Wings From Silence

Twelve days after Jay’s message, Anita got the message she’d been waiting for. Frida would be making the next supply run, and she would be there in five days. If she could push herself to finish the suit in time, Frida could try it and test the design. If the designs were solid, she could begin constructing the next suits. Even if it didn’t work the way it should, she would know what to change. She would have solid data to go from. Anita cut her exercise routine in half, and stepped up her work on the suit. The wings were joined together, and joined to the suit for a power test. All the pieces moved the way Anita expected, but it was impossible to tell how it would work on the surface, on a real human body, until Frida was in the suit. On the scheduled day of the supply run, Anita was impatient. She hadn’t been given an arrival time to expect Frida, and didn’t want to leave the base for any reason. She sprinted around the base a few times to shed some of her nervous ene...

The torment of nights alone faded for a little while. Maybe the intensity created some kind of overload and short-circuited my system, Anita thought. It was a relief. Her schedule settled into a predictable routine again. No more excessive walks on the surface, though the occasional half hour or so still helped fight the cabin fever. Most of her time went into the suit. The fabric and electronic part of the construction was mostly done, and she had moved on to the wings. Those were marginally easier to construct, but harder to find a place to spread them out once they had grown to a certain size. Half of the entry room was now dedicated to the wings, parts spread across the floor in various stages of construction. The changes in her body had mostly stopped, reaching some kind of equilibrium as she maintained her exercise routines. She still wasn’t fond of the new body, but she was beginning to make her peace with it. The additional strength was nice, as was the increased endur...

Despite the recent close call, Anita couldn’t keep away from the open surface of the moon, particularly during the seven days of light. Three weeks after Tohru had flown away, she slipped into her surface suit and pulled on her boots. The suit fit very strangely now, tight in all the wrong place and loose in others. But the seams were still solid, and she had no fear wearing it outside the base. The warm color of the moon flooded across her face as she stepped into the airlock. She waited impatiently while the air vented back into the base and the outer seals opened, then stepped onto Titan. The ochre sands drifted gently across her boots, and the sun was about seventy degrees above the horizon, hidden from direct sight by the murky atmosphere. Probably should have waited a little longer, she thought, fewer shadows. But she didn’t care. It felt good to be outside again. Despite the deep chill of the moon’s surface, it always felt a little warmer, even with the sun so distant a...

A quick note: if you had read Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers, you may remember when writer Harriet Vane faces a decision whether to keep her emotions out of her writing and produce a perfectly serviceable potboiler, or be honest and write with emotional depth, and produce a better book. This book is my Harriet Vane moment. I could have written less honestly about some of the physical and emotion things I went through for the many years I was involuntarily single, but it would have been a lesser book. Anita is not me, but a lot of her sensations and thoughts are ones I have dealt with. Chapter 12 The first scrunch of the carbon-bladed scissors through the suit material was the most exciting sound Anita had heard in a very long time. Every pattern piece had been measured, checked, re-measured, and checked a final time before Anita was ready to begin cutting. It was a challenging puzzle: the fabric had been specially constructed to keep the chill of Titan at bay, and was not reversi...

Chapter Eleven When her alarm sounded, Anita rolled over. Capheus’ bunk was empty, and the blankets were neatly folded at the foot of the bed. She  walked into the kitchen to see him standing in front of the heater, preparing a bag of eggs, meat, and herbs. He smiled as he looked up. “Good morning, doctor. I hope you slept well. I thought I’d get a head start on breakfast, I hope you don’t mind. I need to leave within the hour.” Anita nodded, and gave a wavery smile. Did he know? She felt as if her mental tumult from the night before were printed on her face for anyone to read. That’s silly, she told herself as she sat down at the table. Nothing happened. You did nothing wrong. Desire is a normal human thing, especially after extended isolation. You have nothing to be ashamed of. Breakfast was quiet, but pleasant. The sheer craving for warm food had passed weeks ago, but it was still a nice contrast to the chilly air inside the base. Getting food into her system woke Anita up...

Chapter Ten Anita buried herself in work for the next week, barely letting herself look outside of the base except to watch the night pass by on the computer monitors. Bit by bit, the first suit was coming together on the table. The assembled components were only a few centimeters across, but she added a little every day, and that was the important thing. Or so Anita told herself, when the inevitable self-doubt arose. Capheus was the next scout to arrive. She only had a few hours notice before he skidded to a stop a few meters outside the hatch. When he came inside, she signed, “I would have helped, but you didn’t give me time to put on my suit!” He laughed, and embraced her. She held on as long as she dared, soaking in the feel of human touch on her skin. They got business out of the way by putting away the food supplies and swapping the oxygen out, then Anita showed him the suit components on the table. He touched them gently, drawing a finger along the edge. “This is ...

Chapter Nine It would be a full week before Anita felt the walls of the base close in again and had to escape to the surface. It was one of the full days of sunset and dusk, when the shadows were long. She would have to be extra careful: it would be much easier to see her movements as long as the sun was up. It would probably be a few hours before the sky would darken enough to make spotting shadows difficult, but she couldn’t spare that long. A quick walk, being careful, it would be ok. No satellites were scheduled to pass by during the next two hours. As far as they knew. As usual, Anita walked up the small hill and over to the nearby lake. It was truly spectacular at sunset, with the light reflecting off the surface when she stood at the right angle. She didn’t dare throw a rock today, but it was always so tempting. The breezes were stronger than usual today, and the lake rippled quietly, peaks of the waves catching light and tossing it off in golden sparks. Sh...