Fledgling

Remix of photos by Simon Delalande and Shashank Sahay

Fledgling

by Rudy Vener

Madison leaned forward with exaggerated care, bent down, and peered into the eyepiece of her younger brother’s backyard telescope.

There! In the center of the viewfield hung the Visitor. At least that’s what all the news feeds called it.

Without thinking, Madison reached for the eyepiece.

“Don’t touch it or I’ll lose focus,” warned Carter.

Madison rolled her eyes but pulled her hands back. It was his telescope after all. A fact which eleven-year-old Carter never tired of reminding his thirteen-year-old sister.

Even though scientists were still arguing whether or not the Visitor was alive, Madison had no doubts. None at all. To her it looked like a giant space-going manta ray. Though on Carter’s telescope the Visitor was the size of a pea on her dinner plate, she could still see a slow ripple that would take hours to travel across its distant surface. Scientists were arguing about that too. And about why it sometimes turned its pancake shaped body edgewise to the sun and sometimes fully faced it. If it had a face, which scientists also argued about.

The one thing nobody argued about was that it was changing course to approach the Earth.

“How big is it? ” Madison didn’t look away from the eyepiece.

“Big.” Carter sounded more excited than worried. “It’s three-thousand miles wide.”

“If it lands on Earth, it could cover the whole United States.” Madison felt a chill crawl up her back as she watched the Visitor.

“If it hits Earth there won’t be anything left.” Carter spoke with misplaced enthusiasm. “I mean the Chicxulub impactor that wiped out the dinosaurs was only five or six miles across.”

“Can you make it look bigger?” Madison didn’t take her eye from the telescope.

“No.” Now Carter sounded annoyed.

“The James Webb telescope pictures made it look huge.”

“This isn’t the James Webb telescope.” Carter let out an impatient huff. “If you want the Webb pictures, go inside and browse the NASA site.”

Madison made no reply. She watched the distant Visitor rippling its surface somewhere inside the orbit of Mars.

“Let me see now.” Carter stepped up to her elbow.

Madison peered through the eyepiece a few more seconds, but as the Visitor drifted toward the edge of the viewfield, she straightened up and backed away.

Madison watched her brother adjust his precious telescope’s aim and focus but soon gave up any hope of a second look. She crossed the backyard to the house and went inside.

Fifteen minutes later Madison sat on the edge of her parents’ bed next to Mom’s purse and coat, the corners of her mouth curved down. She watched Mom, standing in her black and silver maternity party dress and examining her swollen belly in the bathroom mirror.

Mom let out a deep sigh and applied her lipstick. She caught Madison’s eye in the mirror. “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to cook anything for you and Carter, but there’s still half a pizza from yesterday in the fridge.”

“Sure.” Madison gave an indifferent shrug. “I’ll just nuke it. Just like last time.”

She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice, but Mom heard it anyway.

“I’m sorry this happened so suddenly.” She turned and faced Madison. “But when the head of the geology department died, your father was selected to replace him. I have to be there for him—”

“Yeah, I know.” Madison swung one leg back and forth. She picked up her tablet, pretending to examine the images of the Visitor from the James Webb telescope.

From the corner of her eye Madison watched as Mom shook her head, gave herself one final hopeless look in the mirror, and trudged out of the bathroom, careful to keep her balance.

Madison flashed a memory of Mom gliding with that look-at-me strut she used when dressed up for Dad’s university functions.

Madison grimaced and stared at her screen, refusing to look any more at Mom’s bloated stomach where The Baby resided. “We’ll be fine.”

“Thanks, Maddie.” Mom gave her a distracted smile, gathered up her coat and purse, and left the bedroom.

Two weeks later Madison slumped on the couch in the family room, tablet on her lap, trying to come up with a hundred more words to pad a book report that was due tomorrow. If only she had read the book instead of just the online reviews. She picked up her phone and texted her best friend, Jarzene, for help.

“Maddie.”

She ignored Carter, hoping he’d get the message and leave her be.

“Maddie!”

Annoyed, she glanced up. “What?”

Carter sat cross-legged on the other end of the couch. He stared at the tablet balanced on his knees and listened to his earbuds. He looked up at her. For once he did not give her his I-know-stuff-you-don’t smirk.

“What?” Madison asked again, this time more softly.

“Skywatch just announced that the Visitor is now on an intercept course with the Earth.” Carter couldn’t hide the tremor in his voice.

Madison’s phone chirped with Jarzene’s reply, but she ignored it. She also ignored the tingle creeping up the back of her neck as she stared over at her little brother. “I thought it was going to miss us. You said it would miss us!”

“It changed course again.” Carter stared back. “They say it will be here in seventy-five days.”

With great effort, Madison pushed out of her mind—and off her face—a recent movie scene depicting the dinosaur-killing Chicxulub impact. But she swallowed hard.

Later that evening, after dinner, Madison picked up her dirty plate and carried it to the kitchen sink. She glanced at Mom, talking into her phone from just inside the family room. Carter sat at his place, ignored his own dirty dishes, and stared at Mom.

“I don’t need you here soon, or later!” Mom clutched her phone with white knuckles. “I need you here now. Right now!”

Mom’s voice held an edge Madison had never heard before. Especially not when she talked to Dad.

“Okay.” Mom relaxed her grip on the phone. “See you soon.”

“Is Dad coming home?” Madison was not taking anything for granted.

“Yes,” said Mom, “but it will still be an hour before he gets here, even with no traffic.” She put her free hand protectively over her distended belly.

“Can we watch TV until he shows up?” Carter pounced on this opportunity.

“Not on a school night.” Mom plodded into the kitchen and sank onto her chair. Madison took her place, too.

“What’s the point of school if the world is going to end in less than three months?” Madison wished she could snatch the words back, but it was too late.

“That’s ridiculous!” Mom frowned, deepening the lines at the corners of her eyes as she glanced in turn at Madison and Carter. “No one says the world is ending.”

“But the Visitor is coming straight to Earth.” Carter argued. “It will be here in two-and-a-half months. That’s what the Skywatch feed says.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world!” Mom slumped back in her chair and placed both hands over her stomach. “Whatever is happening out in space, here on Earth we’re going to make life as normal as possible.”

Madison wanted to protest, to argue. Didn’t Mom understand? Was she denying what was happening? But when she stared into her mother’s eyes, Madison saw no fear, no denial. She saw only fierce determination, strength, and love.

“Come here.” Mom held out her arms. Carter flew into them. Madison came more slowly. Mom hugged them as Carter clung to her, letting her embrace banish his terror.

At last Madison relaxed into Mom’s hug. For the first time since Carter’s announcement, she let herself find comfort in Mom’s arms. Also, for the first time she felt Mom’s pregnant belly. And for the first time she didn’t resent her unborn sister. When the kick thumped against her own stomach, she jerked back, her eyes growing wide.

Mom laughed. “She’s been doing that for a while.”

Madison exchanged a swift glance with Carter. A knot of tension she hadn’t even realized resided inside her chest relaxed. Just a bit.

“Okay,” she said. “We’ll go to school.”

“Yeah,” said Carter, “even if we’re the only ones there.”

“You won’t be the only ones.” A tiny smile flickered at the corners of Mom’s mouth. “Trust me on this.”

“Skywatch says it’s signaling.” The night sky was clear, and Carter fine-tuned the focus of his telescope before stepping away. He gestured Madison toward the eyepiece.

“What’s it saying?” She bent over the eyepiece and peered through it, careful not to touch the telescope. The Visitor looked noticeably larger than it had appeared just a few days ago. Madison thought of Mom’s unwavering trust in the future, her unborn sister, and refused to be afraid.

“No one knows,” replied Carter. “It’s using very low frequency radio waves, so it takes a long time to even record the message.”

“But that’s a good sign, isn’t it?” Madison continued to watch the Visitor. “If it’s trying to communicate, then it’s probably not going to just gobble us up.”

Carter took a long while to reply. “I guess you’re right.”

“Madison, put that away!” Mom’s voice broke into her concentration. “You know the rule, no phones at the dinner table.”

Madison looked up with a guilty start, her hands covering the phone on her lap.

“Sorry, Mom.” She slipped the phone into her jeans pocket.

Carter smirked. “I bet you were checking up on the Message.”

Madison gave Carter her best big sister glare. “As if anyone’s posting about anything else.”

“No one’s ever going to figure out what it means.” Carter bounced up and down in his chair.

Madison lifted both eyebrows at her brother. “How would you know?”

Carter aimed a smug grin her way. “Because we can’t even talk to dolphins, and they already live here on Earth.”

Mom slid a serving spoon into the big green bowl of pasta. “Can we table this subject during dinner?”

“What do you suppose the Visitor is saying?” Carter remained undeterred, by either Mom’s request or his own argument.

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” replied Mom.

She piled heaps of spaghetti in garlic Parmesan sauce onto their plates.

“Maybe it’s warning the Earth that we’re in the way of some super galactic wormhole construction project and we have to move!” Carter shoved a forkful of spaghetti into his mouth.

“Don’t be infantile.” Madison picked up her fork. “This isn’t some silly science fiction story.”

“It might be trying to communicate with humpbacked whales,” said Carter. He slurped a dangling strand of spaghetti. It flipped up and hit him on the nose. “After all, Dad says the message uses Ultra-Low Frequency radio signals. The kind we use to communicate with submarines.”

“This also isn’t an even sillier movie.” Mom lowered herself into her chair, sitting sideways to the table so her swollen belly didn’t get in her way. “Now enough about the Visitor’s Message and eat your dinner before it gets cold. Madison, go tell your father to come join us.”

Madison hopped out of her chair and hurried to Dad’s study. Before she could knock, his voice came through the closed door.

“We don’t know why the Chicxulub site is suddenly producing micro-tremors, which is why we need to send an investigatory team to Yucatán and gather data!”

Fist raised, Madison stood still.

“Of course it could be a coincidence,” Dad said. “No, I have no idea how a space-borne entity wider than our Moon could trigger earthquakes in a sixty-six-million-year-old astrobleme. These tremors are generating seismic waves with frequencies and patterns that we’ve never seen before. That’s why we need data!”

His voice lowered then, and Madison could not make out any more words. After a few seconds, she knocked.

“Dad, time for dinner,” she called.

“I’ll be right there,” he called back.

Half a minute later, Dad walked into the kitchen and sniffed with appreciation.

“Yum.” He bent down to kiss Mom who pretended to fend him off with her fork. Smiling, Dad sat at his place and reached for the serving bowl. “Please, pasta pasta.”

Madison felt Carter watching her watch their parents and forced herself to relax, smile, and eat.

Madison pulled the teabag out of the boiling water. Two teaspoons of sugar and a splash of half and half turned the hot liquid a light golden-brown, just the way Mom liked it. Picking up the plate of cookies, Madison carried them and the full mug into the family room. Mom sat on the couch, her feet raised onto an ottoman, talking to Dad on her cellphone.

Madison froze halfway to the couch when Mom’s voice rose in volume.

“I don’t care!” she shouted into her cellphone. “I don’t care that some fucking crater in Yucatan is going to be the greatest seismic event of the century! I don’t care that the Visitor is ninety-nine percent likely to orbit the Earth instead of colliding with it. I don’t care! I care that they closed the schools and our kids are stuck at home. I care that the town is shutting down services and looks like a ghost town. I care that our baby is due any time in the next two weeks and you are in fucking Mexico watching a fucking crater that you can’t even see because it’s under fucking water. That’s what I care about!”

Madison’s eyes grew wide. Mom never swore. She had never even imagined that Mom knew how. She stood paralyzed as the mug handle grew hotter in her hand.

Mom leaned her head on the back of the couch, eyes closed, listening to her phone. “Okay.” Her voice was quieter now. “Do you promise?” More listening. “What time tomorrow?” Another pause. “Thank you honey. I love you too. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Madison stood frozen until she saw Mom’s belly give a pronounced bulge from a sudden internal kick. Had her sister been offended by Mom’s language? Holding back a giggle, she carried the mug and cookies to the TV table.

At the clunk of ceramic on wood, Mom opened her eyes. “Thanks, Maddie.” She smiled. “Are you and Carter keeping busy?”

Madison’s giggles evaporated, her face grew hot, and she gave Mom a shaky smile. “We’re okay, Mom.”

“Good.” Mom closed her eyes again and drifted into a nap.

Madison sat on the carpeted floor of the family room next to Carter. Right behind her on the sofa, Mom held hands with Dad. He had just returned from the Chicxulub site in Mexico.

Madison leaned back, feeling the warmth of Mom’s knees against her back. Mom’s free hand ran through her hair as Madison kept her eyes on the screen. A news feed showed the devastation in Southern Mexico. On the Yucatan Peninsula more earthquakes rocked the ground. Drones flew over empty villages where not a single building remained standing. They swooped down for closeups of flattened trees, huge cracks in the ground, and the nearest evacuated town.

“When do you think school will reopen?” asked Carter out of nowhere.

After a long silence Dad said, “When all this stops.”

Madison hoped so. School had been closed for a week, but so had everything else as earthquakes, flooding and the weather turned the Mexican Gulf region into one prolonged disaster. And even here in Connecticut, the endless rain and the growing uncertainty kept parents and children close to home.

On screen, the camera zoomed in on the ocean, which continued to roil and steam as the drone swooped in for a closer view.

“It’s got to be the Visitor doing this,” said Carter. “But how is it doing it from space?”

“We don’t know it’s the Visitor,” said Mom. “Not for sure.”

“But the Visitor parked itself in geosynchronous orbit above the Chicxulub astrobleme.” Carter leaned back against Dad’s legs. “That can’t be a coincidence.”

Madison clenched her jaw. She was not about to ask her kid brother what a geosynchronous orbit was. While everyone’s attention was on the screen, she pulled out her phone and began researching orbits.

It was morning, or at least close to dawn.

Madison crept down the stairs. She avoided the third step from the bottom, the one that creaked. Carter followed behind her, keeping just as quiet.

At the entrance to the family room, they paused and peeked around the door frame. Mom and Dad sat on the couch watching the news feed. Mom’s head rested in the hollow of Dad’s neck. His left arm wrapped around her shoulders. The fingers of his right hand intertwined with hers, resting on her tummy where Madison’s sister waited to be born.

Mom and Dad had sent Madison and Carter to bed late last evening even as they stayed up through the night.

“Any minute now,” said Dad.

From his tense voice, Madison could tell he knew something was about to happen. Neither she nor Carter were going to miss it. Whatever it was.

Not that there was much to see. All the news drones had pulled back from the part of the ocean that covered the Chicxulub crater. They had to. The center of the half-submerged crater was now so hot it was boiling the ocean above it, and the resulting steam made close-up views impossible, even for the underground half of the crater. The drones hung fifty miles back, circling the hundred-mile-wide crater, invisible below the ocean and Yucatán peninsula. Watching. And waiting.

Madison and Carter watched and waited too. At least they did for fifteen minutes. Nothing happened. Madison was about to signal to Carter that maybe they should sneak back upstairs. Then through the steam, the surface of the ocean bulged.

“Ohh!” Madison couldn’t hold back her gasp.

Both Mom and Dad turned to look at her and Carter. They exchanged their official parent glances that somehow let them hold complete conversations in the blink of an eye.

“Carter, Maddie, come in.” Mom patted the couch cushion as Dad shifted over. “Sit down.”

Madison and Carter settled on the couch between their parents. Huddled beside Mom, Madison held hands with Carter and watched the screen. No one spoke as the thing, there was nothing else it could be called, emerged from the ocean. At first Madison thought the drones had switched to a view of some distant island. An on-screen scale showed it was two miles wide. But the bump rising out of the ocean continued to grow. It rose higher and higher until Madison was reminded of pictures she had seen of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. Except the thing continued to rise. It grew taller and taller. No longer a mountain, now it was a skyscraper. Its slick black sides gleamed from countless spears of incandescent flames jetting downward. Around it the seas boiled, steamed, and exploded from the red-hot liquid rock that rose with it. The nearer drones fell, one by one, until only one, which must have been a hundred miles away, caught the thing, now looking as straight as an arrow but for a growing bulge in its middle, rising faster and faster into the sky. As it rose, it spewed hundreds of white-hot jets of narrow flame from all over its sides. These blasted into the ocean and more steam erupted below it, as its enormous length rose upwards above the chaos and turmoil it left in its wake.

Squeezed up against Mom, Madison felt her unborn sister’s kick even through the riveting scene unfolding on the screen.

“It’s a baby Visitor.” She spoke without thinking, without hesitation, only with wonder.

“It doesn’t look anything like the Visitor,” Carter objected.

“How alike are caterpillars and butterflies?” Madison asked.

Mom took Madison’s icy hand and held it.

Madison, Carter, and their parents sat spellbound, watching the video from the distant drone. The creature rose straight up out of the boiling ocean, extending ten miles, twenty, fifty, a hundred miles in length. Its titanic body shed water and slag. It soared higher until its bottom end, looking like a giant snake tail, pulled up out of the gulf, out of the cloud of steam. The creature rose upward on its hundreds of jets, its black surface shimmering green, blue and red in the dawn’s light. It streaked up, up, into the sky, above the atmosphere. And then it was gone.

The ocean rushed in, filling the tremendous hole the newborn had left behind it. The seas boiled, sending clouds of steam miles into the air as the water exploded against the exposed magma. The ocean continued to roil and heave. Giant waves raced away to crash against whatever shores they encountered.

Madison, Carter, and their parents didn’t move. Together they watched satellite and space station images on the screen as the hundred-mile-long creature propelled itself away from the Earth and joined its mother in orbit.

That’s when Madison grew aware of a warm wetness spreading from the sofa cushion, and Mom announced in a strangely calm voice, “Honey, my water just broke.”

An hour had passed since Dad bundled Mom out to the car. It was Madison who remembered Mom’s hospital bag, packed for weeks in preparation for this day. At the last moment Dad had second guessed the birthing plan and dithered about leaving her and Carter alone at home.

“We’ll be fine.” Madison held up her phone. “You already agreed that thirteen is old enough to watch Carter. Just call us with updates.”

Now she and Carter, along with the rest of the world, watched the mother Visitor and her child continue to circle the Earth. By now, the entire world was feeling the earthquakes and tsunamis or preparing for them.

“Will we get tsunamis in Connecticut?” Madison wondered aloud.

“Nothing much.” Carter tapped at his tablet. “Nothing compared to Mexico, Florida, or Texas. Those guys are screwed.”

Carter kept her updated with the latest speculations from the Skywatch comments threads.

“Everyone agrees it’s the Visitor’s baby.” Carter glanced between his tablet and the newscast on their big screen. This showed satellite feeds of the Visitor child unfurling its cylindrical hatching form and spreading its body wide and flat.

Madison didn’t reply. She had figured that out way before now.

“They think the Visitors live in the Oort cloud,” Carter continued. “They think the mother Visitor and her baby can hear each other by detecting fluctuations they cause in the Earth’s magnetic field. Or by creating quantum interference. Or maybe something else.”

Madison let Carter ramble as she watched the newborn Visitor child, clutched her phone, and waited for news of her own newborn sister.

Be okay, she thought. Be okay. Was she wishing this for her sister, her mother, or the Visitor child? Maybe all three.

“But Dad, why do you have to go?” Madison tried to keep the whine out of her voice. “You just got home!”

It was a week since Mom had come back from the hospital with baby Andromeda. This would be Mom’s first time out of the house.

She, Mom, and Dad were putting on their coats before going out in the back yard to join Carter. Mom, her hair disheveled and eyes red with fatigue, tucked Andromeda inside her sling under her coat.

“Should I zip up all the way?” Mom fretted. “I’ve got to keep her warm, but she has to breathe too.”

“It’s not just me, Maddie.” Dad helped Mom adjust her coat zipper. “There’s a whole team of scientists who’ve been asked to join this effort. You know how important it is.”

Madison bit her lower lip and nodded. “But are you going to Sudbury or Vredefort?”

“Well, someone’s been doing their homework.” Dad smiled down at her.

“It’s not like I don’t have a tablet.” Madison narrowed her eyes. “And you didn’t say where.”

“He’s going to the Sudbury Basin in Ontario.” Mom’s tone held no room for argument.

“That’s right.” Dad zipped his own coat. “Another team will visit the South African astrobleme site. I’ll probably even be able to come home on weekends.”

Mom tucked her unruly hair under a cap. “You’ll definitely come home on weekends,” she corrected. “No probably about it.”

“What will you do if you find more Visitor children?” Madison stared at Dad without blinking.

Dad exchanged a swift glance with Mom. “They might just be impact craters from ordinary asteroid or meteorite impacts. They are much older than the Chicxulub crater. Billions, not millions of years old.”

“But what if they aren’t?” Madison persisted. “What if they’re a different kind of Visitor? Or what if there are Visitor craters under the oceans that we don’t know about?”

“We’ll be looking for them a lot harder now.”

“And what if we find one?”

“Then we’ll have to figure out what we can or should do.” Dad looked at her, his gaze steady.

At the door, Madison couldn’t stop asking, “Do you think they’ll come back?”

Mom put her arm around Madison and gave her shoulder a squeeze. “We don’t know, Madison. Right now, no one knows. But maybe someday you and Carter will.”

Madison didn’t reply, torn between wanting to be reassured, and proud that Mom and Dad were not treating her like a child.

Mom gave her shoulder another squeeze. “Now let’s go join Carter before he wonders where we disappeared to.”

They trooped into the darkness of the back yard. Their feet squelched in the mud and dead grass, rotting and stinking after a week of salty rain. This was the first clear night since the Visitors’ departure.

“Got anything to show us?” Madison stopped far enough back from Carter so she wouldn’t jostle him and ruin the focus.

“Wow! Do I! Take a look!”

Madison peered into the eyepiece. The two Visitors, mother and child flying close together, filled the viewfield.

“What will we do if they come back?” Carter asked.

“I doubt we’ll have another Visitor anytime soon.” Dad’s calm voice gave Madison a sense of security. “They obviously do things very slowly. The current theory is that they live way out in the Oort cloud. We’ll have millions of years to prepare, so don’t worry about it.”

Madison straightened up from the telescope and looked at the shadow of her younger brother’s dark outline against the starlit sky. She just made out his nod in the darkness and took a step back.

Mom brushed her hand on Madison’s cheek as she passed her to look into the eyepiece.

Madison gazed skyward and picked out the faint dot of the Visitor and her child. She would not worry about the Visitor’s eventual return. Dad was right, that would be such a waste of her life. Especially now that she could look forward to so much more of it.

END