Imagine if it were you who had a secret, Dr. Hassan continued, as though having anticipated Khalidah’s feelings on the matter. If you were experiencing the occasional suicidal ideation, for example, would you want your whole crew to know, or would you wait for the ideations to pass?
It was a valid counterargument. Mental health was a major concern on long-haul missions. Adequate care required stringent privacy. But Donna’s cancer wasn’t a passing thought about how much easier it would be to be dead. She was actually dying. And she hadn’t told them.
Now, after all that silence on the matter, the cancer seemed to be all anyone could talk about.
“I’ve almost trained the pain to live on Martian time,” Donna said, one morning. “Most patients feel pain in the morning, but they feel it on an Earth schedule, with full sunlight.”
Khalidah could not bring herself to smile back, not yet. Doing so felt like admitting defeat.
“She won’t die any slower just because you’re mad at her,” Brooklyn said, as they conducted seal checks on the suits.
“Leave me alone,” Khalidah said. Brooklyn just shrugged and got on with the checklist. A moment later, she asked for a flashlight. Khalidah handed it to her without a word.
“Have you watched any of the games your dad sent?” Marshall asked, the next day.
“Please don’t bring him up,” Khalidah said.
Five weeks later, the vomiting started. It was an intriguing low-gravity problem—barf bags were standard, but carrying them around wasn’t. And Donna couldn’t just commandeer the shop-vac for her own personal use. In the end, Marshall made her a little butterfly net, of sorts, with an iris at one end. It was like a very old-fashioned nebulizer for inhaling asthma medication. Only it worked in the other direction.
Not coincidentally, Marshall had brought with him an entire liquid diet intended specifically for cancer patients. Donna switched, and things got better.
“I’ll stick around long enough to get the last samples from Hellas,” she said, sipping a pouch of what appeared to be either a strawberry milkshake or an anti-nausea tonic. She coughed. The cough turned into a gag that she needed to suppress. She clenched a fist and then unclenched it, to master it. “I want my John Hancock on those damn things.”
“Don’t you want to see the landing?” Marshall asked. “You know, hand over the keys, see their faces when they see the ant farm in person for the first time?”
“What, and watch them fuck up all our hard work?”
They all laughed. All of them but Khalidah. How could they just act like everything was normal? Did the crew of the Ganesha mission even know that Donna was sick? Would the team have to explain it? How would that conversation even happen? (“Welcome to Mars. Sorry, but we’re in the middle of a funeral. Anyway, try not to get your microbes everywhere.” )
Then the seizures started. They weren’t violent. More like gentle panic attacks. “My arm doesn’t feel like my arm anymore,” Donna said, as she continued to man her console with one hand. “No visual changes, though. Just localized disassociation.”
“That’s a great band name,” Marshall said.
Morrígu tried to help, in her own way. The station gently reminded Khalidah of all the things that she already knew: that she was distracted, that she wasn’t sleeping, that she would lie awake listening for the slightest tremor in Donna’s breathing, and that sometimes Brooklyn would reach up from her cubby and squeeze Khalidah’s ankle because she was listening too. The station made herself available in the form of the alters, often pinging Khalidah when her gaze failed to track properly across a display, or when her blood pressure spiked, or when she couldn’t sleep. Ursula, most often, but then Octavia. God is Change, the station reminded her. The only lasting truth is Change.
And Khalidah knew that to be true. She did. She simply drew no comfort from it. Too many things had changed already. Donna was dying. Donna, who had calmly helped her slide the rods into the sleeves as they pitched tents in Alberta one dark night while the wolves howled and the thermometer dropped to 30 below. Donna, who had said, “Of course you can do it. That’s not the question,” when Khalidah reached between the cots during isolation week and asked Donna if the older woman thought she was really tough enough to do the job. Donna, without whom Khalidah might have quit at any time.
“You watch any of those games yet?” Marshall asked, when he caught her staring down at the blood-dark surface of the planet. Rusted, old. Not like the wine-dark samples that Song drained from Donna each week.
Khalidah only shook her head. Baseball seemed so stupid now.
“Your dad, he really wanted to get those to you before I left,” Marshall reminded her.
Khalidah took a deep, luxuriant breath. “I told you not to mention him, Marshall. I asked you nicely. Are you going to respect those boundaries, or are we going to have a problem?”
Marshall said nothing, at first. Instead he drifted in place, holding the nearest grip to keep himself tethered. He hadn’t learned how to tuck himself in yet, how to twist and wring himself so that he passed through without touching anyone else. Everything about his presence there still felt wrong.
“We don’t have to be friends,” he said, in measured tones. He pointed down into Storage. “But the others, they’re your friends. Or they thought they were. Until now.”
“They lied to me.”
“Oh, come on. You think it wasn’t tough for Song to go through that? You think she enjoyed it, not telling you? Jesus Christ, Khalidah. Maybe you haven’t noticed, but a lot of us made a lot of sacrifices to get this far.”
“Oh, I’m sure it was so difficult for you, finding out you’d get to go to Mars—”
“—Phobos.”
“—Phobos, without anything like the training we had to endure, just so you could pilot your finicky fucking drill God knows where—”
“Hey, now, I happen to like my finicky fucking drill
