Sunspot Archipelago

Maren Willard sat on a cold, metal bed in sick bay and stared out the porthole at Jupiter. Though the Solstice stalled hundreds of miles over the planet’s Red Spot, the storm’s immensity made it the only scenery out the ship’s westerly portholes. It was a thousand hurricanes stacked one upon the other, or so Maren had learned from John’s strange pillow talk—but to her, it was nothing more than a Georgia O’Keefe held to a magnifying glass. The Spot’s cherry center swallowed the orbiting oranges and browns in a constant, mindless churn that relaxed her, not unlike the ocean sounds of her old-fashioned sleep machine.           

“John must have had a dozen theories for why it turned,” Maren said. She followed a point on the Red Spot’s perimeter. “A storm needs water. What’s your take?”

“Why does anything turn, Ms. Willard?” The doctor’s voice was as featureless as the walls of sick bay. Maren thought that if voices had a taste, the doctor’s would be of a coppery patina. The metal tip of his pen scratched into the wood of his clipboard.

“So, you’re a philosopher, too?”

The doctor stopped scribbling. Maren heard a shuffling of keys behind her, a clank of an opening drawer, the rushing of sink water. After a few seconds, the sink was turned off, and the doctor’s footsteps came up behind her.

“Before we even docked, some of the passengers were talking to themselves.” Maren turned to watch the doctor’s hands place a plastic cup of water on the bed. Next to that, a handful of white pills on a strip of paper towel. “Are you a psychologist, as well, Doctor?”

“They’ve earned their right to believe.”

“Paid for their right.”

“Even in space, Ms. Willard, money is what makes things turn.” The doctor’s pen made quick, scratching swipes. “How was the scenery on the trip here?”

“Black.” Maren picked up one of the pills. She held it to Jupiter’s amber glow, turned it over in her palm, lay it back down. “I don’t remember signing for these, Doctor…”

“Steinman.” The door to the room clicked shut. “I’m sorry, I didn’t introduce myself earlier. My head’s been in the clouds trying to accommodate all you arrivals.” Dr. Steinman tapped the clipboard, metronomic thuds. “Plus, I have the research from the Europa vessels.”

Maren felt the word on the back of her neck like a cool breeze that began somewhere far, sometime long ago, once warm with promise, now dead and empty—Europa.

“Portal keeps me busy, Ms. Willard.”

“It’s just Maren,” she whispered. “Please don’t say Willard anymore.” She touched her nose to the porthole. A research vessel docked against the Solstice’s hull, leaving blue fountains in its tail stream. Rotors and gears buzzed somewhere below sick bay—they were winding up or winding down, Maren couldn’t tell which, but she knew it was the ship’s doors opening for the research team. That sound means results are coming, John had once said as he steered their H-Car between a narrow band of skyscrapers, Positive or negative, all a man can do is let them come.

“Your husband’s research on DepthX…”

Maren knew he waited for a reaction she wouldn’t give—a testing of waters she’d grown accustomed to ignoring over the years whenever DepthX was mentioned.

“If I only had half his intellect,” Dr. Steinman continued.  Maren turned around. The doctor stood a head taller than the sick bay doors, his skin taut with youth, or something resembling it. His black, no-doubt-synthetic hair dripped like engine grease over horn-rimmed glasses. His eyes reflected the overheads—probably synthetic, too.

“I know who you are, Ms. Willard.” It was stated simply, without a trace of adoration or sympathy. “My wife has one of your paintings in our atrium.”

Maren thought of her studio, where she still paid rent, and let her mind stall in the damp air of that half-empty room, a soundless place save the crinkles of tarps over her stool, easel and paint cans, dust settled onto every surface, her cot folded in the corner, everything as she’d left it the day John left her. “I appreciate her business,” Maren found herself saying.

“John always spoke so highly of you during our poker games.” Dr. Steinman pushed his hands to the bottom of his coat pockets. “You and your daughter.”

Maren waited for him to continue, for some inflection of curvature in his mouth, some seemingly purposeful lean in his shoulders, the body’s avoidance or apology—anything but the dullness that betrayed yet another topic he knew he had only begun to breach. 

“Her name was Katie,” Dr. Steinman said. “Right?”

“What are the pills for?”

“Radiation, inoculation, muscle atrophy. We’re a few hundred miles from the largest storm in all of existence, Ms. Willard. It’d be easier for me to tell you what they aren’t for.”

He approached the bed, stood next to it and stared out the porthole. His profile was right angles and intersections, corners instead of curves. His scent bothered her—not because it had an offensive odor, but because it didn’t have one at all. “They were on the Portal waiver you signed to get up here,” the doctor said. “NASA could have piled a thousand tons of lead on the hull, and the human body would still need help against the solar wind and cosmic rays.” He sighed, looked down. “The Red Spot isn’t known for its mercy.”

“I’m sorry.” Maren knew she was the last of the passengers to see the doctor, and he had probably just finished quelling the same curiosities eleven times over. Even after she left sick bay, the research team from Europa would need a physical to get through the airlocks. That physical’s like a spaceport cavity search, John had once said, Poor me? Poor doctor.  

Maren picked up one of the pills—the word “Portal” was written in blue across its milky surface. “I remember when John told me NASA was cutting your funding.” She swallowed the pill with a sip of water. “We were at my parents’ house. Instead of helping my dad with the steaks, John spent the night alone in the living room, watching sports recaps on mute.” She took the other pills, finished the glass. “Sports calmed him.”

“He used to watch the Bucs during our poker games. I stole a few cards that way.” Dr. Steinman turned to her, backed up and leaned against the wall. “But yes, that whole funding mess cut straight into the team’s carotid, so to speak.” He looked up. “It was quick.”

“Speak freely,” Maren said.

“I’m sure John told you, but the rest of the team was reassigned. Everyone who worked on DepthX was on Mars within the month, working on a fix for the heat shields.”

The cold of the metal bed crawled up Maren’s arms and into her chest—John had been taking trips back to the Solstice for a year after NASA cut ties and Portal took over, and if what the doctor said was true, he was the only one of the DepthX team to survive the shift.

“I never worked on DepthX,” Dr. Steinman said. “But I’m sure your husband was thankful Portal footed the bill.”

“Thankful.” She smiled. “He had heard the world’s largest pharmaceutical company would be backing his research, so he went and bought an H-Car to celebrate. He called me to tell me to stand in the driveway and wait ‘til he got home, like he was Bradley Radcliff landing on a red carpet.” She shook her head. “Two hundred and fifty in the toilet for a toy, though I suppose that’s what men do.”

Another research vessel sputtered past the porthole. It dove straight for the Red Spot, then yoked right to the white-blue kindling that was Europa. Maren wished she was one of its passengers, heading to a new world where memories of the old one couldn’t reach her. “John had a partner here for a couple years, referred to him as Spender. Was he reassigned to Mars with the others?”

“Is this Spender the reason you’re here?”

“My husband was the co-creator of DepthX. I’d like to meet his other half.”

“Never heard of him. John and I really only talked poker and sports.”

Maren wasn’t sure if the answer came too soon, too late, or if she was reading too deep into irrelevant matters. She decided it made no difference—he’d lied at least once already.

“You’re here to see him,” Dr. Steinman said, “aren’t you?”

“Spender. Yes.”

The suppressed smile lines on the doctor’s face said what his tongue didn’t: No, him.

“I don’t believe in that.” A sheen of dust wisped against the porthole. Maren focused on the center of the Red Spot. It seemed to darken the longer she stared. “We had an open casket, and I said goodbye to him then.” Her fingers hurt from the grip they held on the bed. “I didn’t see his old poker buddy there.”

Dr. Steinman held up his hands. “Ms. Willard, I didn’t—”

“Maren.”

“Yes, Maren, I only meant it to suggest that I can help. This is our second time allowing commercial passengers onboard, and the others reported these…simulacras within the first two days. It’s perfectly natural to want to—if my wife—”

“I’m here to see where my husband spent his days, nothing more.”

“The passengers who had the most success seeing,” Dr. Steinman continued, “they often wrote to the person they wanted to see.” A dark lick of hair swung across his forehead. “And we think it triggered something, culled memories from an unused part of the brain…and somehow the Red Spot—”

Maren stood up and shuffled past the doctor. Her only thought as she walked out of sick bay was how John had once referred to sports as a useless inverse of body over mind.