The Second Star, page 44
It was still raining outside by the time they finished their mac and cheese. Lily Mae insisted on helping clean up (which mostly consisted of filling up the room’s small trash bin with the packaging the fast-food meals had arrived in, and rinsing out the mugs they all had various beverages in). She archly told Philip and Stella, both still damp around the edges, to stay by the heater and to try and not throw a spanner in the works by coming down with something that would—at least in the short term—be far more physically draining and incapacitating than—as she put it—merely waiting to carry a child to term. Joe, behind her, rolled his eyes at that but said nothing. Stella might have argued; Philip made no attempt to do so. He had in fact been completely silent the entire evening. Just being in this room, in the same space with Lily Mae, was a major victory for him. He was not yet ready to break his walls down. Joe, aware of the silence and taking matters into his own hands, came to stand in front of Philip and caught his eye, then gestured with a toss of his head in the direction of the second room.
“Philip,” he said, “we need to talk. I am sorry to commandeer your space, Lily Mae, but that room is the only bit of privacy to be had in here. I would take him outside but he just got dry enough to be fully human again and I would hate to undo all that good work. I will try not to keep you from your bed for too long.”
“Make yourself at home,” Lily Mae said with a wry grin.
Joe maneuvered Philip into the room, and closed the door behind them.
“I’m bored and my ankles are the size of elephant feet and my back hurts,” Lily Mae said. “Distract me. Didn’t someone say there was a pack of cards out here? And damned if I don’t need to go to the bathroom again. I swear, if nothing else, I will be grateful when this is all over so I can manage to string together an hour in which I don’t need to go pee three times. I’d love another cup of tea if anyone’s making any—something warm inside of me, on this night—but if I do I will never get any sleep tonight. Or I might as well sleep in the bathtub.”
She waddled heavily into the bathroom and snicked the door closed behind her.
Rob caught Stella’s gaze wandering to the closed door, apparently unable to stop worrying about what was happening in the other room, and finally said,
“He is in good hands. He needs somebody to talk to about all of this,”
“But I…”
“I know. You already told him. He knows too. Now let him find a solid place to stand before you insist on holding his hand. And speaking of sleeping, which Lily Mae mentioned, I shouldn’t think that those two are going to be out of there any time soon. I’ll nap out here with you ladies tonight. I can take the couch.”
“Don’t be silly,” Stella said, “I’m a foot shorter than you are and even my feet would hang off that couch from halfway up my calves if I tried to stretch out there. Lily Mae can have that one bed, you take the other, I’ll curl up on the couch if need be.” She glanced back at the door again. “Whatever helps.”
“But you’re…”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. Is she really set on cards tonight? I mean, we might as well try and grab some shut-eye. We may have a long way to go, tomorrow.”
“I thought the midwife said to stay put, for now,” Rob asked quietly. “Where were you planning to head to?”
Stella gave him a look, full of desperate uncertainty. “Pick a direction. All right, maybe not bright and early tomorrow, but we can’t stay here, not forever, not even for long. We need to find a place to go to ground. A safe place—for her. For Philip. For all of us.” She made a small frustrated gesture. “We can discuss it in the morning.”
Lily Mae came back from the bathroom, padding over to one of the beds in bare feet, ignoring the probable state of cleanliness on the threadbare carpets. She yawned, but her eyes were bright, wakeful. “Did you find those cards?”
“Stella thinks we should probably try and get some rest,” Rob said. “I mean, we don’t know how much time we have—before you—”
“All right, no cards. But then someone tell me a story,” Lily Mae said. “I’m going to need to know some bedtime stories, soon.”
“Lil,” Rob said, “that child is going to be telling you stories.”
Lily Mae grinned, her white teeth a flash against her dark skin. “There’s a part of me that is looking forward to that,” she said. “And a part of me that is frankly terrified of the idea.”
Rob got up from his seat beside the heater and fussed with the bed that Lily Mae was about to climb into, putting one of Nellie’s waterproof pads on it before Lily Mae climbed in—just in case, he said—before reaching over to pull the thin blanket and the bedspread atop it over her, tucking it up against her back. Stella heard his voice drop into the Poet’s tones, and closed her eyes, leaning her head back against the chair, listening as the words drew her in and wrapped her in beauty. It took her a moment to drift back into full awareness, when she realized that he had stopped talking and the lamp beside Lily Mae’s bed clicked off. In the deeper shadows, cast by the single remaining lamp, she saw Rob come back towards her, and lifted her head.
“I thought you were asleep,” he said, and the voice was still not Rob’s.
“No. But I may have been dreaming,” she said.
“The couch is still…”
“Go to bed,” she said, decisively enough, rising to her feet and gathering up the blanket she still had wrapped around her. “I mean it.”
He looked as though he wanted to insist—and if he had been fully Rob he might have—but his eyes were still the Poet’s, huge and shining, and he said nothing more. He inclined his head at her, in silence, and stepped across to where the other bed in the room was tucked up against the window. He waited until she had taken the few steps across to the couch, and switched off the second lamp. The room plunged into shadows, lit only dimly by the nightlight whose wan illumination came past the half-open door to the bathroom.
Stella did curl up on the couch, trying to make one of the stiff, board-hard cushions serve as a makeshift pillow, but she was wide awake, and it wasn’t just the comfortless couch that was to blame for that. She found herself listening, straining with every fiber in her, to the soft murmur of conversation that she could still hear in the second bedroom. Behind her, in the two beds, Lily Mae’s breathing soon deepened into sleep, and she thought she heard Rob’s change, too—but even lying there as still as she could with her eyes closed Stella could not seem to make her body release the tension in her shoulders and her back. Her hair was still damp at the roots, and felt cold against the back of her head where she lay against the unyielding cushion; her feet kept sticking out from under the edge of the blanket, cold even despite the socks she had kept on. Finally, feeling guilty for even thinking about it, she swung her legs down off the couch, wrapped the blanket around her like a poncho, and padded carefully to where she could curl up on the floor in front of the door to the second bedroom, leaning the side of her head against it, straining to listen.
The door was not built to be soundproof. The conversation in the other room was low, and from the couch it had been just a murmur—but with her ear against the door it was easy to make out the words. Silently, carefully, guiltily, holding her breath, she listened.
“But what is it that you have lost?” Joe asked quietly. “Merely the frame. God is greater than the story in which you try to put him in order to understand an existence of such a being. It only makes that god smaller—and, instead, you have blown away that confining frame and expanded the story instead…”
“I know that,” Philip said, sounding so bleak that Stella’s breath caught in her throat. “I understand—but that frame, that story, that is the foundation my life had been built on. It was not just God it was necessary to believe in. It was Christ, and what he stood for, and what was supposed to have been said and done in His name.”
“Christ is not lessened by what you now know.”
“How can that possibly be true? If all of it isn’t true—if Jesus, as we know him, was not the son of God but instead carried the soul of some marooned star traveler who had nowhere else to go…”
“It made him human,” Joe said. “And that was part of what you believed, part of what made the story true for you. It is difficult to make the case that anyone—not even a priest of your clear deeply held faith—can possibly believe that every single word of the holy books is literally true. I have not made half the study of those that you must have done in your day, but I know that when Jesus was supposed to have walked the Earth—in those very days—he himself might not have been what the religion created in his name eventually made him become. Others made him into a deity. In the beginning—in his mother’s womb, as a baby, as a toddler, as a small child—he was no more than what he seemed. No more than Lily Mae’s child will be. In that way, they are the same—even if you see one as a young boy born of Middle Eastern parentage, and the other, a small girl-child who will come of a young black woman and of no known father. But when they were born, they were just that—small squalling babies. It is what Jesus did as a man—the miracles they attributed to his hand as a man—that made him different, rendered him holy. We have no idea what lies waiting for Lily Mae’s child.”
“Just her existence—” Philip choked. “It means none of it was ever true. No, not even in the metaphorical sense. And I—who was called to the faith, who built my life on it, who offered up my soul freely when it was asked for—what does that make of me—who am I now, if I am no longer a priest, a Jesuit, a Christian…?”
“It may mean that your ministry has become bigger than you bargained for,” Joe said. “That the God who called you is not confined to a single world, a single sun, a single system. It may be that we are all made in the image of God but that the image we perceive of Him may not be the same for all of his children—and that He is a greater thing, a greater thing by far, than you may have even begun to believe. My own people believe in a spirit that is inside all things—there are scientists who will tell you that we are all made up of star stuff, the same elements born in the hearts of living stars—so how is a blade of grass or a rabbit or buffalo or a sequoia tree not made in the image of God, then? How is that not true of every star that ever burned? What if God isn’t just a tiny shard of all of his creation—not just human, not just us in all of our hubris—but what if He is also what made the Illogon, the creatures whom he then may have sent to change the worldview of you, a different part of his creation? What if all of this only means…”
A hand on Stella’s shoulder made her jump, and she lifted her head from the door, turning to meet Rob’s eyes where he was crouching beside her.
“Stop,” he said quietly. “Come to bed. Don’t do this to him, or to yourself.”
“But he…” Stella whispered, in protest.
Rob shook his head, and tightened his grip, helping her struggle to her feet. “Come. Leave it. This is something that is not your task to tackle.”
He guided her back to the bed, not the couch, and helped her climb under the covers, but when he would have turned away to seek the couch she had abandoned she reached out for his hand and gripped it hard. Rob stopped, half turning, the line of his body a silent question.
“No,” Stella said, suddenly shivering. “Here. Come here. Hold me.”
14.
He hesitated, but only for a moment, and then nodded, turning back towards the bed. He did not release her hand until they were both fully under the covers, sliding his arm around her and holding her close as she laid her head on his chest and listened for a couple of breaths of silence as his heart beat steadily beneath her ear, another message she was overhearing and eavesdropping on but this time one meant for her to hear and understand. Rob said nothing at all, lying stretched out beside her, his chin on the top of her head, the sound of the rain still pattering against the windowpane behind its thin brown curtains.
After a moment, Stella sighed, and something inside of her gave—she finally relaxed against him, only then aware of how tense and tight and rigid she had been. A shift in his jaw on her head told her that he smiled.
“I can’t have this,” she said against his chest. “I can’t, you know. It is entirely wrong for a doctor to have a patient as a…”
“Even if you ever were,” he said, “I don’t think that applies. Not really. Not anymore. If that’s all that you can hold against it.”
“So what do you want?” she asked, pushing into him, lifting her head to look at him, searching his eyes with her own in the deep shadows of the bed.
“Me?” Rob asked, his tone reflective. “Mine are much smaller questions than Philip’s or even Lily Mae’s. I don’t have to question my position in this world—I know I gave that up a long time ago, when I first left it, and I can never go back to that place. So I am a leaf in the wind, as it were. I might remember what I once had—a family that was once mine, a brother who will always be a part of me but whom I very probably will not see again in this life unless something big changes—and I might consider what I brought back with me from a journey which I may or may not have believed that I would ever really return from—or what I found here, unexpectedly and with an unlooked-for quiet joy, if I were permitted to claim it—”
She lifted a hand and put it across his lips, preventing him from talking.
He obligingly stayed silent, for a moment, waiting for her to say something, but as the silence lengthened he reached up and closed his hand over hers, pulling them both down to rest on his chest over his heart.
“I mean,” he said, “I know that I am two hundred years older than you are…”
“The person who existed those two hundred years ago is long gone,” Stella whispered. “If anything, you’re only a few weeks old, maybe a month or two, depending on when you start counting from, when the Juno picked you up or when they hauled the Parada crew back to Earth—I’d be cradle snatching if I were to marry you—”
“So you are going to marry me, then?” he asked, laughter bubbling in his voice.
She blushed furiously, thankful he couldn’t see in the dark, tucking in her chin so that her face was hidden against him again.
“Well,” he said, and she could still hear the echo of a smile in his voice, “I guess I can call it some sort of a residue of that time dilation thing. More happened to me out there than I knew, mayhap—because I am getting an answer to a question I haven’t asked yet, not properly—but for what it’s worth, Stella, I was going to come to you anyway. Don’t ask me when. Sometime. Soon. And tell you that I know I bring absolutely nothing I can usefully offer you in return but if you were willing to…” He paused, slipping one hand down the curve of her jaw to gently lift her head back up. “Are you laughing or are you crying?”
“Neither,” she hiccoughed. “Both. Lord, if I had ever really pictured a moment like this it would not have been a place like this, it would not have been at a moment like this, it would probably never in a million years be anybody like you, but still, I…”
“You what?” he asked “I am not just doing this to distract you from what is going on right now on the other side of that door. I mean it—I was going to circle around to asking anyway. If I hadn’t thus far that’s because I—maybe because I couldn’t think about what would happen if—”
She hushed him again, her fingers against his mouth, but this time he kissed them, and felt her hand tremble at the touch of his lips.
“Stella,” he said, and she could hear the first cadences of the Poet come into his voice, but he didn’t allow that fragment to manifest, not fully—this was only that part of him that fragmented to give birth to the full persona of the Poet, not the entity itself, he was still holding on to the core of himself, speaking as Rob. “Do you remember what I told you, about the way the Illogon travel the stars?”
“About sending out their mind—their spirit—whatever you want to call it—in the shell of the ship, out to the stars, you mean?”
“And why?”
She hesitated. “You said… something… about it holding them together… about how without the shell they would dissipate into the fabric of the universe, stop existing…”
He nodded against her hair. “That, yeah. In an incoherent nutshell. But here is what I am telling you, now, tonight, and here is what I want you to know, and to believe. If I am no more than a soul adrift on the wild winds of the cosmos, trying to make my way through the galaxies and the constellations tumbling and burning in my path—there is one thing I have come to know about that soul and its journey. It needs its shelter, its shell, its vessel, something that will help it hold together, that will keep this already fractured spirit that you have come to know all too well from spilling out into the empty universe and losing all shape and form and memory of who I was, and who I am, and who I am supposed to be. And for me… that shell, that sanctuary, that peace that is my armor… that’s you.”
Stella sighed, softly, and lifted her head to his, brushing his lips with hers.
“I know,” she said. “I think I’ve known… There were times I might have thought, or even said, that I couldn’t tell you and Jerry apart. But I could. It didn’t take me long. And I have always tried to be…”
There was a noise from the other room, a soft thud, a shuffle, and Rob felt her head move instantly as she listened.
“But a part of you is still listening at that door,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
She turned back to him, sharply. “What did you think—that Philip—”
“I watched the two of you, back at the habitat,” Rob said. “You worked well as a team. But he is what he is, and I didn’t think that he would have…”
