Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

  Watching them, Violet wondered if this quarrel was more than just a simple bout of name-calling. When Rez brought up Rachel, Tin Man was forced to think again about Molly—and to cover up his pain with a show of bravado.

  “You don’t know what that signal is,” Tin Man declared. “You could be making a big deal out of nothing.”

  And then, just as Rez was about to issue a snarling retort about Tin Man’s intelligence—or the lack thereof—something happened:

  Mickey woke up.

  * * *

  The AstroRob twisted. He shivered. A humming sound ensued, followed by a beep and a series of clicks. A light popped on, popped off, popped on again. This time it stayed on.

  Rez and Tin Man forgot all about their argument. They leaned forward in their seats along with Shura and Violet.

  Mickey made a noise that sounded like dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee. Then he made another noise that sounded like eh-eh-eh-eh-eh-eh. And yet another: ya-ya-ya-ya-ya-ya.

  Hinging himself at what had been designed to resemble a waist, the robot sat upright and surveyed the room. He swiveled the flat side of his topmost compartment—the one designed to vaguely mimic a face—from side to side as he took note of the people around the table.

  “Hey,” Mickey said. “I’ve got a limerick.”

  “NO,” Rez declared, his voice rising in protest. “I absolutely forbid it.”

  The AstroRob made a noise that had been calibrated to resemble a throat-clearing and then embarked upon a recitation in a singsong voice:

  A daring young spaceship commander

  Was nervous and just couldn’t land her.

  As his orbit diminished,

  “I fear I am finished!”

  He cried with incredible candor.

  “That’s great,” Violet said. Pleased at Mickey’s recovery, she laughed. “More!”

  “It is not great,” Rez muttered. “Do not encourage him.”

  Shura opened the portable medical kit that she kept in the breast pocket of her white tunic. She drew out three gossamer-thin threads attached to small triangular pieces sheathed in copper plating and used them to test Mickey’s receptors. Finally, she aimed a penlight into the diagonal slashes in his top compartment. The perforations weren’t actually eyes, of course, but their placement was intended to suggest them.

  She lowered the penlight and clicked it off. “He’s back,” she concluded.

  “Too bad,” Rez said with a groan.

  Mickey chuckled and started up again before Rez could intervene.

  A rocketship captain must fly

  Amid dangers of planet and sky.

  Asked why he cavorts

  Through space, he retorts:

  “It’s a whole lot of fun, that’s why!”

  “Fantastic!” Violet said. “Love this guy.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” Rez tapped his console. “Rise and shine, Mickey. Time to get back to work.” The AstroRob executed a complicated rolling maneuver that brought him to the edge of the table; the cylinders shifted and tilted, enabling him to slide off. He landed upright on the floor. The cylinders reassembled in their original position. “I’ll be in my lab,” Rez added, “trying to get to the bottom of that signal.”

  Tin Man mumbled. It sounded to Violet like gut lump.

  Gut lump?

  “What?” Rez said.

  Now Tin Man sighed deeply. His pride was making it hard for him to say what he needed to say, which is why he’d mumbled it in the first place. “Okay, fine. Fine. What I said was, ‘Good luck.’ With finding the signal, I mean. I’m sorry I questioned you. It’s just that when you mentioned Rachel, I started thinking about Molly, and thinking about Molly always makes me feel kind of—”

  “No problem.” Rez cut him off, but not in a mean, you’re-a-dope way. It was more of a I’ve-got-to-get-to-work way. “I don’t blame you for doubting this. It’s pretty crazy stuff. All I know is that, somehow, Rachel’s Intercept chip is still functioning.”

  “Could it be a false signal?” Kendall asked. “An echo, I mean?”

  Rez frowned. “What?”

  “An echo. From an original Intercept transmission—one that was collected and then deployed years ago, perhaps. Maybe it’s not a new transmission. Just a repetition of an old one.”

  Rez pondered the idea. Kendall had invented the Intercept years ago in a laboratory on Old Earth, thus his ideas carried extra weight.

  “I don’t know,” Rez finally said. “That’s definitely a possibility. I need to get back to my computer and start running tests.”

  Violet made eye contact with Kendall. She had something she wanted to ask Rez, too, but she wasn’t a scientist. So she hesitated. Kendall gave her an encouraging nod.

  She took the plunge. “Hey, Rez. What about the exoplanet search? I thought that was pretty important, too.”

  “It is.” He stood up abruptly. “But not as important as Rachel. So I’d better get to it.”

  “Need any help?” Kendall asked.

  Of all the people present, Violet knew, Kendall was the only one with the technical expertise and raw brainpower to be of any service whatsoever to Steve Reznik. But she knew something else as well: Rez liked to work alone.

  Well, except for his AstroRob. A necessary nuisance.

  “I can handle it for now,” he answered. “But thanks.” He addressed the table at large. “I’ll keep everybody posted on how it goes. And I know I don’t have to say this, but I will, because it’s so damned important. Just like with the Graygrunge attack, this has to stay confidential. Okay? Nobody talks about this at all. With anybody. For now, it stays in the group.”

  He looked around the room. Kendall nodded.

  Tin Man grunted.

  Shura murmured, “Okay.”

  Violet said, “You bet.” Her voice had a slight edge to it, but not because she doubted the need for discretion. None of the others seemed to notice. She had a funny feeling in the pit of her stomach. It was a vague, fluttery wisp of a thing, a flicker of anxiety. Once more, something momentous was beginning to stir in their world, something extraordinary and exciting, but also challenging.

  She sensed that they were about to make another great leap into the unknown—a place she loved and feared in equal measure.

  6

  Senator Crowley

  When Violet awoke the next morning, she realized it was still there: the funny, fuzzy, flipping feeling in her stomach.

  Maybe she was just hungry.

  Now, that’s a problem I know how to solve, she told herself, cheering up. Even though I’m not a genius.

  She shuffled into the kitchen of her small apartment, the same one she’d had since she was sixteen and had left the home she’d shared with her father. The basic elements of the place were nothing special—living room, bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. Gray carpet, gray drapes, white walls. What made it extraordinary were Shura’s paintings. Over the years, her friend had given her dozens. Some of them showed scenes from Old Earth, but not the blasted-out, radioactive, rubbed-raw parts. These depicted roller coasters and Ferris wheels suspended high over the deserted landscape, bits and pieces of the half-finished amusement park that Rez had dreamed of creating down there before a crisis had shut it down. Some were portraits of their friends: Kendall, Tin Man, Rez, Shura herself. And Molly and Rachel.

  The artwork made Violet’s apartment dazzling. Not because every single painting was beautiful—some of the paintings, in fact, were deliberately not beautiful—but because they were true. And truth was another kind of beauty, Violet had discovered. A beauty that went beyond pleasing shapes and pretty colors.

  She wasn’t thinking about art right now, however.

  She was thinking about breakfast.

  Hash browns and scrambled eggs sounded good, and so she waved a ReadyMeal across the blue rectangle embedded in the counter and fumbled around until she found a fork. When she was a kid, she’d visited the Technology Museum over in Mendeleev Crossing and was fascina
ted by a funny square box dating from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries called, if she remembered it correctly, a “microwave.” It was hard for Violet to imagine a world in which you had to stick a meal into a black box and shut the door and wait several minutes for it to be done.

  Sometimes she tried to picture a nineteen-year-old from back then—somebody a lot like herself. Did that person wonder about the future just as Violet wondered about the past? One person looking forward, the other person looking back?

  Before she settled down at the table to eat, she touched a small red spot on the wall next to the window. The curtains parted, revealing a fine, sunny day. No surprise there. Most mornings on New Earth were fine and sunny. The truth was, they all could potentially be fine and sunny, because the specifics were created each morning at the Environmental Control Center right next to Violet’s workplace, the Central Administration Building.

  Color Blenders mixed the hues that determined the tint and texture of the sky. Atmospherics Specialists selected air temperature, wind direction and velocity, the barometric pressure. Subspecialists in the Weather Corps checked the algorithms and decided whether it would rain or not rain today, or snow or not snow, or if fog would roll in or not roll in. If a fair day came up on the rotation, they further decided whether the sunlight would be at full strength or whether it would be filtered through an assortment of clouds.

  Variety was the key. Too many beautiful days in a row could be as dreary as too many overcast, drizzly ones. Violet’s father had explained that to her when she was a little girl. She hadn’t really understood it then—Why can’t it always be sunny and nice, Daddy? she would ask him—but she understood the concept now. Sort of. She still longed for sunny days. Who wouldn’t?

  There was no dome over New Earth. A dome, Ogden Crowley had theorized, would come to feel oppressive. Ants in a jar, he’d said to Violet, explaining his reasoning. That’s how we would see ourselves. Thus the environment was maintained through a system of massive magnets that delicately calibrated each aspect of life in this world suspended above Old Earth, echoing its orbit. The magnets were augmented by wind and solar power, as well as by the controlled chaos of nuclear fusion.

  This had been Ogden Crowley’s great inspiration: to create a world that was tethered to Old Earth but completely different from it, too. As Old Earth had sunk deeper and deeper into the morass of poisoned oceans and ruined cities and dead landscapes, many people had advocated the wholesale relocation of the population to a new planet. Mars topped everyone’s list. But Violet’s father fought that idea. We need to maintain our sacred tie to the Earth, he would declare, over and over again, in every forum that would have him. Leaving for a new planet would be too much, too soon. The psychological trauma caused by a complete break with Earth would be devastating. Later, perhaps. After we’ve gotten used to a New Earth that hovers above the Earth we know—then we can make the move to an entirely different planet. But not now. Not yet.

  He had supervised the construction of New Earth, harnessing the brilliance he saw in people, a brilliance that the people themselves often weren’t aware of until Ogden Crowley pointed it out. He inspired engineers to create stupendously effective new materials for New Earth’s streets and structures; he challenged the physicists to perfect the staggeringly complex systems of magnets and hydraulics and fusion that would whip up the necessary energy to maintain the orbit; he rallied the population to share in his vision of a breathtakingly new civilization that prospered atop the old, dying one.

  And then, to ensure that New Earth never fell victim to the forces that had doomed Old Earth—the madness and greed and bloodlust of too many of its people—Ogden Crowley installed the Intercept. That was his only stumble. And Violet had forgiven him. He had only been doing what he thought was right. Once he’d realized his mistake, he had shut it down, leaving its hollow shell: the long, dark tunnels that ran in straight lines from a central hub beneath the streets of New Earth, filled with unplugged computers.

  And occasionally—she shivered at the memory—filled with Graygrunge, too.

  While she ate, Violet checked the news feed on her console. Still no mention of yesterday’s Graygrunge attack. Which was a good thing, because Rez was right: If the average citizen ever knew how close they came to disaster each time a jumping virus made its way into a computer system, the panic would spread like … Well, like a jumping virus, she thought ruefully.

  She spooned up the last forkful of crunchy hash browns. She’d need the energy; she had a busy day ahead. Committee meetings; long, boring hearings; briefings by staff members. Reports to read and assimilate. Hands to shake. Papers to sign. Sometimes Violet looked at her life now—a life of responsibility and regimentation—and she wondered, How the hell did I get here?

  A year ago, she was a half-bankrupt private detective well on her way to becoming a fully bankrupt one, staying out too late at night, dancing at her favorite club—Redshift—and drinking too many Neptunia Nodes in hopes of washing away her troubles. She was, according to what most people saw at the time, a mess. Not even her brush with death on Old Earth had made her change her habits.

  But then six months ago, her father died, and something happened to Violet Crowley.

  She grew up. Just like that. It had taken a little longer than it should have, probably, but she’d always been a late bloomer. Once her grief for her father had gone from being a fierce daily pain to a quiet now-and-then ache, she realized that she had a destiny to fulfill—a destiny that didn’t have anything to do with running a detective agency.

  She would carry on Ogden Crowley’s legacy. She would make sure that New Earth continued to run smoothly, that decisions made by the government were in the best interests of all the citizens. And there was only one way to guarantee that her father’s dreams for New Earth would stay true:

  She had to become a politician herself. Work from the inside.

  When she told her friends what she intended to do, they were shocked. Shura offered to check her for a concussion. Each time Violet turned around, there was Shura, trying to shine the penlight in her eyes. I’m fine, Violet would declare, more than a little annoyed at Shura’s joke as she ducked away from that stupid light. Kendall tried to initiate long, late-night console conversations about it. You’ve never worked in a big bureaucracy before, Violet, he said multiple times. But I have. And it’s no fun. Everybody at the police department’s got their own agenda. Trust me, it’s a friggin’ nightmare. Tin Man was even blunter: Girl, you’re nuts.

  Violet had tried to reassure all of them that, um, yeah, she knew it wasn’t going to be easy. But her mind was made up.

  A senator had retired early. Violet asked President Shabir to appoint her to the seat, and he was happy to comply. The Crowley name was a glittering one on New Earth. When the term was up, she’d run for the seat. She’d win. No question.

  Which would mean, of course, more meetings. More briefings. More reports to read. More staff members to confer with. More hands to shake.

  Yet on some mornings—like this one—when she sat at her kitchen table and recalled those ragged, super-fun nights at Redshift and the crazy, totally irresponsible life she used to lead, Violet was aware of a small doubt in the center of her soul.

  That doubt seemed to have grown just a little bit bigger since yesterday, because she’d been thinking a lot about Rachel.

  Rachel had never had the chance to find out what her destiny was. What it should have been, that is.

  Violet did have that chance—she was living it, right now—but she wasn’t totally sure about the choice she’d made. How could you ever be sure?

  How, that is, did you find the path you were supposed to be on?

  She liked what politics did—that is, help people get what they needed. She simply didn’t like what she had to do to make it happen:

  Be a politician.

  Her father had been a natural at it, but she wasn’t. Not by a long shot. These days, she had to tamp down
her normal inclination to argue and to lose her temper on a regular basis, storming off and slamming doors or firing off nasty console messages when she didn’t get her way. She couldn’t behave like that anymore. Being a rebel wasn’t an option. She had to act polite, even to people who pissed her off. She had to work on her smile in front of a mirror. She couldn’t wear the same tunic two or three days in a row because she hadn’t been home to change. She couldn’t live for weeks at a time with one half-eaten ReadyMeal in her apartment. She couldn’t stay up all night to work on a tough case. She couldn’t call people names and tell her creditors to go screw themselves.

  No more Violet the Wild.

  She’d become Violet the Mild.

  It was worth it, though, because it was for a good cause, right?

  Right?

  * * *

  “I’ve checked all the extra places you suggested. No luck so far.”

  The young woman who had addressed her from the doorway of Violet’s office continued to stand there. Her name was Evie Carruthers. She was one of three assistants assigned to Violet. She had a springy halo of black hair, thick glasses, mahogany skin, and a please-like-me smile. She radiated nervousness.

  That was one of the things that Violet detested about political office: Power made people treat you differently.

  She had watched it happen over and over again to her father. When people found out who he was, all at once they began to sweat and stutter and fret. They tried to come up with clever things to say to make him laugh. Even as a little girl, Violet had been perplexed by this behavior; later, she was annoyed by it.

  Okay, so he’s president of New Earth, she’d think. Big deal. Somebody has to be, right?

  Now that she had power, it was happening to her. She was only a senator, and so people only tried half as hard to impress her, but still.

  “It was a long shot,” Violet replied to Evie’s news. “But thanks, anyway.” She went back to the document she’d been reading at her desk. The proposed bill was about water conservation in L’Engletown. Important, yes. So why couldn’t she focus on the particulars of the legislation?