Unlight

by Chandra Shekhar

  Grandmas as wonderful as ever. Shes the one bright spot here. Id go crazy if she werent around.

  Elizabeth’s journal

  What an incredible year it’s been. I can safely say that no other human beings in history could have experienced anything similar. No, only in the space colonies of science fiction could a comparable situation exist. We’re all still alive and well, against all odds. What a blessing!

  My understanding of practical matters is rudimentary, but I get the sense that the Shell is living up to what Larry expected. I’ve never taken much interest in equipment and architecture and stuff like that, but I’m now realizing how much thought and genius goes into all of that. To make the air breathable, to keep the water clean, to handle our wastes—how complex all of that must be! In the past, I always took such things for granted, leaving it to the practical folks to work things out. Psychology, philosophy, spirituality—that, and some child nurturing, was the sum total of my interests. I’m beginning to feel that I should not have neglected life’s practical side—studying things, making things, making things work. The other day, I ran into a minor glitch in the kitchen—the garbage disposal wouldn’t work. Something had got stuck in it somewhere, that’s all I could tell. It took Jessica all of 30 seconds to unscrew a cover, remove the offending object (a bit of onion peel), and get the unit working again. What if I had a more serious mechanical emergency, such as a burst pipe or a grease fire, and I couldn’t get hold of Jessica or anyone else easily?

  Although I’ve admired scientists, engineers, doctors, and all the practical people who can create and fix things, I always used to think that by spending all their time and effort in the “real world” and not developing their inner lives or pondering life’s ultimate meaning, they were missing out on something vital. Perhaps they were. But then again, perhaps I was missing something equally vital—life’s practical side. Larry—dear, sweet Larry—will insist that I’m the most valuable person in the universe. Has he ever said anything but the kindest words to anyone here? But I’m wondering if I wouldn’t be of more use if I were a plumber or an electrician, not a psychologist. After all, physical survival is a precondition for psychological health, not the other way around.

  Talking of psychological health, the news, overall, is good, given our very unusual conditions. Jessica seems reasonably contented. She isn’t (and might never be) a “happy camper” here, but she doesn’t seem to have any major complaints so far. She seems to like working with her machines and gets to spend some exclusive time with her mother and me in the kitchen. I was the most worried about her when we first moved it, but she seems to be coping well enough.

  Anna seems to be doing okay too, but I could never really tell what she’s feeling deep down. She’s always been an odd mix of child and adult. When she’s teaching us or pulling Larry’s leg she seems to be her mother’s twin, perky and confident, but when she has her nightmares—so rarely now, thank God—I can feel her trembling like a baby. It’s hard for me to say if being in the Shell is helping or harming her. She obviously loves her plants and cherishes time alone with Larry. But she used to be such a social creature, and she must certainly be missing her parties and cafes and music lessons. I’m so glad that Larry gets us all to sleep under one blanket, literally and figuratively. I wouldn’t be comfortable if Anna were sleeping by herself in a separate room, with nobody to turn to if her mind started playing its tricks on her. I think as long as she feels safe and protected, and she keeps busy with her plants and leans on Larry’s gentle strength, she should be fine.

  So the girls are okay for now. I’m not sure what to make of the adults, though. Larry has been as calm and reliable as ever, but he must be under a lot of pressure. He hinted to me the other day that though things are going well now, the situation could “turn on a dime” if any of the key systems began to fail. He immediately backtracked and told me that such a contingency was highly improbable. But, for an instant, he let down his guard, and I could see the weight he was carrying on his shoulders. I glimpsed the worry in his eyes. I wish I could get him to open up to me. Even though I’m the least practical person on the planet, I think it would comfort him to share his anxieties. Perhaps I can convince him that the burden of our survival is not for him alone to bear, but for all of us to share.

  Nicole, my dear, sweet child. I’ve never been this close to her before, and yet I’m only beginning to understand her. Deprived of her personal shell—her work and her busy routine—she’s far more wounded and vulnerable than I’d imagined. And yet I can see some signs of healing as well, thanks no doubt to the precious gift of Larry’s boundless love. Whenever he’s around, she smiles. But at other times, she seems strangely troubled, and her concerns don’t seem tied to present-day worries. Indeed, whenever we experience a health-related problem—we had a couple of minor emergencies this year, I twisted my ankle and Anna cut herself with the garden shears and needed two stitches—she seemed the old Nicole, practical and matter-of-fact. It’s only during the quieter moments that her disquiet seems to emerge.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Year Five

  Looking back, Larry would think of the first five years in the Shell as the Steady State period, an engineering term for the period of stability following an initial chaotic phase that occurs when a system is switched on.

  Many of the bugs in the Shell had been worked out. The air flow in the initial days was erratic, and at times it got stuffy inside Central. Larry and Jessica spent several days trying to diagnose the problem, finally narrowing it down to a defective valve that wasn’t letting stale air back into the purifier. Once diagnosed, the problem was easy to fix. Something similar happened to the heating as well, with temperatures occasionally oscillating inexplicably between uncomfortably cold and wastefully warm. Here, lacking Jessica’s help, Larry was to some extent on his own as far as diagnostics were concerned. Fresh from his Air dome repairs, Larry initially checked the valves, but they all seemed to work fine. The motors ran smoothly. The pipes ran clear with no leaks.

  “What do you think the problem is?” he asked his assistant. Though Anna lacked her sister’s ability to break a complex system down into components that could be individually analyzed, she had a fresh, direct mind, and was sometimes able to go to the heart of a problem in a holistic way. Despite her naive understanding of mechanical systems, she often helped Larry think laterally and approach a problem from a different angle.

  “Can I ask a stupid question first?” Anna put down a coil she had been rewinding and wiped her hands with a rag.

  “There are no stupid questions, only stupid habitat designers,” Larry smiled.

  “If you’re stupid, what does that make me?” Anna said with a toss of her head. “Anyway, my question was—how do you set the temperature?”

  Larry pointed to a panel with several knobs and sliders. “Do you see the control here for the thermostat? We can set it to any value between plus or minus 45 degrees.”

  Anna nodded. “But we mostly keep it at 20 degrees or so?”

  “Right. It’s linked to a thermometer in Central.”

  “What happens if Central warms up to, say, 25 degrees?”

  “The thermostat would shut off the flow of heat to Central until it fell below 20 degrees.”

  “How quickly does that happen?”

  “Instantaneously. As is the switching back on.”

  “I see.” Anna scratched her nose with a ruler and thought for a few seconds. “Okay, the thermostat reacts fast, but how long does it take to cool off or warm up again?”

  Larry reflected for a moment. “Hmm … I think you might be on to something.” He doodled a graph on a notepad and showed it to Anna. “Look! There will be a delay in the system due to thermal inertia. So when the heat is shut off at 25 degrees, the room will cool down to 20, and keep cooling further even after the heat comes back on.”

  “That might be causing the oscillations?”

  “Yes. I should’ve thought of it
before.” His grimace turned into a smile when he saw Anna’s pleasure at having been of help. He wiped away a spot of grease on her forehead with his sleeve and told her: “What would I do without you?”

  Larry reprogrammed the thermostat to anticipate the ambient temperature instead of reacting to it, and that fixed the oscillation problem. It took nearly a year to work out the rest of the kinks in the system, but by the middle of Year Two things ran quite smoothly. The climate inside the Shell now remained stable. The heating and air quality systems worked seamlessly to maintain Central at a comfortable 20 degrees. The air never felt stale. Though the relative humidity varied between thirty and forty percent, it never got too dry or too muggy.

  The food situation underwent major changes but remained comfortable. As Larry had foreseen, their supply of fresh eggs, milk, and fish ran out by the end of the first year, and they had to switch to powdered eggs, condensed milk, and tinned fish. The Shellmates found the substitutes a little hard to swallow initially, but soon adjusted to them.

  “We just need to recalibrate our taste buds,” said Jessica.

  The end of their bread supply—they ate their last loaf on May 16 of Year Four—hit them harder. Their own attempts at breadmaking were only moderately successful. The end results were palatable but couldn’t compare with the delicious gourmet loaves that Larry had provided.

  “Perhaps you should have stocked up with supermarket loaves instead,” Anna joked. “Then our homemade bread wouldn’t seem so bad in comparison.”

  The bright spot was in the horticulture department. Anna’s manure and hydroponics experiments had proved successful, and they had a steady supply of fresh produce to supplement the dry goods and tinned foods that formed the bulk of their diet. Their Stayman Winesap now yielded excellent fruit—sweet, tart, juicy, and crisp—but the apple of Anna’s eye was the avocado, which began yielding fruit in its third year. Plump, smooth, and delicious, the emerald-fleshed produce of the avocado tree was so abundant that they soon had more than enough for their needs, and Elizabeth began freezing some of the fruit for a future avocado-less day.

  Nicole continued giving her periodic health exams and was relieved to observe that no one showed signs of suffering from their prolonged stay in the Shell’s artificial environment. Their bone and muscle masses remained stable, while their heart rates and lung capacities showed improvement. Jessica, exercising regularly and eating sensibly for the first time in her life, seemed to be bursting with health, her pudginess gone and her complexion now clear and smooth. Anna seemed as fit as she used to be. Deprived of his rock climbing and surfboarding, Larry was no longer as athletic as before, but he was still fitter and stronger than most men would be at his age.

  Again, the one who caused Nicole the most concern was her mother. While Elizabeth, like Jessica, seemed leaner and fitter than before, she didn’t have age on her side. She continued to fare poorly on the cardio stress tests, but without extensive diagnostics it was hard to identify the cause. Nicole reproached herself for not having had her tested years ago. To improve Elizabeth’s blood lipid profile, Nicole prescribed her a newly approved medication that was—miraculously, it seemed—among the drugs in the clinic’s stocks. Perhaps if she had put her mother on statins years ago, Nicole thought, her arteries would have remained clear. She felt guilty about her negligence, but there was nothing to do now except to monitor her carefully and make sure she got the best possible diet, the right kind of exercise, and plenty of rest. She shared her fears with Elizabeth and Larry, but if she expected a word of reproach from them she was disappointed. Elizabeth, used to giving rather than receiving, was always touchingly grateful for even the slightest attention shown to her. Overwhelmed by everything her family did for her wellbeing, she was shocked that Nicole would entertain even the slightest feeling of guilt on her behalf. And Larry, of course, who could never see Nicole as anything but the sincerest of women, laughed away her self-reproach.

  “With the benefit of hindsight, we become aware of the thousands of errors in our lives,” he said. “We can’t go around blaming ourselves for all that.” Nicole was comforted by their support, but her nagging guilt never went away completely.

  Larry’s work schedule enjoyed great success. The girls soon mastered the workings of their own domes, and both were happy to be given a share of the responsibility of their survival and eager to show herself useful. Each of the five teams continued to work harmoniously. Larry had toyed with the idea of a reshuffle as part of his plan for all of them to develop some degree of all-round competence, but he decided to wait. Everyone was in a nice groove, and a major change in dome assignments would be disruptive. He consulted Elizabeth. “Perhaps we should hold off a bit,” she said.

  The afternoon classes were a mixed bag. Larry’s talks on Shell design had been very popular, but by the end of the second year he had exhausted that topic. He continued lecturing on engineering topics that were of interest only to Jessica, though Anna and Nicole made a game effort to keep up. Nicole’s medical lectures were popular as well, but there was only so much she could tell them about the human body in a classroom—a biology lab would have made such a difference! She could demonstrate the chemistry of body fluids using equipment from the clinic, but it was impossible to make anatomy interesting without animals or cadavers to dissect.

  Her daughters were luckier in this regard. Anna was able to explain the principles of botany using specimens from the Eco dome, showing her students how seeds, pollen grains, and other plant parts looked under the microscope. This made it easier for them to visualize the intricate docking of the pollen with the stigma and its subsequent journey down the pollen tube to the flower’s ovary. They were no longer mystified by the complex biology that magically transforms a dry, hard seed into a living plant. Jessica was in an even better position to teach her subjects—all she needed was a computer, and Larry had equipped Central with the best available. Soon, everyone at the Shell was not only a competent programmer but could understand some of the complex algorithms that regulated their living environment.

  By the fourth year, however, even the girls had exhausted their repertoire. Elizabeth continued to hold an occasional workshop focused on laughter, mindfulness, or communication, but she didn’t feel the need to do it every day. Her main concern had been to maintain harmony, and that battle was now won.

  The need for instruction in practical matters now felt less important. The family decided to focus their teaching on culture instead. Every week, one of the five assigned the others a book or film that they liked and led a discussion on it. Nicole taught the girls the basic steps of tango. Larry proved to be a waltzer of some ability, and he helped the others master the basics of that classic dance form. Anna taught the others how to play simple tunes on a piano that was cleverly hidden behind one of the large computer panels. To remind themselves of the lost human civilization, they told each other stories of the people and customs they had seen and experienced. Elizabeth gave lessons in Maori, as did Larry in Tamil and Nicole in French. The students had great fun trying to master new and unfamiliar sounds in each language, in particular the zh and L consonants in Tamil, the r and œ in French, and the wh in Maori. The language lessons were popular—actually, too popular, as the girls began to adopt so many non-English words that their language threatened to turn into a patois.

  “Combien de wai irukku in the pot?” [“How much water is there in the pot?”].

  “Pot est kali” [“Pot is empty”].

  The elders grew worried. “What if we leave this place someday and nobody understands us?” Nicole said. The family then adopted a policy of speaking a different language during breakfast each day, but without any mixing of tongues.

  Aside from the culture lessons, the afternoon classes evolved into a self-study period, with each member busy with their own interests. Occasionally, one of them would seek input from another or from the group, and an animated discussion would break out. But more often companionable silence
prevailed.

  So life went on in the Shell, year after year. Everyone did their share, and other than an occasional flash of temper from Jessica—which seemed now more out of habit than from any real vexation, subsiding almost as quickly as it started—there was rarely any discord. Even though they didn’t speak to each other as much as before, their need for each other’s physical company grew stronger. Even Jessica preferred to remain upstairs during her private time. Everyone seemed to feel solace in the family. Although necessity forced them to work in separate teams, they exercised, ate, studied, played, and slept together.

  The comforting presence of one another became their best defense against the terrifying reality outside.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Meeting

  On their fifth anniversary, the five held a special celebration. They gathered at Central after dinner, with subdued but raucous Bhangra music wafting from the sound system accompanied by scents of patchouli and honeysuckle from the incense bowl. Larry produced another excellent bottle of champagne from a source that even Jessica’s shrewd eyes had failed to locate.

  “Awesome bubbly!” Anna said. “Can you believe it? Five years in storage and it’s, like, the freshest and fizziest champagne ever.”

  Everyone sipped their drink in silent enjoyment for several minutes. “Mmm … this is nice,” said Nicole.