A Conspiracy of Stars

by Olivia A. Cole

  My mother straightens her back, holding the collection of flowers loosely in her hand, her arms hanging down at her sides. She seems unaware of me, unaware of anything. She smiles a small smile and I think I hear her humming. There’s something else too: a sound between a roar and a trumpet. It doesn’t frighten me: it sounds some distance away, too far to be any danger. Then I hear it again much closer. My mother appears not to notice. I call to her once more, but my voice still doesn’t work.

  I see the source of the roar: a gwabi, across the clearing from where the strange building stands. It’s full-grown, its chest broad and covered in the beautiful markings that distinguish it from other similar predators. It sees my mother, but my mother still doesn’t seem to notice, even as the animal roars again and comes loping through the clearing toward her.

  My panic rises like a quick red sun. The gwabi easily weighs five hundred pounds, more if it’s female. I’ve seen its teeth in Dr. Espada’s lectures, long curving blades. I try to run toward my mother to warn her but I’m rooted to the spot, watching in horror as the gwabi bounds through the grass, its ears flat, ready to attack.

  It leaps. My mother turns to face it, dropping her flowers. But there is no attack. The gwabi skids to a stop before her, all four massive paws on the ground, its shoulders reaching past my mother’s waist. They stare at each other, neither making a sound, and then the gwabi opens its jaws wide, very wide, in what looks like a yawn. My mother reaches both hands into its mouth.

  I watch, transfixed, and with each second that passes I become more afraid that I’m about to see my mother torn apart. But when she withdraws her hands, they aren’t bloody. They’re shining with the gwabi’s saliva, but she’s holding something, lifting it out of the animal’s mouth.

  I can’t see what it is. Not until she turns toward me—finally acknowledging me with the smile I know so well, my grandmother’s dimples on either side of it—do I see that she’s holding the spotted man’s egg. She holds it toward me, her head tilted to one side as if to say See?

  I wake to the sound of hammers.

  Dragging myself from bed, I go to the window and slide the shade aside an inch. A trio of workers has resumed construction on the tower near the center of the dome. I watch them for a moment, eyeing the metallic-looking materials they create the frame of the tower with. It gives the impression of a skeleton, which adds to its hostile appearance, and I wonder if Dr. Albatur engineered its design. Its cold angles, the pointed fang of it jutting up among the smooth tops of the ’wams . . . it’s almost as if Albatur himself has taken up residence in the commune, an impression that I know would please him.

  Inside my ’wam is another sound—the delicate rhythm of a knife clicking against the platform. By the time I dress, the smell of baking bread has drifted down the hall to my bedroom. Usually it’s my father who cooks, and it makes me hesitate before sliding open my door. I pause and listen—sure enough, I hear my father’s voice, low and rough as he speaks to my mother.

  “Albatur has a vision, Samirah,” he says. “He understands this world as it is, not as we’d like it to be. He sees the injustice in the death of his parents, what it means to—”

  “You voted for the man because you’re both orphans, Octavius? You tipped this balance because you wish you could change the past?”

  “A false equivalency,” he scoffs.

  “Oh? And using what occurred on one planet to shape the life on another is valid? You voted for a man who—”

  “The Council exists for a reason,” he snaps. “The vote is the vote. You’re angry with me for exercising my rights? It’s finished. Be serious, Samirah.”

  “Be serious? Here’s serious, Octavius: the only studies that have been approved for the last two cycles are those of councilmembers who voted for Albatur. With nothing but a vague half-page explanation for why those that are denied have been rejected.”

  “You would prefer a tome?”

  “Don’t you mock me. Stars, don’t you mock me. Not when Albatur is this close to violating a tome of—”

  I try to crack my door without a sound, but it creaks traitorously in my attempt to hear the conversation better. Both my parents fall silent, the clicking of the knife the only noise.

  “Good morning,” my mother says, smiling as I round the corner into the kitchen. The smile pricks at my memory—she looks so much like my grandmother sometimes.

  “Hey,” I say, pretending to focus on the food she’s cutting so I don’t have to look at either of them. My father just takes the flat brown bread out of our stone oven, places it on the platform, and walks toward the back of the ’wam, saying nothing. I order myself not to look after him.

  “Sleep okay?” my mother says, still chopping. It’s not a real question so I don’t answer. Even with the aroma of food I can smell the Zoo on her: sterile and flat.

  “Did you just get home?”

  She puts some of the zarum she was cutting on a plate and hands it across the platform.

  “How could you tell?”

  “You smell like the lab.”

  “Do I?” She stretches the fabric of her skinsuit up to her nose, craning her neck down to meet it, sniffing. “I don’t smell anything.”

  I shrug, biting off a piece of zarum, not speaking. At the thought of her in the labs, the events of yesterday—my placement in the Paw—flood back into my mind. “Other factors.” Why do I get the feeling that “other factors” has something to do with her? The anger that flashed through me at Dr. Espada’s desk reignites in a blaze of sparks.

  “Anything the matter, Afua?”

  “Nope.”

  She stares at me across the platform, her eyes soft. I hate when she looks at me like this. If my mouth were sewn shut, that look could pull the stitches out one by one. I’m not ready to be opened up, so I look down at my food.

  “I’ll be serving my internship here,” I say. “In case you didn’t already know.”

  “No, I didn’t,” she says, but that’s all.

  “So is Alma. I think they’ll probably host her with us. We’re both female, in the same age group. We study together. It’s logical.”

  When I hear my words out in the air they sound like a desperate attempt to convince her I’m capable of the internship. I’m as transparent as the three-dimensional animals Dr. Espada projects in the Greenhouse.

  “Yes, it’s logical” is all she says.

  We’re silent while I eat, and I keep my eyes on my plate. There is almost always tension between my father and me: a constant thrum like the coming of a perpetual storm. But it’s different with my mother. This pain is new.

  “Afua.” Her voice is too soft. The blaze of my anger wavers.

  “Yes.”

  “Look at me.”

  My jaw trembles. I’m not quite in danger of crying, but I feel . . . something. The buzzing in my head—the same sensation I felt when Dr. Espada was staring at me intently—isn’t quite there. Instead it feels like an echo of the buzzing, the shadow of noise. I grip the edge of the platform and sway ever so slightly.

  “What is it?” she says. I don’t know if she’s referring to my apparent dizziness or my attitude.

  “I don’t know,” I say, which isn’t entirely a lie. How can I tell her I feel like I’ve changed but that I don’t know why or how?

  “And what do we say about what we don’t know?” she asks, picking the knife up again.

  My father returns, peering at his slate.

  “I’ll likely stay in the Avian compound tonight,” he says. “I just received word that Albatur would like to see their progress with Oscree 32.”

  “Why the sudden interest in avian species?” my mother says, beginning to slice the bread. “Surely the Head of Council has more important projects to oversee. It must be fascinating. A pity that only the councilmembers who voted for him are privy to these projects.”

  I was nibbling a piece of zarum, but it’s as if the temperature in the ’wam dropped thirty degrees: her
tone freezes my jaw and everything else. My father, also ice, raises his eyes from the screen of his slate to study her. He squints, his face beginning to twist with something like anger. But then it’s as if a wind blows that rearranges the expression into something else, something pained. He lowers the slate.

  “While we’re asking questions,” he says, “maybe you’d like to use this opportunity to share some of your notes with me about telepathic contacts between predator and prey? Or perhaps the Myn 44–Kunike 27 lab comparison that you decided to pursue on an independent basis without consulting me whatsoever.”

  “You didn’t—” my mother starts.

  My father’s voice inches up nearer to a shout to drown her out.

  “All your criticism of N’Terran competitiveness, and yet you wanted to make that discovery yourself. Do I need to tell you again what a fool I appeared to be when Dr. Albatur came to discuss it with me?”

  “Albatur is—”

  This time he slices the air with his hand as well as his voice, as if physically blocking her words from entering his ears.

  “Dr. Albatur is the Head. He was elected. Your refusal to work with him speaks to your ineptitude, not his!”

  He pulls in his lips, as if trying to take back what he has just said. But then he lets them out again, glaring.

  “Octavius,” my mother says.

  “Samirah?”

  The way he says her name sends an explosion of goose bumps racing down my arms. This isn’t his voice. The air I breathe doesn’t fill my lungs as air would—it’s as if I’ve walked into a cloud of the disintegrating pieces of their love and inhaled its graying vapor. They stare at each other for two heartbeats, and then my father leaves without saying another word. Before the door whispers shut behind him, the clang of hammers from the commune slides into our ’wam, stirring the still air he leaves behind.

  My mother exits the kitchen in a hurry and I think she’s going to follow him, but her path leads her to the wall, where the photo of her parents hangs in its chipped gold frame. She stands, gazing at them, her arms crossed over her chest. I’ve seen her do this before, and it occurs to me that I’ve never asked her how well she knew her father before he died on the Origin Planet, if Nana ever really got over losing him. The two of them here on the wall are like an altar and I’m hesitant to speak, but I do.

  “Mom?”

  She squeezes her eyes shut, shaking her head against my voice.

  “I can’t, Octavia. I can’t.”

  “You can’t what?”

  “Have you not been listening?” she snaps.

  I jerk my head backward, her sudden anger like a slap.

  “What?”

  “Pay attention, Octavia! Pay attention!”

  “To what?” I cry. “To you? To Dad? For what? So I can learn how to be miserable?”

  “So you can learn how not to be!”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” I snarl. “I have no intention of being anything like either of you.”

  “You don’t have a choice.”

  “Like hell,” I shout.

  She laughs, so loudly and sharply it stuns me into silence.

  “Hell,” she says. “I don’t know where you learned about it, but you don’t know what it is. I do.”

  She blazes out of the ’wam, the sound of the hammers louder again with the door open and muted when it closes. I long for the clanging. The silence of this room might suffocate me—my breath comes in short spurts, as if the fire of my anger has eaten up all my oxygen with its smoke.

  I stalk back to my room, flinging myself on the bed. I close my eyes and try to find the smell of ogwe trees, buried in my senses somewhere. I can’t actually smell anything at this moment, but the memory of the scent—the impression of it—slowly brings my heartbeat back to normal.

  I breathe out in a long sigh and reach under my mattress. My fingers grope around until they find the egg. I’d raised my mattress and spent an hour carving out a hole in my bed platform to hide it. It hadn’t been easy, but it feels safe. I stroke it with my fingers, enjoying the way it heats my fingers ever so slightly. I wonder if the spotted man knows he dropped it, or if he might have dropped it on purpose.

  I hear a tiny muffled noise, a sound like a small woodchip striking another piece of wood. It’s my slate telling me I have a message, buried in my bag from school. I return the egg to its hiding place and reach for the bag. The message is from Rondo.

  I know something about the spotted man, his message reads. I immediately sit up to respond but he’s already sending a second message. Let’s talk in person. Meet me at our spot.

  CHAPTER 8

  He’s already waiting for me when I near the bridge. He stands with his elbows propped on the rail, gazing over the edge at the stream running underneath. As soon as I set foot on the bridge, he speaks without taking his eyes off the water. “I wonder if the fish can hear what I’m thinking.”

  I don’t respond. I lean my elbows on the rail too and look over the edge. Below, myn sweep their tails slowly left to right like lazy fans.

  “I think your brain has to be wired a certain way for that,” I say.

  “How do you figure?”

  I shrug.

  “I would guess that if animals on Faloiv can communicate with their brains, it’s the result of adaption that has occurred on this planet.”

  “Thank you, Dr. English,” he says, raising an eyebrow.

  Ordinarily I would smile, but his words only twist my mouth into a frown as the events in my kitchen with both Dr. Englishes solidify again in my mind. I push them out.

  “So . . . ,” I say, turning away from the myn to look at him. I study Rondo’s face and notice the way the sunlight makes the line of his jaw glow. I’ve been in classes with him at the Greenhouse since we were small, but he always kept to himself, the shy boy who eschewed group study. How long has he had this face? He must have grown into his nose, his ears—otherwise I should have noticed long ago how much I enjoy looking at him.

  “So . . . I snuck into my dads’ study,” Rondo says bluntly, turning to lean his back against the rail of the bridge. I’m jarred from admiring his features.

  “Um . . . what?”

  He shrugs, looking out at the commune. It’s early and none of the shops are open; most other people are already in the labs or at their various workstations.

  “They had left for the Zoo already. So I went into the study and looked through some slides.”

  “Why did you do that?” I can’t decide whether to laugh or be scandalized.

  He shrugs again. His customary gesture. His fingers drum quietly on the bridge rail, the only thing that ever gives away how busy it must be inside his head.

  “We want to know more about the Faloii,” he says. “And it stands to reason that the spotted man you say you saw is Faloii.”

  For as long as I can remember, the Faloii have been a shadow just beyond the borders of our education at the Greenhouse. Now that shadow seems to have crept in closer. When has Dr. Espada told us anything about them? Rarely. Our recent conversations—with Espada’s reluctance—have been the most our hosts have ever been discussed. The sudden presence of the Faloii in my thoughts makes me uneasy. The storms that sweep over N’Terra from the jungles never come out of nowhere. They build for several days, the clouds in the distance deepening and bruising, working themselves up into the squall that will overtake the area for three sunrises. The mention of the Faloii feels much like this: the coming of a monsoon, the building up of something heavy and furious.

  “You told me I don’t know what I saw,” I say slowly.

  “Well, now I’ve seen something too,” he says. “So forget what I told you.”

  “What did you see?” I say. “Show me.”

  “I can’t,” he says. “I didn’t want to extract the slide in case my dads noticed. But I’m pretty sure the person you saw was Faloii. First off, who else would it be? You said he was taller than your dad, right? Your fath
er’s one of the tallest people in N’Terra.”

  I nod, already knowing where he’s going with this. I’d thought the same thing.

  “So you just suddenly decided to believe me?” I say. “Your deductive reasoning finally kicked in?”

  “It’s not that I didn’t believe you,” he says. He stops drumming the bridge rail to run a hand down over his close-cropped hair. “I just needed more evidence. And now I think I have some.”

  “Which is what?”

  “I found some slides that document the Vagantur’s landing,” he says. “No photographic material, but two pages of text describing our first interaction with the Faloii. I couldn’t figure out an entry point to see the rest—landing agreements and stuff—and a lot of things were redacted, so I could only read those two pages. But they talk about the initial impressions of the planet and give descriptions of its people.”

  “Wait, wait,” I say, interrupting. “You ‘couldn’t figure out an entry point’ for the rest? Rondo, did you hack the slides?”

  He looks at me sideways, his smile narrow but obvious.

  “Yes.”

  I laugh, disbelieving. Who is this guy? I find myself moving a little closer to him.

  “You hacked the slides,” I say, still laughing. “I can’t believe you hacked your own parents’ files.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because . . . I don’t know, because! What if they find out? I can’t imagine that would go over well.”

  “You were the one that started all this,” he says sternly, but he’s teasing me. “You wanted to go into the dome that night.”

  I sigh. He’s right. But that night I was feeling strange, bold. The boldness feels far away now.

  “I just don’t want you to get caught,” I say.

  “I won’t. I covered my tracks.”

  “So you’ve done this before?”

  He drops his chin, gives me a long look. I can’t help but laugh. Talking to him is so easy: the words just come, the questions, the answers. Why isn’t it this easy at home?