The Necessity of Stars Read online

  The Necessity of Stars

  E. Catherine Tobler

  Neon Hemlock Press

  www.neonhemlock.com

  @neonhemlock

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  © 2021 E. Catherine Tobler

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  The Necessity of Stars

  E. Catherine Tobler

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  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  This novella is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Illustration by Marcela Bolívar

  Cover Design by dave ring

  Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-952086-18-2

  Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-952086-19-9

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About the Press

  1

  When I don’t remember my name, I will remember this.

  Tura was the color of a Normandy sky, ten-thirty in the evening. A June. Darker in the east, lighter in the west, the echo of a sun-bright day refusing to fade entirely. The length of them rioted with storm clouds, a blue-black horizon sinking into starless murk. Their naked torso was slashed from shoulder to thigh with the colors of the Milky Way, eggplant blooming from the blue, spilling into apricot and cream before blue swallowed the light again. They would have been invisible but for the moon glowing.

  Stars glowed in the valleys of Tura’s palms, narrow palms bearing only three fingers. A sort-of thumb, though longer than any I’d seen, and two longer fingers. The coal black nails glittered with stardust. You look like you’ve fallen through a nebula, I whispered, and Tura laughed. It was the sound of an overloaded freight train, low and rumbling, moving through water if you listened long enough, with a hiss at the end. I listened long enough. I did fall through a nebula, and another, and yet one more, Tura said as their hand enfolded my bare shoulder.

  This was how they were with the trees, skin to skin, Tura told me. They pressed their skins together and became. But then, Tura realized my skin was nothing like a tree. We stood silent in the moonlight. Tura’s fingers played over my smooth skin, and their eyes met mine. (If their body was the sky itself, their eyes were planets therein, thousand-ringed Saturn and blue Neptune.) I have never touched a human, they said. They had touched many trees, but never a human, until now, and they asked if they could.

  I wanted those star-hands on my skin.

  Tura told me I was the color of Eta Carinae, white hot and blown wide open. Red wavelengths, ultraviolet wavelengths, I asked which, but Tura’s hand brushed over my mouth to silence me. The darkness of them tasted like pine, like bark. Five million more times luminous than your sun, they said as their thin hands slid down my arms. Circumpolar, always above the horizon, pulling the eye back and back again. Variable, but constant. Supernova.

  Their fingers found every ridge and valley I possessed. Every scar and pucker—I had been an adventurous young lady, if no more. Their fingers explored the steps of my spine, the bow of my collarbone. Tura asked me to name every piece of myself so they would understand, so they would know me the way they knew the trees. The shoulder, the breast, the knee. The freckles, the wrinkles, the marks of age. When a touch provoked a blushing response, the heat of my skin making my pleasure apparent even in the moonlight, Tura wanted to understand the why and the how—trees did not do this—and I said stars did not explain themselves, they just were.

  When I don’t remember my name, I will remember this.

  2

  I first came to the Irislands in Normandy with my husband and children, when I was thirty-five, in November of 2120. I am sixty-three now, which serves no great point other than to say I am older than I ever imagined myself being. Once, I could not imagine myself as thirty, so to have surmounted even that was something I did not like to linger over. My heart felt twenty then and feels twenty still, and it was always my mind having to call me back from this ledge or that, and even my mind was growing unreliable in its duties. Sometimes it remembered, often it did not.

  I came to Irislands as the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations. I still hold this title today, though Secretary-General Sugden does not call on me as often as he once did. Diplomats, like older women, had a way of outliving their usefulness, he said—though he had not believed himself overheard. Like men of all sorts, they never think their truest beliefs are heard beyond their own circles. If a thing is not meant for feminine ears to hear, they shall not hear it—and so I learned a good many things about the Secretary-General this way and did not even have to linger unseen around corners. He spoke where he would, assured that only those who the words were meant for would hear and understand their meaning.

  Sugden gave me a tour of Irislands—the house and land that had been allotted for my position—for it had been his own home before he rose to be Secretary-General, and moved into a house that was more befitting of one so titled. Irislands was more house than I had ever imagined and in the bleak November in which I first saw it, it had felt like something of a prison. Its gray stone walls were damp from rains and the moat that had once contained the property—a moat, can you believe it—was shallow and lumpy, bristled with coarse golden grass in the puddles that tried to collect. It would still flood, Sugden assured me—but then everything flooded in the world we inhabited.

  Irislands proved itself no prison, but a sanctuary, for beyond its damp gray face (and I should have known better than to judge an old lady by her face), the house revealed its wealth and glory, a garden unlike any I had seen filling perhaps three acres. And everywhere, iris. A great ocean of blue and purple and white, flecked with yellow as the sea is flecked with foam. They had been planted in generous beds, with wide walks between them, so that one could stand amid the color and simply breathe, as I later came to discover. It seemed more a park than a garden, but Sugden shrugged that idea off when I said it, pointing to the overgrown lily pond, and far beyond it, the careful rows of apple trees in the orchard. You’ll have brandy in two years, he said; who knows, perhaps I left you some in the cellar.

  The cellar was another glory, so many of them having flooded and been made unusable, but here, even this close to the Seine, the cellar was dry and whole, the pantry stocked prior to our arrival. Sugden did find a cask of the brandy, too—calvados, he called it, and we drank a toast in the garden, to all that was to come, even though we could not imagine it there in the damp, for the moment that changed us was twenty-eight years distant. Twenty-eight years, but sitting in that garden all the while.

  My dearest friend, Delphine Chefridi, also lived on the neighboring property—not by luck, or fate, or any invisible hand. She too worked for the UN, as a scientific advisor, despite the fact that no one ever took action on anything she advised. Warming temperatures had ravaged the world, decimating crops and populations alike. Refugees across the world fled flooding rains t
o seek safer lands where they might farm and live, but what was safe today might not be tomorrow.

  The seas had risen a mere six meters—it was surely nothing to be concerned with, world governments insisted. All worlds changed; our task was to change with them, not argue with an entire planet. Humanity was too small, too insignificant, to cause the changes we were seeing. Full ice-cap melt would bring a sixty-five meter rise and we were nowhere near that, they said. Math, you will see, remains a difficult pursuit for some. Six meters was extraordinary and three and a half meters more than had been estimated in the days when humanity might have yet combated it.

  Even the Seine could not escape rising, taking cellars and subways and the catacombs along with it, changing the landscape of Paris herself. Delphine and I spent many long hours in the garden at Irislands, wondering what we two might do—of course it wasn’t just we two, though it felt that way, when no one took the warnings of Delphine’s entire department as truth, when I saw diplomatic mission after diplomatic mission end in catastrophe because of environmental concerns.

  The answer to what we might do seemed to be “nothing to save the entire world, don’t be ridiculous,” because humanity had turned its back on hope long, long ago. Investing in corporations instead of people was one sure way to bring about the end of those very people. The UN was largely an antiquated agency now—though we liked to think we still had our uses. Delphine gave up on that idea long before any others of us did, though Sugden let her remain in the house, given he had no intention of filling her position with another scientist who would plague his days.

  “He would sooner choke,” Delphine was fond of saying, though I always heard it as a wish that he would. Sugden, however, was never one to comply with what others wished of him, and he clung like a barnacle, enjoying every slosh of warming ocean tide.

  Though Delphine no longer haunted Sugden, she and I found the riddle of Irislands worth trying to solve. Irislands felt like a miracle, bursting with life in every corner. Its structure had not collapsed under the rain or floods, nor had it burst into flame during the drought years. Against all odds, Irislands had flourished.

  In those early days, Delphine helped me clear the overgrowth from the lily pond, until the black mirror of water was flecked with only pads and blooms. The lilies found a new life in the cleaned pond, a constant wash of color Delphine tried to capture on paper. Some mornings I would leave my kitchen to find a small watercolor tied to the doorknob, and I carried this with me to the pond, where Delphine waited with more. Each flower lasted four days, and Delphine saved them all with paper and paint, numbered and tied into booklets.

  As the years wore on, I went less and less to the pond and even the garden closest to the kitchen door, because sitting inside by the warm hearth was easier. If the gardens of Irislands were made for springs and summers, the interior of the house was made for winters, with its hearths and close rooms that held in the heat. I had never much thought about the constant pain of a body. It was not that I had overexerted myself, it was that each and every joint I possessed was sixty-three years old. Door hinges at sixty-three also do not fare so well without a little warmth and attention.

  But that garden. I knew every bit of it, and regarded it fondly from my window each morning after hauling myself from the warm cocoon of bed. I was there in spirit, if not body, studying the garden I had helped nurture these past decades. The world had grown more grim, leaders doing nothing to stem the tide of climate change across the planet—how did one fight fire tornadoes—but the garden at Irislands continued to thrive.

  It wasn’t simply my garden that prospered, either; Delphine and I had taken sharp notice how some ecosystems seemed resistant to the warming world. We sometimes traveled for the pleasure of sketching a landscape not so familiar, and though not as broadly as we might have once, even these small excursions showed us strange truths of the changing world. In places we had thought would be devastated, the ecosystem was developing as it always had—if not with more intensity. The Cascade Range, the Amazon rainforest, the Eastern Siberian taiga. In small and concentrated places, the world was thriving. We likened it to a dying system—how could we not—where while the majority of a structure perishes, small pockets show rally and resistance. These pockets would collapse when the system did, of course, but what could we learn from them in the meantime?

  When I rose one June morning to discover a dark shadow slashing across my garden, I thought that the collapse had begun. We had done what we could. But this was no gradual death; I didn’t know what had happened, but it was something terrible. It looked like the ground had been scorched, that something had plummeted from the sky and hit the edge of my lily pond. A meteor strike? I hadn’t heard a blessed thing!

  The damage was so concerning, I didn’t hesitate. I dressed more quickly than an old woman has a right to, and fled down the stairs and out the kitchen door. I should have grabbed a coat, for the day was chilly, the air damp, even though it was a June. I didn’t even have shoes on. My heart would not calm itself, and I thought this is how it ends, I shall run into the garden and my heart will give out, and the touch of the cool grass will be the last thing I know.

  Only I couldn’t remember the word grass.

  I looked at all that green, and how the smudge of black lay upon it and could not remember grass. I plunged into it, the green damp and cold beneath my bare feet, heading for whatever had blackened the ground, and the blackness moved and I recoiled.

  In that instant, the shadow (is that what it was?) looked normal. From this angle, it was only the shadow of a long branch ruffled with leaves, extending over the pond. I glanced up to see the very branch that cast the shadow, leaves moving in the cool breeze just as they should. But beyond the branch and its tree, the sky was a flat gray. A gray that covered the sun thickly enough that no shadow should fall anywhere.

  A look told me I was right—I wasn’t imagining it, I had not forgotten how shadows and light worked. Tree shadows spread over the pond, but anything that wasn’t a tree—every flower, every bush—was without shadow. Only the trees had shadows and they were all normal now, as if those shadows had become aware of me, and had snapped back into the places they knew they should occupy.

  There have been many moments where I considered what I do and do not know. Words have fallen from my vocabulary, and so too have events left me entirely. The past is more vivid a thing than the present—I remembered being twenty and in love so clearly, it was as if it happened yesterday, whereas yesterday could often be a blur. If I did not share the day with someone, it could be even more challenging to remember. What did I eat? What did I do? Did I wander into town?

  The iris trembled in the wind, and I became aware of exactly how wet it was, standing there in my bare feet. I straightened up and looked around again. Only tree shadows. Were my eyes failing me? I rubbed them but the shadows did not vanish, nor did any others appear; it was too cloudy a day.

  I exhaled.

  “All right,” I said. I wouldn’t call myself lonely—would anyone truly admit it?—but hearing my own voice often helped remind me where I was. Who I was. Now, I addressed the shadows.

  “My name is Bréone Hemmerli, and I am the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations.”

  I didn’t know what I expected, but nothing happened.

  Often, in diplomatic negotiations, I found myself in such circumstances. Neither side will want to begin, because going first exposes a perceived vulnerability. No one wants to admit they want something so dear—and yet, by coming to the table, they have already admitted such.

  This was not necessarily a negotiation, because I may well have imagined the entire scene—maybe there was enough light for shadows, so the trees were fine. But nothing else carried a shadow and unless they had all been Peter Pan’d into otherness, something was amiss.

  I thought to get Delphine, to see if she could see what I saw, but I also didn’t want to leave the garden, because the idea
that I was imagining it all was strong. If I brought Delphine and she didn’t see that only the trees had shadows, something was amiss with me. And if she did see the strangeness, what did it say of our world?

  It was curious what a body will grow accustomed to—staying in a single room all day because everything was where it should be, for instance, rather than venturing into a garden where things could so easily be improper.

  I had loved the garden at first sight, but had avoided it because it had come to frighten me with the way it did not change. That is the truth of it, isn’t it? I didn’t only stay inside by the warm hearth. I stayed inside because I could control that environment. I knew where the cups went and where the blankets were and where I had written myself notes of things to remember. Let us not linger over the fact that sometimes I forgot how doors worked and had once trapped myself inside because I could not remember pull instead of push. Nor that I could not bring myself to write those words down. To admit the lack.

  Neither was it easy to admit to the fear I had begun to harbor of the garden, given its riotous life. Droughts did not stop the flowers; they unfurled in sun or rain. The trees did not break in random snowstorms, but only seemed to dig themselves in deeper so they might grow thicker.

  Sugden told me the land had once belonged to Eleanor of Aquitaine—he said the land was magic, because she had built it into the dirt, into the roots, into the very structure. He spoke of her as though she were a witch, but he did this often with women, turning them into something he could never understand, as if they were not people just as him. I did not know if this was true—Irislands sits outside Rouen, and if Eleanor of Aquitaine ever came this far north, I didn’t know.