Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  She’d fought the temptation to call the syncer a needle, though they were using it to pop a bubble. She’d even thought to call it the “Space Needle,” but that had been imploded a decade before, after a tidal wave’s irreparable damage.

  They’d built Baby, a magnet, with loops of wire harvested from Chawla’s docking rig. At the moon, on Mars, it had been essential, but now there would be no more docking, no other ships to meet. The rest came from Louisa’s portable MRI, which she’d happily given up.

  Nedda patted what had once been the MRI’s casing. She’d seen Louisa slide frogs into it, Amit’s leg, Evgeni’s arm. She clamped Baby to a rung, and went about porting it in. Evgeni directed Amit on the wiring. Nedda had provided the equations. An electromagnetic burst would counteract the effect of centrifugal force, keeping the problematic rod from bending, hugging it tight to Amadeus’s core. It would pulse in sync with the power spikes, stopping them before they began.

  Baby.

  Amadeus existed because her father hadn’t wanted anyone else to lose a child the way he and Betheen had. It existed because he’d wanted her to have time her brother hadn’t. She’d thought of him often, looking out the window for his light and wondering if she’d know it when it touched her. She knew now why she’d lied when she told him she saw Halley’s Comet. She hadn’t wanted him to think he’d wasted their time. She’d wanted him to see the stars.

  A lifetime later and he was.

  “Nedda? You are taking too long. I hope I didn’t make radiation poisoning sound too good,” Evgeni said.

  “I’m almost done.”

  “Good. Get the hell out of there,” Louisa said.

  There was warmth on her back, through the layers of suit. Were she to try to touch Amadeus barehanded, the barrier around it would feel hot as it had with Denny, as it had when her father sped through himself.

  She spliced, twisted, and locked Baby into place.

  “Leaving,” she said, then pulled herself back into water storage, locking the hatch behind her.

  She didn’t look back at the impossible thing that shouldn’t be here, at Amadeus’s light, at Crucible’s light. Her father’s light, warmer than the sun.

  She waited for that same pressure to once more empty the room of water. Decades ago, a lifetime ago, he’d told her about a dish of marbles, half red, half white, and how if you shook them up, they’d mix together. When she opened the panel above, the droplets that escaped the vacuum became instant ice beads. But oh, how they caught the light.

  Nedda retethered. Then looked up.

  There was no up or down. East and west were nothing. Directions were meaningless in the map of the universe; relative distance was all that mattered, and it was ever shifting. From a distant world, were a little girl to look up with a powerful enough telescope, that girl would see Chawla. She’d see them thousands of years after they’d lived and died. Nedda’s life did not tend toward chaos. If she could remove that divider between before and after, her life would still be orderly. Her father with her, her mother at home, Denny under the sun, and her in the stars. As it should be. Crucible worked. Chaos existed only in that they had not predicted the variety of outcomes.

  She ever so nearly lifted her mask.

  “Papas,” Evgeni said. “What is that awful bird you listen to every morning?”

  “Hush. I’m fine. I’m coming in.” She grabbed the tether and crawled back to the bay doors, smiling into her mask.

  They spent an hour as a twist of bodies, Nedda at their center. Amit had run their program. She asked him to. She’d flipped enough switches for a lifetime. The lights shuddered as the life support system power switched back over to Amadeus. All there was to do was wait.

  They waited in Amit’s room, pressed against the walls to keep from floating around, from floating loose. Louisa nestled her face in Nedda’s hair. Evgeni held her waist, and Amit wrapped himself around her and Evgeni. Warm. After months and years, she was finally warm.

  Fall and Rise

  Rovers and terraformers chirped through Chawla’s computers, feeding coordinates and trajectories. Progress. There was dust on the landing platform, buildup left by a passing windstorm. A string of data indicated that Trio was clearing the area, reusing particulates to level and fill the pad. Nedda saw the progress through Trio’s cameras, a long pink-gray expanse of something that looked like concrete but wasn’t. She could look through Trio’s eye, but rarely saw the bot, unless Dué or Un happened to cross paths with it. It would be odd when she finally met them face-to-face, the patient little builders on which they relied. She switched cameras, hoping to glimpse Trio, but Un was percolating oxygen in a cell tent, and Dué was tunneling. Tessera and Fiver were mapping, collecting data.

  Evgeni pulled himself in from the corridor. The skin around his eye was still raw from the tape removal, a black eye made of scabs. “We’ll see planetrise tonight. It should be a good one.”

  She let go of the console. “Are you scared?”

  Evgeni sighed, one of the rare few she’d heard across the years. “What’s the good in being frightened? We’re alive now. We’ve got work. We’re doing extraordinary things. I can name a mountain after my mother should I choose.” He said something in Russian. She’d picked up a good bit of it during their time together, but hadn’t heard the words before. It was easy to forget sometimes how much he’d given up—people who understood him as only a native speaker could. Idiom. The tyranny of English now extended well beyond its home solar system.

  “It’s like running,” he said. “Fear is a pain in my side. It’s there, it hurts, I know it’s a part of me, but do I stop? No. Not when I know why I run.”

  “And why is that?”

  He rubbed at the skin below his eye. “Oh, because Earth is dying and to continue human life we must leave. And why should my life not be sacrificed for better? It’s a good thing. For the science of it, and hope.” He spoke with a politician’s bravado, a certain charm she lacked, but the slant to his mouth gave away other thoughts. “The wonder,” he said at last. “Any pain in my side, any blindness, even dying—they’re nothing when it comes to the wonder.”

  The bots chirped, sending out a new set of data as Un switched from percolating oxygen to drilling post holes for what would be the hydroponic garden. Dué whistled happily as it mined new materials. They’d been speaking to one another for years, repairing themselves as needed. They were a small family, tending to one another.

  She had the perverse urge to leave them that way. What if she, Amit, Louisa, and Evgeni never descended, and lived their last days aboard Chawla? The bots would continue building, mapping, fixing one another and cheeping songs across their world.

  She thought she’d had fear burned out of her in 1986, that particular emotion replaced by grit. “I didn’t think I would be, but I’m scared,” she said.

  “So was the first person who ate a lobster. But he was also hungry.”

  The laugh was better than anything in a long time.

  “Want to watch planetrise?”

  “But of course,” he said.

  Louisa and Amit were at the large window in the common area, hands pressed to the glass. Nedda and Evgeni stayed in the doorway, he on one side, she on the other, bodies touching in the narrow portal.

  The light through the window was welcoming, almost familiar. They were still too far back to make out specific features; their new home was more a moon in the distance than a planet—a thought, days away from being reality. Home. It would be their home.

  Amit and Louisa were silhouettes against the glass, small, but also everything.

  She was meant to watch planetrise, to be the first to see a new world with naked eyes. Within a year, one or more of them would be dead. From radiation, from exposure, from a sickness Louisa couldn’t cure, from starvation, if Nedda couldn’t make things grow. They would be incinerated or buried in alien ground. There was a chapter in the mission book about the disposal of human remains, the recycling of t
hemselves. She’d refused to read it until necessary. It wouldn’t be necessary if she went first. Eventually there would be just one, and no one wanted to be the last. They avoided talking or thinking about how things that were noble at the outset were frightening the closer you came to their end. The printer generated a constant stream of pills: things to dull panic, raise or lower blood pressure, increase bone density. Days were numbered.

  And yet.

  It was what she’d meant to ask Denny, how it had been to be alone for so long.

  Fingers knotted around hers. Evgeni bumped her hip. “Come on,” he said.

  “Show me where you’re going to put your ski mountain.”

  His broad hand shoved her gently into Louisa’s and Amit’s backs. They clicked together like a puzzle, practiced. Light brushed her face, and it was Amit’s hair, Louisa’s fingers, Evgeni’s laugh. For a single pure second, Chawla was the heart she was supposed to be.

  “We’re going to die there,” Amit said.

  “Not tomorrow,” Evgeni replied. “Tomorrow we start to build, and then we begin dying. Right now, we watch. We’re the only people alive who get to do this.” There was eagerness in his voice, the lightness of a tongue expecting something sweet. This, Nedda realized, was the thing that made her love him.

  Louisa’s hand turned in Nedda’s grasp. Nedda traced her knuckles, the bends and lines that made Louisa. Touch was a beautiful brushing of electrons, of atoms and molecules. Every touch left them a little less themselves, a little more each other. Had she brought a piece of Denny with her, a hitchhiker on her skin that moved with her across the universe? A piece of Betheen? A piece of her father, perhaps, though the likelihood of that was well below the measure of any significant figures.

  This foreign planet with its pink dust would be their home until they were spread apart to nothing in its dry soil. They’d had many homes: an apartment in the middle floors of a tower overlooking green water and a sinking city; a tiny room of books in a Tudor house held together by centuries of shoddy patching; a seedy flat split between three students that reeked of liquor, sex, and life; a twisty house with a trellis up the side and the breeze of citrus and salt running through it. Home had been a blue planet. Home had been a ship, three other bodies, and the forgiving thrumming of machines. Home would be what they could build.

  They were no longer themselves. They became everyone.

  One carried a continent within him, funerals given for the living, a family of a thousand, thousand hands raised to the sky.

  One carried in her all the medicine humans had ever made, tucked away in a single mind, fragile cells locking up and dying every day. In her lived the empathy that was humankind’s best grace.

  One carried a spirit that ice was unable to freeze from bones, that laughed in the face of fire, and flood, and starvation. The lightness of the suffering soul.

  One carried within her women, all of them, and by nature the men who had destroyed them, those who had lifted them, and women who had tried and failed.

  The sky would be purple, which she hadn’t expected, but the surface of the world and the atmosphere made it so. Colors were what light reflected. Light had carried her here, brought her decades from where she’d begun. In the planet’s purple glow, she found her father, the brother she never knew and his single painful hour. She saw them, the seven who woke her understanding that life had a terminus, and that an ending imbued meaning. They’d brought her to traveling to the sky’s end. They’d woken her to life. She saw her mother.

  Nedda took her hand from Louisa’s and reached in her pocket. Inside was a scrap so worn it was little more than an idea. She pressed her thumb to it, to feel what ink was left. Her good eye watered, but it wasn’t crying. It was washing away. The mass of words she’d held inside her for a lifetime dissolved.

  She saw.

  She touched the face of God.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It would be criminal to write a book involving space without noting the extraordinary openness, accessibility, and generosity of NASA. Any errors and politicking portrayed in this book are the faults of its author, and not of this incredible organization. I view NASA and the people within it as our best hope, and our best teachers of hope.

  The North Brevard Historical Museum in Titusville, Florida, offered key insights to the history of citrus and people along the Indian River. The American Space Museum & Space Walk of Fame was instrumental to my understanding of the culture of space, and the people who love it. Without them, there would be no Mitzi.

  This book is the result of hope and powerful belief. I am grateful beyond measure to Michelle Brower, who remains a champion of my writing and bolsters me when my faith wanes. Her guidance and encouragement are unparalleled. Lea Beresford believed in Nedda and her families as much as I did. She viewed them and me with the kind of generous and insightful eye that makes us our best selves.

  The team at Bloomsbury has been enthusiastic and supportive in the way all writers dream of.

  Jeff Heckelman, Elizabeth Kazanjian, and Kris Waldherr were generous with their time, eyes, minds, and friendship. This book is better for their thoughts. My compatriots in this time-traveling circus are Jennifer Ambrose, Karissa Chen, and Juliet Grames. The books they have in them are as important and beautiful as the people they are. Adrienne Celt, Jason Gurley, Louise Miller, Aline Ohanesian, and J. Ryan Stradal write excellent words and have made this journey less lonely. They make writing novels seem like a noble pursuit. Lydia Chiu, Rune Conti-Reilly, Caterina D’Alessio, Vanessa Hambidge, Samara King, and Fran Stephens: You keep me sane and honest. Thank you for the group chat of a lifetime.

  Everything I do owes an enormous debt to my parents and my somewhat odd upbringing. Their sacrifices afforded me a life in which I can write. I miss them daily, and hope I’ve done them proud.

  I am grateful to Karen Swyler for knowing what is true and what I mean. Nedda’s blue satin jacket was hers. I still covet it.

  I am grateful to Robert for bearing with me, for making a phone call I could not, and for a desk that allowed me to run. I would pick you again and again.

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Erika Swyler’s first novel, The Book of Speculation, was one of BuzzFeed’s 24 Best Fiction Books of the Year, and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection. Her writing has appeared in Catapult Story, Vida, the New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives on Long Island, New York, with her husband and a mischievous rabbit.

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  This electronic edition first published in the United States 2019

  Copyright © Erika Swyler, 2019

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Swyler, Erika, author.

  Title: Light from Other Stars : a novel / Erika Swyler.

  Description: New York : Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018034280 | ISBN 9781635573169 (hardback) | ISBN 9781635573176 (e-book)

  Classification: LCC PS3619.W96 L58 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018034280

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