Spaceman of Bohemia

In a near-future Czech Republic, Jakub Procházka, an astrophysicist and the country's first astronaut, launches alone aboard the space shuttle JanHus1 in the spring of 2018. His mission is to reach Chopra, a mysterious cloud of intergalactic cosmic dust that appeared between Venus and Earth 18 months earlier. Previous unmanned probes returned empty, and though a test chimpanzee survived a flight through the cloud, Chopra has begun collapsing on itself, making a human mission urgent. Senator Tůma, an ambitious Czech politician, recruited Jakub because his personal history carried symbolic power: Jakub's father served as an officer in the communist secret police, and Jakub's transformation into a celebrated scientist embodied the nation's democratic rebirth.

As the shuttle ascends, Jakub searches the monitor for his wife, Lenka, hoping their marriage can survive eight months apart. His mind drifts to the winter of 1989 and the village of Středa, where his grandparents prepared for the annual pig slaughter while the Velvet Revolution, the peaceful uprising that ended communist rule in Czechoslovakia, erupted in Prague. His grandfather told him he would call himself a child of the revolution but withheld the harder truth: Jakub belonged to the losing side.

By week 13, monotony defines the mission. Jakub sustains himself with processed food, Robinson Crusoe, and weekly video calls with Lenka, which have grown strained. He fixates on their last morning on Earth, when he refused the breakfast she prepared, violating a longstanding ritual. She dumped the food and said, "Last time, then" (21). On the day of a scheduled call, Lenka does not appear. Petr, the bearded mission leader at the space program's headquarters, explains that she arrived, sat fidgeting, then walked out. Jakub is devastated. She left him once before, after a miscarriage and his emotional withdrawal, but that time he could chase her to the metro. Now he is 30,000 kilometers farther away with every passing hour.

Shadows with arachnid legs emerge from the ship's corridors. Jakub follows them and encounters a barrel-bodied creature covered in gray fur with eight jointed legs, dozens of red-veined black eyes, and startlingly human lips. Its voice registers not as sound but as a dull ache in his brain. "Show me where you come from," it says (29). The creature rakes through Jakub's memories, accessing the central trauma of his life: His parents died in a cable car accident in the Austrian Alps when he was 10. He spent four days on his grandparents' couch, unable to speak or eat, until his grandfather forced food into his mouth and told him, "You have to be a person" (36). He touches the creature and feels solid bone beneath the fur; it is real. When he tries to take a tissue sample, the creature catches the blade, declares, "The body must not be violated" (57), and flees.

The creature probes Jakub's sleeping mind, uncovering formative memories. When Jakub was 13, a stranger named Radislav Zajíc arrived carrying a rusty iron shoe, an instrument of galvanic torture, and described how Jakub's father used it to electrocute him. Zajíc's visit ignited persecution: the family gate was vandalized, the grandfather was beaten, and Jakub was burned on the calf by a bully at a village festival, leaving a permanent scar. A government letter revealed the house had been confiscated from Zajíc and awarded to the Procházkas for the father's service. The family was forced out, relocating to a cramped Prague apartment.

The creature returns, having eaten Jakub's Nutella. Jakub names it Hanuš, after the medieval clockmaker who built Prague's famous astronomical clock and was blinded to prevent him from replicating the achievement. Hanuš reveals he has orbited Earth for a decade, studying humanity. He encountered Earth while fleeing across galaxies, the sole survivor after parasitic creatures called Gorompeds exterminated his kind. Cloud Chopra comes from his home world, and he must see it before the Gorompeds find him. Meanwhile, surveillance reports arranged through Senator Tůma reveal that Lenka is living alone in Plzeň, her hair cut short and dyed red.

As JanHus1 enters Chopra, Jakub activates Ferda, the dust collector. The dust penetrates the ship, disabling solar panels, destroying internal systems, and cutting off the oxygen supply. Jakub dons his space suit, rejects hidden suicide pills, and exits the ship. Untethered, he floats toward Hanuš, opens the cigar box he has carried throughout the mission, and releases his grandfather's ashes into the cosmos. Hanuš is dying: Blisters on his body burst, releasing thousands of Goromped parasites. Together they enter the core of Chopra.

Inside the core, Jakub relives pivotal memories: meeting Lenka at a sausage stand in Prague's Wenceslas Square, falling in love, making love for the first time in a secret attic she decorated with papier-mâché planets. Hanuš shares visions of his own birth and the genocide of his tribe. In their final exchange, Hanuš plays Dvořák's Rusalka in Jakub's mind, an opera about a water nymph who sacrifices everything for human love. Jakub rejects the opera's declaration that all sacrifices are futile; there is no futility in the persistent curiosity of humans or the bonding of atoms. Hanuš's last words are "How unlikely! Yet here we are" (170). The core ejects Jakub. Hanuš's legs detach one by one. He is gone. As his oxygen fades, Jakub considers removing his helmet but decides death is too easy.

A Russian space shuttle, NashaSlava1, part of a secret phantom program continuing Soviet-era missions never publicly acknowledged, rescues Jakub with a robotic claw. A cosmonaut named Klara nurses him but warns he will be imprisoned upon landing, since his rescue cannot be revealed. He reads his own obituary: a national hero who died without pain. During reentry he attacks the controls, crashing the ship into a Russian lake. Three crew members die. He swims to shore and, through desperate border crossings, makes his way back to Prague.

He finds Petr, who gives him recordings of Lenka's therapy sessions with Dr. Kuřák, Jakub's state-appointed therapist. Lenka articulates grievances she never voiced directly: Jakub never asked her permission before accepting the mission, assumed she wanted children because he did, and built the marriage around solving his own problems. "I'm no Penelope," she says (212), refusing the role of the faithful wife from Homer's Odyssey who waits for a hero's return.

Jakub decides to remain dead, hidden from the nation. After recovery in Carlsbad, a historic Bohemian spa town, he learns that Senator Tůma and Zajíc have been arrested for a massive corruption scheme. He meets Zajíc at his own memorial statue in Prague. Zajíc reveals he watched over Jakub his entire life and gave Tůma Jakub's name for the mission because it seemed a "cosmic calling" (252). He takes Jakub to a room re-created from memory, the place where Jakub's father once tortured him. Jakub straps his foot into the iron shoe, then throws it out the window. Zajíc gives him the original house keys to the family property in Středa.

Jakub rides to Plzeň and enters Lenka's apartment with a spare key. He finds a home filled only with her things: novels, a single bed, an easel with an unfinished painting of the night sky featuring a bright moving star. No photographs of their life together. He spots her at a winter festival, but she walks past without recognizing him. He follows her to the river, where she paints at sunset, her face more peaceful than he has ever seen. He cannot impose his burdens on the life she has built.

Jakub returns to Středa and the ruined family house. The gate has collapsed, the yard is overgrown, and squatters have left beer bottles inside. He finds his childhood bed and a hole in the ceiling opening to the night sky. He buys provisions, cooks his first meal, and begins repairs, patching the roof with wooden planks and deliberately sealing out the cosmos. He envisions a life like his grandfather's: simple and bound to the earth. A daddy longlegs spider rests on his forearm in the darkness. He asks if it is Hanuš; there is no answer. He eats Nutella with his fingers and declares: "It is me. The spaceman" (272).