Bebe meant to fight her, Park saw, or more likely meant to fight Natalya, but then she stared up into the HERCULES’s face and seemed to change her mind. The HERCULES smiled at her, jerkily, the movement like the dents in a crumpled soda can popping back out. Together the two of them led Bebe back to Park’s tent, where Bebe lay flat on her back on the tarp floor, crying, while Park sat on the edge of the cot and droned at her: first standard words of reassurance from the ISF scripts, and then, helplessly, whatever Park thought would have made herself feel better if the situations were swapped.

You wouldn’t want to crack, she insinuated, to lose your composure—not before getting to Eos. The opportunity of a lifetime. Of a million lifetimes. A virgin planet to help discover! Nothing was worth losing that! The violence of emotion would not be allowed aboard the ship, she told Bebe. The irrationality of love had no place in space. So . . . get rid of it.

When that didn’t work, she attempted to explain further. “When you feel love,” she said, “your ascending reticular activating system is stimulated. It’s a cluster of cells deep in your brain stem. It doesn’t discriminate. Not in the way you would think. So you’ll move on. Find someone else.”

Bebe kept weeping. “In other words,” Park said, “this isn’t the end of the world. You can love again.”

Though she didn’t know why Bebe would want to. Luckily, it didn’t seem that the botanist heard any of what Park was saying: she seemed intent on lying on the floor and howling at the arctic moon while the HERCULES watched tentatively through the slit in the tent. Park was reduced to cradling her chin in her hand and making soothing sounds while Bebe gasped and hiccupped with heartbreak.

An hour passed, then two. Eventually the other woman fell asleep on the floor, her tears forming a transparent crust on her face so that it seemed blurry and undefined to Park. Park was left sitting on the edge of her cot, wondering what it was like to feel the things that Bebe felt. What was love, really? Biology, as she’d said—but also nothing more than a pain in someone’s ass.

—

The next morning, Park trudged toward the mess tent for breakfast. She couldn’t keep her head from drooping a little: she’d scraped barely three hours of sleep, and even then Bebe’s snoring had jolted her awake throughout the night. She bumped forehead-first into someone’s shoulder; they put out a hand to steady her and said, “Are you all right?”