Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  Nedda heard the fondness in Betheen’s voice. “You went to school for chemistry?”

  “Yes.”

  “How come you’re not a chemist?”

  “Oh, because I met your dad, and then I wanted other things too. I was so smart. I thought I’d square away my love life, then get to all the rest.” She squeezed Nedda’s hand.

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Yes and no. Baking is mostly chemistry, but it’s not quite the same. There’s less precision, less math, and it’s focused mostly on taste and texture. I’d have to go back to school to do anything more. I’m too old now and I don’t know how to be in school without your dad. I’d have to learn all over again, which seems silly. But your dad was wonderful. He kept pens in his shirt pockets, like he does now. Sometimes there was chalk behind his ear and it made his hair dusty. The lecture hall had sliding chalkboards that were impossible to reach the top of. Before class, your dad would climb on a chair and write equations from the top all the way down. I came in early just to watch him. He had a beautiful back. My roommate, Mickie, warned me about Greek boys. She said they had double eyelashes and if you looked at them too long you’d fall in love. Mickie was boy crazy, but she was right about the double eyelashes. Though, what really mattered was that your dad treated me like a person. That might not seem like much to you, but it meant everything to me. I spent a lot of time trying to be seen, trying to be heard. He listened.” She tugged Nedda’s hair. “God, that machine is ugly, isn’t it?”

  It looked like the kraken on the cover of Nedda’s mythology book. It was worse than ugly—it was cruel.

  “Look. See the scar on his leg? He got that when he fell from a tree. He was a little younger than you are now. A neighbor’s parakeet escaped and he tried to catch it, but the branch he was on broke.”

  Time passed with her mother telling a version of her father’s life, their life together. The shouting through the laundry chute had hidden it, but they loved each other. Her father must know her mother this well, all the stories of her scars, and the way she’d once held her books. Nedda should have known those things too.

  “Right now, he’s just about the age he was when you were born.”

  He was in a rare moment of stillness. “How do you know?”

  “He started biting his nails then.”

  Her father’s fingernails were always ragged, sometimes bloody; she’d thought it was because psoriasis warped and pitted them.

  He lacked the creases and folds that made him her father. His hair was almost a uniform black, but it was him. Had she made him that old? “His face was so skinny.” Is. His face is skinny, though it was too.

  Sharply, he grew very, very thin. Pale. Time spit forward, his body curled, heaved, as if it might break. An American Werewolf in London, but no werewolf broke free, just her dad—older, sadder, gray-looking. He rolled over, almost vanished into a shadow, and blurred once more.

  “What happened to him?”

  “It was a bad year.”

  Betheen’s nails dug into Nedda’s palm. It stung, but Nedda stayed quiet until, like everything with her mother, it became too much.

  “You’re hurting me.”

  Something in the room shifted and Betheen let go. “He’s almost here. Back up. Let him see the board.”

  There was nothing hurried about the man on the floor, her father, as he’d been that morning. He moved slowly, but not too slowly. There was none of the awkward skipping or jerking. He moved like her dad, like a man in pain and used to it. The air around her father had changed too. The odd rippled edge that separated Crucible and her father from the rest of the lab had thinned as though stretched.

  “Dad?”

  Betheen smacked the whiteboard, hard enough to send something clattering to the floor.

  He raised his head.

  Her mother yelled, truly yelled, “Theo, this is what’s happening. You need to tell us what you were doing when it happened. We need to fix it.”

  His voice was a million doors opening all at once, none of the hinges oiled.

  “Dad?”

  He flinched. He heard her. He spoke but wasn’t at the right speed. What if he stayed this way? What if she never heard him again?

  “Theo,” her mother said. “Theo, wait; you need to wait and slow down.”

  “Beth?”

  The change was subtle, like a temperature rise, or the prickle of someone staring. He was in the room, not ahead of it or behind it, but there.

  “Dad?”

  “You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”

  “It isn’t safe anywhere. It’s better she’s with me,” Betheen said.

  “Oh, Little Twitch.” He tried to unfold himself, to stand, but his knees buckled and he fell almost as quickly as he rose. He squinted. “Something’s wrong with my eyes. It’s a stroke. I’m having a stroke.”

  “It’s the machine, Theo. It’s broken and we need to turn it off. Can you see the board?”

  Nedda walked to him, hand outstretched. His knuckles were still swollen, and she wanted to feel his burning hands, to grab on for a little bit. But there was the slick wall, and Betheen, pulling her away.

  “It doesn’t work right yet. I tested it. It … There’s just so much data.”

  “We have to turn it off, Theo. Focus.”

  He wrapped his arms around his knees. Where were his glasses? He needed them. He wasn’t him without his glasses.

  “Why won’t my thoughts line up?” His words slurred as the room grew colder. “Oh, Nedda. I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” Nedda’s stomach dropped.

  “I wish you could stay. I wanted you to, just a little, just for a while.”

  His features began to change, subtly shifting.

  “Beth?” Her mother’s name, a groan and a whisper.

  “Theo, focus.” Betheen used the full-three-names voice. It worked on him too. Nedda saw the sound of it run up her father’s back the same way it did hers. “We’ve got your notes. Tell us where to start.”

  “A bubble.” He said something else, but Nedda couldn’t hear it. Crucible’s arms moved around the track. They should make a breeze, but they didn’t. The air around Crucible was too thick, almost solid. “A needle, a pin. Pop a balloon. Oh, you can decrease the pressure and things expand until the wall stretches so thin it pops, or— Oh, a needle, a needle. How do you make a needle to burst a thing that isn’t there?” He tugged his hair.

  “Mom, what’s happening?” Frost began sticking Nedda’s eyelashes together. She was crying. When had she started crying?

  “There’s too much inside—I was fixing it, I was about to. Sinkhole. The whole town, it’s like a sinkhole. I was trying, fixing it, I think. I’m going away again. Will you come back? If I come back will you be here?”

  “We’ll stay,” Betheen said, and took a step to the machine. It could swallow her up too. Crucibles were for melting things down, metals, but this one melted everything. Her mother’s back was made of shadows. “Tell us where to start and we’ll stay.”

  His voice creaked. “No, get Pete. Go get Pete McIntyre. He was going for copper. We saw Denny. He … We need a current. If you get enough copper—wire, pipe, all of it … is the power still running?”

  “It cuts in and out,” Betheen said.

  “Get Pete. We need a stable power source. And iron—a core, something strong. Magnetic current.” He gnawed on his lip. “The chemicals I had to use, the gases. They’re dangerous, poisonous.”

  “How dangerous?” Nedda asked.

  “They’re like ammonia and bleach. You have my notes?” His arm convulsed, nerves and muscles dancing.

  “They’re in Nedda’s bag,” Betheen said.

  “Don’t tell her, Beth. When you read them all, you’ll know when you see—please don’t tell her. I hadn’t settled on what to say. I’ll figure it out.” Whatever else he said was lost. The lines on his lips deepened and his eyes rolled, then fixed, staring at something only he could see. H
e moved so quickly the subtlest blinks looked like vibrations, a thousand pictures of her father, layered on top of one another.

  “Dad?”

  Betheen pulled her back, sat her in the chair. The plastic squeaked against her corduroys. Her mother’s hands were on her shoulders; her mother’s cheek rested on top of her head, sharp but giving, bone and skin.

  “He’s gone now. He won’t be able to hear us for a while.”

  “There’s poison gas in the machine, Mom. What happens if we break it?”

  Betheen was silent.

  Her father’s chest and arms wrinkled, like he was drying out inside and his skin was trying to fall away. Maybe it always had been. His hands and feet swelled, his fingers and toes curled, and she had to look away.

  “We have to go.”

  “He’s dying, Mom.”

  “Now, Nedda.”

  “Mommy, I can’t.” She couldn’t leave again, not even if she was scared. She couldn’t leave because she was scared.

  “You don’t have a choice. You don’t want to see him right now. He wouldn’t want you to either.” Betheen dragged her from the lab with a strength Nedda hadn’t expected.

  “I have to,” she said. “He’s my dad and he’s alone and he’s scared.”

  “It’s hard enough to watch when it’s not happening fast.”

  “I have to stay.”

  “You don’t get to see this. I’m not giving you a choice.”

  Nedda was empty, paper-bag empty, and let herself be pushed down the hallway. The metal on the door handle was too cold to touch. The hall lights were off and they felt their way down the corridor, guided by light from the exit. Nedda tapped her fingers, counting seconds. Pinkie to thumb. Ring to thumb. Fuck-you finger to thumb. Index to thumb. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

  When they were outside the building Betheen stopped at his car.

  “If you want to know what’s happening, I’ll tell you. Here’s what you would see if you stayed. You’d see a face that you love start to fall apart. His eyes will bother him. They’ll get red and teary, then cloudy. His skin will break down. His body will give out and his teeth will go. Once his teeth go, everything else goes too and he’ll look like a different person. When that happens to someone you love, even if you’ve seen them every day, it’s hard to recognize them. You’d see him and wonder who is that person, and what happened to my father? You’d look for the dad you knew, and you wouldn’t always find him. You’d look for his old hair, his hands when they still looked like hands. You’d see little pieces of who he was peeking through that new body, but you wouldn’t find him. It’s hard enough to watch slowly, Nedda. Don’t watch it happen quickly. He wouldn’t want that for you.”

  Nedda tried not to think of her father’s mouth—toothless—his eyes gone, his back bent. “Why would you say that? Why would you say such horrible things?”

  “Because I’m your mother. Because I love you very much, and because you have a big heart and you don’t know not to hurt it.”

  The sob came from everywhere all at once, “I hate you.”

  Betheen kissed her hair. “I know. Hate me all you want, but we have to go now, okay?”

  Nedda tugged on her book bag’s strap, feeling his notebook inside it, listening to her pony’s space helmet tapping against the cover as she climbed into her father’s car.

  Every morning he had two cups of coffee, one he drank right away, and one he held to warm up. He drank it black, because milk first thing made his stomach sour and sugar would rot your teeth. When he trimmed his beard, he didn’t always clean the sink up and there would be little lopped off hairs stuck to the porcelain and the top of the soap. The funny thing about soap was that when bubbles popped they left an outline of where they used to be, rings of beard trimmings.

  She closed her eyes and felt the car pull out of the parking lot. “Are we going to Mr. Pete’s?”

  “Yes.”

  She tried to see if she could feel each turn in the road, the ruts, and still know where she was. Denny said you could tell a car’s make and model by the engine’s hum and the sound of the exhaust, and you could figure out what was wrong with it by the smell. He was good at it, but she’d only ever learned three cars—the Chevette, her mother’s Cadillac, and Pop Prater’s truck. She listened for Pop. If Annie Prater couldn’t know she and Denny weren’t at school, neither could Pop.

  Then they reached where College Drive met Red Bug Road. It was gone, hidden under a wall of trees and brush tall and thick enough to touch the sky. Chunks of broken asphalt mingled with roots and gnarled pricker bushes.

  “It’s like the grove,” Nedda said.

  “Your father’s genius at work.” Betheen’s laugh was loud and sharp. She put her hands to her face and ground the palms hard into her eyes. “It’s everywhere.”

  Her mother was exhausted. But if they stopped for much longer, they might stay there for hours, not moving. Denny and her dad couldn’t stay like that.

  “Mom? Mommy, come on. I know another way.”

  They left the car. Nedda took Betheen’s hand and led her to a narrow path in the woods.

  Aboard Chawla

  Marcanta had offered Nedda a sedative, but she hadn’t taken it. She wanted to know what a vitrectomy felt like; she wanted to be aware. The farther they were from Earth, the stronger the need was to understand every bit of her body, as though she herself was Chawla.

  “You’re a masochist,” Marcanta told her.

  “And you’re a sadist. Our governments paired us perfectly.”

  Strapped into a chair, halo brace around her head, the experience was different from what she’d anticipated. She’d assumed she’d be tied into a sleep sack, needle in her arm, while Louisa floated above her. But that left too many variables when a stray movement could be catastrophic.

  “It’s going to feel like shit,” Singh said.

  “So you’ve had a vitrectomy?” Marcanta asked.

  “No.”

  “Then kindly shut up.” To Nedda she said, “I’ve got drops that will numb you up.”

  “Do I have to have them?”

  “Yes. It’s a lost cause if you freak out and flail.”

  “You’re sure you can see well enough to do this?”

  “I wouldn’t trust me in two months, but right now? Yes.” Marcanta pulled on her gloves.

  Singh tightened the brace; he’d built it with Nedda’s materials from the hydro lab—tubing, foam, clips. They’d considered using the printer for a proper halo brace, but there was no way to make one without Mission Control’s knowledge and involvement. Nedda’s ears were squeezed flat to her head by thick bumpers that Singh had stripped from the armrests in the control cabin. She lay back and listened for Chawla’s sounds to fade away. She’d been tuned to the module’s heartbeat for years. Now there was only the rush of her own blood.

  Singh floated above, his face upside down. She read his words by the flash of lips beneath his thick mustache. “I’ve got you.”

  Marcanta slipped her arm into a brace and buckled into a chair. Evgeni handed Marcanta the syringe-looking thing. Vitrector. Vitreous, vitrified, vitrification. It had been ages since they’d all been off sleep cycle together for any length of time. Four people in the room was equal parts comforting and frightening.

  “Wait,” Nedda yelled. “One second. Just one second.”

  Marcanta stilled. Singh seemed to understand, because the pressure on her ears let up. Evgeni hooked on to Marcanta’s arm brace and pulled himself tight to her.

  “Nedda, you’ll be honest with me, won’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Have I gotten fat?”

  She laughed. They were rounder, all of them, softer too, and not only because their edges were fading. They’d become their nascent selves, borders still unformed. She knew them by their light, the gentle differences—Amit’s warm, yellowish brown; Evgeni, who glowed like a pearl; Louisa, who was brighter than all of them. Nedda would know them anywher
e; if she lost their shapes, she’d recognize their light.

  They would likely die. It was why they were childless, unwed. Freedom of sacrifice. It was a shame that only three people would ever again be in the same room as Evgeni when he sang. Only three people would know that Singh ate with his pinkie out. That Marcanta pulled hairs from her eyebrows when frustrated. Children would know their names, and drive on roads named Sokolov or Papas. Children would know their ship, Chawla, and who she’d hauled. A little girl somewhere would rattle off everything she’d read about them, and with it everything she knew about space and time, about light.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready now.” Singh covered her good eye with a patch.

  A speculum pulled back her eyelids and anchored her eye in place. Something that looked like a wire clamp coming directly at her should be disturbing, but it was oddly familiar.

  “Ever see an eyelash curler?” she asked.

  “A what?” Singh shouted.

  “Never mind.” No one did that anymore. Her mother used a relic.

  A memory drifted in, of Betheen at her vanity, lit by a makeup mirror, clamping down on her lashes. It makes my eyes look more open. If your eyes are open, it’s easier for people to look you in them.

  Singh held her arms. She gritted her teeth. They’d decided to operate on her right eye, her weakest. If the operation failed, she’d still have her best eye.

  The vitrector was from the lab. Marcanta used it on frogs to test the effects of radiation on their vitreous fluid. The frogs were their coal mine canaries, for the journey, for animal and human colonization.

  Evgeni was near her good eye, and time became the sense of Evgeni’s hand, Singh’s breath, Marcanta’s voice. She felt electricity pass between their skin, air in and out of lungs, vocal chords touching. Their bodies were a great metronome, marking seconds, minutes, hours. A beat that swung back and forth, a wave like a sine curve.

  “She’s breathing fast.”

  “I’m almost done.”

  “How much did you cut?” Singh asked.

  “Would it make any sense to you if I told you? No. So don’t ask.”

  “It isn’t bad, you know. The blindness. I’m fine. None of you have to do this. Certainly not for me. I can teach you how to move this way.”