A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  “Emotional,” I repeat.

  “Fainting at the sight of a tranquilization is hardly the behavior of a logical human being. A scientist.” He’s raised his voice: it rings out loud over the thrumming of the chariot.

  “I’m not emotional!” I say, even louder. He’s not hearing me. “I felt . . . I felt . . .”

  I want to say afraid, but that’s not right. He doesn’t understand what the fear felt like, shoving its way in and occupying my body. “I felt—something!”

  “It’s not about what you feel!” my father shouts. “It’s about what you know!”

  I have nothing to say. He’s not listening anyway. The Paw appears up ahead, but jumping off the chariot and walking into the jungle currently seems more appealing. I set my jaw and stare blankly as the guards—more buzzguns—stand aside to let us enter the compound.

  “Control is how we will survive,” he says more quietly but still with noticeable sharpness. “Entire cities have fallen because they weren’t free to command their circumstances. N’Terra will not lose control. And neither will you.”

  The chariot comes to a stop between two others just like it, and I don’t wait for my father to switch off the power cell before I leap off the standing platform and walk quickly away toward the main dome of the Paw. He calls me but I continue on, my steps long and hard. Right now the sound of my own name sounds too much like his, and I don’t want it to belong to me.

  The air of the Paw flows over me and fills me with a sense of comfort that I welcome. I jog through the sparse jungle of the main dome for a minute or two. I want to get farther away from the entrance before I rest, so that my father doesn’t immediately spot me when he comes in. When I’ve trotted a sufficient distance, I stop and lean against an ogwe, breathing deeply. I smell the smell that Jaquot says doesn’t exist: the multilayered scent seems to curl into my nostrils. My mind feels clearer now, the noise that invaded it earlier fading into silence. Don’t be emotional, I think, and even though the thought makes me as annoyed at myself as I am at my father, I tell myself that maybe he was right.

  I hear voices and peep my head around the trunk of the ogwe to look back the way I came. My father with—of course—another whitecoat, the two of them following the other path at the fork, the one that leads to the labs. Typical, I think bitterly, he’s going to the Zoo on his rest day, even when we’ve been at the Beak for hours. He disappears down the path, his back tall and straight, his right hand gesturing to emphasize some point he’s making to the whitecoat, who’s nodding vigorously. “Yes, Dr. English,” he’s probably saying. “You’re right, Dr. English. You’re so brilliant, Dr. English!” I roll my eyes.

  When my father and the whitecoat are out of sight, I carry on down to the communal dome. The doors open on their own for me when I approach.

  With the main dome constructed on a small hill, the attached commune is built into the shallow valley alongside it. Above is the characteristic arching roof, transparent to let the sky in, but I’m more focused on the commune below. Things change so quickly lately, and every time I come home I pause to make sure everything is as I left it. Last week I returned from the Greenhouse to find that the curving stream that divides the dome had two additional bridges constructed across it. From here I can see the stumps of the three young trees used to build them. My father says the trees were dying.

  Today a team of engineers is painting the roofs of several wigwams. Our homes are low and smooth, built with the white clay abundant around N’Terra, and with the light coming through the dome roof, they light up and shine like white stones in water. The paint the engineers are adding must serve some kind of purpose, I think, watching them work: insect repellent, perhaps—we need that. Surely it can’t be for the aesthetic alone—they’ve chosen red—as there are ordinarily so many colors in the commune already: swatches of fabric dyed with plants grown around N’Terra, draped on the sides of ’wams and hanging from poles driven into the ground. But there are fewer flags and streamers than usual. A new decree by the Council perhaps, I think, like the one that had authorized the construction of the tower.

  The tower has grown since I left the dome this morning, planted there in the exact center of the compound, a spiny-looking gray tree of a structure that the Council had ordered construction of eight weeks ago. The shadow of it falls across the commune like a thorn. After so many years standing in this same spot on the hill, I find the protrusion of the tower is strange. Instead I choose to focus on my ’wam: even from here I can see the yellow cloth that hangs on our door. It was brought here all the way from a place called Englewood, where my grandmother was born. I wonder if I—if we—will ever stop missing her. As I descend the curving steps down into the commune, I brush my fingers along the flowers that grow on either side, tiny petals that curl closed at night, bright yellow in the morning and deep blue by dusk. As always, they lean away from my fingers. I smile, sympathetic. That’s how I feel right now too.

  At the bottom of the stairs, it’s as if some blanket of silence has been pulled back, and I’m grateful for the chaos of children laughing and running. Far across the commune the first beats of a drum rhythm come to life, people relaxing after spending their day at various kinds of work. I frown, thinking of when my father used to play. It’s been a long time.

  I’m so focused on the sound of the drum, I run straight into someone on the path.

  “Stars!” I curse, stumbling. The sudden jolt of my body reignites some of the ache from my sprain, and I grab my neck with both hands as if to clamp down on the pain before it spreads.

  “Sorry,” says a low voice.

  I know this voice but am surprised to find it here—it belongs to Rondo, who, until now, I’ve only ever seen in the Greenhouse, and who I know to live in the Beak.

  “What are you doing here?” I blurt, and I realize too late that I’ve snapped at him, still irritated from hurting my neck.

  “I live here.” He adjusts the burden under his arm, a medium-size black case.

  “Since when?”

  “This morning. My parents transferred their study.”

  “That explains why you look lost.”

  Rondo doesn’t answer. He merely smiles in the quiet way that I always see him smile in the Greenhouse. Rondo is the one our classmates listen to when he speaks, myself included. Maybe it’s because he talks so rarely. There’s something interesting about a person who knows what he has to say is correct but chooses to keep it to himself.

  “What’s in there?” I ask, nodding at the case under his arm. I realize suddenly that this is how my father apologizes—by changing the subject, making his voice gentle. Never really an apology.

  Rondo withdraws the case from under his arm. I don’t recognize the smooth black material.

  “An izinusa,” he says.

  “A what?”

  “An izinusa. It’s an instrument.”

  “For the lab?”

  He chuckles low in his throat. The sound has a rhythm of its own, as if it too belongs in the drum circle.

  “No, a musical instrument.”

  “Oh.”

  “It makes a beautiful sound.”

  “You can play it?” I’m impressed. My dad tried me on his drum once or twice, but it wasn’t a skill that came naturally to me.

  “A little.”

  “How did you learn?”

  “A woman in my compound was teaching me before she passed. Now I’m teaching myself. This was hers.”

  “Can I see it?”

  We catch eyes for an instant, his as deeply brown as mine but the lashes thicker, making his expression gentle. I look away, at his hands where they grip the edge of the case.

  “Of course you can.” Something about the way he says it—soft—makes my face hot.

  With the case being so rigid, I envisioned the izinusa itself as metal, serious. Instead the instrument is like a lovely fruit hidden inside rough peel. I sigh at the sight of it: sloping brown wood almost the same color as hi
s skin, elegant strings, Rondo reaching in the case and lifting part of it out so I can see better.

  “Wow” is all I can say.

  “I know.” His voice carries a smile—I can see it without having to look.

  He carefully settles the izinusa back into the case. His fingers are like instruments themselves.

  “You’re not going to play me something?” I tease.

  “Not today, O.”

  He talks to me as if we’ve been alone like this before. As if we’re always alone. Now we stand in silence, looking at each other without looking at each other. It’s strange that in a class as small as ours—thirty of us, together year after year—I’ve never spoken to him one-on-one. N’Terra encourages rivalry, and the result is much self-chosen independent study. You have maybe one good friend, and everyone else is competition. Rondo has strictly been the latter. Perhaps we’d be closer if he had lived in the Paw. And now he does, I think.

  “So you’re just carrying that thing around?” I ask to distract myself.

  “It was just delivered from the Beak. My dads ‘forgot’ to bring it when they finished transporting our stuff today.”

  “You play that badly, huh?” I smile. “They tried to leave it behind?”

  He grins at this, and a thrill shoots through me.

  “I think they’d just prefer that I focus on my studies. I’m not exactly the best pupil.”

  “Disagree. Dr. Espada loves you. Whenever you contribute you’re rarely wrong.”

  “Contributing and doing assignments on time are two different things,” he says. He runs his hand along the curve of the izinusa one more time before closing and latching the case.

  “Well, you’d better get it together. I heard a rumor about them introducing internships.”

  Why did I tell him that?

  “Hmm.” That’s all he says, and I’m disappointed. Any other greencoat would have snapped at the bait, but as his eyes wander over the commune, I become more and more sure that Rondo isn’t like any other greencoat.

  “What do you think the tower is for?” he says, nodding at it. “They’re building one in the Beak’s commune too.”

  I turn to follow his gaze.

  “An observation deck is what I hear.”

  “Observing the commune?”

  “No. What purpose would that serve? It’s to observe the sky. The stars.”

  “The stars,” he says, and that’s all.

  “Yeah. You know how it is. Always trying something new.”

  He nods.

  “I need to get back,” I say. I’m reluctant to leave. “I don’t want to run into my dad out here.”

  “Why not?”

  I hesitate.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Maybe next time.” He catches my eye and the pain in my neck momentarily subsides, or maybe I’m just distracted by the tingle he infects me with.

  “Yeah, next time.”

  I turn away before he has a chance to catch my eye again—otherwise I might end up standing in the commune all night. Still, I can feel his gaze on my back until I turn the corner and go out of sight. Even then I feel like I can still see his eyes.

  I follow my feet along the wide path to my home, the ground made smooth by the daily travels of many feet. When I reach my ’wam, I slide my hand across the illuminated panel and the front door hums open.

  I assumed my mother would be home from the Zoo since it’s my parents’ rest day, but the ’wam is dark and quiet. While some whitecoats run shops during their days outside the lab, rest days never really mean much to my mother and father. The Zoo is the only thing that distracts them from their grief.

  My grandfather died long ago: before the Vagantur even rose into the stars. But somehow losing my grandmother here was a different depth of tragedy for my parents. She was my mother’s mother, but my father had loved her just as much. Me too. I didn’t see her often: she was even more obsessed with science than my parents. But my mother says I got my logic from them and my passion from my grandmother.

  “Hey, you.” I jump at the sound of my mother’s voice. I didn’t even hear the door hum open, which she walks through carrying a slate and a box of slides for her three-dimensional projector.

  “Oh, hey.” I peer at the labels of her slides to see if there’s anything interesting I can sneak a look at later. “You’re just getting home?”

  “Yes. And I ran into your father in the lab.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes, oh,” she says, placing her slides on the kitchen platform. She levels her gaze at me, and it’s like looking into deep water. I can see my reflection, but there’s so much swimming behind it. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine now. I don’t even know what happened.” Once upon a time I might have looked to her for comfort, a refuge from my father’s stoniness. But his words on the way back from the Beak have lodged themselves in my skull: emotional. Irrational. The implication of ineptitude is too much. Bending to it now—even with my mother—might make it true.

  “They say you were unconscious.”

  “I guess.”

  “What do you remember from before it happened?”

  I pause before answering. Sometimes I can’t tell if my parents actually care or if everything is an experiment to them.

  “Not much,” I say. “I mean, I remember the philax.”

  “Yes, your father told me.”

  We’re silent, and I wonder what it is that’s hanging inside the quiet, if she’s thinking what my father was thinking.

  “Do you think I’m emotional?” I ask.

  She crosses her arms over her chest.

  “Why do you ask me that?”

  “I’m just asking.”

  “Someone told you you’re too emotional?” I can hear the edge in her voice, the rare tone that makes whitecoats falter when telling her something they were so sure of a moment before. I feel closest to my mother when she’s angry: she lights up, fierce compared to the calm, cool scientist’s manner that she usually carries.

  “No,” I lie. As much as I like to see her when she’s fired up, I don’t want it directed at my father. “I’m just wondering why I fainted.”

  My mother hmms and goes to the kitchen, where cupboards dug into the clay wall are filled with round fruits of orange and green, plus the long thick sticks of zarum, which are dried plant tubers but taste, I overheard my father say once, like something called meat. My mother takes down one of the green hava fruits and slices it with the bowed knife that hangs on the wall. The sliced fruit goes into a misshapen ceramic bowl my grandmother had made, another artifact of her life.

  “Passion, compassion, is not a weakness,” she says. “No matter what your father says.”

  Seeing her now, her cheekbones still visible but less defined, I suddenly remember my dream, the one I had when waking in the room at the Beak. I open my mouth to tell her, but she’s moved on to talking about a project she’s working on in the neurology department, studying the brain of a kalu they’d found dead outside the compound. She loves talking about brains almost as much as I love hearing her talk about them.

  “Have you finished your research for tomorrow?” She’s cleaning up the hava skins, feeding them into the biotube in the kitchen.

  “Yes, I finished most of it before class was over.”

  “My girl.” She smiles without looking up.

  The lights flicker a little as the hava skins are fed into our energy surplus.

  “Do you know anything about internships?” I ask.

  “Internships.” Her eyes are on me now and I shrug.

  “Yeah. Dr. Adibuah said something about it at the Beak.”

  “Internships for whom?” Her eyebrows are almost touching in the middle where she’s scrunched them.

  “Greencoats.”

  “Greencoats,” she repeats.

  “That’s what he said. But he said he wasn’t sure,” I add.

  “Did your father know about this?
”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t tell.”

  “I see.”

  She doesn’t say anything else, so I don’t either. It’s easy to be quiet in a house that’s already silent so much of the time. She finishes disposing of the hava skins and wipes her hands on a cloth.

  “All right, Afua,” she says. “I have work to do.”

  She scoops up the slate and slides she brought in with her and moves toward the hallway, where she’ll disappear into her study and hunch over her desk until well after I’m asleep. She stops at the mouth of the hall and looks back.

  “I’d avoid him tonight,” she says. “I think it’d be better if you two discussed things on another day when you’re both less . . . stressed.”

  I raise and drop one shoulder. No answer necessary.

  I sit alone for a while at the platform in the kitchen. My body feels heavy. I look down at my white skinsuit—which is almost like an actual second skin, as tight as it is—and realize I’ve been wearing it all day. My scalp is gritty at the root of the braids that my mother calls cornrows. At one point I asked what this word meant and she couldn’t remember. But the word survives, stitched into my head, part of Faloiv now. The grit in my hair motivates me to take a shower and I finally drag myself up from the kitchen platform. I pad down the hall, unfastening the neck of my skinsuit. I’m halfway to our bathroom, the material peeling off, when my mother’s voice, soft and low, floats to my ears from her study. I drift closer.

  “I knew nothing about the internships. And, yes, they do give me great cause for concern.”

  She pauses.

  “I imagine it would be the entire age group,” she says. “Pulling Octavia and no one else would be unusual. I don’t want to draw attention to her.”

  My stomach lights up with anxiety. She’s talking about pulling me out of the internships? The internships that haven’t even been announced yet? My grip on the skinsuit slips as my fingers begin to tremble. I press even more closely to the door, determined to learn more.

  “Yes, she had an episode today. With a philax. No, I don’t think she understands.”

  Silence for a long moment: whoever she’s talking to goes on for a while. I hold my breath.