On Friday evening Juniper electrified her family by announcing, in the interval between dinner and dessert, that she was going out on a date: not this weekend, which was booked, but next weekend, with somebody she knew from the teen chat echo.
“Who does he think he’s going out with?” said Gentian.
“Me,” said Juniper, coldly.
“Which one?”
“All,” said Juniper, slightly less coldly. “He guessed. That’s the only reason I’d even think about going out with him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Never you mind.”
“You’re going to have to tell me, at least,” said her mother.
“I know, but don’t tell them.”
Rosemary’s not a Giant Ant, thought Gentian, and giggled. Juniper glared at her.
“What about telling me?” said their father.
Juniper considered him. “Okay, but you can’t speechify.”
“I certainly can. I speechify very well indeed.”
Rosemary and Gentian laughed. Juniper said between her teeth, “You may not speechify.”
“I think it’s pretty likely, in fact,” said their mother.
“Why?” said their father. “Is he too old? Mad, bad, and dangerous to know?”
For some reason this question made Juniper, who had shown every sign of bursting into temper, smile demurely.
“I’ll try to rein in his propensity to lecture,” said their mother, “but I think he’ll have to be in on the secret.”
“I’m glad I’m the youngest,” said Rosemary.
“Why?” said their mother.
“Because if I ever go on a date they’ll be too old to care.”
After dinner Juniper went off to research a history paper at the library with Sarah, and Gentian asked for permission to use the computer in Juniper’s room.
“You should have asked before your sister left,” said her mother, who seemed to be in rather a sour mood. “If she’s got anything obviously private sitting out, don’t look at it, and don’t sit on the bed if she’s got a pattern laid out, all right?”
“It’s not fair the computer should be in her room.”
“It’s there because she has two rooms; there’s no space for it elsewhere.”
“It’s not fair she should have two rooms.”
“Rosemary likes to be snug and you need to be high enough for your telescope.”
Gentian considered pointing out that when the present room allotment had been made, she had been five years old and had not had a telescope, but she decided not to press the issue.
Juniper’s diary was where it always was, not left sitting out. Her bed was covered with rejected clothing; most of it was clean, and she had just put it on, exclaimed in horror, and taken it off again. She was not usually quite so picky about what she wore to go to the library with Sarah, so she must be hoping to encounter some boy or other there. Maybe Denny; maybe the person from the chat echo. She wondered if Juniper had found out what he looked like before agreeing to meet him. She wondered if she herself would do the same.
Gentian held Juniper’s diary in her hand for a moment and then stuffed it unopened back into the chair cover. She could look at it later if what she wanted to know was not in the messages on the chat group. She would rather, if it were possible, deduce the identity of Juniper’s date from available evidence. She removed a stack of old newspapers from the chair and sat down cautiously at the computer. As a scientist she should be comfortable with such devices, should view them as extensions of herself, tendrils of her own mind reaching out to the universe. That was how she felt about the telescope.
But the computers at school were too battered and cranky, and this one, while intended for all the children of the family, was too much Juniper’s. Gentian, fingers poised above the keys, thought about trying to use her father’s computer instead. Somehow she felt that Juniper would know if her sister read her chat groups from her own machine. This was irrational. Besides, her father was in his office, using his computer and listening to Laurie Anderson sing about angels.
Gentian sighed and logged on. She called the BBS so seldom that every time she came back her account had expired. For this occasion she called herself Laurie March and used “Scrabble” as her password.
Within five messages she remembered why she didn’t do this more often. Nobody could spell, punctuate, or write a sentence longer than five words unless they did it by leaving out the period and sailing gaily on to the next five-word sentence.
And they flirted, with an ineptitude so profound that Gentian, who found the whole process despicable and tried to know nothing about it, could not help recognizing it. At least when Steph or Alma flirted, you might initially think they were just having a conversation with somebody who happened to be male, until you thought twice, or Becky pointed out that Steph had a special voice for flirting and Alma always put her hand on the arm of the object of her affections. Gentian was sorely tempted to send several pairs of these flirters private mail with advice in it, especially the ones who said they wanted “intelligent females” and demonstrated the intelligence of a large rock.
She quit reading and looked at the list of messages to see what threads Juniper was involved in. Juniper had three presences: herself, Juniper Meriweather; an older girl called Crystal Gold whom Gentian found even more insufferable than Juniper herself; and the fifteen-year-old boy she had made up for her school project, who was called Jason Breedlove, pronounced, as Jason reminded everybody repeatedly, more like “breadloaf.”
Gentian could tell at once which subject headers Juniper had written herself. Wanted: Jane Fairfax. Television tuned to a dead channel. Are You Just Drawn That Way? Keep those cards and letters. Anything Except Star Trek. Ride in Triumph Through Persepolis. And, exasperatedly, You Keep Using That Word. When she wasn’t talking to her family, Juniper could be interesting.
She was also involved, sometimes extensively, in threads named Fear Rules, Beam me up Snotty, Is their anybody there, and Hot Dud sees you.
Gentian knew Juniper’s own on-line personality, of course, of old, and was also wearily familiar with Crystal, who made occasional appearances when Juniper was vying with Rosemary for the bathroom they were supposed to share. But Gentian had not logged on since Jason made his appearance.
Her first conclusion was that with the addition of Jason to the cast, Juniper no longer needed to talk to anybody except herself. Her second was that Jason sounded much more like the Juniper her sisters knew than did either of the other two. Her third, as she leaned back fascinated from a long furious exchange of messages in which Crystal berated Jason for being a sexist, Jason defended himself coolly, and several other girls came eagerly to Jason’s defense, was that Jason was Juniper with the unreasonableness left out, but he was still a jerk. How odd of Juniper to think boys were more reasonable than girls.
Jason’s opinions were idiotic, of course; Juniper had apparently just inverted the sensible half of her own dearly held maxims to create his philosophy, if you could call it that. But he wasn’t impetuous, fanatical, insistent, involved—you could almost say he wasn’t interested in his own opinions, except that somebody who wasn’t would not in fact argue them, even so coolly.
Paging idly through a discussion of several Disney movies, some bands she had never heard of and never planned to, and a couple of British television shows she had similar intentions about, Gentian found the word she was looking for. “There’s no need to be shrill,” Jason said to a massed opposition composed of Crystal, Juniper, Hot Dud—who just might be what her father referred to as a conscious comedian, rather than an illiterate silly-boy—and the only other participant with a female name who agreed with them that Jason was being a sexist. That was what Jason wasn’t, all right. Shrill. And by not being shrill, he had put the rest of them into a position where they could hardly be anything else.
Gentian leaned back in the chair, regarding Juniper’s calendar, which was still on its June page, a photograph of the bluebells in Kew Gardens.
“Wow,” she said.
Did Juniper know what she was doing, or was she just stumbling around? And would anybody else in this odd group, this improbable medium, catch on, or would they either nod sagely or throw metaphorical rocks, depending on whether they agreed with Jason or not? She was tempted to post a message of her own, just to make things clearer. Good grief, if she had met Juniper this way and were not by experience with Juniper or someone like her so put off by histrionics, she might even like Juniper. She would certainly like her better than Jason.
But why? she thought, drumming her thumb on the wrist-rest. He acts scientific, doesn’t he? He’s detached? No. Or well, yes, he acts scientific but he isn’t in fact scientific; he has the attitude but not the essence. He gives detachment a bad name.
She bit off one corner of her thumbnail, and sighed. Steph would notice that on Monday and give her a lecture. Maybe it would be entertaining to tell her that one of Gentian’s criteria for a boyfriend was that he like bitten nails. That might shut her up. Which was more than you could say for Jason: Gentian couldn’t think of anything that might shut him up. I wonder if anybody could really get that way, she thought, having those awful opinions and yet not being involved with them, not taking things personally; I wonder if that makes sense. Nobody else has noticed that it might not, but they’re only kids.
She looked at her watch. There was plenty of time yet. The echo she had looked at first was theoretically for the discussion and, she supposed, promulgation of teen romance. There was another one for “teen culture,” or something like that. She selected it from the menu and looked at the list of messages.
Juniper was posting there under her own name, as was somebody called Peter Pan, who was Juniper’s early try at a male alias. People seemed to be able to spell their subject headers better in this group. Gentian took a look at it. Junie was, of course, in the middle of an argument.
Her chief opponent appeared to be somebody whose handle was The Light Prince. They had a prolonged fight going about George MacDonald, especially the Curdie books. Since Gentian had found At the Back of the North Wind so cloying that she refused even to look at anything else its author had written, she could not make much of the discussion. Juniper got considerably more heated than The Light Prince did.
About ten messages along, Juniper’s alias had joined in. Gentian thought that if calling herself Peter Pan and pretending to be a twelve-year-old boy had so little effect on Junie’s basic personality, she might as well not bother. Surely anybody could tell they were the same person? When they used not only the same arguments but the same kinds of sentences?
It was true that Juniper could spell and Peter Pan couldn’t. Gentian had to admire her sister. Peter Pan had trouble with double consonants—he never knew where they belonged and where they didn’t. He had a bit of trouble with double vowels, too. But was that really enough to throw people off the track?
Apparently it was. Not only that, but Peter’s misspelled arguments got more credit than Junie’s correct ones. Peter Pan had written, “It’s dumb to sugest that taking the fantasy ellements out of At the Back of the North Wind would make it beter. You wouldn’t have a storry at all if you did that. You’d have a borring morral treetise.”
Juniper had written, as herself, “It’s foolish to suggest taking the fantastical elements out of a fantasy. It’s like saying Romeo and Juliet would be better without the romance or Hamlet without the ghost. You wouldn’t have any story at all—just a sermon.”
To Juniper, The Light Prince had written, “But surely the definition of a fantasy is that you can’t take the fantastical elements out without the story’s falling apart. But AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND would still have the same story if it were not a fantasy.”
That was bad enough, but somebody else called Mutant Boy had agreed cordially, if semi-literately, with Peter and then spent three incoherent, unparagraphed, unpunctuated screens yelling at Juniper for being an intellectual snob and a show-off because she had mentioned Shakespeare.
No wonder Junie was so bad-tempered, thought Gentian, her fingers twitching over the keyboard. Of course, Junie had been bad-tempered long before there was a computer in the house. But still, this was enough to make anybody wild.
“Besides,” she said aloud to Mutant Boy’s tagline, “if you were so all-fired anti-intellectual and modern, you moron, you wouldn’t be reading George MacDonald in the first place. You wouldn’t be reading anything. Little creep.”
She read on, past several incoherent messages, and one ill-spelled but possibly insightful discussion of Curdie’s godmother and the ways in which she differed from similar figures in folk tales, until she arrived at an argument between Peter Pan and Juniper.
Juniper had written, “Has anybody read Patrice Kindi’s Owl in Love? I think it’s brilliant.” Mutant Boy had merely inquired nastily if Juniper ever went to the movies or watched television. Gentian, knowing her sister’s addiction to no fewer than four television shows despite her parents’ rules about how much television could be watched in a given week, was momentarily puzzled until she saw a follow-up message from Peter Pan, recommending the shows Juniper already watched as “stuff even an intellectual like you might like.”
Gentian thought this highly uncharacteristic of Peter Pan, who was at least as intellectual as Juniper even if he used somewhat shorter words and couldn’t spell all of them. But the conference as a whole seemed to applaud this remark. The Light Prince was one of the few who did not. He—if it was he, thought Gentian; what else, after all, was Juniper trying to point out? — began a lengthy discussion of what exactly constituted being an intellectual, and concluded that Juniper was not one.
Gentian was delighted and wanted to see how Juniper had taken this insult to the core of her identity, but she had reached the end of the messages. Juniper had not yet responded. It would be a beauty when she did.
She still had half an hour before Becky’s arrival, and everything had been ready for hours. She tapped her fingers on the edge of the keyboard. She was still sorely tempted to swat Mutant Boy, and she also wanted to take up the definition of “intellectual” with The Light Prince. That would take most of her half hour. She backed herself out of the layers of menu, provided herself with an alias, and came back in as Betony. At least the jokes would be different, assuming anybody even realized it was a plant or bothered to look it up.
It was only after she had saved the messages and logged off that she realized who would recognize her middle name.
“Genny,” said Rosemary, putting her head around the door, “Becky’s here. What are you doing on the computer?”
“Looking at the U’s library catalog,” said Gentian. She got up. Well, Juniper would just have to lump it. It wasn’t her own personal discussion area.
As she shut the door of Juniper’s room behind her, it occurred to her that she had never looked in Juniper’s diary to find out who it was from the chat echo that she was going out with. It couldn’t be anybody whose messages she had seen. It must be someone who lurked and then sent Juniper private mail.
Becky was wearing a long emerald-green wrap skirt with a long royal-blue tunic belted over it by means of a bright red scarf in a pattern of yellow and purple flowers. She had on red sneakers, but they were a different red. She was carrying a small overnight case and a huge shopping bag overflowing with books, notebooks, compact disks, and tapes. Gentian’s mother said neither of them ever ventured into the other’s house without enough supplies for a month-long stay. In fact, for such a stay, either of them would almost immediately have run out of underwear, but never come close to running out of entertainment.
“What in the world were you doing on the computer?” she demanded, toiling up the attic stairs after Gentian.
“Well, in default of the telescope—”
“Uh-huh.” Becky dropped her bag of books heavily into the basket chair and shut Gentian’s door behind them.
“I was checking up on Junie’s project, and I got so mad at somebody I decided to leave a message. He said Junie wasn’t an intellectual.”
“I suppose the Pope’s not Catholic, either,” said Becky, bending to greet Maria Mitchell, who had materialized from the direction of the closet.
“When I have time to print the message I’ll show it to you.”
“What’s that other person’s definition of an intellectual?”
“He kept talking about Wittgenstein. He thinks an intellectual is exactly the same as a philosopher, only untrained.”
“Wittgenstein?”
“No, this kid. The Light Prince,” said Gentian, curling her lip and watching Becky roll her eyes briefly ceilingward. “I mean,” said Gentian, “Wittgenstein might think that too; I don’t know. But The Light Prince definitely thinks that.”
“Even so,” said Becky, sitting down on the bed, “why doesn’t Junie qualify?”
“Because she watches television and prefers fiction to nonfiction.”
“I should think it wouldn’t depend on what she did, it would depend on—on the spirit in which she did it.”
“Well, that makes sense. But The Light Prince says that Wittgenstein only dined in the Great Hall at Cambridge once, because he found the conversation dull, so therefore Junie’s not an intellectual.” Gentian shrugged. “You know, not one person said anything about how silly it is to compare the Great Hall at Cambridge with watching television.”
“Cambridge?” said Becky. “When?”
“I don’t know. I never heard of him before.”
Becky got up and made for her bag of books, whence she extracted the battered biographical dictionary. “C. S. Lewis was at Cambridge,” she said, paging through rapidly. “I think it would be hilarious if he missed out on talking to Lewis. No, wait, he died in 1951 and I don’t think Lewis went to Cambridge till later.” She paged through again. “No, he didn’t—not until 1954. Oh, well. Maybe there really wasn’t anybody decent to talk to.” “Maybe they didn’t want to have philosophical discussions at dinnertime,” said Gentian. “I wouldn’t.”
“Just goes to show you’re not an intellectual,” said Becky. Gentian threw a pillow at her. Becky put the dictionary away and came back and sat on the bed again. Maria Mitchell went over and sniffed at the pillow, delicately, with the tips of her whiskers, as if it might suddenly fly off again.
“Gen,” said Becky, “do you think this person might be defending Junie?”
“What?”
“Well, you said she was accused of being an intellectual, as if those morons in the chat group thought it was an insult. So if he’s giving reasons why she isn’t one, he’s defending her.”
“Huh,” said Gentian.
“If it is a he,” added Becky.
“Whether it is or not,” said Gentian, “it won’t do whoever any good with Junie. Junie thinks she’s an intellectual and the rest of them are just that, morons, and she’s not going to agree with him. Besides, they won’t like her no matter what anybody says, because they are morons.”
“You don’t like her either,” said Becky.
“She doesn’t treat them the way she treats her family,” said Gentian. “At least, part of her doesn’t. If I didn’t know who she was I’d like her a lot. But they think all her good traits are bad ones.”
“Maybe they’re nicer in person,” said Becky, “the way Junie is nastier.”
“I wouldn’t hold my breath,” said Gentian.
“I shouldn’t have used the word ‘moron, ’” said Becky. “People can’t help being stupid, they can only help being stupider than they need to be.”
“These people are much stupider than anybody needs to be.”
“Well,” said Becky, stretching, “feed me something, and then let’s have a look at this telescope.”
They sat on the bed and ate sandwiches—the table setting was for the midnight feast, not incidental snacking—and then Becky went up the cherry steps and stood leaning on the carved railing of the platform, looking speculative.
“I know you’re a scientist,” she said, “but really, on reflection, I’d say it was bewitched.” She looked thoughtful, as she did when replaying something she had just said, and grinned. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to make a pun.”
“What does bewitched mean?”
“Well, lots of things, depending on your belief system.”
“My belief system is rational.”
“Yes, I know,” said Becky, as if Gentian had said, “I have allergies.” She sat down on Gentian’s stool. “Is the dome open? Okay.” She adjusted the stool to her height and fitted her face to the eyepiece. “All right,” she said after a moment. “Maybe we can be rational about this. We’ll call it the observer effect. Come and tell me what you see when you look into it.”
“It’s a telescope, not a crystal ball,” said Gentian, irritably; but she did as she was told. Becky stood behind her, exuding a slight smell of sandalwood. She must have been borrowing her mother’s soap again.
The rain-drenched evening sky rewarded her gaze. “Great,” said Gentian. “I can see the sky, and it’s cloudy.”
“It was perfectly clear earlier,” said Becky.
Gentian turned the stool around. Becky was looking at her watch. Gentian handed her the pad and pen she kept by the telescope, and Becky wrote down the time.
“All right,” she said. “I’m going to leave the room, and you look again.”
She did, and Gentian did. “Sky,” said Gentian.
Becky put her head around the door. I’ll go right down into the basement, all right?” she said.
“Sure,” said Gentian over her shoulder. “Should I come get you?”
“No, just keep looking through the telescope.”
Gentian did so, listening to Becky’s sneakers thud down the stairs, and the snick of the door shutting at the entrance to the second floor, and the drip of the rain, and Maria Mitchell washing herself, and the small occasional tick of the bedside lamp heating up and expanding its metal shade. The sky was a uniform flat gray, dyed slightly rosy by city light. Her back began to hurt, because the stool and telescope were adjusted for Becky, who was shorter.
The stairway door opened and Becky came up the stairs and into the room and shut the bedroom door behind her.
“Well?”
“Sky.”
“Huh. All right, we’ll try it again when I go home tomorrow. I wish we had walkie-talkies or something.”
“Alma’s brothers had some, if they haven’t broken them already.”
Becky sat down on the bed, pried off each sneaker with the other foot, not bothering to untie them, and tucked her feet up. Her socks were the same red as her sneakers.
“Your socks match your shoes,” said Gentian.
“Yeah, well, Jeremy gave them to me when I had the green shoes, and he gets fractious if I don’t wear them sometimes.”
“Well, if it’s Jeremy.”
Becky’s little brother was everything Gentian’s sisters were not. “I had the weirdest conversation with Rosie,” said Gentian, reminded.
Becky looked receptive. Gentian hauled out the corn chips. “I can’t tell you details, I promised. But it was weird. She might turn into somebody.”
“What else happened this week?”
Gentian thought. The earlier part of the week seemed infinitely far away. “You go first,” she said. “My brain’s not very collected.”
“Telescope withdrawal,” said Becky. She ate a corn chip. “Well, I wrote four sonnets, but I don’t think they’re much good. You can see them later. Steph made me go for a walk and listen to her quarterly lecture about the way I dress.”
“She’s early,” said Gentian.
“It’s because she’s worried about you. She thinks I’m a bad example.”
“Yeah, right,” said Gentian. Steph’s preoccupation with wearing just exactly the right cool clothes and Becky’s with never wearing matching colors seemed, on one level, exactly the same kind of thing to her; she could not imagine taking so much trouble over one’s appearance. She liked Becky’s trouble better because it was revolutionary, but it was still trouble.
She did wonder what Dominic liked girls to wear, but because it seemed likely to involve something black and slinky, she wasn’t going to waste a lot of time fretting over it. She looked thoughtfully at Becky. “What exactly is she worried about? That the Cool People will laugh at me? That I’ll never have a boyfriend?”
“Both.”
“Well, I’d feel I was doing something wrong if the Cool People didn’t laugh at me, and you can’t captivate anybody if you feel like an idiot, which I would if I dressed the way Steph thinks I should.”
“Steph knows that,” said Becky, “but she doesn’t understand it.”
“She keeps thinking that I’ll hit some magical age when I agree with everything she wants,” said Gentian. She added thoughtfully, “She’s just like most people’s mothers.”
“Mine, certainly,” said Becky, and ate another corn chip with a gloomy gesture.
Gentian crammed her own mouth with a stray quarter-sandwich. She could hardly imagine a better daughter than Becky, and Becky’s mother’s obvious dissatisfaction in the matter made Gentian want to spit. She swallowed and said, “And what’s so tragic about not having a boyfriend, anyway?”
“Don’t preach to the choir,” said Becky.
“Are you going to a movie with Micky?”
“Even if I am, it’s not to avoid the tragedy of my single life.” She ate another corn chip. “What’s single about it, anyway? I’ve got difficult parents and a really great brother and the Giant Ants and three pen-pals and Tesseract. And the whole inside of my head. I’m about as single as an acorn on a hundred-year-old oak.”
“But more singular,” said Gentian.
“Yes,” said Becky. “There’s always that.”
“How can Steph be so smart and so conventional?”
“Protective coloration,” said Becky. “To protect her from her family.”
“Morons.”
“No, let’s save that for Junie’s chat buddies. Boneheads, that’s what I think Steph’s family is.” She paused. “Are. They are bone-heads. Steph’s family is boneheaded. Steph’s family is composed of boneheads.”
Gentian laughed. But while an evening with Becky would never be complete without an excursion into language, dividing stupidity into finer and finer shades was depressing. She cast about for another topic of conversation. What had she been doing, anyway? Not astronomy: not only had she been unable to use the telescope, she had not done her reading, her research. All that homework, Julius Caesar, all full of astrology instead. The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Becky’s study group wasn’t reading Julius Caesar. They had gotten Romeo and Juliet. Gentian wouldn’t have liked that any better, but some of her group would. The rest of the kids who would have liked Romeo and Juliet were stuck with A Comedy of Errors. Gentian suspected malice aforethought on the part of their teacher, who was far too astute for comfort.
“Speaking of boneheads, how’s Romeo and Juliet?” she said.
Becky smiled. “I got Mercutio.”
“Your hooouuusssess,” carolled Gentian, imitating an unfortunate senior production of the play that they had been made to see when they were in sixth grade.
“Micky remembers that, too,” said Becky. “But I beat him to the part.”
“Are you doing it that way?”
“No, certainly not. I was afraid he would, though.”
“How are you doing it?”
“Like Erin,” said Becky.
Gentian was momentarily nonplussed; then she understood. “The onlooker,” she said.
“Who sees most of the game,” said Becky.
“For all the good it did him,” said Gentian.
“That’s because he was careless in dangerous times,” said Becky. Her round face looked austere, not a usual expression.
Gentian considered this remark. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “He was just being a little—a little fantastical, just having fun. And covering up how bad he felt by being silly. Just like lots of people.”
“Yes, but it’s not safe,” said Becky. “Not if you’re in Shakespeare, anyway.”
“Well, sometimes it is. It depends on the play, doesn’t it?”
“No, it’s never safe. Sometimes it turns out all right, but it’s never safe.”
Becky had taken a course in Shakespeare’s comedies last summer, at the university, which had been having a program for junior-high students—presumably, Gentian’s father said, because they were alarmed by the quality of the freshmen they were admitting and wanted to get at the local population before the high schools ruined it. Gentian had thought of taking the course too, but she had never found Shakespeare’s comedies very funny, and summer was the prime stargazing season. She was therefore ill-equipped for argument.
“What if you’re not in Shakespeare?” she said.
“Well, then it would depend, wouldn’t it?”
“On what, then?”
“On how dangerous the times were,” said Becky, patiently. “I’m not sure people can tell. I think they get used to whatever’s going on.”
“Well, maybe up to a point. But being used to it means taking a lot of precautions, it doesn’t mean taking a lot of unnecessary risks.”
“Maybe it depends on your temperament.”
“Mercutio’s got that, sure enough.”
“Is that why he’s named that?”
“Oh,” said Becky, looking delighted. “I never thought. I’ll ask in class next week, shall I?”
“Sure. Nobody makes fun of his name, though, the way they do of Tibault’s.”
“The way he does of Tibault’s,” said Becky.
“Why do I always like the play better when I talk to you than I do when I see it?”
“I have no idea. I can’t believe you hated the Zeffirelli.”
“It was gooey.”
“What romantic stuff do you like, for pity’s sake?”
Gentian looked at her carefully. That was a Stephian question, but Becky seemed quite earnest. “It probably hasn’t been invented yet,” said Gentian.
Becky, to her relief, laughed. Then she said, “Weren’t any great woman astronomers romantic?”
“There’s such a lot to choose from,” said Gentian, dryly. “Caroline Herschel wasn’t either.”
“Poets have a wider range of role models,” said Becky.
So you did pay attention to those biographies, thought Gentian. She said, “I think you should emulate Emily Dickinson and put your stuff in the teapot for posterity.”
Becky lunged at her, laughing, and upset the bag of corn chips onto the floor. Gentian defended herself with her Hmong pillow for some seconds, but was eventually pinned by Becky, who was twenty pounds heavier than she, and tickled until she cried, “I give, I give! She did not put her poems in the teapot, that’s a vile patriarchal lie,” which made Becky laugh so much that Gentian was able to squirm away from her and thump her on the head with the pillow.
“We’d better stop,” said Becky, “Maria Mitchell is eating all the corn chips.”
“Leave her the broken bits. Let’s pick the rest up and have some reading.”
Becky stepped over the crunching Maria Mitchell and rummaged in her bag of books. Gentian, shaking cat hair from the corn chips and laying them on a convenient issue of Sky and Telescope, in case Becky should be having a fastidious day, hoped it would be either Becky’s own poetry or prose.
“I found this just for you,” said Becky, sitting down on the bed again, in her hands a book whose edges bristled with scraps of paper marking everything in it she had found worthy of mention. She opened it to the only purple scrap, and read aloud.
“His heatless room the watcher of the skies
Nightly inhabits when the night is clear;
Propping his mattress on the turning sphere,
Saturn his rings or Jupiter his bars
He follows, or the fleeing moons of Mars,
Til from his ticking lens they disappear....
Whereat he sighs, and yawns, and on his ear
The busy chirp of Earth remotely jars.
Peace at the void’s heart through the wordless night,
A lamb cropping the awful grasses, grazed;
Earthward the trouble lies, where strikes his light
At dawn industrious Man, and unamazed
Goes forth to plow, flinging a ribald stone
At all endeavour alien to his own.”
“Who’s that?”
“Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
“Really! I thought she only did gushy stuff.”
Becky sighed.
“The last one you read me was all full of roses.”
“That doesn’t mean it was gushy.”
“All right, all right, it wasn’t gushy the way you mean it. But it was romantic.”
“Undeniably.”
“I like this one a lot. I like ‘earthward the trouble lies. ’ Can I have a copy?”
She could tell that Becky saw right through this transparent attempt to placate her; but since Gentian really did want a copy of the poem and Becky really was pleased, she was in fact placated. Gentian said, before the argument should start again, “What else have you got?”
“That sonnet,” said Becky, “is from a whole set of them called ‘Epitaph for the Race of Man. ’ They’re mostly pretty grim.”
“Are you going to read me all of them?”
“No. I just thought you should know.”
“All right, now I do.”
“Now, you read me something.”
“I’ll read you a little bit,” said Gentian, “but then I’ll show you something.”
“Without the telescope?”
“Yes; for heaven’s sake.” She pulled her history of the telescope out of the nightstand drawer. It fell open to the passage she wanted.
“My brother began his series of sweeps [Caroline wrote] when the instrument was yet in a very unfinished state, and my feelings were not very comfortable when every moment I was alarmed by a crack or fall, knowing him to be elevated fifteen feet or more on a temporary crossbeam instead of a safe gallery. The ladders had not even their braces at the bottom; and one night, in a very high wind, he had hardly touched the ground before the whole apparatus came down.”
“That’s Caroline Herschel?”
“Yes. And so is this.” She turned back a few pages and held the book out; they leaned their heads together over it. The drawing of Caroline Herschel, in black and white, showed a woman leaning on a pillow, regarding the viewer with a steady and not very encouraging gaze. She wore a sort of knitted cap with white fringe; a ruff under her chin like those you could see in illustrations of Elizabethan dress; a shiny-looking dark dress that was probably satin but reminded Gentian, partly because of its lines of stitching, of an aviator’s leather jacket; and a pair of spectacles around her neck on a strap. She had big eyes, a long nose, and a straight mouth. Gentian had never been able to decide if she was thinking of the eight comets she had discovered or of how her back hurt her.
“Wow,” said Becky. “Now that’s a face.”
“But listen to this,” said Gentian. She read the caption aloud. “Of this drawing, which shows Caroline Herschel in 1847 at the age of ninety-seven, her friend Miss Beckedorff wrote that it does not ‘do justice to her intelligent countenance; the features are too strong, not feminine enough, and the expression too fierce. ’”
Becky snorted.
“Daddy says Caroline Herschel’s in one of those historical novels he reads.”
“Are you going to read it?”
“No; he says she doesn’t actually show up, she’s just mentioned as helping the hero with making his telescope, and the hero’s wife is jealous of her, even though she’s sixty at the time.”
Becky snorted again, more lengthily.
“No, it was cool,” said Gentian. She considered. “Well, Dad thought it was cool. Because the writer knew that she was a real astronomer and really interested in making telescopes, not just her brother’s housekeeper.”
“No, I meant about being sixty.”
“Caroline Herschel was sixty, not the hero’s wife.”
“Whichever.”
“Well, all right,” said Gentian. “The reason she didn’t need to be jealous was that Caroline Herschel was just interested in the telescopes, not in the hero.”
“That’s the most reasonable thing to be jealous about,” said Becky.
“Telescopes?” said Gentian, who very rarely got to tease Becky about saying something ambiguous.
Becky rolled her eyes, shook a corn chip carefully, and ate it.
“What, though?”
“Shared obsessions. Like telescopes. I think telescopes are interesting and I like astronomy, but I don’t feel about it the way you do.”
“No, you feel that way about poetry.”
“Right. But I might feel a little strange if you met somebody who was just as interested in astronomy as you are.” Becky tapped another corn chip on the magazine and ate it whole.
Gentian sat still. “But I don’t want to,” she said at last.
“I wondered why you never joined the Astronomy Club at school,” said Becky. “Or read the astronomy groups on Fidonet or the Internet. Or anything.”
“It’s private,” said Gentian. “I don’t want to talk to anybody else about it. Except you.”
“Well, it’s going to be a little difficult to study it that way, you know.”
“But don’t you feel that way about poetry?” Gentian remembered, suddenly, finding out that Micky had written for Tesseract and her alarm that Becky might take up with another poet.
Becky shook her head. “I don’t show it to people I think won’t get it, but I’d love to find more people who do get it. I like the Tesseract crew, even if some of them are clueless. They understand what it’s like to have written a poem.”
Gentian took a corn chip and put it into her mouth, not because she wanted it but to give herself an excuse for not saying anything. Having chewed, she said slowly, “But you don’t all write the same kind of poetry, and you don’t write it for the same reasons. Does anybody write it for the same reasons you do?”
“No, nobody I’ve met.”
“Well, I don’t think anybody else does astronomy for the reason I do it, and I don’t want to talk to other astronomers, because they’ll ask. Do the people in Tesseract ask you why you write poems?”
“No,” said Becky, and grinned. “They assume that I write poems for the same reasons that they write poems, and I just keep quiet.”
Gentian immediately felt better. “I don’t want to have to worry about it,” she said.
“I don’t worry; it amuses me. But I can see that you would.”
“So,” said Gentian, “you don’t have to worry that I’ll meet somebody who cares as much about astronomy as I do, because I’d run in the opposite direction, fast. But if you met somebody who wrote poetry for the same reason you do, then what?”
“Well,” said Becky, wrinkling her brow. “It’s not the same thing. I’d like to find somebody like that, but we wouldn’t be writing poetry together like you might be doing astronomy with somebody else.” She considered for a moment. “Unless we collaborated on an epic poem.”
“You don’t write epic poetry.”
“I know, that’s why it’d have to be a collaboration.”
Gentian shook a corn chip briefly and ate it slowly. She could tell that Becky was still thinking, and in time Becky said, “Do you remember when Steph was so taken with Mary Beth Jenkins?”
Gentian did. “Fourth grade.” Mary Beth Jenkins, who had moved to Arizona the summer after sixth grade, had been a lot like Steph: extremely pretty, almost aggressively ordinary in her interests and her clothes, a straight-A student and a good soccer player, much given to pronouncements about what was ladylike.
“Well,” said Becky, “we weathered that.”
Gentian regarded her dubiously. She could not see that Steph’s delight in discussing feminine frippery with a regimented-games type was comparable to Becky’s delight if she ever found a fellow poet or Gentian’s if she ever found a fellow astronomer whom she cared to talk to, but Becky’s tone had had a certain finality in it that Gentian did not feel up to contesting.
She contented herself with saying, “Well, yes—we did weather that.”
“What are you reading this week?” said Becky.
Gentian thought. It was hard to recall this week at all. “Homework, mostly, I guess,” she said. “Oh, and Bulfinch’s Mythology.”
“How is it?”
“Mmmm, I’m not sure. The introduction was awfully funny.”
“Funny?”
“It starts out, ‘The religions of ancient Greece and Rome are extinct. ’”
“Well, he didn’t know there’d be neo-Pagans.”
“He also says that the Greeks and Romans didn’t have the information we have ‘from the pages of Scripture. ’”
Becky gurgled. “Well, I’m sure he thought of it that way.”
“‘Information, ’” said Gentian. “As if it were a scientific text.”
“You don’t laugh at Jane Austen for thinking Sunday traveling a very serious problem.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember if it’s Emma or Mansfield Park. Frank Churchill or Henry Crawford. I think it must be Mansfield Park. It feels like Fanny.”
“Yes, I remember now. It’s Fanny worrying about Henry Crawford.”
“You don’t laugh at that, do you?”
“But that’s Fanny thinking just what Fanny would think,” said Gentian.
“Well, isn’t the introduction to Bulfinch’s Mythology Bulfinch thinking just what Bulfinch would think?”
Becky was prone to these disconcerting dissections. Gentian, struggling with a profound feeling that the difference was perfectly obvious and Becky just refused to see it, was suddenly reminded of her conversation in the porch swing with Rosemary. She said, “Yes, I guess, but—Fanny’s just worrying. Bulfinch is laying down the law.”
“Would Jane Austen have read Bulfinch?”
“I don’t know,” said Gentian, who had difficulty attaching dates even to the history of astronomy; she knew the order in which things had happened, but could never relate any of the things to any other event, at least not reliably. She knew Maria Mitchell had helped with navigational mathematics for sailing ships, of course, but not when sailing ships had gone out. Jane Austen had no astronomical information at all to anchor her in time.
Becky went for the biographical dictionary again. “Nope,” she said. “She died in 1817 and Age of Fable wasn’t published until 1855.”
“Why did you want to know?”
“I just wondered what she’d have had to say about his tone of voice, that’s all.”
“Something snarky,” said Gentian.
“Well, probably.”
“Even if she was religious.”
“So what else about Bulfinch?”
“He quotes a lot,” said Gentian. “Like Dominic.”
“Who?”
Oh, good grief, thought Gentian. She had forgotten about meeting Dominic. No, it wasn’t that at all; she had absorbed his existence somehow, so that she assumed everybody knew about him. Or, maybe, she didn’t want anybody to know about him. But it was unconscionable to keep things like this from Becky.
“Dominic’s the boy next door,” she said. “He came over to return the snake his mother borrowed—” Becky laughed, and Gentian acknowledged it by casting her eyes at the ceiling, “—and I tried to make fudge but I burned it, and he quoted the whole time.”
“You tried to make fudge?”
“Junie wasn’t home.”
“You wouldn’t even make fudge for Steph’s birthday.”
“Well, I didn’t make it for him, either. I burned it and Junie had to make another batch, and then he left without eating any.”
“Was Junie much enamored?”
“Probably; she always is. But listen, so was Rosie.”
“Rosie came out?”
“Just so.”
“What did he quote?”
“Heinlein. Shakespeare. That dumb poem about Euclid. Keats—our sonnet. A lot of things I didn’t recognize but I could tell they were quotations because they didn’t make normal sense otherwise.”
“Did you like him?”
“I don’t know,” said Gentian, slowly. “He was interesting.”
“So’s a rattlesnake,” said Becky.
“I don’t think he’s a rattlesnake, but he might be kind of clueless.”
“Better leave him to Junie.”
“He might not be enamored even if she is.”
“Did he seem to be?”
“I couldn’t tell. He just quoted.”
“Is that the big news of the week, then?”
“I guess it is,” said Gentian. She added, with no idea of whether she was telling the truth or not, “The problem with the telescope kind of pushed it out of my head.”
“You aren’t yourself when you can’t do astronomy,” said Becky, nodding. She sat forward suddenly. “Wait—didn’t you use to do stargazing with binoculars?”
“Sure, to learn my way around the sky before we spent a lot of money on a telescope.”
“Have you still got them?”
“Sure.”
“We should check and see if they work, too. And if they do, maybe you could use them until we figure out what’s wrong with the telescope.”
“That’s an idea. It’s not the best time of year for it; I’d have to go outside. But it would be better than nothing. If it ever stops raining.”
“We’ll check periodically,” said Becky. “Did Dominic say anything about seeing you again?”
“You make it sound as if we’d had a date,” said Gentian, irritably. She took a deep breath. “He said something about having us help him with a project of his, a science project, and no, it is not astronomy, and I wouldn’t do it if it were.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I’m not exactly certain. Something to do with time, maybe relativity.” It was odd: she and her sisters had not laughed at the thought of a time machine, but she shied from mentioning it to Becky.
“Who’s us?”
“All three of us.”
“That’ll be a treat,” said Becky.
“Such a nice way to get to know your neighbors, dear,” said Gentian.
Becky chortled. “Well, let me know what it’s all about,” she said.
“When I find out. Were you going to read me some of your poetry?”
Becky propped herself up on Gentian’s pillows and read to her. The first poem was called “Clowns and Puppets.” She had taken its theme from a quotation that Gentian’s father had had pasted above his computer for some years: “I will not be the toy of irresponsible events.” Her father said it was from a comedy, but Becky’s poem was very serious, except for the puns. She punned on “be” and “bee,” on “pawn” and “pun” and “upon,” on “responsible” and “responsive,” if that was a pun. The poem was about being helpless, or maybe about refusing to be helpless even when you couldn’t do anything about the universe.
The second poem was called “Both Your Houses.” Gentian did not understand it, but she loved it. It was full of bright leaves, cold winds, swords, stars, and defiance.
The third one was called “The Butterfly Hat,” and it was about the day Becky took Micky’s butterfly net away from him. The octave was accurate, but in the sestet she said she had put the butterfly net over his head and his hair had all come out in butterflies that stuck themselves onto his scalp with little pins, as though he were a card to display them on. It was gruesome and cheerful.
The last one was called “On the Snow in April.” Becky read it with particular care.
“It’s enough to make one turn to pagan rites,
Burn incense with sly purpose, promise anything,
To bring to these obediently shortening nights
Some herald of the obstinate spring.
Dear Heaven, has it not been cold long enough?
Remember that the regular is beautiful.
Things stretched past their due time are not the stuff
Of loveliness, and all chaos is dull.
What shivering sad time is this for Easter?
There are not even natural miracles.
Is it that through this gaunt delay there pulls
The gleeful string of that essential jester?
They say, let spring bring Christ to mind; this year,
Christ must persuade there will be violets here.”
Gentian was floored. She tried not to be. As she herself had gone to Alma’s church for a year to see if the heavens declared the glory of God’s handiwork, Becky had gone to Steph’s church for six months to see what poetic roots were in the Christian religion.
Becky’s father was, he said, an unobservant Jew, a phrase that continued to delight the Giant Ants disproportionately long after it had been explained to them; her mother was, she herself said, a recovering Mormon, a phrase that also delighted the Ants but less enormously; neither of them, despite a distaste for the religions they had been born into, had anything good to say about Christianity either. Erin said that in a broad sense, a worldwide, cultural sense, all three religions had a lot in common and it wasn’t surprising that anybody who wanted to reject one utterly would toss out the other two as well. Becky said her father’s attitude was not utter rejection but rather the kind of “Who, me?” attitude you see in a cat you are trying to get to come indoors at evening. Her mother, now, was utterly rejecting.
Becky had come back from her six churchly months in a depressed state. “It’s like sexism,” she said. “It’s just everywhere.” Becky was looking at her now. Gentian said, “I wish you hadn’t. You make C. S. Lewis sound right.”
C. S. Lewis, in his autobiography, had said that when he was an atheist, he had been troubled by the perception that the best authors were either Christian or, if they were too early for that, anticipated Christian views. “Christians are wrong,” he had said, “but all the rest are bores.”
“I know it’s the best one, technically,” said Becky, in a discouraged tone, “but that’s because I’ve been picking at it longer and polishing it up longer.”
“When did you write it?”
“Spring before last.”
“And you wrote all the others just this week?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Oh.”
“My one comfort,” said Becky, “is that I sent it to a lot of religious magazines and they all rejected it. They said they wanted something more uplifting.”
“You sent it out?”
“I had to.”
“You could put it in Tesseract.”
“I’d never live it down.”
“Read it to me again,” said Gentian.
Becky obliged her.
“It’s really kind of creepy,” said Gentian. “I mean, if there were a God you’d like it to have a sense of humor, but you don’t really want it to be the sort who plays practical jokes. It would make you wonder if you were one.”
“It’s been suggested,” said Becky, grimly.
“I like the ending,” said Gentian. “I don’t think that’s very religious. Well, it’s not very typical, I mean. Demanding that Christ persuade you of anything. You think that’s what the magazines didn’t like?”
“I hope so,” said Becky.
“Anyway,” said Gentian, “all the rest aren’t bores. I like ‘The Butterfly Hat’ best and I think ‘Both Your Houses’ is extremely cool.”
“What about ‘Clowns and Puppets’?”
Gentian considered. “I like it,” she said, “but I might like it even if it weren’t very good, because I know what you mean.”
Becky groaned. “Typical adolescent angst, you mean?”
“We’re allowed,” said Gentian.
“Yes, but it’s so boring.”
“Having your poems makes it less boring.”
Becky laughed. “You’re supposed to say they make it all worthwhile.”
“I suppose that’s what Steph says.”
“Yep.”
“Steph doesn’t understand the meaning of degrees.”
“She does mean it, though.”
“I know,” said Gentian, nettled. The thought of Steph was making her particularly twitchy just at the moment. “Look,” she said, “don’t tell the rest of them about Dominic, okay?”
“You mean don’t tell Steph.”
“Yes, I do, but that’s easier if we just don’t tell anybody.”
Becky looked dubious. She drew her knees up under the long skirt, folded her arms on them, rested her chin on her arms, and looked at Gentian. “I don’t know,” she said, in the muffled tone this posture created.
“You do understand why I don’t want to tell Steph?”
“Yes, but I don’t like having secrets from everybody. We used to be much more a group; now we’re pairing off.”
“An odd number of people can’t pair off.”
“Well, we are. Erin just varies who she pairs with.” Becky sighed gustily. “Maybe it’s because we’re teenagers and we’re evolving our romantic instincts for later.”
“I want mine to devolve, thank you,” said Gentian, more or less automatically. She ate the rest of the corn chips.
“But when’s the last time you did something just with Erin?”
Gentian said, “I thought you didn’t want us to pair off?”
“Not exclusively.”
Gentian found this inconsistent, but it was easier to answer the question and see what argument Becky was trying to develop.
“It has been a while,” she conceded.
“Didn’t you guys use to sew a lot?”
“Yes, but then Eileen got divorced and moved back in with the baby and we couldn’t use their basement any more.”
“Couldn’t you do it over here?”
“I guess.”
“I don’t mean you have to sew,” said Becky. “It’s just that I think maintaining all sorts of contact is important.”
“All sorts of—?”
“All directions.” Becky considered this. “All variations. All possible combinations.”
“You gonna make Alma and Erin go to a movie together?”
“Some things,” said Becky, “are beyond even my passion for togetherness.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
Gentian got out the next set of sandwiches, and they ate several. Gentian thought about “The Butterfly Hat” with growing delight, and finally asked, “Have you talked to Micky any more?”
“Just in passing,” said Becky. “I was thinking of showing him the poem. I figure if he can take that, he’s definitely worth going to a movie with. But then I wonder if it’s really fair. Maybe he’d take it better from somebody who had been civil enough to go to a movie with him first.”
“I don’t think your affections can be very much engaged,” said Gentian, borrowing a phrase her mother had used on Junie when Junie was about ten and had a terrible crush on Kenneth Branagh. “I mean, you sound like me. Calculating,” she explained, borrowing a term her father had used about her when she was first deciding whether to have Becky or a now-vanished Jessica Lindholm as her best friend.
“I’m trying to be sensible before the hormones strike.”
Gentian looked at her with some alarm. The only person whom she had watched the hormones strike was Junie, and Junie had never been sensible since the day she was born.
“It’s such a silly arrangement,” she said.
“That essential Jester,” said Becky, sourly.
“Let him try it and see how he likes it, that’s all.”
“Well, the Christians say he did.”
“He tried being a man. Big deal.”
“So it does make a difference?”
“I never said it didn’t,” said Gentian between her teeth. “I said it never makes the kind of difference they say it does. And they ignore the real differences. They don’t test drugs on women as well as men, and they don’t build bigger restrooms for women even though we take longer, and they don’t pay any attention to real differences unless they want an excuse to tell us we can’t do something.”
“Hormones strike boys, too,” said Becky, thoughtfully.
This meant that she did not concede the point but could not think of an argument, or perhaps simply didn’t want to bother. Gentian leaned over and turned on the weather radio.
“At midnight in the Twin Cities, we have clear skies and forty-one degrees, with a southeast wind at five to ten miles per hour.”
“That was fast,” said Gentian. She could still hear the rain dripping. She bounced off the bed, stepped over Maria Mitchell, and peered out the window. Yes, it was clear in that direction, but it might start raining again. It would be easier to try the binoculars than to worry about opening and closing the telescope dome.
She got the binoculars in their battered case from the very back of her closet, with some unnecessary assistance from Maria Mitchell, whose obligations as a cat included jumping up onto the shelf as soon as Gentian had removed her suitcase from it, and also sniffing and rubbing her face on every other item on the shelf.
They went out into the hallway, discouraging Maria Mitchell from accompanying them. She insisted on leaving the bedroom, but then ran into the bathroom and jumped into the tub. Gentian tossed her a ping-pong ball, and they went quickly past the two small doors that led into storage space under the eaves. Just beyond these, ending the hall, was a short wide door with a padlock. Gentian unlocked the lock and pulled the door open. In this damp weather, it stuck; it also, of course, creaked. Gentian felt around on the left and found the light switch and shoved it upward. It was an old, thick, heavy switch that made a click as though it were turning on the power for some large, complicated, 1930s factory. The light produced this way was anticlimactic: one forty-watt bulb high in the roof went on, dustily.
Gentian led Becky along the broad dusty boards in the middle of the unfinished attic. There were two finished rooms up here, somewhat lost in the corners. Rosemary had lived in one for several months when she was angry with her entire family. Gentian could never have done it. Her own room was cozy; this part of the attic was cavernous. It was here that they would have to help Dominic build his time machine, supposing he had meant a word he said. They would need a lot more lights.
At the very front of the house was another short wide door with a padlock on it. Gentian unlocked this one too, and dragged it open. A huge breath of night came in. Gentian ushered Becky out onto the little balcony, and wrenched the door shut again. The balcony floor was covered in shingles, which gave it the impression of being a misplaced piece of roof. It had a decorative railing of wrought iron, already dry after the rain. This structure had been reinforced by Gentian’s father a few years ago with a network of two-by-fours that Mrs. Zimmerman had pronounced adequate and safe, but was mercifully hard to see in the dark.
The lounge chair Gentian had used was still folded up against the wall, but it would be wet and possibly mildewed. She took the binoculars from the case, looped the strap around her neck, and leaned her elbows on the two-by-four.
“This should work,” said Becky. “We’re not facing that house at all.”
Gentian had forgotten to take the lens caps off the binoculars. She unscrewed them with increasingly cold fingers and slid them into the pocket of her sweater. Then she pressed her eyes into the eyepieces. Mars sprang out of the southeastern sky at her, a tiny disk, like the ghost of red. She settled her elbows and looked for Orion. There it was, still low; there was Rigel, and Betelgeuse, and Aldebaran.
“Well, that’s a relief,” said Becky.
Gentian turned and brought into her view the sky above the new house next door. It was all there as it ought to be. She feasted her eyes on her stars, picking out particular favorites. It was not the best time to be doing this: good stargazing in mid-October mostly happened earlier in the evening, and October and November formed a largely unspectacular pause between the glories of the Summer Triangle and the lovely cold abundance of Orion and the stars of winter. Becky sometimes talked of the odd omissions in the subjects used for poetry, and had occasionally said she thought of making a specialty of one or the other of them; Gentian had similarly thought of making her own study of the night sky from mid-November to early January. She would bet there was more there than people thought.
“Gen,” said Becky. “Gen.”
Gentian said, “What?” She had the impression that Becky had been saying her name for some time, over and over. Normally you would tap someone so preoccupied on the shoulder or something, but Becky had done that to Gentian once in the early days of the binoculars, and been snapped at. Gentian knew her way around the sky much better by now and would not have been much annoyed even if Becky did jog the binoculars, but Becky didn’t know that. Gentian was pleased to be considered, even if she didn’t need it.
“I’m getting cold,” said Becky.
“There’s a sweater in my room.”
“Is there another pair of binoculars?”
“What? No.”
“I think I’ll pass, then. I’ll go read. Come in when you get hungry.”
“I’ll only be a moment,” said Gentian.
As her family had done when they spent a weekend in New York, she thought, what must I see, what can’t I possibly miss, as though she might never have the chance again. What had been exciting when she first used the binoculars? Oh, of course.
She lowered the binoculars and walked along the balcony to its northern side, and found the Little Dipper lying crooked not far above the northern horizon. Curved around it were the stars of Draco. There was Thuban, there Eltanin—there. She lifted the binoculars, and where there had been one point of light, two minute distinct stars like a pair of headlights shone at her. She went back to Polaris, in the handle of the Little Dipper, and found the Big Dipper from that. Moving back between them she pounced on the tiny spirals, one flat and round to view and the other showing only its edge, of the galaxies M81 and M82, eleven million light-years away, showing her light that was new when the Himalayas were emerging and Ramapithecus was finding trees uncongenial and moving onto the savannah. There were angiosperms and insects and mammals, but no people. No industrious man, flinging a ribald stone at any occupation not his own; though it was probably not to be supposed that anybody’s hominid ancestors had been very interested in abstract learning, either.
She moved on and found bright Vega, and then the Northern Cross with Deneb crowning it.
As one star set, she found another, and another, as the whole sky wheeled by her and moved behind the far roofs of the city and into some other astronomer’s sky. Her right elbow hurt. She shifted to the left one, which hurt too. She straightened up, and almost yelped; her back hurt, and so did her knees. Her hands did not hurt, but were so cold she was afraid to try to move them lest she drop the binoculars. She shoved the door open with knee and elbow and forehead, shut it with her hip, and stood shivering in the relative warmth of the attic until she could unclose her fingers and put the binoculars back in their case. While she was waiting, she looked at her watch. Three-thirty. She and Becky usually stayed up until six or seven, so that should be all right.
When she got back to her room, still shivering, Becky was in bed, in the patchwork nightgown Erin had made her, her bristling poetry book open face down on her chest, apparently asleep.
Gentian climbed out of her cold clothes, hurried into her sweatpants and sweatshirt, and dived under the covers. “Hey. You aren’t asleep, are you?”
“Certainly not,” said Becky, without opening her eyes. “Why would I be?”
“His heatless room the watcher of the skies,” said Gentian, apologetically.
“Nightly inhabits when the sky is clear,” said Becky. “You’re just like me with reading; the longer since you haven’t done it, the longer you end up doing it to make up.”
Gentian objected on principle to giggling at inadvertent salaciousness, but she giggled nonetheless.
“Now you know how sleepy I am,” said Becky.
“We always stay up much later than this.”
“Sure, but we’re talking. And usually drinking something with caffeine in it.”
“You could have had some; it’s right there in the cooler. Or you could have come and gotten me.”
“No, I don’t think so,” said Becky. She finally opened her eyes, saw the position of her book, and hastily closed it, smoothing the spine with her fingers.
“Are you mad?” said Gentian cautiously.
“More bemused.”
“Can I bring you something?”
“Not yet. Tell me what you saw.”
Gentian did not actually feel her mouth dry up, but she was as speechless as if it had, and on reflection wished it would. “I can’t talk about it,” she said. “I could show you. I’ve showed you before, mostly. We split Nu Draconis, remember?”
“Don’t most astronomers take pictures?” said Becky.
“Yes, but I’m not that advanced yet. It’s not the same, anyway.”
“You’d better get that telescope fixed,” said Becky.
“I guess I’ll ask Dad if we can take it in to the store,” said Gentian, gloomily.
“Maybe they’ll rent you a replacement, like they do with cars.”
“I guess they might for a working astronomer, but not for a kid.”
“Well, ask them. You’ll be impossible until you get it back.”
“You are mad.”
“No, I’m not. I’ve just found out something new about you. I didn’t know there was anything.”
“Maybe it’s really new. I mean, maybe it wasn’t here last year. Don’t people change when they grow up?”
There was a long pause. Finally Becky said, “For the first time ever I understand Peter Pan.”