***
“I am not mad,” Bakira said. “I’m simply able to see beyond what you have all put in front of me. I can see beyond this place. I can see something better.”
“How do you know life on those other worlds was any better than life here?”
“It has to be,” Bakira said.
The councilwoman snorted. “For a woman whose use of logic is so vital to her proclaimed profession, you have presented very few logical statements.”
***
They closed the program two years later. The sanctuary’s dozen or so researchers were brought into the skylab, thanked for their time, and issued chits for their final pay and train vouchers home.
Bakira took her chit and her vouchers and packed her things. It was simple enough to pack one of the smaller telescopes in with her belongings. No one had cared much for it while they had the funding. She supposed no one would care anything for it now.
She traveled back to her family farm in Mushirah to find that the women she had left to care for it had abandoned it the year before. Looters had been through at least once, and taken most things of value. The fields were weed-choked and ragged, and her neighbors told here they were six months into a severe drought. When she went into town for end of week prayer, the mosque was more crowded than ever before. During the day, she could now hear the raised voices of daily prayers clearly from the edge of her farmland, every Mushiran united in one purpose –fervent desire for a storm that would not come.
Bakira set up the telescope on the roof, beneath a tattered awning. Each night, she ate fried locusts and sat on the roof, legs crossed, waiting for the suns to set. It was the most peaceful time of her whole life, the time she felt closest to God.
And when the veil of the night descended, she trained the telescope not on the mapped-over moons, but on the smaller satellites, the derelict ships, and every night was a revelation.
There were hundreds of ships circling Umayma, hundreds of types, in various states of death and dismemberment. There were shattered globes; spinning, jagged ovals; pearly rectangles; blocky, mangled squares the color of dawn; and more, so many more that she could not imagine how she had lived so long without ever seeing them. She had stared up at the sky her whole life, but they had fixed her gaze on only one story, one narrative. Umayma’s epic journey from the moons to the world below. No one asked how they’d gotten there in the first place. No one talked about how many more had been barred entry.
It was then that Bakira wondered, for the first time, what it was her people had run from, so many thousands of years before. How terrible must it have been, that they were so frightened now to admit anyone else on the planet… And what was happening out there now, that so many were still seeking shelter on Umayma?
But it was the night she turned her telescope into the blackest part of the sky - that massive stretch of the eastern horizon devoid of stars and satellites - that changed everything.
***
“Aren’t you going to ask what I found that makes me so passionate about reinstituting the program?”
“Does it have relevance? Or is this just drugs and liquor talking?”
“It has relevance.”
“I think that whatever you found, you came to the incorrect conclusion about it.”
“I’m heartened to hear you’ve agreed to this hearing with an open mind.”
***
That night, she realized her farm was a lonely place. When she looked up, now, she feared she would be swallowed in blackness. She knew what she needed to do, though there was no reason or logic to it.
The next day, bereft of money, she hitched a ride out to the coast, to Jameela, and watched the ragged, desolate landscape with new eyes. She knew now that she was not abandoned, not alone.
“I’m here for my children,” Bakira told the clerk at the compounds. It came out all in a rush. She knew that if she did not say it quickly, she would simply turn around and walk home.
“You’re four weeks early.”
“You’ll find the names here.” She passed the paper over to the clerk. “Kinedajah, Nyxnissa, Amir, Faoud, and Ghazi. They are mine, and I’d like to take them home.”
When they presented the five strangers to her, Bakira doubted her decision. What was she going to do with so many children? What did she know about them? But then she thought of the wasted farm, the seething darkness of the sky, and she held fast.
“There is some training, if you wish it,” the nursery attendant told her softly.
“Training in raising children?” Bakira asked. She had not thought such a thing existed.
The attendant nodded.
“Yes,” Bakira said. The five strangers stared back. She wasn’t even sure which was which. “That would be good.”
***
“Perhaps we are alone here for a purpose,” the councilwoman said. "Did you drunken astronomers ever think of that? Perhaps we are here because we escaped a great calamity, and by surging up into those stars, you would kill the last of us. God brought us here. There is no doubt of that.”
“If we have retreated from the stars, that is our fault, not His. Let's not confuse our own faults with some greater plan or purpose. It used to be we could celebrate the beauty of God through study of His creations. You bar the stars to us like there's more to be unraveled in learning how to better destroy others' bodies than within the whole universe. But just because something is lost doesn’t mean we can never get it back. And it doesn’t mean we should shun it because we don’t understand it."
“And you think you understand it.”
“I do understand it.”
“Do you know the true purpose of the outer space initiative, child?”
“Now I do, yes.”
“You know it was never our intent to go to the stars.”
“I know.”
“You know it was simply another program we funded in pursuit of new weapons for our war with Chenja.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I know why you want to keep us all at war.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. I found something.”
***
When the youngest girl, Kine, was six years old, she asked Bakira, “Did you always want to be a farmer?”
Outside, the fields of red grass were ripening, turning crimson-gold in the heat. The children were sitting at the table, dutifully reading the Kitab before evening chores. Bakira stood casually on one foot, partially leaning against the kitchen sink, staring up at the darkening sky. It was the only time she could get them to be quiet, to stop questioning – when she had them read aloud from the Book. Someday, she wanted to be able to tell them what it all meant.
“No,” Bakira said. “I wanted to be an astronaut.”
The other girl, Nyxnissa, looked up from her copy of Kitab, one finger pressed to the pages to save her place. Bakira already suspected that she did not read as the others did. She often caught her up on the roof, sounding out the words under the stars.
“What’s that?” Nyxnissa asked.
“I’m not sure anymore,” Bakira said.
Worst of all, she was not entirely sure why she had come back for her children.
***
“All right, you drunk colonial. What did you find?”
“I found God.”
***
Bakira released the boys to the state schools for training at sixteen. It was almost a relief. She sat on the train afterward and sobbed and sobbed, because with the relief came a deep and abiding sense of grief and guilt, as if she had betrayed everything she had promised by taking them home from the compounds in Jameela, as if she had not truly believed what she saw in the stars. As if she had failed her children, the way God had failed her.
When she returned home, the house was quiet. Kine was off tumbling with some local girls, getting into some fresh round of trouble.
It was Nyxnissa who waited for her, recently ret
urned from the mosque, hair still covered. Such a serious child.
“Where are they?” Nyxnissa demanded.
Bakira did not look at her. At some indeterminate point, her children had ceased to be strangers, and had become active agents with their own dreams and desires. One morning she looked up, and in the place of her dutiful little children, she found herself caring for wild, angry, vexing adults.
How much easier it was, with boys. You tried to care for them a little less. For all the good it did.
“I told you,” Bakira said. “I kept them as long as I could.”
“Just like that? You just threw them away?” Nyxnissa lashed out for the first thing at hand, her copy of the Kitab – and threw it at Bakira. It thumped on the far wall.
The act left Bakira breathless, but it drove Nyxnissa to tears. Nyxnissa was already taller than Bakira, broad in the shoulders, lean, and well-muscled - the sort of young woman Bakira had always wanted to be. Someone strong. Impervious to the terrors of the world outside Mushirah. The world she wanted so desperately to abandon for the stars.
Nyxnissa burst into a terrible explosion of emotion, weeping and snarling all at once as she stormed around the kitchen, throwing plates and bug bins, jars of preserves and pickled locusts.
“Why the fuck did you come back for us if you were just going to abandon us again?” Nyxnissa cried. “What are we to you, things? Don’t you feel anything? Anything at all?”
Bakira thought of the boys, looking back at her as they were led into the cargo hold of a train headed east, to the state combat schools. Three pinched, hallowed faces. Terrified, confused, even after all this time. But it had been easy, hadn’t it? Far easier than continuing this way, responsible for so much.
"I don't know," Bakira said. "I don't know what any of us are supposed to feel."
She reached out and smoothed over Nyxnissa’ s head scarf. The girl was trembling. "You were good with your brothers. You will be good leading boys. I've kept you out here far too long. Maybe this is not the place for you, either."
Nyxnissa pushed her hand away. “Fuck you.”
“That’s enough.”
“Fuck you,” Nyxnissa said again. She retrieved her copy of the Kitab. “If you won’t protect them, I will.”
Some part of Bakira feared she had lost something important in that instant, some tenuous connection to something outside of herself. Why was it that girl seemed to feel everything, when the only time her mother felt anything was when she stared out at the blackness that ate the stars?
***
“That is not an acceptable answer, Bakira so Dasheem. If you want us to fund a dead program, you had best bring something to the table less open to interpretation than your own personal theology. It is admirable that you see God in the stars. Many do. He constructed it, after all. But tangible proof of God outside the Kitab is the stuff of mullahs and ministers, not serious inquiries from the state, not in Nasheen.” The councilwoman sighed. “The clerks tell me it is near afternoon prayer. Let us adjourn until then.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Bakira said. “I am almost finished.” She thought of the day she got the letters telling her her sons were dead, less than a year after she released them to the war.
“Thank God for that,” the councilwoman said.
***
Below, the house was quiet.
Her children had gone off to fight in the war, each in their own way. Bakira sat on the roof, staring out at the blackness in the sky. When she had gone to the former director of the sanctuary with her findings the director had sighed, said “This changes nothing. I know you miss your work, but your obsession with the sky is going to cause you nothing but pain.”
She thought that was funny, as if anything up there could be worse than the world down here.
“You’re a robust sort of woman, Bakira. We could always use more of you at the breeding compounds. We lose too many frail flowers there.”
“Career breeding?”
“Your children are gone, aren’t they? How long can you truly manage that homestead by yourself? The Queen has killed the program. It’s dead, Bakira. Stop fighting and go find another occupation. Something more… grounded.”
Now Bakira put her eye to the telescope once more and gazed out at the blackness. She had always been told the dark part of the sky was simply a lack of stars. It was there because Umayma rested at the edge of everything, all the schools said. Their predecessors had chosen this place because it was the farthest away from everyone and everything - the edge of the universe.
But when she trained her telescope over that darkness, the darkness had… an edge. She had logged its jagged circumference, like a giant puzzle piece smashed upon the night sky. When the other satellites passed into the darkness, she found, their light grew a shade dimmer. Not enough to note with the naked eye, but with her telescope, she could see that something was shielding that part of the sky, like some kind of giant film or filter that protected the world, a second skin – broken, tattered. Because if it was meant to be some sort of protection – from radiation, or contaminants - or perhaps a cloak of some sort, obscuring the planet from view – it had been torn long ago. Now it hung loose and frayed across the eastern edge of the world.
Yes, they were far from any other star systems, it was true. But that swath of the sky was further obscured by the remnants of the cloak. At some distant time, her people had the ability to create and maintain a filter over the whole world. Protection against the dark… or the calamity that had driven them from the stars?
She followed the path of one of the giant dead ships as it slipped across the dark side of the skin, and as she watched, the light it reflected from the sun began to make the misty script visible behind the curtain. It had taken a year on the roof to document it all, every laborious slash and flourish of the old script, spun across the cloak like a prayer on a shroud.
Once, it must have spanned the whole world, held it and protected it. Offered some solace. A promise to those left behind.
God will return for you, the soft script said, in the old
prayer language, visible only with the dead ships as backdrop, and only through a telescope.
That was all it said. She had mapped it a hundred times. There was no more.
A promise? A prayer? A blessing? Some kind of direction? She would never know. Something had torn up the rest of the cloak that once draped the sky, and whatever writ or direction or message beyond that had been lost with it.
God would return for them. They had not been abandoned at the edge of the universe.
They had not been abandoned at all.
***
“A message in the stars?”
“They were able to put a filter over a whole world to keep others out, to shield us. Why would they do it? And, more importantly… councilwoman, why would they tear it down? Why tear it down if they didn’t expect us to return? To escape?”
“Pass this knowledge to a mullah and she will tell you it meant we should stay right where we are, that all will come in good time. If God is returning for us, if there truly is some heavenly writ up there, it simply affirms the Queen’s decision to abandon the program.”
“But it came down. It’s broken!”
“You do not know who tore it, though, do you? That could just as easily have been Iblis making mischief. If you have found anything in the stars, Bakira so Dasheem, you have simply found confirmation of your existence.”
“That isn’t what –“
“If this is the most compelling evidence you have, some tattered dead script in the sky so wildly open to interpretation that the Chenjans would likely tell you it meant the world would explode tomorrow, then I must decline your request for funding.”
“But councilwoman –“
“That is all.”
“Aren’t you at least curious? Don’t you want to know what they hoped for us? Why we’re here, and why they tore down the filter? Don’t you want to see what’s out
there waiting for us?”
“I’m about to go to prayer, matron so Dasheem. And then an early supper. That is enough for me. Ask, instead, why it is not enough for you.”
***
In Mushirah it was full dark, clouded over – no stars.
Bakira stood on the roof, spread her arms.
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