Descended from Darkness: Vol II Read online

  "Hm?" says the medic. His face is arranged in what is clearly meant to be a friendly expression, but Solange can see the evil underneath. Light glints oddly off of the glass and metal instruments. It must mean something. The medic is Uncle Matt in disguise, looking for an excuse to dock her pay. Solange shrugs and follows the signs to the recovery room.

  The walls of the recovery room are a cheerful blue, and there are seats with padding. A knot of women sit talking near the door. A boy with a bandaged foot is playing a game on the wall console, and looks up when Solange walks in. She takes a seat in the far corner, and runs her fingers along her arm, wondering if she can tell where the stitches are by touch alone. She can, with effort. But it's hard to stay interested. Her cousin Marcia is talking to her.

  Solange shakes her head. Focus, she thinks. But there really is someone talking to her, and it really is Marcia.

  "I saw Mickey and he told me you were here," Marcia is saying. "It's been such a while since we've seen each other, hasn't it? You don't need to wait until you cut yourself open to visit, you know. That looks nasty. How'd it happen?"

  "Rope burn," says Solange.

  "You look awful," says Marcia. And she begins to talk about herself, and her important job at the freezebox. The way she goes on, you'd think no Sleepy would ever survive to make planetfall without Marcia's personal help. Never mind that Marcia will be long dead by that point. Solange doesn't care, but at least now she barely has to pretend to be listening. Withdrawing her attention is a relief, and it's unpleasant to have it snatched back.

  "A coffin?" says Solange, slowly working through what Marcia has been saying. "Like Sleepies sleep in."

  "No, dumbass," says Marcia, "an ornamental planter coffin. What do you think?"

  "And it's sitting empty?" says Solange.

  "Yes!" says Marcia. "So anyway, the temperature was rising, and we were getting ready for the transfer, and we were all so worried that we were going to lose him, and that hasn't happened, you know, for more than eighty years---"

  "Can I... see it?" says Solange.

  "What? The coffin?" says Marcia. "You're hardly authorized personnel."

  Solange forces herself to think. And realizes, with a sort of terror, how difficult it is. "I'll pay," she says.

  "I can't do it," says Marcia.

  "Thirty dollars," says Solange.

  This shuts Marcia up for a few seconds. It looks good on her. "Why?" she eventually says.

  "Marcia, I need to. Please," says Solange.

  Marcia considers. "It's really, really forbidden," she says. "Okay. Come tomorrow, before your shift starts. Thirty dollars. Up front. No discounts."

  After finishing work---light stuff, meter-reading mostly, nothing that needs two fully-functional arms---Solange goes back to her dormitory. Elara is there talking with Karen. Solange doesn't want an audience; doesn't want to talk to Elara at all, really, but restlessness and urgent need soon force her to interrupt.

  "Elara, I need a favor," she says.

  "Yeah?" says Elara.

  "Will you lend me thirty dollars till payday?" says Solange.

  Elara snorts. "Pull the other one, Sol."

  "No, I'm serious," says Solange. "It's important, I'll pay you back right away, I promise."

  "You promised to pay me back right away when I lent you five dollars," says Elara.

  "I paid you back," Solange says.

  "It was nearly a year," says Elara.

  "I mean it this time," says Solange. "I just---"

  "No," says Elara, and turns back to her conversation with Karen. And that is that. None of the other cousins is going to feel any differently, even if any of them have thirty dollars, which seems unlikely. There is no point in hanging around here. Solange lets herself out into the corridor and walks.

  It will be evening soon, but for now the corridors are still bright. Solange passes people, all of whom---cousin, co-worker, neighbor whose name she can't recall---glare at her under lowered eyelids before looking away. The faces begin to run together. The corridors curve sharply, turning in on themselves; it's no wonder Solange is lost. The bursts of light at the edges of her vision hurt her eyes.

  "Sol! Hey, Sol!" says Louis. He's happy to see her. Whether he is real or a trick of her overtired brain, he has grown several centimeters since she's seen him last, all spindly arms and legs.

  "Hey, kid," says Solange. "Are the parents in?"

  "Yeah," he says, and one of him keys open the door of the home-place, yelling, "Ma! Dad! Guess who's home!" Another five of him run off in different directions, making the corridor ring with the echoes.

  Solange walks into the kitchen. It's full of steam. Ma pops and flickers like an image on a broken screen. "If I had known you were coming, I wouldn't have just made nama soup," she is saying.

  "What have you done to your arm?" says Dad. "Doesn't Matt take care of his workers?"

  "It's just a rope burn," Solange tries to say. She can't hear her own voice so she's not sure whether she's spoken or not.

  "You never come and see us anymore," says Louis. "I have to eat nama soup all the time."

  "You know you always fought with Sol when she lived here," says Ma. "You still fight with her if she stays more than two hours. Maybe if you didn't she'd come home more often."

  "I'm not staying for dinner," says Solange, or thinks she does. The kitchen is far too small to pace in. She bumps her elbow on the garbage chutes when she turns around.

  "I don't see why flaber ankle vosh," says Dad. "Jimma hoozy lambert skiff?"

  Three Louises are running in tight circles around Solange's legs. She can't put her feet down without tripping. They are poking her in the knees with something sharp. "Stop that," she says.

  Solange manages to catch herself on the counter before she falls. But the gravity's stopped working; if she lets go she'll float off into space forever. She tightens her grip. "I just need thirty dollars till payday," she says.

  "Of course, dear," says Ma.

  Solange is sleeping, when a sudden noise floods her nostrils with panic. She leaps out of the coffin and retreats to the opposite corner of the room, as if her distance from the thing will prove she hasn't touched it. She balances defensively on the balls of her feet. It's only Marcia.

  "I came to tell you that the techs will be here in five minutes," says Marcia, her eyes widening with innocent bewilderment. "What were you doing?"

  Marcia could have told her how much time she had in the first place. She's come to see what Solange is up to. "I was sleeping," says Solange.

  "I could see that," says Marcia.

  "I was tired," says Solange.

  "Tired." Marcia manages to convey with her tone that she knows exactly why Solange has spent a month's wages for half an hour in a room with a malfunctioning coffin. "I'll bet you -were."

  Solange can't tell whether she's bluffing or not. Marcia has always been able to play her. But it was good to sleep.

  Marcia keys the door, opening it for them, and they step out into the polished corridors of the freezebox. There is sensation in the soles of Solange's feet as she walks.

  "You'd better hurry back, anyway," says Marcia. "You want to get some breakfast before your shift starts." Solange is silent. Marcia looks at her penetratingly. "You're not having breakfast, are you?" she says. "You can't afford it, can you?"

  Solange doesn't answer. They turn into a more crowded corridor. Well-scrubbed workers in blue uniforms like Marcia's go about their tasks, and Solange smoothes her stained smock unhappily. "I'll get you something from the canteen here," Marcia offers.

  "I should go," says Solange.

  Marcia frowns and lets the subject drop. "I'll see you then," she says. They have reached the main hospital, where Solange is perfectly inconspicuous. Marcia turns and keys the door that will let her back into the Sleepy unit. Solange keeps walking the other way.

  By the time she arrives at the seaweed farm, her shift is starting. There isn't time for breakfast even if
Solange could afford it, which she can't; she's resolved to stick to one meal a day until she's paid Ma and Dad back. She can feel her hunger now, though, and her exhaustion, for the first time in days. She is still on meter-reading, which is good because it requires walking around the pools. If she had to stay in one spot, she'd fall asleep for sure. As it is, she has to bite the inside of her cheek to stay awake.

  None of that matters. The important thing is that when her shift is over, she can return to her bed-place, and the dark.

  Solange lowers herself onto her mattress and lies back. She closes her eyes and wriggles a bit, imagining metal walls tightly around her. Then she is still. Her breathing is slow and regular. She dreams of planets.

  On planets, the sky is so high that ten men, each as tall as Uncle Matt, could stand on each other's shoulders and not reach the top. Masses of water move through it and when they collide, water falls from the sky with crashing noise and flashes of electricity. Strange animals live on planets without any human tending. A person can walk on a planet for days or years without turning, and never reach a wall.

  Solange is asleep. In her dream, she will only be awakened on a planet. She will smell the alien, living air, feel the alien earth beneath her feet. She will be awakened reverently by blue-clad people, also aliens, generations distant. Ma, Dad, and Louis; Elara, Marcia, Mickey, and Uncle Matt; the medics and the techs will live, grow old and die, and Solange will sleep through it all. She's different from them. They're warm, but Solange is cold.

  Laika's Dream

  Holly Hight

  I think back to a night on a moonlit beach, the crash of breakers loud in our ears. Mara is beautiful in a floral sundress, her dark hair pulled back into a windblown braid. It's the end of the term, a time for celebration. Situated crookedly in the sand is a bottle of red wine, two glasses, half-empty, perched next to it. We are barefoot and my pants are rolled up to my knees, Mara's sundress riffling against my bare skin as we dance.

  She whispers that she loves me, but we are drunk---and careless.

  Two weeks later, we've created one of the most stable forms in the universe, a tiny sphere that will one day turn into our beloved Anna. On the ultrasound, Mara's pregnancy is nothing more than a pea-sized shadow. Fluid shows up black while tissue glows white. The amniotic sac isn't much larger than a bean.

  "You're due in March," the doctor tells her.

  When he leaves, she starts to cry.

  I tell her not to worry---but, to my surprise, she looks at me and says fate has dealt her a different hand.

  I think of this as it relates to quantum physics. Why didn't I see it coming? In theory, we should remember the future as we remember the past, but something in our mammalian brains prevents us from taking a peek at our fates before they blindside us. I tell myself it makes sense, that a will to live must come from not knowing what happens next.

  As an astronomer, I try to answer life's most unfathomable questions. I always thought I wanted to know about such things as supersymmetries and flop transitions. Now my questions, though couched in physics, revolve around what happens to us after we die.

  We are always able to go back to the beginning, watching as our blueprints unfold in a cramped darkness, as I once watched Anna's month by month. Only scientists haven't yet been able to see the universe's conception. They know down to a hundredth of a second or so what happened, that first brilliant flash of light, when everything blossomed, but the nanosecond before, the force that ignited the spark, is still man's biggest mystery.

  It's no different for the giants than it is for the dwarves. Like each of us, the universe was conceived. All of nature's little spheres, and I call them little because in relative terms they are, the suns and moons, the red and blue giants, the binaries, the dwarf stars, and yes, even the black holes, have parents.

  As a professor of astrophysics, I stand before a class of 22, writing my calculations on the board as I share with them the discovery I've made. I haven't told the dean or the head of my department about my hybrid, the connection I've made between the earliest occurring imperfections of genetics and the first moments of the universe, a practical application to the fractal geometry I've applied to M-theory. Everyone else will be skeptical. But I know my students. They are open-minded.

  "You forgot something," one woman says, raising her hand.

  Turning, I catch a glimpse of tangled blonde hair and troubled grey eyes.

  "What about the energy?"

  Sheila Porter. Beautiful and sick. It began last term, this degeneration, her illness. She'd been at the top of my class, one of the smartest students I'd ever taught.

  She is adamant. "You forget; it thinks."

  "Thank you, Sheila." I'm embarrassed for her and she knows it. My gaze bounces around the room; I am desperate for someone, anyone, to speak.

  "You don't believe me, but I can prove it."

  I clear my throat, the class silent.

  "Energy is sentience."

  "Ok."

  "It's pure consciousness."

  "Well, let's---"

  "It's God."

  "Just---"

  "God is everywhere."

  Snickering.

  Reaching into her pocket, she pulls out a knife. "It's the answer to the horizon problem."

  Adrenaline floods through me, white-hot. I stammer. "Just...don't..."

  She walks toward me, the knife in her hand. I stand, paralyzed, the class watching, silent. I keep thinking someone will come to my rescue, maybe myself. But I don't move.

  She stops directly in front of me, her grin crooked and her grey eyes teasing as she says one word: "Watch."

  Quick as light, she shoves the steel blade into a nearby socket, the heat singing the hair on my arm. I lurch backward, a reflexive cry erupting from me. Sparks fly, the smell of ozone heavy in the air. Students leap out of their chairs. I hear the bang of overturned desks, books hitting the floor, the clatter of pencils as they go flying. Hubris. Chaos.

  In the fifteen years my daughter lives, stars are born and die. Whole worlds vanish. And Anna? Like space's primordial origins, she begins as a tiny sphere, her neurons dividing at 100,000 per hour. But something else has already happened; she's been given an extra 21st chromosome and that little piece of imperfect genetic material has changed the glorious staircase scientists now call DNA into something it shouldn't be.

  Seven and a half months later, she comes too soon, before I can get Mara to the hospital. She's born in the backseat of our station wagon, slippery in my new bride's hands as she lets out her first squall.

  "There's something wrong with her," Mara, sweaty and delirious, gasps. "Clark, look at her..."

  At the hospital, neither of us speak. The tiny baby that tiny sphere has become has already set our marriage adrift. Mara won't look at her---or at me---knowing somehow that I've caused something irrevocable and that Anna has descended upon us, unwanted. After the baby's whisked away, my wife is wheeled into the Mother-Baby Unit and put into a bed. Nurses check her vitals. Doctors sweep in and out in their white lab coats and all the while I sit in a bedside chair with my head in my hands.

  "Mr. and Mrs. Namast?" one of the doctors, a balding 40-ish man, says somberly. "I have some bad news."

  Mara looks up, her dark eyes red, anticipation and fear in her gaze.

  "Your daughter has Down Syndrome. It occurs in approximately 1 in 800 births." He pauses delicately. "The good news is that, these days, high-functioning individuals can live relatively normal---"

  "Normal?" Mara sits up straighter, her face red, fury in her brown eyes. "Did I hear you right? Were you about to say these people live normal lives?"

  The doctor takes a step back.

  "Does she look normal to you?"

  "With all due respect, Mrs. Namast---"

  "You want to trade me, then? You got a kid, right? A normal one? How about I trade you my normal kid for your normal kid?"

  I jump up, a reflex, a protective father already. "Mara.
.." I put a hand on her arm. "It's not his fault."

  She turns from the stunned doctor, her eyes imploring. "I don't want her, Clark."

  Sheila's heart stops four times before paramedics establish a regular heartbeat. She is clinically dead for over two minutes and a walking miracle. Proof, I suppose. And 22 people bore witness.

  I visit her in the hospital, wanting to know why. She is haggard, black circles beneath her piercing grey eyes.

  "I saw what I needed to see," she says.

  "What?"

  "God."

  I look away.

  "You still don't believe me."

  "You're sick."

  "In this life."

  I catch her gaze.

  "But not in the other." She smiles.

  I swallow a lump, think of Anna.

  "I've never been so purely myself."

  Anna's brown eyes, her silky blonde hair, and that wonderful dimpled smile run through my mind, attributes unappreciated. My anger erupts. "Do you know how selfish you are?"

  "I'm just trying to hang on to who I am," she says. "That's all that matters to me now."

  I think of Anna and who she was. Kind and willing to give, but nobody's friend. I realize how alike they are.

  "I'll never be smart again---not in the way people want."

  Though steeped in the cloud of mental illness, I see her brilliance. "You're still smart, Sheila," I say quietly. "You're still head and shoulders above every other student I've ever---"

  "So what?"

  I stare at her, dumbfounded.

  "You think NASA's going to hire a schizophrenic?"

  The words inspire an ache in me, celestial in nature, bone-deep; they are Anna's words.

  "I have to think of other ways to make a difference."

  "By killing yourself?"

  "By proving that there's more to life than what we see."

  I want to believe her---desperately. There's got to be more than this. Heartache. Uncertainty. A constant search for truth when the truth we see is never enough or too hard to face.