Scott Westerfeld: Touching Darkness

Dess rolled out of bed.

The big problem was measuring all this stuff. The blue time didn’t come with street signs and trig tables, and you couldn’t Google it for more details. When she pumped Melissa for data, Dess always hid her thoughts, not wanting to reveal her sudden interest in the mindcaster’s reception problems. For some reason, Dess wanted to keep this discovery her own little secret… Well, okay, she knew the reason. Rex and Melissa definitely had their secrets, after all, and Jessica and Jonathan were so far up Couple Mountain, she was considering sending a rescue team. This thing was hers.

But her secrecy didn’t leave Dess much to work with, just midnighter gossip and her dad’s oil-drilling maps. And those she had to borrow in the middle of the night.

“Speaking of which…” It was 1:25 A.M. now, a solid 16,500 seconds before the old grump’s alarm clock went off, if he was working this weekend. The perfect time to do a little map math.

Dess swung her bare feet to the floor, feeling the wind pushing up between the ancient boards. She tested her weight against the wood—some nights were creakier than others. Her bedroom door opened silently thanks to her weekly treatments of WD-40. (Sometimes it was useful having a dad who’d wanted a son.)

The wind was fierce tonight, a low, insistent moan marked by the beat of a loose shutter somewhere in the trailer park across the field in back. Thankfully, there were enough random creakings throughout the house to cover any noise she might make.

In the middle of the Living room was a big flat file, the metal top marked with rust circles the exact circumference of a Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle. Among the empties and bottle caps filled with cigarette ash was a row of precisely arranged remote controls that she rarely touched. Dess had done her parents’ taxes and paid their bills for them since she was a kid, but she did not do VCR manuals.

Over the last week she’d already worked her way through the top three drawers of maps, so Dess carefully slid open the fourth one down. The dark smell of Oklahoma crude emerged, the scent that signified Dad to some part of her brain and brought to mind the black half-moons that never left his fingernails.

The edges of the maps curled up, as if they were smiling at the sight of her.

“Hello, my pretties,” she whispered, then squinted in the dark. “What on earth are you?”

Weighing down the center of the maps was an unfamiliar little device, about as big as a package of cigarettes. It looked new, without the oil smudges and dinged corners that her father’s stuff always acquired. For a moment she thought it was some new remote control, the sort of widget that might command an industrial-grade TV dish.

But then she picked it up and saw the compass logo above its small, blank screen, reading with one sweep of her eyes the multitude of tiny buttons underneath.

“Whoa.” Her mind flashed back to the new image in her dream: the twenty-four bright diamonds in orbit around a wire-frame earth, evenly spaced around its equator and casting out lines of triangulation that hooked onto its surface.

She ran her fingers across the device and suddenly knew what the diamonds were—geostationary satellites, each forever suspended above one spot on the planet, sending out Global Positioning System signals all day long.

Dess pushed the power button, and the little screen came to life.

N 12° 16.41320°

W 96° 51.21380°

“ Oh, yeah .”

The coordinates flickered through Dess’s mind, swinging a radiant x and y across a well-memorized map in the second drawer from the top. They were familiar but far more precise than anything she could figure from the little numbers that marched around a map’s edges: the device was giving the position of her house. Her living room, in fact, down to a meter of precision.

Forget the supercomputer—this was the machine she needed. A little beastie that always knew exactly where it was, that would give her all the numbers she needed to crack the blue time’s code.

Dess stared at the device, suddenly thirsty, her right thumbnail between her teeth. The only problem was how to borrow it. The thing wouldn’t work in the secret hour—even if Jessica’s flame-bringer voodoo sparked it up, a lone GPS receiver was worthless without those twenty-four satellites pinging away up in space. Dess would have to use it in normal time.

Which would be tricky, unless she just…

Dess swallowed. Certainly her father hadn’t bought this. He wouldn’t spend good beer money on a toy. He was a foreman now; the company must have just given it to him. He probably wasn’t even using it. Dad hated all forms of fancy technology unrelated to football instant replays.

She looked down at the glowing numbers again.

“Pretty…” she whispered. And damn it if geostationary wasn’t a tridecalogism, thirteen letters exactly!

At worst, she’d have to hide the GPS carefully and listen to the old grouch rant and rave and turn the house upside down for a few hours. Like that didn’t happen every time he lost his car keys.

No sense sitting here in the dark, Dess decided. She already knew what she was going to do. Her dreams had shown her what she needed.

But Dess paused a moment at that thought. Why had she dreamed about the Global Positioning System when her awake mind hadn’t had any idea that her father owned one of these things? That was something to consider.

In the meantime, though…

She closed her hand around the device and whispered, “Mine.”

“Morning, Beth.”

“What’s so good about it?”

Jessica turned to face her little sister, who was holding a piece of wheat bread in her hand.

“I didn’t actually say ‘good morning,’ Beth. Just ‘morning.’ So I don’t have to explain why it’s good.”

Beth stared up at Jessica through narrowed eyes, her little brain racing as she took a sip of orange juice. “I didn’t say you said it was good. I was just asking a simple question.”

“That is so lame. Dad, tell Beth that’s lame.”

“Girls,” Jessica’s father murmured in an abstractly threatening way, not bothering to look up from his newspaper.

“He can’t help you, Jess. He’s not actually hearing what we say,” Beth explained. “He only reacts to our tone of voice. Sort of like a dog.”

“I heard that,” Don Day said, giving Beth an actually threatening look. She hid behind her orange juice again.

Mom breezed in dressed for work, which was usual for Sunday mornings these days. Her new job at Aerospace Oklahoma was what had brought them all to Bixby.

“Morning, Mom. Want anything to eat?” Jessica turned to pop the bread into the toaster.

“Hey, guys. No thanks, Jess. We’re having breakfast at the meeting.”

“So when does your new job become an old job, Mom? And you get to stay home on the weekends?” Beth asked.

Jessica turned around and saw that her father was also waiting for an answer.

Her mother looked at the three of them and sighed. “I don’t know. Today’s my fault, though. I volunteered to be on this committee about the new runway.”

“Never volunteer,” Dad said, his eyes dropping back to his newspaper.

Jessica’s mother glanced at him in that new way that had evolved over the last few weeks, a cold look that probably had something to do with the fact that he didn’t have a job here yet. Waiting up late for the secret hour, Jessica had heard them arguing about him taking temporary noncomputer work to make some extra money and to get him out of the house.