Arch/Eternal - Chapter Two

Stars and Snakes

This is Arch/Eternal, a sprawling novel-in-progress in the genre of philosophical sci-fi. Think Dune meets Harry Potter, and maybe channeling a little bit of Dan Simmons.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, here’s the Prologue.

And if you’d like to follow along with the world-building behind the story, take a look at the companion series shamelessly titled A Terran’s Guide to the Galaxy.

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Chapter Two: Stars and Snakes

I met Rita Freeman when I was eleven. I’ve thought about this a lot, and it seems clear to me now: the catalyst for that meeting was that for my birthday that year, Nali got me a new tent.

It was one of those tents where the upper section could be unzipped and removed. This way you could fall asleep under the stars without being bothered by the dangerous creatures that so reluctantly shared their territory with the smudge of humanity that had refused to leave for more than a thousand years. 

I was elated.

“This is big enough for both of us,” I said to Andre, my best and only friend.

“I figured you’re going out there no matter what I say,” explained Nali, “so at least you won’t get bit.”

In fact I’d already been bitten less than a year prior, and would have died but for the antivenin Nali never left home without. Since then, there had been a pitched battle over my frequent excursions, but she could tell it was a losing one. I loved the stars more than anything, and couldn’t be convinced of the danger of sleeping out in the desert. Part of that, I’m sure, was the still-vivid memory of what it felt like to know my mom would come back one night, which split me down the middle. On one side, I was embarrassed at the childish fantasy, but on the other side, there was a part of me that still believed God would speak to me through the stars, if I just looked long enough, and listened hard enough. 

In the meantime, I took up hobbyist astronomy. My modest portable telescope was a gift from the year before. I knew everything about the eight planets, and I knew more about the stellar lifecycle than any of my teachers. Which wasn’t saying much. Wind Valley wasn’t known for its academic offerings. In fact, Wind Valley wasn’t known for anything. In fact, Wind Valley wasn’t known at all, outside the handful of inhabitants that had managed to survive a deleterious existence that stretched much further back into history than the name of the place on modern maps, which had its origin in the era of the establishment of Native American reservations, and evidenced all the imagination of the government officials who had so designated it. 

“I think this is a valley.”

“Sure is windy.”

My eleventh birthday was a very small celebration. Me, Nali, and Andre. I was too young to know how lucky I was to have a friend like him. 

After eating some cake and goofing off for a few minutes as the ice cream turned into soup, I started putting some supplies together, and Andre called his parents to let them know he was staying the night. They didn’t know he would be camping with me in the wilderness, and Nali didn’t know they didn’t know, and as we all know, what people don’t know can’t hurt them.

The tent packed tightly enough to easily strap to my backpack. The rest of the contents included a couple of sandwiches, two big water bottles, a small telescope, a few other assorted snacks, two vials of fresh antivenin, a journal I always meant to use but rarely did, a compass that I never used, and a pocket knife with a jade hilt my mother had told me once belonged to my dad.

We used Andre’s pack for more water, a few more snacks, sunblock, and a couple of flashlights.

We walked for a good twenty or thirty minutes before we lost sight of home, but we didn’t look back to notice. We were too busy enjoying each others’ company, the way preteen boys do, unselfconscious and thrilled with the acceptance of a peer. 

I was typically scrawny for my age, but Andre was a shrimp. Short, skinny, and pale. The sunblock was mostly for him. Even though it was well past 6pm when we left, he would have burned for sure without a good slathering.

While I tended to be on the quieter side, Andre had a great, irreverent sense of humor that put me in stitches, and that adults never saw. Nali thought he was a reserved, polite kid, maybe a little dull. I had the privilege of knowing better.

“Hey what did the girl with no arms and no legs get for her birthday?”

“Cancer!” I shouted. I’d heard the joke before.

“What? No, you monster, she got arm and leg transplants. It changed her life. She could run around and play with her friends. It was amazing.”

“Wow,” I said. “Inspiring.”

“Well, yeah, it was.” He paused for effect. “Until her body rejected the transplants.”

“Oh so that’s why she fell off the swing!”

Andre snorted, then added, “Yeah, people always say she fell off because she didn’t have arms or legs—”

“But why would she have gotten on the swing in the first place,” I cut in. 

“Because she finally HAD them!” Andre shouted. “And they worked great!”

“Until they didn’t.”

“Until they went all numb and she fell off that damn swing.”

“And that’s when the transplants fell off, all infected and disgusting—”

“—and her parents were like OH GOD OH GOD—”

“—and she was like, it’s okay mom and dad, I—I shouldn’t have gotten on the swing.”

Andre was laughing so hard he was silent. When he could squeeze more words out, he said, “Like it was her fault.”

Snatching a breath, I added, “Like it serves her right for going and getting arm and leg transplants.”

“And that’s the moral of the story,” Andre said, more soberly. “Be grateful for what you have.”

“Or don’t have.”

“Exactly.”

By the time the sun had disappeared below the horizon, we’d found a good spot to set up camp, up on a little rise that would let us gaze at the bowl of the Universe overhead. I unpacked and set up the tent while Andre ate a sandwich and swatted at the occasional bug, real or imagined. 

It didn’t occur to me back then how big of a deal it was that Andre was willing to spend so much time exposed to the harsh edges of the desert for my sake. I loved every minute of it, so I assumed with the narcissism appropriate to my age that everyone else must love it too. Especially someone with whom I got along so well. 

But Andre was a house child. His natural habitat was the air-conditioned living room, filled with game consoles, chilled beverages, and strong wi-fi. His parents lived on a “ranch” outside of town. Basically, a very large house surrounded by expensive dessert landscaping. They loved the seclusion, and were oblivious to how much the natives hated them. Unfortunately, Andre didn’t share their ignorance, being himself the easiest target for locals’ resentment, via their offspring. In that way, too, he and I were alike. 

Nali and Thomas had moved across the country and parked their trailer here, eager to etch out an existence on the lands of their ancestors. Back then, they had been the new family in a town of some dozens, a knotted community as ancient as the baked dirt they walked on. In almost forty years, nothing changed. My grandparents made their living by cultivating antidotes for various venomous serpents, and had saved a dozen of their neighbors from snake bites. But the gratitude never matured into acceptance, so they stayed outcasts in their own town. 

Which meant Andre and I had no friends among the handful of kids our age who also belonged to Wind Valley. The fact that we had each other was an ecstatic stroke of luck. 

After I had the tent set up, there was enough room in it for us to lay on our backs, side by side, and not feel weird. The roof of the tend was open, so there was nothing between our faces and the rest of the Universe but a wisp of atmosphere. 

Of course, the view was best with no tent at all, but I did understand the trade-off — a slight limitation in exchange for not waking up with a curious black-tail coiled up on my chest in the morning. 

“Did you know it takes two hundred and fifty thousand years for the energy produced at the center of the sun to make it to the surface?”

“Tonight, on Star Facts…” Andre announced. Andre always made fun of me for geeking out.

“What’s crazy,” I continued, “is that seems like a really long time to us, because we only live for, like, seventy or eighty years, or whatever—”

“I choose one hundred, thank you.”

“—but the sun is more than four billion years old, and it’s going to live for at least another four or five billion years. Two hundred and fifty thousand goes into ten billion about 40 thousand times, so—”

“So, the Sun burns a little hydrogen—” Andre said.

“You’ve been paying attention!”

“—and then that energy takes a quarter million years to get outside the Sun—”

“And then about eight minutes to get to Earth,” I reminded him.

“Right. Better not forget about those eight minutes.”

“So, another way to think about it is that a person lives for about thirty thousand days, give or take, and that’s not too far off from forty thousand, so you could kind of think of it like it takes the Sun all day to burn hydrogen and then get it out to us. Like, one day for the Sun is two hundred and fifty thousand years for us.”

“Holy shit,” Andre said, unironically.

“Yeah.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“I know you don’t like swears.”

“I said it’s fine.”

“I don’t want to hurt your tender Mormon ears.”

“Stop it.”

“But, I mean, holy shit.”

After a brief bit of silence while we stared up into the night sky, I said, “Yeah.”

And then a little later, Andre said, “So humanity’s entire existence has basically been one day for the Sun.”

“And every hour for the Sun is like ten thousand years for us.”

“Wait….” Andre did the math. “Oh yeah, you’re right. So the Sun goes for a morning jog, and in the meantime, we’ve done pretty much like all the stuff we can even remember doing. Building pyramids and inventing planes and going to the moon.”

“But here’s the craziest thing—lots of stars are like ours, and live for billions of years, but lots of other stars only live for a few million years, which is, like, a thousand times shorter, and then there are some stars that only live for a few hundred thousand years, which is a thousand times shorter than that. So the longest living stars live for a MILLION times longer than the shortest living stars.”

“So, the stars that only live for a few hundred thousand years basically only live for a day.”

“Exactly! Isn’t that crazy?”

“Why do they die so fast?”

“It’s all about how fast they burn. The really really big ones, the ones that start off really really huge — there’s so much gravity that they burn through all their fuel super fast and then explode in a supernovae.”

“Jesus. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

“Can you tell? From here? Which ones are really big and die super fast and which ones are really old, like the Sun? I mean just by looking?”

“No, you need way bigger telescopes. But, look, do you see Orion?”

Constellations generally didn’t interest me, but anyone can spot Orion.

“Yeah,” said Andre.

“OK, so if you look at the brightest star on Orion’s leg—”

“OK.”

“That’s Rigel, and it’s a blue supergiant that’s less than ten million years old, and will probably die as a supernova in the next few million years.”

“Huh.”

“See that other bright star, in Orion’s shoulder? That’s Betelgeuse. It’s sort of the same age as Rigel, give or take a million years. It’s so big that if it replaced the Sun, it would totally engulf everything all the way out to Jupiter. It’s one of the biggest stars that we can see without a telescope. Also, it’s supposed to go supernova in less than a hundred thousand years.”

“Oh my god. So it’s got, like, less than a day to live.”

“Yeah, basically. But also it’s almost a thousand light years away, so whenever it does blow up, we won’t know about it for a thousand years.”

“Nuts.”

I smiled. It was a good birthday. It was going to be a good year.

“Tomorrow night, on Star Facts: Will Jackson River ever get laid?”

“Dude, I’m eleven. And so are you. Have you ever even talked to a girl?”

“That’s just a teaser, folks. Come back tomorrow for the full story.”

We both went quiet. It was hard to keep up a conversation staring up into the face of infinity.

After a while, after I thought he’d fallen asleep, Andre startled me by asking, “Do you think you’ll ever go out there?”

“I hope so,” I said. I wasn’t stupid. I knew the chances of becoming any kind of an astronaut were very small, and I was very poor. But I could dream.

“Me too,” Andre said.

“You want to be an astronaut?”

“God no. I mean I hope you can. You know, follow your dreams, or whatever.”

“Well then what about you? What do you wanna do?”

Andre was quiet for a while. “I don’t know. The world seems pretty wrecked. I want to find a way to fix some things. Like the environment. Or something. I don’t know. I just don’t want to be one of the shitheads making things worse.”

I thought for a little while. “Something Nali always says is, ‘per aspera ad astra.’ It’s Latin for, ‘through hardships to the stars.’”

“You’re the one who wants to be an astronaut.”

“It’s figurative.”

“I know that, dumbass.”

We went quiet again.

“Ad astra, Jack.”

“Ad astra.”

Eventually, I fell asleep, transcending, as usual, into wild and indescribable dreams. I dreamt of being totally alone, and totally whole, adrift in the expanse of nothing between the stars. I dreamt of fire and light and death roiling together in a great, ecstatic silence. I dreamt of my mother as the desert, the place I lived, my whole world. I dreamt of drowning in liquid sand, and of eating snakes.

I woke to the hungry growl of a pickup truck in the distance.

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Since this is a novel in progress, any and all feedback is earnestly welcome. My goal is to finish this book early next year. You can help me make it better.

Continue to Chapter Three…