely the sky would be tinted some exotic hue; surely there would be plants and landscapes in color and form that would defy the imagination.

In his turn, Tom would have a record of me as he'd known me in my youth: As part of the morale program, the colonists' families and friends had been invited to create special "Planetfall Greetings," full-sense thought recordings so data-rich that we needed to commit them to optical crystal format and submit the crystals well before the Aditi even left Earth orbit. The theory was these records would soothe our loved ones, and help them make the final transition: Not the transition of leaving, but that of arrival.

For my planetfall greeting to Tom, I recorded a long walk in the woods, and made a point of reveling in sunshine and the smell of pine needles. I also recorded myself enjoying a hamburger and a chocolate shake, and then ogling a sunset. Tom thought he wouldn't miss Earth, but I knew he would. He'd have this sense-record to ease his homesickness. And he'd have me to dip into – my first-person mental affect, my sensorium, responses, and reactions. I joked, in my thoughts (which, if I understood correctly, would be his thoughts too, during those three hours of playback), that Tom would have had enough of me for a good long while after sharing my unfiltered psyche.

***

As hard as the months of training and preparation were, Tom worked through them. He was a pillar of strength for himself, and for others. He spent a week with his parents and siblings at the family lake house, once they had resigned themselves to the idea and stopped punishing him. I was there, too, and caught more than one chiding look from his mother, as though she held me accountable for allowing her son to go off into the void. I also caught a few proud glances from his father. It was in their blood: The old man could not contain his envy, and as much as he was going to miss and worry about him, Tom's father also boasted at every opportunity about his astronaut son.

After the lake house weekend, Tom and Emory and Jones had one last adventure, hiking and climbing El Capitan for five days. Then he and I started the task of sifting through our possessions – not because he was taking any of them, but because he wanted to make gifts of some of his things to the people he was leaving behind.

"You don't mind?" he asked, holding up the Tibetan mask, a token he wanted to send to Jones. He brought the mask over his face and gave it a funny voice: "I could just stay with youuu," he crooned. "You can hang me on the wall."

"I hate that thing," I told him.

It wasn't recommended, but we left the dissolution of our legal marriage until the last minute. It was easy: By the power vested in him by the space agency, the guy on the other end of the video call pronounced us divorced, with all of our worldly goods and assets now passing into my sole possession.

We shared the house, our bed, our accustomed life for a week more and then, as Memorial Day weekend slipped behind us, he had to catch a shuttle to the Aditi, now supplied and virtually tested. Whether the ship's real-world performance would match the quantum supercomputer models remained to be seen.

We lay sleepless the night before he left, wrapped around each other, sad and thrilled, not believing that the time had come.

"I'm not sure I can do this," he said.

"You can do this," I told him.

"I'm sorry," he said a while later.

Not sorry enough to stay, I thought. Such thoughts crossed my mind often, but I resisted giving them voice. I didn't want to fight Tom, or belittle him, or shame him. We both knew this was what he was going to do, and what he had to do. The only thing for it was just to let him go. Our last summer together needed to be sweetness and light, just as if...

Just as if Tom were going into that other darkness, at the end of this brief flicker of life. The psych guys were right: We had to let go. Dear God, how would we ever manage it? All the video postcards and corticom sessions wouldn't change the fact of ever-growing distance, ever-increasing years... We'd still be talking, but it would be words cast into a gap, words that would only be echoes by the time they arrived. The messages we'd be sending might as well have been spelled out with an Ouija board instead of being digitally encoded and streamed toward the stars at the speed of light.

"Don't be sorry," I told him, sorrow ripping at my heart. "Just tell me that some day..." I couldn't finish the sentence.

"Some day," he completed the sentence, surprising me, "this will all make sense." He brought our entwined hands to his mouth and sealed their clasp with a soft press of his lips. "Lover," he said. "Ex-husband." And we both laughed, tears in our eyes.

***

We kept in touch via corticom during the shipboard weeks of final preparation, as the Aditi circled the Earth and its personnel settled in and the launch window approached. When the moment arrived – 10:24 a.m., though I forget the exact date – the ship's huge ion engine came to life and pushed the Aditi out of orbit. The world watched, breathless; all went well, and the world applauded. The ship secure and on its way, tracing its nearly flat curve out of the solar system, everyone got back to business as usual.

So did I, as best I could. I won't say I didn't grieve; I did. I went through blame and anger and hate. I struggled with a sense of betrayal and abandonment. Mostly, I felt raw and depleted... incomplete. But I knew this had been my choice, too – my choice for him – and I refused to let my grief make things harder than they had to be for either one of us. Tom and I were still able to interface via corticom for a few weeks; I looked forward to each session with wild excitement. When the ship got too far away for "corticommuning," as they called it, we resorted to video and text messages. Even those less immediate forms of communication were beset with an always-greater lag time as the ship accelerated away.

The old home world spun on in its tight little orbit. I did my best to share its cyclical pleasures with Tom. I sent him the newest novels by Tamlin Bates and Allan Overmyer. I sent him the final installment in the "Sukura" movie series. I send him a few other new titles I thought he might enjoy, including copies of my latest published stories and poems, not to mention a special reserve of unpublished work, some of it erotic, all of it meant solely for him. And every equinox, every solstice, every birthday, anniversary, and holiday, I sent him special greetings.

Did he see those messages? Did he like them? Was cryo really so terrible? Will he make planetfall and join with my recorded sense impressions? Will he send a message home, a hello and goodbye, a video postcard just to say he's made it and he's happy?

I don't know, and might never know. Fourteen months after Tom went into the chill of his cryotube, the ship's feedback and tracking signals stopped. No one knows why. The Aiditi is still out there, of course, but in what condition? And on what heading? There are plenty of questions and speculations, but no facts to go on.

We refuse to give up. We've kept the big antenna aimed at the sky, along the course the ship should be following, and we keep sending letters, music, pictures. We keep sending our love.

If their ion engine is still operating, the effects of relativity will have long since kicked in, slowing the shipboard clock with respect to time's passage here on Earth. But the paradoxical truth is, it's time here on Earth that has stopped, at least for me. Twenty-four years later I still live in our house, without a new life companion. I don't need anyone to share my home; aside from occasional short-term flings, I need no one to share my bed. I still have Tom, in my heart; or at least, I still have the image of Tom, no older than he was back then... much like he actually is right now, on the ship, thanks to cold storage and time dilation. And though I told him to fall in love again, I know my husband well enough to know he probably won't.

This is who we are, and here's the twist to it: We had to separate to remain true to ourselves – so I could carry on in my little circles and he could sail out in a long, straight line. But being true to ourselves means we can remain true to each other. In that way, we'll remain together despite years of distance and years of time. The endless expansion of the cosmos is itself our last summer, lit by all those far-flung suns. I've long since accepted that I have to entrust Tom to the mystery of his own future, accept that he's gone, and let him go. There's a kind of grace to this release: Being out there, in the darkness and emptiness, Tom is also here with me, in the light of hope, in the immanence of possibility.

When they required us to divorce, Tom and I simply married again, with new rings and a few words exchanged under the tree in our back yard. The words we spoke are engraved inside the arcs of our silver rings – the one I never remove from my left hand, the one he took into space on a chain around his neck, counting for four grams out of the three kilos allotted for his personal effects. The simple words of our enduring promise:

Lover. Husband. Always.