Gwendy’s Final Task

Gwendy looks ahead again at the Milky Way. She wishes the brightest of them was Scorpius, but she’s pretty sure it’s Sirius, also known as the Dog Star, because it’s part of the Canis Major constellation. That makes her think of her father’s sausage dog, Pippin. Only that’s not right, is it?

“Pippa,” she whispers. “Pippa the dachshund.”

She’s losing it again. The fog is closing in.

Gwendy fixes her eyes on Sirius, which is roughly at ten o’clock in her field of vision. Second star on the right and straight on til morning, she thinks. What’s that from? Hansel and Gretel, isn’t it? But that’s not right. She trawls her dimming mind for the correct story or fairy tale, and finally comes up with it: Peter Pan.

15% oxygen now, and it will be a race between the end of her breathable air and the end of her ability to think. Only she doesn’t want to go out that way, not knowing where she is … or if she does know that (outer space is kind of hard to mistake for the bus station in Castle Rock, after all), why she’s out here. She’d like to go out knowing all this happened for a reason. That in the end, she completed the task set before her. That she saved the world.

“All the worlds,” she whispers. “Because there are more worlds than ours.”

She doesn’t have to go out puzzled and confused, nor does she have to go out cold and shivering if her heat quits before her breathable air. (She seems to remember Carol—if that’s her name—saying the heat would last longer, but her suit’s temp has begun to drop a degree at a time.) She has another option.

She has only one disappointment. In 1984, ten years after Richard Farris gave her the button box, he came to take it back. He sat in her small kitchen with her. They had coffee cake and milk, like old friends (which they sort of were), and Mr. Farris had told her future. He said she was going to be accepted at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and she was. He told her she was going to win an award (“Wear your prettiest dress when you pick it up”), and she did. Not the Nobel, but the Los Angeles Times Book Award was not to be sneezed at. He told her she had many things to tell the world, and that the world would listen, and that had been true prophecy.

But the mysterious derby-wearing Mr. Farris had certainly never told her she would end a mostly warm and loving life in the deep cold of outer space. He’d told her she’d live a long life. 64 wasn’t young, but she didn’t consider it old, either (although in 1984 she probably would have considered it ancient). He told her she would die surrounded by friends, not alone in the universe and being tugged ever deeper into the void behind a tiny rocket that would continue running on power for 70 years or more and then continue in an endless inertial glide.

You will die in a pretty nightgown with blue flowers on the hem, Farris told her. There will be sun shining in your window and before you pass you will look out and see a squadron of birds flying south. A final image of the world’s beauty. There will be a little pain. Not much.

No friends here—the last ones she made were far behind her.

A spacesuit instead of a pretty nightgown.

And certainly no birds.

Even the sun was gone for the time being, temporarily eclipsed by the earth, and was she crying? Dammit, she was. The tears didn’t even float, because she was under constant acceleration. But the tears were fogging up her visor. The star she’d been watching—Rigel? Deneb?—was blurring.

“Mr. Farris, you lied,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t see the truth. Or maybe you did and didn’t want me to have to live with it.”

No lie, Gwendy.

His voice, as clear as it had been as they sat in her kitchen 42 years ago, eating coffee cake and drinking milk.

You know what to do, and there’s still enough of that last chocolate in your brain to give you time to do it.

Gwendy uses the valve on the left side of her helmet to begin bleeding the remaining air from her suit. It disappears behind her in a frozen cloud. Her visor clears and she can see that star again: not Rigel, not Scorpius, but Sirius. Second star on the right.

A kind of rapture steals into her as she breathes the last of her thinning air.