Damocles (39 page)

“What people didn’t get was that I liked it there. I felt safe there. I felt important because I was Maddie Dupris’s twin sister. I got to see everything. When Maddie was around, people forgot about me and I could watch them. I could listen and see what made them smile, what made them mad. Maddie didn’t care what people thought. She did what she wanted.

“She was careless, though.” Meg flipped the locket closed, not wanting to look, but opened it back up. “She thought nothing bad could ever happen. That was the only thing she ever teased me about, that I would get scared and not want to do things that she wanted to do. She was so athletic. She could jump off a garage roof and not even get a bruise. I’d twist my ankle climbing out of the car. I got scared easily. She never did.

“We were fifteen. Out at our grandma’s house in Kentucky. We loved it out there because we could wander in the woods for hours. Nobody worried about us because they all knew Maddie’d never let anything bad happen to me. So when that board broke, that stupid rotted board neither one of us saw, and we fell down that well, nobody thought to look for us. Not for hours. Not until dark.

“It was so black down there, Loul. It was the blackest place I’ve ever seen. Everyone thinks space is the blackest place but they’re wrong. Earth is the blackest place. Under the earth. Under the ground, where there aren’t even stars and the tiny patch of sky you can see just makes the blackness blacker and the small spaces smaller.”

Meg’s throat ached as she told the story she had never told anyone. She’d never told the mission evaluators or the psychiatrists. She’d never even told Cho. “They said maybe she’d have been okay if someone had found us right away. I tried. I tried climbing up that hole but it kept crumbling underneath my hands. I wasn’t as strong as Maddie. I wasn’t as coordinated and nobody ever said anything but I know they had to be thinking it; thinking that if our positions had been switched, if I had fallen first, Maddie would have been able to climb that well and get help. But Maddie always went first. Always.

“She woke up a week later and they were able to take the breathing tubes out. Mom tried to make me leave the hospital then, telling me that the doctors said she was stabilizing, but I wouldn’t go. I just wrapped myself around the legs of the hospital bed and hung on. I hung on so tight two big interns tried to pry me off and couldn’t do it. I slept in the chair next to my sister listening to the machines breathing for her. Then I slept on the chair next to her listening to her breathe on her own.

“What I was listening for was her to tell me everything was going to be okay. I didn’t want to hear it from the doctors or our parents. I needed to hear it from the one person who had never lied to me, who had never lost patience with me or ignored me. I needed Maddie to tell me she was better and that it was okay I couldn’t climb as well as she did and that it wasn’t my fault I landed so hard on her when we went down that hole. I needed to hear it from Maddie. But she wasn’t talking.

“They brought her home a month later. Said the brain damage was irreversible, that there were no signs of cognition, but I knew they were wrong. I could tell. I could see it in her eyes. She couldn’t control her body and couldn’t make her mouth work, but I could see it in her eyes. The doctors said they were just
reflexive movements but they were wrong. I knew. I know. She was my twin. I knew.”

Meg wiped at the mess running down over her lips, seeing the soot she smeared across her face. “She was home for two weeks when she started the hand gestures. Mom said they were just spasms but I knew she was trying to tell me something. We used to signal each other like that when we were on double dates or cheating in class. Her hands didn’t work like they were supposed to, but I could tell she was gesturing to me. When the nurse saw the movements, she gave her a shot and Maddie got quiet again. The nurse told me I was upsetting her, that she needed quiet and rest. She told me if I wanted to stay in there with her, I had to be quiet too.

“The next time Maddie started moving, I shut the door to her room so nobody would hear her bed squeak. I unplugged the heart monitor so it wouldn’t alert the nurse. I told Maddie what I was doing and why I was doing it. I told her I knew she could hear me and I wanted to figure out what she was trying to tell me. I told her I wouldn’t let anyone give her another shot until we figured out a way for her to be understood. She smiled. The doctors told me later that it was just a spasm but it wasn’t. She looked at me and her mouth turned up and I knew she was glad I was there. Her hand reached out and I took it and she squeezed so hard my knuckles cracked.

“She said my name. It’s funny, she said it the way the Effans do, kind of sloppy and garbled but I heard it. I heard it. She tried to turn her head to face me but her muscles were twitching so I turned her face toward me and she said my name. She said it twice and it was the most beautiful sound I ever heard. The most beautiful sound I’ll ever hear. I said to her, ‘I’m here, Maddie, tell me what you want to say.’ And she made this sound. She said something but I couldn’t understand her, so I asked her to say
it again and she did. She said it again, only this time she said it really loud, like a scream.

“Mom came running in the room. Maddie’s back arched up and she got all twisted in the bed. Her hand kept reaching out over her head and I knew she was reaching for me, but Mom pushed me out of the way. She pushed me really hard and I fell back over the chair and then the nurse was there and they were giving Maddie a shot. They kept pushing me away from the bed and I saw Maddie’s face, her eyes were so big and she looked so scared, trying to talk, trying to reach for me. And I couldn’t get to her. I couldn’t reach her.”

Meg rubbed the locket against her wet cheek. “They said it was a blood clot. That it had just been a matter of time. Said it was a blessing, that she shouldn’t have had to suffer like that. When I came home from the funeral Mass, I locked myself in our room. I didn’t talk to anyone for a month. Didn’t go to school. Dad left meals for me on a tray outside my door. I think they were probably glad to not see me. I think they loved me but I don’t think they could bear to see my face without Maddie’s beside it. My voice would never sound like Maddie’s.

“I don’t know what prompted me but I got on the computer and learned Cantonese. I’d never been much of a student before, never really applied myself, but all of a sudden languages just opened up to me. By the time I went back to school the next fall, I was fluent in Cantonese and could hold a decent conversation in Russian. After that, I just started collecting them—languages, dialects, codes. If it said something, I learned it. I’m fluent in nine languages, conversant in twenty-seven others, and I can read in half a dozen more. Hell, I’m even learning Dideto.” Her voice broke as she tipped her head up to the darkening sky. “I can understand everyone in the universe but I couldn’t understand my sister.”

“Oh!” Loul sighed, his thrum rising. He stared straight up at the sky, his fist raised above him. All around the field, the Dideto followed suit. One after another, hands shot up, pointing to the sky. Meg followed his gaze. There in the darkening sky she could just make out the flicker of a star.

“Meg see this?” Loul asked. “This is night, yes? Urfer night?”

“Stars,” Meg said. “Just like night on Earth.”

Loul smiled even though he didn’t think anyone could see him. “Good/okay.”

“Very.”

Seven more stars came out during the Purpling and the Dideto called to every one of them. They sang songs and banged their fists. Some of them rolled around on top of each other, “sexual intercourse Dideto style,” Cho explained with a badly concealed grimace. For one night out of years of endless daylight, the Dideto moved in shadows. They weren’t afraid of the dark. Meg could hear it in their thrums. It thrilled them. It happened so rarely it didn’t occur to them that there could be any threat in the shadows. The Earthers wandered through the work site easily, finding their way in the dusky twilight, undetected by the Dideto. Like ghosts, Meg thought. Cho joined her, sitting on the dirt beside the blanket she shared with Loul and his friends. He didn’t say anything but just sat down beside her as the sky began to turn rose.

When rose turned to pink, they stood together and moved back to where Jefferson and Wagner sat quietly, staring out over the sea. The breeze shifted up and around them, throwing a fine mist of sand and salt. Long lines of orange and pink streaked the horizon over the sea, not quite sunrise but coming close. They could hear the Dideto rising in clumsy form from their supine positions, could hear blankets and bags being dusted off as pale light warmed the mountains in the east.

“The Red Sun rises first,” Wagner said. “Then the one they call Fa. Fa will come up and stay on the horizon for another ten years at least. Can you imagine that? Ten years of daylight?”

Nobody answered him. Cho pulled out the vitamin shots and they all wordlessly rolled up their sleeves. More than twelve hours had passed, they could feel it in their bones and their dry eyes and rumbling stomachs. Jefferson’s eyes were especially bloodshot, and Meg thought he had probably spent the entire dark period watching the sky, as if he would see the explosion. Maybe he would have. Meg didn’t know where the ship was supposed to be. She wasn’t a navigator or an engineer. She wouldn’t have known where to look.

The Red Sun broke the surface of the water and the sound of Dideto chattering rose. Someone broke out more food, and the log they had used to smudge their cheeks was broken up with rocks and scattered on the wind. Soldiers and work crews gathered the last of the boxes stacked up under the shelters and carried them toward the waiting trucks. Other workers began dismantling the shelters themselves. If the Earthers were staying, they weren’t staying here. The Red Sun cast hard shadows on the broken slab, casting the holes and crevices in sharp relief until the Fa sun rose high enough to soften them.

Loul said something to his friends, leaning in to brush his cheek against the girl’s face. She closed her eyes at the touch, her arm lifted to brush her fingers against this thrum spot. Meg smiled. Loul pulled away and looked over at her, finding her in the shifting crowd. It made sense. It wasn’t like they blended with the Dideto around them. He smiled at her, short brown teeth catching the red dawning light. Wagner’s hand felt heavy on her shoulder.

“You might as well talk with him, Meg. Find out what happens now.”

“Yeah, okay.” But she didn’t move. None of them did. Cho, Jefferson, Wagner—they stood beside her watching the work crews doing what they did, busy with whatever they were busy with. They chattered among themselves, calling out to each other and laughing. Some leaned against each other, bonds having been formed in the privacy of darkness. With the translator off, none of the words made sense. It didn’t matter. Nobody was speaking to them.

Meg rubbed her wrist, the bare skin an odd feeling without her wristband. She had others in her kit. They all did. She knew she’d have to clip another one on soon. The breeze shifted, coming in now from the south. In the greenish light, she could see the silhouettes of birds flying in a chevron toward the eastern mountains. They looked like geese with incredibly long legs that trailed behind them on the breeze. She watched them fly, their wings beating slowly, just enough to keep them afloat on the currents. She counted sixteen birds before they disappeared in the rising Fa sun.

When the radio crackled, the four of them jumped as one. “Would you look at that goddamn sunrise?” Prader’s laugh cackled through the coms. “Son of a bitch! It’s beautiful!”

The generals barked out orders as the convoys rolled out. A secretary appeared with a binder of documents that Ada kept insisting he sign. Black-shirt crews flooded the site, bagging debris and tagging damage done to the slab. Ada had handed over an Urfer wristband to a team of computer scientists, not Olum and the team who had worked with the leader of the Urfers, but a well-dressed team of black shirts. The leader, Agnar, had given it to Olum, but the general insisted he turn it over to the administration. Ada also insisted Loul turn over the one Meg had given him, but Loul refused. The Searcher had stood by him as the general raged, stating protocol and national security.

“If you give it to him,” the reporter spoke in low, even tones as if the general weren’t even present, “you’ll never see it again. That information will go in a drawer in a locked room in a basement beneath the administration’s headquarters. They won’t use the technology. They won’t study it or build on it or learn from it. They won’t try to follow the star charts or figure out who the Urfers were. They’ll hoard the information, gather it like
loro
nuts in a cliff nest.”

Loul knew he was right. What the administration called research was just a filing system. They didn’t value information as anything other than a currency, a stockpile of words and numbers. They didn’t value curiosity at all.

“What about you?” Loul asked. “What would you do with it?”

“Me?” The Searcher said with surprise. “She didn’t give it to me. She gave it to you. Of course, if you came to work for me, we could study it together. You could study it and share what you learn. What you choose to share.”