Starlight

[Shiola]

///

The two brothers sat lying in the mud of the vineyard. Though both past middle age, what had started as a fight between the men turned into a playful tussle, as if they were still children. The younger of the two found it hard not to chide his older brother.

“You were asking for it, you know.”

Robert replied, “Yes, but you needed it! You’ve been terribly hard on yourself.” He looked to his brother, probably hoping to see some level of relief. Hoping his uptight, ambitious sibling had finally fallen back to earth.

Jean-Luc replied, his laughter turning quickly to tears. “You don’t know, Robert. You don’t know – they took everything I was. They used me to kill, and destroy, and I couldn’t stop them. I should have been able to stop them!”

He hadn’t understood what Jean-Luc had been through. It was beginning to dawn on him he might never fully understand it. Robert’s brother continued, though now sobbing through the mud caked on his face.

“I tried - I tried so hard. But I wasn't strong enough! I wasn't good enough! I should have been able to stop them, I should've, I should…” Jean-Luc trailed off, unable to find the words to express the horror he’d experienced, and the guilt he carried with him.

“So… my brother is a human being after all. This is going to be with you a long time, Jean-Luc. A long time. You’re going to have to learn to live with it.”

///

Henry’s eyes were fixed on the television; he would have sat forward if it weren’t for the large, fluffy cat nestled into his lap. Morpheus had plenty of space to sit on the rest of the couch, but he was a lap-cat through and through. Henry couldn’t say he minded all that much.

This was startlingly good. With most of the year’s work behind him, Henry finally had the time to start digging into his father’s list of best Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. He was ashamed to have put it off for this long – the Borg arc was fantastic, and far more moving than he’d ever expected from a Star Trek show.

Most of the time he’d stuck to cyberpunk when it came to science-fiction, as dystopia seemed like all the more probable outcome of human society. It was easier to immerse himself because it seemed more real. He could never understand why his Dad always seemed to turn his nose up at it. It made sense now, though. Henry’s father was a man of possibilities and optimism, the kind of thing that Star Trek presented in spades. It was meant to inspire, and it was fun. Sure, there were the few throwaway episodes here and there, but the ones that were good – were absolutely amazing.

As Captain Picard returned to his ship and crew further on the journey of healing than he had been before, Morpheus rolled in Henry’s lap and looked up at him. Henry paused the episode, having a feeling he knew what was about to happen.

“What is it, Morph?”

The cat replied with a noise somewhere between a meow and a yelp, and nuzzled into his chest before getting up and sauntering to the window. Henry’s bedroom was on the top floor, with a glass door that opened out to a small deck on the roof. He had been tending to a small garden out there, near which Morpheus had discovered an excellent spot where the wood was rough and good for scratching his back, and where there were plenty of moths and bees to chase. He started to make impatient grumbling noises before Henry relented.

“Okay little guy, but only for a bit. It’s late!”

Morph looked to the door, then back at Henry. Another meow, quieter this time.

“I guess this is your favorite time of day, isn’t it?” The door slid open, and Morpheus slinked outside. Henry followed. He knew that he’d paw at the door if he needed to come in, but he liked to go out here at night too. In some ways the cat was taking the human outside as well. Stepping through the door himself, his eyes drifted upward.

If he didn’t, I’d miss this.

Above Henry’s head were tens of thousands of bright white lights. Tiny, sharp points against the blue-black night sky. As he looked his mind could easily find patterns, which led to names he’d known for a long time. Polaris, of course. It was actually a trinary system. Epsilon Ursae Majoris, or Alioth. Most people knew it as part of the handle of the “Big Dipper.” Sirius was easy to find, the brightest but not the largest in the Canis Majoris constellation. That was VY Canis Majoris, which was two-thousand times larger than the sun.

Only barely visible from here; and only if one knew where to look.

He chuckled to himself. Only a few hours ago he’d watched the aftermath of the Battle of Wolf 359. That star was part of the constellation Leo, though it wasn’t one you could see with the naked eye; it was a red dwarf and incredibly faint. Only seven light years away or so. Not so far from Earth, at least as far as Star Trek was concerned.

So many people claimed they felt small and insignificant looking up at the stars. That it was dizzying, frightening even. Henry had a hard time keeping the smile off of his face. The only discomfort he felt was the pain from craning his neck up for so long. Nothing else made him feel this way. Somehow both restless and at peace.

It all felt so close from here. Like he could reach out and touch the sky. Henry couldn’t help but let his mind race, thinking of how the light from billions of cosmic fusion engines had now finally arrived to his eyes. Even after so many had gone silent, that light was now experienced by matter that could understand itself. Isolated but significant. As far as he concerned, that fact alone meant that a planet with intelligible minds living on its surface was just as significant as the vast abyss of burning gases and shattered rock that spawned it - if not more so.

Faintly, he could hear shouting in the distance. A couple was arguing about politics. He voted red, she voted blue. Someone was calling their spouse a traitor, comments were made about fragile masculinity. Something shattered. Then the sound of a door slamming, and a car speeding away.

Well, there goes that moment.

It was so petty. What could matter so much that it was worth feeling that way, or making someone else feel that way? The kind of feelings that made a person say the things he’d just heard couldn’t be worth having. What a waste it was to be a thinking being that could know and experience so much, only to just waste away in self-indulgent hatred.

Morpheus briefly paused from his ecstatic rolling on the deck to glance up at his friend. Henry met his small eyes and expressed his frustration to the fluffy feline.

“How can we hope to explore and understand what’s out there when we do such an abysmal job exploring and understanding ourselves?”

Morpheus replied with a contented chirp, and resumed scratching himself on the deck.

Henry felt his eyes become glassy, and closed them to center himself. There was no real problem he reminded himself. There was no new information that should be any cause of any genuine distress. People focus on the wrong things very often, and he knew this already. It wasn’t worth letting it get to him. Henry sunk onto the deck, lying on his back. This kind of thing didn’t usually move him this much, but he’d probably read too much news during the day. It was one of the reasons he’d started watching TV in the first place.

“I could probably be up there right now and I’d still find a way to hear about all of the awful things going on down here. Probably feel guilty about not being around to help.”

Rubbing his eyes, he swallowed his distaste and looked up once more. The railing of the deck framed the sky. It helped him forget that there was anyone else around here; to forget how people fought over meaningless bullshit. From this vantage point, it was hard to fixate on how much human ingenuity and effort found itself in the service of greed and terror. All he could see were the stars, ringed by the faint glow of streetlights.

It was easy to see the dome shape of the sky from this vantage point, or at least imagine it. Henry found himself picturing being on the inside of one large eye. Disembodied, and with no other task than to look out at the universe. Observing, maybe hoping to understand some piece of it. That seemed to be an apt vision for what humans were doing, or maybe what they were supposed to do.

As a stand-in for some proper meaning of life, it was pretty open-ended. That the act of seeing and attempting to understand was all that there was; there was no unifying theory or bigger picture. A book where you could only read a page at a time, always out of order, with no clear end. The human lifetime was too short to ever know enough or process enough to see reality for what it really was. They could only stare and wonder from inside the bright blue eye. It worked, it let him keep busy without spending too many evenings awake with existential dread.

He didn’t think it was necessarily a pessimistic idea. It was pragmatic, but not very satisfying. It seemed at least a little more reasonable than looking at the sky and seeing something amoral and unfeeling, a void only barely definable by mathematic certainty and the arc of time’s arrow. People who did that always seemed to exude this terrible smug nihilism it was hard to even listen to. Looking at nature that way seemed to invite despair.

Henry preferred keeping his chin up and a a curious smile on his face as he braced the unknown. Optimism and humility; it was probably not as hopeful or useful as belief in God or spirits but it was the best he could do. Religious belief was to him, enviable. Faith was something he could never understand; not because he didn’t try, but because it seemed impossible to make his mind work the way it needed to for that kind of belief.

Mysteries and the unknown should be exciting and challenging, not terrifying.

It wasn’t an easy mindset to maintain.

His father had told him of his parents’ faith, though he wasn’t much of a believer himself. Judaism held respect for what could be understood, and a belief that mystery was a necessary element of existence. Humans were significant, and there was a purpose to be found in life. The struggle, the hardship, it was all meant to be.
Henry thought he must’ve been lucky, that the stars lured him the way they did. Even if he never found what he was looking for, either up there or by sending others to look, he’d have spent his life doing what he was supposed to do. He would do enough, that by the time he found his end he would want for rest instead of finding himself puzzled and perturbed at the prospect of a dreamless sleep. If Life felt full and complete, Death might feel at least necessary.

I’ve got a lot to do, then.

Morpheus chirped, and he realized that his cat was clambering onto his chest, purring and kneading his paws into Henry’s side. It tickled, causing Henry to laugh. He gave him a scratch behind the ears - it was his favourite spot.

“Hey there, little guy.”

The fuzzy affection brought another thought to his mind. Something his Mom had once said about how humans were a young species. Something her grandfather had explained to her as a child: the great flaw of human beings was that they did not understand their place in the world. The sun and the moon rose and fell, and all that walked or grew on the earth lived and died. There was some piece of that which humans were missing, that kept them aching for something more.

Knowledge every other living thing possesses except for us.

As Morpheus rolled lazily into what Henry assumed was a comfortable place in his chest, it was hard to not envy him. He didn’t seem to have much inner conflict, being a cat. His ambitions probably didn’t extend much beyond chasing butterflies or figuring out whether a cardboard box or the top of a bookshelf was a more comfortable place to loaf.

“Maybe you’ve got it right.”

Morpheus purred.

“It might never be enough. So is it worth chasing, then? I guess you’d probably encourage me to chase after things if you could talk, that’s like your favourite thing. You don’t really have to think about it, though. You just go for it. I wish I could do that.”

Maybe that’s it. Chase after it regardless of what happens. Just don’t think about it.

A streak of light briefly crossed the night sky before fading out. The shooting star passed by with only one wish on Henry’s mind; the same one he’d made since he’d first been told of that superstition as a child.

It wasn’t as if he wasn’t aware there was a chance he’d fail. There were any number of reasons he wouldn’t make it into a space program. There were still so many years of school ahead of him, so many things he had to accomplish before that dream even began to become a reality. People found it more unnerving that he didn’t find this all so intimidating, apparently.

Whenever he told anyone his plans for the years after high school, he was always met with a glazed-over look from someone who figured he was aiming a bit too high, or overenthusiastic words of encouragement from people who didn’t quite realize what Henry was signing up for. People always seemed to see it as this impossible task, something that they only ever heard about but never actually did.

For the most part, it never got to him. He was sure of himself, and sure of what he could do. If anyone had a chance, he did.

“If I’m so sure of it, Morph, why do I feel so nervous about this?”

It was probably the events of the next day that were wearing on him. The Senior Trip was tomorrow, and shortly after that the end of high school. It felt like the tutorial level was almost over, and he’d have to start real life very soon. First came the summer, where most of his planned recreation was a few weeks of flying lessons. Then a commercial flight out to Massachusetts, and whatever tiny dorm room awaited him there. It all meant he was going to be making a lot of decisions very quickly with very little room for error, to enter a career where that was more or less the job description.

For the most part, he hadn’t even really registered the D.C. Trip as happening in his mind until this evening. It had seemed like a genuinely good way to end the year, though he was never much the partying type. From what he’d heard, the so-called “#Swiftball” was a complete shit-show. People were probably only going to be marginally better on account of the chaperones and hotel staff, but that was a faint hope.

The Air and Space Museum was supposed to be really interesting, and he always found the old architecture of the Capital really inspiring. It would be nice to see them up close. To take some time to just walk around with no particular direction. Hang out with his friends, before they all went their separate ways.

Take some time to just breathe. Relax.

“I know I can be happy down here. I know I’ll find the right path if it doesn’t work out. I just want it to be me. I want to be the person we send into the unknown. I want to-“

Henry was interrupted by a wet, sandpapery tongue licking the side of his face. Morpheus was an incredibly affectionate cat, and seemed to know exactly the moment to shut him up.

“Hey - hey, stop that.”

He sat up and Morpheus rolled back onto the deck, giving Henry wide eyes as if to ask: What have you done?

It roused a smile on Henry’s face, and he gave the cat a scratch behind the ears before standing up and stretching his arms. The wind began to pick up, and he could see some clouds starting roll in, obscuring the stars. The cool night air was beginning to get a bit too cold for his liking. Morpheus seemed to feel similarly, and pawed at the glass door.

They re-entered the room, the text on the small television still prompting Henry as to whether or not he wanted to watch another Star Trek episode. Though tempting, sleep was a far more exciting proposition at this point. Switching off most of the lights in the room, Henry quickly readied himself for bed. It was comfortable here. With the windows open, the room was the perfect temperature. His body was tired.

Yet he sat upright, his eyes bolted open.

I don’t want to be awake. Why am I awake? This is ridiculous.

Henry was about to reach for his phone on the bedside, in the hope of reading until he passed out. Morpheus had curled up on the couch, his eyes now completely shut. Whenever Henry went to bed, Morph usually rested. Nevertheless, he left the door open a crack for the inevitable moment in the early morning when the cat would decide to run around.

Something clicked in his mind as he saw the small fuzzy creature relaxed on the couch. Curled up, about to dream about whatever it is cats dreamed of. Something about that image encouraged him to reach for the lamp on his bedside table instead of his phone, turning it off.

Thinking of little else other than what might await him in Washington D.C., Henry quickly fell into a sound and dream-filled sleep.