Asimov's Science Fiction 03/01/11

by Dell Magazines

  I trailed off.

  We turned. The light was small, but far larger than the stars.

  “The worst part is, we’ve seen galaxies pass in front of it,” I said. “The light is farther away than that galaxy.” I pointed back to the speck that looked like a star. “And it’s still that big in the sky.”

  I leaned into my grandfather, and he held onto my arm. Our fingers were tight.

  “I’m wondering what the Koran would say,” my grandfather murmured.

  “It’s just something new,” I said. “It’s something scientific. Like a nova. You don’t go to the Koran for that; you build a better telescope.”

  My grandfather exhaled, then patted my hand. He was still watching the light. He was probably still thinking about the Koran, just like all those people who had rushed to church on Tuesday morning were looking to the Bible for answers.

  Mayor McMahon had said it. This was what people were calling God.

  “I’m going to go see her,” Dad said over the phone.

  Her in this case was Mom. Mom, at this time, was still in Monrovia. Monrovia, at the moment, was still trapped in communications brownouts.

  I was pretty sure Dad had gone insane.

  “News is still coming out of Liberia,” I said. “We’d know if anything horrible happened.”

  “That’s not the point,” Dad said.

  I was pretty sure the rest of the world had gone insane, too.

  Outside the window, my next-door neighbor was cleaning out the shed I’d never seen him use. A rusted-out lawnmower and cans of old paint were scattered on his brown lawn, and earlier I’d seen him carrying a box labeled “EMERGENCY GENERATOR.”

  “I never did speak to your mother as much as I should have after the divorce,” Dad went on. “We promised each other we’d still be a part of each other’s lives, and we haven’t been fulfilling that promise.”

  “That doesn’t mean you just hop on the first transatlantic flight,” I argued.

  “Maybe it should,” Dad said. “Say what you will, but this event—”

  “Dad.”

  “—this event has put everything in perspective. There’s enough we don’t have control over. This, I do.”

  Or maybe we’re all just going to use that light as an excuse to panic, I thought. It was like Y2K all over again, except along with stocking up on emergency candles and nonperishable food, every man, woman, and child dropped what they were doing and went to visit everyone they knew. “Dad, you have a job, and projects, and you can’t just—”

  “I’m packing.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”

  I dug my knuckles into the bridge of my nose. “Dad. You can’t just pack up and move to Liberia.”

  “They say that thing in the sky can’t exist, too,” Dad countered. “Maybe ‘can’t’ doesn’t mean what we used to think it did.”

  “Dad, that’s completely different.”

  Dad didn’t care.

  “Look, people are on the news taking loans out for domestic flights,” I tried. “An international—”

  “So I’ll have to pay a little more,” he said. This from a man who’d haggled for a week on the price of my car. “I’ll manage. Maybe I’ll get a one-way ticket and wait for the public to calm down before I come back.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Right. And people will calm down, because nothing is happening.”

  “Katrina,” he said, with the tone he used when Mom harried him too hard.

  That’s when I knew I’d lost the argument.

  I was lying facedown on the bed when Josey came home, and when she joined me I rolled straightaway into her arms and told her the whole story, or what I thought was the whole story. My research partner had disappeared into a crisis of academia, my dad was off to Africa, and my grandfather might convert to Islam. “Because of what? Because there’s a bit of the universe we don’t understand. If people knew how much we don’t understand, we’d never get anything done.”

  Josey listened and made comforting noises until I stopped talking. Then she pursed her lips, considered, and said, “Do you need me to stay around for a bit?”

  I stared at Josey the way people must have stared at that light when it flared into the sky. “What do you mean, ‘stay’?”

  “I mean stay, stay,” Josey said. “I thought—you know. I know the world isn’t ending, but with everything going on—”

  “You’re leaving?” I asked.

  “I’m coming back,” she said, with a look of reproach. “But I want to see my family in Tennessee. That’s all right, isn’t it? Just for a week or so? You’ve got your grandpa so close by.”

  I fought off the strangling feeling in my throat. “Just a week?” I said, because I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t okay. The entire country was going home to their families. I just wanted to stay there, to complete my research, to leave the light to astronomers. Every day some organization put up another grant, another contest, another prize; we’d figure it out because science figured things out, because science, as much as nature, abhorred a vacuum.

  Josey leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, and I felt small beside her mass. I wanted that mass to stay right where I could hang onto it, a planet embracing its sun’s gravity. “I’ll bring you back some real channel catfish.”

  I showed up at my grandfather’s house with a backpack in the front passenger seat, the radio tuned to NPR, and a tension in my jaw I couldn’t relax through gum or massage or willpower. I hadn’t even called first; my grandfather wasn’t out front waiting for me, and it took a minute before he opened the door. I just stood there and pounded, smelling the crisp night, feeling the breezes on the back of my neck, trying not to scream at the slowly growing light in the sky.

  When the door opened I stood there for a moment with my fist raised. My grandfather and I both looked at each other, surprised; I suppose I’d thought that he had disappeared, too. But he was there, he laughed, he ushered me inside. “Come to stay the night?”

  “Can I?”

  He took my backpack, closing the door behind me.

  I was drifting toward the living room when I heard voices talking. I hesitated—I thought he had someone over—but it was only one voice, and it wasn’t pitched like a conversation, it was pitched like a lecture. I turned back to him.

  “What is that?”

  “Hmm?” My grandfather looked genuinely surprised. “Oh, that? It’s one of those internet radio stations. I don’t know if it’s any good yet. Well.” He laughed as he took my backpack, tucking it into the hall closet between a pair of dusty boots and the old telescope. “I’ve been listening to it all evening. I didn’t realize how far my Arabic’s slipped.”

  I could feel my face fall, and when he straightened up again I wrapped my arms around him. He hugged back, but not for long before he ducked his head to nudge my forehead with his own. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Dad’s going to Liberia. Don’t ask me how he booked a flight to Liberia. I still haven’t talked to Mom. Our lab shut down. Even Josey’s gone. I know, I sound fourteen, but you’re all leaving me . . .”

  My grandfather showed his palms. “I’m not going anywhere, Katrina.”

  “You’re going—” I bit off the end of the sentence. How stupid was it to finish the thought, You’re going back to Islam?

  He reached over, rubbing my shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Come have some coffee and we’ll talk about this.”

  I put myself together and motioned for him to go on into the kitchen. I followed him, taking a seat at the counter and kicking my heels against the rung of the stool. Childish, yes, but it helped.

  I watched him go through the motions of making coffee just as he always had: adding in cardamom and cinnamon to the burr grinder, pouring the beans without bothering to measure them. It was the same. He was the same as he’d been when I was a child, when we’d lived in the city, when he’d made that co
ffee every morning before school and enticed me to drink some. It’ll start off your day right, Katri.

  “Will you be going on the Hajj?” I asked. It was the only sensible question about Islam I knew enough to ask, aside from What about me and Josey?, and I wasn’t ready to ask that yet.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I should jump in with both feet, do you? It wouldn’t be right to go on the Hajj only to think in the middle, ‘Oh, no, this isn’t right for me.’ ”

  “But you never thought Islam was right for you before, did you?” I pressed. “Christianity either. And you raised me and Dad outside the church. Any church.”

  My grandfather breathed out through his mouth, turning to pour the coffee. “I never in my life felt terribly religious. But this light,” he said, “it’s probably the sort of event that changes our lives forever—”

  “No!” I jumped at the sound of my own voice. “Man probably did this at the first eclipse, too. They looked up and saw the sun being eaten and they thought it was the end of the world. But it wasn’t. We don’t understand everything. So what? We’ll learn. And the world will keep changing and we’ll learn to deal with that, but we’re all acting like it’s the end of the world!”

  My grandfather looked at me. Then he looked down into his coffee. I was reminded of Josey; of her asking, What happens to us then?

  I wanted to know what was happening to us now.

  “Katri,” he said, after a moment. “These things that people are doing. They’re important.”

  I started to object, but he didn’t let me.

  “So what do you want us all to do, when the world changes around us? Hm? Dig our heels in like you’re doing?”

  “I’m not—” I said. And then, “I’m just not panicking.”

  “You’re dealing with the light very well,” he conceded, and drank from his mug.

  The light.

  But the light, for all that it had sent Dad to Liberia and Josey to Tennessee, hadn’t sent me seventy minutes down the interstate to drink coffee in my grandfather’s kitchen. That had been Josey, it had been Dad, it had been the people buying gas and generators like they’d need to dig in tomorrow for a white night sky—maybe—in twenty years.

  “You think I’m acting fourteen, don’t you?”

  My grandfather set his coffee down. “No! No, I just think you’re in over your head.” He gestured, trying to paint an entire world with his hands. “If God gives you a reason to remember what’s important in life, take it. That’s all. And if everyone else takes it, that’s wonderful. No one has to act like the world’s on fire.”

  I studied his face for any hint of rapture. “Do you think it’s God, then?”

  No rapture. Just a smile, expanding across his face. “I meet a lot of articulate agnostics out here on the ranch, Katri,” he jibed. “So no; I have a very un-Islamic idea. I think God is what we make of Him.”

  We went out back to the patio. My grandfather carried the telescope despite my attempts to help, and he set it up in the corner with the best view. He let me take the first look, straight at the unexplained God in the sky.

  “Has it changed at all?” my grandfather asked.

  I squinted through the lens. The light was as inscrutable as ever.

  “I wonder what we look like from that far away,” I said, pulling away. “If they could even see the light from our galaxy. Or maybe you could see the light from our universe. From the Big Bang.” I shook my head to keep myself from shaking, but the shiver was gone in a moment anyway. “I wonder if the Big Bang looked like that.”

  My grandfather put his hand on my back, rubbing slow circles and meaningless patterns. “Think we’ll find out what it is?”

  “Give it twenty years,” I answered. Two decades, and it would have filled the night sky or faded away. Or just sat there, letting the world learn how to deal with it.

  “Hmm,” my grandfather agreed.

  We watched for a few more minutes in silence before he turned to go back inside. After a while, I followed him. The light stayed behind, waiting in the cold night sky.

  Copyright © 2011 An Owomoyela

  Previous Article Next Article

  Previous Article Next Article

  SHORT STORIES

  Movement

  Nancy Fulda

  MOVEMENT

  Nancy Fulda

  Nancy Fulda is a Phobos Award winner and a recipient of the Vera Hinckley Mayhew Award. During her graduate work at Brigham Young University she studied artificial intelligence, machine learning, and quantum computing. In the years since, she has grappled with the far more complex process of raising three small children. All of these experiences sometimes infiltrate her writing, as is the case with “Movement.”

  It is sunset. The sky is splendid through the panes of my bedroom window; billowing layers of cumulus blazing with refracted oranges and reds. I think if only it weren’t for the glass, I could reach out and touch the cloudscape, perhaps leave my own trail of turbulence in the swirling patterns that will soon deepen to indigo.

  But the window is there, and I feel trapped.

  Behind me my parents and a specialist from the neurological research institute are sitting on folding chairs they’ve brought in from the kitchen, quietly discussing my future. They do not know I am listening. They think that, because I do not choose to respond, I do not notice they are there.

  “Would there be side effects?” My father asks. In the oppressive heat of the evening, I hear the quiet zzzap of his shoulder laser as it targets mosquitoes. The device is not as effective as it was two years ago: the mosquitoes are getting faster.

  My father is a believer in technology, and that is why he contacted the research institute. He wants to fix me. He is certain there is a way.

  “There would be no side effects in the traditional sense,” the specialist says. I like him even though his presence makes me uncomfortable. He chooses his words very precisely. “We’re talking about direct synaptic grafting, not drugs. The process is akin to bending a sapling to influence the shape of the grown tree. We boost the strength of key dendritic connections and allow brain development to continue naturally. Young neurons are very malleable.”

  “And you’ve done this before?” I do not have to look to know my mother is frowning.

  My mother does not trust technology. She has spent the last ten years trying to coax me into social behavior by gentler means. She loves me, but she does not understand me. She thinks I cannot be happy unless I am smiling and laughing and running along the beach with other teenagers.

  “The procedure is still new, but our first subject was a young woman about the same age as your daughter. Afterward, she integrated wonderfully. She was never an exceptional student, but she began speaking more and had an easier time following classroom procedure.”

  “What about Hannah’s . . . talents?” my mother asks. I know she is thinking about my dancing; also the way I remember facts and numbers without trying. “Would she lose those?”

  The specialist’s voice is very firm, and I like the way he delivers the facts without trying to cushion them. “It’s a matter of trade-offs, Mrs. Didier. The brain cannot be optimized for everything at once. Without treatment, some children like Hannah develop into extraordinary individuals. They become famous, change the world, learn to integrate their abilities into the structures of society. But only a very few are that lucky. The others never learn to make friends, hold a job, or live outside of institutions.”

  “And . . . with treatment?”

  “I cannot promise anything, but the chances are very good that Hannah will lead a normal life.”

  I have pressed my hand to the window. The glass feels cold and smooth beneath my palm. It appears motionless although I know at the molecular level it is flowing. Its atoms slide past each other slowly, so slowly; a transformation no less inevitable for its tempo. I like glass—also stone—because it does not change very quickly. I will be dead, and so will a
ll of my relatives and their descendants, before the deformations will be visible without a microscope.

  I feel my mother’s hands on my shoulders. She has come up behind me and now she turns me so that I must either look in her eyes or pull away. I look in her eyes because I love her and because I am calm enough right now to handle it. She speaks softly and slowly.

  “Would you like that, Hannah? Would you like to be more like other teenagers?”

  Neither yes nor no seems appropriate, so I do not say anything. Words are such fleeting, indefinite things. They slip through the spaces between my thoughts and are lost.

  She keeps looking at me, and I consider giving her an answer I’ve been saving. Two weeks ago she asked me whether I would like a new pair of dancing shoes and if so, what color. I have collected the proper words in my mind, smooth and firm like pebbles, but I decide it is not worth speaking them. Usually by the time I answer a question, people have forgotten that they asked it.

  The word they have made for my condition is temporal autism. I do not like it, both because it is a word and because I am not certain I have anything in common with autists beyond a disinclination for speech.

  They are right about the temporal part, though.

  My mother waits twelve-point-five seconds before releasing my shoulders and returning to sit on the folding chair. I can tell she is unhappy with me, so I climb down from the window ledge and reach for the paper sack I keep tucked under my bed. The handles are made of twine, rough and real against my fingers. I press the sack to my chest and slip past the people conversing in my bedroom.

  Downstairs I open the front door and stare into the breathtaking sky. I know I am not supposed to leave the house on my own, but I do not want to stay inside, either. Above me the heavens are moving. The clouds swirl like leaves in a hurricane: billowing, vanishing, tumbling apart and restructuring themselves; a lethargic yet incontrovertible chaos.