Unlight

by Chandra Shekhar

  Over the next few weeks, the family’s customary activities were suspended in favor of the pre-eminent goal of restoring Nicole’s health. It took her a week to start walking by herself, and another month before she could participate in more strenuous physical activity. Even though she was a shadow of her former energetic self, still needing a daily shot of stimulant to start her day, she was obviously “back.” But her improved physical condition only served to highlight her inner turmoil, which she could no longer conceal from the others. She now openly admitted the troubling questions that had taken over her mind.

  “Pity that Mum had to nearly die before we realized what she was going through,” Jessica commented.

  “I should’ve been more forthcoming,” said Nicole. “But I’m so used to taking care of others’ health that I hated the idea of making a fuss about my own.”

  “Now that the spiritual cat is out of the bag, it’s time to treat your ailment,” said Larry. “Do you agree, Lizzie?”

  “Yes, the sooner the better.”

  That very day, October 29 of Year Eight, Nicole’s meditation lessons started. They didn’t go well initially. She could not sit still for more than a few seconds at a time and felt unbearably restless in any position. She also proved to be uncharacteristically irritable. Her mother’s plea to breathe deep, let the tension out, and let the healing thoughts in only seemed to exasperate her. Once again, Elizabeth realized her limitations as a spiritual advisor to her daughter. Naturally calm herself, she could sit quietly in any position for hours on end without discomfort. Meditation came almost naturally to her, and that made her a poor teacher for her daughter, whose restlessness she couldn’t relate to. “I’m like a dolphin trying to teach a human to swim,” she sighed.

  After the failure of their first few sessions, Elizabeth asked the others for suggestions. She observed that her daughter’s nerves seemed to be in an extreme state of irritation. “Until we help her overcome that, she can’t get into a relaxed state.”

  “And the stimulants probably aren’t helping,” said Anna. “But I guess we can’t stop them until she’s better.”

  “How about some counter-irritation?” asked Jessica.

  “Counter-irritation? What do you mean, dear?”

  “I get it!” said Anna, who by now had such close sympathy with her sister that she could decode her thought processes well before anyone else. “We make her feel some other sensation—put ice cubes on her back, say—to keep her nerves busy while you work your spiritual magic. Like those sleep machines that produce a steady rushing sound that drowns out all other ambient noises.”

  “Exactly!” said Jessica. “I was thinking of putting pressure on her hands and feet.”

  Larry rubbed his chin doubtfully. “Hmm … I can’t see how that would help.”

  “I find it soothing when someone grips my hands very hard and then let’s go,” Jessica explained. “Pain is actually calming.”

  Larry pondered her idea for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, let’s give it try.”

  Elizabeth approved the plan. At her next meditation lesson she had the girls dig their nails into Nicole’s calves, while Larry pinched her arms.

  “Pinch hard,” she told them. “do you feel it, Nicole?”

  “Ow!” she said.

  “Pinch harder!” Elizabeth ordered. They did, and Nicole screamed.

  “Okay, girls, ease off just a bit and hold it. Now Nicole, I want you to close your eyes and breathe deeply. Feel the pain.”

  Nicole breathed deeply. The pain was intense.

  “Now Nicole, be the pain.”

  As Nicole continued to breathe, the pain took over her entire existence. At that moment nothing else existed. Her focus was absolute. As she sat and breathed, her pain gradually receded and she was aware of a strange calmness. It lasted only a minute or two, but during that short interval, her questions didn’t nag her. She felt more peace than she had in a long time.

  She opened her eyes and saw that her loving torturers had stopped the pinching. They were now anxiously gazing at her.

  “Well?” asked Jessica.

  “I think it worked,” Nicole replied. “Just for a bit, but things seemed to get quieter inside.”

  “Thank heavens for your cruel streak, Jessica!” said her sister, hugging her. Jessica stuck her tongue out, but she was perilously close to tears. Elizabeth, fighting tears herself, decided to give Nicole a few more doses of the treatment, pinching her at a different spot each time. By the end of their two-hour session, Nicole had managed to stay calm for a full five-minute stretch. They had two sessions the following day, and for several days after. By the third week, Nicole’s arms and legs were black and blue all over. But soon she no longer needed to be pinched and was far more receptive to her mother’s coaching. It took her another two weeks, until early December of Year Eight, to experience her first meditative state. After that, there was no stopping her. She spent several hours each day downstairs in her room practicing the various techniques her mother had taught her and discovering some of her own. Her questions never went away—looking inward produced no more answers than looking outward. But somehow it didn’t matter anymore. Her inner journey often conjured up such bliss that her intimate moments with Philip and Larry paled in comparison. She emerged from each session as recharged as her mother after her “sessions” with Larry.

  “To each her own,” Jessica murmured to her sister with a wink.

  By the middle of January of Year Nine, Nicole had been fully restored to health. The period after her recovery was one of the happiest in the Shell. Nicole, revitalized by a deep inner joy that she had never experienced before, was in the highest of spirits. Her joy was infectious, and soon everyone went around with a smile. Even Larry, who thought his brain lacked a right hemisphere, started dabbling in meditation. The sight of him sitting uncomfortably cross-legged and chanting Ommmm would send the girls into paroxysms of giggles.

  This happy period lasted nearly four months. Then one morning the heat failed to come on.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Cooling

  After causing the closure of the Food dome in May of Year Seven, the well cooled more slowly for a few months and then remained stable for a year and a half. Indeed, it behaved so well that it lulled the family into a false sense of security. Jessica and Larry even wondered if their heroic efforts to install the diesel backup had been worthwhile. But on May 13 of Year Nine, they had the dubious satisfaction of seeing their fears confirmed.

  The first inkling was the failure of the heat to come on at its scheduled time of 5:00 a.m. The unexpected chill caused everyone to oversleep, and it was past 7:00 by the time the family woke up. And when they did, they had a nasty surprise in store: a thermometer that stayed obstinately at zero degrees. Jessica rushed to the Geo dome—by now, the rule about never moving about alone had long been suspended—and immediately found what the problem was. It was not, as she hoped, a blocked pipe or broken thermostat—serious but fixable problems—but what she and Larry feared the most. The well had cooled and was continuing to cool.

  Back in Central, the group met with a feeling of déjà vu. By now everyone knew the drill: close another dome, lower the thermostat, and hope for the best. The choice of which dome to close was obvious this time, as they had only one besides Central and Geo in operation. Nevertheless, Larry consulted Anna first. Her beloved plants were dead, her bioreactors were idle, but she was still the mistress of the Eco dome. The green light would have to come from her.

  “Well, there’s nothing eco about it now, is there?” she said in a resigned voice. “Let’s move the kitchen and chlorella panels in here and shut the damn thing down.”

  Jessica went over and hugged her. A few years ago she might have downplayed or even mocked her sister’s loss; now all she felt was empathy.

  The rest of the day passed in moving the kitchen and pantry to Central. It was gloomy, laborious work, made more tedious by the extra layers of clothing they
had to wear against the now biting cold. By dinnertime, the move was finished. Eco was shut off for good. Before long, that dome, like Air and Food before it, would be just a memory.

  It was a somber family that sat down to dinner that evening. On the positive side, Central was slowly warming up again. Their living quarters, though, were now really cramped. The kitchen and pantry took up most of the office space, while the chlorella panels stood in the living area, squeezed against the medical equipment relocated there after the closure of Health. Their sleeping tent had to be pulled down since it took up too much space. And with all that, the energy situation remained precarious.

  “Is there anything more we can do?” Elizabeth asked Larry.

  “Not that I can think of.”

  Closing the Eco dome got them a few weeks’ respite. Morale, gloomy at first, soon rose again. Their games, dances, and other activities were now seriously circumscribed, but the family took it in their stride. They invented games that took advantage of their peculiar living situation. They played hide and go seek with the lights off. Larry was an ace at seeking, until it turned out he was cheating by using infrared goggles to detect body heat. Another favorite game was walking from any object in the dome to another blindfolded without bumping into anything. Jessica, with her strong spatial memory, reigned supreme until Larry cheated again by moving objects while she was approaching them. Limericks came fast and furious, darker and funnier than Jessica could have ever hoped for. Impromptu skits, music sessions, and dances helped them while away their time. “This feels like the most incredible holiday ever,” Anna remarked. “A bit surreal, but who cares?”

  On July 2 of Year Nine, without any further warning, the geothermal well simply went out. In the space of a few hours its core temperature dropped from about 800 degrees to several degrees below freezing. (“Well below freezing,” as Jessica quipped.)

  Once again, a blast of cold caught the family as they were getting up in the morning. They knew instinctively that this was no ordinary cooling. Jessica went to Geo and hurried back to confirm what they feared. “The well’s history,” she said.

  “It could’ve given us more notice,” was Anna’s only comment.

  Larry and Jessica had anticipated the event, judging by the rate of cooling of the Geo well. A few days previously they had already switched on the diesel heating system at its lowest setting. Now they cranked up its power. By noon, Central was warm again.

  “It’s down to us and Entry,” he said, adding to himself: and we are living on borrowed time.

  “How long will the diesel last?” Elizabeth asked Larry, as always giving him an opening to talk about something unpleasant but necessary.

  “About a year,” he said.

  “And after that?”

  “After that, we’ll have to stay in our spacesuits. That won’t be much fun, I’m afraid.”

  “Yikes,” said Anna. “And how long can we survive in them?”

  “A week or two.”

  “Ouch.”

  The family members digested the news in silence. If Larry had expected his companions to express dismay or fear, he was proved wrong. Once again, he was amazed and touched by their courage and stoicism. Anna expressed the group’s sentiment: “We have like a year before we run out of fuel. Let’s enjoy it as much as we can.”

  “Yes, let’s party like there’s no tomorrow,” Jessica said. “Literally.”

  Animated by this spirit, the family resumed what became their latest version of a normal existence. Maintenance and housekeeping chores mingled with fun and frolic. Morale remained high, camaraderie stayed solid, and optimism held strong. Having only twelve months of heating left was a grim prospect, but to a bunch of humans surviving against all odds on a dead planet, any future other than instant annihilation was to be celebrated. And they did.

  Very soon, they no longer spoke about the geothermal well. “Let’s pretend it never existed,” said Larry.

  That turned out to be a mistake.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Fracture

  While the family worked and played and loved in blissful ignorance, deep below them the Earth’s core had been slowly but steadily losing its titanic thermal battle with the Shroud-cooled surface. Initially, geothermal heat moving upward and outward from the Earth’s interior held its own against the cold front bearing down from the surface. Gradually, however, as the Earth’s surface grew colder, its internal warmth fled further inward. And when the cold front from the surface reached the Geo well’s heat source, the Shell lost its primary energy supply.

  That was catastrophic enough, but the failure of the well presaged a deadlier problem.

  As the family figured out later, when a large, complex, and heterogeneous object contracts, the process isn’t uniform. Some parts shrink more than others. Eventually, the thermo-mechanical stress causes the object to break apart; if the object already has holes or cracks, that’s where the fractures tend to occur. In the case of the Shell, the bedrock underneath had one large, deep hole—the geothermal well—along with several cavities that accommodated the hexes and subterranean tunnels connecting them. It also had the water well and a number of narrow, deep holes in the washrooms intended for the disposal of non-recyclable waste. The rock had several possible routes for fracture, but the path of least resistance lay along the imaginary line joining the Geo, Central, and Air domes as well as the two main washrooms. There was almost as much hole as solid ground along that path. That’s where the break occurred.

  The trouble arrived on September 1 of Year Nine and, as always, came in the small hours of the morning. It announced itself with a deafening crack and a blast of cold that seemed to come from the frigid reaches of outer space. Everyone woke up instantly in bewilderment and shock. Nicole was the first to recover. She struggled up and was about to step forward into the darkened room when she heard Jessica scream, “Mum, stop!” Larry switched on the flashlight he kept near the bed. The sight that greeted them was pure nightmare.

  It was not a sight, but an absence of one, a void, a ghastly, dark emptiness where their office should have been. For just inches away from the foot of their sleeping area was an abyss that went down as far as the eye could see. The kitchen, office, and washroom were gone. The passages to the Geo and Air domes had disappeared. All that was left was the part of the floor where they had slept, their living space with the chlorella panels, and the door to the Entry dome. Most of their roof was gone as well. They were now out in the open.

  What saved them, ironically, was the failure of the well. Since that catastrophe, the thermostat had been turned all the way down at night to conserve energy. In the sub-Arctic conditions that resulted, the family had taken to sleeping in the warmest clothing possible, including thick gloves, socks, and ski masks. But for that, they would have frozen instantly. Even now, they were only seconds away from death.

  “Quick! Into Entry!” Larry shouted. His voice sounded tinny and appeared to come from a great distance.

  Entry was mercifully intact. It took them only seconds to get to its safety, but those seconds felt like an eternity in the hellish cold. Once inside, Larry, Jessica, and Anna put on their spacesuits and fetched the chlorella panels and solar lamps from Central. They made one more trip to salvage what else they could—pillows, blankets, journals—and turned off all heat to the shattered dome that had been their home for the past decade. Larry did a quick check of Air. The door to it opened, but much of the dome had been erased by another yawning crater. Jessica likewise tried to see if Health was intact but found that the Fracture had irreparably jammed the doors leading to it on both levels. It, too, was lost for good.

  They had started their stay in the Shell with a big Central dome and six smaller outer domes. They were now down to a single outer dome, Entry.

  The Shell was now just a shell.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Post-Mortem

  The family huddled together on fragments of carpet salvaged from Central. Lar
ry produced a bottle of brandy kept for emergencies in every dome. Using fuel container caps as makeshift tumblers, he poured out measures of the amber liquid for each of them.

  “Well, Jessica, you were right as always.” Larry coughed as the fiery liquid burned in his throat. “The unknown got us.”

  “But what the hell happened?” said Anna. “I still can’t believe what I saw! What is it, a crevasse?”

  “It certainly looked like one,” Larry replied. “But how and why, I’ve no clue.”

  “Earthquake?”

  “Unlikely. We’re nowhere near a fault.”

  “Jessica, any idea?”

  “Differential contraction.”

  The other women looked puzzled, but Larry nodded. “Could be,” he said and added for the others’ benefit: “Jessica thinks the cold might have shrunk the rock under us unevenly.”

  “That’s right,” Jessica said, and outlined a theory of how the cold could have caused the ground below to fracture.

  The family digested this idea for a few moments. “So what’s our situation now?” Nicole asked Larry.

  Larry took a deep breath. His heart still pounded from the excitement and alarm of their narrow escape. “Our situation is dire, I’m afraid.” His heart brimmed with despair as he looked at the grim, anxious faces of his companions. How do I break it to them? Haven’t they suffered enough? With infinite weariness he said: “We’ve lost most of our food and water. The Air dome has cracked open, and our food store has vanished into the void. The Food dome and the pond under it are on the other side of the chasm.”

  “They might as well be on the other side of the planet,” said Jessica.

  “Yes, they’re forever out of reach. Perhaps we should’ve left half our food here, but like an idiot I had us shift most of it to Air to make way for the fuel.”