Dr. Tomasz Szymanski
Yes. But it is the middle of the morning in Poland.
Maybe Szymanski was talking with his family abroad while he cleaned his data. Maybe that was why he never seemed to mind graveyard shifts at the lab. Maybe it was easier to have parents and siblings halfway around the world, separated by a nine-hour time difference? His fingers hovered over his keyboard in a question, but then his colleague continued.
Dr. Tomasz Szymanski
No. Electroluminescence would not provide the brightness necessary for your work, and not for the duration or energy levels that you require. The life of an LED is short at high currents and temperatures. It is not practical for your voltaic needs.
That’s what their late-night messages were: practical and short.
If the brevity of Szymanski’s words and Ethan’s similarly terse responses were occasionally grating—well, he was just low on sleep. Any communication would’ve irritated him, even if he initiated it. Which he usually did.
But he didn’t ask Szymanski about his family in Central Europe, or if he had a spouse or children. He didn’t ask if Szymanski had read Ted Chiang’sExhalationcollection. He said nothing about Bunsen’s recent near-miss with a skunk in Stulsaft Park, either. Nothing personal.
Why introduce change to a stable system?
Several weeks later, he also said nothing when he received a singleton’s save-the-date for Chase Meyer Jr.’s wedding to Isabel Wright.
They made an attractive pair in their engagement picture, Chase handsome, broad, and smiling with a white grin even wider than his shoulders, Isabel all angles and icy blonde luminosity. The font and graphics on the card reflected Karen Meyer’s taste.
A frequent patron of Carmel’s art scene and a contributor to the de Young Museum’s annualBouquets to Artinstallation, Ethan’s mother had an eye for design, but still had never taken any interest in his early forays into drawing; their refrigerator had been decorated with curated vacation magnets and posed family photographs, not the stick figures and brightly colored finger-paintings that other parents seemed to prize. His admiration for her undeniably elegant work on Chase’s save-the-date card was also undeniably bitter.
He tacked up the notice in his kitchen beside an appointment reminder from his dentist. At least he’d be numb for the root canal.
Friday brought a more welcome piece of mail. A copy ofGalactica Magazinewas waiting for him when he returned to Redwood City after another afternoon spent on the Eischer-Langhoff application in his office. Having dropped his bag, fleece, and shoes at the door, prodded his ancient air conditioner to life, and greeted Bunsen, he unfurled the issue. Behind the magazine’s glossy cover art of a human and an alien figure grasping hands and tentacles while admiring a firework display of planets and bolides in the night sky, his piece was in print.
He shuffled into the living room while thumbing throughGalactica’s pages. Art… poems… a wall of short story text… and then, there it was: an explosion of ink, more sound than image in its visceral vibrancy. He could hear it in the quiet: “Hunger.”
He dropped down onto his Craigslist couch, smiling, and appraised his own abstract, geometric ink rendering of a black hole swallowing a sun. The strokes of his pen were broad at the margins and narrowed toward the center of a ravenous darkness, creating an optical illusion of gravity so that the viewer plummeted over the black hole’s event horizon with the star. It was unsettling and beautiful.
He, Ethan Meyer, had made this. He tore out his sheet and tacked it over Chase’s card on the refrigerator.
Then he leafed back to the beginning of the magazine, making his way through the other artwork—hypothetical blueprints of an Eridian spacecraft from Andy Weir’sProject Hail Mary, a calligraphic rendering of Neil Armstrong’s bungled quote on the moon—and then on to the poetry and short stories, nodding his appreciation for the better narratives, until:
Pandora Rising, by Aaron Forster
First came wonder.
How could it be otherwise?
Tumbling through a sea of stars, space and time passing as currents, unmoored and breathless, weightless, they watched while sky became earth and earth became sky. The way was vast and uncertain, but they were neither afraid nor lonely aboard thePandora Risingon her final voyage, for they had the curiosity of all scientists, and around them were marvels beyond imagination: dwarf stars and meteors, the scattered fragments of stardust from the primordial Nothing and All.
On Earth-That-Was, they had often looked up and pondered:
When I raise my eyes from this bleak wasteland, when I seek answers from the emptiness above, who sees me in my supplication? Who hears my call?
They had this question to satisfy, and they had each other.
Their trajectory took them beyond the glimmering sprawl of the Milky Way, to the very edge of Alpha Centauri’s binary stars, past nameless astral supergiants burning brighter even than their Sun-That-Was, and onward still. Their years stretched long. The wonders of the universe stretched so much farther.
He stopped nodding. He stopped breathing.
He joined the crew of thePandora Rising, following the ship past expanding galaxies and to the rippling edge of lightless space where its instruments swung into madness. He shadowed the astronauts through their approach to a black hole, and he waited with them when they could do nothing but observe the coming of their own end. The author sucked him deeply into the fears and fate of these hopeful, desperate people with a lyrical brutality and a gravity so fierce that he couldn’t look up from the text.
But the last page of the story was missing.
At its climactic moment, he flipped forward—but not to the end of “Pandora Rising.” The next page inGalactica Magazinewas an inane poetic tribute to the astronauts who’d died in the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.
