For six months Reyes lived in a metal shell circling the Earth, and although the work mattered, it was relentlessly repetitive. Checklists replaced days. As the weeks went by, the silence between tasks thickened, and she found herself lonelier than any briefing had prepared her to be.
One Friday night her radio caught a faint signal on an amateur frequency. She suspected her own imagination, a recognized hazard of long missions, but then she made out a child's voice reading a picture book aloud, slowly and with enormous care, the way one reads to someone who is really listening. The girl's name was Lila. She was nine, and she belonged to the radio club at her school in a small town far below, whose members had evidently pointed an antenna at the sky and hoped.
From then on they spoke every Friday. Lila wanted to know what space smelled like, and Reyes, after a moment's thought, told her it smelled of hot metal. Lila asked whether the stars were loud, and Reyes explained that space is perfectly silent, though the stars look as if they ought to be shouting. On her last Friday in orbit she read Lila the ending of the book, and when she finally landed, the first place she went, before she had so much as unpacked, was the radio club at Lila's school, where a small antenna still pointed at the sky as if that were the most natural thing in the world.