The Starry Rift

by Jonathan Strahan

“Is your mother home?” She unhooks the crooked wire gate, and Alpha, who is a very old dog, wakes up from under the cool plants and whoofs her way to the woman’s knees.

  “She won’t hurt you.”

  “Hello?” Mom comes out the door carrying her big straw bag stuffed with papers and her computer and who knows what, ready for class. She’s teaching this semester; then she’s going to Bali.

  Mom is pretty, but she needs help. She has long flyaway reddish hair and blue eyes and laughed and laughed when I gave her some expensive wrinkle pills with hormones in them one Christmas. Go figure. And I went all the way to Miami on the bus to get them so that she wouldn’t see them come in the mail, like she would have if I had ordered them online. She could use them. She needs a good haircut, too, and she needs to dress up more. Right now she’s wearing thrift-store jeans, a tie-dye T-shirt, and zoris. Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be around her. All the mothers of my friends dress like they’re on a permanent cruise. Their hair is perfect and their high heels are tall even when they’re grocery shopping; their clothes are never wrinkled, and little diamonds wink at their neck.

  The woman looks at me as she says to Mom, “I have something to tell you. In private.”

  Mom looks like she is going to melt. She blinks, puts her bag down on the dark green porch floor, and says, “Come in.” The screen door shuts, and I go over and listen while the woman tells Mom that Sam is missing in action.

  He is some kind of scout. The Third Middle East War has lasted for five years now, and he was—he is—a kitesurfer, a champion kite-surfer, and that’s why he was picked for the special flying division. They wear nanotech camouflage and fly through the mountains silent as the air on solar wings that change with the terrain and sky. The scouts record everything with cameras in their eyes. He enlisted, and Mom was very, very angry and said that his father would be very disappointed in him, and he said that he wanted to get the implants and the training and be able to earn a living now, not after years and years of college. It sounded very sensible to me. Our mother is not that sensible, I must say. I am trying to think of something sensible to do myself, but the only thing that comes to mind is cloning Sam like Aunt Cicily cloned the famous Mitisent Baby.

  It’s not really sensible. And it’s against the law. Plus, he would be a baby and not Sam at all. He’d just look like Sam. It wouldn’t be fair to expect him to be anything like Sam. That’s what Aunt Cicily told me when I suggested it. I think I started to scream at one point and that’s when she hugged me so tight that I couldn’t breathe. I’m sorry I mentioned it to her in the first place. She said, with tears in her eyes and so fiercely that I thought she was mad at me at first, “Do you think I haven’t thought of that myself?”

  I’m over that now. I would love him like himself. I wouldn’t even call him Sam. I could just look at him, though, and see Sam, a little Sam I never knew. I would take care of him. I would never, never let him go to war.

  Later I asked Mom why they couldn’t find him, if where he went that night wasn’t on the GPS or transmitted by his eye-camera, and she said she wondered that too and was trying to find out, but that it was all a big f-word secret. She says the f-word when she gets very angry, which is about once a year.

  “Oh God, honey,” she said. “I didn’t mean to say that.” She shook her head and wandered into the kitchen to eat ice cream. That’s all she eats anymore. Mint chocolate chip. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And talk about thin. If I’m a thin stick then she’s a fragile baby twig about to break. I heard her start to play the grand piano that sits in the living room. A Bach two-piece invention, one that I used to love to play too. Now it sounds like dust. It sounds like no.

  I do want to get better. I think that little Sam—little not-Sam, will help. He will help us all.

  Today I wake from the dream of Sam smashing into sharp dry mountain peaks and there is nobody in the kitchen; Mom has left for work, and Aunt Cicily is getting dressed. I eat half an oatmeal muffin and some almonds.

  I am supposed to be in school today, but instead I grab some Cokes from the refrigerator and climb into Sam’s Zodiac boat, a big puffy inflatable that’s good for getting into small, shallow spaces, and untie it from the dock cleats. It has a tiny two-stroke solar Honda; the whole boat is a solar collector, and I move quietly down the green canal while Aunt Cicily runs out into the backyard and yells at me until her voice gets little. They will give me a hard time, but I will tell them that I was working on my science project. I am cloning fish now. There’s a big market for perfect cloned fish. I am looking for something rare—at least, that’s what I tell them. Doctor Harris is helping me with the project. Her son would like me to come over to their house, but I can’t stand him. I used to think I loved Jim Johnson, who is also a Conch and a great sailor and has gorgeous green eyes, but he doesn’t have a clue. I used to walk past his house and stare at his window, but I don’t have time for that kind of stuff anymore.

  Now I just meet Doctor Harris at the lab. She’s a fertility doctor and does research. I’m getting college credits for my work. The adults like it. They say it’s “keeping me busy.”

  I am very busy. Cloning Sam is a big project.

  There are a lot of famous clones. The Tred-Bleck quintet. A

  Britney Spears, a Marilyn Monroe, many Elvises, and other more mundane clones, all cloned before it was illegal in the U.S. The Britney Spears was cloned by the original Britney, and she’s kind of a Britney slave, bringing in money for the first one. She’s trade-marked, and they have some kind of contract. Mom says there are probably lots of clones that nobody even knows about, and that all the things that Aunt Cicily went through aren’t fair, and that if she wanted to move to Sweden she’d be able to work again.

  I’m not sure how I’ll get him into my uterus, the clone of Sam. It’s actually pretty weird when I think about it. I guess I’d have to steal the fertility drugs from Dr. Harris’s lab, which bothers me. But I’ll figure something out. Maybe some woman who can’t have a baby would want him. Maybe I can pay someone to do it. A surrogate mother. That might be the best idea. I’m not allowed to make money from fish cloning, because it’s research through the college, but I’ve got a lot of babysitting money saved up. I’ve been babysitting forever. I could run an ad in the Key West Citizen. It would be better, I think, if Mom would consent to carrying him, but I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t. She would raise holy hell if she knew. Besides, even though she takes the longevity drug, she’s old. She’s probably too tired to have a baby.

  I don’t care what they say. I don’t care if they arrest me. In fact, I’d like to see the trial. “Gifted Girl Clones Brother; Government Confesses That He Is Still Alive.” The article would talk about how I could have been a prize-winning piano player but was driven to give it up by the biological research I had to do. That’s what Mom and Aunt Cicily and Luisa the Cuban therapist, who I’ve had since I was ten and Dad died, complain about—I don’t play the piano anymore because I’m obsessed with science. Then the government would tell us the truth, wouldn’t they? I know Sam is still alive. My friends think I’m crazy, so I just don’t talk to them anymore. They don’t know anything. They’re all dating and talking about their boyfriends and getting nanotech communication implants put in without their parents’ permission, which is easy if you just go to Cuba on the hydro ferry for a day. I’d rather be alone.

  Babies are a lot of work. I know this. Sometimes when I think about this plan, I see little Melanie Eddleson, four months old and screaming with something that turned out to be an earache, when I finally got hold of her mother and she rushed home and took her to the doctor. I felt completely helpless as she lay there kicking and punching, her little face bright red, and even scared that she might die suddenly and it would all be my fault. I know about morning sickness. I know about changing diapers. But would it be the same if I couldn’t leave? I would be the one crazy with worry, calling the doctor. And I might have to put off college, for a little while, anyw
ay.

  It doesn’t really matter. I have to do it.

  I can’t go very fast on the canal because you’re not supposed to cause a wake—plus, there might be manatees. I slowly pass Double Ace, Toad Hall, Windly. You could cruise all the way to Africa in any one of them. White monsters. They each hold a thousand gallons of gas. After I leave Aunt Cicily behind, I pass Pieces of Eight and John Kred’s little sailboat Sly Skimmer and all the regular-sized weekender fishing boats with puns in their names like Reel Incredible. I pass Jane Alberson’s house and whistle to her potbellied Vietnamese pig snuffling around in the yard, and he raises his head and looks at me with his smart little eyes. Mr. Albert waves to me from his backyard where he’s watering his bromeliads and then I’m out into the bay. I put on my CoolBrite sunglasses and polarize the world into brilliant greens and blues.

  The bay is flat as a single diamond facet because there is no wind today. And enormous, like the sky, and filled with mangrove islands. It never gets deep. In most places it is about a foot, and it’s easy to run aground, unless you’re in a little boat like mine. It is also very easy to get lost. All the islands look the same, low and gray and floating today on a lime green band that divides the bay from the sky.

  I speed up, fast as flying, and the wind pushes back my hair. I go through Toilet Seat Cut, where people have decorated toilet seats by painting and writing on them and stuck them on posts. Sam has one here. I cross the Intracoastal Waterway where the big boats roar from marker to marker, on their way to somewhere as fast as they can go.

  Five minutes later I pass the boundary sign that says EVERGLADES NATIONAL PARK, mounted on a metal post sticking up out of the water. I turn northwest, sixty degrees, and head for a white stick I pounded into the mud a while back. I can’t see it yet but I know where it is. When I get an implant, when I’m eighteen (my mom won’t give permission for anything, even if, as I tell her, it might save my life), it’s not going to be for cosmetic purposes. It will be a global positioning system. I don’t want to put this spot into a handheld GPS right now. If they got their hands on the GPS they could find me. And I don’t want to be found.

  I skim over the shallow water, blue and green like a liquid quilt, so clear I can see the seagrass below, pulled like long hair across the bottom by the outgoing tide rushing through narrow channels to the Atlantic. There are low gray islands everywhere, and they all look alike, kind of fluffy and very small. You can’t land on them because they are park. A fishhawk flies overhead, and a pair of white egrets, and doves making their weird, low dinosaur cry. Gulls chase me for a moment, hoping for food, then drop back.

  I’m surrounded by islands now, and sandbars, and I can’t see Key West anymore. If a boat with a bigger draft wandered into this mile-wide basin, they’d have a hard time finding their way back out. They’d run aground and have to call Sea Tow. Golden brown sandbars glimmer in strips around me. Out on the water it’s hard to tell how far away anything is. When I reach my white stick, I turn the boat at a precise angle, and suddenly a channel, two feet deep and brilliant green, appears before me. If you aren’t headed right into it, you can’t see it at all. That’s the thing about the bay. You really have to know what you’re doing, and I do. This is where Sam and I grew up, on the water, with Dad teaching us where to go and how to survive, and then just us two after he died.

  The mouth of my little creek is hidden by mangroves. I look around before I go in, but I see no one except a flats fisherman way, way off. I duck beneath the branches and the leaves scratch my face. Then I’m in the creek.

  It’s only about ten feet wide, with a sandy bottom over which snapper and bonefish phantoms glide. A few yellow mangrove leaves drift past on the surface. I can see every pebble, every branch that has fallen into the water. It’s a crystal place, and utterly quiet except for birds. Sometimes porpoises come into the canal, hunting. They make a snorting sound with their airholes, like hogs, and come up to the boat and look at me.

  Mangroves are peculiar plants. Their roots drop down into the water, looking like gray scribbles, but when you look at a single tree carefully, you can see that the roots arch out, dive straight down, then split at a precise angle. My mother could tell you the angle. The water flows through their roots. There are three kinds of mangroves—red, white, and black. They mostly look the same, though, except for subtle differences. This is a black mangrove hammock.

  I turn off the engine and float but don’t throw in the anchor. It is hot and damp and still.

  There’s a lot to think about out here. You can think about waves that pass through a medium. Like light through the air, like motion through the water. Ripples draw reflections into bands of straight colored lines—green, silver, blue, like their edges were drawn with a ruler. A pelican dives straight down into the water with a big loud smash and surfaces, swimming. He didn’t catch anything. Light wavers and twists on the creek bottom in a diamond pattern.

  You can think about cells, and zygotes, but I don’t feel like it right now. I think about circles. Have you ever noticed how people are always telling you about how things like light and sound are organized in circles? If you paint, there is the color wheel. If you play the piano, you have to learn the circle of fifths so you can transpose like mad, change anything into any other key right away.

  I do like to transpose. I want to transpose the whole world. I want to transpose it to the world where Sam is, to take all the light and dive into it and see him there, where he always calls me Sun-diver. It’s his name for me. But it’s only his. The Day part, the last name, is mine. Making Sam again would be like a circle, wouldn’t it? A new Sam, in a new time.

  I take off all my clothes and sit naked in the hot sun because, as I now realize, I didn’t have time to grab my bathing suit. I pull my snorkel on over my head and get my neon green flippers out from under the seat.

  I look up and the sky is no longer blue. It is the color of no. A cloud covers the sun.

  Sometimes when I am very sad, a face cries inside me. Tears flow there. But they do not flow outside, anymore.

  Then sunlight shoots out and the world winks back at me. I fall into the other world below me, a sundiver. Sam is the triangles of light. He is the color wheel. He is the universe of transposed notes, winking at me.

  He is colors I don’t yet know. I am inventing them. I am giving him a new self.

  If anybody found out, they’d kill me.

  Millicent Swartz, our neighbor, is a real estate agent, as I mentioned before. She sits in the living room now, wearing a red, vaguely Western hat from which shimmering things dangle, shaking whenever she moves her head, which is often because that’s how she talks. Her hands dance around; she just can’t sit still, and she’s tiny, like a human flea with wild, frizzy black hair. She gives belly-dancing lessons on the side, and I took some last year. It was fun. She has a big mirror in her living room, and you have to do a lot of exercises. She’s drinking a cold Cuban beer. My mother, wearing shorts and a halter top, sits in a leather club chair with her long brown legs stretched out on an ottoman. She is drinking red wine from a glass etched with palm trees.

  I’m in the dining room, working on my computer at the table of my grandparents. It is mahogany, heavy and showy and brilliantly shining where it is not scratched. I think it got here on a Spanish galleon or something. Key West was once the largest city in Florida, back in the 1860s. I’m not kidding. The whole rest of Florida was impenetrable jungle (excpet for a few places) full of gators and wild pigs and mosquitoes. The land turned the people back big-time. But Key West has a great harbor.

  Actually, I’m not working at all. I’m just listening to them talk. There’s a heavy wind out of the southwest today, so their words are interlaced with the thrashing of the palm trees right outside the window and cranky Ed croaking, “Up against the wall! Up against the wall!” He used to say, “Up against the wall, mother f-word,” but Mom made Dad train it out of him.

  “I had them this close!” says Millicent, h
at jewels shimmering. She holds up a finger and a thumb to indicate a quarter inch. “This close! But that asshole just didn’t want to close the deal. Two weeks wasted.”

  Mom nods and sips her wine. She looks tired, as usual. I’m afraid that she’s sick or something. Alpha snoozes on the tattered Tibetan rug next to her chair. Her muzzle is gray. Mom and I have had arguments about giving her the longevity drug. I don’t see why anyone has to die, even dogs.

  “I think I’m going to get out of this business.” She says this once a week. Then she makes a big haul, closes a huge deal. It’s like fishing. You never know what you’re going to catch. “One of those Argentineans at the closing last week pulled a gun on us.”

  “Really.”

  “Of course, Bob took his own out of his desk drawer, and it was a draw.” Millecent laughs. “It’s hard to outgun Southernmost Realty. We should put that in our ad!” She intones, “It’s Hard to Outgun Southernmost Realty. We’ve Got Your Deal in Our Sights.”

  She hoots. Sometimes Millicent snorts, sometimes she hoots, sometimes she guffaws. One thing about Millicent, she is always really, really amused by just about everything.

  Mom says that Alfred, her broker, made all his money by smuggling drugs back in the teens. Endorphins, I think. “Oh, it’s probably better to ambush everyone, wouldn’t you say?”

  I roll up my tiny computer, which is just a piece of nanocrystal as thin as paper. Rolling it up turns it off. I tuck it under my arm. It’s time to go to the lab.

  As I pass through the living room, I say, “Hi.”

  “Hi, honey,” says Millicent. “Why don’t you play something for us?”

  For a moment I am struck by how strange the idea seems to me. There is no music in me. Doesn’t anyone understand?

  My computer slips lightly to the floor as I slide onto the piano bench, wrench open the top, and smash my fingers onto the keys, fierce and hard. Dunn dun da dun/Dun ta dun ta dun ta dun, the big minor chords and slow cadence of the death march.