mayflower

kaylie saidin

THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-FIVE DAYS after leaving Earth, all of Fernanda’s fellow passengers and all of the crew members are dead. She sits in the cockpit, which she was never allowed in previously, eating the last of the freeze-dried ice cream reserves. The wide dashboard window gives her an almost 360-degree view of the ship as it hurtles through the stars of Scorpius, or, as Kai called the constellation, Maui’s Fish Hook.

The ship is called the Mayflower, which was not decided by the passengers or scientists, but rather by the billionaire philanthropist who had funded the mission. Fernanda always thought it seemed a little too on-the-nose.

The dashboard computer beeps, a blinking red light glowing with their location and the course. Fernanda was not surprised to learn they had been on an autopilot function all this time, one that was able to reroute and bypass all meteor showers and hazardous space junk, and the crew’s aura of smug superiority had nothing to do with their piloting skills.

In twelve days, Fernanda and the Mayflower will arrive at Gliese.

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IN FERNANDA’S OLD LIFE, she was a professor of linguistics at MIT. The scientists chose her because they thought her linguistic ability would help them see how the language evolved in the new world. She found being on the ship monotonous: everyone on board spoke English. She said yes for a myriad of humanist and research-interest reasons, but she now understood that they all boiled down to this: Fernanda watched an episode of Magic School Bus as a child where the characters went to space, and since then she had always wanted to go, too.

Kai was a bodyboarder who lived in the parking lot at Sandy’s. They chose Kai because he had somehow survived being body-slammed into the sandbar by monster waves for a decade with no bodily harm. He was a perfect specimen of strength and resilience; he never had an ailment and had withstood great force. He said yes because he wanted his family to receive the stipend they were giving out: a sizable amount of money that could pay his siblings’ college tuition. He always felt he had let them down because he chose adventure over hard work. Now, he was both redeeming himself and choosing adventure once more.

In the first few months of the mission, Kai was the only one who did not get spacesick, the only one who could keep down all of the astronaut food and lost no weight. Fernanda would lay in the fetal position of her bunk or in the library, clutching her stomach, listening to the inner workings of her body as they adjusted to traveling in lightyears. The moans of other passengers could be heard throughout the hull. But Kai would wander the ship, whistling to himself and challenging anyone healthy enough to a game of foosball.

“It’s the Polynesian blood,” he said to Fernanda, flexing his muscles jokingly. He had just beaten her at foosball for the third time. “I’m ninety-something percent Hawaiian. We were built to be voyagers.”

“Maybe they should have chosen all Polynesians,” Fernanda said. Three of the passengers had developed gastrointestinal issues so severe, the gossip was that it was unclear they’d even make it through the year.

Kai shrugged. “It wouldn’t fit the look. Anyway, you’re all right, huh?”

All of the passengers on the Mayflower were Americans with an equal blend of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. They took a photo a few weeks before the mission start date, standing in their spacesuits, for the cover of TIME magazine. MEET THE PEOPLE REPRESENTING HUMANITY, the caption read. They also went to a ball at the White House, where the President gave a meandering speech about space exploration and shook all of their hands. Meanwhile, all of the crew members, who operated the ship and largely stayed in the bow, out of view, were White, save for a few Asians.

“I think I’m all right,” she said. “Just perpetually nauseous.”

“What does perpetually mean?”

She looked at him. He was gripping the handles of the foosball machine, swinging the white and black plastic men in circles as if they were doing acrobatics. He looked up at her, and his warm brown eyes sunk into hers. She was pretty sure no one had ever looked at her like that before.

“Always.”

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ANOTHER THING FERNANDA DEDUCED, but only after being on board, was that all of the passengers had previously engaged exclusively in heterosexual relationships. The reasoning for this was obvious, though a bit bleak. No one ever told them directly that they were expected to reproduce after arriving on Gliese. It was simply implied.

The first nine passengers to die did so in the fourth month aboard the Mayflower. Their bodies could not handle the vast changes in pressure, the jarring sensation of traversing through outer space at lightspeed while standing completely still. They held tissues to their noses and mouths, and when they moved them the fabric came away black as if doused in squid ink. During training, everyone had been told they’d likely get spacesick, but no one told them it could be fatal. The nine all died within twenty-four hours of each other, as if in a cosmic pact together. They were found in their bunks, lying in pools of the dark liquid that had spilled from their orifices. Black as midnight, black as a starless space sky.

When their bodies were pushed from the airlock by the two strongest and most stoic passengers, Fernanda tried not to look at them as they drifted out into space. She felt there was something desecrating about the way they died, and that they would not want to be remembered as a body covered in black, dead weight shrinking in the rear view.

By the thirty-fifth body, she was one of the stoics, pushing.

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NOW, SITTING ALONE IN THE COCKPIT, it occurs to Fernanda that something else was implied: they were not meant to survive the interstellar mission. This is the pilot mission, the maiden voyage. Humans traveling at lightspeed has only ever been tested in NASA simulations, on the pages of physics equations. Diversity was not chosen in order to best represent humanity, rather, they were an experimental group. A wide range to see who survived the longest, to refine the data set for future missions. More May-flowers.

Out the window, space goes whizzing by as the ship cruises on autopilot. Fernanda has finished all of the ice cream—strawberry—and throws the wrapper haphazardly on the floor. She licks her fingers and stares out at the black.

The truth is, Fernanda hadn’t liked her life on earth too much. There was something missing from it, something she couldn’t concretely identify, like the hazy outline of a dream one fruitlessly grasps at before it slips away after waking up. She began to feel that way at fourteen, and the thought took up residence in her chest and stayed there, though smaller at times and bigger at others. Sure, she liked her work as a linguist, she liked eating takeout and getting her toenails painted on her birthday, but she did not feel fulfilled.

When she was selected to be a passenger on the Mayflower, she felt for the first time a sense of hope. Perhaps this was it, this was the key to fulfillment! Then she signed the paperwork for her stipend, life changing money she would never be able to spend, and realized she had no one to list as the beneficiary. She lived alone in an apartment in Somerville with her calico cat named Noam. Perhaps it was not that something was missing, but that something was out of place: her. Perhaps she had never found what she was looking for on Earth, but it would not evade her in this life: it lay in the stars.

Or it lay in Kai’s tattoos, which had been tapped by hand with a bone and ash and soot. She spent many nights tracing the lines on his arms and legs, listening to him explain them: each tattoo had meaning, a loss, a love, a story.

Since launch, Fernanda’s mind has been a pendulum swinging back and forth between the concepts of destiny and randomness.

This is bullshit, she thought when she had to pose for press conferences, stand in a designated order next to her cultural rainbow of fellow passengers, sit through interview training sessions before sitting through interviews, perform a large false smile, a false narrative.

This is my purpose, she thought when, after the first wave of space sickness, the remaining thirty-three passengers seemed to get their bearings and adjust to life on the ship with laughter, games, dancing.

This is bullshit, she thought when more passengers fell sick, and when, in response, the crew sealed their own cabins and airlocked the bridge so they would not hear the passengers moan and keel over and die.

This is my purpose, she thought when, for eighteen days, it was just her and Kai left on the ship, when it seemed like they would make it to Gliese together, nothing could stop them as long as they had each other, they would be a perfect retelling of Genesis on a foreign planet.

This is bullshit, she thought when Kai drew his last shuddering breath, succumbing at last to the sickness of space.

This is bullshit, she thinks when she realizes that they were likely all expected to die.

This is my purpose, she thinks when she finds herself on the mission now irrevocably, perpetually alone.

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BEFORE JOINING THE MISSION, all passengers had to complete a series of tests. The most powerful one, for Fernanda, was the VR-simulated view of outer space while traveling through it. She saw shapes and colors as if through a kaleidoscope, the transparent lights of the Milky Way up close and wrapped in a blackness of velvet night. In each direction she looked, there was endless and vast darkness.

Afterward, the computer prompted her to select two from a bank of words that best fit her experience. She chose empty and beautiful.

Now she wishes she could have chosen infinite. This is the strangest part, the most impossible to wrap her mind around—all this nothingness and its beauty, its potential, its terror, and it goes on forever.

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FERNANDA’S WORK at MIT mostly revolved around researching Austronesian languages and the way their dialects varied across Southeast Asia. She had a working knowledge of seven different languages. She was, she knew, considered intelligent. But Kai had learned Hawaiian from his grandmother, who was one of several hundred native speakers left.

Hōkū was the first word he taught her. Star. His people had once navigated the Pacific using stars, with no instruments or computers or lightspeed or totalitarian crew. They had once followed the rising and setting points along the horizon, seen wind, waves, ocean swells, birds bobbing and jumping manta ray guided their way. Fernanda had learned a few programming languages as a by-product of her linguistic studies. She appreciated them, but not the way she appreciated human languages. They were too perfect, missing the flaws that characterized humans.

She laughs. It is only now, alone floating in space, that she realizes her life on Earth had lots of beauty and potential in it if she’d only looked harder. She and Kai had existed at the same time on that planet. They had wandered two sides of the globe. Had she been more adventurous, or he more academic, perhaps they would have found each other one day.

She thinks of his body, floating somewhere in the last set of stars. Without oxygen, he won’t be disintegrating. He’s simply drifting through space, like a balloon. He was the forty-first and final body she pushed out of the airlock, and the only one she had to do on her own. It took all the rational parts of her brain to tell herself it wasn’t Kai anymore, it was just a body. He never did get to see Maui’s Fish Hook. She imagines him slowly disintegrating into the stardust we all came from, even if it takes millions of years.

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A PICTURE OF EARTH AS SEEN FROM OUTER SPACE hung in one of Fernanda’s primary school classrooms. When she saw it in real life, the blue and green and orange of the planet glowing behind them, she couldn’t get her brain to adjust to the vision. It kept reverting, thinking she was a child again seeing the poster. As if it could not process what she was seeing. Work, she had to consciously tell her brain. And finally, it did, and for a moment she was filled with terror and beauty and ennui, just before their home receded further and further away and was obscured.

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SHE WISHES SHE HAD ASKED Kai what he wanted done with his body. From the ship library, she’s learned that the bones are important because they contain the mana, the spirit. That after decomposition, Native Hawaiians would wash the bones, wrap them, and then bury them. There is no use worrying about earthly standards, she thinks, a paraphrase of something the scientists who trained them often reminded. In space, you are making new customs. But if they weren’t meant to preserve human culture, to bring their history to the new world, what were they meant to do?

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ONE HALF OF GLIESE IS A COLD BARREN DESERT; the other half is covered in burning hot red mountains. They were trained extensively on their new home, taught the agricultural techniques they’d implement and the method of timekeeping based upon the orbiting moons. But throughout the training, it all seemed so theoretical, and Fernanda found herself zoning out often.

There is a transmitter to report back to mission control, but Fernanda has not used it since Kai died. Messages stopped coming through; they think she is dead, too, and she is not sure she wants to correct them. She knows this goes against her humanist philosophies, but perhaps she was never a humanist at all. What use is she to the mission if she is only one woman, if she is without Kai? Let her be the only woman to live in other galaxies, and let her be the only one who knows it.

Slowly, Fernanda flips the switch to turn the spaceship off autopilot.

The ship lurches, falters, then picks up speed again. She reaches out to the controls, her fingertips resting on a joystick, and gives it a jolt forward. The ship responds to her touch, as though an alive thing that had been waiting for her all this time.

She is not sure where she is going. If she holds the control columns lightly, with the palms of her hands, she feels a tug. Faint, but it is there. The stars of Maui’s Fish Hook shine and take on shapes and scenes. Her path is illuminated by something much older than her, and this feels right. If she closes her eyes, she knows the way.

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