When Stars Are Scattered

by Spencer Ellsworth

  “We don’t know that yet,” Ahmed said.

  “Well, yes. You don’t,” Jose said.

  “A custom virus,” Ahmed said, standing up and washing his hands, “built to take down a specific genetic structure? That’s a lot to ask of backwater Nova Christos.”

  “There were three thousand kites outside the settlement at this time, just a year ago.”

  Ahmed didn’t speak.

  “But you are right,” Jose said, his voice bitter. “We can’t accuse the Christian homesteaders of crimes against sentience. No matter what we know. No, we have to wait. First, we waited for a virologist. Now, we wait for you to figure out the nature of the virus. Then, once we know, we petition the Islamic Confederation to bring an interstellar tribunal against the territorial authority, who are all Nova Christos and won’t do anything. By then, every last kite is dead. So we wait,” he said, rinsing his plate, “and pray. To the only authority who listens.”

  It was the stupidest thing to say in the whole galaxy. But it came out of Ahmed’s mouth anyway. “Don’t be so quick to consult God. No matter which way you look at it, He’s responsible for the virus.”

  Sofia, Jose, and Adéla all stared at him. Sofia looked shocked. Jose looked angry. Adéla put her face in her hands. Was she laughing?

  Pablo walked up to Ahmed and said, “Whoosh! Spaceship take us away!” When Ahmed didn’t answer, he pointed at the spaceship and said, “I want you to come too.”

  * * *

  Adéla’s family cleared out in the awkward silence, and Ahmed went to work, focusing on anything but the conversation he’d just had. In a way, it was a relief. They were finally leaving him alone.

  Once the scanners were set up, it took little time to find the disease. The kites were Earthlike enough, their blood red and thermo-regulated like a mammal’s despite the lack of milk ducts, and despite irregularities in their blood, Ahmed found something that looked an awful lot like a virus; a nasty, complex thing. Ibrahim’s blood had lower concentrations of the virus, as expected, than the other blood samples.

  He spoke aloud to the empty room. “Something’s going on there.”

  The autopsy was more questions than answers, but Ahmed discovered that there were dozens of little glands in the secondary respiratory system on the kites’ chest. Must be where the pheromones came from. Each one was a perfect little sack of chemicals, ready to become airborne and expelled. They were connected to what looked like thick nerve clusters. Can they actually control what they release? Is it conscious?

  Pheromone exchange explained why an airborne virus moved even quicker than usual, at least.

  Too many questions. But he looked at where he had mixed Ibrahim’s antibodies, and thought there might be an answer.

  When Ahmed walked into the sickroom, Ibrahim was awake, whistling softly to himself. Ahmed hesitated. Hell, he couldn’t avoid checking vitals, no matter what sort of creepy visions they were putting in his head. Ahmed forced himself forward, looking at the readings on the old kite’s monitor.

  “Anything, friend?” Ibrahim chirped.

  His Standard was better. That was fast. “Well, your blood’s not overripe,” Ahmed said, as he checked the old kite’s vitals. “It’s well-seasoned.”

  Ibrahim squealed with laughter, so hard he almost fell off his bed. “Oh, friend! You understand!”

  Ahmed walked away from the table. No vision. He couldn’t help sighing with relief.

  * * *

  Three batches of cake batter, and Adéla’s tongue was numb from sugar. “I feel sick, Sofia. I don’t think I’m a good taster anymore.”

  Sofia looked over at the now-depleted box of chocolate rations. “I can’t believe he gave me all of it!”

  “I’m glad you’re happy, sweetie,” Adéla said. She couldn’t avoid brushing her hand through her daughter’s hair. Narina and her family were talking in the living room, drinking the fresh coffee. Adéla couldn’t think enough for small talk; it was all about how good the new food was, anyway. And about the kites. “Are you coming home with me? Dad will be home by now.”

  “I still have to make frosting, Mom!”

  “Fine,” Adéla said. “Come home later. No, wait. Stay here. Pablo, too. I don’t want you walking home.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Don’t question,” Adéla snapped. “Trust me.”

  Sofia nodded quietly. “Okay, Mamí.”

  Adéla left, first checking to make sure her son was still asleep on Narina’s couch. She couldn’t say why she’d told them to stay. She walked the sixty-six steps to her own prefabricated house—why worry about sixty-six steps? They should be fine—and opened the door and said, “I left them at Narina’s with the sugar. Did you know Ahmed gave Sofia—”

  Jose wasn’t there.

  Adéla checked around the house. Jose was not asleep. He was not in the bathroom or the kitchen.

  We pray. To the only authority who listens. And what had God told him?

  She stared at the cupboard. She was better off knowing less and less—and yet she walked to the cupboard, and opened it.

  The bullets were gone.

  She walked out into the dry cold wind. “Oh God,” she whispered. “What do I do?”

  * * *

  It was well after midnight when Ahmed finished the autopsy and stumbled to bed. The wind howled around him, throwing dust in his face. He slammed the door behind him and fumbled for the battery-powered lamp, flipping it on.

  Adéla was sitting on Ahmed’s bed. She held up his flask of whiskey. “This will not make you popular.”

  “It’s for my bedside manner.” Ahmed sat at his table. “Hello.” It seemed stupid to ask why she was there.

  “Jose’s gone,” she said. “I don’t know where.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.”

  She laughed. “I’m pretty sure you want nothing to do with God. ‘He made the virus anyway’? Cute, Doctor.”

  Ahmed didn’t answer.

  “I knew a boy, growing up, who wanted to be a doctor. Very much. Not very religious, until the Confederation covered his medical school. You’ve never seen a more rapid conversion.”

  “Uh, uh … I’m not the most devout, but…”

  “Secret’s safe, if this is.” She took a drink from the flask. “Oh. Wow.” She poured a glass of water, then another one, gulping them down.

  “First time with a bottle?”

  “First time in quite a while. I was hoping it would help me forget my worries. I think it’s just going to make me sick.”

  “You need something for your stomach?”

  She clicked her tongue for no. She stood up, taking a moment to steady herself, then walked closer to Ahmed. “You want me to be blunt, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right now, I would take any way off this planet. Anything that lets me, and my children, go somewhere safe. Tonight.” She was standing even closer. “I should have said something before, but this all happened so fast, and I’ve been so tired…” He could smell her breath, sour with whiskey. “I don’t know what Jose is doing, but I know that whatever he is doing, he believes he’s in the right, and he can’t be convinced otherwise. That scares me.”

  “That’s a side effect of always speaking for God.”

  “You are a terrible actor,” she said. Quicker than he would have thought possible, she unpinned her hijab and removed it, letting it fall to the ground. Her black hair fell around her shoulders. She leaned over and her hair brushed his ear. “Please, tell me what to do.”

  Ahmed found his voice. “Adéla, I’m—what are you doing?” Her hot breath was on his cheek now. “Are you using me for a convenient way to divorce?” She looked very beautiful, her pleading eyes caught in the low light. It had been a long, long time. Many virology labs ago.

  “I’m … flailing.” Her voice fell, soft, blending with the howling wind outside. She withdrew a little, looked at the hijab on the ground as if just now realizing she’d taken it off. “You don�
��t know what it’s like. I love the kites, and I love my children, and I love my husband, but the ones I can still protect, out of the three, are my children.”

  Ahmed couldn’t think of what to say.

  “You have an education, connections. If you could get us off-world, I would…”

  “No.”

  Relief filled her face, for half a moment before the fear returned.

  Ahmed waited. The wind beat at the corrugated tin walls of his shack. The metal shook, ringing. Adéla walked to the other side of the room, and then back again, picking up her hijab and twisting it in her hands as if wringing it out. “I’ve been watching kites die for a month now, on sickbeds. For years, I’ve been watching homesteaders kill them. I can’t do this anymore. And Jose never sleeps. He prays, and he reads the Qur’an and hadith. All night long sometimes. Prays and reads and prays.”

  “Doesn’t he get answers?” Ahmed said.

  “I’m scared that he has gotten his answer.”

  Ahmed stared at the window. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he finally settled on, “I can get you something for anxiety.”

  “That’s good,” she said. She stepped closer to him. “I suppose it would be a horrible scandal if I asked simply to sleep here?”

  Ahmed didn’t answer.

  “Simple sleep. I don’t want to be alone.” Her voice trembled, broke, high-pitched for a moment like a kite’s. “One of those pills would help.”

  “I’ll take the floor,” Ahmed said.

  Adéla clicked her tongue for no. She lay on the bed, and he brought her a glass of water and a sleeping pill. After she took it, he lay next to her, not touching, chaste, just listening to each other’s breathing.

  She whispered, “How can you not believe? Look at the sky, the water. Children! It will change when you have children. The universe is such a cold place if you assign everything to chance.”

  “It is a colder place when you have to know why a merciful God would do horrible things,” Ahmed said.

  “You got me there.”

  They waited, until exhaustion took over.

  * * *

  To struggle, in the soul, before God.

  He glided through the sky, on high, cold winds, spattering drops of rain. He tumbled, soared over small dark buildings. He dove and seized the ground, rooted himself and flattened out on the plain.

  These were kite thoughts, Ahmed half-realized, through sleep. A dream? No, he felt the rain slide against his thin skin, the wind beat at his ears. The air was rich with scent: sweet corn, the stink of cattle, dry grass rapidly softening in rain.

  A large cross rose against the stars here, and beyond it, a circle of brick homes. This was not territory for friends; it was a place of others, the not-yet-friends. Why were the friends, the Muslims, here?

  He climbed across the ground, letting the wind beat against him, flatten him out over the small pricks of grass.

  The lights went on in the small, dark buildings.

  The friends, the Muslims, knocked down doors, forced other humans out of the buildings with the crosses on them. The other humans were not-yet-friends, but the friends, the Muslims, were not kind to them, did not seek to befriend them. The friends forced the others to their knees.

  The friends, the Muslims, made prayers, allahu akbar and bismallah.

  But the prayers were made in not-friendship, and such prayers do not fly up to God.

  The friends pressed guns against the not-yet-friends, the homesteaders. Their fear filled his nostrils, a sharp, cutting scent, breaking into his brain, making him quiver. Homesteaders wept and he smelled the salt of tears, heard the words of a father telling his daughter to be brave, of curses, of prayers to the cross God. He climbed forward, against the wind lifting his body, clutching at the wet earth, to speak to the friends, to stop them—

  They fired. Muslims shot homesteader after homesteader. The round human heads broke, like clouds in wind, shreds flying away.

  Ahmed jolted up, bumped into Adéla, fell back against the wall. She mumbled and rolled over.

  It was cold and dark. His window rattled. It had blown partway open, letting in the freezing wind. He slammed it shut. His breath ran ragged through his lungs; Ahmed looked down, expecting for a moment the flat flap of a kite’s chest.

  The moon was shining through the window onto the waves of Adéla’s hair on his pillow. She rolled over, mumbled in her sleep, and suddenly opened her eyes. “Bismallah! Not-friend!” She sat up, eyes wide open, locking with Ahmed’s. “Jose? Ah—” She swallowed. “Ahmed.”

  “Hi,” Ahmed said.

  “My God. What a dream.”

  “I saw the same thing,” Ahmed said.

  She turned toward him, her face alight with the moon. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that dream was exactly what it seemed like it was.” He stood up and rubbed his eyes. “Some kite saw it, and it got relayed to the other kites. We even caught a bit of it on the wind in their pheromones. It means…” He stared at her, his heart hollow. “It means Jose just killed an entire homestead.”

  She didn’t speak. She looked unable to speak, as if her voice had been taken. After an eternity of cold silence, the walls ringing with the wind, she said, “I need to check on my children, Doctor.”

  “Call me Ahmed, for God’s sake.” He frowned. “Stop making me feel like I’m diagnosing you.”

  She looked at the door, then she leaned closer to him. “Thank you for tonight.”

  After she left, he crossed the brown openness to the clinic, looking around. For once, the wind had died down. It was still as a funeral out here today. The Isachian sun hadn’t broken the horizon yet. The sky was a sheet of predawn gray over the soft brown landscape.

  The clinic was quiet in the early morning. Ahmed went through the sickroom, holding his nose, keeping one eye on the kites. Everything appeared normal. All monitors were showing vital signs as good. “Sofia? You here?” He thought he heard noises in the exam room again.

  Ahmed opened the door to find Ibrahim, clutching at the table in the exam room, praying. “Ash-hadu anlaa ilaaha…” He looked up at Ahmed and launched into Arabic.

  “Ibrahim,” Ahmed said.

  The barrage of chirpy Arabic would have been impossible for even a linguist to understand. But this was good. Ibrahim wanted to pray, and he had the faculties to do so—that meant the old kite was actually recovering.

  He reached for Ahmed. “Help, friend? No wind to help me pray.”

  “To pray?”

  “The wind,” Ibrahim said. “We pray in ground, and we pray in wind.”

  “Oh.” Kneeling and standing. Of course it would be difficult for the kites to move up and down without the wind. They must have prayed on the ground first, then flying up into the wind in lieu of kneeling and standing.

  Ahmed clutched at his pants. Wondered if he should get nose plugs. And then thought, stupid. After last night, there would be far worse things in store than a few pheromones.

  Ahmed took the kite’s hooked hands. The pebble-rough claws grated against Ahmed’s skin. The same tough, thick claws that he’d felt last night, digging into the earth, keeping him rooted against the wind. He lowered Ibrahim into something approximating a kneel while the kite prayed, raised him again as if he were standing. “Thank you,” Ibrahim said.

  “Let me look at your nose while you’re here.” Ahmed hesitated. “Just … go easy on me.”

  Ibrahim didn’t answer. Ahmed shone the scope into those enormous nostrils. The mucus was fairly viscous, but there was no blood, and he could hear the air whistle through the passages. “Still looking good. It’s like you just got a cold and everyone else got tuberculosis. Hm. We may have an option other than watching you die.”

  “We are watching you die, friend,” Ibrahim said, with an uncharacteristic serious tone.

  Ahmed had to stop for that one. “What?”

  Ibrahim’s nose sucked in air like an overeager dog, but his voice tone was cold an
d serious. “Friend. Listen, friend.” He peered at Ahmed through those wrinkle-rimmed black eyes. “This is the struggle. This is the jihad. To understand the friend.” He opened his mouth, showing sharp teeth, in a strange smile. “We teach you flying.”

  More words came back, from the dream-that-was-not-a-dream. The prayers did not fly. Ahmed’s mind went different. Wrong. Like a kite’s. He could feel it. Storm clouds, cold, wet, driving hail, eating him up, along the lines of his skin. Roofs and walls were wrong, keeping out the wind. His hands shook and his breath wheezed in his throat.

  A voice called to him out of the sky, a voice that rumbled in his body, moved through him like blood. The voice of—God?

  He saw the homesteaders’ heads break apart again. They were on their knees, still before the guns, their fear was burning in his nose, and then they were dead.

  Sofia came into the room, her hair tied up. Her eyes were bleary. “I brought you cake, Doctor. We used your chocolate and made three kinds last—are—are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Ahmed lied. Tears trickled cold down his face. “Ah, just sand in my eye. Sand everywhere.”

  She coughed suddenly, a long series of coughs, grabbing a tissue and hacking into it. “Gross. Sorry. Allergies.”

  “Did that bring up mucus?” Ahmed asked.

  “Not much.” Sofia held up the tissue. Ahmed took it. It wasn’t the stuff of allergies; there was a distinct dark note to the mucus. “You might have a sinus infection,” he said. “I ought to take some of your blood.” The tissue shook in his hand. “After I get some air.”

  “I can take my own blood,” Sofia said.

  “You shouldn’t,” Ahmed said.

  “I’ve been doing it for two years.” She rolled her eyes in the way only a thirteen-year-old could. “I’m not afraid to take blood, Doctor.”

  He stumbled outside, leaving Sofia. The sun was rising over the plain, a faint gray light stealing over dull metal buildings and the variegated, irregular surface of the mosque. The wind battered Ahmed’s face. The community was just waking up. He saw the thin man who had talked to him in the mosque, and his friend, and a half-dozen others, a few of whom waved. Ahmed wished he could tell whom, of the figures walking to the mosque and to the garden plots, gently weeding or carrying pots of food, had been in the dream last night.