Gwendy’s Final Task

And the wait for her trip into space stretched out ahead of her, with no firm date set and so many days to struggle through.

But I have to try!

28

AND NOW THE TIME has come to do that.

Gwendy pulls the lever that dispenses the chocolates. Out comes a butterfly with tiny, perfectly scalloped wings. She pops it into her mouth. Warmth spreads throughout her body and lights up her brain. Then, for the first time in her long and complicated history with the button box, she pulls the lever again. For a moment nothing happens and she’s afraid the box is refusing her, but then another chocolate comes out. She doesn’t bother to examine it, just swallows it down. The world leaps forward into all her senses. The clarity is painful but at the same time wonderful. She can see every grain in the box’s mahogany surface. She can hear every creak as the MF station makes its endless journey through space. She can’t hear the Chinese in their spoke, but she senses their presence. Some are eating, some are playing a game. Mahjong, perhaps.

She takes a deep breath and can feel it filling her lungs and enriching her blood. The knock at the door sends waves of vibration across the room. It’s a V shape, Gwendy thinks. Like birds heading south for the winter.

“Gwendy?” Kathy asks. “Are you ready?”

“Just a second!” She puts the button box back in its bag and stows it in the closet wall safe, which is hidden behind her spare pressure suit. She thumbs the CLOSE button and hears the lock engage. She checks for her notebook in the pocket of her jumpsuit, then shuts the closet, bounce-walks to the door, and opens it.

“Ready,” she says.

29

THERE’S A SMALL CONFERENCE room in Spoke 1, next to the ops room. Present for Gwendy’s mental acuity test are Kathy Lundgren, Dr. Glen, and Sam Drinkwater. Sam doesn’t know that Gwendy has a special high-priority mission (unless Kathy has told him, that is), but he’s going to be her buddy on her Day 7 spacewalk, so Gwendy supposes he has a right to be here. It would be his responsibility, after all, if she became disoriented and freaked out while they were tethered together.

Doc Glen clears his throat. “Gwendy—Senator—I hope you understand that we have to—”

“To take every precaution,” she finishes. She knows she sounds impatient. She is impatient. No, more than that. She’s angry. Not at them, exactly, but at having to be here and having such a terrible responsibility thrust upon her. “I understand. Let’s get to it. I have emails to write and weather info to collate.”

They exchange looks. This isn’t the smiling, friendly woman they are used to.

“Er … fine,” Doc Glen says. He powers up his tablet, then takes an envelope from the breast pocket of his coverall. “It won’t take long, an hour max. I’ll give you a number of questions to answer and certain tasks to perform. Just relax and do the best you can. To begin with …”

He opens the envelope. Inside are eight metal squares. He puts them down in the center of the table on a magnetized rectangle, which he turns to face Gwendy. Words have been printed on the squares in Magic Marker.

go mother must store the to I for

“Can you arrange these to make a sentence?”

Gwendy moves the words around on the magnetized rectangle with no hesitation. She turns it to face the three crewmembers—my judges, she thinks resentfully—on the other side of the table. “Clever that there’s no capital letter,” Gwendy says. “Makes it a bit harder. Intentional, I suppose.”

They look at how she’s arranged the words. “Huh,” Sam says. “It’s a sentence all right, but not the one I would have made.”

“And if there’s a handbook that goes with this test,” Gwendy says, “it’s probably not what the people who made it expected. Which is a bit dumb, if you don’t mind me saying. You were expecting I must go to the store for mother, weren’t you?”

Sam and Doc nod. Kathy just looks at her with a small smile. Maybe it’s admiration, probably it is, but Gwendy doesn’t care. They brought her in here like a test animal and expected her to perform—hit the lever and get a piece of kibble. And so she has. Because she has to, and doesn’t that just suck?

Gwendy’s sentence reads, for mother I must go to the store.

She says, “I must go to the store for mother is the simple way to do it, but simple isn’t always best. It’s ambiguous. Does it mean ‘I have to go there because mother wants pasta and a quart of Ben & Jerry’s’ or does it mean ‘I have to go to the store because mother is there and she needs to be picked up.’ Some ambiguity is still there in my sentence, but it’s less because mother comes first. My sentence says it’s almost certainly an errand.” She gives them a hard smile without a shred of good humor in it. “Any questions?”