A Trip to the Stars

by Nicholas Christopher

  “And move him?”

  “Why not? It’s not like we’re going to call the police. We both know how he felt about them. But, more to the point, there is nothing they could do about this.”

  Steadying my hands, I pried Samax’s hand away with difficulty, and was surprised at once by how wet it was. His robe, too, was soaked through at that spot on his side.

  “Why, it’s blood.”

  “No, not blood,” Desirée interjected. “Do you see a tear in the robe?”

  I smoothed and tugged the fabric, but saw nothing.

  “It will barely be visible,” she went on. “More like a puncture.”

  “This might be it,” I said, pressing my fingers up behind the wet patch.

  “Now look beneath that spot at the pajamas.”

  The pajamas’ silk was thinner and I was able to find the puncture in it, barely the width of a pencil.

  “But if that’s not blood, what is it?” I said.

  “Water,” she replied. “Ice water, to be exact.”

  All at once I saw what she was getting at. My mind flew back to a long-ago dinner when I was a boy at Samax’s side, hanging on his every word as he regaled the table with a description of the Borgias’ special methods of commiting murder. Foremost among them stabbing the victim with a dagger of ice, frozen in a mold, that left no fingerprints or evidence of a weapon, just a puncture wound—if one was looking for it—and a bit of water.

  “He was stabbed?” I said incredulously.

  “By the thinnest of blades.”

  Just then, there was a deep howling in the corridor before the door burst open and Alif and Aym ran in with Sirius barking at their heels. Alif brandished a drawn pistol, and Aym in his blind man’s black glasses froze, cocking his head, alert for sound.

  “You’re a little late,” Desirée said.

  Sofiel had found them finally at the edge of the property, bringing Sirius back, and informed them of Samax’s death. Extremely agitated, Alif several times circled Samax’s body, examined it, circled again, and finally stood beside it, his hard black eyes shot through with grief. Aym also circled the body, his ear tilted toward it, listening intently, biting his lip. Then Alif burst into tears and Aym fell to his knees, wringing his hands. After all those years at my uncle’s side, watching over him wherever he went, seeing to so many of his needs as he grew infirm, his bodyguards had grown close to him. But, after all, their real mission was to protect him from death. And when the Angel of Death had finally come for him, stepping out of the spectral light of his visions, Alif and Aym were nowhere to be found.

  “Who would want to murder a dying man?” I said, turning back to Desirée. This was the question I kept asking myself, like a mantra, thinking that if I answered it philosophically, I would be able to answer it practically.

  Desirée took a blanket from the closet and spread it over Samax’s body. “Someone running out of time themselves, Enzo,” she said bitterly. “It doesn’t take inordinate strength to thrust a dagger. Especially when your victim isn’t expecting it.”

  “You’re talking about the Man of Smoke?” I said, and she seemed puzzled for a moment.

  Then she looked me in the eye. “Enzo, just so you know: the person you call the Man of Smoke is my father, Spica. He came back after all these years,” she said with a rueful smile, “not to see me, but to help redesign the hotel.”

  “Spica?”

  “Yes. Samax told me last night who he was.”

  “Have you spoken with him?”

  “Not yet. But I know this: he didn’t kill Samax.”

  At that moment, we caught our first whiff of smoke. Desirée and I both knew immediately that it was a kind of smoke we had never smelled before around the hotel. Only once had I smelled it elsewhere, I thought, as all the fire alarms around the hotel began going off.

  “We’d better get downstairs,” Desirée said, grabbing my hand and pulling me into the corridor with Sirius at our side. “You, too,” she called back to Alif and Aym, but they shook their heads defiantly as if to say that if they had failed Samax in life, they certainly weren’t going to leave his side in death. Then Alif made a sign indicating they would bring Samax’s body down.

  “Shouldn’t we wait for them?” I said to Desirée.

  “They can take care of themselves. And nothing can hurt Samax anymore.”

  At the door to the fire stairs she stopped suddenly and leaned closer to me. The clatter of the alarms was growing louder and we heard shouts from the lower floors. “It was Dolores who killed him,” Desirée said, her breath warm on my face. “And god only knows what she’s done now.”

  19

  Houston

  I tilted the book into the rays of a small yellow light as I read. “All the other moons in the solar system are either captured asteroids, like Phobos and Deimos around Mars, or satellites created at the same time as their planet, like Io and Europa around Jupiter. Our moon is neither.”

  Cassiel had his head in my lap. “There have been plenty of theories about its origin,” he said, “all disproven. We’ve mapped it and broken it down geologically, but we still don’t where the moon came from or how it got there. It’s one of the great mysteries.”

  I shut the book, a history of the solar system which I had picked up that morning. “Did you know,” I said, “that the Babylonians thought it was a mirror reflecting a lost portion of the earth which no one would ever discover?”

  “I like that.” He closed his eyes and I began massaging his temples.

  “Pythagoras, on the other hand, was convinced that the gods created the moon as a dwelling place for the souls of the dead.”

  “Everyone from here who ever died? It would be very crowded.”

  “Not in his time.”

  “Hmm. I hadn’t thought of that. What else did you find out?”

  “Oh no, it’s your turn. What has NASA discovered about the moon’s origin?”

  “That would take me all night.”

  “We have all night.”

  We were lying in the rear seat of his speedboat, in the darkness, anchored far out on a misty lake. The sky was overcast, with low blue clouds. It had been overcast all week: we hadn’t once seen the moon. On the shore, nestled among thickets of maple and elm trees, the houses twinkled with lights. In one house a blue light glowed in an upstairs window, where I had screwed a blue bulb into the bedside lamp.

  This was where Cassiel lived, a small ranch house in Clear Lake City, on the outskirts of Houston, a mile from the Johnson Space Center. A lot of NASA people, including astronauts, lived around that lake. Cassiel said it was the first real house he had lived in since he was a boy. He had been renting it for two years, yet it contained very few possessions outside the basic furnishings. He had bought himself a stereo, an aquarium stocked with neon fish, and a pool table, and there was a black BMW motorcycle and a white Corvette in the garage. That was about it. For him, it was a lot. A career nomad, accustomed to carrying everything he owned in a pair of sky-blue Air Force duffel bags and a trunk, he simply wasn’t one to accumulate objects of any sort.

  I had been visiting him for ten days. Five months had passed since our rendezvous in Honolulu. At the end of the week he and the other astronauts would fly from Ellington Air Force Base to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral; twelve days after that, they would be launched into space. In Florida, they would live in quarantine in the Spartan quarters of the Space Center. Cassiel would have his own bedroom, but would share a living room, mess hall, and conference room—its walls adorned with lunar and astral maps—with the others. They would be served high-calorie meals, work out in an exercise room, receive endless briefings, and continue the daily sessions in the flight simulator that had been their second home in Houston. Eight hours a day for six months they had worked the complex control panels of switches, levers, and valves, learning to read every nuance in the dense array of dials and displays before them while they simulated hundreds of planned maneuvers
and countless variations that might arise in a crisis.

  Seeing the pressures Cassiel was under, feeling them palpably, vicariously, as I slept beside him, I understood why a number of Apollo astronauts a decade earlier had become religious zealots or alcoholics after their missions. Gazing back on the earth while standing on the moon might make me very religious, too—as if I’d seen the light and then some—but there was also a time it might have made me want to drink a great deal. In fact, Cassiel would stand on the far side, at the dead center of the forty-one percent of the lunar surface that is never visible on earth, looking out to the stars—something no man had ever done. I thought that this image of himself, gazing into an enormous glittering expanse, must have been hovering in the back of his mind for months.

  My own feelings about his mission remained the same: I was at once excited and fearful. He had explained the mechanics of the flight to me, and shared many of the briefing materials that he brought home at night. Many of the facts that related to the flight, crucial to him as a navigator, I now knew by heart.

  For example, that the moon, 234,000 miles from earth, orbits it at a speed of 2,300 mph and is an elusive moving target, especially if you yourself are traveling at 5,000 mph.

  That the three-stage Saturn V rocket which would propel him into space was 363 feet high, with five enormous engines to power the first stage alone. At liftoff, the combined thrust of those engines would be 160 million horsepower. 160 million horses pulling them into the sky. Burning half a million gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen for 21/2 minutes in order to travel 40 miles. And then falling away.

  The flight to the moon would take 66 hours. Half the time required for a transatlantic voyage by ocean liner. Or the time it would take to drive nonstop from Miami to Anchorage.

  To enter lunar orbit, they would decelerate to 3,700 mph. On the far side of the moon, whether orbiting or on the surface, they would lose all radio contact with mission control. During their third revolution, Cassiel and one of the other astronauts would board the lunar module, detach from the command module, and descend to the surface. Landing on the far side, in pitch-darkness, would be treacherous. To be sure they touched down on clear, level ground, Cassiel would override the onboard computer and navigate manually, scanning quickly with infrared viewfinders. The only natural source of illumination on the far side is starlight, and Cassiel said it would be strong enough to cast his shadow—something that had happened to him only once on earth, in the Sonora Desert on a moonless night.

  On the near side of the moon, the temperature varies wildly, from 225°F in full sunlight to -240° in darkness. On the far side, it remains -250°. Cassiel and his partner would set out a semicircle of high-intensity lights beside their module and work with powerful helmet lamps, like coal miners. They would assemble the twin 120-inch refracting telescopes, gather geological specimens, and take seismographic readings. For four nights, until their work was done, they would sleep in their space suits in net hammocks suspended within their module.

  When they returned to the command module, the Constellation, they would immediately leave lunar orbit. The Constellation’s engine had no fallible moving parts—no fuel pumps or ignition system. Pressurized helium forced the propellants into the combustion chamber. In the icy prison of lunar orbit, this engine—and its backup—were the crew’s lifeline. It would launch them into space for another 60,000 miles before carrying them the 300,000 miles back home. The amount of fuel they could carry on such a long mission left little margin for error; and the same went for air, food, and water. If they should veer off course for very long at any point—and this would be Cassiel’s responsibility—they wouldn’t be able to return to earth.

  From the moon to Nova 1, a point in space that would be roughly in line with Mars and Jupiter when they arrived, was two days’ flying time. Each mile they traveled beyond the moon would put them farther into space than any astronauts had ever been. At Nova 1 they would take hundreds of telescopic photographs of the larger stars and the closest galaxies, including Andromeda.

  Five days later, the three astronauts would reenter the earth’s atmosphere at 25,000 mph along an angle of entry just 2° wide. Their projected landing point was at 148°20’E, 12°6’N, in the South Pacific between Guam and Saipan.

  Their estimated time in space: 527 hours, 12 minutes, 56 seconds.

  I reviewed the facts of his mission many times, and in the end was comforted by one thought above all others: the sky was Cassiel’s element, whether it was earthly, lunar, or interplanetary. He had come to me from the sky, in Vietnam, and when he took leave of me someday—as he had once before, but this time forever—I was certain it would be the same way. I could live with that. But in my gut I didn’t think that day had arrived. Not yet. Not even with this mission, filled with so many perils.

  By the time of my visit to Houston, alone together for the last time before the mission, we had stopped talking about the perils. The launch date was fast approaching, it was going to happen; any abstractions attached to it were quickly evaporating. In Cassiel I sensed no fear whatsoever, despite the fact that at the Space Center, where he was now spending practically every waking hour, they were focusing on everything that could possibly go wrong, ironing out kinks. When he came home, we talked about other things. We still had plenty of the past to catch up on, and it was easier to do so now that the wounds of our long separation had begun to heal. He liked hearing stories about my own travels and, especially, my days in the mind-reading business. We cooked together—neither of us very good at it—and shot pool and made love and listened to his jazz records lying on the living room carpet. Each morning before dawn we took the speedboat out and went for a swim.

  For much of my visit in Clear Lake City I stayed around the house. I tinkered in the small garden or canoed alone on the lake. I culled a chronology of Cassiel’s mission from the briefing books, so that back on Kauai I could follow his progress each day. A couple of times I accompanied him to the Space Center and he led me on a tour that was off-limits to ordinary tourists: up into the gleaming rocket gantries and through the labyrinthine chambers of the flight simulation center. He took me into the simulation models of his command and lunar modules. In the command module I was most drawn to the small triple-layered convex window from which Cassiel would view the moon, the stars, and finally the earth, the size of a nickel, from deep in space.

  I also went into downtown Houston several times while Cassiel was at the Space Center, to go to the movies or wander through a museum. To my surprise, on the last of these solo outings I ran into an old acquaintance.

  I had just bought a green dress with a flowered print—so much like the one I had worn for Cassiel in Manila that I couldn’t resist it—and then worn it out of the store. Next I picked up the Christmas present I had ordered for him at a map store, a highly detailed topographical globe of the moon, three feet in diameter, with his projected landing site marked by a gold star.

  At five o’clock I went to the natural-science museum where I spent the next hour and a half before meeting Cassiel for dinner. After exploring an exhibit about ancient deep-sea creatures, I took a spin through the entomological wing, where there was a new selection of South American jungle moths and giant mountain butterflies. I was at the last display case when a slight, stoop-shouldered man with a white goatee hurried by, steering a pushcart through the narrow aisle. I don’t know if it was his thick, wire-rimmed spectacles or the spider terrarium perched on the pushcart that registered with me first. But the moment he passed me, I realized the man was Zaren Eboli, my onetime employer in New Orleans. It took him a bit longer to recognize me after I called his name. When he did, he turned ashen. I thought he was going to faint as he approached me, taking his furtive, pigeon-toed steps.

  “Mala? Mala from the morgue at the Saint-Eustace parish library?”

  “Yes.” I hadn’t thought of myself in those terms in some time, and for a moment I felt a twinge of regret for having stopped him.


  “My god. I often wondered over the years what happened to you.”

  I flushed, for it was a painful memory. “You mean, after I got myself bitten by one of your spiders.” I shook my head. “The Ummidia Stellarum. I hope I didn’t kill it.”

  He smiled ruefully, and I saw just how much older he looked, how time had deepened the creases in his brow and the crow’s-feet beside his eyes. His nervous voice and polite manner, however, were just as I remembered them. “No, the spider survived,” he replied, “but I wasn’t sure that you had.”

  I extended my hand. “Well, here I am. And I must apologize, however belatedly.” His hand, with the missing pinky, was small and dry. “You were so kind to me back then.”

  He scoffed at this. “No apologies necessary. But what happened to you after that day?”

  “Oh, the venom didn’t affect me much,” I said drily. “I just drove up to Savannah and enlisted in the Navy Nursing Corps and was shipped off to Vietnam.”

  “Really. I remember you being very much against the war.”

  “Oh, I remained so, more than ever. But things worked out unexpectedly for me in the end. I wouldn’t be here in Houston right now if your spider hadn’t bitten me.”

  He cocked his head.

  “I met someone in Vietnam,” I said, “we fell in love, met again after many years, and I’m here with him now. He’s with NASA.”

  He seemed taken aback by my directness. “He’s a scientist?”

  “An astronaut.”

  “Well, I’m glad for you.”

  “But tell me about yourself,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I’ve just finished cataloguing the spiders of the southwestern states. 2,942 of them, to be exact. The head curator gave me an office here. You know, I’m doing what I’ve always done.” He cleared his throat. “Do you have time for a cup of tea, perhaps, in our modest cafeteria?”