Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  “Not even close. I just want to know what’s going to kill us. Call it a physician’s morbid fascination.”

  “You look sweet but you’re quite ghoulish, aren’t you?” Evgeni said, and flicked Marcanta’s ear.

  “Gravity. They didn’t account for the effect strontium would have on artificial gravity and friction,” Nedda said. The isotope swap had broken the design.

  “People who aren’t always thinking about gravity forget to plan for it—or for its absence,” Marcanta said. “Blindness and dying generators. Same thing. So what do we do?”

  “We could crack it open and replace that piece, but the dose of radiation anyone would get while fixing it would probably be fatal,” Evgeni said.

  “Sure,” Nedda said. “But how soon? Would they die before planetfall? If we can get there and get at least some of us on ground …”

  “Fast. Days, not months. That’s good in some ways, but they’re bad days. Chernobyl, Fukushima bad. Paluel bad,” Marcanta said.

  Paluel still turned Nedda’s stomach. She let go of the wall, spinning around onto her belly, letting herself float, letting the air cradle her. The purple grow lights were peaceful, comforting. The hydro lab looked and smelled alive. “That’s assuming the rod needs replacing, but it functions properly before Amadeus overheats.”

  Evgeni tapped on the screen. “Singh’s idea of flooding the chamber may be helping, but if the spikes continue, or accelerate …”

  The water would heat up and form steam, which, with nowhere to go, could blast a hole in the module. “Have you ever seen an old pressure cooker?” Nedda said.

  “What’s that?” Evgeni asked.

  “It was this pot with a gasket that used steam— Never mind. They used to explode a lot. You know, take boiling water, add a lot of pressure and a faulty gasket. Boom.”

  “Ah. Boom.” Evgeni said.

  Chawla’s hum and Singh’s ragged snore filled the silence. Sometimes he hummed in his sleep; Nedda had thought it tuneless until Marcanta recognized one of the songs as the theme from a children’s program Nedda had never seen.

  The diagram of Amadeus rotated on the tablet between them. Nedda traced its lines, which were precise, clean, and had been run through a thousand computers. The failure was human. Thrift, politics, reliance on a beautiful but unrealistic idea that the world could cooperate.

  “You all right, Nedda?”

  “Yeah, just homesick, I guess. It hits me at weird times.”

  “All time is weird here,” Evgeni said. “Do you want anything from the printer? I’ve been tinkering with a program to get it to make quaaludes. You won’t feel homesick. You won’t feel anything.”

  “Thanks, but no. I need a little space to think.”

  “It’s time to wake Singh up anyway,” Marcanta said.

  They left her alone to straighten the long beans on their frames, detangling them from the squash. They looked like sea monsters, wriggling wherever they pleased. The sweet potatoes were getting too much light and sprouting in every direction. The beans seemed happiest. They grew fat rather than long. They curled and twisted, but the seeds were viable.

  She was mixing a batch of growing medium when the lab printer beeped. The screen blinked:

  PAPAS, NEDDA

  PLACE HAND

  The screen heated her palm, then the printer whirred and spit a tiny pill—green, and smaller than a pencil eraser—into its tray. She searched for it in her tablet. A stronger derivative of propranolol. She read through the uses. Off-label for glaucoma. Anxiety. Not Evgeni’s quaaludes, but aimed at the same thing.

  Chawla knew their fears.

  She swallowed the pill and pulled up the diagram of Amadeus. A slight warmth came from the screen as she rotated the diagram with her finger. A gentle, blanketing heat let her know the pill had begun to kick in. In the cold of space and the module, it was welcome. She closed her eyes, and the artificial warmth felt a little like home.

  1986: Oscillation

  Theo bent below a vent hose, dodging the gaze of someone in the hallway. The window in the lab’s door was small, but any underclassman walking the halls this early had the kind of ambition that bred intrusiveness.

  He inched his hands into gloves and waited for the throbbing to subside. Nedda had hurt him. Intentionally, which was shocking, but not as shocking as her observation. She was right. Crucible was moving.

  He’d shut it off.

  He reached for the power switch with his elbow and was met by an uncanny sliding sensation. But not the switch. He tried with his left hand, the better of the two, and felt nothing at all—no push, no pain, only slipping. Oleaginous, yet not.

  Crucible was running and he couldn’t touch the switch.

  His daughter was many things—prickly, smart, sometimes rude—but she wasn’t a liar. Nedda had been terrified. That was why she’d hurt him, the only logical reason. Whatever had happened, whatever she’d seen, she believed. And Crucible was running.

  Shit, Papas.

  A dull ache started in his feet, each bone announcing itself as it ground against the next. He ignored it. Pacing was essential for thought. He combed what he knew of the lab’s wiring, the circuits, power supplies, and where the lines ran in the building and out to the street—webs of electricity through the town. He plotted a power surge, a pulse, and conceded; there were, at minimum, five ways a surge could run between the lab, the grove, and Pete McIntyre’s yard. He should have had his own power supply. A self-sustaining unit.

  Shit, Papas.

  It was on, running.

  One glove still on, Theo stumbled down the hallway, unsure of exactly how he meant to get to the grove and the Prater boy. After the damage Nedda had inflicted on his hand, the stick shift would be impossible. He turned back to his office to call Betheen and a heavy body crashed into him, sending him staggering.

  A torn flannel shirt, grease, a thin gray rattail of a braid, a nose that leaned like a drunk. With decades of salvage at his fingertips, Pete McIntyre was helpful with parts when other suppliers were slow or too costly. He also had no reason to be at the college.

  “Professor,” McIntyre said, once he’d recovered. “I was hoping to catch Mrs. Papas. She wasn’t at the house and I figured she might have come by.”

  “No, she hasn’t. Why?”

  “She was in an accident—she’s fine, but I had to tow the car. The axle’s busted. She said she was walking home, but she was pretty shook up. The guy who hit her didn’t make it.”

  “Wait, someone died?”

  “Yeah, an out-of-towner. It happened quick, he went right into the canal. And the damn thing’s frozen too. I never seen anything like it. The trees by the interstate are nutso too. Everything’s grown over the roads. Can’t barely get out of town. That’s how we all wound up on Satsuma.”

  “But she’s fine? Betheen’s all right?”

  “She wasn’t banged up at all. I was going to take her back to the shop, but she said she was fine and wanted to walk home. And you know that look a woman gets when you shouldn’t mess with her. My phone’s out, so I went by the house to let her know I have her car. When she wasn’t there, I thought I’d look for her here, and at least let you know before I headed back.” There was a look people got when looking at Theo’s skin, like they’d smelled something sour. McIntyre was as nice as they came, but his eyes still left that trail of unease—curiosity, disgust—small enough no one else would notice. “You okay?”

  There was no good way to say it. There might be a frozen monkey in your yard and I may have done something terrible to Denny Prater didn’t trip off the tongue. Neither did Thank you for not mentioning that my wife would rather walk home alone than come here for comfort.

  “Yes, yes. Just shocked. You’re sure she’s all right?”

  “She seemed a little shook up, but okay.”

  “Do you have your truck? Of course you do. Right, that’s how you got here. I’m sorry, I didn’t get much sleep last night. Would you mind gi
ving me a ride?”

  “Yeah,” Pete said. “You want me to bring you back home or should I take you over to the garage to have a look at the car?”

  “Home,” he said. Nedda would go there. Betheen would go there. “But would you mind stopping at Prater first? Nedda was after me about something and I don’t want her bothering Betheen with it. Not today.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Theo was braced against the truck door and vomiting onto the gravel at the exit to Prater Citrus. The nausea was sudden, violent, and left him empty while offering no relief. He spat onto the stones. Pete said something Theo couldn’t make out through the ringing in his ears. He pulled in as much air as he could until his vision cleared; then he climbed into the truck. Hollow.

  “Take me back to the college. Please.”

  “What was—” Pete began.

  “Please. I have to get to the lab.”

  Pete shook so badly that it took three tries to get the truck into gear.

  Theo dissected what he’d seen. The grove itself was pulsing—expanding and contracting temporally. Trees aged, then grew younger, running through their lifespans. The trees. Focus on the trees and not on Denny. Were they growing the same fruit again and again, or was it different each time? It should be the same—if it wasn’t, it implied a different form of chaos. Perfectly balanced, they rushed forward, then back through their lives, a closed system.

  A perfect system.

  But even the trees hadn’t prepared Theo to see Denny. Nedda had tried to tell him but he hadn’t listened. He’d been too excited about Crucible.

  Denny Prater was in the equipment shed. Rather, who or what Denny would be in ten or twelve years was in the equipment shed. Alone. A young man—frightened, half-insane, possibly entirely. Isolation caused depression, paranoia, psychotic breaks. There was no real way to measure Denny’s time. His movements were fast, blurred; he jumped like electricity. Watching him was like the disjointed movement of a silent film missing frames. It was worst when Denny had paused, and they’d seen how pitiful he looked. Banging his fists against air. Chewing his hands, which bled and healed in an instant. Theo closed his eyes as Pete drove over a rut. There had been piles of hair on the ground, hair Denny had pulled out—and then the piles disappeared. He’d ripped his own hair out. And then what? Where did it go? Had he eaten it? Scratches appeared on his arms and were scarred over in seconds. How long was it for Denny?

  The trees were balanced, moving forward, then backward, through their life cycles. Equal and opposite reactions. It was watching basic Newtonian physics applied to time, to growth. Nedda said the monkey was slowed. Stopped. Denny had sped up.

  “What did I just see?” Pete said.

  There were no answers. What they’d seen was horrifying. The effect was supposed to be contained. It shouldn’t have bled out of the lab. Denny’s legs, his feet, were no child’s. The boy who’d been Nedda’s shadow was now a man, wild and trapped.

  Sprinklers. She’d said something about sprinklers.

  “Pete, do you have sprinklers in your yard? A drain? Water lines, anything like that?”

  “Yeah, I got sprinklers and I’m on town water. Why? Holy hell. Someone’s got to tell the Praters,” Pete said.

  “Tell them what?”

  “Shit,” Pete said. It sounded like a prayer.

  When Denny first climbed their trellis, Theo had been relieved. Nedda had needed a friend, and if that friend would also punch anyone who teased her, more the better. He enjoyed hearing them whispering, dissecting movies, talking about bikes, fireworks, and space. He knew that boys were never simply friends to girls, but he’d had faith their differences would make a budding romance impossible. He had faith Denny wouldn’t hold her back. Most men didn’t take to women who were smarter; it upset what they saw as the proper order of things. Denny’s order had been upset—by Crucible. It could have been Nedda, it nearly was her.

  I’ve probably killed him.

  He rested his forehead on the passenger window, and pictured Denny’s rolling eyes, the patchy beard of a young man. He looked like his father. Theo kept his interactions with Desmond Prater to a minimum. He was the kind of man who hadn’t cracked a book since high school, who mistrusted scientists, whose head and neck were the same muscular width.

  Denny looked like him, but he looked like Annie too—her sharp cheeks, straight dark eyebrows. Annie, who had looked after Nedda when he and Betheen couldn’t. Annie, who never mentioned a word about Baby Michael, not to Nedda, and they’d never had to ask. Annie, who had first taken Betheen’s cakes to the Society House.

  He’d taken her son away.

  The time Denny was in, the temporal anomaly, had tension. It was almost like the window glass his cheek rested on, but it had pushed back. It was bubble-like, as Nedda said. Like the invisible barrier around the machine. That meant layers, three at least: time around the outside, a connecting area, time inside. Slow, optimal speed, fast.

  “Copper,” Theo said.

  “What?”

  “Pete, do you have any copper? Wiring, pipe—whatever you have. I need a lot. Anything you can get your hands on. I’ll pay you for it, I promise. I can fix this. But please, take me back to the college, then bring me whatever copper you can find.”

  “Denny, he—”

  “Please, just do it.”

  Pete left him standing on the science building’s stoop, inhaling the dust left by the truck tires. Theo breathed it in, particles of everything. The surge from the launch must have caused it. It was the only major variant from every other test.

  He took wire from the engineering lab, all the spools he could find, and then chewed more aspirin. It was bitter mixed with a lingering sourness, and threatened to have him retching again. Soon the pain would become too much and he’d crumple, cradling himself from the ache. But now the pain was a needle, pricking him to focus. He pulled a wire from its coil with his teeth.

  A soft glow came from behind Crucible’s door. Light, an intangible thing that behaved as though it had substance, yet never changed states. Light from the Big Bang still traveled the universe. God’s light.

  He’d lied to Nedda. For years and about so much. He’d said light continued, that people, thoughts, and energy traveled, but it was a lie. There was no continuance, only absence. He hadn’t wanted her to feel that absence, not the way he and Betheen did, as a shadow that walked with you. It had been a good lie, one that protected, but his lie meant she’d never understand what he’d meant to do, all the good it could accomplish. He’d meant to preserve life, not destroy it. To preserve power. Extend healing. Buy time for his hands. For Nedda, if she wanted it.

  Nedda would never forgive him for Denny. Unless he fixed it. If he fixed it he could explain.

  The power in the building had been compromised. He needed a battery, a current to counter a current. Which of the labs would have one powerful enough? Somers had been working on something—no—he was on sabbatical. The wire unspooled in long, loose curls across his work table. It wasn’t enough, not even close. He held down one end of the wire with his shoe. He’d ask Pete for batteries—if Betheen’s car was with him, the battery was technically his. The battery from his car as well.

  Every bite of metal tasted of life. Blood supposedly had a copper taste to it; Theo found it was the other way around. If Dean Babcock saw him, straightening metal with his teeth, reeking of sweat and vomit, there would be no warning or committee, just an order to clean out his desk—the desk he’d rocked Nedda in, whose contents she’d thrown at him. Crucible would be dismantled, and he’d be fired because he looked like a mad scientist. After he’d finally succeeded. Mad scientist indeed. Iron—it too tasted like blood, and he’d need it to fix Crucible, to help Denny. Iron. There was a coat rack, one of the graduate students in engineering had brought in a coat rack. It was stained, old-looking, and a possibility.

  Crucible worked. Denny proved it, the grove proved it—multiple time states existed within an few hundred yards o
f each other. An echo of delight lingered inside Theo, an ugly, yet welcome little fire.

  He needed to call Liebowitz, let him know that the centrifuge model worked, but was prone to cracking. Liebowitz would be jealous as hell, which was its own reward. After. Once he’d fixed it. Once he knew why it had done what it had done. Water. It was something about water. Electricity. The sprinklers going on. If Denny sped forward, he could be sped back as well. It was a matter of a few tweaks. There would be pullback, physics demanded it. His sample had slowed, Denny had sped up. If Crucible made perfect systems, for one thing to speed, another must slow. If he sped up the sample, somewhere else there would be a slowing. He just had to get it working again. Excitement and fear dulled the pain in his hands. This could be fixed.

  He shouldn’t be smiling. It was awful to smile—but he could fix it. He could fine-tune. Possibility danced inside him. What if?

  He saw Michael—his tiny body, the tearing skin, the nascent idea of who a child was meant to be—what could have been if that born-too-soon child was where Denny was, his lungs growing, his heart like a fist punching life, growing stronger?

  What if no one had to lose a child that way?

  What if? He could hold on to Nedda at this moment, at this perfect age, for as long as they pleased. If she wanted. She would have infinite time to learn. Infinite time to watch comets and launches. There had been a foolish little part of him who’d imagined unwrapping time for her like a present. All the time to do whatever you want, for as long as you want, if you want it. Nedda was made for What if.

  What if had joy at its center that burned like Crucible’s heart.

  No one would have to lose a child. And there would be no more lies.

  He would rewind—like the trees shrinking into themselves—to just before, the moment before things had gone wrong, before Michael died. When Betheen still loved him.

  A spark shot from a wall outlet. Had he not been in pain, he would have noticed the temperature drop, the steam rolling off his skin.

  To know how much copper and iron he needed, he had to know the area of effect. Where its edges were. There were smaller temporal anomalies he knew of—Denny, the grove, and the monkey. Pete said the canal on Satsuma was frozen. How far did Crucible’s reach extend? Water pipes, irrigation systems, sprinklers. Canals. They connected somewhere.