by Erika Swyler
“Denny?”
His mouth blurred too. Had he said something?
There was a wave of heat. With it, he changed.
Denny’s arms moved too quickly to see; he raced and blurred like sped-up film. Dents appeared in the pruner’s hood. He was beating and kicking it. The air got hotter and hotter. Denny’s hair looked longer, unkempt. It began to cover his face, curling and tangling. Then he was a blur, moving too quickly to see. When he next stilled, he was sitting on the ground, back against the pruner. A bald patch was above one of his ears, pale and red, and a soft-looking curl of hair poked from his fist. There was a spit of cold air, and it seemed to radiate from him.
She shouted his name. The second he looked back, something pulled her, a tight string around her middle, around her heart, the empty place that was inside and out of her. The cold broke into heat, and he was once more a blur.
The pruner never moved, never shifted, but it began to rust. Paint bubbled and peeled in long orange stripes then cracked and flaked to the ground, exposing red-brown metal beneath. Months. It should take months outside for something to rust like that.
When Denny next stilled he was taller, thinner. Denny and not.
She ran for him, but something stopped her. Her hands and feet hit something, not a wall, not as hard, but something warm, with a slick kind of give, slippery as one of Betheen’s blouses. Like a jellyfish, she thought. A clear baby jellyfish. She leaned in, only to be pushed back.
A bubble trapped Denny inside, like the one around the monkey. But the monkey had been calm, still enough to be frozen. Denny was not.
“Put your hands against it,” she shouted. “Feel around!” People who got trapped under ice had to feel along the underside until they found the hole they’d fallen through, eyes closed so they wouldn’t freeze. She felt around, but found a seamless wall.
Denny wasn’t searching on his side; he was kicking the pruner. Then heat rose and he blurred again. New dents took shape, more paint fell, and a pile accumulated where he’d stood. When he stilled again she knew what was happening. Too fast. He was moving too fast. And the Denny she was looking at was older than he should be.
There were marks on him, cuts that had healed and scarred. His shoes had holes in the toes. His eyes were hungry and lost. There was something animal about him that made her think of bears in zoos, who paced and licked their fur bald in patches. She didn’t know this Denny. This was not Denny in the shed with her. He was gone.
Pop would come by. He’d find them. Did it even matter? She hadn’t done this. Denny hadn’t done this. Her stomach hiccupped. Fear was vinegar in her mouth, startling, nearly painful.
“I’ll help,” she said. “I’ll get help.” Could he even hear?
There was a back door to the shed, and she ran to it. She wasn’t leaving him—leaving wasn’t leaving as long as you knew you were coming back. She’d come back. What if it happened again? What if the sprinklers went on again and there was another light and she got stuck, like Denny? Like the monkey? Stretching and pulling herself apart.
Nedda ran for her bike. The clacking beads on her spokes were explosions in the damp. She should have stopped him from going. She wanted to see how things worked. She hadn’t wanted to be alone.
She rubbed her eyes, and her jacket sleeve came away soaked with tears and snot. No good. She had to see to ride.
She needed her father.
She’d been taught that fear was worry that something bad would happen to you. It wasn’t. Fear was something horrible happening to someone you love, someone you need, and you being left alone.
Aboard Chawla
Nedda’s dream eye kept traveling as she slept, searching for all the things she missed: the town, the buildings inside it, the houses, rooms, and people, like dolls, whose hearts she knew. The seismic hiccup of the launch rolled through her. She saw glasses break at the Bird’s Eye, and Ellery Rees sweeping up a shattered sundae dish. The gators at Jonny’s Jungle World sank into their ponds like beans in soup, hugging the murk at the bottom. Then the surge from Crucible ran through her like an electric shock, hot and cold at once. Strong. It coursed through power lines, the lines to the college, the wires in the walls, through the outlets in the labs. It pulsed across a gold-plated switch, shattering a glass divider beneath it.
Light spilled from Crucible, infrared and ultraviolet, escaping everything meant to contain it. Her father’s machine was as much hope and wish as it was metal and glass.
The anomaly moved like a stream of water, almost vitreous in appearance. It was time made liquid, nearly solid. The first gelatinous droplets of it traveled in the power lines, pulled along by electricity, spreading through the sciences building and beyond. Around the lines there was a subtle distortion, warping the world the way water bent light. She followed its progression, watching Easter shift, building by building. The powerline between the telephone pole on Latchee Street and Pete McIntyre’s backyard was frayed, the result of his longstanding lax relationship with Florida Power & Light, and time dripped slowly down from the wire into the bed of a truck in his backyard. The drops collected, each a clear, shimmering universe in miniature. Solid raindrops like Betheen’s champagne cake.
It reached the pumping station, where it met water, the pipes that ran through Easter, the sprinkler systems, the lakes and canals. Though it was decades before Liberati and Maccione would suggest a liquid spacetime, in Easter, atop an aquifer, surrounded by canals and irrigation, time had found a perfect home.
In the water lines the anomaly expanded, wending through the town, and eventually into the irrigation system that misted Prater Citrus, the last holdout grove.
Don’t look.
The sprayers in the southeast corner spluttered rainbows over trees. A net of time cobwebbed into a translucent dome. It was beautiful and broke her heart. Droplets clung to one another, to the trees, binding to leaves, caressing Flame Red grapefruits’ dappled skins, settling into the pores on the pineapple oranges.
Fruits shriveled and rotted, limbs fell and grew anew. Trees decayed and sprouted as she watched.
Wake up, Nedda. GET UP.
A figure moved in the south grove, standing outside. She looked closer. Little Mike Costas, watching fruit on craggy limbs shrink back to blossoms, watching trees grow slimmer, straighter, reverting to graft cultivars and root stock that disappeared into the ground.
His thoughts became hers.
He checked his pulse, convinced he was having a stroke. His mother, Yosie, had suffered one at the age of forty-five. She’d known it was happening only when the porch swing began singing to her in English. A lifetime spent stewing in heat and humidity could boil the water off the blood until it clumped like old honey. Little Mike had been poaching himself in the Prater groves since he was fourteen. After an hour or so, he figured a stroke would have already killed him. Whatever was happening was frightening. He walked to the management office, picked up the phone, and dialed Desmond Prater. A man should know when his grove was dying.
Then he was gone, and Nedda was left watching trees die.
She sang to herself softly, watching vines grow, roads buckle, waiting, waiting for Marcanta to wake her up. Wouldn’t it be nice?
She wouldn’t look at the equipment shed.
Marcanta, wake me up.
The headache from a sleep week was of hangover proportions, the kind earned from drinking ten different types of alcohol all poured into a cooler—what people used to call swamp juice. Typically, they gave each other grace periods emerging from sleep. But Singh was there.
“Get Marcanta to pump you full of saline. I’ll be in navigation.”
Nedda croaked. She stuck her finger in the printer, waited for it to spit out Dramamine. It chirped and crunched before burping out the usual pill plus something else. She checked the readout. Acetazolamide. She swiped at the screen until it became clear: The printer had determined she required old-world glaucoma treatment.
Marcanta did her eye
test during the saline drip.
“Did you put us all on diuretics now, or am I just lucky because I’m a throwback?”
“What?” Marcanta slipped, nearly tugging the line out of Nedda’s port.
“I got new meds this morning.”
“Shit,” Marcanta said. “It must be all the data piling up from the tests. The printer is running backup. If I miss something in bloodwork, the printer catches it and doses precautionary meds. Keep checking new pills with me, okay? We’ll learn that I’m an asshole who misses things, but we’ll all be healthier.” She tapped at her tablet. “Acetazolamide? That’s seriously old-school. I wonder if that’s just you or if it’s all of us.”
“Do you want me to take them?”
“For this cycle, yeah. It’s worth a shot. Who knows? We’ll watch.” She didn’t sound optimistic, but that was part of what was good about Louisa. She didn’t deal in false hope. She was figuring things out with everyone else.
Nedda found Amit staring at a data panel. Soft green numbers flicked across the glass. He rubbed his eyes. It felt wrong that she couldn’t see blindness, that her crewmates would look the same as they changed from the inside out. Amit’s eyes were the same brown, almost black, they’d always been, the skin below them soft-looking, delicate.
“Hey. Look at this,” he said, pulling up a file. “The spikes are at regular intervals. Here, here, and here. The energy that’s generated is—it’s like strontium on steroids. I don’t have a better way to say it.”
She pulled closer, hooking her foot on a rung. At the base of Amit’s skull was a dark whorl of hair like a hurricane. “Is there any kind of rebound?”
“No. It goes right back to the half-life we should have been getting with accelerated strontium.”
“You’ve done it already, I take it.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know you’ve done the math.”
Singh turned away from the screen. He looked at the tip of her nose, not her eyes.
“Normally, without accelerated burn, we’d get about eighty-eight years of power for life support from plutonium-238 and around twenty-nine years from strontium-90. So an isotope fuel swap shouldn’t have been a problem. If Amadeus was working properly, even with strontium, we would have had years on planet with life support in the module before the generator gave out. More than enough time to set up other reserves to take care of ourselves.”
“Or already be dead from something else.”
Singh didn’t acknowledge that. “Amadeus wasn’t calibrated for strontium, hence the power spikes. With Amadeus’s current malfunction, the half-life decreases significantly. If we do nothing and it sticks to this pattern, we can expect life support systems to give out about six months short of when we reach planet.”
“There’s no turning back for Mars, or a rendezvous, is there?”
“We’re too far out. Even if a rendezvous could be arranged, the prep time for a mission like that, not to mention the travel … There’s not enough time.”
“We’d be stranded and still on the same timeline,” Nedda said. It was the worst of all possible outcomes, worse than dying on planet. They’d never get there. “Why do you think they swapped plutonium for strontium?”
“Evgeni thinks it’s part of a bidding war for more Euro colonist spots on Fortitude. Russia is still the biggest strontium supplier, and he who supplies the fuel has more clout when claiming beds on Fortitude. If the Euro government proves it can supply the fuel more cheaply than the Americas, they gain control.” Fortitude was in a hangar back on the moon. Its living quarters were in a spinning drum that generated low artificial gravity. Gravity that would save skin, organs, sight. The collapse of British Sterling had set its build back another five years. Cities were sinking, and fast. One day, Fortitude would bring colonists—but they’d be Chawla’s replacements. Settlers. It would be foolish to not consider that there would also be a land grab.
“Cheaper fuel makes sense if the money gets used for other upgrades. But as far as I know there haven’t been any major changes to Chawla’s original design.”
“My guess is the fuel switch isn’t about us. It’s about Fortitude and after. It may even have been approved by the mission directors and higher-ups. If we die, it’s a windfall for one government because it proves the other can’t be trusted as a fuel supplier. If we don’t die, it’s a windfall for the other because we can travel more cheaply and efficiently. Marcanta thinks the Americas are betting on failure. If it goes wrong, they cut out the Euro fuel suppliers, and future colonization will be run by your government.”
Nedda squeezed his shoulder. “Doesn’t matter for us, does it?”
“No.”
“So what are our options?”
“We can try to take life support off Amadeus and run it off the main engines, but that leaves us short on fuel. We could try to split the difference between the engine power and Amadeus to see if we can stretch them both, but I don’t know how to do the swap, and there’s still a good chance we’ll wind up short on fuel and not reach planet. We could try to fix Amadeus itself, which makes the most sense, but also potentially exposes us to lethal radiation— Oh, and none of us have worked on a generator like Amadeus before.”
“Give me the specs for it.”
He sent the data to her tablet. “Should we ask them how we wound up with the wrong fuel?”
“Would it help us?”
“No.”
“Then no. We just fix it,” she said. “Like Evgeni says, we’re in charge.”
1986: Firecracker Dance
Annie Prater’s favorite secret was the Mariposa Cinema in Cocoa, a deco-style theater that reminded her of childhood trips to Miami. On weekdays, the Mariposa ran dollar matinees of classic films, and Annie had been going to see them twice a week since Denny had started the first grade. A small popcorn and a children’s soda was lunch. With no butter, the popcorn was hardly any calories, meaning the soda counted as lunch. The expense was easily hidden in the grocery budget. Just a small fib to Des about the price of eggs and milk, which he never bothered to keep an eye on. But, oh, how the little lie was worth it for two hours alone, sinking into a velvet seat. It was a long drive, and ate up a whole chunk of the day, time that felt stolen and better for the stealing. This week they were playing Holiday Inn, which was her favorite. And today she left early. Not because she was avoiding Des. Maybe. And maybe not all that early. The sun was up, so it must be later than she thought. Holiday Inn. Bing Crosby, Fred Astaire, and Marjorie Reynolds—who was no Ginger Rogers, but nobody was. It was her favorite for Astaire’s firecracker dance. Bang! Crack! Boneless, the man was boneless. Yes, there was blackface for the Presidents’ Day number, and yes, she knew that was wrong, but it was just the one number, surely that didn’t ruin the thing, especially because that wasn’t even the point. She’d watch Fred Astaire throw bang snap firecrackers and pop them with his heels, and Bing would sing “White Christmas,” and for a little while she’d be Marjorie Reynolds and everything would be fine.
The Mariposa had beautiful gold ceilings and red carpets like Valentine’s Day roses. Everything about the Mariposa felt better than life. It made her feel like more.
She’d taken Denny there once to see Lawrence of Arabia, but Des hadn’t liked that it kept him away the whole day. Des also didn’t like Peter O’Toole, because he seemed “light in the loafers.” But Annie liked his eyes. He seemed kind and smart and she’d believe anything he told her, which was the entire point of How to Steal a Million. She also liked Omar Sharif. That jaw and those cheekbones could cut glass.
Denny had fallen asleep during Lawrence. She should have taken him to Creature from the Black Lagoon instead.
She’d meant to pick him up, to bring him with her and have a fun day playing hooky, but she drove by Betheen’s without stopping. He was having a sleepover, his first one. A co-ed sleepover too. She would have killed for that at his age. This is what she told herself as she headed out to Cocoa
and turned her car radio up. But all that came through was static, no matter which station. She flicked it off. Just as well, there would be news on the radio. Those poor astronauts. Denny had seen that too. He needed a little fun, a little time away.
Denny was fine with Betheen, and Betheen owed her. Annie had spent so much time with Nedda, had showed Theo how to grind baby food, and hadn’t ever said a word about baby Michael. They both owed her. One night and a morning wasn’t much at all.
Her son, her sweet son, with his goofy Fred Astaire smile. Des had hit him. She was married to a man who hit his child.
She turned right off Acacia Lane and noticed steam rising off the Emersons’ pond like fog. Fancy, keeping a koi pond. Ted made good money on the stock market, maybe he had new pumps put in. Though why you’d want a fish pond boiling hot, she’d never know. Did you do that before you put in new fish? It looked like a jacuzzi or a bathtub.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Yes, Des had hit Denny, but it was once. A quick pop, and that was it. Just this one time. And Denny could have gotten badly hurt on the pruner; the blades on it could have ripped his arm right off. Denny had learned his lesson. Des wouldn’t do it again either. He wouldn’t have to. She knew he felt bad. She could see it in the way he shook right after. Her father had swatted her good and hard once for taking money from the cookie jar, and she hadn’t done it again. It would toughen Denny up.
He’d need to be tough. Soft boys got hurt. Des was tough and she liked him that way. Like Robert Mitchum, who made her shiver. Des had made her shiver too.
It would be fine. Denny would be fine.
She drove toward the interstate, but the uneasy feeling just wouldn’t shake. Annie knew Denny had climbed out his bedroom window to go see Nedda before, but this was the first time she’d ever told him to do it. Betheen had been so kind.
Do you want me to send Theo over? Let me send Theo to talk him down. Does Denny need anything? Do you need to stay? Oh honey, you can stay. We’ve got more rooms than people and enough sweets to feed an army. It’s been a rough day for all of us. Come over. You don’t even have to answer if you can’t right now. Just show up anytime. Theo hardly sleeps, he’ll hear you if I don’t.
