by Erika Swyler
“Are you crying?”
“Yeah,” Nedda said. Her dad had done one good thing, a really good thing. Time had rewound for Denny, just a little, skipping over a bad part, the part where Pop had hurt him.
“You miss him, I bet.”
“No,” she said. You couldn’t miss someone who was everywhere. He said he would be, and she believed him. You couldn’t miss someone you were angry with. You couldn’t miss someone you killed.
Except she did.
“I can’t even remember going into the shed. I wish I knew why I was on the pruner.”
There were very few things Nedda could fix. This was one. He didn’t know what his dad had done, or that his dad could do a bad thing, could hurt him. A lie greased with good intention, the words came easily.
“I wanted you to teach me how to drive it,” she said. “I made you sneak out. You were about to show me when it looked like you got struck by lightning. I got scared and I ran. I’m sorry.”
Denny chewed his thumb more, nipping a long piece of skin between his teeth. “That would have scared me too,” he said. “Do you still want me to show you how to drive the pruner?”
“Okay.”
The good of a lie was eleven years of having been the only star in her parents’ sky. She couldn’t have her dad anymore; she’d maybe never had him at all, not in the way she thought she had. She’d been sharing him with Michael. The good of a lie was to protect someone. To give them their dad.
The good of a lie was for Denny.
1989: Amadeus
The shrill hum and clicks of Avi Liebowitz’s printer drowned out the subtle guilt that ran underneath his excitement. It was good work. Solid work. The best he’d done in years, even if it wasn’t his. Enough of it was his to get him out of Oak Ridge, and likely back at NASA, over at JPL. That most of it wasn’t his—there was nothing to be done about it.
He’d tried.
He’d called Theo after his last note. The final diagrams were good, if scaled too large. The choice of materials was also questionable, but structure had always been Theo’s weakest point. Frail frames. Still, it was brilliant. Avi had called to tell him so, to toss around ideas for other materials, but Theo’s phone had been disconnected. Avi tried his office at the college, but the call didn’t go through either. Theo might have been fired. Quite likely. Papas wasn’t an extraordinarily tactful man; if he was he’d have had an easier time landing at a lab. It was odd that the office line was gone, but who understood the ins and outs of small college telephone systems.
Theo might have disconnected it himself, if he were in a focused phase. His last notes had included something about his wife’s gastronomy experiments driving him out of the house. That had made Avi smile. He’d met Betheen only a few times, but liked her. Once, at a department party, he’d made a comment that most of the interns were about one drink away from an orgy, then blushed when he realized he’d spoken too loudly and Betheen was standing next to him.
“Apologies, Mrs. Papas.”
“Good thing it’s not a chem lab party or they’d be on home-cooked amphetamines and screwing like rabbits,” Betheen said.
“And she’d have been the one who cooked them,” Theo said, grinning.
“Purely out of curiosity,” she replied.
Liebowitz had tried calling again a week later, but the line was still down. He called information to get the main number for the school, but Haverstone College’s directory line rang and rang until it disconnected. It was a small school, which meant funding was likely unstable, but Theo had mentioned nothing about it closing.
Frustrated, he wrote a letter.
Two months later it was returned as undeliverable, address unknown.
For a year and a half, Avi tried to find Theo. Missing persons reports were almost impossible to file when the police department you needed to file them with had itself gone missing.
How did an entire town vanish?
He continued work on Theo’s notes, neatening, changing the materials just so, homing in on acceleration. So much of Theo’s work focused on slowing decay, but the potential lay in speeding up half-life. The possibilities were endless. Compact fuel for long journeys, contained radiation effects. Had something like it been employed at Chernobyl, the catastrophic damage might have been stopped. He wrote, and continued to write, and slowly developed a generator.
Compact, lightweight, high-powered, and perfect for a space probe.
When he was near the end, he spent long hours in a cafeteria at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, drinking coffee and writing like a madman, snapping pencil leads, swirling the bubbles in his coffee cup. Watching them spin in place and cling to the edges.
One of the summer interns slid a tray next to Liebowitz. The kid still looked like a teenager, zits loosely strung together by what few scraggly beard hairs he could grow. Avi had looked like that himself once, only with unfortunate red hair that wouldn’t quite curl or lay straight. Then he’d learned to nearly shave his head and occasionally wash his face. He clinked his spoon against the lip of his mug.
“Hey, have you ever heard of an entire town disappearing?”
The intern looked startled. Sure, it was a crazy question, but it was a crazy situation. Theo had vanished, as had everything around him.
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. An entire town, gone. Poof. All the people in it. Ever heard of anything like that happening?”
The kid shook his head. “Nope. I saw a car fall into a sinkhole once, and I guess a sandstorm could cover stuff up. I mean, that’s what archaeology is about. I guess.”
“You guess. What department are you working in?”
“Materials.”
“Who’re you working for?”
“Dr. Stanger.”
“Do yourself a favor. At least one time, tell Stanger to go fuck himself. He likes interns who push back.”
The idea of a sinkhole stuck with him. It was perfectly Floridian, fitting for that weird little town Theo lived in.
Liebowitz peeled the perforated edges from the final printed page, separating it from the one before it. It was good work, pioneering work. He’d love to claim it as his own, but it was Theo’s too. He credited him where he could, how he could, in a way that wouldn’t raise questions about his missing collaborator. If Theo ever resurfaced, they could work it out then.
Theo’s given name was an ungainly mess. Avi had seen it on papers only once or twice. Even his identification badge had only listed T. Theo said it was a name his parents hung on to because it had appeased their church and his grandfather in one blow. Theophilos.
Liebowitz named the generator Amadeus. For Theophilos, whose name, like that of the musical genius, meant “friend of God.”
Pasadena agreed with Avi better than any other place in the world. He tanned for the first time in his life. He could sweat and not have it stick to his body, and he’d managed to find a pair of sunglasses that balanced out his face. He wore them to read in the mornings, before heading to JPL. NASA wanted the drive he’d designed, and Jet Propulsion Lab was the best place to work on it, which meant moving to Pasadena and discovering the kind of weather he didn’t know he’d been born for. Theo’s letters were spread across a glass table—an indulgence he’d thought particularly Californian at the time, though it looked out of place in his bachelor apartment. All was not perfect. Almost, but not quite. Guilt chewed at him. He’d profited from work that wasn’t entirely his, and he missed his friend. He found himself digging through what notes Theo had sent and noticing the size of the shaky scrawl. Why had the diagrams gotten large? The drawings themselves, yes, larger might have been easier on days when he could barely grasp a pen. But the measurements? Then he realized: Theo couldn’t build small for the same reason Theo couldn’t write small.
Theo hadn’t been hypothesizing. He’d built that machine. And he’d used it.
What would a sinkhole be if it wasn’t in the earth? What would it be if it wa
s in time?
Chawla
Nedda was tethered to Chawla like a child to its mother. She’d walked on the moon, ground the chalky soil beneath her boots, leapt as if to fly. She’d worked on the Mars station after they’d done their first long-haul training mission as a crew. The surface of Mars was grittier than the moon’s silky dust. She was lighter there than on Earth, though without the moon’s free flight. On Earth, they’d trained to navigate micro gravity by spending long hours in swimming pools, learning to perform mechanical operations underwater. Eventually her body began to feel that air was too light. Through all that, she had never walked in space. Amit and Evgeni had. Louisa would never have the need; her entire function was indoors, as was Nedda’s.
The blackness she’d looked into for years wasn’t black; it was faintly light, fragile like the rays at the bottom of a swimming pool. Chawla’s lights cast her hull in bright blues, and Nedda’s shadow stretched across it, long and lean, despite the bulk of her thermal suit and the sweater underneath it.
When the bay doors closed, the thump ran through her.
“Doors closed and sealed.” Amit was tinny in her ear. “Papas?”
“Closed and sealed. Starting walk.”
It was harder to move than she expected, harder to resist the urge to let her grip boots go, to fly into that thin, clean light.
“Sixty yards down, toward the engine. The panel you’re looking for is numbered—”
“CAN1283. I’ve got it.”
“Right. There are twelve tiles holding it in, plus the pressure latch. When you pop it, nothing should come out, but hang on just in case. There could be air from when we moved water over to Amadeus. There shouldn’t be, but if it’s there, it could blow you from the module.”
“That’s what the tether’s for.” Nedda hefted the tile puller over one arm. The other held the syncer they’d named Baby, due to its size. Both tools were tied to her as she was to Chawla. Years of running hadn’t combatted muscle atrophy as much as she’d hoped; lifting her feet from Chawla’s surface left her thighs burning within a few steps.
“So ladder down. The water storage unit is going to be dark, but that’s your safe room.” The water unit was shielded with a heavy protective material. Weight mattered less when launching from the moon. “Evgeni’s got a monitor light on, but it won’t do much. Keep your headlamp on.”
“Amit?”
“Yes?”
“Shut up. You’re ruining space for me.”
She was alone in the universe with Singh’s laugh. For thirty seconds Nedda stood still, reveling in there being nothing above her head. Four solar years ago, there’d been an accident on a Mars orbiter. An astronaut on a routine walk took off his visor in the middle of space and froze to death. The event caused international mourning, and a new set of psychological evaluations for everyone in the program. New latches meant visors couldn’t be opened without a specific stream of lucid commands. The man had given in to the wildest urge—to be in space, part of it, to touch it, skin to skin. For a moment, she understood. It was where all light traveled, and she was in it. There was no bigger sky.
“Walking,” she said.
Near Amit’s com, Louisa whispered, “Thank God.”
Chawla’s hull was bulbous, marred by scratches from moon rocks. It was a lattice network of doors and tight hinges, all of which were meant to be reconfigured on planet to make a living space. Each door was marked by its manufacturer to indicate point of origin and function. CAN1283. CAN: Canadian territories. 1283: water storage access point.
The casing was a slide puzzle, not intended to be removed except under specific circumstances. The twelve tiles clicked and slid around the access point, until she was able to pull the sheet of them away, exposing the hatch beneath. Nedda folded the tile sheet into a smaller square, which tucked into a pack she locked to the hatch hook. Quiet. Without Chawla’s engines churning, there was deep quiet. Silence was all there had been before the universe began. She popped the latch, and waited for air to blow her off into space, for her tether to snap, to drift away into nothing.
Heartbeats.
“Tell Evgeni he moves good air.”
“I’m not telling him that. We all share a cabin,” Amit said.
“Free walking.” Nedda hooked her tether to the side of the hatch. The ladder inside dropped to the cavernous room where the landing-cushion water normally would be. It was lit by a single light, dim enough to show the silver chamber shielding. Once inside, she closed the hatch.
“Papas.”
“I’m good.” She runged herself across the chamber, clipping her boots where she could. There was a wheel-handled hatch at the far end. Beyond it, Amadeus.
She reached the hatch. “Amit, I’m here. Flood it.”
Instinct told her a flood was a wave, a canal overflowing and gators in the street, rats swimming in a basement, a car sinking. But the water didn’t move that way. It was a great viscous bubble that splintered as it encountered other objects, as it encountered her. It was the closest she’d seen to a shower in space. As more water came, the fractured droplets rejoined, gelling together.
“Water storage is filling up.”
“I’ll give you the go once levels are equal.”
“Okay.” Pieces of the water—and it did feel like pieces—clung to her. What would become their radioactive landing cushion. If there was a hole in her suit, she’d die from the radiation. If there was a hole in her suit, she’d die from air loss. If there was a hole in her suit, she’d die from cold.
“Amit, I want to talk to Evgeni.”
“Hello, Nedda. I’ve been listening in.”
“Genya, tell me something bad. Really bad. Worse than this, okay?”
“My wake-up music is the next rotation and I’ve discovered a new band. You’ll love them. They use found instruments and do no repairs. The sounds you can get from a broken saxophone? Better than a fixed one.” She could hear him smiling.
“No, catastrophically bad. Chernobyl bad.”
“As you’re about to open our little reactor? No.”
“Please.”
“How about Fukushima? Nuclear catastrophe and a tsunami.”
“I don’t know much about it. I wasn’t around then, I guess.”
“Neither was I, but I still had to learn it. Are all Gappers lazy?”
“No, only me.” A wobbling ball of water split around her waist.
“Just as I thought. What do you want to know?”
“After. Tell me about what happens to everyone after.”
“The quick death? Not many people get that. The sickness? Yes. It is bad. Worse than you think. An entire generation gets that, plus the one after. After Chernobyl, the genome for much of Eurasia changed. Children born with holes in their hearts, blood disorders, bone disorders. Even I am different because of it.”
They were the entire genome for the species, the four of them.
“But,” he said, “something wonderful happened too. All the people went away. I don’t mean the ones who died—death is terrible, obviously.” The word obviously cartwheeled on his tongue. “The people who would have stayed in the area had to leave. It stayed untouched and became a land where no man went, and the grass and plants grew. It reverted to wild, how it was before people built things. An uncolonized, uninhabited place, as it was meant to be. It was beautiful. I’ve seen pictures. It was the last oasis in Russia. From death comes beauty.”
The water grew around her, slowing her. So much like a time bubble. Like one of her mother’s champagne water cakes, and she was the fizz trapped inside it.
Louisa turned on her com. “Papas? Your heart rate picked up. Slow your breathing,”
“I’m fine.”
“Genya, stop telling radiation stories.”
“You expect her to wait in a flooding room with no one to talk to? Cruel woman.”
Their nattering calmed her, as did the thought of an irradiated pastoral world. Earth would be that, once t
hey were all gone. Maybe that was how things were supposed to work.
“You’re at even water level,” Amit said.
“Okay. Going in.”
She undid the hatch and runged into a room filled with familiar yellow-green light. She remembered the smell of solder, alcohol, all tinged with citrus, as though it were inside her helmet. She recognized the shape, but was startled by its size.
Amadeus was small, barely larger than the printer in her cabin. Water floated around the room in beautiful bubbles.
“The port you want is on the ‘S’ wall.” She’d come in and locked onto the wall at an angle, and the S was on its side.
“EUR2020,” Evgeni chimed in.
The light from Amadeus was bright enough that it blotted out her headlamp. She should rung over to the panel and hook up the syncer, but she was shocked to stillness.
It was familiar: the spinning, the blades. Vent hoses had been replaced by conduit, but it was similar enough that she imagined a miniature version of her father ducking beneath the wires, leaning to tweak a bolt, shaking out his hand. She inched closer. Gold, the center of it should be gold so it looked like a spinning sun, a capsule just for her.
It was Crucible.
Oh, you little light that caused such trouble. Oh, you little light. This was what her father longed to make, but couldn’t. He’d followed her here. She reached out, the tips of her gloves brushing the yellow-green light, that familiar feeling from decades before, slick, like glass.
Were worlds perfect, his hand would be on the other side.
Gas, carbon, heat, light. That’s what we all become.
And time. He hadn’t said time.
“Nedda? Talk to me.” Louisa this time. “Your blood pressure spiked.”
“Ever have déjà vu?”
“Yeah, sure. We can talk about it when you’re not about to be irradiated, okay? Plug Baby in and get out.”
“Okay. On it, I’m on it.”
She navigated to the panel. EUR2020 in bold black letters. With a little pulling it opened to reveal a network of wiring. She unraveled Baby’s cord.
