“I love you,” Peter said. “I think I always have.”
“And I love you.”
She drew herself closer against him; Peter replied in kind. He took her left hand, slipped her fingers through his, pulled it to his chest, and held it there.
“Michael’s right,” she said. “We should sleep.”
“All right.”
Soon she felt his breathing slow. It eased into a deep, long rhythm, like waves upon the shore. Amy closed her eyes, although she knew it was no use. She would lie awake for hours.
—
On the deck of the Nautilus, Michael was watching the stars.
Because a person could never grow tired of them. All his many nights at sea, the stars had been his most loyal companions. He preferred them to the moon, which seemed to him too frank, always begging to be noticed; the stars maintained a certain cagey distance, permitting the mystery of their hidden selves to breathe. Michael knew what the stars were—exploding balls of hydrogen and helium—as well as many of their names and the arrangements they made in the night sky: useful information for a man alone at sea in a small boat. But he also understood that these things were an imposed ordering that the stars themselves possessed no knowledge of.
Their vast display should have made him feel tiny and alone, but the effect was exactly the opposite; it was in daylight that he felt his solitude most keenly. There were days when his soul ached with it, the feeling that he had moved so far away from the world of people that he could never go back. But then night would fall, revealing the sky’s hidden treasure—the stars, after all, weren’t gone during the day, merely obscured—and his loneliness would recede, supplanted by the sense that the universe, for all its inscrutable vastness, was not a hard, indifferent place in which some things were alive and others not and all that happened was a kind of accident, governed by the cold hand of physical law, but a web of invisible threads in which everything was connected to everything else, including him. It was along these threads that both the questions and the answers to life pulsed like an alternating current, all the pains and regrets but also happiness and even joy, and though the source of this current was unknown and always would be, a person could feel it if he gave himself a chance; and the time when Michael Fisher—Michael the Circuit, First Engineer of Light and Power, Boss of the Trade and builder of the Bergensfjord—felt it most was when he was looking at the stars.
He thought of many things. Days in the Sanctuary. Elton’s blind, rigid face and the hot, cramped quarters of the battery hut. The gassy stink of the refinery, where he had left boyhood behind and found his course in life. He thought of Sara, whom he loved, and Lore, whom he also loved, and Kate and the last time he had seen her, her compact youthful energy and easy affection for him on the night when he had told her the story of the whale. All so long ago, the past forever retreating to become the great internal accumulation of days. Probably his time on earth was reaching its end. Maybe something came after, beyond one’s physical existence as a person; on this subject, the heavens were obscure. Greer certainly thought so.
Michael knew that his friend was dying. Greer had tried to conceal it, and nearly had, but Michael had figured it out. No one thing in particular had told him this; it was simply his sense of the man. Time was outstripping him—as, sooner or later, it did everyone.
And, of course, he thought about his ship, his Bergensfjord. She would be far away now, somewhere off the coast of Brazil, churning south beneath the selfsame starry sky.
“It’s beautiful out here,” Alicia said.
She was sitting across from him, reclining lengthwise on the bench, a blanket covering her legs. Her head, like his, was tipped upward, her eyes glazed by starlight.
“I remember the first time I saw them,” she continued. “It was the night the Colonel left me outside the Wall. They absolutely terrified me.” She pointed toward the southern horizon. “Why is that one so bright?”
He followed her finger. “Well, that’s not a star, actually. It’s the planet Mars.”
“How can you tell?”
“You’ll see it most of the summer. If you look closely, you can see that it has a slight red tint. It’s basically a big, rusty rock.”
“And that one?” Directly overhead this time.
“Arcturus.”
In the dark, her expression was hidden from his view, though he imagined her frowning with interest. “How far away is it?”
“Not very, as these things go. About thirty-seven light-years. That’s how long it takes the light to get here. When the light you’re seeing left Arcturus, we were both a couple of kids. So when you look at the sky, what you’re actually seeing is the past. But not just one past. Every star is different.”