#14

She took the tests and kept her food down.  She did the workouts and did not collapse.  She answered question after question, first from the company and the subcommittees, then from the television reporters and the newspapermen.  What do you hope to find.  Have you considered the risks.  What will you miss the most.  None of the questions made it seem any more real, of course.  The time lost, the distance traveled, they were numbers and ideas.  Alice thought about flying, and worry washed away.

#13

She had dreamed of how she would make the new soil sing, learning how to feed it, nurture it, coax it into giving birth to things they had never seen before. Life never before seen by human eyes, forms of growth she could not guess, could not imagine. Ordinary leaves and stalks, perhaps, or maybe shimmering thorns and thundertrees and timevines. They were possibilities she could never have said no to. So when they asked to drop her into the black, she smiled and shook their hands and signed her name.

#12

They would have been happy on their new rock, still believing it mattered.  Their ignorance of the one big truth would allow them to still care enough to discover all the new rock's little secrets.  They would taste the air, measuring toxins and perfumes.  They would swing metal balls on strings to test the pull and spin, they would count the new stars, they would drill into the earth and crumble the soil between their fingers.  And Alice would plant her garden.

#11

Alice often thought about the fact that, if everything had gone the way they told her it would, she would have never discovered the truth.  She would have slept her way to tomorrow, closed her eyes once and not opened them again until they were on a new rock, new ground, new false bottom.  The six of them would have stepped out and looked up at the new sky and believed that the big black empty between the two rocks was nothing, a neverdream, a forgotten.

#10

The people who believed the lies of "launch" were the same ones who told beautiful stories of flying, of lifting off from the ground and soaring into the heavens.  They believed with all their hearts that the earth was the beginning, the center, and that taking off would send them rocketing out into the beyond, to explore the sky.  But there was no such thing as earth, as ground.  There was no center, no sky, and no flying.  There was just the black, the hole.  And they were falling.

#9

At this point, she had no reliable way of knowing how long it had been since they had started falling.  Of course, she knew as she thought these words that, if anyone had been there to hear her, they would have corrected her.  They had not fallen, they would tell her.  They had "launched."  She knew now, naturally, that this was a lie.  This was the lie people told themselves, the lie that made sense with the lie of "earth" and "sky," of "up" and "down."  Alice knew better.

#8

Sometimes, she prayed that it was only her, that the rest of the crew was blissfully unconscious, drifting towards their destination without thought, without pain.  Other times, she found herself desperately wanting to believe that they were awake like her, that she was not alone in her silent screaming.  One way, she was consumed by loneliness; the other, by childish fury.  She tried not to think about it.  She tried to think of the soil.  But it was gone.