Jon,
You will receive this when we leave the light. I write “when” because I cannot bear to write the other word on a page addressed to you. That is hope, not a report from the navigator.
We entered it six days ago. The observation windows turned white so gradually that I thought someone had closed a blind. We were halfway through breakfast. Ivo, who has the room opposite mine, lifted his cup to the glass and said the light made the tea look like milk.
He is eighty-one. He joined the voyage to see what people younger than him kept describing as impossible. My reason is less grand: your niece has settled on a planet with a difficult name, and I would like to see her kitchen before I die. She sends pictures. Pictures have never told me where a person keeps the spoons.
Our navigator is Mara. She came into the dining room that first morning and said we would be stopping while she determined a safe direction. I asked whether we had gone off the route. She said the route went through a space that no longer returned useful range measurements. She held up three images of a probe signal. Each showed what looked to me like an untidy ball of thread.
“The same object?” I asked.
“The same transmission.”
“Could we go back the way we came?”
“We have that course stored. The probes sent back along it give the same tangle. We can reverse without checking, but I won’t take passengers through a path we can no longer measure.”
Ivo asked for copies. He was delighted. I was annoyed that he could be.
We stopped, and the engines settled into a hum that sounded no different from travel. Outside, there was no dark point, no line, no place for my eyes to rest. We could close the shutters. I did, but Ivo left his open, even when he slept.
By the second day we had learned that our messages were not passing out. The ship could maintain air and food for months. Those assurances came from people who had checked the stores, and I believed them. They did not make the dining room larger. I began eating quickly because I wanted to go somewhere else, then found there was nowhere else I particularly wanted to be.
On the third evening I asked whether anyone wished to pray with me. I said we could gather in the room beside the laundry, where the dryers made a steady noise. Six people came. One had never prayed before. Another said she knew prayers in a language I could not follow and hoped that would be all right.
We pulled the chairs into a circle. A laundry basket remained between two of them because there was no other space. When I began, I called the light a trial, then asked for a way through it and for patience while the crew looked for one. The man who had never prayed kept his eyes open. At the end he said thank you very politely, as if I had offered him cake.
Ivo came the next evening. I was glad until he asked why I was asking to be taken away from the only thing most of us had never seen before.
“Because I want to reach my daughter.”
“So do you have to say it’s something to escape?”
“I didn’t call it evil.”
“You called it a trial.”
The dryer clicked off. In the sudden quiet, everyone could hear the laundry basket creak beneath the weight of the clothes. I had meant our waiting, not his delight. He had heard something else.
“What would you ask?” I said.
He rubbed his thumb along the edge of his chair. “I don’t know who you’re asking. But I’d like not to waste this.”
The woman who prayed in another language spoke next. Her son worked in the engine room. She wanted him to sleep. That was the prayer she had come to make. We sat for a while, and I said her son’s name, then your niece’s, then the names other people gave me. I did not know a name for Ivo’s request.
You once said that prayer seemed to you like posting letters into a box without knowing whether anyone collected them. I answered too quickly then. I knew the quotation that would oppose you; I did not know how to tell you what I did when the box remained closed.
On the fifth day Mara brought new images. Until then, the probes had sent their signals together, and the light had bounced them back in overlapping echoes. Now the crew sent one, waited for its return, then sent the next. Most still came back tangled. But in one narrow direction, a signal returned without overlapping itself.
“Like hearing one person in a crowded room?” I asked.
“Like finding the person without mistaking an echo for someone else,” she said. “Now we have to find out how far that clear path goes.”
They repeated the test, then changed direction a little and repeated it again.
Ivo asked to watch. She said he could sit in the observation room if he stayed behind the rail and didn’t talk during readings. He agreed with an earnestness I had not seen from him when she asked passengers to return used cups.
I stayed with him for one interval. Nothing changed outside the window. On the screen, numbers changed faster than I could read them. Mara and her colleague barely spoke. At one point he indicated a row; she shook her head and made him repeat the transmission. The clear line disappeared. They tried again.
There was no revelation for me to recognize. Ivo watched until the meal bell rang, then asked whether someone could bring him food. Mara pointed toward the door. He got up, displeased, and went with me.
“Do you think it’s God?” he asked as we walked.
“I think I want it to mean something.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“No.”
I did not say more. He did not ask again. We ate lentils and something the menu called a peach. He talked about the real peaches in his mother’s yard. I told him about the summer you and I were sent to pick fruit and ate enough to make ourselves sick. For a while we were two people who had come a very long way from trees.
This morning Mara announced they had found a direction they could test at low speed, marking their passage with the probes. We had to return to our rooms for departure. Ivo sat beside his open shutter. I closed mine, then opened it a hand’s width.
The light remained white. I prayed. I did not ask it to give me a sign that the navigator was right. I asked to be able to wait without making my fear everyone else’s task. Then I was frightened for another hour.
There is a black edge at the window now. It is growing. Ivo called across the corridor to say he could see stars, and I heard him laugh before I could see them myself. The communication indicator has turned green. This letter will leave before I decide whether it says enough.
Tell my daughter I am still coming. Tell her I would like to cook one meal in her kitchen, if she will show me where things are. You need not tell her anything about God on my behalf. I will have to find the words when I get there.
Elin
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