Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  With a shiver, I scrolled the skypad up and stuffed it back in my bag. I’d had my fun. The pad was entertaining, but I preferred to look at the night sky with my own eyes.

  And so I did.

  I knew what I risked by staying outside. Mom’s patience, though legendary, was probably waning. Aly doubtless had a smile on her face as she sat in bed, knowing I’d be in trouble when I came home.

  But I couldn’t help it. The night was clearer than any in my memory. And with the moon still not above the mountaintops, I felt alone in the darkness, just me and seventy-billion trillion friends.

  Many times, I’d heard it said the night sky made most people feel small. Dad had admitted it, and even Aly had said the same. But it wasn’t true for me. I didn’t feel small. I felt curious. I stood there, a little boy in a frosted field, and I might never have moved until dawn.

  They might have found me frozen.

  But I saw something that made me jump.

  Maybe it was luck. Maybe I just happened to glance at the right slice of sky at exactly the right time. When the lonely little star winked out and didn’t come back, I thought at first my exhaustion had played a trick on my mind.

  Can’t be, I thought.

  Stars don’t just go away.

  I stared hard at the tiny segment of sky. I knew there’d been a star there only moments before. It’d burned brighter than the others around it, sharp in my eyes.

  Gone? I asked myself. Did something move in front of it? An orbital station maybe?

  I walked through a long conversation in my head. I argued the possibility of a star vanishing against the likelihood I’d hallucinated it due to lack of sleep. But I never blinked. I never looked away from the spot where I’d seen it disappear.

  I wasn’t crazy.

  And then I had an idea.

  Almost frantic, I pulled the skypad out again. It was cold to the touch, and I heard the polymers crackle as I unrolled it.

  With a deep breath, I asked:

  “Skypad, how many stars do you count in the sky right now?”

  She paused. I knew she did. It was a subtle hitch in her voice, but it happened.

  “Four-hundred million, seven-hundred thousand, nine,” she said.

  I shivered again, but not from the cold. Twenty minutes ago, she’d said four-hundred million, seven-hundred thousand, thirty two. For a few breaths, I considered her count could be lower for any number of reasons. The Earth had moved relative to the stars, after all. Her field of view had changed.

  But then I remembered it wasn’t her field of view she used to count with. The skypad used the telescopes out in far orbit.

  In theory, her count should’ve been the same.

  “Skypad, how many stars in the sky now?” I asked her a third time.

  She didn’t pause this time. Maybe I’d only imagined it the time before.

  “Four-hundred million, six-hundred ninety- nine thousand, nine-hundred eighty four.”

  I stood there for what felt like forever. In twenty-two minutes, forty-eight stars had dropped off her count. In my young mind, I dreamed a hundred different reasons for why her number had fallen.

  They moved, I thought.

  Or something moved in front of them.

  Or the orbital ‘scopes aren’t so precise after all.

  There’s an easy explanation.

  And yet, when I remembered the first star, the bright one I’d seen go dark, I wasn’t curious anymore.

  I was terrified.

  Feeling the cold wash over me, I stuffed the skypad into my satchel and sprinted home. I didn’t stop in the kitchen when Mom called my name. I didn’t say anything when I ran down the hall and slammed my door. I didn’t answer when Mom knocked again and again.

  I was too scared. And she must’ve known. After a while, I sensed her leave, and I pulled the covers up over my head.

  Fewer, I kept repeating in my head.

  Fewer.

  I didn’t remember falling asleep. I couldn’t recall when in the night Mom came in and stuck Alpo under my covers. All I knew was that when I woke up in the morning, most of my fear was gone.

  But not quite all of it.

  The good thing about being eight years old was that a full night’s sleep helped me forget most things. Or maybe it was just that I hadn’t eaten, and that when I shambled down the hall to the kitchen, half dazed, a platter of griddlecakes and a tall glass of milk awaited me.

  “Feeling ok?” Mom asked me once I’d settled in my chair and piled my plate high with cakes.

  “Fine,” I said. It was mostly true.

  “You didn’t eat dinner last night.”

  “I missed lunch, too.”

  “You must be starving.” She sat down across from me. She didn’t really look worried, which told me I probably wasn’t going to get in trouble for staying out late.

  “I am,” I said with my mouth full. “Is that why you made griddlecakes? Where’s Dad and Aly?”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Aly’s at school, dear. Dad’s already outside at work. It’s raining today, so Dad says you have the day off.”

  I hadn’t noticed the rain. I looked over my shoulder and out the window behind the kitchen sink. The skies were grey and gloomy, the rain winding in little rivers down the glass. It was strange, but my first thought was that I wouldn’t be able to look at the stars that night.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Ten o’clock,” she said mildly.

  “Ten o’clock? But I usually wake up at seven.”

  Calm as a cloud, Mom sipped her tea. “You were tired, dear. I’ve never seen you sleep like that before. Dad and I agreed you needed a day off. Besides, it’s raining, and we’re expecting guests. Wouldn’t have been a full day’s work anyway.”

  She was right. I never slept like that. I usually woke at the crack of dawn, sometimes even earlier.

  “Who’s coming today?” I’d forgotten.

  She peered over the rim of her teacup at me. I had my mouth stuffed with griddlecakes, but I still noticed the look in her eyes. Something was off. It almost felt like she was about to lie to me.

  “The Quota Office, dear.”

  “Oh,” I mumbled. “I remember now.”

  She sat quietly for a while longer. I knew she wanted to say something to me. She wanted to ask what had scared me the night before, and she wanted to say something else, too.

  But she never did say anything. And I was too busy stuffing my face.

  Of all the dull, lonely days I’d ever experienced as a boy, that one was the worst. Without any work to do, with the cold rain tearing at the half-frozen fields, all I could do was lurk in the basement and flip through books I’d already read three times apiece.

  Most of the books were Aly’s. My sister was four years older than me, but she’d never really taken to the challenges of education. For her, school was time to talk to her friends. My opinion was, with all her books gathering dust in our basement, talking was all anyone ever did at school.

  Another reason I’m glad I don’t have to go.

  I read for several hours that day.

  Hunched beside a lamp, I started with her math book. I didn’t know why I enjoyed it so much. I liked geometry and solving equations, but it was more than that. Something about the numbers touched a part of me I didn’t fully understand.

  Later, I flopped on the floor and thumbed through one of her science books. Aly hated those the most, but I was riveted. Chemistry, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics were pretty heavy material for a boy my age. It didn’t matter. I loved all of it. The music of space and time called to me, and I was more their student than any of the kids in big, bright Donva.

  I was just about to crack open a history book, which Dad had already done a fine job of debunking for me, when I heard thumping on the floor above me. At first I thought maybe it had been thunder, and that the first spring storms were rolling over the mountains.

  But it wasn’t thunder. They were
footsteps.

  Mom must have thought I’d fallen asleep or that I’d fallen too deep into Aly’s books to care. I’d heard her click the basement door shut hours earlier, and I hadn’t made a peep since.

  At first, I shrugged and dove back into the history book. ‘The 23rd Century,’ it was called. And even though Dad had told me it was mostly lies, I still liked the stories of the Oil Wars, the post-Exodus Renaissance, and the Days of Discovery, during which humans were said to have invented new things at the rate of many hundreds per day.

  But for a reason I didn’t know, after reading two pages I slapped the book shut and walked over to the Dirt Room. The Dirt Room was a creepy, empty, dirt-floored space beneath the stairs. I’d always been scared of it, but I’d also learned it was the perfect place to hide from Aly.

  And the perfect place to eavesdrop on everything said in our kitchen.

  Their voices came right down the flue. I wasn’t sure why I decided to listen. It’s not as though the GQO officers ever said anything interesting. I stood there and listened, only half-interested, ready to bolt for my books if the conversation got too dull.

  There were two officers, I could tell, and they sounded way more serious than usual. I caught myself rolling my eyes at the mechanical way they talked to Mom. And when Dad came in from the rain, they greeted him like they knew him, even though I was sure these two officers had never been in our house before.

  But it wasn’t until I heard Mom say, “Oh don’t worry. He’s downstairs. Probably asleep. Long day yesterday,” I realized something.

  The two men in my kitchen weren’t GQO officers.

  These men were something else.

  They sounded almost like Lukas Mosk, big and booming, maybe even dangerous.

  And they weren’t at my house to talk about crop yields or tax credits.

  They were standing in my kitchen, just above my head, talking about me.

  Admissions

  On a warm summer’s eve a few weeks after my tenth birthday, Dad and I marched across the fields toward home.

  We were dirty and tired, but satisfied. We’d just finished the two-month task of burying new water pipes to supply irrigation to our farm. It was a rudimentary system, our pipeline, but we’d done it all ourselves. No powered pumps. No automation. No hired help. All either one of us had to do to start the system was hike up to the well, open a big valve, and unleash a slow, steady stream of water to our crops.

  And the best part was, I’d designed the entire thing.

  “It was your mother’s idea,” Dad said as we tramped across a creek.

  “Mom’s?” I was surprised.

  “She found your drawings,” he explained. “She didn’t mean to. They were stuffed in one of Aly’s books we shipped to her school last winter.”

  “Oh,” was all I could muster.

  I remembered the drawings. During the coldest nights of the last year, I’d shut myself in the basement. Aly had been snowed in at her friend’s house two hours away, and after Mom and Dad had gone asleep I’d had the whole place to myself.

  I’d drawn fractals.

  I’d copied star charts from memory.

  And I’d sketched a new system of pumps, pipes, and machinery for the farm.

  Of course Dad would’ve never allowed all the modern equipment I’d dreamed up, but the pipes, levers, and stream-fed reservoirs were just fine. And so we’d built it: my schematic paired with his desire for simplicity. Beyond the laser cutter for the pipes, we hadn’t used a shred of modern technology.

  The only thing was – I’d always believed it’d been his idea to let me design it, not Mom’s.

  “Dad…” I slowed down. “I want to ask you something.”

  My change of tone must’ve caught him off guard. He slowed down even more than I did.

  “I’m listening.”

  “I um…” I stuttered. “Do you—”

  “Say it, Joff.”

  “Do you remember those two men who came to the house a few years back?”

  The way he paused gave it away. He knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “Yes. Why do you bring it up?”

  “Well…” I chewed my lip. “I saw two more men yesterday afternoon. I know you and Mom thought I was up near the mountains, but I came down for an early lunch. I saw them. And they weren’t GQO’s.”

  Dad took a deep breath. Maybe if I’d have been Aly, he’d have lied to me.

  But with me he knows better.

  “You saw that, huh?”

  “Yes. Who were they?”

  “You’re right, Joff. They weren’t GQO’s. They were here on different business.”

  “They were wearing suits,” I said.

  “Black suits,” Dad admitted.

  “Government suits.” I made a face.

  “Yeah.”

  I wasn’t trying to corner him. I wasn’t really even sure why I’d chosen that exact moment to ask him about it. It was just that maybe I’d dreamed up a connection between all the not-so-typical work for a young boy I’d done and the presence of the men in the black suits.

  We were still walking through the grass, but only half as fast as before. Dad had fallen silent. I could tell he was thinking.

  “I heard what they said,” I announced.

  “How?” Dad looked at me. “You might’ve been off the mountain, but you weren’t in the house. Did you have a sprite spying on us?”

  “No. I don’t mean yesterday. I mean two years ago. It was raining. I took a day off. I was in the basement. I heard one of them tell you, ‘the Exodus isn’t the main problem. It’s what they intend to do now that they’re gone.’”

  “Right.” Dad looked a little stunned.

  “What did he mean by that?” I asked. “Who are they and what do they want to do to us?”

  Finally, Dad stopped walking. He looked every which way into the red sky, but not once at me. I’d never seen him like that before.

  “Dad?”

  “Aly’s going away tomorrow,” he said. “She’s been admitted to a school two cities away from Donva. I know what you think of your sister, but it turns out our girl is pretty smart.”

  It was my turn to be stunned. Had the black suit men come to talk about Aly, and not about me?

  “I don’t under—”

  “Your mom is pretty upset about it.” Dad rubbed his forehead. “With you, we’ve always known. But now Aly…so soon…just like that.

  It’s funny how quickly things change.”

  “Dad, what are you talking about?”

  He glanced at me. In the twilight, I saw a shadow on his face, a darkness in his eyes I didn’t expect.

  “The skypad’s broken, Joff.”

  “Oh. But what does that have to do with—”

  “Once we get it fixed, there’s a program I want to show you. It’s about some of the things that started happening after the Exodus. It’s a good program, not full of lies like the others. It can explain things better than I can.”

  The air went out of me. Deflated, I looked up at Dad and understood he wasn’t going to tell me what I wanted to know. Most kids my age would’ve pestered him until he caved in or got angry, but not me. He was unhappy, and I wasn’t about to make it worse.

  “Let’s go home, Joff,” he said.

  “Ok.” I fell in behind him.

  * * *

  That night after a quiet dinner, I knocked on Aly’s door.

  “Come in,” she said with none of her usual haughtiness. I figured she must’ve been expecting me. It wasn’t like her not to yell at me for disturbing her at night.

  In her room, my sister was propped up in her bed. Her black hair was a mess, stark against her pale, pretty face. Her eyes were puffy. She hadn’t eaten dinner with us. I began to grasp why Dad had been so quiet.

  I padded across the room and plunked down on the floor beside her bed. In the soft glow of her lamp, I saw her bags piled up against the wall. Dad had been serious. Aly was leaving us.
<
br />   “So where you going?” I murmured after a short silence.

  “Boulda,” she answered. “At the bottom of some ugly mountain. There’s a school. I’m being admitted early.”

  I didn’t say a word about it, but I was surprised. I’d never thought of Aly as stupid, but the last thing I expected was for her to be sent to Boulda, which housed the biggest university in a ten-city radius.

  “What’s your scholarship?” I asked.

  “Psyche classes.” She shrugged.

  “Psyche classes? Is that your thing? I didn’t know you liked that stuff. Never heard you talk about it before.”

  She shrugged again. Shrugging was definitely her thing. “I guess I didn’t know either,” she said. “The teachers came to me and said I was good at it. I never saw it coming, but whatever.”

  “Any of your friends going?”

  She cracked a slender smile. “They’re sending Melina with me. Same scholarship.”

  Weird, I thought. Melina’s her best friend. And not smart…at all.

  “Um, that’s good,” I said.

  She sat up straighter in bed. She still looked sad. “I don’t want to go, Joff,” she told me.

  “Why not?” I asked. “You’ll finally get to be away from home. You’ve always wanted that, right? I mean…isn’t that what you’ve always said?”

  “I know I said it.” She looked ready to cry. “But I take it back.”

  “Take it back? You can’t just take it back.”

  “I know,” she sighed.

  “Well…tell them you’ve changed your mind. Tell them you want to go to school in Donva. The university is decent there. You could come home almost every night.”

  She shook her head. The way she did it reminded me of Mom. She was deliberate about it, almost serene in her sadness.

  “No,” she said. “I don’t have a choice, Joff. I have to go.”

  “That’s silly…” I said. But then I caught myself. She wasn’t joking. She meant it exactly the way she said it.