Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  Mr. Pete kept things like she did. Liked things that she did. She was what Pop Prater talked about too, a rat person.

  From the window, she saw the flatbed. It was where things had started. She’d been in it with Denny.

  Easter might have changed, but the truck was the same dark beast on its way to decay. She touched the front fender and her hand came away red with rust. Inside its bed were her footprints, hers and Denny’s. She could step into them, stand on the shadows of where they’d been. She tossed her book bag inside, climbed up, and looked around. In the summer, the truck bed had been hot on their backs, the kind of heat that made you think you’d never be cold again.

  Now, the cold in the truck had a source point, the spot in the corner and the creature in it. The monkey was small, manageable, far more than Denny, far more than her father. It hadn’t moved.

  “How come you got off easy?”

  The marmoset was so still, so happy looking; she hated it.

  Betheen’s and Mr. Pete’s voices carried from inside the garage.

  She jabbed, stabbed, and punched at the monkey as hard as she could, but wound up smacking the truck and jamming her fingers. What was happening to Denny was stretching and pulling his body way too fast. What was happening to her father was the most awful thing she’d ever seen. Her dad might not be in pain—it was hard to tell—but Denny was. He’d scratched himself and pulled out his hair.

  She flopped back, looking up. It wasn’t day or night, and there were yellow-green ribbons of light across the clouds. The sky was cut through by power lines from the back of Mr. Pete’s house to the pole catty-corner from it. Eventually they fed into the transmission towers that ran along the highways. Miles of wire. How much of it was copper? Water dripped from one of the lines, falling lazily into the truck bed with a pearly yellow glint. It was weirdly pretty, a shooting star.

  She’d lied to her dad about Halley’s Comet.

  Nedda opened her backpack and ran her thumb over Cotton Candy’s plastic space helmet, brushed her tail and mane. Then she took out her father’s notebook.

  8/31: Growth at this age unpredictable. Ht. Wt. BMI unreliable. Twitches and squirms too much.

  Balances on one foot after repeated attempts.

  Can do large plastic zips. Refuses snaps. Cries.

  Counts fingers and toes.

  Knows colors, shapes.

  Vocabulary ~500, relies on favorites. “Mushy,” “cooperation,” and “apogee” cause laughter.

  Nedda spending days when I work with neighbors. Their son is one year older.

  Nedda asked where Betheen’s belly went. Betheen told her, “Sometimes mommas get big and sometimes they get small again.” Impossible not to imagine what Michael would be like.

  It was about her. He’d taken notes on her like one of his experiments, cataloging everything about her. And her mother. Betheen had gotten big, then small again. Her mother had been pregnant. And that name, Michael. After the mention of Michael was a long list of what looked like medical terms, and then dated theories:

  9/15: The problem is time related. Knowledge acquisition is at war with cell death. Children, with their brain plasticity, don’t have these challenges. Nedda is too young to grasp that a week is not interminable, that an hour isn’t remotely eternity.

  Q: Are seconds longer for her? Is perception experience? What does an hour feel like?

  10/15: The problem with time is breakdown. Memory lapses are symptomatic of wear, cell breakdown, data written over too many times. Does thought create friction across neurons? Even children have wear. Growth is wear.

  10/22: Nuclear family = child as nucleus. Parent = electron, orbiting, hopping shell, never too far, always pulled. Chest pain = psychosomatic atomic bond.

  Nedda’s foot bounced against the truck bed. The hollow tapping was calming, as was the feel of the metal. Solid. Was she just an experiment? A specimen to observe and study, to help him form new projects?

  10/30: Magnets to cut friction. Spoiler to vacuum. Air resistance. Fins. Legs. Arms. Blades. COLD.

  11/5: Posit: Acceleration of entropy to reduce half-life producing greater short-term energy bursts. Entropy stopped locally creates stasis. Stop wear, not activity.

  A spill across the page smelled like old coffee. He didn’t always drink his coffee; sometimes he just held it to help with aches. Hot water would have worked, but it didn’t smell the way coffee did. The stain and the words below had turned into a frustrated blot.

  11/9: It isn’t fair to her to have two broken parents. I don’t remember Michael correctly. He’s not here, but he’s here. We don’t talk about him. Betheen can’t take it. I can’t either.

  11/15: Posit: If one could pause a life—wear and aging—a single person could learn infinite things. Life is limited by wear on the brain, wear on the joints, wear on the heart. A child deserves infinite time, a perfect heart, a body and mind that won’t break.

  11/16: Betheen said, “A mother is only as happy as her saddest child.” And if that child is dead? Then what?

  A dead child. A sibling. She’d had a brother. Her father had never said a thing. Betheen hadn’t either.

  Pages of messy equations followed, some scribbled through, some with the slanting S her mother told her to look for. He’d written in ballpoint pen. It hadn’t smeared like her Erasermate, but it ripped the page the same way as when she pressed too hard—the paper thin, the ink almost angry.

  12/1: I want her not to wear, for her to have all the time she’ll ever need. I want her to have lifetimes of hours.

  A perfect body is frictionless within itself

  A child who never leaves you

  12/7: Isolated heat loss. Isolated entropy. EACH BODY A CLOSED SYSTEM.

  12/12: What if it’s like water? If there is tension to it? If like water, it needs to spin. Centrifugal force at subatomic lvl.

  12/25: We could be good parents. I could be a good father. We’d have time. And a daughter who wouldn’t leave us. She’d have two lifetimes of hours.

  Her father had built Crucible because of her. He’d built it for her, and he’d been thinking about it since she’d been a baby. He wanted to stop her from growing up, and not just for her.

  For Michael, who was dead.

  She tried to imagine her father in the basement, writing things down anytime she wasn’t crying, anytime she wasn’t demanding attention. She’d seen all his faces, his young self through who he’d been when he’d looked for the comet with her. The man in the notebook was the gray, sick-faced father she’d seen in the lab. The man who’d written that notebook had held her, and she didn’t know him at all.

  “Nedda,” Betheen called.

  The end of her braid crunched between her teeth.

  He didn’t want her to grow up. He never wanted her to leave. Because of Michael, the brother they’d kept secret.

  The monkey remained unblinking beside her. She kicked it, hard as she could, but her foot pounded into the side of the truck.

  “Nedda?”

  Did he want her paused in time, stopped like the monkey?

  Stopped was not being able to kick. Stopped was angry and crying and needing to punch something but knowing you couldn’t.

  He’d told her Crucible was for his hands, for conserving fuel and making things reusable. He said it was to help people.

  They’d lied to her about stupid things. Things she should know about, like Michael, about being sad, about how bad things hurt. But her mom didn’t lie when she needed her to. It was the simplest, dumbest, most basic lie and she couldn’t do it. Her parents could hide an entire person from her but Betheen couldn’t say that things would be all right.

  Mr. Pete called her now too. The dirt in the truck bed was ruining her jacket’s pale blue satin and the pink piping.

  Judy hadn’t hidden in a truck bed; she’d gone on the shuttle. Judy got up, even when it was frightening. It was probably always frightening. Things that mattered were. Astronauts went up, knowing t
hat they might not come back. They did science, good science, and asked questions, the right ones.

  Astronauts got up.

  “Nedda Susanne Papas, get your ass over here right now.”

  Ass. Nedda had almost forgotten about the word because it meant so little—donkey, bottom, butt. Ass had made her swear list so early on she’d contemplated crossing it off. Her mother made it sound good and angry and scared, too, all those things that rolled inside her. Betheen stood in the door to the screen porch.

  “I’m out here.” Nedda’s head rushed as she sat up. When her vision cleared, she saw the launch sequencer, pristine under the awning on the back of Mr. Pete’s house. The awning would keep it mostly dry, but everything in Easter rusted. Everything in Easter was wet.

  What if the bubbles around her father and Denny worked like water? Her dad thought as much. He’d written it down.

  The sprinklers had been on when she and Denny were in the grove. On cold mornings, water—condensate—dripped from the powerline above the truck. Plit, plit, plit.

  She grabbed the notebook and scrambled to the ground.

  It was hard to see her mother’s face, backlit as she was by the porch light. Mr. Pete was nearby, a mess of wires and cables in his arms.

  “Stay where I can see you,” Betheen said.

  “She can’t come to much harm back there,” Mr. Pete said.

  Secrets were like bubbles too, two layers of lie with the truth in between. And they hurt.

  “You’re shitty liars. You don’t even know how to do it right. You think I can’t tell when you’re lying? Well, you’re wrong. I can.”

  Betheen reached for her and Nedda pushed her back. “No. The thing the machine is making, it works like water. It’s like water and bubbles like I said. It’s in Dad’s notes. And I know why he built it. I know there was a Michael, and he was my brother and he died when I was little and you never told me. I had a brother. And it’s not fair you never told me. If you were going to be shitty parents, I should’ve at least known why.” She stomped hard and it felt good. Nedda looked at Mr. Pete. “My dad isn’t okay. He’s in his lab and he’s really hurt, as bad as Denny, maybe worse. My mom can fix it. She’s smart, even though she’s the shittiest liar in the entire world. And we need your stuff, so do what she says.” She squeezed her hands into fists to stop them from shaking. “Everything is fine. We’re going to fix it. We’re going to fix my dad’s machine and my dad and Denny are going to be okay. Because bad stuff doesn’t happen to good people and everything happens for a reason. We’re going to fix it. That’s how you lie. Like that.”

  Aboard Chawla

  Singh’s arm hair was fine like summer grass; a gentle breath could set it moving. Nedda had read that losing one of your senses changed how you experienced emotions. She wondered if loving the hair on Amit’s arms might mean the last days of sight.

  Singh smelled everything. On Earth, it would have been unsettling. Had a man sniffed her like that in Easter, he would have spent ten minutes trying to pick himself off the ground, a mouth full of bloody Chiclets. Amit wouldn’t get that phrase at all, none of them would. Even so, they knew her so well, so intimately. Boundaries had disappeared with Evgeni’s vision. Sleep sacks abandoned, they bunked in a knot of limbs, drifting across Chawla’s main cabin, softly bumping into walls, caroming around as a single, four-hearted organism.

  Marcanta was the best to sleep near. Louisa’s body was giving, she sweat the least, and if you woke with a start, she’d kiss your forehead. Evgeni had difficulty keeping to the sleep schedule and wedged between Nedda and Singh, using their heartbeats to lull himself to sleep. He called them a UN treaty, a peaceful agreement between nations.

  Fear made bodies crave touch.

  Nedda was on the outside tonight, Singh and Evgeni in the middle. Her eye itched beneath the bandage, keeping her awake.

  Singh’s fingers touched where the tape crossed her eyebrow. “An eye for an eye,” he said into her hair.

  “Eye for all, and all for eye,” she whispered back. “Sorry if I woke you. It’s driving me crazy.” He shuffled behind her, locking a leg between hers and Evgeni’s, fidgeting. “You’re thinking about something. I can almost hear it.”

  “I wouldn’t have volunteered.”

  “Yes, you would have. You did volunteer, we all did. We’re noble little guinea pigs.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m selfish. But you let Marcanta do that to you, knowing it might blind you faster, knowing it could kill you. You volunteered.”

  Nedda tucked her chin to his chest. The motion set them drifting to the bookcase wall. His beard brushed the top of her head, and she sniffed him the way he did her. Amit smelled like the module, like the vegetal water of the hydroponics lab, like sponge-bath showers, like the alcohol used to clean everything.

  Evgeni kicked out and sent them spinning the rest of the way into the bookcase. The landing was soft, but he swore anyway, and untangled himself from their knot. Marcanta woke at the movement.

  “I’ll go,” Evgeni said. “Time to tire myself out on the bike.” He felt his way out of the room, then drifted down the hall.

  “The printer upped his psych meds this morning,” Singh said. “The hypnic jerks are probably a side effect.”

  Marcanta yawned. “I should watch him. Should I watch him? Yes, Louisa, you should monitor him for other side effects,” she said to herself.

  “He’ll be fine,” Nedda said.

  Nedda found it hard to tell that Evgeni had moods at all, let alone ones that needed regulating. He appeared to have three settings: happy, stoic, and amorous. It seemed a good way to be.

  “Sure. But now I’m going to worry.” Marcanta swore and followed him to the gym.

  Singh and Nedda rearranged themselves and drifted by the window. The light was filmy now, not clear and cold like it had been in the early days of their departure. She picked at the tape around her eye. It messed with the seal on the pressure goggles, and was a constant reminder of her body breaking.

  “Why’d you tell Louisa about his pills?”

  “She wants to worry about something. Worrying about someone else feels more productive than worrying about yourself,” Singh said. “If you’re concerned about someone else, you do your best to make them comfortable. When you’re worried about yourself, you’re just worrying.”

  She knew Singh had helped nurse his grandparents in their last days. His grandmother had surrendered to dementia. With his grandfather, it had been a messy cancer, a wasting awfulness that left a gap no words could explain. He’d worried.

  “Stripping down medical is the only way I can think of to get the materials we’re going to need to fix Amadeus,” she said. The idea had been eating at her since she and Singh had run numbers. Medical had almost everything they needed.

  “I came to the same conclusion. There are some things we can get from Hydro if you’re up for losing them, but not the essentials. Louisa’s going to kill us.”

  Nedda knew differently. Louisa would rip the med bay apart with her teeth if she thought it would help. “Obviously. You’re going to have to let her jab you a few times just for fun,” she said.

  “I guess that’s a fair exchange. If you talk me through it, I’ll do the walk to Amadeus when the time comes.”

  “No, you won’t. Marcanta and I already decided. If something goes wrong, we can lose me and still survive. If we lose you, our chances of landing go to zero.”

  Amit squeezed Nedda a little tighter. She let him.

  “It’s beautiful math,” he said.

  “I know. Behind every brilliant woman is her doubly brilliant mother.”

  “How did she think of it?”

  “It was the pressure.” The same adrenaline that made it possible for humans to lift cars had jolted Betheen’s mind to genius.

  They floated in silence, Marcanta’s and Evgeni’s voices quiet and distant, Chawla’s engines churning below. Amit was hard against her back, but not pressing. He nudged
once, then let it go. The advance wasn’t unwelcome, but it was nothing she acted upon. In the last months, they’d begun to feel less like people and more like a symbiotic part of Chawla. Amit was idealistic in his longing. And what was sex but longing? But he was applying ideals to her, qualities she’d never possessed—that she was noble or sacrificing.

  “I’m not good, you know,” she said.

  “I never said you were.”

  “You implied it, but it isn’t true. I’m making up for things.”

  “What could you have done that was so awful you’d let Louisa cut into your eye and volunteer yourself to walk into a nuclear reactor?”

  “It was more like a poke than a cut,” she said.

  “That’s not any better.”

  “My father built the machine that created the anomaly, that made all the Gappers.” She couldn’t say the rest, the uncomfortable familiarity of the Amadeus drive, what she and her mother had done.

  “And? My uncle killed two people in a DUI, but that has nothing to do with me.”

  Amit’s beard bristles scraped her ear as he turned. Evgeni’s cheek was smoother, Marcanta’s the softest, including hers. Nedda was still bony, prickly like she’d always been.

  “It’s not the same. That’s two people. My dad ruined the lives of an entire town.” When they’d worked Amit’s data into her mother’s equations, tracked the timing of the surges, she wondered if he suspected. If he did, he was kind, and said nothing.

  “I missed the part where you’re responsible for that.”

  “He built it to stop me from growing up, among other reasons.”

  Fuck was a universally satisfying word. Always cathartic, intonation gave it all the meaning it ever needed. Amit’s voice was beautiful and he said the word with compassion, an understated F, a lovely K. “That’s messed-up logic. He told you that?”