Harley laughed out loud. “What do you suppose our barbecue-loving Texas friends are going to say to that?”

“Actually,” Sasha said, “I’ll be more interested in what our friends from Bangalore will say to what our Texas friends will say.”

Rachel thought that was pretty darn funny, but Zack only grunted.

There’s another thing we won’t have on Keanu, she realized.

Fun.

Part Two

I can’t believe they’re having me do this.

Hi, Rachel, it’s Amy…Amy Meyer. I hope you can see this…your dad’s friends thought we should send messages to everyone who went away in those things. I guess they have the idea you’ll receive signals. Everyone thinks you’re still, you know, alive.

God, that’s stupid, I mean…hello, we’re all still thinking about you and praying for you and hoping you’re doing okay. It’s a little weird here, that’s for sure, but nothing like…whatever’s going on with you.

Sorry, can I stop now?

BROADCAST FROM HOUSTON MISSION CONTROL TO KEANU BY AMY MEYER

AUGUST 31, 2019

Okay, who do I know here? Some of the people from Bangalore. There’s Mr. Vikram Nayar, who was my father’s mission director and my mother’s—well, let that slide for now. Mr. Nayar is tall and grim and usually unhappy.

There’s Dale Scott, who’s this American astronaut who was working for Nayar and my father because he was kind of a dick and NASA got rid of him. His girlfriend is here, too. Valentina is her name. She’s Russian and looks unhappy, too.

There’s another ISRO engineer named Jaidev who’s maybe 28, and creepy.

I also know Rachel Stewart, Zack’s daughter, who is 14 and from the Houston group.

There’s no one I actually like.

Which makes sense, because there’s nothing about Keanu that I like, either.

KEANU-PEDIA BY PAV, UNNUMBERED ENTRY, ARRIVAL DAY

ARRIVAL DAY: VALYA

Valya Makarova would remember several things about the trip from Earth to Keanu inside a giant bubble.

First there was the fear. Can I breathe? (Yes, as it turned out.) Am I trapped? (She remembered having nightmares about the sinking of the Russian submarine Kursk fifteen years back, and the horror of finding yourself in a cold dark tube from which there was no escape. And yes, she was trapped…but the bubble was translucent…and the temperatures stayed Bangalore-high.)

She noted that she was still holding on to her purse. It was a large black bag, a Hermès Birkin knockoff she had bought in Moscow, and filled with such necessities as her phone, makeup, bits of candy and tissues, and her growing collection of key cards and security passes. Her right arm was through the strap; the purse rode high on her shoulder.

Reassured by that, at least, she commenced a brief, urgent search for Dale Scott. They had been standing right next to each other in the shattered parking lot of the Bangalore Control Center when the looming bubble had expanded.

Tumbled upside down into darkness, she had lost sight of Dale in seconds…she wasn’t even sure whether he had been scooped up, or left behind, or, horrid thought, sliced in half.

What is happening? She hadn’t been able to make a count, but it was obvious that something like a hundred people had been scooped up by this bubble…. As it rose into the sky, then beyond the sky into space, some floated in zero g, screaming, while others tried to swim. Several people collided, fighting like panicky drowners. One encounter was so violent it left a cloud of blood floating in air.

And with blood, there came the inevitable discharges of vomitus. At least a third of the hundred people looked either green or pale, each suffering from motion sickness.

Some simply closed their eyes and attempted yoga positions, or sleep. After thrashing around and finding the actions useless—and exhausting—Valya had selected the last option, relaxing to the inevitable, folding her hands across her chest and finding that, after a while, she floated toward the bubble’s wall.

For a moment, she was afraid she might sail through it—or slam into it. Or be electrocuted at a touch.

Fortunately, none of that happened. She simply…bounced…and found herself gently but definitely sliding toward one end of the bubble along with several dozen others. (Just as many seemed to be sliding toward the other “pole.”) The object must be spinning, imparting some motion to its contents.

And now all Valya could do was take in the spectacle of a group of people floating inside a giant bubble, an image that looked as though it were more suited to some demented ride at an American amusement park.

For the longest time, the bubble was filled with screams, complaints, prayers in a polyglot stew of Hindi, Urdu, even Chinese, Portuguese, and Russian.

As for the other, nastier aspects of existence inside the bubble, Valya noted that, quite separate from the water and food dispensers, a different machine was sucking in the blood, urine, and other debris.

She found this reassuring. It told her that the builders of the bubble had deliberately collected them and, for whatever reasons, planned to support them.

Somewhat comforted, Valya had spent much of the next half day, in rotation, sleeping—the worst airplane sleep was better than the best she was able to get in the bubble—and then taking inventory of her purse (There seemed to be fewer items every time! Where had the roll of Dyno-Mints gone?) and speculating on who had grabbed them, why, and what for.

Mostly, however, what she remembered was feeling as though she were falling.

Intellectually, she knew it was no different from what cosmonauts had experienced for sixty years: zero g or microgravity or, yes, free fall.

But knowing that…even knowing that Dale, her most recent lover, had lived it…nothing had prepared her for the unsettling experience.

She passed the journey without significant interaction with her fellow voyagers. Yes, there was an occasional nod, a shared grimace. At one point, a sobbing young woman floated within reach and Valya grabbed her, saying soothing things in Hindi that she half-believed herself. “Don’t worry. We’re being taken somewhere. If they wanted us dead, they wouldn’t be giving us food and water.”

One thing that Valya couldn’t help noticing: the surprise on the woman’s face when Valya spoke. True, she’d been a real outsider in Bangalore. Although she was of average height and weighed more than she wanted (at age fifty-three she was finding it depressingly easy to put on pounds), she had blue eyes and blond hair and spoke Hindi with a Russian accent.

Russians had never been popular in India.

In spite of her linguistic skills, her isolation from the other bubble victims was no surprise. Valya had gotten to know very few of the team at Bangalore. To this point, all her Brahma-related work had taken place in Moscow.

As well it should have. She was a linguist, not a space person. Yes, she had grown up on the fringes of the space program—her father, Anton Makarov, worked in the Energiya factory, where spacecraft were built; he was essentially a plumber. Valya’s mother was a secretary in one of Energiya’s sister organizations.

From both parents their daughter had learned about the overwhelming and unproductive role of the Communist Party—never dealing with ideology, but only with bonuses and perks—and the inside politics of any organization larger than a football team.

Rather than follow her family, and her contemporaries, into aerospace engineering and a sure job at Energiya, Valya had chosen to study languages at Moscow University.