Heartlight (8 page)

“I know that’s amazing,” said Kate, shaking her head, “but this is still too much to believe.”

“More so than the tadpole who somehow becomes a frog? More so than the trees who manufacture food from beams of light? More so than the flowering spring, which follows the frozen winter? More so than the human child, once smaller than the smallest speck of dust, who comes to learn language, make tools, and bring forth a child of its own?”

“This is still more than I can handle,” Kate replied. “How a simple ring could—” She halted, gazing at the butterfly ring on her finger.

“Something’s wrong!” she cried. “It’s damaged!” Indeed, the rim of the ring’s left wing was roughly tattered, as if it had been eaten away by a powerful acid.

“Nothing is wrong,” answered Morpheus calmly. “Your ring has begun to deteriorate, that’s all.”

“Deteriorate?” Kate clasped the butterfly’s neck firmly. “What do you mean by that?” Then she remembered: Four minutes . . . that’s what Grandfather said was the limit . . .

“The process of deterioration began the instant you put on the ring, and it will continue until the ring has disappeared completely.”

Kate stiffened. “You mean I can tell how much PCL is left by watching it, like the fuel gauge in a car?”

Morpheus waved his antennae in assent. “Except with this kind of car, running out of fuel would be fatal.”

Gracefully, the butterfly spun his body around so that, instead of facing Earth, they were facing a dark sector of space. Dark, but for one pinpoint of reddish light that sparkled like a distant ruby.

“Is that where we’re going?” asked Kate. “It looks so far away.”

“Is it your desire to go to the star Trethoniel?”

“My only desire is to find Grandfather!” she exclaimed. “To make sure he’s safe and to bring him home again. I have this dreadful feeling that somehow he’s in much more danger than he realizes—from what, I don’t know. If finding him means we have to go all the way to Trethoniel, then I guess that’s what we’ll have to do.”

“I don’t know where Orpheus has borne him, Kate, although my inner sense tells me it is someplace very distant. All I know are the instructions your grandfather programmed into the ring. You see, like you, this is my very first journey. But I can tell you this: Trethoniel is much farther away than it appears, and the journey there and back could be much more dangerous than you realize. I don’t know whether your ring will last long enough to do all that.”

Kate looked anxiously at the distant red star. “We have four minutes of Earth time.”

The butterfly cocked his head pensively. “Four minutes of Earth time is not a great deal.”

His repetition of those words struck Kate, to her own surprise, as vaguely comforting. After all, how much could go wrong in only four minutes? Even in the expanded time of interstellar travel, four minutes didn’t feel like very long. The real risk was that it wouldn’t be enough time to find Grandfather, and she would be forced to return to Earth empty-handed.

“You must remember one cardinal rule,” declared the great butterfly in a tone of voice that suddenly reminded Kate of her fears. “Never, but never, remove your ring.”

She shuddered. “What would happen if I did?”

Morpheus studied her gravely. “If you should take off your ring, even for an instant, you would immediately revert to your normal human form. And in the realms where we are traveling—that means certain death. You could be vaporized by the fires of a star, suffocated by some poisonous atmosphere, or instantly frozen—but your ultimate fate would be the same.”

“All right, all right!” exclaimed Kate. “I’ve got the message. I won’t take off my ring.”

“No matter what,” emphasized Morpheus.

“No matter what.”

“The only environment where you might have any chance at all to survive would be a planet with an atmosphere much like Earth’s—and I don’t have to tell you how unlikely that is.”

Kate twisted the ring on her finger, making sure it was attached securely, and surveyed the endless darkness of space extending in all directions. “What if I fall off your back? The ring won’t stop that from happening, will it?”

“It should,” replied Morpheus. “I am the product of your heartlight reacting with the pure condensed light of the ring, and I am part of you now. As long as you’re wearing the ring, I will remain tied to your heartlight. I will hear your every thought, sometimes even before you do. My guess is there’s only one way you could leave my back, Kate: If you choose to.”

“Fat chance of that happening,” she replied, nervously biting her lip. It felt the same as her old lip, even if it were only made of whatever Morpheus said it was made of. “But won’t we get burned by the heat of the star? We’ll be going awfully close to it, won’t we?”

“No, we won’t get burned. You’re now made of heartlight—and I’m made of pure light. You have no skin to be burned, and no eyes to be blinded by the brightness of Trethoniel.”

“But I can still see you,” objected Kate. “How can I see you if I don’t have any eyes?”

“The same way you see in your imagination.”

Kate turned to face the blue planet beneath them, silently spinning in space. She could see the thin, wispy edge of what must be Cape Cod, protruding from the body of North America like the prow of an ancient ship. So many shades of blue were there, they could not be counted; the whole planet gleamed with a luster more luminous than dawn’s first light. Then, with a start, Kate realized how perfectly
round
is the Earth. Indeed, it felt as though she had never before understood the true meaning of the word. That very roundness seemed to emphasize the planet’s vulnerability. Like a delicate bubble, its sweeping blue curves caressing the sea of outer space, the fragile Earth floated—helpless, lovely, and alone.

“I can feel pain in my imagination, too,” said Kate quietly.

“Yes,” answered Morpheus with a stirring of his wings. “You can feel anything you could feel with a body—and probably a few things more. You can feel warm or cold; you can laugh or cry. The only difference is that you lack a physical body that would be destroyed by the elements and forces of space travel. You will even continue breathing—although it’s not air you will breathe, but light from the stars around us. You are in some ways physical, and in some ways metaphysical. You are part light, and part beyond light. You are
heartlight
.”

Kate gazed thoughtfully at the iridescent wings. “Do you think there could be something out there—some kind of force or something—that’s dangerous to heartlight?”

“I don’t know,” replied Morpheus gravely. “There is much that I don’t know. That’s why you must be very sure you really want to travel all the way to Trethoniel.”

For a few moments they drifted in silence at the edge of outer space. No snow geese honked; no winds whistled. Kate felt all alone, poised at the boundary between the known and the unknown.

At last, she spoke again. “I want to try, Morpheus. I want to find him.”

Instantly, the butterfly’s powerful wings exploded into action. Faster they raced, much faster than before, until soon they were nothing but a vaguely blue blur against the stars.

Kate stole a glance to the rear; Earth was no longer in sight. The Sun itself quickly receded into deep darkness. Now there was no turning back. She turned forward again to see hundreds of new stars moving swiftly toward them. The great glowing arch of the Milky Way slowly submerged into a sea of speckled light, and before her eyes, the sword of Orion compressed into a tight knot of stars.

The ride was amazingly smooth. But for the whirring of the wings and the passage of the starry vista, it seemed as though they weren’t moving at all. Kate slightly relaxed her grip on Morpheus’ neck. Hearing the hum of his wings, but unable to see them anymore, she wondered for an instant if they were still there. Instinctively, she started to stretch her hand toward one of the invisible wings.

“Don’t,” warned Morpheus. “My wings are moving faster than light and they could slice anything that touches them to ribbons. That includes you, Kate.”

Embarrassed, she withdrew her hand.
None of my thoughts are private anymore. Not even the stupidest ones.

Quickly, however, she forgot the incident as they raced past hundreds upon hundreds of stars. So swiftly did Morpheus carry her that almost as soon as a star drew near, it had vanished behind them. It was like riding a rocket headlong into an endless meteor shower. Throughout, Kate kept her eye on one glowing red star in the deep distance.

“How many stars can there be?” she mused. “Is there any end to them?”

Morpheus gave no answer except to continue beating his powerful wings.

Suddenly, Kate was aware of a delicate, distant sound that seemed to permeate the silence of space.

“Morpheus! What’s that?”

The antennae quivered uncertainly, as the wavering sound grew stronger. As they sailed swiftly into the sea of stars, Kate strained to hear. It was very difficult to catch more than a few faraway wisps of the slow, low, flowing tones.

Gradually, the swelling sound grew more and more resonant. The beautiful tones seemed to dance through the empty corridors of space, like something that was half music and half starlight. Celebration and peace moved through the melody; Kate had never heard anything so lovely. It felt closer and closer, and seemed to surround them, like the beating of some celestial heart.

A special phrase of Grandfather’s popped into Kate’s memory:
mysterium tremendum et fascinans
. She recalled the day he had discovered it in a medieval prayer and how happily he had shared it with her, saying it should be reserved only for rare moments of wonderment.
O great and wondrous mystery.

She listened, eyes closed, for a timeless moment. Then she remembered another phrase, one from a poem by Wordsworth. Fortunately, she had read the poem in one of Grandfather’s books, rather than at school, or it never would have lodged in her memory. As Wordsworth had entered a beautiful valley in Wales, he had found himself, as he put it,
disturbed with joy.
How, Kate had then wondered, could joy also be disturbing? It seemed an impossible contradiction. Now, for the first time, she felt a glimmer of understanding. But why did this strange music seem to bring those words to life?

Her thoughts turned to the stars whizzing past her: so many of them, and so beautiful! Could they be the source of the music? She recalled how Grandfather had once likened the story of a star’s life to a great biography of Gandhi, Joan of Arc, or Abraham Lincoln: a compelling tale of birth, struggle, triumph, and violent death. He had said that every star eventually reaches a point where the age-old balance between its own gravity, which pulls inward, and its radiant energy, which pushes outward, will fall apart. If it’s a normal star, like the Sun, it will suddenly shudder and compress down to the size of a moon. But if it’s unusually massive, it could expand and expand like a luminous red balloon until—at last—it will burst and collapse so fast and so far that it will
disappear completely,
leaving nothing behind but a black hole.

Kate looked at the radiant glow of Trethoniel, still distant but drawing ever nearer, and she shuddered at the thought of any star, not just the Sun, dying in a final spasm that swallowed up all its energy and light forever. How wrong that such beauty should be doomed to disappear forever down some cosmic drain! Grandfather had once said that the gravity of a black hole is the strongest physical force in the universe—so strong that even light cannot escape. Did that mean that the heartlight of the living star is also trapped, without escape? Could it be lost forever to the universe?

“No, Kate.” Morpheus did not wish to leave such a question unanswered. As the strange music washed over them, growing stronger by the second, he explained: “Energy can’t be lost completely from the universe. It may be transformed into matter, and back again into energy, but it never totally vanishes. If an electron and a positron collide, they may annihilate each other, but they will still leave behind two photons—brand new particles—with exactly the same energy as before. And what is true at the tiniest level of the universe must also be true for a star. Even a star as big as Trethoniel.”

“So the energy of a star that dies might show up somewhere else? In some new form?”

“Perhaps,” answered Morpheus, his pulsing wings glistening with starlight. “Your physical body was made of material once manufactured inside of a star. So who can tell? Perhaps some of the energy of a dying star finds its way into the heart of a young girl on a distant planet.”

“But what if the whole star gets sucked into a black hole?” demanded Kate, still distraught. “Nothing can get out of there—no light, no heartlight, no anything! Could all that life just vanish?”

Morpheus waved his long antennae gracefully, as if to comfort the hazel-eyed girl seated on his back. “Nothing totally vanishes, Kate. Life doesn’t disappear forever. It only evolves.”

“. . . as part of the Pattern that Grandfather always talks about,” Kate heard herself thinking. But she wasn’t comforted. The haunting music now seemed more disturbing than joyful.

Suddenly, Kate realized that the great glowing mass of Trethoniel was upon them. Imperceptibly, Morpheus slowed the beating of his wings. Like a flower slowly unfurling, the swirling nebula surrounding the star opened into the spiraling veil she had seen on Grandfather’s monitor. There, in the center, sat the magnificent star itself, encircled by a necklace of gleaming planets.

“Trethoniel!” cried Kate. “Is that where the music is coming from?”

“
Mysterium tremendum et fascinans
,” said Morpheus in answer.

Soon the great wings ceased beating entirely, and the travelers coasted in open space, illuminated by the shimmering light of Trethoniel and caressed by its music. At once, Kate understood that Trethoniel was not only a star, but also an entire system of planets, moons, and clouds of incandescent gases—as well as the spiraling nebula that wrapped around them all. How many times larger than the Sun’s own solar system this star’s realm must be, she could only guess. She looked in wonder at the luminous circles of light at the outermost edge of the nebula, sparkling like spherical rainbows decked with dew. The entire system seemed to whirl around itself like a dog that had chased its own tail since time began, and would continue to chase it as long as time lasted.