Pi in the Sky

by Wendy Mass

  “And I’m helping,” Annika chimes in, adjusting her leaves so they’re not covering her eyes. “I’m in a bag!”

  My mother tilts her head at that comment, then shakes it and turns back to me. “C’mere,” she says, opening up her arms wide.

  I’m surprised. Mom is not usually the warm, huggy type. But I move forward into her arms, feeling a little awkward in front of Annika. Still, it would be more awkward to refuse.

  My mother’s arms are strong and I feel myself relax. I close my eyes and the darkness is comforting. “Joss.” Her voice is a whisper, and I can tell it’s in an audio range Annika can’t hear. “Joss,” she repeats. “I’ll keep your secret, but of course I can’t help you, since I would never go against what your father ordered.”

  “I would never ask you to,” I reply in the same low tone.

  “But I will tell you one thing: You do more than deliver the pies.”

  I pull away. “What do you mean?” I ask, in my regular voice.

  Mom glances at Annika, then seems to decide she can be trusted. “You do more,” she says, emphasizing each word, “than deliver the pies.”

  “I know,” I reply. “I go to school, too. Well, I may have missed a few days….”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she says. But she abruptly stands up instead and busies herself clearing the table from Annika’s lunch. Annika jumps up to help and the two of them giggle again at the sink. I watch them and think for the first time, ever, that maybe my mother might have wanted a girl instead of the seven boys she wound up with.

  “Are you okay?” Annika asks as she watches me put my face in front of the reader. Just because Bren didn’t follow the rules doesn’t mean I’m about to break them.

  I nod. “Let’s just go.” I don’t want to get into all the emotions I’m feeling. It’s too much, and I need to focus.

  Annika follows me out, swinging the bag of snacks my mom packed her. “Where are we going?”

  “To find my brother Laz. He’s the middle child—number four—and can be a pain. But he’ll know how to build a sun.”

  “I have no idea how to build a sun,” Laz says when we find him on the hillside behind PTB headquarters (which is currently in the shape of a three-legged toad). He is sipping a cold drink and lounging on a beach chair. If I thought my job was easy, Laz’s is almost ridiculously simple. All he does is lie on his chair in front of a giant view screen of an ocean. We don’t have real oceans in The Realms, obviously, but this helps Laz to imagine a horizon like on the planets. Every once in a while Laz waves a stick in the air and the sun on the view screen begins to descend. He flicks a button on his chair and the scene changes to another beach, this one with two suns in the sky. Personally, I think they stuck him with this job to keep him out of trouble. Working on his own like this means he can’t argue with his coworkers.

  “What do you mean you can’t make a sun?” I ask. “We know all the ingredients, we just need to know how to put it all together. Isn’t it your job to control sunrises and sunsets?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t really control them, more like manage them. Or, technically, watch them, I suppose.” He takes another long sip of his drink.

  I push the confidentiality agreement I had been holding back into my pocket. I don’t even need to waste this one on him.

  “Joss, wait,” Laz says, as we turn to go. “I may not know how to make a sun, but when I was training for my job—”

  Annika interrupts. “You have to train to sit on a chair and wave a stick at a screen?”

  “Okay, fine,” Laz snaps. “While I was doing my very quick, blink-and-you-miss-it training for this job, I saw a really old part of The Realms. Like back when the universe was new and stars and planets were just being built. I bet if you go there you’ll find what you need.”

  “Thanks, Laz,” I say, feeling a little guilty that I was so quick to dismiss him. “Do you want to know why we need to build a sun?”

  “Nah,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “I figure you’ve got your reasons.”

  Laz is an odd one. Either he’s all fired up about something, or he can’t be bothered to act even remotely interested.

  He does give us the directions, though, ending with, “You’ll know it when you see it.” Before we leave, he gives Annika a long look. “Bum luck about your planet there. Sorry to hear of it.”

  “Um, thanks,” she says. “It’s been… difficult.”

  He nods sympathetically, then turns his attention back to his view screen and waves his stick at it.

  “You have a strange family,” Annika comments as we head back the way we came.

  “Don’t I know it,” I reply, looking up at PTB headquarters. I’m not sure which office is my father’s now. The toad’s head? His rump? Dad’s definitely been avoiding me. Or at least it feels that way.

  When we get to the other side of the building, I stop short. The statues of Kal’s parents have been completed! There have been a few alterations since the blueprint I saw. For one, Kal’s mother is now wearing pants, which would certainly please her, and Kal’s father is holding a hot dog in one hand and a cup of lemonade in the other. Is he supposed to be at a summer barbecue? Maybe Aunt Rae saw these statues and that’s why she suspected something earlier. Soon everyone will know. I want to throw a blanket over the statues, cover them up somehow, buy some time to get them back before the grieving sets in.

  “Hey,” Annika says, looking the statues up and down. “I know those guys!”

  I shake my head. “No you don’t. Those are Kal’s parents. They just look more human than most of us because their job was to blend in on Earth.”

  “No,” she insists. “I really do know them. That’s Rose and Marvin Sheinblatt from down the street. Marvin and my dad used to go fishing and stargazing together.”

  I know she’s mistaken, because OnWorlders are never allowed to make close friends. But the last thing I want to do right now is argue, and a small crowd has started to gather around us. I take Annika’s elbow and steer her quickly away to avoid them.

  We don’t get too far when I begin to hear the drumbeats. They start softly, then grow stronger and more insistent. I stop and call out Kal’s name.

  Annika puts her hand on my arm, alarmed. “Joss, are you all right? What are you doing? No one is here.”

  “Do you hear it?” I ask. “The drumbeats? Do you hear them?”

  She shakes her head.

  The drumming has become almost frantic now. I excuse myself and run a few yards away. Maybe he can only talk to me in private. But as quickly as it began, the drumming cuts off. Ice trickles down my back. I have a feeling Kal and his parents aren’t safe there much longer. How quickly can an entire universe collapse? Or maybe whoever the Supreme Overlord is (if there is one) has them locked up deep underground somewhere!

  I rejoin Annika and explain to her about Kal and the drums and how frustrating it is not to be able to reach him.

  “Another universe?” she asks. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around this one! What’s the other one like?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her honestly. “But from what we learned in school, probably nothing like this one. I think it’s really unstable. Like the laws of physics aren’t working there.”

  “Oh. That doesn’t sound good. I’m sorry.”

  She sounds so sincerely sorry that I feel the need to change the subject. “Hey, so I found the empty box that those data dots were in. The ones that were stolen.”

  I hadn’t meant to tell her that. I guess she’s pretty easy to talk to. For a girl.

  “You did? Where?”

  “My brother Bren took them.” I cringe a little as I say the words out loud. It still stings.

  “Bren? Isn’t he your favorite brother? I thought you guys were really close.”

  I nod. “I thought so, too.”

  We walk in silence for a while. I’m half-wishing Annika would continue her tales of teenage girl angst, so I wouldn’t have to
think about how everything I thought might be wrong. But she stays uncharacteristically quiet. I’ve never been to the part of The Realms that Laz described, and after walking for what feels like a very long time, I’m beginning to wonder if he sent us way out here as a gag. He’s not really a joke-playing kind of guy, though—that’s more Bren’s and Grayden’s territories. And mine, I guess.

  “Are you sure this is right?” Annika asks, as though reading my mind. She, too, is looking around at the nothingness that surrounds us. We left the buildings and houses and statues behind long ago. Even the view beneath our feet has grown dim, like we’re above an area of space almost entirely devoid of stars.

  “Let’s keep going a little farther,” I say as we begin to climb a gentle slope. “Laz said we’d know it when we saw it, so…” The words dry up in my mouth. Annika gasps and grabs my arm. We both stare, openmouthed, at the scene in front of us. I’m not sure she can see all that I can see, but clearly what she sees is enough to cause her stunned reaction. If there’s a word for the complete and total opposite of nothing, that’s what we’re looking at. This is truly something. It’s… EVERYTHING.

  Trillions and trillions of hydrogen atoms, the most primordial of all of the elements in the universe, are swirling around in a massive cloud as high as I can see. They float and zip and dodge around each other in a graceful and chaotic dance. I can see right into them, in a way I’ve never been able to before. I can see the single proton inside the nucleus, and inside that, packets of pure energy, the quarks. The single electron forms a blurry cloud, protectively, almost as if to say Buzz off, this proton’s mine, get your own.

  Annika slowly unfurls her fingers from my arm. We both look down to see five deep furrows. They will take a little time to fill back in again. “Sorry,” she whispers. “Forgot how squishy, I mean softish, you are.”

  I look up at her face. Funny how foreign it was to me not that long ago, and how familiar it is to me now. I smile and she returns my grin, her eyes glassy and bright and full of confidence in me. Me! I am filled with the same sensation that comes over me when I deliver a pie, a fullness that starts at my feet and goes up the rest of my body.

  I turn back to face the roiling, spinning mass of primordial atoms and reach out my hands. I feel the space around me shift, and my palms get warmer. The heaviness settles in my limbs, connecting me to the ground in a way that I’ve never experienced before.

  I allow my palms to move closer together until there is hardly any space between them. I push and squeeze and my whole body gets hotter and hotter and I don’t know why I know how to do this, or why I’m not burning up. I can feel the hydrogen atoms trying to avoid each other, spinning and spinning until the pressure becomes too much and they surrender, allowing their nuclei to merge into one blazing-hot core.

  And just like that, the sun ignites.

  What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?

  —Stephen Hawking, theoretical physicist, cosmologist

  I move my hands apart, so slowly it’s barely noticeable. But each time I do, the heat increases and the baby sun gets bigger. By the time my hands reach my sides, the sun has grown so big, so bright, so hot, that the hydrogen atoms start turning into helium, exactly what needs to happen to keep the sun going. The whole electromagnetic spectrum shoots out in all directions and the force of it knocks me off my feet.

  Annika has run far to my right. To my left, I hear the echo of frenzied drumming. How long has it been going on and I hadn’t noticed? “I’m coming for you, Kal, hold on!” I say this out loud, not caring how it sounds. It’s not like anyone is around to hear besides Annika. I turn to check on her and find her waving her arms and pointing behind her.

  A figure appears at the top of the slope. Our surroundings are so incredibly bright that all I can see is a bulky shape with arms and legs.

  The shape gets closer, and my eyes widen as I recognize who the wide chest and thick legs belong to. “Thade?”

  In an instant he’s beside me. “Joss!” he yells, even though I’m inches away. “What are you doing?”

  “Why are you yelling?” I yell back, realizing that the new sun is making a lot of noise. Banging and swooshing and churning types of sounds scream from it in all directions. “Did Laz tell you I was here?”

  “Yes!” he yells.

  Guess I should have given him the confidentiality agreement after all.

  “Are you doing that?” Thade shouts, pointing to the ever-growing sun.

  I hesitate, then shout, “I think I am!”

  “Impressive!” he roars, clasping me on the shoulder.

  Thade isn’t my father, of course, but he’s so much older than I am that he might as well be. His praise makes me stand a little taller. “Um, thanks?” I say, uncertainly. “You’re not mad? I thought there might be some consequences to trying to build a solar system inside The Realms.”

  “Oh, I’m mad. And there will certainly be consequences. But tell me why you’re doing this?”

  I thrust the agreement into his hand. He glances at it and crumples it up.

  “It’s too late for this,” he says. “The Powers That Be already know something’s going on out here. The shock waves from your new sun can be felt all over The Realms. Does this have to do with the new statue outside PTB headquarters? Of your friend’s parents?”

  I hesitate again, then nod.

  “You’re trying to get them back? And Earth, too, I’m guessing?”

  The drumming is growing louder, more insistent. I can hear it clearly over the sun now. “Yes,” I reply. “The whole solar system.”

  “What is that?” Thade asks, looking around us. “Is someone playing the drums?”

  “You can hear it?” I ask excitedly. “It’s Kal! He and his parents are trapped in another universe and—”

  Thade holds up his hand. “There are no other universes.”

  “Okay,” I shout, “we’ll deal with that later. Right now I need your help building planets and getting them in the right places. That’s what your job is, right?”

  Now he’s the one who hesitates. “I don’t actually make them. The planets form out of the dust and gas released from the birth of a star. You know that from school. Their orbits are determined by the gravity between the star and the planet, and the speed of the planet when it originally formed. My job is to monitor all that. We can talk about our job descriptions later. You have to focus! You have a sun to control!”

  My sun (MY sun!!) has grown so big that I can barely see around it on any side. Panic sets in. “Thade! I’m still pretty sure I’m the wrong person for this job!”

  Thade reaches over and tilts up my chin until his furry brows are level with my eyes. “Joss, you are the only person for this job. You still don’t understand that, do you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have one of the most important jobs in the universe. Without you, nothing would exist. Nothing would have gravity, or weight.”

  I make a choking sound and shake my head. “I deliver pies, that’s all.”

  “No,” he says, his voice firm. “You don’t just deliver the pies.”

  The memory of Mom saying those same words floats back to me. “I don’t?”

  He shakes his head. “When you—and only you—carry the pies, they absorb mass like a sponge and increase their weight.” He pauses, then chuckles. “Hey, the pie makers should really be making sponge cakes instead of pies.” He jabs me in the arm. “Get it? Sponge cakes?”

  Now is the time Thade decides to develop a sense of humor?

  “Okay, bad joke,” he admits, waving it off. “So anyway, the Powers That Be send the pies out into the expanding universe. Once they get where they’re going, they provide the gravity that pulls the interstellar gases together. You, little brother, start the stars.”

  His words seem utterly impossible to believe. But there’s that heaviness that I’ve never been able to explain when I pick up t
he pies. And I felt it again just now, with the sun, only so much stronger. Does that mean… no, he can’t be right. But Thade is never wrong, or at least I’ve never known him to be.

  “How can that be?” I ask. “Why should I be able to do that and not you? Or Dad?”

  He smiles. “Because you are the seventh son.”

  “But… but why didn’t someone tell me before now?”

  He shrugs. “We figured you’d get a big head if you knew how important you were. We had to protect you from your own ego.”

  I stare at him, dumbfounded. I could have used some of that confidence instead of thinking I didn’t have anything to contribute.

  “Hey, don’t look at me like that. I’m only joking. We knew you’d put it all together someday. Everyone comes into their talents when they’re ready, Joss. You’re ready now. So keep going! You can do this!”

  With Thade’s revelation hanging in the air, and the sun expanding before me, I suddenly remember Annika. I whirl around and shout her name.

  “Over here!” a thin voice replies. “Behind the hill! In the cave!”

  I run over to the lip of the ridge and find her tucked underneath an overhang, barely a cave at all. But it does a good job of protecting her from the activity on the other side of the ridge. “I need the bag from Ash. Do you still have it?”

  With a shaking hand, Annika reaches into her pocket. Our hands linger ever so briefly when she passes me the ingredients. “Annika, are you holding up okay? Are you hurt at all?”

  “How are you doing this, Joss?” she whispers.

  “Somehow I just know what to do,” I reply honestly. I don’t think I can explain what Thade just told me. Not now, anyway.

  “Go on, then,” she says, waving me away. “Send me back home.”

  I squeeze her shoulder as reassuringly as I can and run back to the sun. Getting as close as I dare, I open the bag and throw the contents right into the churning ball of gas. When Thade sees what I’ve done, he grabs me and hauls me back over the ridge to where Annika is now huddled into a ball.