Troubling a Star

by Madeleine L'engle

  That was terrible. Stupid. It didn’t begin to say what I felt about Adam’s rejection. Why couldn’t I write about it directly? I pushed my mind into writing something different, something that had nothing to do with my pain, something maybe I could show to Siri for her to sing. Something maybe Otto could listen to.

  Tell me, oh tell me, the one who sings,

  Do angels really and truly have wings?

  Do they call out with a cry like a bird

  And then fly low to see if we’ve heard?

  When they make their energy manifest

  Do they put on wings to be fully dressed?

  Is it really true, what I have heard,

  That if it has feathers, it is a bird?

  That was plain silly, and probably equally bad poetry, but later I’d probably copy it out for Siri.

  I sat there, my head on my hand, and thought again of my conversation with Otto, and that not everybody on the Argosy was there for a vacation. Was Otto telling me more than I could understand? Surely Otto felt responsible to the entire planet as well as to his own small country. He had pointed out that the Argosy was neutral territory, and that was why it was a good place for representatives of various nations to meet and discuss plans, quietly. Quietly.

  Surely Otto hadn’t kissed me just to keep me from suspecting him of some kind of international skullduggery. That was not consistent with the Otto I had come to know during these few days. Maybe he wasn’t the golden fairy-tale prince he appeared to be, but I certainly had no political importance which would draw him to me. In Otto’s world of international diplomacy, I was nobody. I had to believe that he walked with me ashore and sat with me on the ship and kissed me on the deck because he liked me. Me, Vicky, and not just because the two of us were the only people under twenty aboard.

  I had thought my heart belonged to Adam in such a way that I would not, could not, respond to anybody else. But Adam had rejected my heart. And I had responded to Otto.

  I pulled the book I was reading off the chest between the two bunks. I had put Esteban’s pyramid postcard in the book to mark my place. It was not there. And it had been there. I was certain of that. I looked around, and finally spotted it under the second bunk. I opened each one of the three drawers of the chest. I am not the tidiest person in the world and I couldn’t tell whether or not anything had been touched. I checked my backpack. Adam’s cards and letters, the cards from school, Adam II’s letter were in their place in the inside zippered pocket. Nothing looked different, but I was sure someone had opened my backpack, checked everything, and put it all back.

  Why?

  What were they looking for?

  In the morning, things would be clearer.

  They weren’t. I felt as vulnerable and naïve as ever.

  Eight

  It wasn’t vulnerability that had me on an ice floe. Maybe it was naïveté, though I don’t think so. It was power and corruption and paranoia. I knew that people who are motivated by power are ruthless. I’ve known that for a long time. It’s a kind of global insanity, almost like a virus. I’d met it in New York, but it isn’t confined to big cities. It’s everywhere, and little people get caught in it the way they always have.

  On TV the good guys always win. But this wasn’t TV. Unless somebody came soon, the bad guys were going to win this one, and nobody would know anything except that Vicky Austin had disappeared. Just as Adam Eddington had disappeared. But Adam Eddington, Adam II, had sprung an information leak which had stopped disastrous experimenting in Antarctica. Was that action affecting only what went on in Antarctica a generation ago, or was it touching the present? Had I been incredibly foolish to set off for Antarctica without telling about those two warnings in my school locker? If I never got off the ice floe alive, that would affect not only me but my family, my parents and John and Suzy and Rob; it would affect Aunt Serena and Stassy and Owain and Cook. No. Not Aunt Serena. It did not seem possible that fate, never mind how blind, could deal another blow from the Antarctic to Aunt Serena.

  When I went in to breakfast, Jorge was at an otherwise empty table and beckoned to me to join him. I sat down across from him and was brought coffee and my usual oatmeal. Not only has my mother emphasized the virtue of hot oatmeal, but I like it. The sea looked choppy and cold. Maybe we’d see icebergs.

  “Good morning, Vicky.” Jorge nodded at me. “It is good to see you looking fresh and ready for the day.”

  “I’m ready for icebergs,” I said.

  “Maybe you’ll be the first to spot one. It is tradition on the Argosy that the first person to see an iceberg gets a bottle of champagne as a prize.” He passed me the rolls. “You still have schooling ahead of you?”

  “One more year after this of high school, and then college; that is, if I can get a good scholarship. We’ve all been putting money away for our education since we were little kids.”

  “College, rather than marriage?”

  “Couldn’t I have both?” I asked. “I do want a good education which will give me a chance to decide what I want to do to earn my living.”

  “Ah.” He nodded approvingly. “You don’t expect it all to be handed to you on a silver platter. Otto, too, has a sense of responsibility about all he is inheriting.”

  I smiled. “At least I don’t have a whole country to worry about, just myself.”

  “You enjoy school?” he asked.

  “Pretty much. I have a very good English teacher.”

  “Do you learn languages? French? Spanish?”

  “I took French in school a year ago. My sister is taking Spanish this year.”

  “And science?”

  “We have a good science teacher. My sister’s the scientist, not me.”

  “It is literature that you enjoy?”

  “Yes.” I was polite, but I couldn’t see why he was interested.

  Jorge leaned across the table toward me. “Captain Nausinio told me you had an accident on the large pyramid, not long after I left to go to my ranch.”

  “It was only a near-accident.”

  “Nausinio said that it was Esteban’s quick reflex that kept you from a bad fall.”

  “I’m very grateful to him.”

  “A good lad, bright and talented. I, too, am grateful. It would have put a cloud on the whole trip if you had been hurt.”

  —Or killed, I thought.

  “I’m sure it must have frightened you.”

  “It happened so quickly I didn’t have time to have hysterics.”

  Jorge smiled warmly. “You are a lovely young woman, Vicky. I hope life will treat you as kindly as you deserve. I know that whatever you decide to do, you will do it well.”

  “Thank you.” He meant it sincerely, and that warmed me.

  He said, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you about your friend Adam Eddington last night. I have long been an admirer of his uncle.”

  Adam II had always seemed special and private to me, but that was naïve, again. Jorge’s interest in him still jarred.

  “It is pleasant for you that you will have a friend waiting for you at the station. And, Vicky, please excuse me, but—if I may—Otto is very taken with you.”

  I tried to laugh. “We’re the only teenagers on the Argosy.”

  “You’re a charming girl, and you yourself do not know that, do you?” He pulled back his chair. “See you in a little while.”

  I watched him leave the dining room. He meant the nice things he said. But I didn’t know what I thought of him. I was not born with a suspicious nature. I grew up in Thornhill. But too much was going on that I couldn’t understand. I thought of the postcard on the floor, instead of where I had left it in my book. I thought of all the warnings, and I was afraid. I do know that there is evil, real evil in the world, and nobody is safe. Jorge hoped that life would treat me as kindly as I deserved. But did Otto’s mother deserve to be tortured and killed?

  Leilia came into the dining room and sat down by me, and was followed by Angelique and Dick, an
d I relaxed. There are still a lot of good people in the world. “Good morning,” I said, and they all welcomed me with their smiles.

  We had two lectures that morning. I took notes dutifully, setting down bits of information like “90% of all the ice in the world is in Antarctica, and 60% of the world’s water.”

  Gary was lecturing, and he was passionate about how important Antarctica is for the world’s water.

  “A slight exaggeration,” Jorge murmured to Sam.

  “Is it?” Sam asked.

  One thing Gary said I really enjoyed was, “Mammals groom. Birds preen.” What about people? Suzy preens.

  Between the lectures, several of us stayed up in the Womb Room. With the curtains pulled open instead of drawn across the windows, and with the door to the aft deck propped wide, the room was reasonably light, and cooled off quickly.

  Several people went out on deck, including Otto and Jorge. Angelique, shrugging into a sea-green cashmere cardigan, came and sat down by me. She wore jade earrings which swung against the rosy darkness of her skin. Siri joined us, saying, “I did get sleepy, even though Gary is a fascinating lecturer.”

  “Womb Room, indeed,” Angelique agreed, stretching. Her neck was long and slender, and her earrings showed it off. I used to think I wanted to look like Suzy, but Angelique’s beauty was deeper, and it seemed to shine out of her from the inside as much as from the outside. Every instinct told me that Angelique could never be a Mata Hari. She said, “Dick is down in our cabin, napping. He’s really enjoying this voyage, but he does get tired.”

  Sam strolled over, his unlit cigar in his mouth. “Has he had many patients?”

  Angelique shook her head. “A couple of people arrived with turista from eating unwisely in Vespugia. But this seems to be a healthy group, and the Meclizine pills are good for preventing mal de mer.”

  Someone began drawing the curtains, and Jorge came in, looking back at Otto and Jack Nessinger, who were in the rectangle of light by the open door, putting out cigarettes. Jorge said, smilingly, “Todd’s about to give his famous lecture on the virtues of guano.”

  Angelique laughed. “Don’t knock it, Jorge. I come from a very little nation, and about our only valuable export is guano—not from penguins, we’ve too warm a climate for penguins—but we have many other seabirds. Guano is a valuable fertilizer. We’re also learning to use it for building material. It looks rather like stucco and it does not, I assure you, smell like penguin guano.”

  Otto came in, pulling off his heavy sweater. “I am looking forward to this lecture. Todd has a good sense of humor. At home I do not often have the opportunity just to relax and laugh.” He sat down beside me. “You’ve been taking so many notes, Vicky.”

  “I promised to,” I said.

  The lights were dimmed as Otto said, “Not everybody cares about honoring promises.”

  Benjy found me before lunch and we went into the dining room together. Benjy was taking care of me, but not hovering. I wondered if I should tell Benjy that I was sure someone had been in my cabin. I trusted Benjy.

  But not only was there someone in Vespugia I didn’t trust, there was also someone on the Argosy.

  It didn’t add up. Who would have had access to my locker at school? To my cabin on the Argosy?

  My brother John is a scientist, and he believes in verification by repetition. An experiment performed once is not enough. It has to be repeated, over and over, to be taken seriously.

  That was Adam’s theory, too. Adam III. But I did not want to think about Adam. I had thought I trusted Adam completely. Did his rejection of me constitute a breaking of trust? To me, it did.

  Benjy gave me a small shove; the people just ahead of us in line had reached the buffet table. Among other delicious salads spread out before us there was a large bowl of hydroponic lettuce from the Falklands. Small countries can do large things with very little. I told Benjy about Angelique’s buildings made of guano. He said he’d seen a couple, and they were white and clean and architecturally quite handsome.

  This was a day at sea. No Zodiacs. After lunch we had a couple of hours to relax, and then more lectures. I wondered if the lectures I was hearing on the Argosy were the kind of thing I’d get in college—not that I planned to major in any kind of science. But there’d be lecture courses, and I hoped the lecturers would be as good as the ones I was hearing on this trip.

  Between lectures the beautiful, clement weather deteriorated, and the ship began to roll. I went out to the fo’c’sle to look at the birds, and Sam followed me. We saw Southern giant petrels, Cape pigeons, Wilson’s storm petrels—I wrote the names down for Suzy. I could be a lot fonder of Suzy with several thousand miles between us than I could at home.

  Benjy came out and told us we were crossing the Scotia Sea, and the Antarctic Convergence, and that was why it was so rough. “You don’t get seasick?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Then I doubt if you will. Dick’s got several miserable patients this afternoon.”

  By late afternoon we began to see icebergs.

  Icebergs!

  Pictures simply do not do them justice. Color, for instance, the incredible, burning blue! The majesty of floating ice, some of it millions of years old, ice that has broken off from glaciers!

  At last I was seeing the world Adam II had written about in his journal.

  That night at Wrap-Up, everybody was talking about icebergs. There was a new feeling of excitement in the atmosphere, good excitement.

  Quim talked to us about Elephant Island, which we’d be passing the next day, and where we’d take the Zodiacs if the wind and waves were quiet enough. Then he said, “We have a nice surprise for you. Siri has promised to play her harp and sing for us.”

  I hadn’t realized that Siri had her harp in the lounge with her, leaning against her chair. She picked it up and went to the center of the floor. Benjy brought her a stool, and she sat and played her “Troubling a star” song. I would never hear that song without thinking of the penguins coming to her as she sang. She followed this with a couple of folk songs, and then, totally to my surprise, she began to sing the silly song I’d copied for her and slid under her cabin door.

  Tell me, oh tell me, the one who sings,

  Do angels really and truly have wings?

  When she came to the last two lines, she reprised them.

  Is it really true, what I have heard,

  That if it has feathers, it is a bird?

  Everybody laughed and applauded, and then Siri asked me to come up and sing it with her. She’d written out the melody on a sheet of paper and it was simple. I could read music fairly well, so, although I was embarrassed, I sang it with her, and she sang a descant, and wove in and around the melody with her harp. When we went in to dinner I felt happy, with my anxieties far below the surface.

  The next morning we were threading our way among thousands of icebergs, from little ones to enormous tabular icebergs, bigger than a football field. They were staggeringly beautiful, glowing blue and sometimes green. They seemed to have an inner light, to contain deep within their ice the fires of the sun from the days when the planet was young and still forming. On many of the bergs were what at first looked like shadows but were sleeping seals.

  Siri sat by me at breakfast.

  I said, “I’d like a picture of you sitting on an iceberg and playing to the seals.”

  She reached for the cream. “I’ll sing for them when you write me a seal song, and also when we’re closer to land.”

  “Siri, that song you sang about troubling a star, who wrote the words?”

  “Francis Thompson, an interesting nineteenth-century poet, maybe not a great one, but he had a good and loving mind.”

  “Your music to his star poem is lovely, too. You’re a fabulous composer.”

  “Thanks. I love making music.”

  “Will you sing it again?”

  “Sure. It’s one of my favorites, and I think the penguins like it, too. I’ll play the
m your angel song and see how they respond to that. What gave you the idea for it?”

  “A conversation I had with Cookie before we left home, about angels and feathers.” I found myself telling Siri about Aunt Serena and her gift of this trip, and about Cook.

  “So he was once a monk? Not surprising, somehow.”

  All day at sea, the waves worsened, and quite a few people didn’t make it up to the Womb Room for the lectures. Todd gave us a lecture about whales, and the disastrous effects of whaling. The figures on remaining whales of various species made me shudder. “Whale oil was used for everything, from dog food to jet turbines. The high temperatures for the turbines required lubrication that was hard to refine from petroleum, but during the Second World War it was discovered that it was much easier to use sperm-whale oil. It is especially tragic to me that the oil of these peaceable creatures should be used for war.” He had a picture of the Antarctic blue whale on the screen, and was silent for a moment, letting us look at it. Then he said, “However! In the 1970s it was discovered that the jojoba bean, a desert shrub found in the American Southwest, had oil that was an ideal substitute for sperm oil. But the whale population had already been decimated. We can hope that there will be enough calves so that the population will increase, but it is easier to destroy than to create, and greed pays little attention to destruction.” Then he tried to cheer us up by showing slides of whale flukes, each one unique.

  By the time we went in for dinner that evening, there were quite a few empty places. Jorge ate about half his dinner, then said, “I took a Meclizine pill, hoping it would keep me from being seasick, but I have a feeling I would like to lie down. Excuse me.”

  Suddenly Greta put her hand to her mouth and hurried out. I was glad seasickness didn’t seem to be one of my problems.