The Girl at the Center of the World

by Austin Aslan

  Keali`i. Tribesman. Liar. Killer. Thief.

  Keali`i. Hero. Gentleman. Protector. Friend.

  I feel sweaty. “I’m too tired,” I tell Dad. “I’m so sorry.” I need to get to work. Make the globe turn the right way.

  “Hon, go to bed. We can watch it again later.”

  I know we’re going to the array tomorrow, but…we’re already out of time. Things have to start working again. Start making sense.

  Upstairs I sleep and drift, dot and dash. But I never know who sees the pattern, who knows the words. When is enough enough? Does it really even matter?

  As the famous line from the Planet of the Apes movie goes: is there even a difference between saving them…and damning them all to hell?

  The world below flickers in silence and solitude. Even so, from somewhere very far away, the rhythmic shuttering of a projector and the muffled pleas of apes and men steal into my dreams.

  * * *

  The shores of the vast Asian continent are dark. I hover over the dim green eastern coast. My islands are just now visible as a distant scar along the day-lit curve of ocean blue. The frontier of night creeps away from her shores; it’s morning there. The sun will soon flash into view as it peeks above the haloed edge of the globe.

  A fleck of glinting sunlight on the water near my islands catches my attention. I stop flashing my English-language, American Morse code-message over Tokyo and Pyongyang and Seoul and Beijing and Taipei and Hong Kong and Manila and Bangkok—all hosts to nuclear power plants—and drift nearer to home in order to investigate. The journey takes time. I love this angelic drifting.

  I can sense the presence. Distant, retreated.

  The dawn bathes me as I near Hawai`i. Hello? I ask. Come forward. We need to talk.

  I do not wish to talk. I pick up the voice in spite of the owner’s attempt to guard it.

  We can’t let them leave. You must stop this effort. They’re preventing global nuclear winter. Their fields soak up the radiation, make it inert.

  That’s ridiculous. You can’t keep them here. Who are you to decide we must all live in a dark age?

  The mental shout startles me, but I guard my surprise. I will let go when the work is done and we are safe. Soon. Be patient.

  The islands are near, now. I can just make out the object of my interest. A speck of gray in the waters between Kaua`i and O`ahu. Is that a battleship?

  I’ve seen your message. You’ve got it all wrong. GO NOW.

  It is a ship. I drift closer. Naval.

  Has the military returned?

  Leave.

  I shift my attention back. You’ve seen my message?

  LEAVE.

  You cannot kick me out.

  I will find a way. The spawn.

  I control it, too, I lie.

  No, you don’t. The spawn doesn’t even talk yet.

  A flash of panic. How does this person know that? I do.

  I will find a way to kick you out. If I can’t, I will find YOU.

  This is meant to intimidate me? I project amusement into the space we share. You cannot find me. You cannot reach me. Give this up. Trust in me. I will let them go when we are ready to be alone again. It’ll be soon.

  Somehow I sense masculinity. The confidence of a hunter, a chieftain, domineering. He’s frustrated that something feminine has bested him. I feel his sudden menace.

  You spend an awful lot of time over the Hawaiian Islands, my dear.

  * * *

  I awake in a flash and draw in a sudden gasp. He knows I’m in Hawai`i!

  I sit up, rub my eyes. My bedroom. Morning. The disorientation and the alarm mix in my mind.

  Doesn’t matter. Of course he knows you’re here. He’s right: the Orchid hovers over these islands like they’re her nest. She goes out to forage, but she always returns.

  “But why’d you have to flinch, idiot?” I ask the quiet room. Now he thinks you’re scared. You encouraged him by showing weakness.

  But I’m not scared. Just startled. He can’t dislodge me, can he? I scan my mind, finger along the anchor that sits in my brain. It’s there. Strong. Embedded like a fishhook tangled in a web of coral. That tension is always there. I’ve grown so accustomed to it that I hardly notice it, like a hat on my head. But the second it lightens, I’ll know.

  He can’t hurt you. He can’t take her away from you. And he can’t just come to Hawai`i and “find” you. Shake it off.

  A knock at my door. I yelp, then clasp my hands to my mouth. Dad swings the door open. “You okay?”

  I drop my hands. “Yeah.”

  “Glad you’re awake,” he says. “Come on down. Time to roll.” He shuts the door.

  “Dad?”

  He halts, pops his head back in the room. “Yeah?”

  “He’s a man. He knows I’m in Hawai`i.”

  “Huh?” Then he gets it. “Oh, wow. Okay.” He steps into the room. “A man? Did you get a name? Where is he?”

  A name? How about Asshole? I shake my head.

  “No sense of location? How does he know you’re here?”

  “Because the Orchid’s always over Hawai`i.”

  “Ah. Well.” Dad pauses. “Come on down. We’ll think through this as we head up to the observatories.”

  “There’s something else: I saw a ship near O`ahu. It was military.”

  “Really? What kind? How many?”

  “Just one. I can’t tell what kind. I could barely make out a ship at all.”

  He frowns in thought. “Okay. Could mean anything. Try to keep track of it.”

  “Obviously.”

  “And about that voice—any sense of where it’s coming from yet?”

  “I have no idea where he is. I’m not even sure he’s an English speaker, Dad. I just get the gist of his thoughts. Like we communicate only by passing notes back and forth under a door. I only know he’s a guy because…he smacks of…”

  “Testosterone?”

  I grunt. “Exactly.”

  CHAPTER 16

  I fill my duffel with my warmest clothes, have breakfast, say good-bye to Mom and Kai, who will be helping Sara and the baby at the Irving house for the next few days while Keali`i, Paul, and Uncle Hank patrol the neighborhood.

  From the living room window I see Keali`i pulling farming tools out of the garage, placing them neatly on the driveway next to `Imiloa’s saddle. Tami sits at the base of the lanai steps. I study Keali`i, wondering if it’s a good idea to leave him in charge of our place—but I do trust him. Whatever else he is—he’s `ohana. A brother. I can’t bring myself to question his loyalty.

  I step out and hurry past Tami, meeting Dad and Grandpa at Buzz’s van. Dad pans between me and Tami, casts me a questioning look.

  Tami grumbles and rises with the help of her cane. She heads up the steps. “Hey,” I tell her. She glowers, but I see something soft behind it. “Um…I hope it goes okay down here. A few days, okay?”

  She forces a smile, aware of her onlookers. “Yeah. Be safe up there.”

  “Tami. I’ll…We’ll figure this out. ’Kay? I’m not…I’m not mad anymore.”

  Her expression thaws. She nods and heads inside.

  “What’s going on there?” Dad asks.

  “Just…private.”

  We all pile in. All the doors are gone, the hood and the hatchback, the bumpers, the glass except for the windshield. The rear seats have been removed, replaced with bags of produce tied to the floor with twine so they can’t roll out of the back. Buzz jumps into the driver’s seat. “Some car,” I say.

  “No superfluous weight.” He winks. “When you live above ten thousand feet and your food is grown at sea level, you maximize fuel efficiency.”

  Dad leans forward from behind me. “We should have thought of this.”

  Great. I see my next weekend at home helping Dad dismantle our truck.

  We motor through Hilo, ignoring stop signs and weaving along cluttered blacktop passageways that have forgotten they were once busy streets. H
ilo’s a living ghost town, caught in a flickering space-time rift. We pass Kai’s gymnastics center, and I’m stabbed with a sense of loss. But it’s covered in mold and mildew, as if it’s been abandoned for five hundred years, not five months. They say truth is stranger than fiction. Hilo is stranger than both.

  “You know, Lei, I can’t say it enough: your mother and I are so proud of you.” Dad is trying and failing to connect the dots, about the tension between me and Tami. I smile.

  “It feels really stupid to say that,” he continues. “Given what you’re actually doing. That we’re proud of you—it doesn’t even begin to grasp it.”

  “It’s almost done,” I say. “Maybe that other voice is right. Maybe I should just send them away today.” My stomach drops. And let my epilepsy take over my life again?

  Buzz shakes his head. “No, Lei. You’re doing the right thing. There’s more than a hundred facilities out there that will probably still blow. At least.”

  “But when will we know that the last plant has melted down?”

  “We can’t know for sure. I can do some fancy math with probabilities and normal distribution curves. We’ll at least know when we’re a couple confidence intervals out. At that point we may just have to live with the uncertainty.”

  Dad winks at me. “Sorry you asked?”

  “I should have known better,” I say.

  We navigate a bottleneck, where piles of cars on either side of the street have been pushed aside just enough for a vehicle to pass, and we’re suddenly soaring high above Hilo on an empty highway. “A part of me…” I fall silent. What I’m about to say feels so petty, so callous. …wants them to stay forever.

  “Me too,” Buzz says. “Believe me: me too.”

  “You too, what?” I ask.

  “Wants them to stay.”

  I jerk. How did he know I’ve been thinking that?

  Grandpa leans forward, pats my shoulder. “Mo`opuna, you keep ’em here if you want to. I know you’ll do right.”

  I nod, look at my knees. Yeah, but “do right” for whom?

  We wind up the Saddle Road toward the intersection of two giant volcanoes and finally break through the forest of ohia trees, emerging onto an open land of broad lava flows and big sky. The rising peaks of Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea are distant, disguised as timid hills. The peaks are connected by a vast saddle of hardened lava, black and ropy, or brown and as sharp as shattered glass, swirling together like bands of marble.

  These mountains rose one lava flow at a time. Magma spilled forth, hardened, and then was buried by the next eruption. Jungles grew, burned away, grew again.

  The pearl’s crater and its wide debris field are a blotch on Mauna Loa’s slope. Square miles of land pulverized to cinders and basaltic ash. I groan. I’ve forever marred the natural beauty of Pele’s home. It looks as if someone took an ice cream scooper to a dish of rocky road and then sprinkled powdered chocolate in a circle around it. Toward the center a tunnel veers into darkness.

  We’re going to hike into that?

  “I actually think all of this happened at exactly the right moment,” says Buzz. “Really makes you wonder, you know? The timing doesn’t quite feel random to me.”

  “What’re you talking about?” Dad asks.

  “Let me ask you,” Buzz continues. “If this happened a hundred years ago, would it have affected the globe at all? But what if this happened a hundred years in the future?”

  “Huh.” Dad nods. “Interesting.”

  “What?” I ask. “What about it?”

  Buzz shoots me a grim smile. “Our race has been on the cusp of an insane revolution. Microchip implants in our brains. Artificial intelligence. All in the name of progress. All in the name of making our lives easier, more efficient. In the course of decades we moved our computers from buildings to desktops. In the span of years we transferred our computing from laptops to our pockets and phones. We wear it, Leilani! Glasses. Watches. Cochlear implants. Robots in our hearts and lungs. What was to stop us from microchips in the brain? Just a little processing boost. Bigger, better memory. We were about to connect ourselves to neural networks. Commands would soon happen at the speed of thought—no interface required.

  “If this Orchid had come to calve a hundred years from now—when the world could no longer even count to ten without consulting the technology in our brains—it would have sent our species back to the Pleistocene, not just the Industrial Revolution.”

  I sigh. “So why am I rushing to flip the switch back on?”

  “Yeah, well, good question,” Buzz says. “I mean, are we going to treat technology differently after this? Or make the same mistakes and court an even darker age down the road?”

  “I wish we could have it both ways,” Grandpa says.

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugs.

  “I’m sick of both ways,” I say. “Isn’t that how it already is? Whatever happened to black-and-white? Right and wrong? Up and down? I want the world either on or off.”

  Grandpa tosses his hands up. “Maybe you’re right.”

  “That’s exactly the problem!” I cry. “I’m sick of maybe. I’m either right or I’m wrong. Which is it?”

  “Lord only knows.” Dad sighs.

  “Well, I don’t buy that, either,” I blurt. “God’s so black-and-white to most, but He’s the murkiest thing of all, if you ask me.”

  Grandpa squeezes my shoulder again. “Hey, that’s okay. That is right. God’s not black-and-white. You steer clear of anyone who says He is, you hear? God’s every color of the rainbow. He’s Rangi, the sky, and Papa, the earth. Wind, sea, lava, snow. He’s all of it, everywhere. Of course He’s murky.”

  “Well, why do we grow up being taught that it’s simple?”

  “Because big truths are hard for little minds. We forget sometimes, though, that our baby brains grow big enough for bigger truths. Shame on us when that happens.”

  It grows cold, and Buzz slows to reduce the wind chill. Dad fishes my winter jacket out and passes it to me. I put it on without daring to loosen my seat belt, looking out at the yellow reflectors on the side of the road as they flash by. I have to smile. I realize I’ve learned nothing, just now. Grandpa, for all his infinite wisdom, Dad and Buzz, with all their smarts, have talked themselves in a circle. We’re right back where we started.

  What am I supposed to do? There has to be a right answer. When I go looking for it, why do I only find more questions?

  * * *

  We arrive at the observatory near the radio telescope array. Thirteen thousand feet above the sea. The biting wind and a patchwork of thinning snow sweeps across the crumbly Martian terrain. Puffy white clouds churn beneath us, lapping against the steep Mauna Kea slopes like a fog bank in a chilly bay. Ao—Grandma Lili`u—feels close, as if she has shut us off from the rest of the island, the world. Grandpa pats my shoulder, her ambassador among the living.

  Buzz leads us into the Subaru Observatory, overlooking the array. Our new base camp. Footsteps echo as we enter, and the door booms closed behind us, cutting off the wind and casting us into darkness. No windows on this lower level of the observatory, probably to keep light from escaping at night. We get a quick orientation by candlelight. Small dorm rooms, beds, bathroom, pantry, kitchenette.

  We meet three other astronomers who live up here, Buzz’s friend Richard and two Japanese nationals. The ginormous 8.2-meter telescope looming over the fantastic chrome fortress, encased in a towering silver silo nested within retractable oblong frames, feels like the world’s largest museum artifact, an idol of the past age. Future giants might mistake it for a holy relic in a steel Parthenon.

  I go up to the next floor and stand along a rim of narrow windows overlooking the radio telescopes. The Subaru is one of several observatories on a high, eroded cinder cone—and the radio dishes are below in a grid in the bed of an ageless lava flow. Eight individual radio dishes about the size of boxy, two-story houses gaze up at me. I’ve thought of them as
giant white flowers before. Right now they seem like animatronic poodles, sitting tall on all fours, awaiting a treat, their noses lifted to me expectantly. I could be a queen readying to address my eight unwavering subjects from the balcony of my silver palace. I almost laugh. They gaze upon me, frozen with anticipation. Tonight I shall give them their orders.

  Buzz and Richard will employ Dad and Grandpa and the Japanese astronomers in an elaborate synchronized dance. I’ll be hooked up to the array—which will act as one giant radio telescope the size of the entire hillside—with electrodes fastened to my head. They will work as a team to point each dish toward the Orchid’s baby. I will provide the electrical impulses that will be amplified, and try to perform the same “Vulcan mind meld” that worked on the mother months ago.

  And if I do manage to imprint with the baby this time, then what?

  * * *

  Hello, little one.

  You can trust me, little one. I am safe. I am your friend. A friend of the one who gave you. Will you talk to me?

  I am Little Leilani. Little Flower of Heaven. It is good to stay here, and the sweetness is good to take up.

  Hellllooooo? Do you want to play? Do you want to learn to flash like the one who gave you?

  * * *

  I broadcast this message for hours. “Nothing. I’m getting nothing.” Dad and I are nestled in the cab of a large truck, wrapped in sleeping bags and blankets. I stretch, so that my whole body trembles pleasantly. It’s the dead of night, and it’s very, very cold. I lean forward to peer out the windshield and accidentally yank on the wires tethered to my head. I pull back just a bit, but I can still glance up at the Orchid and her baby in stationary orbit high above the horizon. Their wispy petals intermingle at the edges, emerald and amethyst and studded with a backdrop of brilliant stars.

  “It’s okay,” Dad says. “You’ll get it. Did you do your trick? Don’t talk to it, just become it?”

  “Of course I tried that. But I’m not getting anything. I’m talking to myself.”

  “That military ship? Anything new there?”

  “It’s dark, Dad. No. I’m not a spy satellite.”