"Vitaly", Deep Map Pilots series, 2018 Eliza Gauger
Vitaly has the balled-up bodymass of an old Earther, which is impossible. Built like a fist. New guys figure he’s gene-tweaked, or juicing, but you’ve seen him in good light on a bad day, and he’s real. He says it took him a hundred years to get out this far, and you believe him. He says he was “misplaced”. The accent makes it difficult, but if you listen, it’s all there.
You get drunk together in his berth, and you don’t talk about it.
He picked this place specially, for the privilege of the window: a swallowing black convexity curled around Jupiter, crosshatched with Jove Station’s tinker-toy catwalks and modules receding into the abyssal distance of the planet. Vitaly listens for the pipes knocking for each particular bilge, so he can point to it before it blows.
To Vitaly, the most beautiful thing in the world is watching the toilets flush all over the station. He loves the sparkle of vented waste, how it catches the horizon of the gas giant and for a minute, he says, it’s like the blessed edge of Jupiter itself crumbles into the sky. He spreads his stubby fingers like releasing a dove. Once, in a bad mood, you said it looked like a stolen blood cell hatching new viruses. Vitaly’s silence was so wounded, you never said it again. He forgave you, because his heart is big enough to forgive a whole country.
It is cold under the window; the vapor and ice carry your body heat away from the radiant plexi like wind chill. You wear his old snoopy hat, and his longjohns – short and baggy on you, not unlike Vitaly – and faded mostly to colorlessness. He calls it “orange”, but everything is brighter in his memory. You wear his medals too, tarnished to cyrillic illegibility from years in recycled air. Keep them, he says. Medal looks good on you. You are beautiful. He is charmingly drunk on bootleg Scope (the label says “Scrope”), toasting every time you hear a flush. They don’t give him a bigger heat chit for this hole just because the Empty can look right in, but he doesn’t care. Vitaly keeps you warm as long as you want him, and keeps to himself when you don’t.
