The Window in the Floor

The weather changed while Ada was still brushing her teeth. She pushed off the wall and floated to the round window, toothbrush in hand. A green ribbon had come up over the edge of the world. It bent, and folded, and shook itself out again like a sheet on a line. Bram floated up beside her and hooked one broad paw through the rail. "The sun sent wind," Ada said. "It's hitting the air down there." All along the corridor the lamps went down to amber, then lower, the way they always did when something worth seeing came by. Space Station Nine was making room for the storm.

Ada's small hand lamp clicked on in her palm, a warm white circle. She and Bram went hand over hand down the corridor, past the sleeping plants, past the hum of the water pipes. The windows they passed were full of green now. Ada counted them. Four, five, six. At the end of the gallery was the round room with the window in its floor, where the crew went to watch the world go by. Ada had looked in at that door many times. She had never once gone inside. Bram waited beside her, not hurrying her, his striped face turned the same way as hers.

The door was open. Green light came up through the floor and lit the ceiling, and the ceiling looked like water. Ada held the frame with both hands. "I don't like a floor I can see through," she said. "It makes my stomach think I'm falling." Bram nodded, slow. He did not tell her it was safe. He only put his paw on the first handhold and left it there, broad and patient. Ada looked at the handholds going round the wall like stepping stones in a stream. "One more handhold. Then one more," she said. She took the first one.

She got as far as the third handhold before her hands wanted the doorway again. So she went back. Bram came back with her, no faster and no slower, and they hung in the doorway together and breathed. That was allowed. Nothing on the station said how long a thing should take. Below them Earth turned, dark and quiet, with the green ribbon lying along the curve of it like a scarf left on a chair. Ada watched it fold and unfold. Her heart stopped knocking quite so hard. Then she reached out and took the first handhold again.

Three handholds. Four. Bram moved along beside her, unworried, his shoulder near her shoulder. "One more handhold. Then one more," Ada said, and Bram said it back to her in his low voice. The lamp swung in her other hand and threw their shadows round and round the walls. At five, the green came up warm on her face, like light off summer grass. At six, she could see the whole window beneath her, a great clear circle with the world inside it. She stopped there. She did not go back. She stayed where she was and let her breath catch up with the rest of her.

Then Ada let go with one hand and reached her foot down. Her sock touched the glass. It was cool and solid, like a frozen pond in winter. She put the other foot down too, and stood on nothing at all, on the thickest window ever made, with the whole turning Earth under her toes. Bram settled beside her and leaned in, warm through her sleeve. Ada laughed, once, in surprise at herself. The aurora rose around them in long slow folds, green and then a seam of red, and the light slid across the floor and across her hands.

The only wrong thing now was the lamp. Its white circle sat on the glass and hid the world behind it. Ada looked at the lamp, and then at the station, every corridor gone soft and dim so that the storm could be seen properly. Then she clicked her lamp off. The dark came, and the green came with it, pouring up through the floor until Bram's stripes were green and her sleeves were green. Oceans moved below. Cities lay in the night like spilled sugar. "One more handhold. Then one more," Ada said. But she did not need one just then.

They stayed until the ribbon began to thin. Ada floated back along the handholds, and this time she did not count them, and Bram carried the lamp for her in his teeth. In her bunk she slid the strap across her middle, and Bram hooked one paw under it beside her. Through the small window the green went pale, then paler, the way a candle thinks about going out. Ada watched the last thread of it lie down along the edge of the world. Then it was gone, and there was only the hum, and the warm dark, and Bram breathing slow.