by David Liss
“Forgive me,” she said, holding out her arm with her hand hanging limp like it had been detached. “I’m Nayana.”
“I’m Zeke,” I said, waggling the loose hand, “and of course I know who you are. You’re totally famous.”
“Oh, please,” she said, with a dismissive wave of the hand. “You’ve never heard of me. Or do you follow chess?”
“Not religiously or anything,” I said. “I don’t, like, watch the Chess Network or whatever, but everyone knows about how you beat Magnus Carlsen last year.” I figured I had it, I might as well use it. “That was pretty sweet.”
“It is fine when people admire me for my skill at the game,” she assured me. And what a relief it was to learn she was okay with my admiration. “That doesn’t bother me in the least, but all the reporters and cameras and magazine spreads became a bit of a bore very quickly. I suppose if I were a plain Jane they wouldn’t have cared, but they were all agog to stare at the beautiful chess genius.” She shook her head sadly. “It’s nothing but foolishness.”
“Yeah, foolishness,” I agreed. “For fools. And morons.”
She was now squinting. I was starting to think I might have made a better impression, but I was also starting to think that it was possible to be beautiful and a chess genius and kind of an unpleasant person.
“Would you be a dear and fetch me a sparkling water?” She gestured toward a sideboard, about fifteen feet away, where drinks and snacks had been set up. “I’m terribly thirsty.”
I wanted to tell her that she should go fetch her own sparkling water, but I thought that there were only four of us, and antagonizing a third of my companions for the next year might be a bad move. She was almost certainly testing me, seeing if I would volunteer to be her servant when we left Earth. I didn’t particularly want to be her personal butler, but I also didn’t want to do anything to make her dislike me. My Spidey-sense told me she could put on a pretty fierce dislike.
I fetched her the water, and Park Mi Sun scowled at me as I did it. She clearly didn’t think much of my butlering, so I guessed I had to make sure I won Nayana over. The idea of both of them hating me before we even left Earth was completely depressing.
When I came over with the bottle and a glass, she let out a world-weary sigh. “No lime?”
“I didn’t see any.”
She pressed her lips together and cocked her head. “Might I trouble you to ask for some?”
Like an idiot, I did ask, and Agent McTeague, a guy who under other circumstances was supposed to take a bullet for the president, ended up both fetching limes and thinking I was the lame-o who wanted them. When I finally had the drink prepared for Nayana, she gestured to a little table next to where she sat. “Right there is fine,” she said, and picked up her binder.
I sat there in the room with the three of them reading their binders, and after five minutes I wanted to throw myself out the window. Then Ms. Price stepped into the room and told me she wanted a word.
• • •
We sat in a couple of chairs outside the meeting room. Ms. Price folded her hands and looked at me the way I’d once seen my mom look at a mouse she’d discovered in our kitchen, when she couldn’t decide if she should chase it out of the house or crush it with a broom. Maybe that was a bad analogy, because Ms. Price seemed pretty solidly in the mouse-crushing camp.
“I want to talk to you about certain problems you may face once you leave Earth.”
“If I leave Earth,” I said. “My mother hasn’t agreed to anything.”
“She’ll agree,” Ms. Price said, flicking her fingers impatiently. “Your mother won’t forbid you from helping all of humanity because she doesn’t want to miss out on a year of baking cookies and tucking you in for night-night kisses.”
“Do you have children?” I asked.
She scowled. “What do you think?”
“I think you haven’t been around this many people under eighteen since you graduated from high school.”
“Correct.”
“I’ll try not to get on your nerves,” I told her, giving her my best smile. It was more polite than saying You are both intense and super scary.
She sighed. “I wish we had better material to work with, but you’re what we’ve got.”
“Thanks,” I said. I packed up the smile and put it away.
“I’ve read your school records. You seem to get into a lot of trouble.”
“I never cause those incidents,” I told her, hating how defensive I sounded.
She flicked an indifferent hand upward. She could not trouble herself to care. “The president exerted a lot of influence to make certain the United States provided the adult permitted to accompany the delegation. We had to promise all kinds of beneficial trade deals with India and South Korea, and offer a great deal of aid to Uganda.”
“Welcome aboard?” I offered.
Her facial tic suggested I was, once again, too slow to get the point. “It’s also worth pointing out that the other species are not sending any sort of chaperone. Only Earth.”
“Why?”
“Because the other species didn’t think to ask,” Ms. Price said. “And that is my point. Dr. Roop has allowed me to review certain data about the Confederation in advance of our departure, and I find some things both interesting and troubling. More than eighty percent of the member species evolved from herbivores. Almost none of the species eat primarily meat, and most of those that are omnivores eat mostly insects or other small, harmless creatures.”
“What are you telling me? That I should order a hamburger before I go?”
She sighed at my failure to understand her point. “Do you know what the symbol of the Confederation is? It’s a gas giant, like Jupiter. Do you know why?”
I took a moment to consider what I knew about planets of that sort. “Maybe there’s a gas giant in the outer solar system of every inhabited planet,” I proposed.
She squinted at me, maybe impressed, maybe suspicious. “How could you know that?”
“I’m into this stuff,” I said. “Gas giants are supposed to be a possible precondition for intelligent life. The gravity pulls big stuff into the planet’s orbit. If we didn’t have Jupiter to protect us, the Earth would constantly be getting smashed by asteroids and comets, like the one that killed the dinosaurs.”
She nodded. “Correct, and their symbol is this thing that exists to protect them, not a thing they have done to protect themselves. They’re passive. They’re sheep.” Her voice grew quiet. “They are nice and orderly and calm and helpful, but they are not innovators or inventors like we are. All of their technology comes from these ancient aliens, these Formers, and they’ve been recycling their old technology for centuries. They have very little crime, and even less violent crime, not because they’ve solved those problems but because they never had them in the first place. I don’t know why they asked us to apply—we’re much more aggressive than most member species. So my point is that you are going to have to be on your best behavior. I’m less worried about your average intellect and lack of useful skills than I am about your adolescent rebelliousness. You need to keep it in check. No fighting, no troublemaking, no rule breaking.”
“I am not a troublemaker,” I said. I didn’t want to tell her that I got picked on a lot, because that would sound pathetic.
“I don’t care what you were,” she said. “I only care what you will be. Understand that I will do anything to make certain Earth is accepted into the Confederation, and if your behavior becomes a problem, then I will deal with it in ways you won’t like.”
“I also respond well to positive reinforcement. I like Twizzlers, FYI.”
She stood up. “Tone down the sarcasm. I’m not sure how it translates. Now I need to speak to the rest of the delegation, so go wander around the grounds or something until your mother arrives.”
She went inside the meeting room and closed the door. She paused, just a beat, and then locked it. Whatever she had to say to the other humans, it was not for me to hear.
• • •
They made my mother sign nondisclosure agreements with serious legal consequences for violation, but I couldn’t imagine they would have actually prosecuted her for speaking up. Who was going to believe her if she claimed the government was in on a scheme to send her son to Hogwarts in space? The end result was that later that afternoon I was back in Ms. Price’s office with Dr. Roop and now my mother, looking utterly astonished.
My mother wasn’t skeptical about what they were saying. It’s easy to believe in aliens when an actual alien is making the case. The Confederation’s laws prevented my mother from getting the translation nanites, so Ms. Price and I had to tell her what Dr. Roop was saying. Mostly me. Ms. Price tended to type on her laptop when other people were speaking.
Dr. Roop was a charming giraffe guy, but even he couldn’t make her happy about her son heading into space for a year. Given that my mother didn’t know just how many years she had left, I understood that this was hard for her. It was hard for me, too.
They let us have some time alone together in an adjoining room. My mother looked pale, and maybe a few years older than the last time I’d seen her. Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying. Not yet. Or maybe not anymore. Or maybe both.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said. “I don’t know if I can let you go. We have no idea what’s out there, what they are going to ask you to do.”
“They say it’ll be safe,” I told her, not liking the whiny tone of my voice.
“They say that, but how do we know?” She shook her head. “We don’t.”
Was my mother really going to refuse to let me do this? It wasn’t like her to hold me back. She always encouraged me to take risks, but this was a whole new order of risk, and for her the stakes were high.
She stood up. “I’m going home. I need to think.”
“They want an answer soon, Mom.”
“I understand that,” she said quietly. “But I can’t figure anything out knowing that the giraffe man is in the next room waiting for my answer. I need time to come to terms with this.”
“When do you think you’ll decide?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” she snapped. Then she hugged me tight, and I felt her tears against my neck. “I don’t know,” she said much more quietly.
Then she left.
CHAPTER SEVEN
* * *
I spent much of the rest of that day fending off Ms. Price, who wanted me to call my mother and persuade her to sign. I knew that would be a mistake. She did not respond well to bullies. I had to believe that she would make the right decision and that she simply needed the room to make it on her own.
The next day, when she returned with a large duffel bag in the back of the dark sedan, I knew she had decided to let me go.
Agent Jiminez, carrying the bag, led her into a private room where I was waiting. He set down the bag and left.
My mother hugged me. “This doesn’t mean you have to go,” she said when she released me. “It’s your decision. What do you really want?”
We sat in two armchairs across from each other. She leaned forward and took my hand.
“I don’t want to leave you alone,” I told her, “but I do want to go.”
“Because going off into space seems like a fun adventure or because you want to accomplish whatever tasks they give you and take all our problems away? Do you want to go for yourself, or to search for a cure for me?”
“Both,” I told her, which was the truth.
She let go of my hand and leaned back. “I don’t want to spend a year alone,” she said. “You’re all I have, Zeke, and I’m scared. I don’t want to watch my days and weeks and months vanish forever. But I also know that’s selfish, which is why I decided to let you do this.”
I was relieved, and also a little hurt. Maybe I wanted it to be a harder decision for her. “Are you sure you can get by without me?”
“No, I’m not sure, but this is the most amazing experience you could possibly have, and I would be a monster if I took that away from you. It’s also your duty to your country and to your planet—though I can’t believe I just said that out loud. I won’t be a selfish mother who holds on to her child despite the consequences to the world. The whole world, Zeke, is depending on you to do this, even if they don’t know it, and I can’t stand in your way.”
I nodded.
“And there’s another reason,” she said. She wiped at her eyes with the tips of her fingers. “What’s coming for me is going to be bad. We both know it, but what keeps me awake at night is not how bad it will be for me, but what it will be like for you. You’re too young to have to deal with taking care of me, how I’m going to become.” She paused to take a breath. “Maybe what you do on this space station will help me, and maybe it won’t, but I can’t ask you to watch me fall apart knowing you could have helped, could have at least tried to do something, but I wouldn’t let you. If I do that, you will come to hate me, and that seems worse than anything.”
I was feeling like I was on the verge of tears now. I knew she wouldn’t mind if I cried, but I was a big-boy space adventurer now, and crying seemed like a step backward.
“What are you going to tell people?”
“They’ll invent a cover story about boarding school, so you don’t need to worry about that,” she said, seeming to take comfort in the discussion of organizational details. “Do you want to see what I packed? There might still be time if I forgot anything important.”
“I wish you hadn’t had to go in my room,” I said as I walked over to the duffel bag. “It’s kind of a mess.”
“No kidding.”
I looked through the stuff quickly, and by all appearances my mother had done a fine job. She had sent me off with mostly jeans and short-sleeved shirts, but also a few long-sleeved shirts, a sweater, and my favorite Justice League T-shirt. She hadn’t packed my ultracool Tenth Doctor coat but she had thrown in my ultracool Firefly coat and matching Firefly suspenders. She’d also put one of my Martian Manhunter action figures in there. She knew I would want it. It was like taking my father’s memory to the stars with me.
“There’s one more thing,” she said, and then pressed a little cardboard box into my hand. Inside was a silver locket on a chain. I had never been much for jewelry, even less so for ladies’ jewelry, but I decided if I waited patiently, I’d get an explanation.
“No, you don’t have to put it on.” She laughed and shook her head. “I never thought I’d have to give this to you.”
“What is it?” I asked. “I’ve never seen you wear it—I don’t think.”
“No,” she said, “but it’s been in the family for a long time. When your great-great-grandfather went off to World War One, his mother gave it to him, with her picture and a lock of her hair. And then when your great-grandfather went to fight in the Second World War, his mother gave it to him, with her own picture and her own lock of hair. When your granddad went to Vietnam, he got it, with your great-grandmother’s picture and hair. They all came home safe, so maybe the locket is good luck.”
I opened it up. Inside was a little picture of my mom, and a little clasp of her brown hair, with a single gray hair snaking through.
“I’m not going to war,” I told her.
“And thank God for that, but you are going far away. A little extra luck can’t hurt.”
I nodded again. We stood and I hugged her as tightly as I could.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said.
She smiled. “For what?”
“For letting me go,” I said. “For being cool about it. For raising me to be the kind of kid who could be randomly selected by aliens to spend a year on a space station.”
She shook her head and then said what we had both been thinking. “Your father would be so insanely jealous of you.”
I laughed. “Yeah.”
“He’d be proud, too. But also jealous. I’m just proud.”
“I haven’t done anything yet.”
“You will. I know you will.” And then she went over to the table where the release form had been left. She picked up the pen and signed with a trembling hand. I tried to think about what this trip might do for her, not what it would do to her.
• • •
After we’d said our last good-byes, Agent Jiminez drove me, Ms. Price, and Dr. Roop across Camp David. Of the difficulties Dr. Roop had in getting comfortable in the back of the car, the less said the better. We passed several checkpoints but were waved through each one. The windows of the car were tinted, and the soldiers never once glanced at the car’s interior. I guess they’d been told to see nothing. At last we drove into a hangar, and that was where I saw my first real spaceship.
It was dull gray, with no markings, and sort of rectangular and boxy in the way of TV sci-fi shuttles, but it had two protruding engines toward the back and some truncated shuttle-type wings on the side, no doubt for in-atmosphere flight. The whole thing was about as large as a school bus and, to be honest, about as sleek. I understood it was designed to be functional, not impressive, simply a practical tool for getting from here to there. To me, it was unimaginably beautiful.
Dr. Roop boarded up a ramp and through an opening of double doors as soon as we arrived, but Ms. Price asked me to remain outside for a moment. She then proceeded to ignore me, sending out some last minute e-mails from her phone while I stood there like an idiot, moving my duffel bag from hand to hand for something to do.
After about three tedious minutes, a black car pulled up, and the president emerged. He walked over to me and shook my hand.
“Zeke, I can’t thank you enough for representing our nation and our world. I know you will do your very best for us.”
