#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.

#7

When she thought about them (which was as little as she could), she found herself running through the same possibilities, torturing herself with the same unanswerable questions.  Were they sleeping, lying in dreamless black like she was meant to be?  Were they dead, from a failure worse than hers?  Or were they frozen, trapped in identical agony, wondering the same things about her?  There were, of course, no answers.  Around and around she went.

#6

There was the pane of perfectly polished glass, without a single smudge (for what would cause one?), and beyond that, the white floor. Beyond that, another pane of glass. Beyond that, another bed, like hers. Above that, another. If she forced herself to focus, she could see a third above that one. Out of the corner of her eye, Alice could see their bodies.

#5

The truth was, focusing on these memories was as much a way to hold onto her history as it was a distraction.  She needed something to think about, to imagine, to draw her attention away from what always lay just out of sight, in the corner of her peripheral vision.  She could not turn her head to look directly at it, even if she had wanted to.  It sat there, out of focus and barely visible at the edges of her vision.  Maddening.  Reminding her where she was.

#4

She would spend as long as she could, poring over every detail of that memory.  The bite of the frozen air at the back of her throat.  The crush of ice under her boots.  Her grandmother's wrinkled skin, her hand holding on tight to Alice's as they walked down the front steps.  Alice had never imagined how many senses, how many atoms of memory could be packed into one moment, never imagined the density of history until she began to lose hers.

#3

There were, of course, a few things that Alice knew she would not forget.  The quiet hum of the lights, muffled but not silenced by the glass.  The white ceiling above her.  The slight cold, not a chill or a freeze, but enough to make the tips of her toes sing.  She would use this, the cold and the white, to hold onto other memories.  She could still remember snow.  She could still remember walking outside her grandmother's house at seven years old and breathing the winter air in deep into her lungs.

#2

Sometimes, she would try and pass the time by counting all the things she had forgotten.  By her rough count, it had been three weeks since the smell of freshly-brewed coffee had slipped away.  Two months since the last sound of a trumpet solo drifted away, twice that long since she could no longer picture her mother's eyes.  It was around the time that Alice realized she had long since forgotten how long three weeks or two months felt like that the list became depressing and futile.

#1

Reluctantly, Alice admitted to herself that she had forgotten how it felt to hold a clump of soil in her hand.  It had been slowly slipping away for days by that point, and the harder she worked to freeze the feeling in her mind, the more it faded.  She would have rubbed her fingertips together to jog her memory, to remind her senses of the feeling of digging into the earth and letting the summer dirt move between her fingers, if she could have moved them at all.  Alice stared ahead.