Relativity

For Julian

B
EFORE YOU HEAR
any words, you can hear the panic.

It surfaces as an irregularity of breath, a strain of vocal cords, a cry, a gasp. Panic exists on a frequency entirely its own. Air into air, particle by particle, panic vibrates through the elastic atmosphere faster than the speed of sound. It's the most sudden and terrible thing, piercing the calm and propelling us toward the worst places. Before the words come out the anxiety is there, roaring on the other side of silence. Before your brain can register what you're being told, you know that something is wrong. And before you can respond it's already too late. Because once you've heard those words, an event is set in motion and everything will change.

“Help,” he said. “He's not breathing.”

E
THAN TOOK HIS MUM
by the hand and led her into the tunnel. Graffiti covered the walls—veins of green and silver—with patterns and symbols sprayed into stories like sacred paintings in a cave. Cryptic characters spelled strange words; the mismatched letters reminded Ethan of formulas and equations. Aerosol fumes lingered, but nobody else was there.

“Come on, Mum!” The tunnel threw Ethan's voice further ahead. “Hurry up! We'll miss it.”

They emerged in the darkness, rushing under the brick archway of the golden viaducts and into Jubilee Park. Along the footpath by the mangrove habitat, past the oval and cricket pavilion, over the mossy bridge, they ran toward Blackwattle Bay. It was low tide: empty stormwater drains, shallow creek, a bank of exposed mud where water lapped at the shoreline walls. Across the bay was the Anzac Bridge, its cables stretching from the pylons like strings of a harp. Streetlamps dotted along the bridge reflected in the dark water, staining it with orange stripes.

Ethan frowned. “There's too much light. We should've gone to the country.”

His mum gave him a weary smile. “You're lucky we're even here; it's two o'clock in the morning. You have school tomorrow, I have work. We live in the middle of the city. This'll do.”

She spread out a blanket and they sat by the promenade. Both of them were wearing their pajamas. The park was silent and empty; the air smelled like wet grass and salt. Ethan concentrated, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. It was a cloudless night and the moon hadn't risen yet. Optimal conditions for seeing the meteor shower, and tonight was its peak. Behind them, the glare of Sydney's skyline turned the horizon amber. He worried about light pollution, that the glowing metallic city would stifle the secrets in the sky.

“There!” Ethan pointed. “See the row of three stars? That's Orion's belt. And there's Rigel, the constellation's brightest star. That means the Orionid meteor shower is happening over here. Look!”

Mum kept her eyes on him. “How long until we go back to bed?”

“Tonight there'll be somewhere between twenty-five and fifty meteoroids per hour. They're actually dust from Halley's comet entering our atmosphere. Air friction makes them glow with heat and then
swoosh
! They vaporize.”

His mum lay down on her back. “So I guess we wait then?”

“Yeah, we wait.” Ethan nestled in beside her, resting his head on her arm. He looked up at the northwest corner of the sky and connected the dots of the constellation Orion. One of its bright stars—Betelgeuse, a red supergiant—floated near the belt. Red supergiants were the largest stars in the universe and Betelgeuse was so big that if it replaced the sun, it would spread all the way out to Jupiter.

Ethan squinted, focusing on the vague pink spot. Betelgeuse was a dying star. Eventually, it would run out of fuel and collapse under its own weight. He imagined the red star exploding, the cosmic boom as it went supernova, shockwaves sweeping across the galaxy. Violent plasma bursting into the brightest ball of light. He could almost see it burning. But Betelgeuse wasn't going to explode for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe not even a million.

In a million years, Ethan thought, these constellations will break apart. People would need to make new maps and tell new myths for the changing patterns in the sky. Orion would be a different shape; the Southern Cross might become a square. Ethan watched the stars move, like a movie on a massive screen. He saw the cinematic trajectories of darkening dwarfs and brightening giants. Everything was slipping and unthreading, disappearing and beginning. Up in the celestial jungle, there were no static stars.

In two billion years, the galaxy Andromeda would be so close to the Milky Way that every night sky would light up like fireworks. And in four billion years, the two galaxies would spin closer and closer together and finally collide, swirling and twisting, giving birth to new stars. Becoming one galactic knot. But all that was so far away. There were so many things in the distant future that Ethan would never see.

He dragged his knees up to his chest. “Mum, do you ever think about the future?”

“Right now I'm thinking about what we're going to eat for dinner tomorrow night.”

“No, not like that. I mean The Future. Like in a million years. Or a billion.”

Mum smiled. “Not very often, sweetheart. I won't be alive in a billion years.”

Ethan turned to face his mum, propping himself up on his elbows. “But I don't want you to die. What if I sent you away on a spaceship traveling at nearly the speed of light? Because of time dilation, it'd only feel like one year for you. But for me it would be twenty. So when you got back to Earth, we'd almost be the same age.”

“I wouldn't want to spend twenty years away from you, though.”

“Me neither.” Ethan scratched his nose. “Okay, what if we were both on the spaceship together? We could travel close to the speed of light or through the deepest parts of the fabric of space-time where gravity makes it warp. By the time we got back home, millions of years would've passed. But we'd still be alive. We could see Betelgeuse go supernova, and the Milky Way collide with Andromeda. Maybe if we just fly around the universe for the rest of eternity, then we never have to die. Or maybe we could go faster than the speed of light. There must be some loophole in theoretical physics that makes living forever possible.”

His mum studied his face, the hypnotized way people stared at paintings or sunsets. “Ethan, sometimes I have no idea where you came from.”

“Yeah, you do. I came from inside you.”

“As usual, you're right,” she said, rolling onto her stomach.

“Mum, want to know something crazy? Statistically, the probability that I exist is basically zero. Did you know you were born with two million eggs? But when you were thirty you'd lost 90 percent of them, and by the time you turn forty you'll only have about fifty thousand left. So the chance that I was born was 0.008 percent. I'm one in two million eggs, plus I'm one in two hundred and fifty million sperm. That's approximately how many sperm are in each male ejaculation.”

Mum looked confused. “How do you know all this?”

“We're doing sex ed at school. Mr. Thompson even made us watch a video of a real birth. I saw an actual vagina and everything.” Ethan paused. “Mum, do you think they ever miss me?”

“Who?”

“The other eggs. My brothers and sisters inside your ovaries. So far, I'm the only one who's successfully made it out.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well, the other eggs would all be your sisters. Only men have the Y chromosome that makes baby boys. At the moment, all the eggs are girls.”

“So I used to be a girl?”

“You also used to be an egg.”

“It must be scary for them,” Ethan said. “Sending one egg down the fallopian tube every month, like a sacrifice. It's like
The Hunger Games
in there. And you only have a few more years left before the whole system shuts down. What if the other eggs run out of time? Mum, what happens if all my sisters die before they get to exist?”

Her hand found his. “Ethan, do you have survivor's guilt?”

“No,” he said in a clipped voice. She was making fun of him. But he'd been one of those eggs once, made of the same proteins, and they were still stuck. Trapped in an eternal moment before life could begin. Ethan couldn't save his sisters, couldn't let them know he didn't mean to abandon them. He hunched his shoulders and sighed.

“What's wrong?”

He wasn't sure. He didn't want her to have another baby. And besides, to make another baby she'd need a man to contribute another set of chromosomes. Mum wasn't a Komodo dragon; she couldn't reproduce by herself. But as Ethan thought of his thousands of sisters—squashed together in his mum's ovaries, waiting—he suddenly felt very alone.

He rubbed his eye. “Nothing. I'm fine.”

“You're tired.” Mum kissed him on the forehead. “And I'm freezing.”

“But the meteor shower!”

“Ten more minutes. That's it.”

Ethan leaned forward and focused on Orion; it was high above the horizon now. The night sky was a gauze of symmetries and spirals, an ocean of darkness and light. Ultraviolet and infrared, filled with invisible radiation and empty vacuums. Ethan felt like he could split the yawning universe open with his eyes and see its boundless dimensions, look beyond the blueprint of space and time. He'd always had an aptitude for spotting patterns and finding the geometry in chaos.

His mum looked out at the water; maybe she didn't care about the meteor shower. She pulled the sleeves of her sweater over her hands and shivered. Ethan gave her a hug to help her molecules expand. In the dark, her pale skin and fair hair seemed blue; Ethan's black hair never absorbed the color of the light. When he looked at his mum, Ethan saw another universe—a world intact, of soothing shapes and soft textures, of beautiful angles and the warmest light. His universe.