Dark Star Calling

by Julia Keller

  “I know what this is,” he said quietly.

  “I thought you would.” Shura accepted it back from him. With her free hand, she touched Kendall’s forearm.

  “Yeah,” Kendall said.

  Addressing the rest of her friends, Shura said, “It’s deckle. I keep a small supply in my bag, in case a patient is anxious or frightened.”

  Deckle.

  Now Violet got it. She knew why Kendall had reacted as he did to the sight of the fine white powder.

  Deckle was a substance found exclusively on Old Earth. It was harmless, but for many years, it was believed to be a dangerous drug, fiercely addictive. And it topped the list of illegal drugs bought and sold on the ragged streets of Old Earth by desperate people. Actually, deckle had only one significant effect: It rendered the user immune to the power of the Intercept.

  Kendall’s brother, Danny, had been killed on Old Earth by a drug gang in search of deckle. Seeing the substance, Violet realized, must have evoked a flurry of memories in Kendall, memories of his life with the last family member he would ever have. And now Danny, too, was gone. Kendall was alone.

  He has his friends, Violet thought. He has me and Shura and Rez and Tin Man, but that’s not the same as family. As blood. She knew that very well. She had learned it six months ago, when her father died. Rez knows it, too, after losing Rachel. Even though he never talks about it. And Tin Man’s no stranger to that kind of loss, either.

  There was no substitute for the people whose blood you shared.

  “How’s deckle going to help us?” Rez inquired. He was still a bit cautious around Shura after her takedown. “It just calms you, right? And barely that?”

  “Yeah,” Shura replied. She’d poured a few grains into her palm while she talked. “But ‘barely’ is all I need.”

  “You don’t seem nervous to me,” Tin Man observed.

  “I’m not. But my mind is resisting the alien signal. That’s why Violet’s plan isn’t working. The plan is just fine; the problem is me.” She put the grains of deckle on her tongue and then put the stopper back in the vial. “That’ll do it.”

  “Can’t you just tell yourself not to resist the signal?” Tin Man persisted.

  “I’m an artist. I paint what I want to paint—nobody else. I paint what I feel. It’s the strongest part of me. The most powerful element in my whole being. I can’t be a passive conduit for the alien signals. My will is too fierce for that.”

  “You don’t seem fierce to me. You always seem kind of—well, kind of quiet and polite,” Tin Man said.

  Shura laughed. “I am quiet and polite—everywhere except when I’m in front of a canvas. Just ask Violet. She’s the troublemaker, the rebel, and I’m the little voice in the background going, ‘Um, Violet? Should we, like, ask permission to do that? I mean, the sign says No Admittance.’”

  Violet grinned.

  “But when it comes to my art,” Shura went on, “everything changes. My art is the one place where I’m this pure, primitive, furious force.”

  “So true,” Violet murmured. “I’ve watched people try to tell you how and what to paint. I’ve seen you kick some ass.”

  “And deckle,” Kendall said, nodding as he followed her logic, “will let you relax enough to be that conduit.”

  “Right.” Shura closed the clasp on her black medical bag with a crisp snap! and handed it back to Tin Man.

  “If we’re finished with all the explanations,” Rez said, more than a little impatiently, “can we get back to work?”

  They returned to their former posts: Shura stepped into the middle of the ring of easels; Rez hunched over the control panel; Kendall stationed himself next to the receptor-laden tripod; Violet sat cross-legged on the floor next to the crate of paint tubes and stacks of extra blank canvases; Tin Man stood vigil in the corner, his eyes on the monitor that measured Shura’s heartbeat and respiration.

  “Mickey, initiate the signal changeover,” Kendall ordered.

  “Roger that.” The AstroRob couldn’t help himself. “Although to tell you the truth, I’m not really sure who Roger is.” He coughed. “Sorry. Bad habit.”

  Rez ignored the indiscretion as he checked the readouts on the panel. “Energy vectors online. Signal level stable.”

  “Materials ready,” Violet declared from her spot. “Shura?”

  “Ready.” Shura examined the brush in her hand one more time. The slender wooden stalk looked so old-fashioned, Violet thought, here amid the dazzle of twenty-third-century technology, and the bristles were like a throwback to a world of simple tools. But there was magic in the brush, a lively and robust magic that enabled it to float above all the gleaming marvels in the lab. It reminded Violet of a truth she’d come to believe in the last few years: Methods, techniques, and technology might change, but human beings didn’t.

  “Ready,” Shura repeated in an even stronger voice.

  Once again, the room was invaded by a whoosh and the dull thuds and a faint rumble and finally another whoosh. The lights flickered once more.

  Shura uttered a soft but audible gasp. Her shoulders moved to one side as if she’d been slightly jostled in a crowd.

  She closed her eyes.

  She lifted the brush. She angled the palette. Her brush hand trembled, and then, as her friends looked on with rising excitement, she leaned forward and began to paint, at first carefully, but after the first few seconds, feverishly. The picture burst forth upon the canvas, blossoming like a flower.

  The moment was so intense, so captivating, that none of them noticed one small detail:

  Tin Man was no longer in the room. He had taken advantage of their keen, absolute focus on Shura and slipped out through the porthole in the floor.

  14

  Strokes of Genius

  It was the most amazing thing Violet had ever seen. She assumed her friends were equally stunned, because no one moved—only Shura.

  And Shura was doing enough moving for all of them.

  Now that her own imagination had moved over to make room for another, she was a tornado of pure painting energy. She was a whirling circus of creativity. Her brush danced across the canvas, skipping and sweeping and then engaging in large circular swoops, sending forth sparks of colors. The blues were fantastic and ethereal; the greens were a living thing, wet and lush; the reds and yellows popped and sparked. The grays and blacks had a haunting quality to them, a sense of deep time and the slow emergence of wisdom.

  Kendall was the first of the onlookers to break free of the spell.

  “Mickey, check the signal strength,” he said.

  “It’s at 152.8 and rising.”

  “Too fast,” Rez muttered. He was clearly worried. “The aliens—they don’t know our capacity. I think they’re turning up the signal intensity at their end. It’s too much. But they realize they’re getting through, and so they’re a little reckless.”

  “Yeah,” Kendall said. “They are. But it’s not too much. Not yet, anyway. She can handle it.” His voice was riven with awe. He took a quick look down at Violet, who was resupplying the paints as fast as Shura needed her to, which was very fast indeed. Astonishingly fast, as a matter of fact. Violet uncapped tubes and jammed them into the easel trays with deft, rhythmic motions. Then she swept up the empty tubes, getting them out of the way. Shura snatched up the new tubes and squeezed the fresh colors onto the palette.

  “It’s working, Violet,” Kendall declared. “It’s really working. You were right. They don’t know our words, but they’re desperate to communicate their feelings. I mean, just look.”

  He swept a hand toward Shura’s canvas. She had just finished with the one on the second easel and was moving on to the third. Her eyes were still closed, but she seemed to know instinctively where each canvas was located and precisely where she wanted to place her brush upon it, and with which colors. As she completed each canvas in mere minutes, Violet yanked it away and immediately replaced it with a fresh one, angling the finished canvases again
st the wall.

  She couldn’t answer Kendall. Not right away. She was too moved, too overwhelmed by the breathtaking spectacle of what Shura was doing and how she was doing it.

  And what of the paintings themselves?

  The paintings …

  They exploded across Violet’s consciousness. They told of impossibly distant worlds brimming with fantastic spectacles. They described planets made of pure glittering ice, planets that burned with sinuous flames, planets surging with volcanoes, and planets that were nothing but writhing tendrils of smoke and fog.

  They depicted galaxies that spun so fast they were mere blurs against the blackness of space.

  One painting looked like rage; it was black and harsh. Another looked like melancholy; it was slathered in gray, the gray of lost hope and thwarted ambition. A canvas slashed with red made Violet think of passion that had changed into hatred.

  Every stroke of Shura’s brush conveyed a distinct emotion.

  Occasionally, a word would form at the edge of the canvas, the letters shifting and tentative, a word added before Violet was quite aware of it. Only in retrospect was the word visible.

  Trillum, one said.

  Nogg was another, followed by waw.

  And there were other words, too, words that had not been part of the first transmission: foxol and lunti and cawbon and siggul and pompf. It was as if the aliens were still trying to grope their way into human language, still grappling with the alphabet—even as emotions, bold and blunt and florid, assumed visible form across painting after painting.

  The paintings leapt out ahead of the words, communicating much more swiftly and directly than if they had to rely upon the cumbersome journey of language.

  “This is—this is fantastic,” Rez gushed. He kept switching his attention from Shura’s canvases to the control panel, going back and forth, back and forth, as fast as he could. He needed to monitor the signal, because that was his job, but he was drawn to the paintings. “And it’s coming to us through Rachel’s Intercept chip.”

  Violet, leaping about as she replaced paints and canvases, was astonished. Gone was Rez’s cynicism. Gone was his sour smirk. The old Rez had fled, at least temporarily. Instead he seemed filled with …

  Wonder.

  Yeah. That was the only word for it, Violet decided; he was wonderstruck. And I’m pretty wonderstruck myself, she thought as she switched a new tube of bright scarlet for a used-up one.

  Hours passed. Or was it minutes? Violet didn’t know. Nor did she care. The tiny lab was bathed in a radiance that seemed brighter and truer than any light yet known on New Earth. It was a light beyond light, a light that purified as much as it illuminated.

  And then it disappeared.

  There was a brief sizzling sound, and suddenly Rez’s computer screen was filled with fuzzy gray blobs. They had replaced the sharp, beguiling blue. Another signal had overridden the alien transmission.

  “What happened?” Rez yelled.

  The room was dominated by a loud burst of static and then a halting, ragged voice: “This … this is Tin Man. I need help.” The transmission was fitful and weak. It quickly disintegrated into snatches of words: Need … trapped … hope … please.

  “Hey!” Rez called out angrily. He punched buttons on the panel with a rising fury. “We’ve got to get the alien transmission back.”

  “Hold on,” Violet said. She had grabbed the back of Rez’s chair and spun him around so that, for the moment, he couldn’t switch the signal. “That’s Tin Man. We can’t just cut him off.”

  Behind her, slumped over on the stool, Shura took several deep breaths. She’d been painting with such passionate intensity that she was totally exhausted.

  “We’re in the middle of an important experiment here,” Rez countered. “We’re making incredible progress.”

  “I know that. And we can go back to it after we figure out what’s going on with Tin Man. He’s asking for help.”

  “No,” Rez declared. “We have to keep going.” He scowled. “Where is he, anyway? He was here just a second ago. Over there in the corner.”

  “I don’t know,” Violet said. “But we can’t ignore him. Kendall? You’re with me, right?”

  Kendall was torn. Violet could see that. He was deep into the interpretation of the signal, totally focused on the challenge at hand. Like Rez, he was desperate to figure out what the unknown civilization from beyond the stars was trying to tell them.

  But Tin Man was his friend.

  “Okay,” Kendall said reluctantly. “We’ll find Tin Man and see what he needs. And then we’ll switch back to the alien signal.”

  Rez uttered a howl of protest and sputtered a profanity, but Violet was already at the control panel, twisting dials to try to clarify the image.

  “Tin Man,” she said. “Hey, where are you? Where are you transmitting from?”

  The reply was garbled and weak.

  “What?” Violet said. “Can you repeat that?”

  “We can’t hear you!” Kendall yelled.

  The gray screen turned a hazy, mottled brown. Finally, it resolved into an image of a small, windowless room with slimy walls and a dirt floor. In the center of that floor—lying on his side, curled up and moaning while he clutched his stomach—was Tin Man. There was a deep gash in his forehead. Blood had dried on his neck and hands.

  “You’re hurt,” Violet said. She knew she was stating the obvious, but she couldn’t help herself.

  “Oh my God,” Rez muttered. “What’s that jerk gotten himself into this time?”

  Violet started to tell Rez to shut up. Instead she raced over to the control panel, her gaze taking in all the dials and switches that she didn’t know the first thing about. “Where’s that signal coming from?” she demanded.

  Working at his own computer, Mickey located the transmission coordinates. His answer stunned them all:

  “Old Earth.”

  15

  Tin Man’s Betrayal

  Violet checked her console three times. And then she checked it a fourth, because if she and Kendall became separated—which might very well happen, given the chaos and unpredictability of any visit to Old Earth—they’d need a means of keeping in touch.

  Old Earth had a way of taking even the very best plan and turning it upside down, shortly before shredding it to bits and setting the scraps on fire.

  “Console’s testing fine,” she said.

  “Mine, too,” Kendall verified.

  They walked side by side along a winding path that might once have been a road. In the distance was a pus-yellow smear that might once have been a city. A tangled mass of thick vines seemed to reach at them from both sides, and behind the vines, there was a tightly furled block of dark woods that was, Violet felt, pushing hard against them. If they didn’t keep going, they might very well be crushed. Or maybe just suffocated to death.

  Overhead, the sky was the brownish-red color of an infected wound. The sun was somewhere up in that rusty haze, too. You’d have to part the layers of heavily polluted air with two hands, though, to actually see that sun, Violet knew, like somebody peeking out through a thick dirty curtain.

  “His console signal’s coming in at north-northeast,” she said. “Another mile or so and we’ll be there.”

  “Okay.”

  “No telling what we’ll find. Need to be ready for anything.”

  In a weary voice, Kendall responded, “We always are, right?”

  Neither one of them wanted to be here. They wanted to be back at the observatory, watching Shura paint her marvelous paintings, trying to figure out what the aliens were saying and why a distant civilization had asked for their help. They wanted to be solving the greatest puzzle of their lives.

  Instead they were trudging along a weed-choked, mud-clotted, barely discernable path on Old Earth, following the distress signal from Tin Man’s console. Of course they were in a hurry—he had appeared to be injured, and they still didn’t know how badly or why, because he hadn
’t answered direct questions—but they couldn’t go any faster across the rugged terrain. The wind blew straight in their faces, and it brought the hot, rancid smell of decay along with it.

  The argument back in the observatory had been quick but tense. Rez had tried to argue them out of their decision to track Tin Man. He wanted them to continue channeling the signal through Shura and her stupendous paintings. Violet told Rez he was being callous. She and Kendall won the argument, but the truth was that part of her didn’t want to win.

  Indeed, part of her thought Rez was right. My God, we’re actually seeing the emotions of an alien civilization! Hesitating, even briefly, was excruciating.

  Finally, they’d all agreed that Violet and Kendall would go to Old Earth and look for Tin Man, while Rez and Shura stayed in the lab. Shura needed to rest; she was dizzy with exhaustion, and the hand with which she’d held her paintbrush was twisted into a cramp.

  Rez, meanwhile, would watch for a new message. The aliens would surely wonder why their signal wasn’t going through anymore. Rez wasn’t sure how he’d do it, but somehow he would explain:

  Hang in there. We’ll be back.

  Violet was furious with Tin Man. Why had he sneaked out of the lab? And gone to—of all places—Old Earth? That difficult, forbidding place had been the site of the worst moments of his life. He’d lost his sister there, and sold drugs on the street, and been arrested, and served time in prison. Coming to New Earth had given him and his mom a new start. Why would he throw all that away, and why would he do it right now?

  Now, when they were on the cusp of an amazing discovery?

  As angry as she was at Tin Man, though, she would help him. He was her friend. No matter what he’d done, that was the most important thing.

  “Give us two hours,” Violet had said to Rez, her voice steady, implacable. This wasn’t a negotiation. “We’ll bring him back, and then we can restart the connection again.”

  “Two hours,” Rez had said glumly. He winced, because he hated the idea of waiting even two seconds to resume the grand experiment. “I’ve got your word on that.”