Arkwright (26 page)

I once had a great-grandmother, as well, but I have no memory of her. Kate Morressy Skinner, the family matriarch, lived long enough to make one last trip from Boston to Crofton so she could hold her newborn great-granddaughter in her arms, and then she went home and, a couple of months later, quietly passed away in her sleep. When I got older, I learned that Grandma Kate was the person responsible for her family coming to live on Juniper Ridge. As the last surviving member of the Arkwright Foundation's original board of directors, she'd approved the purchase of the observatory and then delegated the task of monitoring
Galactique
's voyage to my parents and grandparents.

From the start, I was a lonesome child. My mother, whose behavior was already erratic when she and Dad got married and moved to the observatory, became even more reclusive after I was born. The truck bomb had been set off by a member of something called the New American Congregation, and although they were no more—the Arkwright Foundation had sued them into bankruptcy—she continued to believe that another one of them would try to find us and finish the job. Paranoia was a legacy of her head trauma. The nearest public school was in another town twelve miles away, meaning that she'd have to travel there by car or bus every day, a commute that would take her from the familiar safety of the mountaintop retreat and into a world of strangers whom she increasingly distrusted. Once I finished preschool, she decided to homeschool me herself. Although Grandpa and Grandma argued against this, Dad didn't mind; he'd disliked making the twenty-four-mile round trip to my kindergarten five days a week and figured that Mom's new role as their child's teacher might help stabilize her precarious mental state. And since Uncle Win and Aunt Martha were willing to pitch in, Mom wouldn't have to do it herself, which was also just as well, because Dad was often too hungover to keep up his end of the bargain.

So after age six, I saw children my own age only occasionally. There were twin girls who lived on a horse farm three miles down the road from the observatory and a boy who lived with his father in a trailer a mile farther on, but the sisters were a little younger and the boy a couple of years older, and at that time of life, even a year in age difference can seem like an impassable gulf.

And it wasn't just that. In the constant company of six intelligent and highly educated adults, three of whom took turns every day as my teachers, I grew up in an intellectual environment. I was reading at middle-school level before I was nine and by the time I was in my teens, I was fluent in French, Spanish, and Indian, adept in higher forms of algebra and physics, knowledgeable of American and world history, and had read the most of the classics of Shakespeare, Poe, Hemingway, Marquez, Clarke, Swanwick, and Le Guin. I was a brainy little girl, but precocious children often don't have a lot in common with kids their own age, and that made me even more lonesome.

I also knew something most kids didn't know: the details of humankind's first starship, now bound for Eos—or, if you want to get technical, Gliese 667C-e, a terrestrial planet in close orbit around an M-class red dwarf twenty-two light-years from Earth. Every day, my family and the Crosbys took turns standing watch in the observatory, which we called the MC. Inside the dome, a ring-shaped array of computers, control consoles, and holoscreens had been installed on the ground floor, while on the newly installed second floor, a twenty-foot radio dish antenna had taken the place of the old telescope. Once the dome's aperture slot was open, the dish was able to slowly rotate on its pedestal, tracking a network of communications satellites across the sky. The comsats relayed information sent to them from another pair of satellites in orbit above the Moon, which in turn transmitted data gathered by the laser receiving station on the lunar far side.

This data was the voice of
Galactique
. The ship was already three and a half light-years from Earth the day my father took me in his lap and, in a moment of sobriety that was becoming increasingly scarce, patiently explained what he and Mom and Grandpa and Grandma and Uncle Win and Aunt Martha did for a living: they were listening for reports sent from a vessel on a long, long journey to a distant star, waiting for the day many years in the future—sometime in July 2135, in fact—when we would finally learn that it had safely arrived.

“See, everything the ship tells us about what it's doing comes to us here.” Dad shifted me from one knee to another as he pointed to the holoscreen floating before us. “All those numbers are codes, and the codes let us know that the ship is doing just fine.”

“Uh-huh.” I gnawed the knuckle of my left thumb as I gazed at the glowing columns of letters and digits. “I don't know what they mean.” I was pretty smart for a seven-year-old, but not
that
smart.

“Don't do that.” Dad gently pried my thumb from my mouth. “It'll make your teeth crooked. Sure, you don't know what they mean, because they're in code—short for what the ship wants to tell us. But since
we
know what the codes stand for, we can figure it all out, and if they tell us something's going wrong, we can tell the ship how to correct itself and make things right.”

“Although it takes a while,” Grandpa added. My grandfather was seated in a chair on the other side of the ring, studying another display as he listened to us. “We can't tell at once what
Galactique
is telling us because it's so far away, and
Galactique
won't know what we're telling it for the same reason.”

“I don't understand.” I fidgeted in my father's lap, but nonetheless, I was fascinated. I tended to chew my thumb when I was trying to figure something out. “Why does it take so long?”

“How fast does light travel? Do you remember?”

“Umm”—I sought to remember what Uncle Win had taught me just last week—“186,000 miles per second.”

“That's right! Good girl! And that's also how far the laser beam carrying data from
Galactique
travels in one second. It can't travel any faster because a laser is just a concentrated form of light, and…?” He waited for an answer.

“Nothing moves faster than light!” I was proud of myself for knowing what Dad meant. “Nothing! Nothing at all!”

“Okay, so let's figure it out. How many seconds are in a year?”

“Ummmm…” I started to raise my knuckle to my mouth, and he pulled it away again. “A lot?”

“That's as good an answer as any. A lot. And if you multiply all those seconds by 186,000, and then take that number and multiply it by”—Dad paused to run his forefinger down the display, pulling up the figure for
Galactique
's current distance from Earth—“3.523 lights, or light-years, that's how far away the ship is from us. Which means that it now takes three and a half years for us to hear anything
Galactique
has to say to us and another three and a half years for it to hear anything we'd have to say to it today.”

I stared at the holo. “Three and half
years
?”

“Uh-huh. And getting longer all the time.”

I remember that day well, for in that instant, I had an epiphany seldom experienced by little girls and sometimes never fully realized by quite a few adults: a sense of the vastness of space and time, the sheer enormity of the cosmos. Not only was the distance between the stars greater than I'd thought it was, but the implication that the universe itself was unimaginably huge was a revelation both awesome and frightening.

Suddenly, I'd become a tiny and inconsequential little thing. The bottom had dropped out from under me, and I was an insignificant particle of a far greater whole.

I shivered. The hollow concrete eggshell of the MC had become a cold and forbidding place. I had an urge to scramble out of my father's lap and run from the building, never to return again. But Dad put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and then he whispered something in my ear that I'd never forget.

“Do you want to know a secret?”

I looked at him. “What?”

Dad glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Grandpa wasn't listening in. Satisfied that he wasn't, he went on. “There's a little boy aboard
Galactique
.”

“
Really?
” I was astonished.

“Shh!” Dad raised a finger to his lips. “Yes, there is. He's asleep just now and won't wake up until
Galactique
reaches Eos, but yes, he's there. And it's our job to make sure he gets safely to the place where he's going. Understand?”

“Uh-huh.” I thought about this a moment. “Dad, what's his name?”

My father hesitated, and then he gave me an answer. “Sanjay.”

 

3

Later in life, I'd often wonder why my father told me that this imaginary child was a boy and why he'd picked the name Sanjay. Perhaps it was only a spur-of-the-moment decision, the sort of embellishment a father would add to a fairy tale. Yet it's also possible that he might have been revealing a subconscious regret. Maybe he'd wanted a boy instead of a girl, and he would have named this boy Sanjay if things had been different.

Yet this didn't occur to me at the time. The revelation that there was a little boy asleep on
Galactique
provoked a different kind of wonder. As I lay in bed that night, the lights turned off and the blankets pulled up against the winter cold, I didn't sleep but instead gazed up at the ceiling, thinking about Sanjay. Dad told me very little about him, but it didn't matter; my imagination supplied the details, and before long, he became as real to me as any living person.

Sanjay was my age, naturally, and like me, he also had the dark skin and straight black hair of someone with an Indian-American heritage. He slept in what my father called “suspended animation” because that was the only way he'd be able to survive the half-century-long voyage to Eos, but I figured that, every now and then, he'd wake up, knuckle the crust from his eyes, and then rise from his little bed and wander through the ship just to see what was going on. In my mind's eye,
Galactique
was very different from what it actually was; it was the kind of spaceship I was familiar with from the old science fiction movies I sometimes watched with Uncle Win, who had a fondness for such things. Sanjay would gaze through portholes at the passing stars, have a cup of hot chocolate and a cookie, check the instruments to make sure the ship was still on course, and then get sleepy and return to bed again.

No one knew about Sanjay except my father. The little boy was a shared secret that we tacitly agreed to keep from my mother, grandparents, and the Crosbys. And since I'd found that there was little I could talk about with the few other children I knew—the two girls, Joni and Sara Ogilvy, were only interested in their dolls and the pony they wouldn't let me ride, and I tried to avoid seeing the boy, Teddy Romero, who was scary and a little mean—I didn't reveal his existence to them. Which was just as well. Sanjay was just as lonely as I was, which made me feel a certain kinship toward him. He was the little brother I didn't have, the playmate I'd been denied. He became a friend I'd never actually met yet with whom I carried on many conversations, always when I was certain no one else was around.

As imaginary friends go, Sanjay was wonderful. Nonetheless, I was aware of the fact that my little chats were rather one-sided and that he wasn't really talking to me. I also knew that, even if he did occasionally wake from his long slumber, anything that he might actually want to say to me wouldn't be heard for years. Still, I wanted very much to speak to him. I considered the problem for quite a while, and then one day, I approached my father with my solution.

“I want to send a message to Sanjay,” I said.

It was an afternoon in late spring. The winter snows had melted, and there were new leaves on the trees. My father was behind the observatory, standing on a stepladder to clean the solar panels that, along with a small wind turbine on a nearby hilltop, supplied Juniper Ridge with its electricity. His eyes were puffy—he'd slept on the living room couch again, having come home from the Kick Inn late the night before—but he managed a smile as he climbed down the ladder to patiently listen while I explained what I wanted.

“You know it'll take a long time for it to get there,” he said when I was done.

“Yeah, I know. But he can hear it when he—” I stopped myself. Dad didn't know that Sanjay wasn't always asleep. “Whenever he wakes up,” I finished.

My father nodded but didn't say anything as he wiped his hands on the cloth he'd been using to clear the spring pollen from the photovoltaic cells. “It's very expensive to send a signal to
Galactique
,” he said at last. “If I let you do this, it can only be one time. And you'll have to make it very short—no more than a minute. Understand?”

A minute seemed much too short for everything I wanted to say to my friend. “All right. Just a minute. Please, Dad.”

“Okay, then. We have to send some course data next Wednesday, anyway. Write down what you want to say and show it to me first, and if I think it's short enough, I'll let you record it, and we'll attach it to the next pulse.” He paused. “But don't let anyone else know you're doing this, okay? Sanjay is still our little secret.”

I grinned and happily nodded, and over the next week, I wrote a short script for what I wanted to say. Knowing that I had only sixty seconds, I rewrote it again and again, pruning unnecessary words and revising my thoughts, and then I carefully rehearsed it while keeping an eye on the clock to make sure that I didn't exceed the time limit. The following Tuesday, I showed the handwritten script to my father while he was standing watch in the MC. He liked what I had to say but made me read it aloud while he timed me. Satisfied, he told me to come back the next night, which was when he was scheduled to send the transmission.