Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  Even on the grainy little skypad screen, I swore I saw Lukas hesitate. It wasn’t even a flinch. It was something about the way he breathed.

  Whatever he says next will be a lie, I thought.

  “Resources,” said Lukas. “Of course, much of Lun-dun was burned away during the Exodus. But there’s still resources. Precious things beneath the craters.”

  “What precious things?” The newsman sounded skeptical.

  I didn’t know why, but in that moment I wanted to hear Lukas’ answer more than anything I’d ever heard in my life. I didn’t just want to know; I needed to.

  And that’s the exact moment Dad flicked the ashes off the end of his cigarette and glanced over his shoulder.

  “Joff?” he said.

  I didn’t know how to answer. I just stood there, frozen the same as the icicles hanging off the barn’s roof. I’d figured he knew I was there. After all, he always knew everything.

  But this time it turned out I’d truly surprised him.

  And worse, him facing me meant the skypad was blocked and I couldn’t hear what Lukas said.

  Oh God. I shivered. Dad’s never gonna trust me again.

  Split Screen

  That winter, Dad and I watched Aly’s skypad as often as we could.

  Other kids might’ve been angry at their father’s sudden change of heart. In a way, it was a betrayal of everything I’d been led to believe. Dad never apologized to Aly. And whenever Mom asked him where we’d been, he’d lie and say we’d been cleaning tools, working on a new engine, or patching holes in the barn roof.

  Even so, I never once felt a moment of anger. Some part of me had always known his disdain for technology wasn’t what he’d made it out to be.

  We forged an understanding, Dad and I.

  And we became closer than ever.

  It’s not that he conspired to shelter Mom and Aly from what we learned on the skypad. He didn’t. It’s more that he trusted me to understand the things we saw. He hoped I’d absorb the hard truths told by the Dusktime Dispatch. He believed I’d begin to grasp the world much sooner than most seven-year olds could.

  And I did.

  One night early in spring, after Dad and I had spent twelve hours tilling the fields, we hunkered in the little tool room and gazed at the skypad screen. The feed was sharp that night, and the sounds and images as crisp and clear as we’d ever seen. We were both hungry and exhausted, but it didn’t matter. Important things were happening.

  A week ago, Lukas and his expedition had left Lun-dun.

  And it’d been reported that upon their return home, they’d been imprisoned.

  Castyn Clarke, the beautiful and serious anchor who reported during the Dusktime’s night feeds, sat in a black chair at a black table. The vid screen behind her had been purposely greyed out, and the walls surrounding her were dark.

  “Good evening, citizens of Earth,” she began. “I’m Castyn Clarke, and tonight I’ll be reporting on the fate of Lukas Mosk and his so-called ERM, the Exodus Reclaiming Mission.”

  Dad looked at me just once. I knew what he was thinking, even though he said nothing.

  Listen to this part, he told me without a word. This is where it gets serious.

  Over the next thirty minutes, Castyn never once smiled. In fact, she made no expressions at all. If she felt anything for the dire facts she reported, one would’ve never known. The other newscasters called her a ‘real hardball.’ But I knew why she occupied Dusktime’s prime casting slot. She might’ve been the prettiest, but she was also the smartest. And no one knew her facts better.

  “It’s true what you’ve heard about Lukas Mosk.” Castyn gazed at us through the skypad. “Most of it, anyway. The truth is that Mosk was not who he claimed to be. He had more aliases than our Earth has people, it seems. And while it’s not known, or rather not admitted, just how Mr. Mosk infiltrated the government team and won rights to the ERM, his motivations were what some of us suspected all along.

  “And one thing is clear. Though Mosk was imprisoned, his mission was a success. He found exactly what he was looking for.”

  Dad and I looked at each other.

  “What did he find?” I mouthed.

  “Listen,” Dad whispered.

  Castyn folded her hands on her black table. She was so pale, her skin looked like white knives against the deep, dark marble. I’d seen her be serious before, but nothing like this.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” she began, “for their crimes against Earth, for their betrayal of mankind, and for the evil they have perpetuated, Lukas Mosk and every member of his ERM team have been executed.”

  My mouth fell open. I didn’t know why, but I’d expected her to say the opposite. I’d expected Lukas to be set free and for his imprisonment to be denounced as a mistake.

  “But Dad, how could they?” I asked.

  He looked at me. He didn’t blink. He didn’t speak. Somehow, he knew exactly what was happening, but he was going to let me learn the hard way.

  By listening to Castyn.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” She almost smirked. “You expect us to show vids of the execution. You want to upload it to your pads and your sprites, and to satisfy your need to see these men punished, you want to watch it over and over again.”

  Maybe, I thought. But first tell us why.

  Castyn shook her head. “But to give these men and the outcasts who support them a public death would be to martyr them. And so there are no vids, and there never will be. The only important thing for you to know is that Lukas and his men died quickly. No torture. No indignity. Despite the gravity of their crimes, they were executed like any other prisoners. Swiftly. And in silence.”

  I just sat there, mouth still open. I didn’t care how they had died. I needed to know what they’d done to deserve it.

  “Dad?” I pried.

  “Shhhh,” was all he offered.

  And then it came. The moment I’d waited for. Through the skypad, Castyn looked the entire world in the eyes, and though her message was meant for everyone, I felt it as though it were only for me.

  “Material,” she said. “Material for Ebes. The reports are clear; Lukas Mosk and his men weren’t scouring Lun-dun for artifacts or old world newspaper scraps. They weren’t looking for anything physical at all. They lied to us…all of us. Government agents have already determined Mosk’s men procured the Ebes material years ago. All they needed was a safe spot to launch it from. And it so happens that safe spot was in an Exodus crater deep in Lun-dun.”

  What material? I screamed inside my head.

  What’s Ebes?

  Dad must’ve read my mind. He reached out, and with a flick of his finger he closed the skypad down. Castyn’s icy gaze vanished from our sights. The little tool room was just me, Dad, and a sad blue lamp lighting our tired faces.

  “Joff,” sighed Dad, “it’s time.”

  “For what? Dinner?” I said, even though I knew it wasn’t what he meant.

  He was tired. I saw it in him. We’d worked so hard in the fields, and our bones hurt. But his exhaustion was deeper than mine. After all those years, he looked like he was moments from dropping a burden he’d carried all his life.

  “I think you understand, son.” He rubbed his forehead.

  “You have something you want to tell me,” I said. “You’ve always wanted to say it, but something stopped you.”

  “My Joff.” He managed a smile. “Sharper than a sunbeam.”

  “Well?” I could barely contain myself.

  “Well…” he began. “I imagine you have questions. About why I let you watch the skypad. About why they killed Lukas Mosk. About a lot of things.”

  My mind sharpened. I remembered something Mom had told me years earlier. ‘Don’t start small,’ she’d said. ‘Ask the biggest questions first.’

  “What is the material?” I asked Dad.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh.” I sagged a little. “Ok. What’s Ebes?”

/>   “Ebes is a place,” he sighed. “A planet far from Earth. It’s not in our solar system. They say there’s air on it, breathable air. And they think it’s where Mosk sent the material, whatever it is.”

  “And…?” I knew there was more.

  “And Ebes is where much of humanity went during the Exodus.”

  “The Exodus,” I exhaled.

  “Now’s the time to tell you about it,” he said.

  And he did.

  Never mind that Mom and Aly were waiting for us, probably full of worry. Never mind that our dinners were going cold. In the light of Dad’s old blue lamp, we sat there and he told me everything.

  “Remember Alpo?” he began. “Not your bear, but the little metal can? About three-thousand years ago, you couldn’t have taken a step on the planet without stepping on things like that. Every field was buried in waste. Every ocean had turned black. They say twenty-billion people were alive, eating, making trash, fighting, and suffering.”

  I just sat there. For all my powers of imagination, it was hard to see the world he spoke of.

  “And so…” He shrugged. “As people do when things go dark, we had a war. I say we because it was everyone. I wasn’t there, of course. And I know you don’t know much about it because I’ve kept it from you and Aly, but it was bad, Joff. They didn’t use the big bombs like everyone feared. They fought street to street, block to block. Imagine a city a thousand times bigger than Donva. Now imagine it burning.”

  I imagined it with a shiver.

  “And they kept fighting and fighting,” Dad continued. “You’ve heard Castyn talk about the Thousand-Year War. It wasn’t really that long. It was maybe…oh…three hundred years. But it must’ve felt like a thousand to the people who lived it. It’s another thing I can’t say for sure; I wasn’t there. But if you believe the newsfeeds, if you’ve read the old dispatches, they say fifteen-billion people died.”

  “Fifteen billion,” I breathed.

  Most boys my age probably wouldn’t have felt it like I did. But I’d studied math since I’d found Aly’s first schoolbook years before. I knew what fifteen-billion meant. In my mind, in that moment, each person who’d died felt like a star being extinguished in the night sky. For me, the thought was terrifying.

  “And then came the Exodus,” said Dad. “There was a man named Frost. They say he was a general, as in an army leader. While fighting in a place they used to call Europe, Frost gathered scientists to the place they called Lun-Dun. I think…when I hear the stories, Frost must’ve known the only way to end the war was to leave Earth. And not just him and his family, but millions of us.”

  “Millions?” I wondered how that was possible.

  “I’m not a scientist.” Dad shook his head. “Maybe Mom could explain it better. But they found a way to make huge spheres that could escape the Earth. And since they had a few hundred years to study during the war, they found Ebes. So they left us. They were the best of us, the smartest and the fittest. They left Earth for the stars, and that was that.”

  “But that’s not all, is it?” I pried.

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “Because otherwise they wouldn’t have killed Lukas.”

  “Right.”

  I wanted to ask more. I could’ve kept Dad up all night, needling him with questions, but I saw something in his eyes that made me go quiet.

  It was sadness.

  Sadness for what had happened to the world.

  Sadness for humanity.

  And sadness for something else, something I couldn’t guess.

  We walked home in silence that night. We slipped into our house more than an hour after we’d said we’d be home for dinner. Aly had gone to bed, but Mom was still sitting at the table.

  I expected her to be upset with us. But she wasn’t. She sat at the table, a cup of warm tea nestled in her hands.

  She didn’t say much.

  But I knew she knew everything Dad had told me.

  Fewer

  On the first night of spring, the air was bitterly cold.

  It had been a hard year, and a harder winter. I’d worked every single day from dawn until well after dusk. After so many hours of labor, I could feel the chill in my bones like no other eight-year old in the world. The rest of the world didn’t do farming like we did, Dad had told me. In most civilized places, machines did most of the work.

  Tilling.

  Seeding.

  Watering.

  Monitoring.

  Harvesting.

  All the work, by robots.

  Everywhere except for our farm.

  It’s not that I minded hard work. I didn’t. It’s just that sometimes I felt like I was being tested. By day, I worked my hands raw. And each night when I sneaked into the basement and read Aly’s schoolbooks, I felt like Dad and Mom knew. Like I was doing exactly what they’d hoped for. Like all my work and reading were supposed to mean something more.

  And I didn’t know what to think of it.

  Standing beneath the cloudless night sky, I closed my eyes and let all my thoughts drain out of my head. The cold didn’t matter. My hands didn’t hurt anymore. I didn’t worry that tomorrow we were expecting a visit from the GQO, the Government Quota Office, to assess next year’s harvest. And I didn’t care that I was late for dinner again, which Mom always borrowed Dad’s Look to scold me for.

  I just stood there in the cold and breathed. To have a few moments alone felt indescribably good. I opened my eyes to look at my palms, and I smiled at all the cracks in my skin. I saw the moonlight rising behind one of the mountaintops, and I dreamed of what it might be like to watch the moon from one of the orbital stations a hundred-thousand kilometers above the Earth.

  If I felt free that night, and if I dared to be late for dinner again, it was for good reason: I’d taken Dad’s skypad. I didn’t steal it; I borrowed it. Before that night, he’d never left it where I could find it. I knew he’d meant for me to take it, and so I did.

  When I reached down to the satchel at my feet and tugged the skypad out, I looked around to make sure no one was watching.

  No one was there. I was all alone in the middle of a fallow pasture. The dry grass crackled beneath my boots. I felt like the only person alive on the entire planet.

  Dad’s in Donva tonight.

  Aly’s at the dinner table, baiting Mom to punish me when I come home.

  Mom’s sitting in her chair, patient as a mountain.

  That moment was a first for me. I’d never had the skypad alone before. Even though I was sure Dad had left it for me to find, some part of me felt guilty for peeling it off the workbench and rolling it up in my work satchel.

  Too late now, I thought.

  I unrolled the skypad. It was several years old, but it still looked in perfect condition. Skypads were made in a city far west of Donva, in a valley deeper than ours. I understood the basics of how the makers fused silicon chips with flexible polymers, but I knew I’d never understand the hard science behind it.

  It didn’t matter.

  I knew what I wanted out of the skypad that night.

  And it wasn’t Castyn Clarke’s news or anything from the Dusktime Dispatch.

  After stretching it out, I held it up to the sky. The void was so full of stars, the heavens pricked by thousands of little lights.

  The pad did what it was supposed to do.

  “The Leo Triplet,” it said in a soft female voice.

  The Leo Triplet, I smiled. I’d read about it in one of Aly’s books. Effortless, the skypad zoomed in on the portion of the heavens I’d centered on. It pulled up an image of three little discs, three galaxies in the same triangle of space. They looked close together, but in reality were impossibly far apart.

  I sighed. I wondered how many billions of stars lay in each of the three galaxies. I wanted to see them all.

  And then I moved on.

  “Saturn,” the skypad said to me. “And its moon, Tethys.”

  I let the pad zoom in
again. I’d seen Saturn in books before, but never in such perfect clarity. The image on the pad was delivered to my eyes by a telescope in Earth’s far orbit, and it was magnificent. The rings looked like discs of the softest sand, and the planet’s surface like a beach I’d never be able to walk on. Of course, I knew the reality of the great gas planet and its frozen circuit of rings, but seeing it on the pad put me in a daydream. I wanted to go there. I wanted to touch it.

  And so I let the skypad wander, using it to peer into the deep, dark skies above our valley. I centered it near the mountains, above which I glimpsed a silver lunar station. I looked straight above my head, where countless stars wheeled. I got lost in the view of a blazing supernova a trillion kilometers away, of a dozen scattered nebulae, and of clusters of fresh white stars born in a pillar of red dust a hundred billion kilometers wide.

  “Skypad,” I said, “How many stars do you count in the sky tonight?”

  “Four-hundred million, seven-hundred thousand, thirty-two,” she answered.

  Making a face, I looked up. Dad had once told me that with my own eyes I could see maybe three or four thousand. My eyes were sharper than most, and so I liked to think I could see many more than that. But of course the skypad was cheating. It was synced to more than a dozen telescopes in far Earth orbit. It couldn’t see all the stars, of course, but even its shortest-range scopes could find millions more than I’d ever be able to.

  It wasn’t really fair.

  “Skypad,” I said with a smile, “how many stars are in the known universe.”

  I expected a pause. But the skypad was good.

  “In the observable universe, it is estimated that more than seventy-billion trillion stars exist,” she said. “This is an estimate, and should not be used for precise calculation.”

  I smiled again. The last part had sounded almost smug.

  I was more exhausted than on most nights. Dad had worked me extra hard rebuilding an engine before his trip to Donva, and to show off I’d skipped lunch and breaks to finish it. If he’d been impressed, he hadn’t said so. Sometimes it felt like I worked myself to the bone for no real reason at all.