Children of Andromeda

Val's eleven years are up and she knows it: a pause at the post office, a remark at the feed store in August, a county clerk who has started calling her young lady. She is packing the crates of notebooks nobody is allowed to see. At Sunday dinner she tells Kyra it is time; Kyra says not yet, as she has the last two times. Neither mentions that leaving Calderveil would mean leaving the basalt shelf above Hallam Lake, which they have returned to every decade since 1851.

Kyra meets Marcus on the wrong fork of the Salt Fork trail and likes him immediately. But the field has been wrong all week — early, and stronger than in four centuries of feeling the eleven-year rhythm come and go — and when he turns around it goes through her like a struck bell and her eyes flare. At the diner Val reports something she has seen: Marcus standing in Ray's yard at night, head back, facing northeast and low, as if something had told him where. Kyra names the possibility they have not named in four hundred years, and each of them begins a line from the old plateau ceremony and neither finishes it. Driving home, Kyra talks to Kal, as she has for four centuries without noticing. She has told Val about the hammers and Charlie's socks and every other thing. She has not told her how strong the field is, or how early.

Marcus becomes a Thursday at the library. The chapter lays out what they are, and also what November is: Val finally says aloud, after four hundred years and four attempts, that November was the middle of the eleven months, the part where she stopped being able to tell which of the things happening to her were hers — which is why the lamps. Kyra teases her about "Val's box," a theoretical shielded room that has been turning up in her notebooks since McKinley and is never going to be built. Then, at ten to nine on the last Thursday in November, Val finds Marcus with the big astronomical folio open to a plate of the galaxy in Andromeda, one hand flat on the page, looking at it the way people look at a photograph of the house they grew up in. Her light rises in a room with one lamp in it, and he sees her hands. After he goes she bags his abandoned coffee cup without touching the rim, and hears, driving home, exactly who she sounds like.

Kyra breaks the rule about friendships with her whole chest: Ray's porch, the fire hall, teaching Marcus to read a slope. Val cuts her hair in the kitchen and points out she will be gone in a year; Kyra says then she'll have been good to him for a year, which is more than his father managed. In January Kyra goes into the surf below a headland after a photographer, her eyes going fully gold in the black water, with Charlie Walsh up the beach holding a flashlight. In early February, doing an inventory she has already done, she feels something turn under her bones — the cycle, which for four hundred years they had both believed this planet had ended. It had not ended. It had been waiting. That night her eyes go all the way in Charlie's bed, and she ends it at the door with her boots in her hand, giving him no reason he could use. Then she drives to the diner, sits across from Val, keeps her hands under the table, and says nothing. It is the first real thing she has kept since the snow, and she knows it as she does it.

It began in Val the same day, shelving a field guide. She understands immediately that the eleven-year peak has arrived early and gone through both of them on the same day, and that there is no still end anymore: nobody on this world or any other has ever been through a cycle here. She starts holding it shut by force, hour by hour. The light begins to leak. She ends it with Daniel in broad daylight, as gently as she knows how; at the door he observes, without accusation, that she has always left like somebody who has to be somewhere before dark. At the booth on Sunday the two of them watch each other lie and lie back, each knowing exactly what the other is doing. Kyra asks for a word in the parking lot and Val says no, with nothing after it. Meanwhile Val sends Marcus's cup and a hair to a lab in Portland under a false name, and stops at the mill on the way back, where most of a room is now built. The first result is nothing. The second is not: four markers in his genome — not genes but states, which parts are switched on — have moved a fraction, in the direction she once drew for a flyer named Renn. They are changing him by being near him, and he does not know.

At the fire hall's spring fundraiser the power fails and the grange hall goes to lantern light. A stranger tells Kyra she looks just exactly like a woman he knew in Portland years ago. Across the hall, Kyra finds Val the way she has found her in dark rooms since 1607 — by the pale of her hair — and sees light at Val's wrists, faint enough that Kyra herself has to look twice. And she sees Marcus seeing it. He is not afraid, or puzzled; he looks homesick. Kyra does not turn the car around and tell Val, because Val would ask why she was watching so hard, and her own hands are shaking on the wheel. Now there are two things.

Nine nights at the kitchen table. The markers keep moving. Then, in the part of the data that is not about the markers at all, Val finds structure — an arrangement she has seen in exactly one other person. In 1608, as soon as she could hold a pen, she wrote down everything she knew about the bodies that mattered to her, including a panel a woman once shrugged and agreed to give her over a bench, and she has copied it forward from notebook to notebook ever since. It is Kyra's. It is Kyra's family: the line of Sorren Dael, four thousand years dead, who went out alone on a method nobody else ever used and did not come back. The lab's ancestry estimate puts one very old strand of Marcus's line in the flat country between two great rivers — where Dael came down, and lived, because somebody there was not afraid of him. Marcus does not carry the markers; he carries the thing underneath them, faded almost to nothing across four thousand years and still there: the inherited capacity to hold time with another body. Val had once written, in a paper a whole program was built on, that this was not heredity, not destiny, no bloodline. She had been half wrong. And the last piece arrives at four in the morning: a body native to this field that can still hold Sethal time might be the one outside on Earth that a Sethal body in a cycle could lock to — might be the difference, for one person, between coming apart and not. Then, on a Thursday, watching Marcus stand and stare down a broken microfilm reader, Val says Kal does that out loud, in front of him, after four hundred years of never. That night she sits on her porch with the phone in her hand, knows exactly what she should do, and knows the real reason she will not: as long as she says nothing, it is still hers to decide. She does not call.

Marcus comes to the fire hall and asks Kyra not to be funny at him until he forgets the question. Then he lays out his list in order, the way a person lays out tools: Val's hands and throat; Kyra's eyes on the trail; Ray's joke that isn't one; a librarian who knows which county surveyor was drunk and talks about the Portland riverfront as though she had walked it; and Kyra's own hands, under the table every Sunday he has been there. Then he shows her a photograph from an uncatalogued archive box in Portland — a flooded street, a rowboat, and Kyra in the second row with a child on her hip, captioned Vanport, May 30, 1948. She knows the day. She also knows, with a lurch, that this is the one Val missed. So she lets her eyes go on purpose, for the first time in a century, and watches his face do not fear but relief. She tells him everything, out of order and with her hands — the ship, the fold, the snow, the eleven months, the rules, the towns, and Kal and Genie, whose tense she has not known for four hundred years. He asks whether it hurts being on the wrong planet; nobody has ever asked her that. Twice she comes to the edge of the thing under her bones, and twice she goes around it. Then he deletes the photograph in front of her, twice over, and holds up the empty screen. Afterward she calls Val, learns that Val said her daughter's name to a stranger in a library, and understands that she has learned it secondhand — the way everything about Val used to come to her for the first three hundred years, and has not for a very long time. That is the part that takes the floor out: not that Val kept something, but that Val had to go back and learn how.

Three people in Val's kitchen who know the same things, for the first time since the snow. It is funny, and then it is not. Marcus asks about the daughters; Kyra does Kal and makes them laugh, and stops mid-sentence as though she had walked into a glass door. Val says Gennive's name aloud to someone who is not Kyra for the first time ever, and finds it comes out steady. Then Marcus asks the table the question neither mother has ever had asked by anyone but the other: do they think the girls thought they left them. Nobody answers. Both girls had known for years what their mothers kept from them, and had said so to their faces — that they had not decided once but every single day — and then their mothers went away for a few months and never came back. Later Kyra talks over Marcus mid-sentence, exactly as she once talked over Kal, and sees herself do it, and goes gray. In the yard, Val lets her light rise a foot from a boy who can see it and does not turn away; he tells her it's kind of beautiful and drives off with his headlights off until he is past her gate. Inside, Kyra is on the kitchen floor shaking in long waves. Each woman looks at the other and sees it — the throat, the hands, the thing underneath — and neither says a word. Val gets her onto the couch and sits on the floor with her back against it, and says: the overlook, tomorrow night.

On the warm basalt under a scoured sky, they put it all on the table. They felt it the same day, in February, and each said nothing for months — after the one thing they promised in the cold with nineteen dead behind them. They talk first about the man at Solara who told each of them, in two rooms eleven miles apart, that he could not get anyone pregnant: the same shape, the same secret carried separately, and eighteen years of lying to two girls who found them out anyway. Kyra confesses the grange hall. Val confesses the cup, the hair, the bandage, the lab, the four markers moving, that they are changing him and he does not know. Kyra, who interrupts everyone, does not interrupt once, and says only that Val took it without asking him — again. And that is all she ever says about it, and it is enough. Then Val gives her the rest as an argument, because that is the only way she has ever been able to give anything like it: what a permanent coupling might do, that it would not undo, that his capacity might be too faint, that a body which opens and fails to hold comes apart faster than one that never tried, and that the only trial in the history of either species was run four thousand years ago and produced a daughter, a line, and him. One trial — nothing anyone would publish on. Kyra asks how long she has known. Since the beginning of April. It is May. And Val does not give the good answer she has ready — that Kyra was in pain and out of time and would have gone straight to Fenner Road without weighing anything — she gives the true one: as long as she didn't tell, it was still hers to decide, and she wanted a week in which she decided, and then she took another. Her light comes up on the dark rock with nothing to hide it, and Kyra says nothing about it at all. They agree it is Marcus's to decide, not theirs. Neither says the other half: that there is one of him, and it can only be decided once, for one of them. And Kyra knows, the way she knows north, that there is not going to be time.

A call goes out on a Tuesday in May for a hiker with a bad ankle above Hallam Lake. Val hears it on the scanner Kyra installed under the library desk years ago as a joke, leaves the door unlocked and the lamps on, and drives faster than she has driven anything since a wagon. She finds the hiker with his splint strapped beautifully and then abandoned in the middle of a knot, and Kyra far down a slope in the ferns, losing — the body letting go of itself, every process that had agreed for four hundred years about what time it was disagreeing at once. Don't let them take me. Val carries her out over one shoulder down a deer track to the logging spur, the way Kyra once carried a man out of the surf. At the trailhead lot there is an ambulance and a deputy with a clipboard, and it is Charlie Walsh. He looks past Val at the blanket, and at one hand gripping the edge of the seat very hard, for a long moment. Then he writes down that she was transported by a family member and tells Val to get her home — a man who was given no reason at all at a door in February, giving one away for nothing. At the house, Val pulls the curtains and kneels with both hands flat on Kyra's back and cannot say how long it will take, because everything she knows was learned where the field was right. A week, perhaps. Perhaps less. Then she calls Marcus and tells him all of it, fast and clean, including that she took his blood without asking and that a failure might kill Kyra faster — and that he has every right to say no, and that nobody should be asked to decide something like this in a night. He says he can't decide something forever tonight. I know, she says. And then she says the thing she had not planned to say: the four-thousand-year-old words from a high plateau, spoken at a ceremony, which she could never have cited aloud on Sethal without permission she did not have — that two enter, that neither completes without the other, that one carries what the other cannot. Not a bond. Nothing to decide. Just two people holding on to her instead of one. On the other end of the line she hears him already reaching for his keys.

Time goes wrong first. Kyra's heartbeat and the rain stop agreeing about how long a moment is, and every part of her that knew what time it was lets go. She catches fragments above her: Val's level, ordered voice telling him that if it's too much he lets go, that he doesn't stay for her sake — and Marcus, in a voice she has never heard him use, the voice of somebody who once sat beside a hospital bed and was told to go home and did not: I'm not letting go. Val does not argue with him. Kyra will remember that, of all things. His hand closes over hers and one thread stops falling — a human hand, entirely of this planet, with something underneath it very faint, keeping her time, old time, a beat she has not heard from outside her own body since the snow. Then Val lies down behind her and puts a palm flat on her breastbone, and Kyra feels the terrible deliberate steadiness pouring out of it and understands that Val has been spending that on herself every hour since February and is spending all of it now. Two things to hold on to; not one planet, two people. In the worst hour Kyra is back at the last breakfast table, begging Kal to go on, and from behind her, in the old language, Val answers as somebody else, a sentence at a time, inventing what the girl had been going to say. It is not true. Kyra knows it even then, and holds on to it anyway, and neither of them ever mentions it — not because Val could not have talked about it, but because Kyra wanted to keep it exactly as it was handed to her, and Val let her. Toward dawn Val's hold fails and her light comes up through all of her at once, bright enough to show the bones in the hand on Kyra's chest. Marcus sees it and does not look away and does not let go. Nobody ever says anything about it. Then it holds — no moment, just the slow end of a long cold — and Kyra's body finds the two beats outside it and begins to agree. She wakes in full morning, alive and wholly present, with Marcus asleep against the couch and his hand still around hers. Val is gone. The rug behind her is cold, and there are two flattened tracks in the wet lawn. It was not a bond; it held for one night and will not hold the next time. And Kyra does not know where Val has gone.

Val's own cycle begins turning as her hold fails, and the one person who might have held on to her has just spent the night nearly coming apart. So she lies there a minute longer than she should with her face against Kyra's hair, and gets up quietly, and drives to the mill. Inside the old building, inside a room she framed out of new lumber, is a second room lined with sheet metal and copper mesh, every seam soldered, grounded through a cable to a rod driven into the wet earth, with a steel door she hung herself: as far as this planet's field is concerned, a hole. On a shelf, a timing unit of the kind that keeps cell towers honest, bought under a false name, taught to drive one very weak field at one very precise signature — read out of the edge of the eleven sheets of lattice record, the only written thing that ever came out of the wreck. Val's box, from the notebooks, the one Kyra teased her about since McKinley. Built. She knows exactly how crude it is: the field half of it was always Kyra's science, not hers, and she built it alone out of textbooks and memory and a great deal of guessing, with half the data, knowing she was building it wrong, because the other half of the data was asleep on a rug. She shuts the steel door and for the first time in four hundred and nineteen years the planet's wrong enormous hum stops, and in the quiet there is only the box keeping time, and her light comes up completely with nothing to stop it and nobody to see it. She has done this once before: at eighteen, up an outside stair into a warm room with eleven chairs, where a woman asked twice whether anybody was coming and twice she said no. Years later she stood at the bottom of that same stair and watched her daughter go up it with somebody. And the night before, on a rug in Oregon, she had been the one who came. She shuts the door on herself anyway. It works badly. The loosening slows against the borrowed beat and hangs and stops — which is not the same as resolving — and she believes it will stay down until the next peak, eleven years off. She believes it; she does not know it. And when she comes out, the light through the high windows is afternoon, and her watch says a quarter to nine in the morning, and she cannot make the hours come back. At home she writes it all down plainly, so somebody else could read it later, in the same notebook that holds the unsendable letters to Genie, and adds one more beginning: she did it alone again, and she wants that said. Two days later Marcus brings her a sample himself, in a clean container with his name on the label in his own hand, telling her she can ask now and doesn't have to take anything anymore — and his markers have moved further in one night than in the whole winter. She tells him first, before anyone, as she once promised Renn, and tells him she does not know whether it is a wound or an adaptation or both. He asks whether she would tell him not to. She says no: she would tell him everything she knew and everything she didn't and let him decide, and would find it very hard, and would do it anyway. Then, on Sunday, Val is half an hour late to the booth for the first time in eleven years and cannot account for the drive. She watches Kyra notice, and decide out of kindness not to ask. Val never tells her — not out of shame, but because the only person she could hand four missing hours to is the one person it would cost something. It is the one thing kept that year that she carries the whole way out the other side.

June: Val's season, the one month she turns her sleeves back at the wrist. The town has noticed nothing. Leaving is not discussed, which both of them know is a decision. Kyra is well — all the way down, every part of her agreeing — and knows it will not hold, and that for the first time in four hundred and nineteen years they both have a date. Outside the post office, Charlie tells her that what he wrote seemed accurate, and lets her go kindly. Then Val brings a folder to Kyra's kitchen table: the Vanport print is still in its box in Portland, the boxes are all being scanned, and she could sign in under a name and make it go away, as she did with every other print and negative in 1948 after Kyra told her not to. Instead she pushes the folder across the table and asks what Kyra wants done — and Kyra thinks about it properly, longer than Val expects, and says leave it. It is the only picture of her anywhere in the world doing the only thing she was ever sure she was for. She wants there to be one, even if it costs them. Val says all right, twice, as though practicing, and will live the rest of her life with a box she cannot watch. A few nights later Val cuts her hair — and asks first, which is the tell, because in four hundred years neither of them has ever asked. Kyra spends two days watching her carry it around under a face that gives nothing away, which has been the tell for about three centuries. The kitchen chair, the towel, the shortest night of the year, and then Val's palm resting on the top of her head as it always does — and not coming away. Afterward, upstairs, in the blue that June gives at ten o'clock, with a bird still going outside the open window, Kyra's thumb finds the old ring low down where nothing has ever shown it to anybody living, and they lace, and Val's light fills the room like a second weather. Later, in the dark, Kyra's hand tightens before she has decided anything; Val goes still for a second, answers, and does not ask. And a good while after Kyra has decided she is asleep, Val says into the ceiling that she is frightened of eleven years from now — that she isn't going to do anything with it, she just didn't want to be the only one in the house who knew it. Kyra says she knows, and does not say hers: that four days ago, on Ray's new porch in the long light, Marcus asked her something — an offer, or a question, or a request for time to find out whether it could even be an offer, all three at once, carefully and bravely and with unsteady hands — and she has not answered him, and has not told Val. In the morning Val makes breakfast badly and Kyra sits on the counter in Val's shirt and is not asked to get off it, and what they mention is the bird. Days later, at the overlook, Kyra finally says it: he asked her something, and she hasn't answered. And she waits for the question she has heard Val ask about every important thing in both their lives. She watches the sentence land in Val like a stone dropped in still water and the rings go all the way out. Val's mouth opens. And closes. Kyra watches her sit with it like a woman holding something hot in both hands and deciding not to put it down — and watches her not ask. It is the hardest thing Kyra has ever seen her do. Neither of them remarks on it. After a while Val's shoulder comes to rest against hers, and the valley goes dark by slow degrees.

Val drives home before light and does not go inside. Above the trees to the east there is a smudge most people would never notice, and she has watched it from porches for four hundred years — from Hawthorne, from Missouri, from a doorstep in Boston, from the steps of a house in Trieste whose street no longer has the same name — always the way you look at a door that has closed behind you. She has had it the wrong way round the whole time. Home was not left behind. Home came here, a very long time before she did: fell out of the sky into the flat country between two rivers, was not feared, stayed, and made itself into part of this world one ordinary life at a time, all the way down, until it was asleep at that moment in a house at the end of Fenner Road with a new porch. And there will be others — four thousand years is long enough for a line to fan out across a whole planet — who will not know what they are, who will look up at night and feel less lost and never know why. She has eleven years. She has a continent, and then another one. She has a line to find. She does not go and get a notebook; there will be time for notebooks. She says the old thing out loud to nobody, in English, the way it has been said on a road out of Maribor and on a wagon and in about a hundred rooms since — not far now — which has been a lie every single time for four hundred and six years, and which she has never once said without meaning it, and which is a fraction less of a lie this morning than it was the morning before. Then the rain starts, and comes through the porch roof in the one place it always comes through, onto the same warped board, and she stays out in it a while longer.