Darkness Between the Stars

by J. Edward Neill

  She really doesn’t have a choice.

  “You have to go?” I asked.

  Instead of answering, she slid off the bed and sat down on the floor beside me. I couldn’t remember her ever doing that before, sitting next to me without punching me in the arm or making fun of me.

  And just when I expected her to say something, she hugged me.

  Hard.

  “I’ll miss you,” she said. “My stinky Joff, always smelling like dirt.”

  “I…I’ll miss you, too,” I managed. “But—”

  She squared my shoulders in her hands and looked at me. Her eyes were swollen and red, her black hair hanging in lank strips down her face.

  “I can’t tell you, Joff. I can’t explain. I’m not allowed.”

  “But—” I tried again.

  “Just don’t ask me, ok? You think this is easy? It’s not. Maybe someday when we’re older…maybe then. But not tonight. I’m leaving tomorrow before you wake up. This is it, you understand?”

  I just sat there. I felt stupid. First Dad, now Aly? I thought. What’s going on around here? Why is everyone acting so weird?

  I wanted to ask her so many things. I felt it on the tip of my tongue, and she saw it in my eyes. But I didn’t. Somehow, someway, I willed myself to stand up and walk to the door. I looked at her one more time, mouthed goodbye, and padded down the hall to my room. I was more tired than I knew. My head was spinning, and I felt a little sick.

  But, as most ten-year olds could do, I sank into bed and fell asleep within moments. And for the first time in years Alpo slept with me.

  * * *

  By the time I awoke in the morning, my sister was gone. Dad had driven her, Mom explained at our lonely breakfast. I’d tried to wake up well before sunrise to say a last goodbye, but it hadn’t mattered. Dad and Aly had woken up much earlier.

  “You miss her, don’t you?” Mom saw me picking at my eggs.

  “No,” I lied. “Ok…maybe a little.”

  She sat down across from me. I’d never seen her so exhausted. Mom’s hair had always been as black and lustrous as Aly’s, her eyes always bright and blue. But that morning, she looked greyer. It was almost as if she’d aged overnight, as if Aly leaving had taken an awful toll.

  “Joff,” she said while cradling a cup of tea in her palms, “I know you have—”

  “Questions,” I interrupted. “Yeah. Lots of them.”

  She looked out the window behind me. The sun was just then rising, and the sky was the same blue-grey as her eyes. “When your father gets home, maybe at dinner tonight, we’ll have a talk.”

  “A talk?” I was skeptical.

  “Yes. We owe it to you.”

  “So…” I put down my fork. “You guys will tell me about the black-suit men? About Aly getting a scholarship for a subject she doesn’t know anything about? And about…” I considered even darker questions. “…you know…things?”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I repeated. “Just maybe.”

  She tried to console me, but I wasn’t having it. I hunched over my plate, scooped up every bit of egg, and gulped down my milk. I didn’t feel all that hungry, but the long days in the fields had made me into an eating machine. I didn’t know many boys my age, but I figured I ate more than all of them.

  Even when I didn’t want to.

  With Mom still sitting there looking glum, I walked out the door. The morning was made of dark clouds, and the rumble of distant thunder matched my mood. I wasn’t angry or sad. I didn’t feel any disappointment in Mom or Dad. I felt an emotion I couldn’t place. The clouds and I were the same. We were dark. We were ominous.

  I marched for the barn. All I could think of was the skypad and what Dad had told me.

  ‘It can explain things better than I can,’ he’d told me.

  We’ll see about that, I thought.

  With a last look at the morning sky, I slid into the barn. Somehow I knew I’d remember that last glimpse at the roiling clouds, no matter what happened.

  Aly’s gone.

  Mom’s changed.

  Dad’s tired.

  Nothing will be the same.

  I walked through the darkness and came to the tool room. The only light I had to see with came from a few cracks in the walls and ceiling. I didn’t need a lamp. I knew where I was going.

  I found the skypad exactly where we’d left it. A week ago, Dad had used it to show me a vid of a rocket launch. I’d been awestruck, standing beside Dad while he smoked, my eyes wide with the image of a long, pale cylinder gliding up into space. He’d told me rockets had once used fuel and hot fires to speed their way into Earth’s orbit. But the rocket on the skypad vid had no flames at all. It reached for the heavens on a stream of quantum particles too small to see.

  I’d understood it immediately. Somehow, the math had made sense to me.

  “They’re telling the rocket what to do,” I’d said to Dad.

  “What do you mean?” he’d asked.

  “The particles. We can’t see them, but they’re there. Instead of the rocket using fire to fight gravity, the particles just tell the rocket where it needs to be. And it goes there because it has to.”

  Dad had smiled, though the look in his eyes had been far from amused. He’d been impressed…and worried.

  Reluctant to ruin the pleasant darkness, I flicked a lamp on and peeled the skypad off the toolbox. Skypad tech was much like rocket tech, I figured. The quantum skin on its back told it when to be sticky and when to be rigid. I pulled it taut, plucked a trio of small tools out of the toolbox, and let out a deep sigh.

  He said it was broken.

  Ok, fine. C’mon, Joff. Fix this thing.

  It’s not like Dad is gonna buy us another.

  And so I sat by the soft blue lamplight, as focused as ever in my life. I poked, prodded, and opened the skypad up. I lost all sense of time, even when the thunder boomed and the rain started slashing against the timbers.

  I worked the morning away.

  I didn’t go home to eat.

  I just sat in Dad’s stool, probing at the skypad for hours and hours.

  Until Dad walked into the room just before dusk and saw me watching the vid he’d told me about.

  The Visitor

  “Wait, you mean Mom used to make weapons?”

  Two nights after had Aly left for school, we sat at our kitchen table, just me and my parents. We’d just finished dessert, a pie made with apples from the orchards outside Donva. I’d already forgotten how good the pie had tasted. Stunned, I sank into my chair, glancing between my parents as if they’d both just slapped me.

  “It wasn’t like that, Joff,” Mom answered. “I worked in the science division. We designed propulsion for spacecraft. We engineered gravity-control devices. And yes…sometimes we tested theoretical weapons. Not often, just sometimes.”

  “But…” I made a face. “I thought…you know…with Dad not liking technology and all.”

  Dad opened his mouth as if to answer, but it was Mom’s moment. Talking about long bottled-up things made her seem younger by the moment.

  “It’s true.” She smiled at Dad. “Your father didn’t much care for tech. He was at university with me; that’s where we met. His study was history, the Exodus, the wars, all of it. And of course he also knew agriculture. We met during a class called Earthbound Physics. We got married. I went on to work in an orbital station for a few years. He used the money I sent home to buy our farm.”

  “I thought you said the farm has always been in the family?” I squinted.

  “It has been,” said Dad. “But our family was just me and Mom. Before we came along and developed the land, this place was a garbage dump. I’m not kidding, either. The valley was stuffed with trash end-to-end. It took years to get it ready.”

  “Alpo…” I realized.

  “Yep. That old food can was leftover junk. A few clicks beneath our fields, it’s still an ocean of metal and plastic.”

 
“So…” I refocused. “…Mom was an astrophysicist?”

  “Yes.” She smiled again.

  “I don’t understand why you couldn’t tell me before tonight,” I protested. “I mean…it’s outer space and stuff. You know I like science. Why didn’t you just say something?”

  Mom and Dad traded glances with each other. It felt as if I were the parent and they were the kids. I had The Look, and no one at the table could leave until it was answered.

  Dad spoke first.

  “You remember last year when the school official came?” he asked me. “Remember the lady in the white dress with the stacks of paper?”

  I remembered. The tall, serious woman had arrived with a summons to send me straight into Donva’s school system. After four years of missed studies, it turned out Donva’s truancy officers had finally noticed me missing from the school roster.

  All I remembered was that Mom had pulled out a piece of paper, and with one look at it the woman had scurried back to her hover-car and jetted off.

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

  “Joff,” Dad interrupted, “what we’re trying to say is that your mother is more than a little famous.”

  “Kind of like my mother before me,” Mom added.

  “Famous?” I blurted.

  “For inventing things. Mostly things to help people, but also things for the government. With you, we feel we can talk about it,” said Dad.

  “But with Aly…” Mom raised her eyebrow.

  I thought about things for a moment. Mom being an astrophysicist who played with extremely high-tech devices and weapons was a surprise, but not a complete one. It started to make sense. The people in Donva didn’t stop and wave at our car because it was fancy and old-world. They stopped and waved because they knew who Mom was. It explained why everyone called her by name, and why people were always giving us free things. It also explained why, despite Dad’s skill at farming and rebuilding thousand-year old technology, Mom was the one with all the ideas.

  I understood then she had known about Dad and me staying out late to play with the skypad.

  I understood why she’d made Aly leave her science and mathematics books where I was sure to find them.

  And I remembered many of the things she’d said to me, all the bedtime stories about deep space she’d told, and just how much smarter than most people, even Dad, she’d always been.

  But none of that was as important as the thought that popped into my head. Even as my indignity at being left in the dark dried up, I had more questions.

  “So now that Aly’s gone, what else can you tell me?”

  They looked at each other again. I wanted to reach out and beg them, look at me, not each other.

  “What do you want to know?” Mom asked.

  “Um…well...” I reached deep. “Why am I not in school? Why’d you send the lady away?”

  “You’re in a special program,” she replied. “It’s perfectly legal. The men in the black suits, the government men, they gave us the papers I showed to the truancy officer. But it’s not forever. You will go to school…though it won’t be anything ordinary.”

  “Why me? I’m nothing special.”

  “Oh, but you are,” Dad chimed in. “You’re learning things most kids never will. How to work with your hands. How to be dedicated to a project over many months. You’re learning science, math, and physics, just not in the way most boys do.”

  They’re right. I considered it.

  It’s the same for all of them. All the kids.

  They only know computers. Nothing else.

  “Why did Aly go away to university?” I asked the hardest question I could think of. “She doesn’t care about psychology. I love her and all, but she doesn’t even like her lessons.”

  They’d expected my question. I saw it in their eyes. Before they uttered a word, I couldn’t help but doubt the coming answer.

  “Aly’s in a program, too,” said Dad.

  “She’s smarter than you think, but in a different way,” Mom added.

  I murmured my agreement, but I didn’t really mean it. I knew what was up. No matter what questions I asked, Mom and Dad meant to give me half-answers and partial truths. What made it hurt more were the looks in their eyes. They wanted me to believe, but they sensed my doubt.

  They know.

  But they can’t say they do.

  “Anything else?” asked Mom. She said it in her impossibly sweet way. I wanted to ask something simple just so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings.

  But I didn’t.

  I said something else.

  “I think I get it.” I stared hard at them. “I’m in a special program. You can’t tell me about it yet. Aly’s gone because she knows and you’re afraid she’ll tell me. You want me to work a few more months in the fields, maybe even a few more years. You want me to get older, stronger, and smarter, and maybe then you’ll tell me. It’s too important to tell me now. You’re afraid you’ll scare me. Or maybe…maybe you’re not supposed to tell me. Maybe someone told you not to.”

  I couldn’t believe I’d said it. Dad pulled at his face the same way he did when he was really tired. Mom sat quietly in place, not moving at all, just like she used to whenever Dad wore The Look.

  “Can I go to bed?” I asked.

  Mom nodded. Dad didn’t say a word. After I exhaled the biggest breath in my life, I slid out of my chair and padded down the hall. Like a robot, I brushed my teeth, changed into my pajamas, and made for my bedroom.

  “No stories tonight,” I called down the hall to Mom. “I’m tired.”

  I didn’t know what they thought. I felt bad for them. I loved my parents to pieces, but all the questions they’d failed to answer had begun to add up. They should’ve known better. They’d done everything possible to make me into a thinker, a hard worker, a doubter of universal truths.

  And finally it had turned against them.

  I waited until they went to bed. They didn’t talk, at least not that I could hear. Within an hour of me shutting myself in my dark, dark room, the house was utterly silent. Even the wind outside was still, rare for a summer’s night in our valley.

  Long after everything went quiet, I looked at Alpo. My one-armed teddy sat on the little table beside my bed, and I could saw him in the starlight.

  “Watch the door for me, old buddy,” I whispered to him.

  “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  Summoning all the skills I’d learned in many years of hiding from my sister, I slithered out of bed, opened the shutters, and crept outside my window. Our house wasn’t old, but the creaks and groans could’ve given me away if I hadn’t known how to muffle them. I knew the grass outside my bedroom would be tall and crunchy, and so I’d slipped my thickest socks on. I must’ve looked ridiculous in my grey pajamas and white socks, but I didn’t care.

  There was something I needed to know.

  Swimming in the heavy starlight, I walked toward our old barn. All around me, the mountains were black against the stars, while the waifish clouds were still and silent.

  The air was cool, but stagnant.

  I could feel each breath escape my body.

  Why were Mom and Dad lying? I wondered.

  Why hide anything from me?

  Don’t they trust me?

  I crossed a fallow field. Still damp from yesterday’s rain, I felt the mud stick to my socks. As I whisked along, getting filthier with each step, I kicked at the crackly reeds of last year’s harvest and I realized something.

  I was angry, truly angry, for the first time in my life.

  At the barn, I noticed the latch was up and the door slightly open. I didn’t care. I waded right in, not even bothering to shut the door behind me. I slid through the shadows, walked down a narrow corridor, and peeled the skypad off the wall in the tool room. Dad and I hadn’t touched it since he’d found me absorbed in it two nights ago.

  I rolled the skypad up in my armpit and made for the door.
>
  As I walked, I remembered some of the things I’d heard when last I’d watched it:

  “Exodus traitors send secret communications to Earth!”

  “Materials for strange device smuggled offworld! Conspirators caught!”

  “Ebes colony suspected of plot to destroy Earth!”

  The program Dad had suggested I watch had set thoughts into motion I wasn’t able to control. It had been loud and bombastic, and the man who narrated it had been so passionate I couldn’t get his voice out of my head. Even as I walked back into the night, I heard his shouts echoing inside me:

  “Ebes must be destroyed!”

  “Aiden Frost must be stopped!”

  “The Exodus is a curse against humanity!”

  I still wasn’t sure why Dad had wanted me to see the program. The recordings were old, as in thousands of years old. Since they’d been made, wars had ravaged the world and generations of people who’d left Earth during the Exodus had lived and died, including the traitor Aiden Frost.

  Aside from being fascinating, it all felt pointless now.

  Besides, I had bigger things on my mind.

  At the edge of the fallow field, I stopped. The night couldn’t have been more perfect. It wasn’t balmy or chilly. The clouds had cleared off. I looked up at the sky and saw exactly the kind of night I needed.

  I unrolled the skypad and aimed it skyward.

  “Skypad, how many stars do you count in the sky?” I asked aloud.

  “Four-hundred million, six-hundred seventy- thousand seven-hundred sixty-two.”

  I shivered. Hard.

  “Skypad, how many stars did you count when I asked two years ago?”

  I felt the skypad pause, as if somehow it were alive.

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

  I sucked in a deep breath and asked my final question.

  “Skypad, what is the numerical difference between the last two star counts?”

  “Twenty-nine thousand two-hundred twenty-two,” she said.

  Twenty-nine thousand, I thought.

  Twenty-nine thousand fewer.

  That’s not an accident.

  It couldn’t be.