The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

  Naomi was working her way through Roger Zelazny and Kage Baker. She was a pretty fast reader. First a Baker novel, then Zelazny. Then Baker again. I kept catching her reading the endings first. “What’s the point of doing that?” I said. “If you cheat and read the end of the book first, why even bother reading the rest?”

  “I’m antsy,” she said. “I need to know how certain things turn out.” She turned over so she was facing the wall, and said something else in Spanish.

  “Fine,” I said. I wasn’t really all that invested. I was rereading some Fritz Leiber.

  About fifteen minutes later, Lara came over and sat down on the cot next to Naomi. She picked up the stack of books that Naomi had already read, commenting in Spanish on the covers. Naomi laughed every time she said something. It was annoying, but I smiled like I understood. Finally Lara said, in English, “All of these girls have the large breasts. I did not know science fiction was about the breasts. I like the real stories. Stories about real astronauts, or scientific books.”

  “My father doesn’t really go in for nonfiction,” I said. I didn’t see what was so bad about breasts, really.

  “It makes for depressing reading,” Naomi said. “Look at the space program in the old disunited States. Millionaires signing up for outer space field trips. The occasional unmanned flight that conks out somewhere just past Venus. SETI enthusiasts running analysis programs on their personal computers, because some guys blew up the Very Large Array, and guess what, when the real aliens show up, some guy named Hans Bliss says something and they go away again. Poof.”

  “Our space program is state of the art,” Lara said. “Not to brag, like Dorn is always saying. But we will be sending a manned flight to Mars in the next five years. Ten years tops. If I keep my grades up and if I am chosen, I will be on that flight. That is my personal goal. My dream.”

  “You want to go to Mars?” I said. I’m sure I looked surprised.

  “Mars, to begin with,” Lara said. “Then who knows? I’m in an accelerated science and physical education course at my school. Many of the graduates go into the program for astronauts.”

  “There are advanced classes at UCR doing some work with your space program,” Naomi said. “I don’t know much about it, except that it all sounds pretty cool.”

  “We sent a manned flight to the moon last year,” Lara said. “I met one of the astronauts. She came and spoke at my school.”

  “Yeah, I remember that flight,” I said. “We did that, like, last century.” I was just joking, but Lara didn’t get that.

  “And what have you done since?” she asked me.

  I shrugged. It wasn’t really anything I was interested in. “What’s the point?” I said. “I mean, the aliens showed up and then they left again. Not even Hans Bliss is saying that we ought to go around chasing after them. He says that they’ll come back when the time is right. Costa Rica getting all involved in a space program, is, I don’t know, it’s like my father deciding to leave everything behind, our whole life, just to come down here, even though Hans Bliss is just some surfer who started a cult. I don’t see the point.”

  “The point is to go to space,” Lara said. She looked at Naomi, not at me, as if I were too stupid to understand. “To go to space. It was a good thing when the aliens came to Costa Rica. They made us think about the universe, about what might be out there. Not everybody wants to sit on a beach and wait with your Hans Bliss to see if the aliens will come back.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But not everybody gets a chance to go to Mars on a spaceship, either. Maybe not even you.”

  I was just being reasonable, but Lara didn’t see it that way. She made this noise of exasperation, then said, emphatically, like she was making a point except that she was saying it in Spanish and really fast, so it didn’t really tell me anything: “jTurista estupido! jUsted no es hermoso como usted piensa usted es!”

  “Sorry?” I said.

  But she just got up and left.

  “What? What did she say?” I asked Naomi.

  Naomi put down her paperback, The Doors of His Face, the Lamp of His Mouth. She said, “You can be kind of a jerk, Dorn. Some advice? Hazme caso—pay attention. I’ve seen you play soccer and you’re pretty good. Maybe you’ll get back to the States and get discovered and maybe one day you’ll save some goal for some team and it will turn out to be the block that wins the World Cup. I’ll go out to a bar and get drunk to celebrate when that happens. But my money’s on Lara. I bet you anything Lara gets her chance and goes to Mars. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but when she isn’t playing soccer or hanging out with us, she’s studying for her classes or talking with the pilots about what it’s like to fly commercial jets. And she also knows how to get along with people, Dorn. Maybe you don’t have to be a nice guy to do well in team sports, but does it hurt?”

  “I am a nice guy,” I said.

  “Stupid me,” Naomi said. “Here I was thinking that you were arrogant, and, um, stupid, and what was the other thing? Oh yeah, short.” And then she picked up the Zelazny again and ignored me.

  Lara didn’t speak to me for the rest of the day. She didn’t come back when we played soccer in the afternoon, and even though it was the Tucancillos’ turn to do the dishes, she didn’t turn up.

  We still had plenty of surgical masks, but by the fourth day hardly anybody was wearing them. Just the sticklers and the guards in their N95s. I think everybody else was using the remaining supply for toilet paper. I wore one like a headband during soccer. I kind of needed a haircut. I couldn’t do anything about that, but I did have a bath on the fourth night, after dinner, in one of the makeshift bathing stalls. Some of the people on the flight didn’t have a lot of clothes in their suitcase, and so some borrowing had been going on, and there were clothes and various species of underwear draped over tires. I leaned against the outside wall of the hangar, away from the latrines, and admired the sunset for a bit. Not that I was a huge fan of sunsets, but the ones here were bigger, or something. And it smelled better out here. Not that you noticed how bad it smelled in the hangar most of the time, but once you came outside you realized you didn’t want to go back in, not immediately, at least.

  And the guards didn’t seem to mind. There wasn’t really anywhere for us to go. Just asphalt and runways. Still no planes coming in. Nobody to watch the sunset with me, which was an odd thing to think, since I’m usually pretty comfortable being alone. Even out on the field, during the game, the goalie is alone more often than not. Lara wasn’t talking to me. I wasn’t talking to my dad. Naomi and I weren’t talking to each other. The sun went down fast, regardless of how I felt about the whole thing, and yeah, I know that’s a melodramatic way to think about a sunset, but so what? Universe 1, Dorn 0.

  When I came back into the hangar, Lara was over in the petting zoo, just sitting there. A dog was curled up on her legs and she was thumping its belly, softly, like a drum.

  The petting zoo was an ongoing project. There were the three smelly crabs and a skinny brownish snake in a plastic makeup case that the kids fed beetles to. Some girl had caught it when she went out to use the bathroom. There were lizards in recycled food containers and a smallish iguana one of the guards had donated. There were even two dogs who got spoiled rotten.

  I wandered over, trying to come up with something interesting to say. “What’s up?” was all I came up with.

  She looked up at me, then down again. Petted the dog.

  “Watching the iguana,” she said.

  “What’s it doing?” I said.

  “Not much.”

  I sat down next to her. We didn’t say anything else for a while. Finally I said, “Naomi says I shouldn’t be such a jerk. And also that I’m short.”

  “I like Naomi,” Lara said. “She’s pretty.”

  Really? I thought. (But I knew better than to say that out loud.)

  “What about me?”

  Lara said, “I like watching you play soccer. It’s like watching the soccer
on television.”

  “Naomi’s pretty brutal, but she’s honest,” I said. “I may never get tall enough to be a world-class goalie.”

  “You’ll be taller. Your father is tall. Sometimes I have a temper,” she said. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you.”

  “What did you say exactly?” I asked.

  “Learn Spanish,” she said. “Then when I say the awful things to you, you’ll understand.” Then she said, “And I am going to go up one day.”

  “Up?” I said.

  “To Mars.”

  She wasn’t wearing her mask. She was smiling. I don’t know if she was smiling at me or at the idea of Mars, but I didn’t care all that much. Mars was far away. I was a lot closer.

  My father was on his cell phone. “Yes,” he said. “Okay. I’ll talk to him.” He hung up. He said, “Dorn, come sit down for a minute.”

  I didn’t say anything to him. I just sat down on my cot.

  I realized that I was looking around, as if something had happened. Naomi was over against the wall, talking to the HANS BLISS FOR WORLD PRESIDENT guy, the one with the big nose. He was a lot taller than Naomi. Did Naomi mind being short?

  My father said, “Your coach. He wanted to talk to you.”

  “Sorken called?” I said. I felt kind of sick to my stomach already, even though I wasn’t sure why. I should have listened to those messages.

  “No,” my father said. “I’m sorry, Dorn. It was Coach Turner. He was calling about Sorken.”

  And I understood the difference immediately. “Sorken’s dead.”

  My father nodded.

  “Is everybody else okay? On the team?”

  “I really don’t know,” my father said. “Mr. Turner hasn’t been able to reach everyone. A lot of people around Philadelphia came down with flu, just like everywhere else. If I’d had more time to plan, I don’t think I would have booked that flight. You were right, you know. I got an e-mail from a colleague out in Potlatch who thought something was coming, and meanwhile I’d been in touch with Hans Bliss off and on, and the visas had just come, and it seemed like a minor risk, getting us onto the flight, getting us through the airport. I thought if we didn’t leave right then, who knew when we’d get here?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was remembering how Sorken used to come down on me when I was being a showoff, or not paying enough attention to what was going on, on the field, during practice. Sorken wasn’t like my dad. If you weren’t paying attention to him or you were sulking, he’d throw a soccer ball at your head. Or one of his shoes. But I’d just left those messages from him on the phone. I didn’t even know where my phone was right now.

  I’d never really thought about Sorken getting the flu and dying, but it had always seemed like there was a good chance that my father would catch something. A lot of hospital workers died during the last pandemic.

  My father said, “Dorn? Are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry about Sorken,” he said. “I never really sat down and talked to him.”

  “He didn’t have much time for people who didn’t play soccer,” I said.

  “It always looked like he was riding you pretty hard.”

  “I don’t think he liked me,” I said. “I didn’t like him most of the time. But he was a good coach. He wasn’t ever harder on me than he should have been.”

  “I told Coach Turner that you wouldn’t be back for a while,” my father said. “To be honest with you, I don’t know what we’ll do. If we’ll be allowed to stay. There’s been some talk in the hangar. Rumors that our government is responsible. That we were targeting Calexico. It doesn’t seem likely to me, but we weren’t going to be very popular down here, Dorn, even before people starting making up stories like that. And I’m not going to be much more popular back in Philadelphia. I checked in with my team. Dr. Willis yelled for about five minutes and then she just hung up. I skipped out even though I knew they were going to need me.”

  “Maybe you would have gotten sick if we’d stayed,” I said. “Or maybe I would have gotten sick.”

  My father studied his hands. “Who knows? I was planning to tell you about the visas. Give you a choice. But then I just couldn’t leave you. You know, in case.” He stopped and swallowed. “I was talking to Paula and some of the other Hans Bliss people. As of this morning they haven’t been able to get hold of anyone out that way. At the colony. They’ve been under quarantine, too, remember? And no doctor. Just two OB-GYNs and a chiropractor.”

  “Everything will be fine,” I said. I was a regular cheerleader. But I couldn’t help looking around again, and this time I could see all the things that I’d been trying not to see. All around us, other people were having, had been having, conversations just like this one. About people who had died. About what had been going on while we were trapped in here.

  I said, “The aliens are coming back to see Hans Bliss, remember? So there’s no way that Hans Bliss can just keel over dead from something like flu. Those aliens probably vaccinated him or something. Remember how he said he didn’t ever get sick anymore?”

  “Good point,” my father said. “If you’re gullible enough to buy all the things that Hans Bliss says.”

  “Hey, you two,” Naomi said. She looked flushed and happy, as if she’d gotten the last word again with the Hans Bliss guy. She didn’t seem to be annoyed with me. And I couldn’t really be annoyed with her, either. Everything she’d said was true, more or less. I hadn’t known her very long, but I already knew that that was the terrible thing about Naomi.

  My father took the soccer ball out of my hands. I don’t even know when I’d picked it up, but it felt right to let go of it. He put it down on the floor, sat down beside me on the cot, and patted my leg. “It will all be fine,” he said, and I nodded.

  My brother Stephen was older than me by four years. He didn’t like me. According to my father, when I was a baby Stephen used to unfasten my seat belt and also the strap that held my baby seat in. When I was five, he pushed me down a flight of stairs. I broke my wrist. My mother saw him do it, and so once a week for the next two years Stephen went to see a counselor named Ms. Blair in downtown Philadelphia; I remember I was jealous.

  When our parents got divorced, Stephen was ten and I was six, and they decided they would each take custody of one child. Stephen thought that this was a great idea. His goal had always been to become an only child.

  My mother went back home to Dalton, Colorado, where she took over the bookkeeping at her family’s fancy dude ranch and spa.

  Whenever I flew out to visit, Stephen made sure I understood that it was all his. His house, his horses—all of them—his mom, his grandparents, his uncles, aunts, cousins. He came back east to stay with us once, and then he developed an inner-ear condition that made it impossible for him to fly. So he didn’t ever have to come visit again. He didn’t like my father much either.

  The last time I saw my mom and Stephen, Stephen was applying to colleges. He didn’t seem to loathe me as much as usual. He was practically an adult. I was just a kid. I was athletic, which he wasn’t, but my grades were pitiful. I was small for my age. He could tell how annoyed I was that he was tall and I wasn’t, and somehow it made things better. He had a girlfriend, a massage therapist at the spa, and he didn’t even care that she made a point of being nice to me. I had a pretty good time on that trip. My mother and I rode out and went camping down in the canyons. Stephen’s girlfriend cooked dinner for us when we got home. It was almost like we were a family. Stephen showed us a movie he’d made to send along with his college applications. When I said I liked it, he was pleased. We got into arguments the way we always did, but this time I realized something, that Stephen liked a good fight. Maybe he always had, or maybe he’d just grown up. If you stood up to him, it made him happy. I had never tried standing up to him before. He was applying for a visa so he could go study at a big-deal film school in Calexico.

  A few months later, the horses at the dude ranc
h started dying. My mother e-mailed and said my uncle had brought the local vet in. They were putting the sick horses down. When we talked on the phone, she sounded terrible. My mother loved horses. Then people on the ranch started dying, too. Sometimes a flu will jump from one species to another. That’s why a lot of people don’t keep cats or birds as pets anymore.

  I talked to my mother two more times the next day. Then things got worse, real fast. My father was staying over at the hospital, and lots of people were dying. My mother got the flu. She died. Stephen died. The girlfriend got sick, and then she got better again. She sent one e-mail before she got sick and one after she got better, which is how I found out what had happened. Her first e-mail said that Stephen had wanted her to tell us how much he loved us. But he probably died in quarantine. He probably felt like he was getting a cold, and then I bet his temperature shot up until he was delirious or completely unconscious and couldn’t say anything to anyone. My dad said that their kind of flu was fast. So you didn’t suffer or anything. I think the girlfriend was just making all that up, about Stephen and what he supposedly said. She was a nice person. I don’t think he’d ever said anything to her about how much he disliked me. About how he used to try to kill me. You want the people you like to think that you get along with your family.

  It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, telling my father when he finally came home. And we haven’t talked about it much since then. I don’t know why it’s easier for some people to talk about aliens than to talk about death. Aliens only happen to some people. Death happens to everyone.