Dead Stars

Ore felt like crap. His vision of the Radium Girls was enough for him to deduce why. Undark had done far worse things than what the courts made them pay for. Over a hundred years ago, as the dangers at the plant became impossible to hide, they had the three women take down most of their radium surplus to hide in the extinct volcano, and apparently left them down here so they couldn’t reveal the conspiracy. The dream also supported what Crowley had told him, that Ore would find the philosopher’s stone where he was going, and judging by how awful he was feeling now, there was enough radium here to provide power for centuries. But how long could Ore survive down here? He tried to eat another granola bar, but it felt like nails going down his swollen throat.

Then he heard a scuttling sound and noticed a white crab run across his path. He remembered reading about carcinisation, how different types of crustaceans had taken separate evolutionary paths to end up with a crab-like body plan, suggesting that instead of heading towards diversity, life tended towards becoming-crab. This one seemed different from any crab he’d ever seen. Instead of the usual rosy pink, its shell was a pearly white, probably because of the lack of sunlight down here, Ore reckoned. He wondered if life here evolved to adapt to the radiation.

He continued in the direction where the glow got brighter. The cavern walls looked like they were studded with thousands of tiny glow-in-the-dark stars, like the ones he had on his ceiling as a kid. Small bits of powdered radium danced in the air like so many fireflies. He remembered the first time Yuri slept over in his room. He was nervous that she would laugh at him when she saw the stars and say that he was too old for that kind of thing. But he had spent many hours creating the intricate spiral galaxy that radiated outwards from the middle of the ceiling, replete with small comets and planets, and then continued on down the walls. The hardest, most time-consuming part of the task was the placement of the stars near the corners where the ceiling met the walls. He wanted it to feel like a planetarium and for the fake sky to look like a dome inside a cubic space, an illusion that was only possible from one place in the middle of his bed, any other point of view would create a parallax shift and ruin the illusion. This required constant going back and forth, turning the lights on and off, to get right. It was like trying to square a circle, or in this case sphere a square.

When she came over, his heart was beating like crazy, but he did his best to act cool. They played a game of chess on his bed and he lost. Yuri was the only one of his friends better than him at strategy. He did win sometimes, but was never sure if she was letting him win so as not to bruise his ego too much. His mind wasn’t really in the game that time. When they were done, with her still sitting in the right place, he turned off the lights to show her his own, personal sky.

Yuri never praised anything enthusiastically. That was one of the things that drew Ore to her, since he had been praised constantly growing up, which he didn’t particularly enjoy, and found it to be fairly useless compared to almost any kind of criticism. But he did want her to like his sky, since it felt like a part, or rather an extension of him. She took her time taking it in, moving her head from side to side to find the exact perspective that completed the dome. She patted the spot next to her on the bed, like one would do to call a cat to sit next to them. Ore obeyed, and they lay next to each other, looking up at the stars.

“I like how the spiral pulls you in,” she said finally.

This surprised Ore, he had always seen the spiral as scattering outwards, but upon hearing her, the movement instantly reversed, like in a two-stroke apparent motion illusion. He told her about how he had always seen it in the opposite way, and she just laughed.

“Can you make the same thing in my room,” she asked, “that way we’ll always be looking up at the same sky before bed.”

“Sure, I’d like that,” he agreed immediately.

He thought about their differing perceptions of motion, how she felt that she was pulled in by the spiral galaxy, while he thought he was being showered by stars, and that making a version of the sky in her room would be like creating a wormhole, pulling her in and drawing her to him. But afterwards, her view had so permeated his mind, that most of the time he’d see the spiral as pulling him in instead.

Was it all apparent motion? Ever since he had met her, he thought that he was the one attracting her, always trying to impress her with his music, words, and kindness. But once he got to know her, it was clear that she was smarter and a better tactician than him, so was she the one in control all along? He often felt like they were a binary star system, spinning around a common axis, drawn to each other. But few bodies are exactly equal, almost always one is drawn to the other. Moreover, it isn’t even a question of size, but mass, a smaller metal planet exudes more pull than a larger gas one, just like a child can hold a balloon twice its size.

Was he really going to save Yuri, pull her back up, or was she pulling him down after her? Did this even have anything to do with her, or was it just a motion illusion created by his own grief? Did the plastic stars on the ceiling of his childhood room represent the night sky, or the radium spots of this place that would likely become his tomb?