Arkwright (27 page)

The scheme almost fell through at the last minute. After dinner, I walked over to the dome at the appointed hour only to discover that Dad and I weren't alone. Uncle Win was there too, and while he and I got along just fine, when it came to
Galactique,
he tended to be rather humorless, often saying that keeping track of the ship was “a sacred trust.” He wouldn't understand the notion of sending a nonessential video to the ship.

Dad caught my eye when I came in, and he silently placed a finger to his lips. I kept the message in my pocket and remained quiet while he and Uncle Win checked and rechecked the coded material they were preparing to transmit. Then Dad drained the last of the coffee in his mug, idly wished aloud that he had more, and asked Winston if he'd mind going back to the house and brewing another pot. Uncle Win was a coffee bug, and everyone was in favor of doing whatever it took to keep Dad away from the Kick Inn, so he was only too happy to comply.

As soon as he was gone, my father hustled me to a chair in front of the console where the videocam was located. He fitted me with a headset and did a brief mike check and then stepped out of range of the lens. “We're all set,” he said, pointing to the keyboard. “Whenever you're ready, just push the Enter key and start talking.”

“Okay.” I spread the wrinkled notebook pages out on the console.

“You've only got one shot at this. Make it count.”

“Okay. I will.” I took a deep breath, nervously fussed with my appearance. I was wearing my nicest blouse and skirt and had even put a little yellow silk flower in my hair. Then I touched the key and looked straight at the lens.

“Hello, Sanjay,” I began. “My name is Dhanishta Arkwright Skinner, and I'm calling you from Earth…”

 

4

Sanjay wasn't real, but thinking about him so much accustomed me to imagining
Galactique
in vivid terms, so it was easy for me to visualize what was happening there.

A little more than three and a half years later, my message was received by the ship, along with a related set of instructions my father hadn't told me about. Since they were prefixed as a nonessential communiqué not to be opened until after the ship reached Gliese 667C-e, the AI stored them in memory and then proceeded to the more important material.

Galactique
's course was taking it in the general direction of the galactic center, just below the plane of ecliptic. By then, the ship's point of origin was no longer visible; Earth's sun, along with its family of planets and neighboring stars, had vanished into a conical zone of darkness that had appeared behind the ship. The same Doppler effect caused by the ship's relativistic velocity—a little more than 93,000 miles per second—caused the stars around and in front of
Galactique
to redshift, changing hues slightly as they seemingly migrated in the direction of travel, while at the same time causing infrared and ultraviolet sources to enter the visible spectrum as seemingly new stars.

If there had been any living passengers aboard, they would have been confused by the display.
Galactique
's AI, along with the array of lesser computers it managed, was prepared for these phenomena. The navigation subroutines ignored the visual distortions and instead took their bearings from galactic coordinates, taking into account the parallax motions of the nearby stars. There was little chance that the ship would get lost on its way to Eos, but just to make sure, Juniper Ridge periodically transmitted navigational updates.

In turn,
Galactique
responded by confirming its status, using the twin high-powered lasers that had been elevated from its service module shortly after launch. The beamsail itself, no longer serving as the propulsion system, now performed a second role as the ship's receiving antenna, using sensors threaded through its carbon-mesh surface.

On the whole, though, the ship's navigation system was mainly autonomous. It had to be. Although the time dilation effect of .5c caused the hours to pass more slowly aboard
Galactique
than they did on Earth, many years went by between the moment the ship sent back its confirmation signal and the moment it was received on Juniper Ridge.

I was fifteen years old when I learned that the message I'd sent Sanjay had been heard.

 

5

This was one of the few good things that happened to me in that year of my life. When my grandfather, who'd read the message the night before during his watch in the MC, told me about it the following morning over breakfast, it came as a poignant reminder of one of the last fond memories I had of my father, who was no longer living on Juniper Ridge.

Dad had become tired of the observatory's isolation. As the years went by, he gradually came to regret leaving behind the freewheeling life he'd led before rejoining his family and sharing their commitment to the Galactique Project. He'd been a drifter before then, and as he approached his forties, he began to miss his old ways. My father still loved me, but relations with my mother had become strained. They still slept in the same bed, but days would go by when they wouldn't even look at one another, let alone share a kiss. The Kick Inn had become the center of his social life, and there were nights when he didn't even bother to come home but instead crashed on the couch of one of his drinking buddies.

We didn't know it, but he'd also met a local woman, a lady named Sally Metcalfe, who liked single-malt whiskey as much as he did. Their friendship didn't become a full-blown affair for quite a while, but it wasn't lost on Mom that her husband's eye had begun to wander. She never fully recovered from the head injury she'd sustained years earlier, and her distrust of outsiders soon extended to Dad as well. I often heard my parents arguing from the other side of the wall that separated my bedroom from theirs, and although my grandparents tried to bring peace to the family, it was becoming increasingly obvious that, little by little, Dad was withdrawing from us.

One Saturday afternoon shortly after my fifteenth birthday, I went with Grandpa and Grandma on a shopping trip to Pittsfield, the nearest large town. Uncle Win and Aunt Martha were in California for an astrophysics conference at UC–Davis, and Dad claimed to not be feeling well, so we left Mom in the MC while we went to buy new clothes for me.

Pittsfield shopping trips were always special, and I didn't get new clothes as often as I would have liked. It was a happy day for me until we returned. The first thing we noticed when we pulled up in front of the house was that Dad's car was missing.

Mom was still in the observatory, analyzing the latest data received from
Galactique
, so she was completely unaware that, sometime in the last several hours, he had thrown his clothes into a couple of suitcases, left a brief, impersonal note on the kitchen table—
Going away for a while. Don't call me … I'll come back when I'm ready!
—and taken off.

Grandpa tried calling him anyway, but he never received an answer. Although my father's car was found in the parking lot of the Boston transtube station, his phone's GPS locator remained active for a few days, so Grandpa was able to track Dad's westward route on the tube through New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, until the signal vanished in Indiana. Apparently, Dad remembered that he could be traced that way and ditched the phone while changing trains at the Indianapolis station. Grandma went into Crofton and visited the Kick Inn, and from its denizens, she confirmed what Mom had suspected: Dad had been seeing another woman, and apparently she'd persuaded him to run away with her. Where they were headed, though, was anyone's guess. The drunks only knew that Sally used to live “somewhere out west” and that she'd often talked about going back.

I spent the next couple of days in my room, lying in bed with the blankets pulled up over my head, refusing to talk to anyone. Through the wall, I often heard Mom crying. Sometimes we both wept at the same time, but never together. Truth is, I had never been as close to my mother as I'd been to my father. Mom had always been a little aloof, preferring the role of tutor and disciplinarian, while Dad had been the one who gave me piggyback rides when I was little, took me hiking and swimming in the summer and snowshoeing in the winter (when he wasn't drinking, that is), and told me about Sanjay.

Although I'd long since learned the truth—there wasn't a little boy aboard
Galactique
; it was just a story my father had made up—deep in my heart, I always believed that Sanjay was real, if only in a metaphorical sense. But when my father broke my heart, he also broke what little faith I still had in that childhood fantasy.

My family was shattered by the loss, but we did our best to pick up the pieces. Yet things only got worse. Six weeks later, Uncle Win and Aunt Martha came to Grandpa and Grandma with news of their own. While they were at the conference, Uncle Win had learned about a teaching position that was opening up in UC–Davis's physics department. The job was tenure track, with a salary considerably higher than what he was earning from the Arkwright Foundation; without telling anyone except his wife, Winston had quietly submitted his résumé. Now the position was being offered to him, and the Crosbys had come to the conclusion that this was an opportunity too good to pass up.

I could be cynical and say that Winston Crosby's idea of the Galactique Project being a sacred trust apparently had an expiration date, but in hindsight, I can't blame him or Martha. Their titles as my aunt and uncle were honorary, after all, and although we'd always thought of them as family, they'd been on Juniper Ridge for almost eighteen years. Like Dad, they were pushing forty. My mother and grandparents didn't want to see them go, but they reluctantly agreed that the time had come for them to move on. Their car was the next to leave Juniper Ridge, never to be seen again.

Since the observatory was now staffed by my family alone, Grandpa and Grandma decided that I needed to take on some of the work in the MC. Perhaps it was just as well. Mom had become even more reclusive, if that was possible. A borderline agoraphobic by then, she seldom left the house anymore, and when she did, it was only to putter around the greenhouse that was attached to the main house, a silent communion with the cucumbers, radishes, and tomatoes she planted after Dad went away. In many ways, she was an invalid, but it was even worse than that; heartbreak had made her a ghostly presence, a specter of the woman she'd once been.

I was old enough to look after myself, though, and since there wasn't much else to do besides watch my mother silently suffer, I gratefully let my grandparents teach me what I needed to know: how to monitor the communications equipment, how to rotate the radio dish so that it could properly receive signals from the lunar tracking station, how to interpret the coded messages that periodically appeared on the screens. Grandpa still reserved for himself the crucial task of calculating the astrometric updates that occasionally needed to be transmitted to
Galactique,
but we both knew that responsibility would eventually become mine, as well. Despite the retrotherapy he and Grandma had undergone when they were younger, it was clear that the years were finally catching up with them. Their hair was graying, their postures were becoming stooped, and there were times when their short-term memories for little things weren't as sharp as they used to be. Perhaps they'd never leave Juniper Ridge, but they wouldn't outlive
Galactique,
either.

But I was getting older too, and I was no longer sure I wanted the role that was being put upon me.

 

6

My teens were not an extension of the idyll in which I'd spent my childhood (and it really was a happy time, all things considered). Although I was smarter than most kids my age, Mom had done me no favors by keeping me out of school. By the time I was sixteen, I'd become painfully aware that I was not only mostly friendless but also rather naïve.

I wasn't entirely lonely. I'd established my own online social network, and although I'd never met any of the other kids with whom I communicated, I knew who they were and what they were up to. They often hid behind avatars and screen names, but I realized that their daily lives were much different from mine. I knew nothing of what it was like to be in homeroom with a cute boy whom they really liked, and when sex came up, I had to pretend to be just as wise about it as they seemed to be (they probably weren't, but I didn't know that). They bought their clothes in malls; I went shopping maybe two or three times a year, and a big day for me was when I'd get a new winter parka. They dropped casual references to sock bands of which I was only dimly aware, let alone seen. Yes, I could explain the Drake equation or the Doppler effect, but how many teenagers want to hear about that? Next to them, I was either a country bumpkin in bib overalls or a virgin princess locked in a castle tower, depending on the way I felt that particular day.

Naturally, I began to rebel.

I lost the argument with my mother about going to school, but she couldn't stop me from using my feet. In the afternoons, I started walking down the road to Joni and Sara's house, where I made a deliberate effort to cultivate their friendship. The twins were both fourteen by then, but in some ways, the three of us were the same age; I'd learned to dumb down a little bit when talking to them, and in return for helping them with their homework, they introduced me to music and movies and girl stuff that I wouldn't have been exposed to otherwise. Sara continued to be a bit snooty—the Ogilvys had money, as she seldom missed an opportunity to remind me—but Joni and I became close friends. In years to come, that friendship would become valuable.

And I introduced myself to sex. Let's be honest about this: I had no interest in being a thirty-year-old virgin. I wanted to get laid and wasn't very particular about how I'd go about it. Which was just as well, because the only likely prospect was Teddy Romero. His father was another regular habitué of the Kick Inn, and Ted himself was just a few years away from elbowing up to the bar alongside his old man. He had the necessary equipment, though, and that's all that really mattered. He was a bit surprised when I started coming down the road to the double-wide where he and his father lived and practically threw myself at him, but he obligingly took me out on a couple of dates and didn't mind too much that I wouldn't drink with him (liquor was something I'd shun my whole life, for obvious reasons). Two or three nights like that, and I finally got what I wanted from him; he drove me out to an abandoned granite quarry on the outskirts of Crofton and did the deed.