Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“What’s it like?” James asked. “Coming back to one-G?”

Francis thought. “Strange,” he said. “After six months in orbit? Unpleasant at times, certainly, but more than anything, strange. You feel leaden, slow. You step on the ground and your body expects to fly up, even though your brain knows it won’t. You have to think about your gait in a way you never have before—it takes real concentration to walk. You’re dizzy—vestibular system’s haywire, you’re hypotensive, your neck’s not even used to holding your head up. For a week or two all you want to do is lie down, and when you do it’s—it’s intoxicating, almost. Your own clothes feel like a weighted blanket.” Francis peered over at James, who’d been puttering around the module in an odd, nervy way all morning. “The physical effects pass in a couple weeks at most. Mental readjustment—can take longer.”

James did not look up.

“But you’ll have been told that before, I’m sure,” Francis said.

At the other end of the module, James was chewing his lip. He took his time before answering. “Thousands of hours of training, and drills, and simulations, all so that when I finally did the real thing nothing would surprise me. And despite it all—every new thing—I think I know what to expect, and each time I’m wrong. There’s just no way to know—really know—until you’re in it.”

Francis nodded. “You’ve done just fine acclimatizing up here. You’ll do just fine once you’re back on the ground.”

James shrugged—offered a little smile that didn’t quite meet his eyes—and drifted away to the incubator along Destiny’s aft equipment bank, where the C. elegans were due for a progress check. He and James were not, Francis realized only then, talking of the body and its trials.

“The first time I saw Earth from orbit—” James began. He trailed off. Poked along the incubator’s seams with a tiny vacuum hose.

Francis waited.

“I’d seen pictures, obviously,” James said at last. “I thought I knew what to expect.”

Even in profile Francis could see the little frown of concentration, the sharp line of James’s jaw—familiar to Francis now as his own skin.

James popped open the lid of the incubator and bent to peer within. “Funniest thing,” he said. “When we were waiting on the launch pad, I wasn’t even nervous. You know what it’s like—you’re strapped in like a sack of potatoes, right on top of seven million pounds of explosive rocket fuel, and there’s not a damn thing you can do up there for two and a half hours of prelaunch checks but think. Goodsir was having some kind of conniption next to me. But my mind was clear. I meditated. I was so certain I would be the one to make it into orbit with my head on straight. Awe and wonder and all that, sure—but I really believed nothing would surprise me.”

Francis watched him. With steady hands James turned the centrifuge and extracted a live culture bag to the incubator’s temp-controlled bay.

“Utterly foolish, of course,” James said softly. “There’s simply no way to anticipate the impact of leaving your home planet. No amount of training could have prepared me to look down at Earth and realize: I’m not on it.” He turned, at last, to Francis and smiled sheepishly. “I guess you’re going to say you were flying 70,000-foot missions before I was born, or—”

“James,” Francis said suddenly. A small and sudden panic as though his voice might crack. He wished—he wished he could reach out and touch James. He wished, madly, far from the first time, for a temporary reprieve from freefall—for purchase on the surface of another weighted body. A frictionless world, Francis learned over and over again, was a lonely one. “James. There’s not a single person on this station who would begrudge you that. Not a single man or woman has ever been to space and not felt—” Francis floundered. Self-transcendence? awed expansive love, profoundest fragility? sheer reverent terror masked in the overwhelming call to duty? Not a word of it was sufficient, so he only shook his head. “And besides. 70,000 feet doesn’t come close. Nothing does.”

James didn’t look up. Francis watched him position a transfer pipette for sampling. James’s fingers were long and sure.

“I wept,” James said. “We decelerated, leveled into orbit, made contact with Houston. You know—checklist stuff. We’d rehearsed hundreds of times. But then I caught a glimpse through the porthole overhead. Just a glimpse, and I—” James shook his head. He chuckled ruefully. “I told myself it was the hypoxia making me loopy.”

“It’s humbling,” Francis said simply. “It has to be humbling. Anyone who didn’t feel it—well, that’s not a person I’d want for a crewmate.”

“Is that what you thought of me?” James asked lightly as he spread a tiny sample of nematode growth medium on a glass slide.

Francis sucked in a breath. They’d not talked about it—not exactly. In the first tentative light of détente, some weeks ago—when or how it had crept up Francis was powerless to say—he had given in to the easy temptation to let his rancor go unnamed. James had been no less eager: full of gentle, earnest, toothy smiles, freely given and undeserved. Before long, as in all things, a wretched tightness in Francis’s chest, the shame of a thief, the misery of having what should not be his—and, more and more, the inscrutable knowledge of something precious. Crawling fear of his own limitless power to destroy fragile things—the wrong words, the wrong times.

But James deserved better. “My conduct toward you was—unkind,” Francis said lamely. “And inappropriate. Unprofessional given the—” he waved around them. He waited while James fidgeted with the scanning electron microscope. Lens settings, wires, cables. He tried again: “I’m truly sorry, James.”

If James noticed that that wasn’t quite an answer, he didn’t say. Instead he turned to Francis with a floppy grin. “Maybe you’re picturing gentle, elegant crying—shedding a single tear, that sort of thing,” he said. “That’s not what it was. I mean I wept. We’d hit zero-G, so the fluids went straight to my head, and the tears don’t actually fall, of course, they just—stay there. I was a horrible, snotty mess. Goodsir, meanwhile, suddenly cool as a cucumber! He helped me get out of my helmet—I swear, I might’ve drowned in it otherwise.” James said all this with a conspiratorial hush. Francis knew it for what it was—a gift, in James’s peculiar way. The image came unbidden to his mind: James, just as Francis had found him on the first morning of the new expedition, spinning out indignantly along the module’s centerline axis like a wobbly top or a bug stuck on flypaper, proud and petulant.

“The first time I returned to Earth after an extended trip in orbit I fairly destroyed half my fiancée’s house,” Francis offered. “I’d gotten over the physical effects by this point. It was the habits that lingered. I’d be halfway through fixing dinner and decide to set a stack of plates down in midair, expecting them to be more or less where I left them a few moments later.”

“They were on the floor.”

“Well, yes,” Francis said.

James took a beat to calibrate the microscope. “Didn’t realize you were married,” he said delicately.

“I’m not.”

“—still engaged, then?” James tried. He glanced to Francis. “Or, oh—okay.”

Francis sighed. “It wasn’t because I broke all the plates,” he said. “That wasn’t the reason.”

“Right,” James said. “Wow. Look at that.”

“Hmm?” Francis glanced up. The feed from the microscope lit up a panel of laptops over James’s work station: a nematode’s little body, blown up to greater and greater levels of magnification until Francis had to blink to visually parse anything more than wavy gray strata.

“Cuticle resynthesis,” James said, pointing at the darker substances under layered furrows of exoskeleton. “These are the actin bundles.”

“Oh, that’s—”

“Right on time,” James finished.

It wasn’t their job to analyze data. It wasn’t their job to be microbiologists. It was only their job to be the hands. When James was done with the electron micrography he would transmit the images to PIs in Berkeley and Paris and put the nematodes back where they came from. But pointing out to Francis the spacing of annular bands in the cortical collagen, James confirmed that, at least at a cursory glance, their nematode passengers were developing at a rate equivalent to the control group on Earth. This much Francis could understand: in the long, slow slog of human progress into space, good news for a roundworm was good news for everyone. Incrementally so, perhaps—but so, nevertheless.

“What’s the first thing you’ll do when you get back?” James asked in Destiny the next day. “I mean once you’re up and about and aren’t likely to embarrass yourself in the grocery store by forgetting how your feet work. What are you looking forward to?”

“Ah,” Francis smiled. “Coffee. The kind you don’t drink out of a plastic bag. Don’t even ask me what I would do up here for a good cup of coffee some days.” He’d had three already by midday. Any more and he could expect a well-tempered talking-to from his flight surgeon at the next downlink—though he rarely let that stop him. Back in his academy days, Ross and the other midshipmen had traded in naval lore—incredible stories of survival at sea, where castaways were said to have eased the pain of hunger, at least for a short time, by vividly imagining sustenance. Francis had heard the tales. But imagination had never done him an iota of good. If it didn’t work for booze on Earth, it certainly wouldn’t work for a cappuccino in space.

“God, yes,” James said. “That’d be nice.”

“How about you, then?” Francis asked, even though James’s own tour was less than half over.

“Let’s see,” James said. He spun slowly as he thought, the way he might have at a bar stool back on Earth. He grinned at Francis. “I’ve got a 2018 Scharzhofberger Riesling Kabinett in my wine fridge at home. Been saving it for—well, the right occasion. Yes—I think that would do it for me.”

“Sounds nice,” Francis said simply. “I don’t drink, myself.” He studied his hands. He looked James in the eye and decided to take a chance. “Anymore.”

James raised an eyebrow. Francis stared back.

“How long?”

“Five years.”

James let out a little breath. “They wash people out for far less than that.”

“I know.”

James tapped on his console with a ballpoint pen. “A fellow who went through eighteen months of training with me got released because his left arm was one and a half centimeters longer than his right. They said they would’ve had to manufacture a new fit of EVA gloves for him. That was the end of that.”

Francis stared ahead.

“The—” James began. Brows furrowed. A look to him Francis feared to study. “The sabbatical on your NASA record—?”

“Rehab.”

“That’s an impressive comeback,” James said carefully.

“You mean you want to know how they let a recovering drunk like me up in space,” Francis said. It was a fair question. He’d asked it himself plenty of times. It was one thing to say a person deserved a second chance—but the chance of a lifetime? NASA was in the business of eliminating human error, not courting it, or forgiving it.

James didn’t flinch. “Don’t misunderstand me, Francis. You belong here. That’s not in any doubt, not for me. And for all your moods, it never was. But I am curious. We both know what selection is like. We’ve both sat for psych screening. Houston’s not exactly known for accommodating the variability of the human condition.”

James didn’t know the half of it. “It wasn’t easy,” Francis said quietly. “It was years before I flew again. But I had a long career on my side—distinguished—and a NASA flight record so spotless it would bore you to tears. And before that, a naval record just the same.” Francis fought the urge to turn away. “And—and there were some powerful people in my corner.”

“Ross,” James said.

Francis saw it: the grounds at Johnson Space Center. Ross striding furiously beside him. We’ll get you in the air again. You’re a pilot. It’s where you belong. Sitting before a panel in the Directorate, feeling small as a boy at altar. Palms sweaty. Two months out of rehab. We are gratified to see you recovered, they said, from your recent difficulties. Francis could hardly begrudge them the disdain. The honor of being up there—thrown away like garbage for a sickness of his own creation.

Pending final physical and psychological screening—

Restricted duties—

Indefinite ground assignment—

It was more than he’d deserved. He’d said as much to Ross, again and again, but Ross had shaken his head. Slammed his fist—you’re a pilot. I’ll make them see.

James’s eyes were on him, soft and intent. The module was quiet.

“Ross,” Francis confirmed. “A job like this—no one can deserve it. We’re all lucky to be here. But I am far luckier than most.”

“Then this crew owes him,” James said simply. “Because you are right where you belong.”

Commanding the International Space Station was not a role that admitted of great opportunity for self-revelation. Francis had gotten to where he was with clear eyes and, at least when it came to matters of orbital mechanics, a cool head. Self-knowledge in his line of work began and ended with the capacity for grace under fire—the fact that six other astronauts trusted him with their lives.

Confined as he was to a pocket of the world that admitted of no margin of error, Francis did not make a habit of pondering vagaries of the soul. He was a pilot, and his job was to keep the ship afloat, and the ship, in her wisdom, did not care what manner of dreams disturbed Francis at night, so long as he woke from them with a clear head.

—a clear head—Francis rubbed his eyes. He stabbed plastic tubing into his third coffee of the morning with force that was beginning to make his colleagues eye him strangely. 

In two weeks’ time, they would rendezvous with an Erebus transfer craft bearing the three new astronauts of Expedition 68. Francis would pass command of the ISS to one of the cosmonauts from James’s flight crew. And then he, Silna, and Edward would return to Earth. And he would not see James again, at least not for months, and for all Francis knew maybe never. Would James want to see him? When all was said and done, were they friends? Or was he, Francis, only a colleague—a colleague with whom James had learned to make the best of close quarters but whose company James would not feel sorry to lose?

Gravity—his dreams came rushing upon him. They had fallen together, he and James, matter upon matter, like any problem of Newtonian mechanics. In Francis’s dreams the weight of gravity stirred him, pressed him fast; it moved him with strong arms and gentle whispers. And when at length he was coaxed awake he’d found himself flustered and feverish and panting in the humming dark of the Harmony module, floating once more amid cords and dials, desperately blindingly bereft. It was not his own weight he’d dreamt of but James’s—heavy and powerful all around him in the dawnlight of the earth below. 

“For me, it was the family medical history,” James said suddenly one afternoon. 

It was a day of housekeeping in the Destiny lab. Francis had been fiddling for forty minutes now with faulty coolant tubes on one of the EVA suits. James was directly overhead, vacuuming the module’s fan compartments.

“What?” Francis said. James had a particular habit, sometimes, of yanking conversational threads from thin air—of pulling the both of them back to something Francis had thought gone. But Francis had been distracted of late, he supposed. 

“I’m missing half of it,” James said. “NASA didn’t like that.”

Francis peered up at him. “Half—?”

“Unaccounted for,” James said softly. “On my mother’s side.” Then he flipped belly-up to get at the zenith ventilation rack.

“I see,” Francis said.

Francis told himself he had not the time or use for self-discovery. He could only let experience wash over him. He could only look with a scientist’s hindsight on the evidence of the past: sagas of hurt, of self-denial, and of blind, foolish, ruinous hope. In the present moment he could only take in stride the staggering rush of his own senses—mundane, lovely facts, tiny but paralyzing in their millions, each one of them a revelation.

James talked while he worked. He talked to Francis, most of all, but when Francis was not available—when Francis was, for instance, just around the corner in Kibo or Tranquility—James talked to nematodes and to tadpoles, to plants and even to stem cells. He frowned while he worked: furrows of concentration deep as the stark lines of his jaw. The muscles in James’s forearms were long and smooth—they moved gracefully when he inspected the delicate leaves of his Arabidopsis seedlings, or fine-tuned the confocal microscope, or went up to his elbows in the guts of temperamental robotics systems. In two and a half months, his hair had grown enough that the French braid Francis dutifully did for him each morning now fell to the top of his spine. 

Sometimes, in the early morning, when Francis had his hands in James’s hair—sometimes, Francis could almost swear—James leaned back, pressing his scalp into Francis’s fingers and his broad shoulders into Francis’s chest. Sometimes, with his hands full of James’s hair and James’s warm body close in front, Francis thought he could hear soft contented sighs and even fainter noises from the back of James’s throat—small murmurs, little hitches of breath, pleased happy sounds like a great spoiled cat. Once, when Francis had finished, James turned around, still so very close, and had run a large hand through Francis’s graying buzz cut. He’d said, if you ever do grow this out, I’d be delighted to return the favor. Then he winked—winked! Francis had said he had no interest in looking like an aged folk singer. But in truth he was desperate to know what it would feel like, to be in James’s hands in turn.

That morning, mid-braid, James had tipped back against Francis’s chest, nestled there, and—there was practically no other word for it—purred. He turned and faced Francis when it was done, fingering thoughtfully at the plaits at the back of his head like he always did. “Thanks, Francis,” James had said softly—as he always did. He was very close. The station might have experienced catastrophic mechanical failure at that very moment, and Francis would have been insensible to it, busied as he was only by the mad, mad thought of whether or not James was the sort of man who kissed his friends. 

In Tranquility Francis pounded bullishly at the treadmill. He’d left his average mile split in the dust twenty minutes back. He strapped on extra resistance bands and kept going, sweating out great fevered sheets, huffing like he was going for his very life.

He saw a pea-sized droplet of sweat jostle off his arm and hang suspended, perfectly spherical, before drifting away. Silna wrinkled her nose at it from the stationary bike alongside him. Earlier, she’d watched him puffing and groaning away against the vacuum cylinders that did duty as a benchpress, her eyes wide.

“You can just talk about it, you know,” she said.

“What?” Francis panted.

She slowed in the bike’s resistance harness just enough to serve him a withering look. “Don’t make me hold your hand, Francis.”

“What?” he said again.

“And don’t make me drag you off that thing, either. I’m not going to watch you go into cardiac arrest just because you can’t have a simple conversation.”

Francis grunted at her. His thighs burned. He was too breathless to speak—and Silna was razor-sharp as ever. 

Silna mainly spent her time in Zvezda, taking ultraviolet readings of the tops of thunderstorms. The terrestrial gamma ray flashes she tracked lasted for mere microseconds and were invisible to optical cameras. It was work that suited her well, Francis felt. He knew very well it was irrational, but sometimes he couldn’t help but entertain the thought that the search for dark lightning had given her preternatural powers of sight. Loosened by fatigue, he tried the thought out loud.

“You idiot,” she said. “I wake up three feet away from you every day.”

“So, what else?” James asked one afternoon. 

It was Francis’s day off. Nothing scheduled but his two hours’ mandated exercise later that evening. He’d chatted with Ann, emailed his sisters, watched no fewer than three sunrises from the observatory windows, watered the lettuce plants in the Kibo Advanced Plant Habitat, and even paid a visit to Zvezda to practice his Russian. But he’d missed his lab, and James in it, and so by afternoon he’d decamped to Destiny to watch James fertilize frog eggs.

“Hm?” asked Francis.

“Good coffee, you said,” James prompted. “What else are you going to do first chance you get?”

Francis smiled. There was so much. He’d eat fresh fruit until he made himself sick. He’d impose upon the Ross family home, where he would be climbed upon by Lizzie and run ragged by young James’s games of pirates and space battles—a reconditioning regimen hardier and more restorative than anything the Space Medicine teams in Houston could hope to devise. Once he was on his own again, he’d find someplace to walk for miles and miles by himself, or—

“You know,” he said. “I’ve been thinking of getting a dog.”

The Cupola was pitch black when Francis entered. He’d come in the dark, silently as he could. But when he felt along the observatory’s overhead for the shutter controls, he was startled to find that they were already down. Had one of them forgotten—?

“Oh—hi,” came a voice from somewhere near the nadir windows. 

“Jesus!” Francis hissed. “Fucking hell!”

“It’s James.”

“Jesus Christ—” 

“I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to startle you,” said James. 

“Jesus,” panted Francis once more. “It’s alright. I’m sorry. Didn’t realize anyone else was here.” Squinting toward the nadir, he began to make out the paneling of the observatory windows, and far beyond them—far below—the faintest wisps of clouds. They were in the shadow of the Earth.

“It’s dark,” James said, which was quite obvious. “South Pacific. No ground lightning.”

Francis let go of the hatch and let himself drift toward the windows. By the faintest glow of reserve power behind him, Francis could at last make out the shape of James, drifting alone above the blackest night with his knees tucked neatly to his chest.

“We’re not about to fly past another island of yours, are we?” Francis whispered.

“No. No,” James said. He moved over to make room for Francis. “I just couldn’t sleep. There was a lovely sunset not long ago. Thought I’d stay for a bit longer and see the other side.”

Francis nodded. “The same.”

They drifted there, shoulder to shoulder, bumping gently in the dark. James was steady, warm, and uncommonly quiet. The station thrummed softly around them—fans and coolant pumps and distant thrusters, like the breaths of a living organism in repose. Francis was quiet too. For all that awaited him on Earth, a certain deep and inevitable pain had been fomenting: he felt it like a heartache; he feared to say it out loud. Next to James he breathed in and out—in and out like the great creature around them—and allowed it at last to come to the surface.

“I may not see this again,” he said.

James turned. “What? But you’re not retiring, are you?”

No, no—but nothing was guaranteed. There were others who could do what Francis could do—all of it, and more. There were pilots younger and brighter. “Not yet,” he said. “But these tours don’t come around often.” 

“Well. No one knows the station like you do. They’ll send you again,” James said. He spoke of the ISS with a certainty that forced Francis to recall, not for the first time, that James had been only a child when it was first launched, twenty-four years ago. And in the dark—James found Francis’s hand.

But for the ISS, too, the writing was on the wall. Twenty-four years of service was venerable, but there was no place in the world for an antique space station. The agencies of the world wanted back on the moon, and after that Mars. Within the decade at the outside, the ISS—the only craft in lifetime of naval service Francis had ever thought of as his ship—would be decommissioned, stripped, de-orbited, and led to a controlled, targeted, gentle death in a remote region of Earth’s oceans.

He squeezed James’s hand back. His own felt small in James’s fingers.

“Francis, I—” James started tentatively.

Francis turned. He could see the sharp lines of James’s cheeks in the dim light of faraway clouds. He could see him bite his lip.

“It’s silly,” James said.

“What, James?”

“It’s so silly,” James said again. His thumb stroked at the back of Francis’s hand. “I’ve wanted to be here for so long. Every time I look down—even now—I can hardly believe it’s real. I can hardly believe it’s me who gets to do these things, and that I get to do them for three more months. And yet—and yet—the closer we get to the rendezvous, the more I find myself wishing I could leave, too.”

“Leave?” Francis whispered.

James turned to face him. “With you,” he said. “With you, Francis.”

Francis shut his eyes. He thought of the plasma experiment that James had rescued two weeks into the expedition. At this very moment, somewhere in the Zvezda module behind them, complex plasma hung in suspension inside a charged chamber—a delicate crystal lattice, ordered and pristine, a wonder not of human design, and not for them to keep. The plasma crystals were an experiment only possible in microgravity. Take the chamber back to earth, and the lattice would crumple under its own weight.

“James,” he whispered. He dared to look. They were not so fragile, he and James.

James shifted close. “Can I—?” he began.

Francis kissed him. When their lips touched he heard a soft sound escape James, a little murmured hitching of breath. Francis stilled. Was that shock? pleasure? horror, perhaps?

“Francis,” was all James said—a low rumble, raw and soft as velvet—and Francis surged at him, for even to him some things were unmistakable. His hands came up: they clutched James’s broad shoulders; they tangled in James’s wild, wild hair.

“Is it alright,” he begged. “James, is it alright—”

“My god, Francis.” James moaned into his mouth in a helpless, open way. Francis could register only dimly, somewhere in the back of his mind, that in this act, too, James made himself urgently noisy: breathy and whining as though he’d never been kissed in his life. A sweetness belied by the strength of his hands on Francis’s body, which spoke of nothing but intent.

Francis was mad for him. James tasted like NASA toothpaste, and the collar of his shirt, when Francis dipped his head to gasp against James’s neck, smelled like recycled air and dry sweat. And Francis was mad for him, aching beyond reason, hungry to crash upon him and desperate to feel James meet him, force for force, matter upon matter. Instead they set themselves spinning, unmoored from the world and senseless to any notion of physics more abstract than two bodies coming to rest out of a silent void—two bodies at rest against each other. “James,” he whispered. “James, James—”

They floated—Francis let James hold him—and for the first time since entering orbit nearly one hundred and sixty days prior Francis felt like a weighted object in the peril of great height. He floated, but not because he was in constant freefall inside a hurtling satellite—he floated because James floated, and James held him up. He drifted, buoyed by new currents and salt-sea swells, every sensation an impossible, strange marvel to him: the fuzzy drag of soft velcro against soft velcro as their legs tangled, the overwhelming giddiness as hands, shockingly big hands, cradled his neck, moved over his shoulder blades, and dropped low.

Francis was helpless against him in turn, hot and shameless, rushing— “Were we on Earth,” James said breathlessly, his lips crushed to Francis’s neck, “this is the point where I’d invite you home.”

Sunrises came suddenly to the station: every ninety minutes they unfurled over the forward horizon at a breakneck pace as the station itself plummeted ever downward and eastward to meet the coming of dawn. This one announced itself in brilliant smoldering red, flourishing at once like a distant bomb. Francis knew what he would see if he looked out the aft windows—the stark white of the station glowing like a blood moon wherever its face caught the rising day. Francis watched the sunrise on James instead. His face alight in the dusky blush of the starboard photovoltaic arrays, quick and glancing angles, crosshatched and eerie on his skin. The next moment it was over. Pale white sun ahead of them and daylight on the world below.

“Francis?”

James’s lips were swollen dark. His hair was wild as ever. Francis stared helplessly. He had never been good at this sort of thing on Earth. Never even dreamed of it in space.

“I have a house in Florida,” he said suddenly.

James blinked. “What?”

“Never did like Houston. I quit my lease the week we left for pre-launch quarantine.”

James stared at him. “Florida?”

Francis nodded. “Cape Canaveral. I have a house,” he said again. “The place is a dump. It’s hot and wretched and too close to the lagoon. It might—” he laughed madly. “It might be at the bottom of the swamp by now. The stilts weren’t looking good, last I saw them.”

“Francis—”

“But there are birds,” Francis pressed. “All kinds of birds. Kestrels, egrets, spoonbills, and scrub jays. They’re a god-awful racket in the mornings. You’d like them.”

“Oh—” James said. “Francis.”

“And manatees. Oyster beds, salt marshes. A sediment or two for you to peer at, I’m sure. And, if the house is still standing, there’s a good view of the launch site from the roof.”

He finished in a rush. He stayed there in the broad light of the hastened day, stood straight, and waited.

“Three months and twelve days,” James said. A grin split over his face. “You can expect me.”