Heiresses of Russ 2012

by Connie Wilkins

  “It’s a bit of a disappointment.”

  “Only you would say that about the most…” He waved at the night sky, taking the telescope. “What would you call it? Miraculous? Terrifying? Only you would say that about the most interesting thing up there.” He adjusted the focus. “What do you suppose it is?”

  I leaned back. “Something new, probably,” I said. “Something no one’s invented a word for, yet.”

  He laughed. “Well, what good is that? All the important things in life—love, birth, death, family—all those have had names for thousands and thousands of years. All these new things like virtual economies and carbon offsets? Those are only important in the day-to-day.”

  “Yeah, we live day to day,” I pointed out. “Life’s day to day.”

  “Katrina,” he said, looking at me. “You just remember that whatever happens out there is nothing compared to what happens down here,” he said, and patted his chest just above his heart.

  “All right, gramps,” I said. “I’ll make a motivational poster with the light and that quote.”

  “Good.” He grinned. “Market it. That’s my granddaughter, off to be an entrepreneur! I want a share in your profits.”

  I chuckled. “Of course you do.”

  It wasn’t late, but by then I was missing my bed and my girlfriend, and I’d had time to sober off the beer. I excused myself, and my grandfather walked me to the door. He kissed me on the cheek. “Give Josey a kiss for me!”

  I laughed and told him I would.

  •

  MAYOR CALLS NIGHT-SKY OBJECT “GOD,” read the headline in the paper the next day. The bold pull quote said Mayor McMahon of San Angelo, Texas, caused an uproar Saturday by saying “This light is certain proof of God; it may be God in His glory.”

  I read it when Josey put her laptop down on the kitchen table in front of me. It was only seven and we were both up, both in robes, her with the morning’s first cup of coffee and me with a phone to my ear. Josey turned back to the window after handing off the laptop, her powder-blue robe looking softer in the early-morning light.

  “Yeah,” I said into the mouthpiece, like I’d been saying any time my advisor let me get a word in edgewise. “No. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. I hope so too. Okay.” I counted on him running out of things to explain after a while, and after a while, he did. We hung up. “The research office is going on hiatus,” I told Josey, who looked back with the sort of bleary-eyed tired interest I used to get from my grandfather’s old dog. “The other assistant bailed. He doesn’t know if this is what he wants to be doing. Said he wanted to spend time with his mother.”

  “Because the world is ending,” Josey said.

  “Something like that. Dr. Greene says he’ll find something for me to do, keep me paid, but who knows what. Maybe loan me out to another department. Rain gauges in the Chihuahuan, or something. Trapping and tagging snipes.”

  Josey rolled the mug between her hands, watching the reflections in the coffee, then shook her head. “Here.” She sashayed up to the table and slipped into the chair beside me. “I thought you’d be interested. There’s a science section. They say in twenty years…”

  She reached across to click a link, calling up some Flash page blinking with layman’s statistics. I put away the phone and took a look at it—most of it was the same stuff I’d been reading for days; how the light had appeared, how many people had called it in to NASA, but there was some information I hadn’t seen before. I read through most of it with detached interest until something gave me pause. “Whoa.”

  “Nelly?” Josey said. I grabbed a stray envelope and looked across the table for a writing implement, but nothing was in evidence. “Yeah. In twenty years? It’s supposed to fill the night sky.”

  The way she said that, it was almost a question. Like maybe she hadn’t read that right. I frowned at the screen. “You have a pencil?”

  “I hid a few in your robe pockets,” Josey said. I looked down and rummaged in one: sure enough, there were a pair of golf pencils waiting for me. Josey leaned over, brushing hair off her shoulder. “What is it?”

  “Arc seconds,” I said, and started a line of calculations. Josey rested her chin on my shoulder, hanging on the movement of the lead. I finished the calculation and re-read it before answering. “Okay. Yeah, if it keeps growing the way it is. I mean, the Earth turns, it’s gonna rise and set, but the math’s right. Horizon to horizon.”

  Josey pulled away and looked down into her mug, running her thumb around and around the circumference. “What happens to us then?”

  I paused in the middle of putting the pencil back. “What makes you think anything will happen?”

  Josey shrugged and mumbled something indistinct.

  I drummed the pencil against the table. “Actually, what makes you think that’s gonna happen?”

  “What, the news?” she asked.

  “Josey,” I said, turning on my chair to tilt my head at her. “Name one thing in the universe that just grows and keeps growing forever. I mean, other than the universe.” I dug the pencilpoint into the envelope. “It flared already, and now it’s slowed down. Stars explode and then they collapse again. You get things like gamma bursts flashing up, making a lot of noise, and then they vanish. It’s not gonna keep growing; it’s not gonna fill the night sky.”

  Josey shrugged. She raised her cup and downed the rest of the coffee in a go, setting it down hard and giving me a defiant look at the face I’d pulled.

  “Your lab isn’t happening. I don’t have class until this afternoon. You know what? Let’s go back to bed.”

  I rolled my neck. “Josey…”

  “Just snuggle!” Josey protested, and pushed her laptop closed. I closed my eyes. “The world might be ending.”

  “It’s not ending.”

  “Just come be with me,” Josey said.

  I opened my eyes again. “It’s not God and it’s not gonna end the world,” I said, but I got up and followed Josey into the bedroom anyway.

  •

  I usually tried to make it out to my grandfather’s ranch once a month or so, but I drove up later that day. A two-hour round trip wasn’t bad, with my lab cancelled and me with nothing else to do. Not as bad as the half-hour spent waiting for a gas pump, or the clogged street in front of the grocery store where everyone was buying water and canned food. My grandfather and I followed form from last time, sitting out back and watching the sky after we’d eaten, waiting for it to get dark enough to look through the telescope again. Except for the almost-imperceptible growth, the light looked the same as it had the day before, and the day before that.

  “Everything up there seems little,” my grandfather said, blocking the light with his thumb. “See there?” He waggled his thumb at me. “Only as big as the deck lamp.”

  I snorted. “It’s a lot further away, gramps.”

  “And how far would that be? Hmm?” He tilted his head at me, smile roguish. “You being the expert.”

  I stared at him for longer than I should have. He was joking, though it struck me that he was right. I was the first generation on my father’s side to go into science. My grandfather had come from Egypt and gone into business, and my father went into history and taught. I was the authority.

  I put my drink aside and pulled him up from his chair. “Here. Look at this.”

  I pulled him to the spot on the patio which gave us the best view of the night sky, uncut by trees or the line of the roof.

  “Things look smaller away, the further away they are, right?”

  “Yes; I know that,” he said. I searched among the stars for a certain speck, and pointed up toward it.

  “You could line up twenty-two Earths in a row, and that’s how wide across Jupiter is,” I told him. “And look. Up there, in the sky, it’s only that big. Okay?”

  He nodded. “Very far away,” he agreed.

  I searched out another point in the night sky and guided him to it, describing the line through a constellation u
ntil I knew he saw the same thing I did. “Jupiter orbits the Sun. Think Jupiter’s big compared to the Earth? The Sun’s five Jupiters across. And all of our planets and their orbits describe a solar system that make the sun look like a marble in a kiddie pool, and the space between solar systems makes those solar systems look like… I don’t know.” I was running out of metaphor. “The galaxy is big, gramps. We don’t have words for how big it is. But that pinprick, right there? That’s not a star. It’s a galaxy.”

  I heard him take a breath.

  I shivered, and looped my arm through the crook of his elbow. I’d never had a sense of agoraphobia until taking astronomy classes in undergrad, but the universe yawned open on every side of the Earth. It seemed designed for something bigger. All the planets and all the stars were grains of sand scattered in an ocean, and that halfdollar light was supposed to fill the night sky.

  “We can calculate how far away that galaxy is,” I said, and my voice was soft enough I didn’t know if he’d hear it. “But we can’t work out that light. Sometimes we can tell how close a star in a galaxy is, but we can’t see stars in that. Or we can tell how redshifted a galaxy is, more red the further away, but that light’s not redshifted at all, not that we can tell. That means maybe it’s not part of our expanding universe. It’s not something…”

  I trailed off.

  We turned. The light was small, but far larger than the stars.

  “The worst thing is, we’ve seen galaxies pass in front of it,” I said. “The light is farther away than that galaxy.” I pointed back to the speck that looked like a star. “And it’s still that big in the sky.”

  I leaned into my grandfather, and he held onto my arm. Our fingers were tight.

  “I’m wondering what the Koran would say,” my grandfather murmured.

  “It’s just something new,” I said. “It’s something scientific. Like a nova. You don’t go to the Koran for that, you build a better telescope.”

  My grandfather exhaled, then patted my hand. He was still watching the light. He was probably thinking about the Koran, still, just like all those people had rushed to church on Tuesday morning.

  Mayor McMahon had said it. This was the thing people were calling God.

  •

  “I’m going to go see her,” Dad said over the phone.

  Her in this case was Mom. Mom, at this time, was still in Monrovia. Monrovia, at the moment, was still trapped in communications brownouts.

  I was pretty sure Dad had gone insane.

  “News is still coming out of Liberia,” I said. “We’d know if anything horrible happened.”

  “That’s not the point,” Dad said.

  I was pretty sure the world had gone insane.

  Outside the window, my next-door neighbor was cleaning out the shed I’d never seen him use. A rusted-out lawnmower and cans of old paint were scattered on his brown lawn, and earlier I’d seen him carrying a box labeled “EMERGENCY GENERATOR.”

  “I never did speak to your mother as much as I should have after the divorce,” Dad went on. “We promised each other we’d still be a part of each other’s lives, and we haven’t been fulfilling that promise.”

  “That doesn’t mean you just hop on the first transatlantic flight,” I argued.

  “Maybe it should,” Dad said. “Say what you will, but this thing—”

  “Dad.”

  “—this thing has put everything in perspective. There’s enough we don’t have control over. This, I do.”

  Or maybe everyone’s just going to use that light as an excuse to panic, I thought. It was like Y2K all over again, except along with stocking up on emergency candles and nonperishable food, everyone dropped what they were doing and went to visit everyone they knew. “Dad, you have a job, and projects, and you can’t just—”

  “I’m packing.”

  “You can’t—”

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do.”

  I dug my knuckles into the bridge of my nose. “Dad. You can’t just pack up and move to Liberia.”

  “They say that thing in the sky can’t exist, too,” Dad countered. “Maybe ‘can’t’ doesn’t mean what we used to think it did.”

  “Dad, that’s not even remotely the same thing.”

  Dad didn’t care.

  “Look, people are on the news taking loans out for domestic flights,” I tried. “An international—”

  “So I’ll have to pay a little more,” he said. This from a man who’d haggled for a week on the price of my car. “I’ll manage. Maybe I’ll get a one-way ticket and wait for things to calm down.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Right. And things will calm down, because nothing is happening.”

  “Katrina,” he said, with the tone he used when Mom harried him too hard.

  That’s when I knew I’d lost the argument.

  I was lying face-down on the bed when Josey came home, and when she joined me I rolled straightaway into her arms and told her the whole thing, or what I thought was the whole thing. My research partner was off having a crisis of academia, and Dad was off to Africa. And my grandfather might convert to Islam. “Because of what? Because there’s a bit of the universe we don’t understand. If people knew how many things we didn’t understand, we’d never get anything done.”

  Josey listened and made comforting noises until I stopped talking. Then she pursed her lips, considered, and said “Do you need me to stay around for a bit?”

  I stared at Josey the way people must have stared at that light when it flared into the sky. “What do you mean, ‘stay’?”

  “I mean stay, stay,” Josey said. “I thought—you know. I know the world isn’t ending, but with everything going on—”

  “You’re leaving?” I asked.

  “I’m coming back,” she said, with a look of reproach. “But I want to see my family in Tennessee. That’s all right, isn’t it? Just for a week or so? You’ve got your grandpa so close by.”

  I fought off the strangling feeling in my throat. “Just a week?” I said, because I couldn’t tell her it wasn’t okay. Everyone was going home to see their families. I just wanted to stay there, to complete my research, to leave the light to astronomers. Every day some organization put up another grant, another contest, another prize; we’d figure it out because science figured things out, because science, as much as nature, abhorred a vacuum.

  Josey leaned over and kissed me on the forehead, and I felt small beside her mass. I wanted that mass to stay right where I could hang onto it, a planet embracing its sun’s gravity. “I’ll bring you back some real channel catfish.”

  •

  I showed up at my grandfather’s house with a backpack in the front passenger seat, the radio tuned to NPR, and a tension in my jaw I couldn’t relax through gum or massage or willpower. I hadn’t even called first; my grandfather wasn’t out front waiting for me, and it took a minute before he opened the door. I just stood there and pounded, smelling the crisp night, feeling the breezes on the back of my neck, trying not to scream at the slowly growing light in the sky.

  When the door opened I stood there for a moment with my fist raised. My grandfather and I both looked at each other, surprised; I suppose I’d thought that he had disappeared, too. But he was there, he laughed, he ushered me inside. “Come to stay the night?”

  “Can I?”

  He took my backpack, closing the door behind me.

  I was drifting toward the living room when I heard voices talking. I hesitated—I thought he had someone over—but it was only one voice, and it wasn’t pitched like a conversation, it was pitched like a lecture. I turned back to him.

  “What is that?”

  “Hmm?” My grandfather looked genuinely surprised. “Oh, that? It’s one of those internet radio stations. I don’t know if it’s any good yet. Well.” He laughed as he took my backpack, tucking it into the hall closet between a pair of dusty boots and the old telescope. “I’ve been listening to it all evening. I didn’t realize how far m
y Arabic’s slipped.”

  I could feel my face fall, and when he straightened up again I wrapped my arms around him. He hugged back, but not for long before he ducked his head to nudge my forehead with his own. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Dad’s going to Liberia. Don’t ask me how he booked a flight to Liberia. I still haven’t talked to Mom. Our lab shut down. Even Josey’s gone. I know, I sound fourteen, but everyone is leaving me…”

  My grandfather showed his palms. “I’m not going anywhere, Katrina.”

  “You’re going—” I bit off the end of the sentence. How stupid was it to finish the thought, You’re going back to Islam?

  He reached over, rubbing my shoulder. “Come on,” he said. “Come have some coffee and we’ll talk about this.”

  I put myself together and motioned for him to go on into the kitchen. I followed him, taking a seat at the counter and kicking my heels against the rung of the stool. Childish, yes, but it helped.

  I watched my grandfather go through the motions of making coffee just as he always had: adding in cardamom and cinnamon to the burr grinder, pouring the beans without bothering to measure them. It was the same. He was the same as he’d been when I was a child, when we’d lived in the city, when he’d made that coffee every morning before school and enticed me to drink some. It’ll start off your day right, Katri.

  “Will you be going on the Hajj?” I asked. It was the only sensible question about Islam I knew enough to ask, aside from What about me and Josey?, and I wasn’t ready to ask that yet.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think I should jump in with both feet, do you? It wouldn’t be right to go on the Hajj only to think in the middle, ‘oh, no, this isn’t right for me.’”

  “But you never thought Islam was right for you before, did you?” I pressed. “Christianity either. And you raised me and Dad outside of the church. Any church.”

  My grandfather breathed out through his mouth, turning to pour the coffee. “I never in my life felt terribly religious. But this light,” he said; “it’s probably the sort of thing that changes things forever—”