New Decameron Eighty-Eight: Leah Cypess (Patreon)

Distant Like the Stars

by: Leah Cypess

Every important moment of my life has happened in front of a Door.

That’s not true, of course. But right now it feels that way.

The Door in front of me is more primitive than any I’ve seen for years, a gray-green rectangle with the dimension-detangler thrumming on its left side, a jumble of cords and chips and tiny flashes of light. But it will work. As soon as I open the Door, it will unwind the extra dimensions of spacetime between this Door and the Door on Earth. All I’ll have to do is step through, and I’ll be back.

The purple-grass plain where they built the Door is crowded with spectators, a solid line of eager faces pushing up against the electronic barrier. The few people on this side of the barrier – Bella and three other councilors – are silent and composed. The clouds sweep by overhead, pushed swift and free by the southern wind. The familiar itch crawls beneath my skin, as if I am so trapped that my own body is part of the cage. My legs tremble with the need to run, to run and run until I am far away and free.

But there is nowhere to run. There never is, not any more.

The unraveler is a faint buzz in the palm of my left hand. This part, too, will work simply. All I have to do is touch the unraveler to the correct cord, and the Door will be gone.

Rage and desperation swirl through me, and I know this isn’t going to be as hard as I thought it might be. It isn’t going to be hard at all. I am a cornered animal, and it amazes me that no one here sees it.

That they honestly think I’m going to open their Door.

#

I was six years old the last time I stood in front of a Door this clunky. Back then, it was the latest version, and of course, my parents were the first to have the newest model installed.

There were so many people watching me – a dozen executives from the company that had invented Doors, some foreign leaders, and hundreds of members of the press. My mother led me to the Door and then let go of my hand. When I looked up, waiting for her to activate it, she said, “You do it, Sylvana.”

The tension of the watchers was palpable. Even the confused but trusting child I had been could feel it, coiling through the air. I can’t remember if I sensed that it was also coiling around me, trapping me into a narrow tube of a life, with only one possible future.

It still amazes me that they let it happen that way. My mother let her love of publicity overcome her better judgment. Skill or not, how likely was it that a nervous six-year-old could focus enough to open a Door for the first time, on her first try?

What she didn’t know was that it wasn’t my first try. Despite my parents’ firm admonishments against it, I had been opening Doors for almost a year, ever since I first figured out how to make them work by turning the handle with my brain as well as my hand. I couldn’t resist the thrill of stepping through that twisted metal frame into a vast desert or a snow-covered city or a tropical beach and feeling the distant air filling my small body.

I could open the Doors, but I didn’t know how to set their coordinates, so I always ended up following the coordinates of whoever had used that Door before me. And when I stepped through the Door on the other side, and discovered where I was, and how far from where I had been a second ago, I would first take a deep breath and then laugh aloud in delight.

When I was home, it was as if I only pretended to breathe. As if the air in that spacious mansion pressed down on me from all sides, constricting my ribcage, making me itch with the desire to get away. Back then, I thought the Doors were an escape, not a part of the trap. Back then there had only been a few hundred Doors in the world, a few hundred places I could reach simply by setting the coordinates and taking a few steps.

So I smiled up at my mother with precocious confidence as I placed one hand on the side of the Door and focused. It had taken me a while to get it right, that little twist of the mind, but by now I could do it without half trying.

As always, the Door responded to my mental push, and I felt something vast and incomprehensible unfurl and twist away. The space inside the Doorway went clear and bright. Through it I could see – we could all see – rough golden cobblestones beneath a fiercely blue sky.

“Care to have lunch in Jerusalem?” my mother said, and the watchers burst into applause. I was the twenty-seventh member of the Fastein family to demonstrate an ability to open Doors. Outside of my family, there were less than a hundred people from the entire human population who had proven they could do it.

I grinned so hard my face hurt, proud of my skill, glorying in the attention, and most of all, eager to step through the Door. I had never been to Jerusalem before.

That was before I realized that there was nowhere I couldn’t go – and that no matter where I went, I was never far away from home at all.

#

It feels the same now, the weight of the people watching me. Their hushed expectation, their held breaths.

What’s different is the startling intensity of my hatred for them, for each and every hypocritical one of them.

They promised. And they stand here without shame, waiting for me to break their promise for them.

Rage flares within me. I am not six years old anymore. This time, I know exactly how I would be trapping myself if I open that Door. And I’m not about to let it happen. Not when I’ve finally discovered what it feels like to be free.

#

The year I started high school there was a rash of teenage suicides, spanning every country where Doors had become commonplace. One famous suicide note, the first to go viral, explained the reason: “I can’t take knowing that I can never get far away from this town, that there is no such thing as far away.”

At fourteen, I was attuned to trends. I locked myself in the bathroom and held a kitchen knife to my wrist. I tried pressing down and sliding it against my skin, but it hurt. I covered the tiny cut with a bandaid, returned the knife to the cabinet, and never tried again.

In retrospect, I’m not sure even a suicide attempt would have convinced my mother of how desperately trapped I felt. She laughed off my bouts of depression as a typical teenage phase. And maybe she was right, but I couldn’t see through to the other end of it.

A popular song by the Leptons, “Death is the Only Away,” was banned after a group suicide at a dance club. It became more insanely popular than before. I played that song over and over, locked in my room, its urgent desperate rhythms the only thing that calmed me. It was as if the same discordant pulse ran through my blood, as if I couldn’t stand being inside my own body. I needed to burst out of my skin, I needed to run, and there was absolutely nowhere to go. I could fly to the other side of the world, and I still wouldn’t be any farther from my home than I ever was.

My mother didn’t worry about me, not even for a second. She went on installing new Doors, creating our famous international home: the living room in Tokyo, the kitchen in Rome, my bedroom in New York City, our front porch in Costa Rica. With every Door, she told me, she expanded our horizons. And with every Door, I felt my cage growing smaller and smaller. Every time I turned around, the bars were a little bit closer.

I tried explaining that to my mother, once. The conversation didn’t go well.

#

Someone begins to clap, prematurely, and is hushed. I squash the urge to look at the crowd, and keep my eyes focused on the Door.

#

Until they built the ship, the Alfians had never been more to me than a weird fringe religious group. But after they announced they would not allow Doors on the planet they were headed to, I formally converted, and then I spouted religious convictions until the moment the ship’s hibernation gas silenced me.

But it’s always dangerous hitching a ride with people whose agendas are not your own. The Alfians did not, like some other religious groups, consider the Doors an abomination – at least, most of them didn’t. They just liked the idea of separating themselves from the values that had become part of the majority culture on Earth. It’s not easy being a minority in a society with instantaneous communication and transportation. Seventy light years seemed to them like just the right amount of separation.

A noble goal, or a ridiculous one, depending on your point of view. In any case, it lasted all of four years. When we landed, the first thing we discovered was that Earth now had instantaneous communication, and could use the technology already on our ship to send us real-time messages. The pressure to build a Door began immediately. We were promised luxuries shipped from Earth, supplies to help us in case of emergency, refuge in case we had to evacuate. Words like “safety” and “trapped” and “mutual benefit” were used over and over.

The Council debated the Door for a year, deciding whether to even submit it to the people for a vote. That was illegal and undemocratic, and the ruckus over it was still going on.

The last meeting, before the final vote, lasted two days. Some people gave up and went home, but not me, nor any of the other die-hards. I gave the last speech, but all my carefully-prepared arguments fell away under Bella’s hard barbs, and finally, almost in tears, I said, “Some of us came here to get away from Doors.”

They all just looked at me, faces blank.

I didn’t stay to watch the votes counted. The next morning I set out on an expedition to map the southern portion of the continent, and when I came back five months later, the Door was almost finished.

The night I returned I got drunk, drunker than I had ever gotten since the day I determined that I was going to be on the Alfian ship. The next morning I logged onto the intranet using a passcode nobody knew about, and started searching for people who would hate the Door as much as I did.

#

I take a second step toward the Door and raise my hand. The unraveler hurts, a constant tremor beneath my skin. I made sure no one else will be harmed when I use it, but I didn’t ask whether it was safe to imbed it in my hand. I don’t want to know the answer.

Besides, it’s a good reminder. My whole body once tingled like this, with the need to get out from my stifling life, to run until I was out of breath, until I was somewhere I had never been before. I would have done anything to get away. To make a place that was far away, now that there wasn’t anyplace like that left on Earth.

I finally found that place, a world with lavender grass and unexplored continents and three bright red moons. And now all these people want to take it away.

#

Ironically, back on Earth, I had to step through a Door to get to the Alfian ship. We all did. There were a few anti-Door diehards – the cultist who gave me the unraveler was one of them – who tried to fly. But there were very few planes left, and passage on them was extremely expensive.

I had flown once. Expensive was not a problem for my family. It was a thrill, lifting up away from the earth, watching everything below get smaller and more distant. Soaring above the clouds, speeding over a blanket of white. It was the best feeling. Eleven hours, and then we touched down in a distant land, where huts were raised on stilts above turquoise water and palm trees were framed by distant blue mountains.

But I recognized it. I had been to Bora Bora many times before, as a child. I had stepped through the Door and out of one of those huts, onto the graceful series of bridges that stretched into the sea. The palm trees and the raised bungalows were familiar to me. I just hadn’t known what the place was called.

I can still taste it, as if it were yesterday: my vast disappointment upon realizing that all the distant lands I dreamed of visiting were places I had already been.

That there was no such thing as a distant land, or a distant anything. Not when every single place in the world was only a few steps away.

#

Someone steps up next to me, and out of the corner of my eye I see a solid mass of bushy black hair. Bella. I turn to stare at her, and she smiles at me. But not for me. Her smile is for the cameras to capture. Bella never misses a photo op.

Bella thinks we are still friends, even after she stood up in Council and made the winning argument for opening the Door. I haven’t bothered to disillusion her, because being friends with Bella is really not much different from not being friends with her.

Bella has random weird ideas that get into her mind and stick like burrs, becoming beliefs of which she is strenuously convinced. Alfianism is one of those ideas. The value of the Door later became another. Another of her weird ideas is that since the two of us shared a double hibernation chamber on the journey over, we have a connection that even our mutual anger can’t sever.

It’s a good thing I never tried to talk her out of that one. In the end, it came in useful.

#

After I made contact with a separatist cult, allied myself with people who made my skin crawl – and who, I reminded myself, still didn’t share my agenda – I spent the night on the roof of my home, watching two of the three red moons arc across the sky, trying to decide if I was really going to do this. Trying to convince myself that I didn’t have to. That maybe, if I didn’t open the Door, no one else would be able to.

Door technology has one significant limitation, one that used to get beaten to death every night on the religion channels. No preacher or rabbi or ascetic could get through a speech without pausing to revel in the fact that manipulating the hidden dimensions of spacetime is something no machine can do. It takes machines to do it, of course, but the machines can’t run on automatic. No theoretical reason why they shouldn’t, they just don’t. A person has to be there, doing whatever it is he or she does – push a button, pull a lever, it makes no difference as long as it’s being done by a person and not a machine.

And as long as the person has the skill to pull it off.

A human being has to be there every time a Door is opened, which means anyone with the skill has guaranteed life-long employment. In theory, anyone can do it, which is what the pro-Door Alfians were counting on. But it requires a certain type of mental focus, what I think of as a twist of the mind. Like most skills, some people can’t do it at all, some people are better at it than others, and a proclivity for it seems to run in families.

But in only a few families. The Senguptas. The Akwals. The Balashovs. And most famously – because we had been discovered first – the Fasteins.

There were no Senguptas or Akwals or Balashovs on this planet. But there were twenty thousand other human beings, and the Council was prepared to let each one have a try. The ability to open Doors, it had once been estimated, existed in one out of every ten thousand people in the general population.

Maybe I could risk it.

But as the moons faded beneath the horizon, and the sky went black, I felt that old trapped feeling creeping up on me. I had almost forgotten what it felt like to see your future stretching ahead of you as a thing to be dreaded, to know that the best you could ever hope for was becoming used to dragging yourself through life. To know that there was no way out, nowhere to go, no hope to grasp for.

The absence of the moons made the stars bright and sharp and glittering, as if I could reach out my hand and touch them. I turned my face away from them and began to cry.

#

With the unraveler humming through my skin, I allow myself to glare at Bella, and see her eyes widen. As if, in that moment, she finally does understand how desperate I am.

Too late. I’m too close for anyone to stop me now.

#

I arranged to meet Bella in a little coffee shop on Earth Street, a cozy nook with green couches in the corners and outrageously expensive but really good pastries. It was the same place we’d met last, before that Council meeting, where I had made a futile effort to change her mind. It had been a disastrous conversation. Bella’s mind is not conducive to change, not when it comes to one of her Ideas.

This time, I didn’t bother trying to make her understand. I got straight to the point over a plate of axenberry pie. “I want to be the one who opens the Door.”

“As an act of contrition?” Bella’s voice was so laden with sarcasm it was amazing she managed to fit the actual words in.

Apparently, I hadn’t done as good a job as I thought of pretending we were still friends. In which case, I had nothing to lose, so I didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm out of my own voice. I hated Bella as much as I had once hated my mother, but with better cause. “You can sell it that way, if you want. The last retrograde opponent seeing the error of her ways. You could make a lovely speech out of it.”

Bella watched me through steely dark eyes. She had colored her hair back then, so her face was an artful shaded palette: eyes almost black, skin medium-brown, golden hair framing her intense expression. “All right, then. Forget why you want it. Why on all the planets would we let you do it?”

Deep breath. There was no turning back, once I said it. But the Door was going to be completed in two days, and once people had access to Earth libraries, they would find out anyhow. “Because I’m a Fastein.”

She looked at me for a moment as if she had not heard me, or not understood. Then she said, “What?” And then, before I could answer, “It was you?”

I shrugged, and she continued looking at me. In the silence, I could hear the murmur of conversations from tables around us: a woman planning a mapping expedition, a teenage couple doing an amateur job of flirting, someone talking about how he missed the blue sky. This was what I had wanted to be, for all of my life: just a normal person, the sort who could sit in a coffee shop unfettered by talent or responsibility, by a skill I hadn’t asked for, a skill my parents had used IVF to make sure I was born with. My two older sisters had been duds, Fasteins without the Fastein Skill, and they had wanted to make sure they passed it on to at least one child. Because it was so important.

I had been so tired of being important. And here I was, setting myself up to be important again. To be the most important person on the planet.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you never can escape, even without the Doors. Maybe I’ve only lulled myself into believing it was the Doors that kept me feeling trapped.

“I can prove it,” I said, since Bella still hadn’t said anything.

She shook her head. “That won’t be necessary. I can see it now. You have the Fastein features.”

No, I don’t. But people always insist on seeing them, once they know who I am.  “Why?” Bella said finally. “After all your opposition, why would you want to open the Door for us?”

“Because I want to be gone,” I spat, and the desperation in my voice was real. 

Not that it is truly possible to be gone, of course. Not anymore. Not ever.

#

I turn away from Bella and stretch my left hand toward the dimension-detangler. The buzz of the unraveler intensifies as it gets closer to the Door. Once I lock it onto the detangler, it will destroy the Door in a blinding flash of light, and – in theory – send this entire area of multi-dimensional spacetime into a tailspin, which will make construction of a new Door next to impossible.

I take a deep breath, close my eyes for just a second, and take the necessary step forward.

The Door buzzes, and a familiar voice says, “Is everything all right on your end?”

I stop moving. My whole body goes hot, and then cold.

“Mom?” I whisper.

#

When my mother figured out what was behind my conversion to Alfianism, she did everything in her power to keep me off the ship. She had a judge declare me incompetent, she sued the Alfians for undue influence, she got a celebrity to make it his own personal cause.

I heard about all her efforts later – much, much later – after I awoke from hibernation. Luckily for me, I had managed to keep her from finding out what I was up to until the ship was gone, and I had hidden my identity so well that she couldn’t specify which Alfian was really her daughter. Without that information, even she couldn’t make them turn the ship around.

But watching the news vids, my blood ran cold, realizing just how close she had come.

I watched them all, every single one of her tearful and pleading and angry interviews, and I still don’t know if she ever understood why I had to leave.

In retrospect, my mother probably had claustro-anxiety. It was a new phenomenon when I was young, a fringe psychopathy that got a lot of press but primarily affected the already unstable. By the time I left, it affected a quarter of the population of developed countries. People so used to being able to go anywhere that the fear of being trapped without a Door paralyzed them. Among the more extreme cases, the thought of any place without a Door induced anxiety. 

It was sufferers of claustro-anxiety who started the Open Doors movement, financing the creation of Doors in underdeveloped countries, making the world a vastly different place.

A larger place, my mother liked to say. A more free society. And maybe, in most ways, it was.

But to me, the world felt smaller every time I opened my eyes.

I was seventeen when I first read an article about the Alfian expedition. I dreamed about it for weeks. About the ship heading far, far away, to a completely new place among the distant stars. 

A place that will never be far away again, unless I do what I came here to do and use the unraveler buzzing beneath my skin.

#

There is silence on the other side of the Door. My heart pounds so hard it hurts more than the buzz in my palm.

A sudden crackle fills the space between the gray-green metal, and then I see her. It’s clearly a projected image – it crackles and wavers – and even that shouldn’t be possible, with the Door not yet opened, but who knows how technology has advanced back on Earth? The sight of her hits me like a blow. Dark hair coiled above an elegant neck, high tilted cheekbones, large dark eyes. I look into those eyes and feel my breath tighten in my throat.

With one motion of my hand, I can sever this unasked-for connection, reestablish the light years that I tried to put between us.

“Hello, Mother,” I say, the words scraping their way out.

She blinks at me and smiles. My mother hasn’t smiled at me like that – like I am a truly welcome sight – since the day I tried to tell her how much I hated the Doors.

“They say I look like her,” she says, and my brain belatedly kicks into gear to remind me that the last time I saw my mother was seventy years ago in Earth years. “Welcome to Earth, Aunt Sylvana. We’ve been expecting you.”

Not my mother. My mother is long dead. Even on the other side of this Door, she doesn’t exist.

What else might have ceased to exist in seventy years? What else might have changed?

I don’t know. Possibilities unfurl before me, for the first time since the Council approved construction of the Door.

I clench my fingers around my left palm, lift my other, silent hand, and open the Door.

#

Once again, now that I’m on Earth, I have to step through a Door to get to the ship. But I have to step through a Door to get anywhere. Seventy years in the future, there is no other way to travel.

I don’t go many places. Only two, actually. The second is the office of the highly-paid doctor who removed the unraveler from my palm and checks regularly to monitor the damage. With time, he says, I might have almost full use of that hand again.

The exorbitant fee I pay him isn’t for the removal or the therapy. He’s being paid to keep his mouth shut.

“Another four months, more or less,” the ship designer tells me. He has grown used to my weekly visits. It’s amazing how quickly people can adjust, and how fast they can work, when you pay triple their usual rate. “Then she’ll be ready to fly.”

Away, into the dark vastness of space. I can’t help but thrill to that thought, even though I know – now – that there is no such thing as distance. Not any more.

When I get to Ariesta, the almost-certainly-habitable planet my consultants have recommended, my fellow colonizers will not be Alfians. I’ve selected a mixed group of idealists, wanderers, and persecuted people. No one with a firm theological objection to Doors.

It doesn’t matter how far we go. Once we get there, once we have time to build a Door, Earth will be only a step away.

But it will be a different Earth, because Ariesta is a lot farther away than Simalion. We will wake from hibernation not seventy years in the future, but five hundred. When we do build the Door and step back onto Earth, it will be a completely different place, one I’ve never seen before. A land strange and new and far removed from anything I have ever known.

And if it isn’t, I can do it again. I can’t get farther away in space, not in a way that matters. But I can move as far as I want into the future.

I won’t fight my fellow colonists, this time, when they decide to make a Door. In fact, I can’t wait to stand in front of it.

*********************************************

"Axenberry pie?" he offers. Maya reaches out and takes it.

"Pie from another planet," she says. There's a swirl of cream, and the berries are bright blue under the crisp flaking pastry shell. She tastes it, hesitantly, then grins. "Yum!"

"No doubt whether you're a xenophile," he says. 

"I wish those Doors were real. I'd go. I'd get away."

"But the whole point was that there wasn't any away," he says. "Except the future."

"Time and distance, like in those bits of Perhaps the Stars," Maya says. "Those Doors would really ummake distance. I suppose it depends on whether you like it or not. I want there to be new places. But there always would be."

"New places," He smiles to himself. "If you've eaten your pie, we should take the next couple of books downstairs and read them in the light. It's getting too dim up here."

"OK." Maya scrapes up the last smear of cream and axenberry juice and puts the plate down. He picks up a couple of books, and they make their way downstairs to their table at the back. The cat is curled up on Maya's chair. He gets up when they arrive and then settles himself on Maya's lap. She switches on the green-shaded lamp.

"S,B. Divya," he says.

"Author of Runtime!" Maya says, enthusiastically.

"This is the beginning of a new novel, coming out next year. It's called Machinehood," he says, handing her the book.

"Oooh," Maya says. And they read.