Maxon saw the Mare Orientale and knew that they were above the moon’s dark side. The Mare Orientale, one of the biggest of many scars on the moon’s gray face that had been brought about by meteor strikes. Planets are round, like the shape of an eye. And the galaxies unfold in spirals, like water in a funnel. The shapes, perfectly rendered, repeat throughout the universe. You could always know the shape of a planet, or the shape of a moon. Round. A droplet of water, the center of a flower, a ripple around a falling rock, the moon’s protected lava pipes where he’d planned to house his Heras—all perfect. A circle is the hardest shape to draw for a human, but the easiest shape to find naturally occurring. A circle is an easy shape for a robot to draw. Any shape is easy for a robot to draw.
Inside the cargo module, the Hera clicked and buzzed. She was cutting the pieces for the comm unit, meticulous work that she carried out meticulously. Maxon knew that her work would be perfect, but it was taking a long time. Meteor strikes, like thunderstorms, like meiosis, were unpredictable. Meteor strikes did not exist between lines of code, or in a laboratory setting, or in Maxon’s brain, usually. But the one meteor strike he had experienced was a recognition of the value of meteor strikes. He noted and wondered at the sight of the moon, where there was not one spot, not one square mile unmarred by the scar from a meteor. It was the home of random. It was defined by it.
Maxon turned his head to the moon’s horizon and saw a sliver of blue emerging, a sliver of white and blue. The Earth was rising.
“This is something not a lot of people have seen,” he said to Bubber. “You should pay attention to this sight of an Earthrise.”
“Okay,” said Bubber.
They gazed at the Earth, so very small, the swirls and spirals of clouds twisted over the surface of blue and gold. Outer shape such a perfect curve, and yet all over it, a mess of vapor. Maxon looked down at the moon and thought, The marks of meteors are circles too. The most random, unpredictable, powerful event in the history of life, and it leaves a mark like a ripple in a pond.
“Dad,” said Bubber. “Are we running out of time?”
“Yes,” said Maxon. “I really don’t think there’s enough time.”
“What will run out first?”
“The air,” said Maxon. “I’ll run out of air.”
“Tell the robot to hurry up,” said Bubber.
“It can’t,” said Maxon. “Anyway, hurrying up will make a bad result.”
“Can you go back and get more air?” asked Bubber.
“I could,” said Maxon, “but I don’t want to leave her.”
The Hera unit clicked and whirred, now welding without sparks.
“Why don’t you just bring her back to the rocket? She doesn’t need a space suit.”
Maxon sniffed. He looked at the Earth, now full, just over the lunar horizon. It was a beautiful sight, so messy and perfect. He thought about the real Bubber, back at home. Maybe sitting in school with a blue pencil in his hand, maybe listening to his iPod and tapping his toe, driving Sunny crazy.
“Son, you’re a fucking genius,” he said. And he fired up his jetpack.
Soon, the four of them were headed back to the rocket together. Maxon in his jetpack, gently shepherding the Hera with the growing comm unit inside her. Bubber drifting off beneath him, hanging on to one shoe. A walk in the park. A trip to the ice-cream store.
“Dad,” said Bubber.
“Yes,” Maxon answered.
“Will I be able to go on the rocket?”
“Probably not. I don’t think I will still be hallucinating on the rocket.”
Maxon looked down at Bubber and realized that already the image was fading, the tiny space suit winking off and on, like a holograph. They were together for just one more minute. The Hera unit and Maxon, and the child Bubber and the nascent comm unit. Like a family.
“Well, I want to come back to space with you sometime,” said Bubber. “I like it. I didn’t get to go on the moon or anything, and I really want to.”
“Oh, you will,” Maxon reassured him. “You will be on the moon. You’re made for it, buddy. You’re made for it.”
Maxon clicked on his radio and immediately heard Phillips in his head, in midsentence.
“—the fuck are you doing?! You have got three and a half minutes of air left in that tank, Dr. Mann, do you hear me? Turn on your fucking radio!”
“It’s on, Phillips,” said Maxon. “I’ll be back in five.”
The image of Bubber was drifting ahead, out of Maxon’s reach.
“Wait up, bud,” he croaked.
“I know, Dad,” said Bubber. “But you have to hurry now. So match your speed to the speed of your companion. You know. It is a rule. Rate sub-robot equals rate sub-human. Otherwise, the robot is always going to win.”
“Wait, Bubber,” said Maxon, seeing black rings around his vision, like a mist descending from all points. “Synchronizing speed can only occur when the robot accelerates by an amount equal to the companion’s current speed minus the robot’s current speed.”
Bubber was out of reach, floating away from him. He blinked his eyes, trying to see clearly, trying to hold on. And he felt the most overwhelming sorrow, that in the end he had not managed it at all. He felt a hot stab of regret: for leaving the family, for going up in the rocket, for being susceptible to meteors and for the needs of his body. If it was possible for him to fail, he should never have come in the first place, should never have left her there alone, wanting him, waiting for the way their bodies seared together like two wounds healing. What arrogant faith had brought him here, prepared to break the future with his own head, incognizant of any possibility of failure? It was only when he was running out of air, his lungs pulling on nothing, his mouth open like some ghastly animal, that he realized it. I am really human, he thought. I regret. This is what it’s like to be human, and die. In a way, it was a tragedy. But in a way, it was a huge relief to finally know, he was not a robot after all.
He found that he could not see. He found that he was crying. By the time the hiss of air filled the airlock and Phillips clicked Maxon’s helmet open, he had already blacked out.
A COUPLE OF MONTHS before the rocket went off, they had such a bad fight. She was anticipating his departure. He knew, from what Emma had taught him, that Sunny would express worry for him in different ways. He watched her express the worry by checking many times with many different types of questions whether he was scientifically prepared or physically prepared for a week in space. Now he watched her express the worry by arguing with him. He was prepared to engage in an argument over something inconsequential.
He had been told the argument would be about something stupid like what kind of tea he had been supposed to buy, but would really be about something else. About him leaving. He had to listen to the words she was saying, but he had to understand the things she was feeling: fear, loneliness, abandonment, worry. He stood across the kitchen island from her. The kitchen island was covered in cool granite, granite that looked like leather, that felt like the surface of a meteor. Bubber had been put to bed, it was ten o’clock at night. When he came out of the office, she was banging dishes around in the kitchen, and then within minutes they were on opposite sides of the kitchen island, and fighting.
“What am I supposed to do for all this time? Two weeks in Florida, a week on the mission, more time after that. Am I supposed to just put a plug in this baby hole and not let it out? Am I supposed to just turn off the processes around here, shut it down, and wait for you to get back? I don’t have an Off button.”
“No” was all he could say. “I’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”
The kitchen was lit artistically, recessed lighting in the ceiling dropping down a gentle glow around the copper pots. Behind her, the state-of-the-art refrigerator. Behind him, the farmhouse sink recast in silicon. Deep, wide, perfect for canning, picturesque. The back of his head reflected in the window over it. The back of her head was a gray interruption in the glistening nickel of the fridge.
“So, I just carry on, then, all by myself. That’s great. Perfect. Well, you know what? I quit. I fucking quit. I say lights off. Shut it down. I want out of this sweater, I want out of this house, I want out of this city, I want out. I’ve been holding things up on my shoulders for too long, I want a break! I want to not be a mother for five fucking minutes!”
She waved her hands around, rubbed at her cheek. She never, of course, drove her hand through her hair or pressed upward on her forehead, or shook her head vehemently from side to side.
“So go out, do what you want to do, I’m here now, safe and sound. I can help you. Go take some time for yourself,” he said. He said the words “time for yourself” as if it were one word. Like bicycling.
“I can’t just go out, Maxon, and leave it. Do you not understand this? I am Mom, twenty-four/seven. It doesn’t end because I am not physically with you and your child. I am always Mom. It’s right here with me, inside me, this makes me Mom, whether I’m here or there or passed out drunk in a ditch in the city, I’m still the mom, it’s just then I’m the shitty mom. You, you leave. You’re the scientist, you’re the builder, you’re the astronaut, you’re the cyclist, I’m none of those things. I’m the mom, that’s it. I’m saying, I just want a little break to try and be someone else, but I can’t have it. It’s impossible.”
Behind her the automatic ice maker clicked on, dumped out a load, clicked off.
“Honey, it’s all about priorities.”
He knew as soon as he said it that it was wrong. He had to remember what this fight was about.
“All about priorities? That’s rich. That’s really fucking rich. This from the man who gets up at dawn to bike, stays at work as long as he can, sometimes until after dark and then shuts himself in his office all night. Here I am pregnant with another baby, another child of yours that’s not going to know what the front of your face looks like! They’re going to see streaming lines of code across your eyes, a reflection always, your screen on your face, that’s their father.”
“Now, that’s not right. That’s not true. That’s not right or true.”
“You don’t help me when you are here. You might as well go, be well, live on the moon, colonize space. I’ll just be here pushing around the dishes, the laundry, the dishes, the laundry, and outlining my lips, wearing my stockings, and lining up my dove gray pumps in the closet.”
“I don’t expect you to do that. No one expects that. You make yourself do that.”
“Yeah, well, what do I expect me to do? What does he expect me to do? What does this one expect me to do?” She pointed upstairs at Bubber and then to her belly. “There actually are no expectations of me, Sunny, this person. It’s just me, this slot, this role, this mother. What I’ve got to do as her, to be her, and those expectations are clearly defined. Clearly defined. You, in fact, are the only one that can’t see them. Because you don’t see anything that’s not written down in black and white! Look at me, Maxon, I am dying here! Motherhood is death, do you get it? This me that you see, this thing standing here, this is a dead thing covered in a shell. I am dead. Maxon, I’m dead!”
“You don’t look dead,” he said.
“Maxon! I am not a fucking robot! You cannot determine whether I am alive or dead just by looking at me!”
Her face was blotchy and striped with tears. Her wig, her immovable wig, was perfectly coiffed, glistening, real. Her hands wrung at each other, and she hit softly on the countertop. She was crying.
He remembered the hermit crabs they had brought home from Cape May when the mother took them there on a trip. They’d kept them in a bucket next to the bathtub until they crawled out of their shells and died. Sunny had wept and mourned, holding the strange little shrimps in her hand and talking to them while she choked with sorrow. The mother firmly forbade morbid rituals; no funerals were allowed. Later he found out in a book that the crabs hadn’t really been dead, they were just trying to find new shells, and shedding their exoskeletons. Had they been left alone, they would have lived. But they were thrown out on the compost pile, covered in the next day’s cabbage leaves, the following day’s watermelon rind. If Sunny felt dead like those crabs had been dead, then Maxon had failed her, and he was sorry.
“You don’t even know me, Maxon!” she shrieked. “Do you know what I have done?”
“Yes,” he said.
“You’re just going to go, up in space, and leave me here with your children? This thing I am? This bastardization that I have become?”
“I thought you said it was necessary. I thought you wanted me to go.”
“Maxon, do you know how your father died?”
“He froze in a ravine.”
“He froze in a ravine because I left him there.” Sunny choked in her throat, like she was coughing and talking at the same time.
“I know.”
“You know? You don’t know. You never knew.”
“I know because you told me. You told me years ago. You were standing right there when you said it.”
Maxon remembered clearly, the dinner party. Sunny told a story about her father dying in a ravine, and he had known, without a doubt, that she had really meant that his father died that way, and that she had seen him dying, and that she had done nothing. Maxon had already taken in that information, at the time she had said it.
Sunny paused.
“You knew?”
“Yes. You said his leg was shaped like a sigma. You said he was covered in pine needles, don’t you remember? Everyone knows pine trees don’t grow in southern Burma. It would have been deciduous—”
“You knew and you said nothing?”
“I said something. I said ‘wow.’”
“Maxon,” said Sunny. “There is a way to respond when someone tells you they killed your father. You elevate your voice an octave, you increase its volume, you make an expansive hand gesture, you raise your eyebrows, you shout something like ‘WHAT?’ or ‘I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU HAVE DONE THIS!’ and you … you don’t just carry on as if nothing had happened!”
“I forgave you,” he said. “That happened. That is something that happened.”
“What?”
“I forgave you that night, before you even stopped talking, I forgave you. I forgive you. I forgive. It’s okay.”
She threw herself into him and wrapped her arms around him so tightly that the wind came out of his lungs in a whoosh.
“Oh, Maxon,” she said. “Don’t ever die. Don’t ever, ever, ever die!”
Maxon had written down everything he had eaten for the last seventeen years. He had a resting heart rate of thirty-two. He had a graph to indicate the wattage he had emitted in an eighty-seven-mile bike ride yesterday. But he could not stop himself from dying.