Descended from Darkness: Vol II Read online

  In the grips of severe postpartum depression a week after Anna's birth, Mara gets up at 4 a.m., slips into a robe and tiptoes into our daughter's bedroom. She peers over the crib railing at our newborn, watching as she sleeps. Tears slip from Mara's eyes as she makes a decision.

  "I won't let you suffer," she whispers. For a moment, she thinks about pressing a pillow over the baby's face. It would be painless, easy. It'd look like SIDS. Down's children are prone to crib death.

  But she can't bring herself. If she does anything, it has to be abstract, cleanly and comfortably out of view. There has to be some doubt. She has to believe that maybe she didn't succeed, that maybe, just maybe, her daughter might someday be living that normal, productive life the doctor spoke of. So instead, Mara wraps our daughter in a pink receiving blanket, climbs into our beat-up Honda, and drives 40 miles south. All the while, as her cold hands grip the wheel, she shakes and cries. Anna's on the front seat, squalling, hungry and wet, a typical newborn and an anathema.

  It's a patchwork morning, grey clouds crumpled over the ocean, cobalt blue in the east. Out on the shore, death is waiting. Mara looks for it there. Some shape of it. A form slipping beneath the waves or around the rocky abutments she sees. Fog clings to the sand, to the water, now calm. She pulls over, closing her eyes as she picks up our newborn, and steps out into a tongue of frigid air.

  She tells me all of this later, after driving home, still shaking, horrified at what she almost did---and for fifteen years, I keep her secret.

  That newborn turns into a girl of fifteen who likes Star Trek and dreams of going elsewhere. She is high-functioning enough that Mara insists she go to public school. "We're not babying her," she says. "There's more to life than dancing with boys."

  I almost believe her, but in the quiet of the night I hear Anna crying, and that's when I realize that there isn't more to life; it is everything to be normal.

  Our true heartbreak begins one morning when Anna sits down at the breakfast table, smiling that sweet, dimpled smile and I notice something shining blue on her eyelids.

  "Notice anything?" She grins.

  I smile back. "You look nice."

  She points at her eyes, giggles.

  "Anna Grace Namast, you march into the bathroom and wash it off."

  I catch Mara's gaze, anger spiking through me. "She's fifteen; she can wear a little---"

  "It looks ridiculous on her."

  "She looks nice."

  "Everybody's going to laugh at her." Mara turns her attention back to Anna. "It's not going to change anything."

  I don't remember what Anna did, whether she washed off the makeup. I do remember the look on her face, her fading smile, her brown eyes brimming with tears. And that's when I have to believe in something more, something beyond this, our everyday lives.

  At birth, a child's brain has as many neurons as stars in the Milky Way. That's what I thought when I looked at Anna, that she had the whole galaxy in her. And it didn't matter that some small thing went wrong in the beginning; she was still whole, still beautiful. Still a galaxy.

  As a scientist, I studied her as such. From the time of her birth, I collected information on Down Syndrome, cataloguing all of the disorder's idiosyncrasies, from the physical (the upturned corners of Anna's doe eyes and her flattened face) to the mental (her "delayed" development, though I tend to think that she simply held onto a child's spirit longer than most), to the genetic (an extra chromosome replicating itself in all of her cells). I wondered who'd caused it. I asked, was it me? Is it my fault she's so unhappy?

  Even now I look for the answer doing what I do best. I use numbers and probabilities and I plug them into formulas. I know they can't extrapolate and explain a child's crippled spirit, but maybe they can tell me something.

  I write on the board, frenetically, as my students look on. But the principles I apply aren't about cosmic space and time.

  "Can anyone tell me what this is?" I point to the numbers, formulas upon formulas. A continuum of inner space, soul.

  Silence settles as my glance darts over all of the blank faces. Then I see hers. She knows, smiles, raising her hand. "The human genome," she says.

  I swallow a lump. "My daughter's."

  "I know." Sheila's eyes sparkle.

  "You're applying M-Theory to inner space, to genetics?" another student asks, bewildered.

  I nod, my eyes still on Sheila's. "I want to know what happened in the beginning."

  I wait for her to come down the stairs, holding the paper up when I see her. "What's this?"

  A shadow passes over Anna's face as she pauses at the bottom. "My project."

  "What project?"

  "It's about what I want to do when I get older."

  I gaze at her scrawled handwriting, heartsick. "Anna, this paper's about Laika."

  Her smile fades. "I know."

  My heart sinks as I stare at the paper about a dog in space, science's first orbital casualty, launched by the Soviets in 1957 and left to die. "What's this got to do with you?"

  "I want to be like you; I want to learn about space." She waits, desperate for my approval. "That's the only way I can do it."

  A lump catches thickly in my throat; her answer takes my breath away. "That's not true."

  "It is true."

  "Laika died, Anna."

  Her gaze is unflinching. "I know."

  I find the letter to NASA a day later, a 6-page offering, Anna's life laid out, her bone-deep pain, her all-encompassing despair and her fierce desire to make up for it by sacrificing herself to science. I don't read much, but I read enough to feel it in the pit of my stomach. Enough that I'll go to my deathbed with the weight of it on my shoulders.

  I tear up the letter, viciously, enraged and grief-stricken, breathless as I rip at it with my teeth, the tang of lead on my tongue.

  "Clark, what are you doing?"

  I turn to see Mara standing in the doorway.

  I burst into tears as I let the torn bits of Anna's bequest swirl to the floor. "We're losing her," is all I can manage.

  Contrary to the seeming paradox of it, there is such a thing as deterministic chaos. Initial conditions exist. Add time and evolution and you get something else. What appears to be random isn't.

  Scientists believe time flows in this way, in one direction. And this fact is often one of life's biggest tragedies; people lay awake at night thinking, if only...never to return to that magical half-second something might've changed an indisputable and heartbreaking truth.

  "We lost her years ago," Mara answers.

  "You lost her, not me," I shout, my anger spiking. "You were the one who gave up. You were the one who didn't want her."

  "Clark Namast!" My wife's voice is full of tears.

  Dear God, what have I done? I catch Anna's sweet face peering around the doorway. That angel face, looking at Mara, then at me, disbelieving.

  I can't stop her, can't catch her as she runs away from me. Anguish has a strength all its own.

  Alone in the classroom, I feel her hand on my arm and I look up to find Sheila's shining grey eyes.

  "I want to help you prove your theory," she says. "I want to die again."

  I slam down my book. "No way."

  "I haven't forgotten what it's like."

  Her words stop me, quiet me. I turn to her.

  She seems small suddenly, vulnerable, like a child. "Most people forget." She smiles. "It's different than you think."

  I look away, a lump in my throat.

  Once again, I feel her hand. "It isn't heaven."

  I feel sick. Now there is doubt.

  "Help me do it."

  I shove her hand away. "I can't." I catch her gaze. "I won't."

  "What are you afraid of?" Her gaze has hardened. "Don't you want to know what it's really like?"

  I jump up and sprint out, papers flying in my wake. I am suddenly, inexplicably, terrified of her.

  That night the lights go out sixteen times. My cell phone drops
four calls. Seven severe electrical surges fry my TV and DVD player despite the fact that outside, the stars shine. There are no tempests. No sunspots.

  Then I get a call from Edric Lind University Hospital.

  "She left a note," a doctor tells me. "And your phone number."

  I find out that Sheila took fourteen of her Lithium pills, enough to send her into acute renal failure, though doctors were still able to flush her kidneys and save her life.

  But I can't face her. Not this time. I turn from the doctor and walk away, realizing at last that I don't really want to know after all.

  I return to my office at the University and destroy my research, shredding, deleting, feeling the paper tearing in my adrenaline-drenched hands, all the while recalling a dog lost in space.

  Then I see her face in a dream. Anna's dancing brown eyes and her sweet smile. Those dimpled arms poised to embrace me. I awaken with an anguish so bone-deep it chokes me, Sheila's disheartening words flashing through my mind: It isn't heaven.

  Then what is it?

  She is asleep when I get there, as I stand at the foot of her hospital bed.

  Then she opens her eyes, smiles. "That was me."

  "Huh?"

  "Sorry about your TV."

  My breath catches.

  "I was trying to tell you no one dies."

  I cover my face; I can't let her see me cry.

  "I was myself. Pure energy. Electricity. Light. Power. I was with you and I was at the farthest corner of the Universe at the same time. There is no light speed after death. No vast space to traverse." She makes a gesture. "It's all right here."

  I swallow a lump, my heart pounding. "What'd you mean when you said it isn't heaven?"

  "Heaven's too oversimplified. This can't be defined---or quantified. Everything's here and now. There's no time. No space. It's as though every dimension is unified." She smiles. "It's the answer to the horizon problem."

  I nod, drifting. "Death's dimension..." Something I've never considered in my theories or calculations.

  "And life's dimension," she adds. "There's a reason there isn't a unified theory. We've never considered the possibility that there was more than one force acting on the point of origin during the big bang."

  "A conception?"

  She smiles, nods. "Two Gods."

  As I offered up Anna's genetic profile as proof, Sheila confirmed what I already knew; that we are all pieces of a whole, the living fractals of an astonishing Union.

  I can't stop the flood of memories. The rush into the woods, Anna's footprints through the mud, my strangled voice calling her name. We find her hanging from a tree branch, one of my neckties cinched so tightly around her neck that I cannot find a grip to loosen it.

  And then Mara's heart-wrenching screams: "You did this. You killed her. I hate you I hate you I hate you..." Fists on my chest, blows to my heart. Tears on my shirt. A spirit unraveling.

  I close my eyes. I can think no more.

  "This is your shot," I tell Sheila. "I want you to present our theories at the upcoming Astronomy Conference in Paris."

  She gazes at me, puzzled. "But don't you want to---"

  "This is yours. You made it happen." I smile. "After the Conference, no one will care about your illness." They are words I wish I could've told Anna.

  I close my eyes as I sit at my desk. As I remember her sweet smile. I think of the random fractals that made her up, the same fractals that make up snowflakes, coastlines, and mountain ranges. I recall a night on a moonlit shore and I'm inspired. Two Gods. Maybe love existed long before space and time.

  I think of a dog lost in space. A scientific breakthrough. Mankind's step forward. And an unspoken loneliness. I need to find her, to tell her what Sheila told me---though I'm sure she already knows.

  Artifact

  Peter Atwood

  The hover bucked. Davis staggered. The propulsion fans roared. He swore.

  He cut power to the fans and looked out the back window of the cabin. The towlines had gone slack and the skimmer tilted, half sunk in the viscous orange lake. "Shit," he said.

  Davis had been harvesting for twenty-five years. The lake was too thick for the mollusks to surface in the coldest months, and the summer winds whipped the lake's sludge into a toxic foam, so harvesters like him made the most of the fall and spring.

  He pulled his hood over his brow, leaving the mask dan-gling, tugged his gloves up over his sleeves and stepped out onto the rear deck. The hover floated, its impellers turning the lake into a pale orange ring around its air cushion, opaque like pulled taffy. The sun had tugged itself above the horizon, and the air stung his cheeks and eyes.

  The skimmer was a basic design: a floating bin with a grilled front. When open, the grill angled down, forming a ramp that rode the mollusks up into its bin as the hover pulled it across the lake. He fired up the winch. The torque motor whined as it reeled in the skimmer. Something had fouled it badly.

  Davis reached out with the gaff-pole to hook the skimmer. The backwash from the impellers blew up between the vessels, catching him in the face with fumes. He stepped down and ba-lanced his way around the skimmer's rim.

  The bin was half-full of sludge. He stirred the orange goop with the end of the gaff. Only a few flat mollusks had been collected so far. Then he saw it: black and round, a fat object, the size of a large buoy, almost submerged. Beads of orange slipped across it, leaving its surface pristine.

  An hour after turning back, he saw the headland that marked the eastern end of the span. He had closed the grill, and now the skimmer tugged behind the hover like salvage. The propulsion fans thudded in an interference rhythm.

  The radio beeped. Time for the call, he thought. He grabbed the headset from its hook.

  "Thanks for doing the dishes," Reeda said.

  "No problem, hon." Davis had started cleaning up in the kitchen at the onset of Reeda's morning sickness. Nowadays, it seemed just as important to continue. "Did you sleep okay?" he asked.

  "Oh, you know. How's the lake?"

  "I'm coming back early. What are you doing?"

  "Laundry's on. I'll need to run the generator."

  "Could you have a look at the cold-house?" he said. He had forgotten to check it on his way out that morning. "Its cells probably need changing too."

  "Sure, I could use the walk," she said.

  "Great," Davis said, uncertain. It was rare for Reeda to want to do something so active these days. "I'll be back early afternoon," he told her.

  "See you then." She clicked off.

  He checked his heading and adjusted the fans. Ahead, a pack of skaters ran across the glistening orange swells, their long lizard tails leaving a fading mesh on the viscous surface.

  Davis got his rig onto the wide flats of the shore, a safe distance from the lip of the lake, and deflated the hover's cushions. Behind it, the skimmer was pitched to one side, its back right corner had scored a groove across the packed black sand.

  He yanked open the skimmer's chute and stepped back as the sludge drained. He reached in and scooped the ooze along with his gloved hand. When the bin was empty, he climbed up to get a look at the offending object. It sat tilted in a corner and looked like a fat, squashed, oversized child's top. It was unmarked but obviously manufactured.

  Goddamn Mirfac, he thought. I am going to sue their corporate ass.

  "I've navigated my whole life by the tower out of Bremi," Davis had told Rass the night before. "Hell, I know the shape of every headland along this shore."

  "It's not about that!" Rass said. "And you know it."

  Their conversation had been working toward this since the two friends had sat down with their tea. Rass sighed, and Davis followed his gaze to the sitting room where Reeda leaned over the coffee table, sketching.

  "She's designing her dream home," he explained.

  Rass said nothing.

  Davis' eyes returned to the kitchen, to the cupboards he had painted himself and the unmatched plates draining beside t
he sink. "She says she still lives in a bachelor's shack."

  "Losing the baby hit her hard," Rass said. He had said this often in the last months.

  "I know," Davis said, impatience creeping in. "But she won't get over it obsessing over a house that'll never get built!"

  Rass cleared his throat, but Reeda made no sign she had heard.

  "Toby saw two fliers over the lake last week," Rass said. "They'll be moving up the span next."

  The mollusks Rass and Davis harvested were sold for the blue-white ingots of antimony inside, a by-product of their digestion. Last year, the moon's biggest processor had announced plans to mine the bottom of the lake instead of buying from the harvesters. Mirfac's drones were a common sight now, surveying for antimony concentrations deposited on the lake bottom by decaying mollusks.

  The harvesters in Bremi all talked about blocking the company, but no one really expected success. A lawyer had advised them to save the logs from their navigation systems. Laying claim to the patch where you harvested might let you sell your stake for an early retirement.

  "Look, Rass, everyone knows my patch. Who's going to dispute it? Not anyone from here to Bremi, least of all some shoe-wearing lawyer from Mirfac."

  Reeda came up to the table.

  "Rass, would you like some meringues?" she offered. She went to the cupboard.

  "Sure," Rass said. He looked at Davis.

  "Thanks, hon," Davis said. Her short dark hair was growing out. She had always worn it long, and only now was she starting to look the way he remembered. He missed her. He missed the way she used to smile and tell him not to be so loud when he laughed. "Have a cup of tea," he said.

  She had laid the plate of sweets between them and shook her head.

  Davis clambered into the bin and kicked the few flat grey mollusks out of the way. He needed to shift the object to right the skimmer. He squatted with a grunt and reached underneath, laying his hands flat against its underside. A tingling sensation danced across his palms. He pulled away. Spots floated in his vision. "God in hell!"