The Storyteller

by Aaron Starmer

  “What’d he do?” she asked, unable to hide her glee. Then she put the bag down and hopped on the swing next to me.

  “I have a diary,” I said. “I write about life and I write stories in it sometimes. It’s private. I think he’s been secretly reading it.”

  Mandy leaned her head against the swing chain and her face went hangdog. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “That sounds positively jerkish of him. But maybe he has a good reason.”

  “I can’t think of one,” I said. “He tells me these outrageous things. He gives me hope that Fiona and Charlie are still out there. He’s picked me as a sucker because he knows I want to believe in magic.”

  “I’m not sure I get what you’re saying,” Mandy replied. “But consider yourself lucky. It must be nice to have the sort of mind that still believes in magic.”

  “Magic doesn’t solve anything,” I said. “Because eventually, you see the strings. At least if you’re even a half-smart person.”

  “You are a whole smart person, Keri Bear,” she said. “The smartest I know.”

  “Not recently,” I said. “I saw all these coincidences in my life and I began to think they were magic. But coincidences are usually the sign of something else. Tricks. Alistair was tricking me.”

  “How would he do that?”

  “With stories,” I said. “Such as, Alistair told me about a monster called the Mandrake shortly after I’d written a story about a monster named the Dorgon. He told me about a brother who absorbs his sister right after I wrote a story about a family of clouds that basically do the same thing. He told me this long adventure that is jam-packed with ideas and images that are drawn directly from my stories. And he does this to convince me that I’m being magically inspired, that the coincidences mean something, when all they really mean is that he’s been reading my diary and telling weird, twisted versions of my stories back to me. Jesus, he even has some girl, who may or may not be in Australia, conspiring with him.”

  “International conspiracies?” Mandy said. “Sounds a bit elaborate, and I’m still not sure I get it. But you said he’s trying to give you hope, right? At least hope is a good thing.”

  “Not false hope,” I said. “Fiona and Charlie are dead. We all know this. They are dead. Dead. Dead. Their souls, gone. All of who they are and who they will ever be … G. O. N. E.”

  As the tears welled up in my eyes, Mandy got up and put her hands on my shoulders. She said, “We don’t know that. No one knows that.”

  “Someone does know that,” I said as I stood up and fell into her. “And I’m scared that it’s my brother. He’s been distracting me for some reason. Why have I been so willing to believe him?”

  “Because you love him,” Mandy said, hugging me tighter than she’d ever hugged me but still not nearly tight enough.

  “Making Jenny Colvin mention Sigrid was bad enough,” I said. “But you know what’s been bothering me the most? The waterfall and the name ‘Banar.’ He knew about those before I wrote them, right? I haven’t even written them yet and he knows about them, right?”

  Mandy released the hug, but still kept her hands on my shoulders. “I’m with you, baby, even if I really don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “But you do,” I said. “Because it’s you that helped me figure that one out. I’m a sleep talker. I talk in my sleep.”

  “That I can confirm,” Mandy said. “You yammer away all night.”

  “And Alistair is often up all night,” I said. “So he probably heard me talking about the waterfall, heard me mumbling about Banar. Because I dream this stuff, you know? And then he used what he heard to rope me in. But why? That’s what’s really bugging me now. What exactly is he trying to accomplish?”

  “All I know is this,” Mandy said. “Just because he read about your knock-knock joke and your tubes and all that, it doesn’t mean he’s out to get you. He’s probably a fan and—”

  “Wait a sec,” I said, gently pushing her hands off my shoulders. “How do you know about the knock-knock joke? How do you know about the tubes? I didn’t say anything about those.”

  “Um, sure you did.” Mandy took a step back. Her arms were straight and her fists were tight at her sides.

  “No. I didn’t. I mentioned the Dorgon. I mentioned clouds. That was it.”

  Mandy took another step back and slid on the icy snow. Her arms flew out and spun in the air. She fell, but only to her knees. Looking up at me, she said, “Your brother is probably a fan. Like I’m a fan. Like Glen is a fan.”

  “How are you fans?” I asked. “What are you talking about? Wait! The only way you could be fans is if you read my diary.”

  “If you didn’t want Glen to see it, you shouldn’t have given him your locker combination,” Mandy said, still on her knees. “It was supposed to be a surprise. A Christmas present. He borrowed the diary. I just did the Xeroxing. You’ll understand soon enough.”

  “I … won’t. I … can’t.”

  But I did. Suddenly I understood something about Mandy. I turned so I didn’t have to look at her, and my eyes fell on the baby swing that, two years before, weighed down with backpacks, had smashed into and bloodied my nose. And I made a silent apology. To science.

  Sorry for doubting you, science. You were right all along. Pendulums always do end up where they started. Unless some extra force is added to them. Unless …

  “You pushed it,” I said.

  “What?” Mandy asked.

  I stepped over and grabbed that baby swing like I was grabbing a handful of hair. And I threw it straight at Mandy’s face.

  She flinched and fell back on the snow, but the swing didn’t even come close to hitting her. It swung up and around the top bar of the swing set, then crashed down, now a few links shorter. Ironically, I was the one it almost hit, but I dodged it just in time.

  “What the hell?” Mandy yelled.

  “What the hell?” is right! What the hell was she trying to do to me? What the hell was everyone trying to do to me? I didn’t answer. I ran. Out past the basketball courts, my feet sliding on the snow. When I hit the pavement, I sped up.

  “You don’t deserve him!” Mandy yelled at me. “You don’t deserve me!”

  I kept running. Faster. Faster.

  She kept yelling. Louder. Louder.

  “Why does everything always have to be about you, Keri? Go on and write all the mean things you want about me, instead of doing something nice for me for a change!”

  The walls of plowed snow that lined the road made it feel like a maze, a tunnel, a hole I was digging myself deeper into. Alone. Alone.

  The cold air squeezed me as I ran.

  THE PHOSPHORESCENT WOMBAT, PART IV

  Aside from its strange body-like shape, the hole at the floor of the ocean was perfectly hole-like, and Luna let herself sink into it with the fifteen-mile-long tether, her only link to the world above, unspooling behind her.

  Down. Down. Down. Two more miles. Three more miles. Down a long passageway toward the center of the Earth. Luna illuminated the walls and she could see they were smooth. No markings. Not even scratches.

  When she finally reached the bottom, seven miles below the Mariana Trench, she found what maybe, perhaps, possibly created the hole. It was certainly not what she expected to find, and she knew right away that she had to report the strange discovery to the scientists.

  She spent a total of five minutes at the bottom. Then she yanked a cord on her harness that sent a signal through the tether that told the scientists to pull her to the surface. Amazingly, the tether hadn’t broken and the scientists received the message. A machine cranked the tether and brought Luna up through the briny deep.

  “What was at the bottom?” chief scientist Gladys Gershwin asked when Luna was safe in her chamber again.

  “A message,” Luna told them using her laser.

  “From who?”

  “A bush baby,” Luna told them, because that was the truth. A little bush baby w
as sitting at the bottom of the hole, its butt wedged in a crack. And when Luna got close enough to touch the bush baby, it whispered a message into her ear. Using her laser, she wrote the message phonetically on the board for the scientists.

  The scientists couldn’t make heads or tails of it at first. Neither could Luna. It was a series of sounds and, well, gobbledygook. So they sent Luna down on more missions into the hole. For explanations.

  The additional missions yielded only one new thing: a personal message from the bush baby. The second time Luna touched him, he said, “My name is Banar. I am an entirely suitable bush baby. I came from where you came from.”

  Luna couldn’t figure out how to ask Banar where that place was, and Banar didn’t bother to tell her.

  “Our destiny is the same,” he went on. “To be alone. This will help you be alone.”

  Then Banar repeated that original, indecipherable message.

  Luna didn’t tell the scientists what Banar had said about his name, about being from the same place, about being alone. It felt like it was a message that was meant exclusively for her, and she deserved at least one thing for herself. Besides, Banar never mentioned those things again. Each time Luna visited him after that, he simply repeated that indecipherable message. Over and over again. It seemed an impossible code to crack.

  Until one day, they cracked it. It was DeeDee who did most of the work, actually. Her encounter with Luna had left her blind, but her mind was as sharp as ever. Instead of sending her home, chief scientist Gladys Gershwin gave DeeDee a small room and time to think. For months, she pondered the message and spoke it out loud to herself. She rearranged the sounds in the dark corners of her mind. Since she was trained as a geneticist, she knew a lot about DNA, and there were patterns in the message that reminded her of genetic code. But it was slightly different.

  After months of going over it with no luck, she tried to rethink her approach. This message was found on the bottom of the ocean. Why was it there? Why did it take such efforts to find it? Maybe because it was related to water? Maybe because only people with the technology to find it would know what to do with it?

  Those ideas were the key. She called in chemists and physicists, and they all pooled their expertise. Until they finally figured it out.

  It was a formula. It was a recipe for how to draw energy from water. Only this wasn’t like drawing energy from oil or coal or nuclear reactors. The formula could help them create more power than all the power plants in the world did. From a single drop. That’s right. A single drop of water. If Luna was the ultimate source of light, then this formula was the ultimate source of power.

  “I have an idea,” Sandra Sussman, a cosmologist on the rig, said. “With Luna getting brighter every day, I’m not sure we can deal with her anymore. Why not send her into space? Using a tank of water, we could fuel a spacecraft for millennia. She could report back what she observes. She might find other messages out there. Other things that will benefit the Earth immensely.”

  Even DeeDee, who loved Luna dearly, had to agree that this was a decent plan. It meant losing Luna, but keeping her wasn’t a viable option. Life on Earth was no life for this particular wombat. They had samples of Luna’s hair and blood, so they could always study those. Her actual presence, however, would only cause others pain. She was indeed destined to be alone.

  So they built a spacecraft, equipped with state-of-the-art communications devices, and on a sunny October morning a year later, they prepared to launch Luna into space. Her vocabulary had grown to the point that she could converse and read at a high school level. (That’s a good high school, not one of those crappy ones where kids come to class with switchblades.) She no longer needed a laser to communicate either. She could type on a keyboard with her little paws.

  “I’ll miss you,” DeeDee told her through a speaker in the spacecraft.

  “I am still so sorry for what happened to you,” Luna wrote, using her keyboard.

  “Don’t be,” DeeDee said. “It was not your fault.”

  “I love you,” Luna said. “I will always love you all.”

  She did love them all. They had found a purpose for her. They had given her something noble to do that would benefit the entire world.

  The spacecraft was about the size of a VW bug, and for Luna, it brought back memories of Rosie and how she used to drive them back and forth from the studio. Rosie was likely dead by now. Everyone Luna knew before the oil rig was likely dead. Which meant, besides DeeDee, who was she leaving behind? No one.

  The spacecraft took off at 10:23 a.m., and it looked like a comet shooting into the sky, a glowing orb with a trail of smoke. At the speed it would travel, Luna would be passing the moon in a day. She would pass Mars in about four months. She would reach Jupiter in four years. And she would pass Pluto and the edge of the solar system in thirty years.

  Communications traveled at the speed of light. So Luna could have conversations with the scientists and only have to wait seconds for a response. At first.

  DeeDee was her main contact, and the two forged an even greater friendship through their correspondence. DeeDee talked into a microphone, which then broadcast on a speaker in Luna’s spacecraft, and Luna typed her responses on her keyboard, which were translated into an electronic voice that DeeDee could hear.

  When she passed Mars, Luna wrote, “It’s more orange than red and reminds me of the cheese balls I used to eat with Hamish.”

  “Are you hungry, dear?” DeeDee asked.

  “I’ll be okay,” Luna wrote. “I learned long ago that I don’t need food to survive.”

  “I wish we could send you a million cheese balls to eat anyway,” DeeDee said. “I wish everyone else in the world knew you were out there and how brave you are. But we have to keep it a secret. We don’t need the Russians to know what we’re up to.”

  “I have your voice,” Luna said. “That’s enough.”

  DeeDee told Luna about events on Earth, about how the formula was being harnessed into wonderful things—like energy grids that promised to build up third-world societies. Also into awful things—like weapons that threatened to wipe out first-world societies.

  Luna told DeeDee about the beautiful sights of outer space, the asteroids and meteors, and DeeDee reported it all back to the other scientists, all the while knowing that Luna was doing it for her benefit, to give her the mental image of places and things she could never possibly see.

  As a way to repay the favor, DeeDee talked to Luna about emotions. Luna was getting more intelligent by the second, but she was also feeling a heck of a lot more. She was still a wombat, but she was experiencing all the emotions that any intelligent being would experience. Most of all, fear. But she didn’t fear death. She feared losing DeeDee’s voice. It was inevitable, of course. The distance would become too far, or the spacecraft would get ripped apart, severing their connection. And even if those things didn’t happen, DeeDee would eventually die. They spoke about these things sometimes until they realized that speaking about them wouldn’t make them any less true.

  Over the first few years, they spoke multiple times a day. But response times stretched from seconds to minutes to hours. The speed of light was fast, but not fast enough. And DeeDee could only dedicate so much time to talking to Luna. She had to sleep, and eat, and wait for Luna’s responses.

  To keep Luna company and feed her mind, DeeDee started broadcasting books on tape to her. Luna was becoming such a good absorber of information that she asked for multiple books to be broadcast at the same time, at high speeds. After a while, she didn’t even need to hear the words.

  “I learned Morse code once,” Luna told DeeDee. “Can you send the books in Morse code?”

  DeeDee spoke to some engineers, who designed a computer that could send the text of books in Morse code. It transmitted so fast that it would’ve sounded like static in the speaker of the spacecraft, but Luna could understand it perfectly. Her intelligence was reaching unprecedented levels. It was doubli
ng by the day. She devoured thousands and thousands of books.

  When she reached Jupiter, she described its brilliant swirling colors and its many strange moons, but she also made observations that furthered science. She understood astronomy and cosmology now, having absorbed countless books on the subject, and so the scientists barely needed to analyze the data she sent back. She did all the analysis for them.

  Soon, all the scientists wanted to talk to Luna, and DeeDee was left with only a few minutes here or there to correspond with her dear friend.

  “Things are getting dangerous in the world,” DeeDee told Luna one day when Luna was passing Saturn. “More people are arriving on the rig every day. Powerful people. People who want to use you and the formula for purposes I certainly don’t approve of.”

  Luna responded with Morse code. It sounded like static, so the other scientists who reviewed the tape wouldn’t notice it, but DeeDee understood what it was. She made a tape of it, then brought it back to her cabin to slow it down and translate.

  “You told me once that you have a pair of walkie-talkies,” Luna’s message said. “Turn one of them on tonight and tune it to 345 Khz.”

  DeeDee followed Luna’s instruction, and that night when she tuned the walkie-talkie to that frequency, she heard an electronic voice.

  “This is Luna,” it said. “I have modified the spacecraft so that I can speak to you directly, without anyone else listening in. I too am concerned about what’s going on. First things first: we need to get you off that rig. So someone will be coming to get you. They will relay false information about your father. Do not worry about what they tell you, but look worried. You’ll be out of there before you know it. Pack the walkie-talkies and we’ll chat again soon.”

  “Whatever you say, my dear,” DeeDee responded, because at this point, Luna was not only her most intelligent friend, but also her most trusted one.

  Minutes later, there was a knock on DeeDee’s door. It was chief scientist Gladys Gershwin. “DeeDee, I’m so sorry,” she said as she stepped into the room.