Out here, the features of Earth were so compressed they were hard to distinguish, and anyhow the planet itself was already so remote you could cover it over with the palm of your hand. When she looked out the window, when she thought about it too hard, she felt lost, a dust mote drifting around, a fly in a cathedral dome.

She had to find a new frame of reference.

Well, there was the Earth, a blue ball over there, the Moon a grey disc off thataway, and the sun, a glaring white torch: three beacons, enough to fix her in three-dimensional, interplanetary space.

And beyond those references, visible when her eyes were shielded from the sunlight, she had the stars.

Already she’d come an immense distance in any reasonable human terms, but the stars were so remote that they hadn’t shifted in perspective from when she’d lain out under desert skies, in California and Nevada, and tried to count them. The stars were still there, and they would guide her, as they had sailors on less strange oceans than this for millennia.

The stars, and Venus, of course, an ugly grey smudge, like a stain on the pristine darkness.

Distance: endlessly accumulating as they slowly climbed away from Earth.

What made it all seem real, at last, was not the changing view, but the lengthening moments of silence that punctuated every exchange when she spoke to Houston. She had come so far, at last, that even light was taking its time to reach her.

She felt her sense of space and time shifting and flowing, oddly. Here, in this timeless submarine of a capsule, without perspective beyond the windows, she lost her sense of how big they were — reduced to atoms, adrift in the cosmos, or inflated to the size of giants, able to reach out and enclose the Earth itself. Even time seemed to dissolve away from the steady clockwork of orbit, the ninety-minute dawns and sunsets. Sometimes it was as if her heart raced, other times as if it was pumping sluggish lava through her veins, as if she was losing her grounding in the frame of the universe.

For the first time, she understood what the old guys like Jays had been telling her, all these years. Being an astronaut wasn’t supposed to be a career step. It was about going someplace. I really have come a long way from home, she thought.

It was in this mood that she cornered Arkady, in the descent module, when Henry was asleep.

They didn’t need words. They pulled off each other’s coveralls and underwear, until they were surrounded by a drifting cloud of clothing, like Jane Fonda in Barbarella. Then they found places to anchor themselves, with hands and feet, thrusting their mouths and bellies together.