Light from Other Stars

by Erika Swyler

  Her car was broken on the roadside, near a dead man.

  As with everything, there was nothing to do but move forward.

  Betheen picked her way through the remains of the park. She’d charted this path to ensure it was safe—if not perfectly safe, then the right amount of dangerous—before telling Annie that the kids were old enough to play outside on their own. Betheen knew the park would be irresistible, so she’d spent two full days making sure there was nothing awful, no hidden drops, and that the rides and buildings were far too broken to be inviting. She’d become a master at distance mothering, the kind that allowed her daughter to get in trouble, safe trouble. Theo didn’t understand. He taught, incessantly lectured, never realizing that Nedda would try to be all the things he wished for. She couldn’t be. But she’d try until she hurt herself. It’s what women did. Some girls didn’t need expectations; they needed an enemy. A person who forbid them from swearing so they’d teach themselves to cuss properly.

  Her foot snagged on a root that sent her tumbling. She caught herself on the remains of a poured-concrete floor. This was where the butterfly house had been. She remembered it: wings like flower petals, how they’d rest on your arms like the wind kissing you. She wished for ten thousand butterflies, wings beating, hooked feet digging into her clothing, latching on, and carrying her into the sky.

  A whisper inside. Get up.

  Wrongness washed over her. Other women might call it mother’s intuition, but Betheen recognized the extra sense as what it was—the tension of a chemical bond made long ago, of oxytocin and dopamine, a heady mix that changed you chemically so you’d know when your child was hurt, when your spouse had died.

  Nedda: Safe.

  Michael: Dead.

  Theo: Unaccounted for.

  BETHEEN. GET UP. MOVE YOUR ASS.

  She dug her feet into the loamy ground, got up, and ran.

  He’d been a teaching assistant for Physics 101, which she couldn’t test out of; Palm Lake High School had refused to let her take physics, routing her into business classes instead. There was such a thing as too smart. Mr. Papas hadn’t seen that. Mr. Papas stammered when he said her name. Miss Squ-squires. But he called on her, which was more than her professors and other TAs did. And he made an effort not to stare at her legs, which, in the way of anything a person tried not to do, made the staring more obvious. She fell in love with the way he wrote on the blackboard, how every 5 wore a hat that tipped upward. She fell in love with being called on, and being right, and, better still, being permitted to be wrong. She fell in love with chalk and pens and the particular smell of the lecture hall when he was in it. Smoky.

  Chemistry made you fall in love with the shape of a jaw: serotonin, oxytocin. Sex was physics, but love was chemistry. She knew why she loved the scent of dry-erase markers, why black hair had become better than any other color, and why a specific pair of glasses made her see the man behind them. A deluge of chemicals.

  He’d never asked why she wasn’t a biology major, or how she’d wound up in science. He’d said, as she picked up her books before heading to her next class, “Miss Squires, I have a sneaking suspicion you’re smarter than I am.”

  She smiled, the way her mother said debutantes did, the way women did when they knew that they were better. She told him to call her Betheen.

  She waited until term’s end because it was proper, until her exams were graded and she was top of the class as expected. On the first day after winter break, she left her chemistry notes on his desk before his lecture. She’d asked around, figured out which classes he was assisting. The notebook had her address and the number of the dormitory written inside the cover.

  She had the hall mother let him up. After all he was a doctoral student—nearly a professor—what did it matter that he was young? Twenty-five and brilliant.

  She answered the door in her underwear and stockings. Light green satin. Seafoam.

  He tried to hide his skin. The rough patches were continents, large islands on his body’s map. She plotted them, touching her lips to each, intent on learning his composition. Noble, in the moral and elemental sense.

  Yet they’d still broken. School, marriage, children. She hadn’t known the last one might undo the first two.

  The hallway to the lab was narrow. His door was closed, but light came from under it, a soft pulsing that meant something was running. When she opened it, damp and cold washed over her, then a biting odor. At first, she thought it was ozone or Freon, but it was nothing so familiar.

  It didn’t smell like him. His lab, the house—they always smelled like him. Where was he? And the light—it was sun without heat. Alive somehow, generative like the glow of lava or molten metal.

  The machine was enormous. A potbellied beast with jointed arms and ventilation piping that reached across the ceiling. How had he managed the build? He must have had graduate students help, people who needed credit to pass his classes. Envy ran through the part of her that still wished they’d been like the Curies. But children meant certain things, and she’d wanted those things, and Marie Curie had wound up dead.

  “Theo?”

  The chemical smell grew heavier, tart. An ester—a liqueur but without the pleasure.

  “Theo?”

  Still no answer. There was a soft hissing in the back of the room, the machine humming. She flicked the switch for the overhead, but it remained stubbornly off.

  “Theo?”

  There was movement.

  A picture of him stood out in her memory, Theo at age six or seven, dressed as a cowboy, sitting on top of a pony. He said a photographer had come through his neighborhood with a costume trunk and a pony that was a thousand years old and sick of children.

  The eyes were hard to recognize at first, as she’d rarely seen them without glasses. Even the boy in the picture had thick black frames. But the ears were the same, one that stood out like a jug handle, the other pinned close to the skull. The hair. The little boy’s hair was his. As ever, psoriasis marked him, though it hadn’t yet ruined his joints. By the time she’d met him, his skin had improved, but she’d seen pictures of before, tucked in a box of his father’s things. She’d have never known otherwise how bad it had been, how much of him it had consumed. When she asked, he said, “I made it harder on myself. I couldn’t stand pine tar soap.”

  Until then, she hadn’t known what the smoky scent was. She’d fallen in love with his medicine. Aromatic hydrocarbons.

  This boy, this impossible six- or seven-year-old child behind the machine, was the boy in that picture.

  Two legs, two feet, two eyes, two arms, two hands, his familiar fingernails, all the ingredients of Theo, hiding behind his own improbable water cake.

  The room grew warm, suddenly unbearably hot, and the machine threw more light. Then the boy fluctuated, spreading and growing, until before her—eyes wet, mouth gasping soundlessly, shaking as if to rattle himself apart—was the young man she’d marry. Skinny, angular. The flaking redness was gone from his face, but wrapped around his torso. She remembered the discovery of it, rough but supple, as she’d slipped her hand beneath his shirt while he stood in her open doorway. She’d asked if it hurt. He never told her; she learned his aches later. He said she didn’t have to touch him if she found it upsetting. He talked about his body the way her grandmother’s friends talked about profane language. It made her want to lick him. In that coarseness was a heart he wore across his stomach.

  His eyes, Theo’s eyes, met hers. She waited for the recognition, the clicking into place she’d had with him in a lecture hall. Lust rose for a man she hadn’t seen in years, for the bump on his wrist, the downy hair on the back of his hands, his eyes. This man who didn’t know what would happen. The tightness in her belly made her weep. Did he know? Did he remember?

  “Theo?”

  His mouth moved. She knew the shape. Miss Squires.

  If she made a sound, it was lost to the light and convolution manifested by the machine. Crucible. Nedd
a said he called it Crucible. Theo’s body retracted, his arms and legs drawing up. Baby fat bloomed, his eyes rounded, widened. The rash danced all over him, flaring, fading, exploding. He seemed a part of the light, dimming and flashing with each stretch and scream. Betheen watched her husband turn inside out until she had to look away.

  And then there was an infant—pink-tipped fingers, bow lips—bobbling and squirming as infants did, blinking and startlingly quiet. She could see Michael in this infant, what he had been, what he might have been. Perfect fat limbs. Young enough to still have the plugs that keep amniotic fluid from the nasal passageway. Soft black hair, the first fuzz of a baby.

  She reached for him, almost touched, then her hand slipped against something smooth, something she could almost see, slick. Like agar.

  There was a child in Theo’s lab. A baby. Perhaps it wouldn’t be there in five minutes, ten minutes, but it would be back. Her husband, the infant, shifted and writhed.

  Look. Get up. Think.

  She caught her breath. She could walk away. She could try to contact his friend. Who had he worked with—Avi, Ari … Lieber? A manic person, high-pitched laugh. Liebowitz. A fast thinker. She should call his friend Liebowitz.

  Miss Squires, I have a sneaking suspicion you’re smarter than I am.

  She turned back, checked her wristwatch and marked the time. She watched.

  Think. Find the pattern. Fix it.

  Aboard Chawla

  Singh refused to be a pincushion. “If Papas wants to be the guinea pig, we should let her.”

  Marcanta swore. “I should have just stuck you while you were out. I can’t risk Papas. I can’t do anything to a Gapper that’s not tested on one of us first. I’ll probably have to do a puncture on everyone eventually. What’s it matter if you’re first?”

  “Maybe it benefits us to have someone with functional eyes who knows how to fix the on-board systems? Have you thought of that? Do it to Evgeni first. They’re his eyes,” Singh said.

  Nedda didn’t want Evgeni to be the first to learn that it was unfixable. While the rings from the mask were painful, she feared the day he wouldn’t have them, when he’d given up. For him, and for the rest of them. “I’m perfectly capable of fixing systems and you know it. Besides, Evgeni’s a bad sample,” Nedda said. “He’s progressing faster than the rest of us. He’s atypical. Singh, you and Louisa are the baseline. It has to be you or her. Just admit that you’re afraid and do it anyway.”

  “I can’t do my own tap,” Marcanta said.

  Singh took three hours on the exercise bike. It was childish, but Nedda understood. A fluid draw was small, yes, but it was the first admission that it wasn’t just Chawla that was failing.

  She checked the communications schedule. She wasn’t slated to speak with her mother for another month. She hadn’t expected the disconnect she’d feel at not being able to pick up a phone anytime she wanted. Of not knowing where or when her mother was. She missed the kitchen telephone cord, the yellow spring of it, letting the receiver dangle to unravel a snarl. What she wouldn’t give for a kitchen telephone cord that stretched across the universe, knowing that Betheen was on the other end, leaning against a wall, something slightly dangerous bubbling on a burner. Oh, her mother’s lean. The strength of her. Nedda positioned a tray of corn seedlings under the grow lights, then brought up Amadeus’s schematic. She chewed her lip. Scared was fine. Lonely was fine. You could be those things, as long as you worked.

  They saw Singh at dinner. He rolled up chunks of tofu in a tortilla, folding it precisely into something that looked like a wonton. Meticulous. His fingers always clean.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “Of course I’ll do it.”

  Chawla was cold, and while Evgeni enjoyed it, happily floating shirtless between bathroom and bunk, Singh had long maintained a layered modesty. Shirts under sweaters, under jumpsuits. Nedda hadn’t seen his back before. He lay on his side, strapped to the table in medical, curled up like a child. Vulnerable, Nedda thought. Each vertebra a gentle hill, a sand dune.

  Marcanta took her hand and ran it down Singh’s spine. “You’re looking for the space between. There’s something stupid about the human brain that wants to poke anything that sticks out. Don’t be stupid. Feel here.”

  Peaks and valleys like the moon, like Earth, like all of them.

  “Still in the room,” Singh said. “Person, not a cadaver.”

  “We know, Amit. Cadavers are better patients.” Marcanta let go of Nedda’s hand. “For our purposes, it doesn’t matter if we get a little blood in the fluid, but it should still be mostly CSF. And obviously, mind the spinal cord.”

  “Obviously,” Singh said.

  “You’ve got a nice back,” Nedda said. “The vertebrae look strong.” Comfort wasn’t something she excelled at.

  “Please, just do it or let me up.”

  Marcanta sank the needle in and Singh inhaled sharply. “Pull back, just a little—like so—and now we wait. We’ve got a few minutes, Singh. Entertain us.”

  “Fuck off,” he muttered.

  “You can do better than that,” Nedda said.

  Singh repeated himself.

  “You’re a scientist. Try harder. At least say ‘fuck nugget.’ If you’re going to swear in English, have the decency to use British or Scottish swears.” The words rolled out like a satisfying stretch, the kind Nedda hadn’t had since Earth. “ ‘Cunt,’ ‘twat,’ ‘cockwomble,’ ‘bellend,’ ‘knobend,’ ‘piss-flaps,’ ‘wankstain,’ ‘gobshite,’ ‘fuck trumpet,’ ‘jizz trumpet’—anything you want to add a ‘dick’ to, go with ‘trumpet’ or ‘bell.’ There’s a literal musicality to it Americans never bothered with,” she said. She spouted the long-ago gorgeous list and wondered if all collected data, every list ever made, was waiting for the moment it found its purpose. “ ‘Arsemonger,’ ‘cocksplat,’ ‘clunge.’ ” Marcanta’s husky chuckle echoed in the lab. Every now and again, Singh would repeat a word, his clipped T making it elegant.

  “Where the hell did you learn all those?” Marcanta asked.

  “Research.”

  Nedda’s curses became a lullaby. Singh asked Nedda to write them down to tell Evgeni. Marcanta kept her eye on the vial connected to the needle in Singh’s back. As it filled, Singh clamped his eyes shut. Near the end, he bit into his cheek. A small blood droplet escaped, a single perfect bubble filled with chains of molecules, DNA, a microcosm of Singh. Nedda caught it with a tissue.

  Marcanta pulled the needle and cleaned the wound. “Look at that. Totally clear, no blood. In residency, you call a draw like that a ‘champagne tap,’ and your senior or the attending gives you a glass of champagne. Well, they used to, anyway.”

  “Nice of you to wait until after to get drunk,” Singh said.

  “Shut up and put your pressure goggles on, Amit. Then, bed. Tomorrow I want to check your eyes before morning call, got it?”

  He asked about the headache.

  “Only a small number of people get it. Zero g might eliminate it, since you won’t get the fluid shift you normally would when you stand. If you get it, you’ll know.”

  “Fantastic,” he said.

  Before Nedda left for Hydro, Marcanta took her arm.

  “Do you think you can do that to me?”

  Could she feel her way down Louisa’s back, prick her, and not clip her spinal cord? Singh would need to see it on someone else before trying. There was no one else. “I’d rather not have to,” Nedda said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Yes, I can do it.”

  “Good.” Marcanta slipped the vial into a drawer. “Here’s hoping you’re better at nursing than I am at botany.”

  Later, as Nedda added nitrogen to nutrient gel for the carrots, she thought of a thousand things she might have said to Marcanta, about fear, about responsibility, and what failure meant, but she’d had no words left. She’d spent them on profanity. She turned on her tablet. Amadeus was familiar now, friend and enemy. Switching th
e isotope had contributed to the problem, but it was also something as simple and monumental as failing to account for zero gravity. Chawla was the first ship to tie life support to an accelerated radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Amadeus meant deep space travel for humans. Colonization and species survival. Time. Fortitude was outfitted with the same kind of drive but had artificial gravity, a backup kinetic system. Even if they couldn’t fix Amadeus for Chawla, they had to try. They had to give Fortitude’s colonists a foothold, a real chance at survival on planet. For the greater good.

  Singh’s moans woke her. He couldn’t tolerate the lights in his cabin, so she turned them off.

  “Too much noise,” he said when she tried to talk to him. A sandpaper whisper. “Can’t stand my own voice.”

  In the end, she held his feet, squeezing them between her palms, rubbing through the sleep sack’s quilted layers. Her mother had done this for her. She’d had mononucleosis in her last year of high school. Bedridden and crying, the only thing that had anchored her was Betheen rubbing warmth into her feet. Men’s feet were strange things, bonier, lumpier than women’s. Singh’s reminded her of a giraffe—long and knobby. Here she was, mothering a grown man.

  She’d never been maternal. Her single-mindedness had blocked that sentiment, or what had happened to her had replaced that particular tenderness with scar tissue. And yet. Chawla thrummed around them, breathing. Comfort had once been her father’s cold steel lab table. Now, it was a machine with a heartbeat.

  She squeezed Amit’s feet again and discovered they were flat.

  When she left him to sleep, it was with renewed purpose. After three more hours of studying the schematic, there was a small sting in her chest, like the pull of a string. Were she to trace it with her fingers, it would span the distance to Easter. She dashed off a message to Mission Control.