Desert Stars

by Joe Vasicek

Surayya glanced over her shoulder at the camp before giving Mira a sheepish look. “I’m sorry,” she said running back to the rest of the family.

  “No!” Jalil shouted, slamming his fist against the shuttle with a fury that made Mira take a step back. “No no no!”

  “Rina,” Shira yelled. “You get back here right this instant!”

  “No,” Mira said, holding onto her little sister as if to never let go. “Don’t leave, Rina. Please don’t leave me.” Rina tensed, but she made no move to run away.

  As Jalil continued to shout, Mira looked up and bit her lip to keep the tears from welling up in her eyes. Her family stood motionless by the camp—Mother, Father, her sisters. Another silent explosion filled the sky, making their shadows dance even as they stood as still as statues. The two younger ones, Majd and Alia, glanced from her to Mother and back again, confused and scared. Shira, however, shot her a look as cold and unyielding as any that she’d ever seen. Come back to me, her expression said, or you are not my daughter.

  Mira’s hands shook and her legs felt weak, but she stayed with Jalil. This was her decision—a decision, she realized with some surprise, that she’d made a long time ago.

  “Please,” Jalil pleaded, his whole body shaking. “Won’t you let me save you?”

  “No,” said Sathi, his eyes large and sad. “This is our place, Jalil—our home. If you cannot understand that, then you are not my son.”

  Jalil bit his lip and nodded, tears spilling out of his eyes. “Then this is goodbye,” he whispered.

  He turned his back to them and helped Mira climb up the ladder. She stopped midway to look one last time at her family, knowing somehow that she would never see them again. Surayya was crying now, while Amina looked on with folded arms, shaking her head. Alia and Majd hugged their mother’s knees in fear, while Sathi stared on with an unreadable expression on his face. And Shira—she didn’t dare look her mother in the eyes. I’m sorry, she wanted to call out, but she knew it wouldn’t do any good.

  She climbed through the open hatchway and into the narrow passageway beyond. As she stepped into the cabin, her vision clouded over and she fell to her knees. The floor rocked underneath her as the shuttle lifted off, and Tiera helped her up and strapped her into a seat. The faces of those left behind flashed across her minds eye, burning their last expressions into her memory. She knew that they’d haunt her forever.

  She closed her eyes and gripped her armrests as her stomach lurched under the terrifying pressure of the acceleration. Through the walls, the whine of the engine filled her ears, but that wasn’t important; it would pass. Jalil had come for her, and from now on, they would be together. That was all that she had anymore—that was all that mattered.

  * * * * *

  “There’s a lot of debris in orbit,” said Michelle, all her attention focused on her instruments. “We’ll be lucky if we make it out of this alive.”

  “Just do your best,” said Jalil, staring out the forward window as they climbed into orbit. Below, the rust-red desert gave way to an unending sea of dark glass—the domes. A few explosions still occasionally flared in the distance, but immediately around them the sky seemed blessedly clear.

  “Nash, are you there? Nash, do you copy?”

  “I copy.” Nash’s voice came over the radio, distant and fuzzy. “Establ… ing data link.”

  Michelle nodded and hit a series of keys on her computer. Though her face was pale, she kept at her work without faltering.

  “Anything I can do?” asked Jalil.

  “Nope,” she said. “Just hang in there.”

  He nodded and glanced over his shoulder at Mira and Rina, Zayne and Tiera. With the other seats unoccupied, the cabin felt horribly empty. Sathi, his father; Shira, his half-mother; Surayya and Lena, his older sisters; the two little girls with the looks of terror on their faces—he’d reached out to them, and they’d rejected his help, even with the world burning all around them.

  Why?

  He bit his lip and turned back around. The shuttle dropped for a second, making the women cry out in terror.

  “Don’t worry,” said Michelle, making some adjustments to the controls. “Everything’s fine—just give me a few minutes.”

  Jalil nodded. Outside, the arc of the horizon glowed dark red as they passed into the night.

  “I’ve established line of sight,” Nash’s voice came over the speakers, clearer than before. “Course is good—watch for debris, though. There’s a lot out here.”

  Jalil looked towards the surface and saw the wreckage of a spaceship light up as it fell through the atmosphere towards the domes below. As the flames engulfed the derelict craft, the pieces crumbled and split apart, streaking brilliant white against the darkness.

  “Hameji forces are moving in,” said Nash. “We’ll have to pull the same stunt we did at Karduna. You copy?”

  “I copy,” said Michelle. She gripped her control stick a little tighter.

  Above them, a ship flashed into existence as it jumped into orbit. Jalil caught his breath; it was a Hameji mass accelerator. The engines came to life as the giant machine of death prepared to slag the planet below.

  “What’s going on?” asked Tiera. She peered over Jalil’s shoulder at the scene out the window. “Is that one of the Hameji ships?”

  “Yes,” said Jalil, his legs turning to water. Outside, the engines on the mass accelerator began to flare.

  “No. No. No!” Tiera screamed, pounding her fists against the back of Jalil’s chair. Together, they watched as the mass accelerator fired. The asteroid burst into flames as it hit the atmosphere, smashing into the black expanse of a dome seconds later. As the blast exploded upwards, it sent up a giant plume of debris that ripped through the underside of the sea of glass, shattering it into a million shimmering pieces.

  Jalil’s breath caught in his throat. He thought of Raya Dome, billions upon billions of people crammed into a city that stretched from horizon to horizon and up through the pillars that held up the sky. All of those people, dead. The thought made him sick.

  “You’re coming in too low,” said Nash. “Hold your velocity—I’ll slow down to compensate.”

  Off in the distance, Jalil caught sight of the Bridgette. It was angled nose upward, with the shuttle bay facing them. Judging from her size, the ship was perhaps half a kilometer away, growing closer with every second.

  “Coming in,” said Michelle, every muscle in her body tense. “Steady, Nash—we’ve only got one shot at this.”

  “I hear you, ‘Chelle. You’re doing a fine job. Just bring her in a little more to port—”

  Tiera cried out again. Another giant meteor shot past them, smashing silently into the sea of glass. Shards and splinters twinkled and glittered as they broke apart, the shockwave extending like a giant ripple out towards the horizon. As Jalil stared in horrified fascination, the entire structure broke apart and collapsed, falling in on the bottled world inside.

  “What’s going on?” Mira’s voice came from behind him. Jalil looked up and saw her floating in midair, gripping the edge of the cockpit partition in fear with her hair and clothes adrift in the weightlessness. She stared at the scene before them with wide, frightened eyes. Jalil unfastened himself from his chair to help her back down.

  “It’s the end of the world,” he said softly. “The destruction of the world by fire.”

  “Babylon,” Mira whispered.

  “Almost there,” came Nash’s voice over the intercom. “Less than a hundred meters to go.”

  “I see you. Steady…”

  “Look!” said Tiera, pointing excitedly. “Is that—Lord of Earth!”

  Jalil glanced in the direction that Tiera was pointing. Out on the horizon, a giant white spire jutted out of a gap between domes. He recognized the ivory tower at once—the Holy Place, the Sacred Shrine, the Memory of Earth, the Temple of a Thousand Suns. All around it, clouds of grimy brown and gray spilled out of the wounded landscape, gushing out of the shattered dom
es like blood from a hundred severed arteries.

  As they watched, a flaming black meteor shot through the sky, crashing into the base of the temple. Mira gasped, and Tiera cried out in horror. For a heart-wrenching moment, time slowed to a stop, as if history itself had come to an end. As the shock wave rippled across the landscape, the tallest spire of the temple shuddered and collapsed into the cloud of death. Within moments, the plume completely engulfed the temple, blasting the holiest shrine of mankind into dust and ashes.

  “Almost there—now!”

  Jalil’s stomach lurched, and the walls seemed to collapse in on him. For an instant, he lost all sense of orientation as the universe inverted itself and reality flipped inside out. He closed his eyes and gasped for breath, pulling Mira close.

  A moment later, he opened his eyes and found himself staring at the magnificent starfield of deep space.

  “Wh-what happened?” Mira asked, holding onto him for dear life.

  “We’re through,” Jalil whispered, letting out a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “It’s over—we’re safe.”

  Chapter 22

  “We owe you our lives,” Jalil said, giving Nash a trembling handshake that soon turned into a brotherly hug. “We can never repay you.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Nash, clapping a hand on his shoulder.

  Jalil returned the gesture and smiled. He glanced over at Michelle.

  “You too,” he said, nodding to her. “If you hadn’t come back, we would all be dead right now.”

  Michelle smiled at him with sad eyes. “Yeah,” she said, her voice distant. “Anytime.”

  “This isn’t the end—I refuse to believe that it is.”

  “No,” said Nash, “it’s not the end.” He put his arm around Michelle’s waist, pulling her close in a reassuring embrace. “For us, it’s the beginning.”

  “God-willing,” said Jalil, smiling at Mira. “God-willing.”

  * * * * *

  Jalil found Tiera in the engine room of the Bridgette, chatting with Michelle. As the door hissed open and he stepped through, she glanced up and rose to her feet.

  “Jalil,” she said, smiling broadly. “You’ll never believe the news—Michelle and Nash have agreed to take me on as one of their crew!”

  “That’s—that’s great,” said Jalil, a little surprised by her enthusiasm. He wished he could share it, but recent events had left him feeling as if a heavy weight had been placed on his chest.

  “Are you all right?” Tiera asked, a look of concern coming over her.

  Jalil sighed. “To be honest, I don’t know.”

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” said Michelle. She smiled at him before heading out the door, shutting it behind her. Once she was gone, Jalil and Tiera both sat down on the floor.

  “It’s about the others, isn’t it?” Tiera asked.

  Jalil nodded. “I just—I wish I could have saved them!”

  Tiera reached up and put an arm around his shoulder. In some ways, the feel of her touch did more to comfort him than words ever could.

  “You did all you could,” she said. “You showed them the way and they made their choice. There was nothing you or I could have done.”

  “That’s what’s so frustrating,” said Jalil. “Why wouldn’t they come? Why would they choose to die?”

  “The camp was their world. They never would have left it, not for anything. It’s enough that you came back and tried.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Besides, you were able to save some of us, right? We’d all be gone if it weren’t for you.”

  Jalil nodded. As Tiera rubbed his back, the tears slowly trickled out—tears of pain, tears of healing.

  “So you’re going to stay on the Bridgette?” Jalil asked.

  “Yeah,” said Tiera. “Michelle says she can take you and the others as far as you need to go, though.”

  “That’s kind of them. Now that our home is gone, though, I don’t—”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He looked up and saw Tiera frowning as if to scold him.

  “Our—our home,” he said. “The desert, Gaia Nova—”

  “That’s not our home,” she said, jabbing her finger at Jalil’s chest. “Home is right here—it’s you and me. Home isn’t a place; it’s family. Am I right?”

  Jalil smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I think you are.”

  * * * * *

  The moment Jalil stepped through the door, Mira leaped to her feet and threw her arms around him. For several moments, they just held each other, saying nothing. Mira closed her eyes and let the comfort of Jalil’s touch soothe her pain and sorrow.

  “It’s just us now,” she whispered.

  “I know,” said Jalil.

  “What will we do?”

  “Nash is setting a course for New Rigel,” he said. “All the other refugees have fled that direction, so it might take us a while to get past them, but God-willing the Hameji won’t follow.”

  His talk of war and refugees, of names like “New Rigel” and “Hameji” made little sense to her.

  “But what will we do once we get there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said softly. “Find another world, settle down, start over.”

  She nodded. “Do we know where yet?”

  “No, but we’ll find something. For the time being, we’ll stay here on the Bridgette—she’s a little cramped, but she should be enough of a home until we can find a more permanent place to live.”

  Mira smiled. “You mean build a new camp? Start a new family?”

  “Yes,” said Jalil, giving her a worried look. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  “Of course,” she said, stepping forward and putting her arms around him again. Their lips softly met, and she melted in his embrace.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered, his mouth close to her ear. “I’m sorry about the others.”

  “I know,” she said, feeling the tears return to her eyes.

  “Are you afraid?”

  Jalil’s arms felt warm and comforting, like a well-made cloak in the cold desert night. She thought back to the night they’d shared the blanket on Sarah’s balcony, beneath the light of the stars and satellites.

  I could spend the rest of my life with him, and be happy.

  “No,” she answered. “Not as long as you’re with me.”

  Jalil looked down at her and smiled. Somehow, she knew she’d said exactly the right thing.

  Outside the observation window, the stars shone ten times brighter than Mira had ever seen them. Their soft light illuminated Jalil’s face, making him glow like an angel.

  “Strange,” he said. “The stars seem somehow… empty.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jalil sighed. “I don’t know. Perhaps it’s just me. But whenever I see them, I can’t stop thinking of the Temple of a Thousand Suns. To think that the holiest shrine in all the universe is gone now—it’s as if Earth itself has somehow been destroyed.”

  “Perhaps,” said Mira. “But isn’t it true that there is holiness within us?”

  He glanced down at her and smiled. “Perhaps.”

  As he leaned into her, she lifted her chin to meet his lips. They closed their eyes and kissed again, bathed in the light of countless stars.

  Author’s Note

  This book was a long time in coming. Even though the first draft started to take shape in the fall of 2008, I feel as if it really began in late 2005, when I came home from my mission.

  From 2003 to 2005, I volunteered as a full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (also known as “the Mormons”). For two years, I spent almost every day focused on religious service and spiritual things. The missionary program handled all of our housing and transportation, and periodically dispensed money from our families so we didn’t need to work or really even keep much of a budget. I’d already been accepted to Brigham Young University, and the scho
ol had deferred my enrollment for two years, so I didn’t have to worry about that either. In fact, I was so focused on the missionary work that even though I served in Silicon Valley, I didn’t know what a flash drive was until I came home.

  Soon after coming back, I began to re-immerse myself in my favorite works of science fiction & fantasy. For a couple of months, however, I felt really depressed, because none of these fictional universes had room for my religious beliefs. I was a little bit like Dan Wells in season 1 episode 27 of Writing Excuses (World Building Religion), who said he didn’t like Ender’s Game as a boy because the mother was Mormon in a world in which Mormonism, as he knew it, couldn’t be true. It wasn’t that any of these stories were actively anti-religious, or that I was disappointed because they didn’t explicitly vindicate my beliefs. I was just looking for a secondary world where I could immerse myself without having to set aside the religious part of my life that I’d come to cherish. After a couple of months, I found a balance and got over it, but the experience gave me a desire to write something that countered that trend.

  This isn’t as much of a problem in fantasy, but in most science fiction and space opera, the universe is actually our own universe fast forwarded some two or three thousand years. The trouble with this is that most religions, especially Western religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have at their core a story about Earth: its creation and beginnings, its relationship with God as a dwelling place for humanity, and its future destruction and millennial rebirth. Of course, mainstream science fiction cannot incorporate any aspect of this religious cosmology and remain mainstream—the moment it does, it simply becomes religious fiction. However, by presenting a far-future universe in which the Earth has not been transformed, mainstream science fiction almost gives us a universe in which none of these religions can be true. I wanted to find a way to do both: to present an acceptably mainstream far-future universe in which no religion was explicitly true, but any of them could be.