NOW PICTURE THIS: in an outer stretch of outer space, in the “cosmic deep” as the space-poets call it, in a quiet nook of the universe, a star explodes. This is a supernova: an astral bang which in an instant is shining a billion times brighter than our own sun.
The blast wave that follows slams hard into the first planet in this unlucky solar system. The planet slams into its moon, its moon slams into the next planet over, and so on and so forth until the wreckage from this celestial smash-up goes shooting every which way in a storm of newborn meteoroids.
But suddenly the supernova implodes, “imploding” being the opposite of “exploding,” so instead of bursting further out, the supernova caves completely in. The star that used to be there is gone for good now, leaving in its place one of the strangest—and most dangerous—of all cosmic phenomena: a white worm.
Of course, the appearance of a white worm in an outer stretch of outer space would hardly matter to human beings such as us on any ordinary night, safe and snug in our beds a thousand galaxies away (though the ordinary is often an illusion while the hard-to-believe can be absolute fact). This story then begins properly in the bedroom of one Byron Barnett, nine years and eleven months old, an Arizonan born and bred, on a Thursday night at 7:35 p.m., or five minutes past Byron’s school-night bedtime—though Byron was not in bed in the slightest.
The other members of the Barnett household were otherwise occupied at the moment and more or less unaware of Byron’s in-bed versus out-of-bed status. For instance: Byron’s older brother, Taji, was downstairs in the den watching Fear Sphere on the telescreen, a show about people with unusual phobias. Tonight’s episode: fear of smells and fear of being licked. Originally Taji’s plan was to be out on a date, but his young lady had twisted her ankle playing laser-lacrosse earlier in the day and wasn’t in the mood for any more excitement. So Taji had offered to stay in and babysit Byron—a term that Byron found highly offensive and visibly incorrect, since he hadn’t been a baby for years.
By 7:36 p.m., Byron’s father was standing in the foyer, looking in the wall mirror while folding a white handkerchief into the breast pocket of his tuxedo, after which he combed his hair, popped a mint in his mouth, and cleaned his glasses using a tissue from the fancy glass tissue box on the foyer table.
This takes us to 7:37 p.m., where two floors up, in Byron’s bedroom, Byron was still not in bed. He had, at least, already pajamafied himself in his white flannels with the gold-colored stripes down the legs and golden shoulder patches, like the uniform for a soldier of sleep.
He also had on his Hat Of Many Dinosaurs, a feather-based creation that he’d made himself using imitation plumage and whatnot from the crafts and hobbies shop. It was an artist’s impression in headwear of the kinds of feathers you would’ve seen on an assortment of dinosaurs if you’d been out for a stroll about a hundred million years before tonight. Byron found that most people didn’t even know dinosaurs had feathers, which made the hat a real conversation-starter. On the downside, it had turned out to be more of a pre-sleep garment than an item you could wear to bed, since it was hard to lay your head on the pillow with so many feathers in the way. Byron had tried it more than once.
He was seated now at his card table next to the picture window, the window that he kept his telescope aimed through, the window with the best view of the Moon between the hours of dinner and slumber. In fact, earlier in the evening, Byron had devoted a good quarter hour to telescopically studying Crater Copernicus, one of the Moon’s better indentations; but at the moment his eyes were fixed on the hand of cards he was holding in tonight’s game of Flapjack.
Opposite him at the card table stood a robot of seven feet and several centimeters, its innards whirring faintly. Coincidentally, this mechanical individual, “José Ignacio” by name, had been constructed in the same color scheme as Byron’s pajamas: metal casing the color of white flannel, with golden switches here and there for this and that. José Ignacio was the picture of card-playing competition, holding his own claw of cards close to his titanium torso.
Byron looked up at the robot’s glass cranium and said:
“Showdown.”
Rotating his claw to reveal his cards, José Ignacio informed Byron dryly:
“Blueberry flush.”
Byron grunted his irritation. “Pair of walnuts,” he said, spreading his losing cards on the table.
From the staircase in the hallway came the voice of Mrs. Barnett:
“Byron? Are you in bed?”
“Very nearly!”
“Teeth brushed?”
“Yes, and I can prove it!”
“Toys, devices, and cards put away?”
“Not at the present nanosecond!”
Mrs. Barnett appeared in the doorway. She was dressed up for a night out, wearing a glittering red gown and fastening an earring in her ear. She eyed Byron at his card table—where he gave her an outstanding grin, if possibly one too wide for the size of his face.
“You haven’t seen my red cape by any chance,” she said.
“Ummmmmmmmmm—I don’t believe so. Not today.”
Mrs. Barnett considered her son’s odd answer for a moment. But since most of Byron’s answers were, frankly, odder than this one, she decided not to pursue the question.
“I’m coming back in five minutes. Be in bed.” She stepped out of the room, closing the door behind her.
Byron turned to José Ignacio across the card table and made a face like a person getting a flu shot.
“What’s wrong?” José Ignacio said.
Byron loudly sucked in all the saliva in his mouth.
“What is it?” José Ignacio said.
“The cape.”
“No! Do not even tell me you left it where I think you left it.”
“I left it where you think.”
“Impressive,” José Ignacio said—though he almost certainly meant exactly the opposite.
“I’ll just go get it.”
“You don’t have enough time.”
“Of course I do, you outrageous apparatus!”
Byron leapt up from the card table and dashed into his walk-in closet. A moment later he came out jumping a leg into a sleek, silver spacesuit, complete with slim oxygen tank on the back.
“Your parents are about to leave!” José Ignacio said.
“You’re not a problem-solver, José Ignacio! It’s among your very greatest flaws!”
Byron put both hands on his tightly fitting hat and pushed it up and off, revealing a cobalt-blue head of hair underneath. Actually it was only about fifty-two percent cobalt-blue, since the pigment pills that Byron took once a week didn’t change the natural black of every single one of his hairs. More like every other hair. But the two hues blended together nicely, akin to the sheen of a cobalt-blue tarantula—widely considered the one really gorgeous member of the spider family.
After giving his scalp a vigorous rub (because the feathers on the Hat of Many Dinosaurs tended to leave one’s scalp quite itchy), Byron dropped to his knees and pulled out from under his bed a device on wheels. It was nearly as tall as Byron himself, cylindrical, about a foot in diameter, with spinning mechanical innards visible through its glass casing. Byron unspooled its electrical cord and plugged it into a wall socket.
José Ignacio grumbled: “I don’t know how reliable a biomass transducer is from a mail-order company.”
“Lunar Shipping Systems is a perfectly respectable outfit!”
“Says who?”
“Says their ad in Lunar Life Quarterly. Anyway, I’ve already used the thing a dozen times.”
“And you still can’t aim it. You could be off by half a mile.”
“Then I’ll run the rest of the way!”
“But there’s a meteoroid storm in the forecast! It’s too risky!”
“I giggle at risk! I give risk a kick in the shins!”
“You’re saying two things at once. Which is it, you giggle or you kick?”
Putting on his spacesuit’s clear bubble helmet, Byron’s voice went muffled in answering:
“I giggle then I kick! Then I make risk do the dishes!”
As Byron latched down his helmet on both sides, José Ignacio extracted a stopwatch from a hidden compartment on his metallic elbow and started a countdown. “You have four minutes,” he said. “I’m betting against you.”
Byron switched on the biomass transducer: the device revved up fast with a sound like the drill at the dentist’s. Next he opened one of the bedroom’s tall windows. He peered through the transducer’s built-in telescope and zeroed in first on the Moon itself, then more specifically on Crater Copernicus. He angled the transducer, getting the position as tight as he could for maximum trajectory. He detached from the transducer a remote control featuring a small joystick and a switch labeled for two settings: “Propulsion” and “Suction.” He set the switch to “Propulsion.” Positioning himself between the transducer and the open window (with the Moon perfectly framing his bubble-helmeted head), he sneered at José Ignacio and thumbed a button on the remote.
The transducer fired its propulsion beam straight into him, shooting him out the window and up into the night sky. It felt something like being kicked in the chest by a horse while an octopus tickled you under your arms and lathered your hair with carbonated shampoo all at the same time. Byron was half laughing, half shrieking as the transducer’s beam pushed him two hundred and thirty-eight thousand, eight hundred and fifty-five miles between the Earth and Moon in just under ten seconds …
He slammed into the lunar surface, sending up a cloud of moondust not unlike the talcum powder he enjoyed sprinkling over his feet after a bath. He lay still for a few seconds, recovering from the impact. The biomass transducer had its drawbacks. Byron wouldn’t have admitted it to José Ignacio, but this was not the most reliable way to get to the Moon. Unfortunately the price of a ticket on a rocket-ship was several hundred times Byron’s weekly allowance, possibly several thousand.
Anyway, rocket-ships only left from spaceports, and the biomass transducer had made off-Earth travel possible from the comfort of Byron’s own bedroom—without anyone else having to know about it. How safe was the device really? Who knew? But Byron was no worrywart. Even the pain of a harsh lunar landing was not enough to put him off, since a little pain never hurt anybody in the pursuit of big things. Especially this big thing, the thing of being on the Moon, which was, to put it simply, Byron’s great obsession, his ruling passion, his constant desire and self-assigned mission in life.
Jumping to his feet, he brushed the moondust off his spacesuit and scanned his surroundings. With the clock ticking, he figured he had approximately three minutes and forty-two seconds left to get the job done and get back to Earth. José Ignacio had been right about at least one thing: Byron still couldn’t aim the transducer very well, so he was not now at his actual destination.
To get his bearings he tried orienting himself against the mile-high mountain range in the distance, its peaks all bright with starlight—but truth be told, this left him still slightly fuzzy on where he was. Fortunately the built-in compass on his spacesuit was in good working order. After checking it, he pivoted south and bounded off. In the low gravity it didn’t take long to get to the rim of Crater Copernicus, that monumental indentation on the lunar surface that was some fifty-eight miles across and more than two miles deep.
Standing right on the edge, Byron leaned over and looked down. He contemplated, cogitated, and knew what he had to do next. He switched on the miniature reel-to-reel tape player built into his spacesuit, filling his helmet with his favorite song of the moment, “Mucus,” by his favorite band of the year, Phlegm. He backed up several steps, ran straight at the crater’s edge, and jumped …
…
…
…
As he fell in low-gravity slo-mo down the double-mile drop, he twisted onto his back so he could watch the stars swirling above him …
…
…
… then flipped onto his stomach to see the crater floor rushing up below …
……
…………
… until, right before impact, he jabbed the release-button on his wrist—and an airbag like a cluster of fifty beach balls burst from his spacesuit’s chest compartment to cushion his fall. The impact knocked the wind out of him anyway, but he was alive, he was on the floor of the crater, and he was in one piece.
The airbag deflated automatically, after which he detached and discarded it. Next he swiveled toward the middle of the crater and started running. He was making good time, charging toward his target (it helped that Phlegm was thumping out a beat for him with the drum solo in “Mucus”). But then, in his peripheral vision he noticed objects streaking overhead, which wasn’t only inconvenient, it was especially irksome, because it meant there was another thing that José Ignacio had been right about: the meteoroid storm.
Suddenly space-rocks were coming down in every direction. One landed directly ahead of Byron and blasted a mini-crater-within-a-crater out of the lunar surface. Another landed to his left and blew a boulder to bits. A third hit the powdery surface and rolled like a gigantic bowling ball right past him. Zigzagging to avoid being hit himself, Byron started laughing in a kind of crazy glee, enjoying the bombardment more than made sense …
… until he tripped and conked his head inside his helmet, which sucked the fun out of the whole thing. He jumped up, shook it off, and dashed toward the goal of this entire operation: his lunar fort, at the crater’s dead center. The size and shape of a largish igloo, the fort was made of foot-thick super-glass and featured a flagpole rising over it, flying a red flag with a skull and crossbones in masking tape.
This is why Byron was here, because the red flag, in actual fact, was a red cape, his mother’s red cape, which he’d borrowed from her closet and brought up to the Moon the week before. He’d wanted to see if he would like the look of a red flag over his fort before saving up several weeks’ allowance to buy a real one. As it turned out, he’d liked the look of it very much; but then, regrettably, he’d forgotten to bring it home with him.
Still darting sideways and once or twice backwards to dodge incoming meteoroids, Byron moved toward his destination as best he could. It was more a dance than a dash at this point, but such is life. When the meteoroid storm let up a little, he capitalized on the opening to lunge for the fort, where he jumped onto an adjacent boulder, sprang off it in a low-gravity leap, flew right up to the very top of the flagpole, and grabbed hold.
He curled his spacesuited legs around the pole and stationed himself there. With his hands freed up, he began untying the cape from the crosspiece that stretched it out and held it in place. Once the crucial garment was in his possession, he dropped down to the curved roof of the fort, hopped off to the lunar surface, and dashed into the fort, closing the little airlock tightly behind him. Here he unzipped the front of his spacesuit and started stuffing in the cape, in preparation for the trip home. The suit’s fabric was just stretchy enough to fit the whole cape in, though getting the zipper closed was a challenge.
After this was done, he scanned the fort for signs of intruders. Fortunately everything looked the way he’d left it last time: orange leather recliner ready to be reclined in (just not today) … telescope aimed at the rings of Saturn … recent editions of Lunar Life Quarterly in a stack on the side table … half-full box of Space Gazelle Space Cakes on the shelf. It was a variety pack, so Byron reached in with eyes closed and by pure luck picked his favorite flavor: Chocolate Comet.
As a wholly owned subsidiary of Galactic Snacking Solutions Incorporated, Space Gazelle truly was one of today’s great food-and-beverage brands, in Byron’s opinion. Also he enjoyed their mascot, the Gazelle, pictured on all the packaging—a gazelle being a kind of slender antelope. This gazelle, the Space Gazelle, wore a spacesuit that even covered his upward-curving horns—so presumably he was having miscellaneous adventures out in the cosmic deep. Byron hadn’t been able to track down any of the details on that, though he’d written to Galactic Snacking Solutions asking for information.
Anyway: the Space Cakes. Byron could live on them if he had to. They were actually too tasty, which is why he’d decided to only keep them here in his fort instead of at home in the kitchen pantry along with the rest of his provisions. If the Cakes were as easy to get to as a quick trip downstairs, he’d polish off a box every couple of days. Better to leave them way up here on the Moon, where he could only eat them on intermittent lunar occasions.
Not to imply that they were bad for you. Space Gazelle snacks were extremely wholesome across their entire product line, as Byron had to keep explaining to his mother every time they went to the grocery store together. Not only were the Space Cakes packed with protein from almonds and other delicious nuts, but right on the wrapper it stated:
“For Astronomical Energy!”
What more could you ask from a foodstuff? Yet Space Gazelle gave you more: they put extra calcium and Vitamin D in everything they made, nutrients your body needs when you’re living extraterrestrially: on the Moon or in a space station or aboard a rocket-ship intercepting an asteroid.
Sadly, in Byron’s experience adults failed to appreciate the role that snacks played in getting you through the day, whether on Earth or elsewhere. Life was hard; refreshments helped—especially in space. And if appetites were sometimes spoiled between meals, such was the price one paid for being human.
In fact, Byron’s backup plan to becoming an officer in the Astral Corps and piloting rocket-ships across the cosmos was being President and CEO of Space Gazelle Brands—because surely whoever was head of the company right now would be ready to retire by the time Byron was old enough for the job. Or if not Space Gazelle, then he might even start a competing operation of his own. He was confident that he could add value to the future of snacking.
Just thinking about it made him feel like he needed a nibble, even though his teeth were brushed and apart from the fact that he was on the Moon, he was supposed to be in bed. Unlatching and taking off his helmet, he ripped open the Cake’s foil wrapper, crammed the whole thing in his mouth, and chewed fast. His mother often told him to slow down with his food, but looking up through the fort’s glass roof he could see that the meteoroid storm was still going strong—and one rather jumbo-sized rock was heading his way.
Gulping his Cake—not so easy without a glass of chilled hazelnut milk to wash it down—he re-helmeted and scrambled out the door mere seconds before the fort was hit by the incoming meteoroid—and demolished. Only when he was a good twenty yards away and out of range of flying chunks of smashed super-glass did he stop running.
Here he unclipped the biomass transducer’s remote control from his spacesuit belt, switched its setting from “Propulsion” to “Suction,” pushed a button, and watched a suction beam shoot from the Earth up to his vicinity here on the Moon. But it was still aimed at the spot above Crater Copernicus where he’d landed—two miles straight up the crater.
With more meteoroids bombing the moonscape all around him, Byron worked his remote’s little joystick, causing the suction beam in the distance to swivel in his direction. He only had a few seconds of leeway, however, because a space-rock with his name on it was screeching down from the storm and would surely crack him open like a piñata, sending his blood, guts, and gore spilling over the lunar surface if he didn’t—
CONTACT! The suction beam snatched Byron up and off the Moon half a heartbeat before the incoming meteoroid smacked him dead, yanking him home at just under 27,000 miles per second. He shot through the open window of his bedroom, hit the floor, and rolled uncontrollably until he slammed into the far wall—which brought him to a stop.
José Ignacio, still seated at the card table, looked up from his magazine, Good Semiconducting, eyed Byron, and clicked his stopwatch. Six seconds remained on the clock: Byron had transduced to the Moon and back in under four minutes. It was a solid victory, but before the robot could comment one way or the other, Byron unzipped his spacesuit, pulled out the red cape, and waved it in triumph.
Not thirty seconds later Mrs. Barnett opened the door from the hallway, holding her red cape. She glared at Byron in bed.
“Byron Barnett: why was my cape hanging on your doorknob?”
“I found it for you!”
His mother gave him a cold stare, so Byron added:
“You’re welcome!”
For a moment Mrs. Barnett was distracted by Byron’s blue hair, which looked even bluer than usual against the bright white of a freshly laundered pillow case. She still didn’t understand why a soon-to-be ten-year-old would spend half his weekly allowance on pigment pills that changed his hair from its normal human black to the color of a peacock’s neck—or as Byron liked to remind her, the sheen of a cobalt-blue tarantula. But their pediatrician had assured them the pills were perfectly safe, so there wasn’t anything to object to on medical grounds. And at least Byron was keeping his hair combed for a change, so that was a plus.
Mrs. Barnett looked around Byron’s room now with an exploratory eye, as moms are wont to do, until something by the card table caught her attention. “And what is that doing up here?” she said.
“Yes, Byron, your ‘biomass transducer.’ Or as I like to call it: my vacuum cleaner.”
Now Mrs. Barnett saw something else she didn’t like and crossed the room to pick it up off the floor. It was Byron’s Halloween costume from last year, a silver spacesuit, complete with plastic bubble helmet and pretend oxygen tank. She draped it over the clothes valet in the corner and informed Byron that throwing one’s things on the floor was a sign of general disrespect about the things one was lucky enough to have. And to have things at the age of nine and eleven months, one had to be given things—by one’s parents. One could always be given—did it really need to be said out loud?—less.
But if his spacesuit was a Halloween costume and his biomass transducer a vacuum cleaner, what did that mean about Byron’s quick trip to the Moon of a moment ago? It meant that Byron had only been to the Moon in his mind, a sad fact he would have done anything in his power to change.
What had happened in reality was this: wearing his Halloween costume and with his mother’s vacuum cleaner whirling its mood-setting sound, Byron had climbed out his window, down the emergency ladder drilled into the glass polygons of the house, and into the garden. From there he’d dashed into the desert just behind the house, zigzagging around cactuses whose spines and spikes could’ve pierced his pajamas and slashed his skin if he’d accidentally made contact at the speed he was going, since even the light from the Moon wasn’t always enough to see by in the desert after dark.
About fifty yards from the house he’d reached his fort, a structure the size of a large shed, made of junked materials that Byron’s brother had been good enough to acquire for him from a hovercraft body shop in town. Above the fort, Mrs. Barnett’s red cape was hooked atop an old telescreen antenna that looked like a metal fern, the cape not flying there magnificently flag-like, but drooped like a dead flower in the windless night. Byron had yanked it down, dashed with it back to the house, climbed the ladder up to and then through his bedroom window, hung the cape on the doorknob in the hallway, pulled off his Halloween costume (he was still wearing his pajamas underneath), and jumped into bed. Which is where he now lay, watching his mother roll her vacuum cleaner toward him from the other side of the room. She stopped beside him and stared down.
“What is it doing up here?” she asked again.
“I was cleaning!” Byron said.
Mrs. Barnett looked around. “I see no proof of that.”
Byron tried to make his eyes sparkle by angling his face under the bedside lamp, but his mother seemed immune to his every charm tonight.
“And where specifically did you ‘find’ my cape?” she wanted to know.
“You look pretty! Red is your color!”
“You’re too kind,” Mrs. Barnett said suspiciously. She bent down, tucked Byron’s blanket tightly around his sides, mummifying him the way he liked. Then she kissed his forehead and turned toward the door. Which is when Byron saw something frightening.
“Wait!”
His mother stopped. “Yes?”
“One more kiss!”
Mrs. Barnett stepped back in, bent down again, and gave Byron another kiss, during which Byron used the end of his blanket to pluck a tiny cactus ball off the red cape in his mother’s hand. It would’ve been a nasty turn of events for all concerned if, wearing her cape out on the town tonight, she’d sat down on a cactus-balled bit of it.
At the door again Mrs. Barnett stopped one last time, glanced back at Byron, then over at Byron’s twelve-inch toy robot on its stool at the card table—gripping five full-sized playing cards in its tiny claw—then back at Byron.
“Go to sleep,” she said firmly—and closed the door behind her.
So we come, at last, to a crucial clarification: the robot José Ignacio was not, strictly speaking, real. At least not the seven-foot-and-several-centimeters José Ignacio that weighed three hundred and thirty-three pounds and forty-four grams. The life-sized José Ignacio, to say it another way, was a figment of Byron’s brain.
As soon as his mother was gone, Byron turned to the seven-foot José Ignacio at the card table and said:
“What’s the moral of this story?”
“Never share a bedroom with a demented person?”
“Wrong! Never bet against a person who thinks being demented is a good thing, you bulbous widget!”
“Why don’t I feel this is the end of The Incident of The Missing Red Cape?”
“Because you’re a catastrophizer! And I’m an optimist! That’s the difference between us!”
“I’m too tired to fight about it,” José Ignacio grumbled, crossing the room from the card table to the second twin bed. “I’m powering down now for a circuit purge.”
“Congratulations.”
Byron turned away from the robot and stared out the window at the Moon. What a killjoy José Ignacio was. Still, the robot’s track record for being right about things was annoyingly good. Thinking about it, Byron’s natural optimism decayed by several iotas as he drifted into sleep …
Meanwhile, a thousand galaxies from Byron’s bedroom, way out in what used to be that quiet nook of the universe but was now the cosmic zip code of a certain monstrous white worm, extreme things were happening.
First a quick description of the worm itself: five thousand miles long, its front end was a dark, round, swirling mouth … its middle section was bright white like a fluorescent light bulb, but stretchable like the hose on a vacuum cleaner … and its back end ended in an electrified coil that was already starting to zap its way through the very fabric of space.
From every direction around the worm space-rubble was at this moment hurtling toward it. No surprise really, since the gravitational field of a white worm is one of the strongest forces in nature, so strong that nothing it swallows can ever escape again: not a comet, not a spaceship, not even a beam of light. (These items might eventually be pooped out the worm’s other end, but that’s a whole different discussion.)
Also: random rays of gravitation were firing out from this particular white worm, sticking onto more distant objects and yanking them in the way a frog’s long tongue catches flies. For instance, the trillion-ton chunk of a smashed-up moon had just been yanked at six hundred miles a second toward the worm’s swirling mouth. On contact it had simply vanished, like some astral magic trick—exactly the kind of trick that Byron himself would have loved to see, if he’d had a telescope with intergalactic magnification and known where to point it.
Actually he’d never even heard of a white worm: this was a gap in his space-education that would be fixed sooner rather than later. For the moment though, in a deep sleep with nothing wormy whatsoever on his mind, he was dreaming about having just won a quiz show by correctly answering the question:
Dinosaur feathers: true or false?
… his prize being a lifetime supply of Space Gazelle Space Cakes—all of which made for some very pleasant slumber and was sure to leave him hungry by the time he woke up.
The next morning at the breakfast table, Mr. Barnett was finishing off his egg-white omelette with Spanish seasonings, Mrs. Barnett was spooning elegantly at her grapefruit and yoghurt, Taji was enjoying his bowl of buttery oatmeal, and Byron was deeply engaged in a plate of chocolate-chip waffles. So engaged that he was taken completely by surprise when his mother turned to him and said:
“I had an interesting experience with my cape last night.”
Byron’s heart jumped in his chest. Had he missed another cactus ball? Had his mother sat down wearing the cape in a restaurant and jumped up howling from a barb in the buttock? Had an ambulance been called and the emergency room visited? Were stitches involved? Was his mother wearing a bandage under her skirt at this very moment?
“Your father and I were walking out of the theatre,” Mrs. Barnett continued.
“What did you see?” Taji asked.
“The Importance of Being Earnest,” Mr. Barnett said. “A fine production.”
“And just at the bottom of the staircase,” Mrs. Barnett said, “there was a commotion in the crowd behind us. Sort of a surge of whispering and snickering.”
Mr. Barnett focused an intense eyeball on Byron—and Byron, though he had no idea what was coming next, knew it wasn’t going to be anything good.
“So we turned around,” Mrs. Barnett said, “and saw that the commotion was all about me. People were chattering and laughing, and some were even pointing. At my back. To be precise about it: at the back of my cape. During the show I’d used my purse pen to write down an idea that popped into my head for a pumpkin soufflé, and I thought maybe I’d held the pen against the folded cape in my lap and it had leaked. But it wasn’t ink on my cape.”
“It wasn’t?” Byron said.
“No, it wasn’t. It was masking tape.”
“Masking tape?” echoed Taji.
“Masking tape,” confirmed Mrs. Barnett. “In the shape of a skull and crossbones. I looked like a big red flag on a pirate ship.”
“Not a pirate ship!” Byron blurted, “a lunar fort! To warn space-vermin to steer clear!”
Mr. Barnett put down his fork. “Byron, please explain what you were doing with your mother’s cape without permission in the first place.”
Answering a somewhat different question, Byron insisted:
“I didn’t mean to leave it on the Moon! I just forgot to bring it back with me last time I was there! Then when I transduced up last night to get it, I forgot to peel off the skull and crossbones before I hung it on the doorknob. I’m sorry!”
Calmly Mrs. Barnett told him:
“I don’t mind being laughed at by people I don’t know, Byron. No one should worry too much about what other people think of them. But if I’m going to be laughed at, I’d prefer it to be for something I’ve decided to do: like taking a fashion risk that hasn’t paid off or standing up for something I believe in that other people find ridiculous or even because I’ve slipped on a banana peel and fallen on my fundament. What I don’t especially care for is being laughed at because of a risk you’ve decided to take that affects me without my knowledge. And above all, I don’t appreciate being embroiled in an unpleasant situation as the result of a half-truth, falsehood, or fantasy of any sort.”
“If it makes you feel better,” Byron said, “your cape did look really good as a moon-flag. Now I know that an actual red flag is what I want to fly there.”
Mrs. Barnett shook her head and turned to her husband. Mr. Barnett was equally displeased. “Where, Byron,” he asked, “is the dividing line?”
“Between what and what?”
“Between using your imagination for fun and using it as an excuse for bad behavior.”
“Um … is that a real question?”
“It’s a question I want you to spend some time thinking about. You’re going to be ten years old next month. Telling the truth should not be optional by age ten. Remember: veracity, or the quality of being honest—with yourself and with other people—is the hallmark of a first-rate person. On the other hand, being ‘mendacious,’ which is the quality of being untruthful as a general rule, is something that one way or another will ruin your life in the end.”
Byron scrunched up his face and nodded slowly to convey his understanding of this vital point that his father was making—though a fair bit of scrunch was really about the breakfast-related tragedy that his chocolate-chip waffles were going cold.