by PAMELA DEAN
“This should work,” said Becky. “We’re not facing that house at all.”
Gentian had forgotten to take the lens caps off the binoculars. She unscrewed them with increasingly cold fingers and slid them into the pocket of her sweater. Then she pressed her eyes into the eyepieces. Mars sprang out of the southeastern sky at her, a tiny disk, like the ghost of red. She settled her elbows and looked for Orion. There it was, still low; there was Rigel, and Betelgeuse, and Aldebaran.
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Becky.
Gentian turned and brought into her view the sky above the new house next door. It was all there as it ought to be. She feasted her eyes on her stars, picking out particular favorites. It was not the best time to be doing this: good stargazing in mid-October mostly happened earlier in the evening, and October and November formed a largely unspectacular pause between the glories of the Summer Triangle and the lovely cold abundance of Orion and the stars of winter. Becky sometimes talked of the odd omissions in the subjects used for poetry, and had occasionally said she thought of making a specialty of one or the other of them; Gentian had similarly thought of making her own study of the night sky from mid-November to early January. She would bet there was more there than people thought.
“Gen,” said Becky. “Gen.”
Gentian said, “What?” She had the impression that Becky had been saying her name for some time, over and over. Normally you would tap someone so preoccupied on the shoulder or something, but Becky had done that to Gentian once in the early days of the binoculars, and been snapped at. Gentian knew her way around the sky much better by now and would not have been much annoyed even if Becky did jog the binoculars, but Becky didn’t know that. Gentian was pleased to be considered, even if she didn’t need it.
“I’m getting cold,” said Becky.
“There’s a sweater in my room.”
“Is there another pair of binoculars?”
“What? No.”
“I think I’ll pass, then. I’ll go read. Come in when you get hungry.”
“I’ll only be a moment,” said Gentian.
As her family had done when they spent a weekend in New York, she thought, what must I see, what can’t I possibly miss, as though she might never have the chance again. What had been exciting when she first used the binoculars? Oh, of course.
She lowered the binoculars and walked along the balcony to its northern side, and found the Little Dipper lying crooked not far above the northern horizon. Curved around it were the stars of Draco. There was Thuban, there Eltanin—there. She lifted the binoculars, and where there had been one point of light, two minute distinct stars like a pair of headlights shone at her. She went back to Polaris, in the handle of the Little Dipper, and found the Big Dipper from that. Moving back between them she pounced on the tiny spirals, one flat and round to view and the other showing only its edge, of the galaxies M81 and M82, eleven million light-years away, showing her light that was new when the Himalayas were emerging and Ramapithecus was finding trees uncongenial and moving onto the savannah. There were angiosperms and insects and mammals, but no people. No industrious man, flinging a ribald stone at any occupation not his own; though it was probably not to be supposed that anybody’s hominid ancestors had been very interested in abstract learning, either.
She moved on and found bright Vega, and then the Northern Cross with Deneb crowning it.
As one star set, she found another, and another, as the whole sky wheeled by her and moved behind the far roofs of the city and into some other astronomer’s sky. Her right elbow hurt. She shifted to the left one, which hurt too. She straightened up, and almost yelped; her back hurt, and so did her knees. Her hands did not hurt, but were so cold she was afraid to try to move them lest she drop the binoculars. She shoved the door open with knee and elbow and forehead, shut it with her hip, and stood shivering in the relative warmth of the attic until she could unclose her fingers and put the binoculars back in their case. While she was waiting, she looked at her watch. Three-thirty. She and Becky usually stayed up until six or seven, so that should be all right.
When she got back to her room, still shivering, Becky was in bed, in the patchwork nightgown Erin had made her, her bristling poetry book open face down on her chest, apparently asleep.
Gentian climbed out of her cold clothes, hurried into her sweatpants and sweatshirt, and dived under the covers. “Hey. You aren’t asleep, are you?”
“Certainly not,” said Becky, without opening her eyes. “Why would I be?”
“His heatless room the watcher of the skies,” said Gentian, apologetically.
“Nightly inhabits when the sky is clear,” said Becky. “You’re just like me with reading; the longer since you haven’t done it, the longer you end up doing it to make up.”
Gentian objected on principle to giggling at inadvertent salaciousness, but she giggled nonetheless.
“Now you know how sleepy I am,” said Becky.
“We always stay up much later than this.”
“Sure, but we’re talking. And usually drinking something with caffeine in it.”
“You could have had some; it’s right there in the cooler. Or you could have come and gotten me.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Becky. She finally opened her eyes, saw the position of her book, and hastily closed it, smoothing the spine with her fingers.
“Are you mad?” said Gentian cautiously.
“More bemused.”
“Can I bring you something?”
“Not yet. Tell me what you saw.”
Gentian did not actually feel her mouth dry up, but she was as speechless as if it had, and on reflection wished it would. “I can’t talk about it,” she said. “I could show you. I’ve showed you before, mostly. We split Nu Draconis, remember?”
“Don’t most astronomers take pictures?” said Becky.
“Yes, but I’m not that advanced yet. It’s not the same, anyway.”
“You’d better get that telescope fixed,” said Becky.
“I guess I’ll ask Dad if we can take it in to the store,” said Gentian, gloomily.
“Maybe they’ll rent you a replacement, like they do with cars.”
“I guess they might for a working astronomer, but not for a kid.”
“Well, ask them. You’ll be impossible until you get it back.”
“You are mad.”
“No, I’m not. I’ve just found out something new about you. I didn’t know there was anything.”
“Maybe it’s really new. I mean, maybe it wasn’t here last year. Don’t people change when they grow up?”
There was a long pause. Finally Becky said, “For the first time ever I understand Peter Pan.”
Chapter 8
Gentian and Becky woke up at eleven in the morning, which felt decidedly odd, and ate all the remaining food for breakfast. Then they tried to have the kind of conversation they ordinarily had at six in the morning, but this proved impossible. The smells of coffee and pancakes from downstairs, the sounds of Juniper playing all her mother’s Peter, Paul and Mary CDs on random selection and of Rosie practicing karate in her bedroom, were distracting; so was the strong sunlight coming in through the windows and the skylight. They both grew embarrassed, which had hardly happened to them since they were five.
“How very odd,” said Becky at last. “One might make a poem out of this.”
“We’ll try again next week,” said Gentian, feeling acutely guilty.
“In the meantime,” said Becky, “I’d better go home and do my homework.”
She put on her clothes and stuffed the patchwork nightgown into her bag of books, along with the collection of poetry and her own poems. Gentian saw her downstairs.
“What are you doing up?” demanded Juniper over the sound of Peter, Paul and Mary going on and on about how this train didn’t carry no gamblers, this train.
“Is it dinnertime already?” said Rosie.
In the front hall, Gentian’s
mother said, “Is one of you ill?”
“No, we just went to bed early,” said Gentian. She and Becky rolled their eyes at one another, which made her feel better.
They escaped out the front door, crossed the porch safely, and were caught by Gentian’s father, who was planting bulbs in the front lawn. His usual reaction to their appearances was to say, “Ah, youth,” in a melancholy fashion. This time he said, “What emergency could bring you out before sunset?”
“Gentian’s telescope is broken,” said Becky, crisply.
They went down the steep steps to the sidewalk. It was a glorious sunny day, abnormally warm, with all the red and yellow leaves as precise as stained glass. Gentian’s mother’s chrysanthemums shone like huge stars, dark red, pale red, yellow, white, orange.
“Well,” said Becky. “I’ll see you at school.”
Gentian was reluctant to let her go, without being able to think of anything to say that would keep her. Becky seemed to feel something similar; at any rate, she said, “I’ll call you,” before she turned and walked away, her lumpy bag bumping on her shoulder and the green skirt billowing in the warm southern breeze.
Gentian went back up the steps and found her way blocked by her father, standing muddily in the middle of the sidewalk and looking perplexed. “You broke that telescope?” he said.
“No,” said Gentian, “but it won’t work. It’s out of adjustment somehow, and Becky can’t fix it.”
“It must certainly be out of adjustment, then,” said her father.
“Can we get it fixed?”
“Well, we can get it diagnosed and get an estimate on what it will take to fix it, anyway.”
“When?”
Her father looked over his shoulder at the bulb planter, the hose, and the dozens of little mesh bags of bulbs piled by the shrubbery. “Right now,” he said, “if you help me plant bulbs when we get back.”
Gentian glowered at him, but it was mostly for form’s sake.
They climbed all the stairs to her attic and removed the telescope from its careful installation. “You look as if somebody were taking out your liver without anesthesia,” her father remarked at one point. “We’ll put it back.”
Gentian felt too hollow to answer. They swaddled the telescope tenderly in bubble-wrap and Styrofoam, wound tape around the resulting bundle, and carried it down all the stairs, snapping at one another to be careful and scraping their knuckles on the plaster walls.
“Did you find a body in the attic, or what?” shrieked Juniper, over a loud rendition of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”
“Can I come too?” cried Rosemary, just as if she were still five years old.
“Is that your telescope?” demanded her mother as they carried it through the kitchen. “Is that what all the thumping I heard last night was about?”
“Yes. No,” said Gentian, and banged the back door shut with the bottom of her foot.
The telescope store was a rather makeshift affair across the street from the vet they always took Maria Mitchell and Pounce to; it had originally been a Middle Eastern restaurant and still had a small green-and-gold half-dome over its door. The sleek shining instruments displayed in its windows looked out of place. It had its own cat as well, a large black-and-white beast called Lowell. Lowell was not allowed in the display windows, and all the merchandise was in glass cases, to keep out the cat hair.
The young woman who had sold them the telescope was not there, and the middle-aged one behind the counter did not seem to know what she was doing. She had great difficulty understanding Gentian’s description of the problem, and even once or twice looked at Gentian’s father as if she did not really believe Gentian at all. The third time she did this, Gentian’s father said, “She’s the expert. And she isn’t a practical joker.”
“Well,” said the woman, “I’ll look at it this afternoon, and if I can’t see anything wrong, either Josh or Janice will look at it on Monday.”
She took their address and telephone number from Gentian’s father. “If we can’t fix it, we can ship it back to the manufacturer,” she said.
Gentian was cheered, until she realized that this would mean quite a lot of time without the telescope; her father looked glum, which probably indicated it would also mean a lot of money. They went out into the sunny, windy day, blinking.
“Why don’t we sneak out for lunch before going back to an afternoon of hard labor?” said her father.
“I won’t go to that Middle Eastern place,” said Gentian.
“Fine, and I won’t go to any pizza place whatsoever.”
They went to a Chinese restaurant and ate shrimp lo mein and curried squid. This made them very pleased with one another, since nobody else in the family would touch squid and everybody else in the family resisted having shrimp in restaurants because they had it every Friday—Catholic theology, their mother remarked, being far less durable than Catholic menus.
“So,” said her father about halfway through, “Juniper is of the opinion that you and your sister drove a potential swain away?”
“What? Who?”
“The young man from next door?”
“Junie’s crazy,” said Gentian. “He just went home. Nobody drove him. You’d think he was a flock of sheep. He wants us to help him with a science project.” She looked at her father, content and mellow with shrimp, and risked it. “We thought we might use the attic.”
“What kind of project?”
“I think it’s some kind of relativity experiment.”
Her father put down his chopsticks. “In the attic? Most relativity projects I can think of are either strictly thought experiments or require very large things like particle accelerators. Unless he wants to do Michelson-Morley. That’s pretty tricky, and I don’t think you could get everything up those stairs.”
Gentian knew that if she were going to be an astronomer she would have to learn physics, but so far, with the exception of the optical theory necessary to understand her telescope, she had avoided doing so. You couldn’t take physics in school until you had gotten through biology and chemistry, anyway. She said, “If we can get stuff up the stairs, can we use the attic?”
“Well, let’s check with your mother to make sure she hasn’t decided to make it into a computer room or a pool hall or a conservatory.”
Gentian laughed.
“And the lease will have to have a comparatively short date. You can’t leave stuff strewn around up there for months.”
“If it’s a school project it’ll be due at the end of the year.”
“You mean by next spring.”
“Yeah.”
“When do you propose to begin?”
“I don’t know. He only just mentioned it. It might be for next semester.”
“Well, let’s lay the proposal before your mother.”
“What’s the wiring like up there?”
“The wiring is adequate—your mother did it before we moved in, and gave the attic two circuits all its own, just in case she did decide to have a conservatory—but there isn’t a great plenitude of light fixtures, and she didn’t finish wiring all the outlets. Just what power requirements are you anticipating?”
“I don’t know, really; but you can hardly even see up there, as it is.”
“Well, your mother’s been panting for an electrical apprentice for years.”
“Why can’t you do it?”
“Because I drop things,” said her father, and cracked open his fortune cookie. He looked blank for a moment and then extremely sardonic. “‘The cautious man misses many opportunities, ’” he read.
“Oh,” said Gentian, “a platitude cookie.”
“What does yours say?”
Gentian broke hers open, gave the bits to her father to eat, and unfolded the fortune. “‘The morning and the evening star will smile on you. ’”
“Well, at least it’s a fortune,” said her father. “Even fairly apposite. Perhaps they’ll fix that telescope of yours in
a timely manner.”
They didn’t, though. They called late the same afternoon, when Gentian and her father had just come in from planting bulbs, to say that nothing obvious was wrong and they had cleaned and adjusted the instrument on general principles, but really Gentian should wait until Josh got over the flu so he could look at it, though of course she could come get it at any time if she liked.
Gentian consented with very ill grace to her father’s suggestion that they let Josh have a crack at it when he could, with the provision that there was a lunar eclipse on the twenty-eighth of November and she wanted the telescope back by then regardless.
The time without a telescope had to be got through somehow. Sunday was like Saturday, warm and sunny and windy. Gentian went with her mother and sisters to fly kites in Memorial Park. They came home and had a picnic in the back yard, since, her mother said, this weather could not last much longer.
“Doesn’t matter if it does or not,” said Rosemary, casting a baleful glance at Dominic’s house. “We don’t have any gardening work to do.”
“I have a great deal,” said her mother. “You can help me.”
“It’s not the same thing at all.”
On Monday, in accordance with her mother’s prediction, it was still windy but very much colder, brilliantly sunny and clear. At lunch that day Gentian asked if any of the Giant Ants would come over that evening and help her make a red corduroy jumper to wear to all the holiday parties. She knew that her taking an interest in clothes would please Steph; she also knew that her asking for help would please Becky, no matter who volunteered or even if nobody did. In the event, Alma did.
In this way Alma became the first of the Giant Ants to actually lay eyes on Dominic. Theoretically, Gentian would of course have liked this honor to be bestowed upon Becky, but in fact she could hardly conceive of those two as existing in the same universe—it would be as though Arthur Ussher met Elizabeth Bennet. Theoretically, also, she wanted to keep Steph away from Dominic, but while the consequences to Gentian’s own acknowledged but not considered plans might have been dire, the spectacle of their meeting would have been almost as good as a play.