Look Up

On a rarely perfect night, my father woke me with a whispered, “let’s look at the stars.”

So, I stood next to him, as he lined up my grandfather’s old telescope, yawning and pulling my thick blanket close around my shoulders. Despite the light pollution from the city, in the early hours of the morning, when the city lights dimmed, the stars were beautiful.

“I wanted you to see something,” dad put his hand on my shoulder, eye glued to the telescope’s eyepiece. “Something that does come around just every day.”

“What’s that, dad?”

“Earth, son.”

Looking up at him, I remember feeling a thousand questions lining up on my tongue. I had seen Earth a hundred times, everyone had. The pictures were all over our schoolbooks and the colony intranet. What difference would this make? But I trusted him, I hadn’t yet grown out of that part of childhood, and this was the first time I would get to use the old telescope.

Grandfather had, my dad used to tell me, been quite the adventurous youth. Climbing Olympus Mons alone back before suits were reliable, and other unimaginable things. The kinds of things that it seemed everyone’s grandparents had gotten up to. The kinds of things that made wonderful stories.

So, I waited, tiredly patient, while dad fiddled with the controls.

Calling the telescope grandfather’s is a bit of a stretch. Rumour had it that his father, the last of our line to be born on Earth, had brought it with him against orders during his own mission to Mars. Being the pilot gave him significantly more leeway than normal, leeway that he had supposedly used to bring the telescope with him.

I never met grandfather. I don’t know his stories from his own mouth. But I know what my siblings and father tell me about him. And I always loved listening when mom – who had no interest in being out in the Solarium stargazing and so was asleep – would tell stories about any of my four grandparents. So, I certainly believe his going against the Oligarchy to pass down this old telescope.

“You know,” my father said, still making adjustments via the telescope’s remote. “I’ve been approached by the University about this here telescope a few times. I’m thinking maybe I’ll give it over to them, a piece in their museum, assuming that you don’t want it.”

“Why would you give it over?”

“Lot of stuff got forgotten back there,” his voice was distant, the way he got when splitting his attention. The way he got when he answered questions. “Lot of information and methods. They think this here telescope might be something special. Contraband from Earth that made it through corporate censors.”

Being a child, I had heard about the censorship debates. Well, I suppose debate is a pretty relaxed word for the fifteen years of violence that eventually toppled the Oligopoly. But I didn’t then understand why exactly something as simple as a ‘sovereign’ telescope might be a point of interest.

“But I suppose I’ll wait to make that choice until you’re a little older. Wouldn’t make any sense to force you into making a decision now, especially since you’re probably still annoyed I woke you up.” It was said smilingly, but I knew he was a little disappointed with my lack of enthusiasm for the project.

He was a realist my dad. He knew that, much as he might hope for me to be jumping out of my skin at the thought of looking at the stars, I had then no reason to be excited. To my mind, the stars were something I was forced to memorize. Infinitely far away points of light that meant nothing beyond their beauty when viewed through the naked eye.

There was no offence meant, given, or taken at my repeated yawns and the quiet shuffling of cold feet.

Finally, dad pulled his eye away from the eyepiece and smiled at me. “She’s ready,” he said. “Come take a look.”

Shuffling over, I went up on my tiptoes and looked into the telescope.

“What do you see?”

“Dad, this is amazing!”

“What do you see, son?”

It was the clearest picture of Earth that I had ever seen with my own eyes. What few photos we had in school were old, very old. So old in fact, that the shapes of some of the continents no longer matched with what I could see.

During the reign of the Oligopoly, before the ‘debates’ ended with the deaths to three degrees of relation of every member of the ruling class, dad told me that most of our information was destroyed. The people who owned the servers simply wiped them, and infected the intranet with viruses that could target undesirable information with the precision of a surgeon’s laser.

“What’s that scar on the planet,” I tried to make sense of what I could see through the eyepiece. Sometimes, even now all these years later, I still marvel at what I was able to see. And, looking back on it, I struggle to understand why my father never gave over the telescope. It was a miraculous gift, though he had taken pains to tell me that, before great-grandfather smuggled it off of Earth, it had been far from the best ever made.

Taking my spot at the eyepiece, dad tried to find the scar I meant. It took him longer than I thought it should, but then maybe my eyes were better? He always laughed that I should be happy with my youthful vision for as long as it lasted.

Finally, though, he said, “that’s not a scar, little man. Take another look and try again.”

I huffed. This was going to be one of those things that he meant me to figure out myself. Not that it was the worst thing in the world, not like when he patiently asked me to only think about my math homework. But still, I knew from the tone of his voice that he wasn’t going to give me an easy out unless I started a fight that would ruin the whole experience.

Had I been a few years older, no doubt I would have argued and questioned. But as I said, I was still in the part of childhood that trusted unconditionally; not yet so corrupted by worldly cynicism as to aggressively question the people who raised me. So, despite my misgivings, I again put my eye to the telescope and looked back at the Home World, as some people insisted on calling it.

Not a scar, my father had said. So, I looked again at the enormous mark, the splash of out of place colours that marred the landscape. Wracking my brain, I tried to remember which continent I was looking at and why it was all out of sorts in my head. Certainly, that terrible, clashing scar was prominent enough that my dad should have noticed it, even if my eyes were better. So I took pains and described it in detail.

“Not sure how you missed it, dad. But it looks like… what is that North America? Yeah, I’m certain, right across what looks like the middle of it. Up near the Interior Seas, it’s all…”

“What is it?”

“Dad, it’s green? Why is it green? They told us in school that none of the Sites should still be glowing.”

“It’s not nuclear fallout. That’s what Earth was supposed to look like. You were born after the Disputes, but trust me, in ancient days it was green. And we had a few photographs of it before the Oligopoly tried to send us back to the dark ages.”

“Why did they want to do that?”

“No one knows for certain, but we can make guesses.”

“What kind of guesses?”

“First and foremost, it’s good to the be the king. Most people want power and control in their lives, son, and people who start to acquire it want more. It’s like a rot; everyone thinks that they can do it better. Can run things perfectly if only they had the chance. But the more power they get, the more they not only want but can achieve. And the more people surround them, trying to get a piece of that power for themselves, telling them how wonderful they are.”

“They tell us about the amazing things we can do in school all the time, none of us turned evil.”

“Evil’s a complicated word. Talk to me when you’re older and we can discuss it,” of course, being young as I was when I heard this, I didn’t understand it. Evil is evil, everyone knows that. But I did eventually learn, and that much later conversation with my father taught me more about being a man than anything else I’ve ever heard. “But there’s a difference. Those teachers are telling you what you’re capable of, so that you can have the confidence to try. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t, I don’t know. But the point is, the Oligopoly wanted to send us back to the Dark Ages, wasn’t that what you asked me about?”

“Yes, I want to know why.”

“Because they wanted control. That’s why we have so little information from back on Earth. The corporations that built this colony only brought with them things they owned. Things they could control directly. And, of course, little of history can be owned. When I was growing up, we were still reeling from the worst of the Disputes and the last of the Hunts was ongoing. But the intranet servers were all wiped of public-access information. So, we only know what we were able to scrape up from the ashes. And, of course, what was remembered by the elders that survived the Disputes.”

“So, it was green before I was born, and the Oligopoly wanted to hide that?”

“Centuries ago,” Dad started, sliding his hands into his pockets and rocking back on his heels the way he liked to do when remembering old things. “We all lived on Earth. We lived without domes, under a sky that we could not dream of reaching. Then, one day, we learned to fly.”

I had always yearned to fly. In one of my older brother’s science books, I had seen pictures of things called birds that moved their feathery arms and flew. He had crushed my dreams of doing it myself, but told me, “No reason you can’t build something to help you. Same way as how we got here, right?”

But that had been before he moved to the New Hague, formerly Bezopolis to work with the prosecution on the last trials for the executive class. Fewer and fewer were running around, but still the hunters were out there. Finding the last gasping remnants of the Oligarchy. I didn’t like to think about their punishments then, and I don’t much care for them now. Explosive decompression is a quick fate, but we’re promised, extremely painful.

“After learning to fly, we fashioned those machines into weapons of war. Our world changed and in less than 70 years we had put people on the moon. There was so much hope, way back when. So much enthusiasm. So many easy answers.”

He looked solemn, then. And I returned my eye to the telescope, wanting to cram as much time looking at Earth as possible into that night. I gave him his time; dad was always a deep thinker. Mom told me that his father and grandfather had wanted him to be a public thinker, not that there was much room or space for them in those days.

“Easy answers?”

“Yeah,” his voice was still low, eyes out of focus. “Easy answers. That’s what most people want, easy answers. They don’t want to be in charge, they don’t want to make the hard choices.”

“But you said that everyone wants to be king?”

“Maybe I misspoke. What I meant was, that everyone wants the privilege of being king. Think about it, you’d never be told no. Your word would be law. People would live and die based on your desires. Intoxicating as your uncle Sam’s finest moonshine.”

“So, what happened?”

“Things became easy. Too easy some people said. Bits of the planet stopped working with their hands and started working with their minds instead. But handwork still needed doing, and the people who worked with their minds forgot that they were the same as the rag-pickers and iron miners. Who also forgot they were the same as the thinkers.”

“How can they all be the same? Our teachers keep telling us to embrace what makes us unique?”

“Yeah, they’ll do that. And you should do that, never let anyone take your individuality from you, son. Because they’ll try. But you can’t let them. And more important, you can’t forget that they’re just the same as you. Only human.”

“Janice Ontario says that we’re not human anymore. We should be called Martians.”

“Another easy answer. It’s easiest to forget the past, where we came from, and what made us who we are. But let me ask you something: what would happen if people survived back on Earth? What will they think if they find us, stranded out here, and we insist that we aren’t the same?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, I doubted you did. The Assembly is full of those questions. The easy way out is to close the door on Earth, to call ourselves Martians, and hope to forget where we came from. But that’s just another easy answer that will lead to dark roads.”

“So why is the planet green, dad?”

“Because it’s healing, little man. That’s why. The planet was always supposed to be green, or at least, it was while we were living on it. I don’t know if there are people there helping it heal, I like to hope that we aren’t everything that’s left. But the point is that whatever is happening up there, I think it’s a good thing. Something worth hoping over.”

That was what my father taught me that night, standing in the deserted solarium, staring up at the Earth through my family’s old telescope from the Old World. He taught me to hope, because I had seen something that no one else in my class had seen, maybe no one on the whole planet. Earth was healing, the evidence dashed across the open space that housed the North American Internal Seas.

It would be fifteen years before our planets entered near perihelion again. Sadly, I wasn’t able to share a similar experience with my own son until he was himself fifteen – meaning he was much less willing to listen in the dark hours when his father woke him with a whispered, “let’s look at the stars.” But still he came and looked through the lens of our family’s old telescope.

Pretty sure it didn’t mean the same to him as it did to me. Eventually I asked my father to loan the telescope out, so that we could still get it back. He succeeded in launching a life-long love of the stars in me. Probably because he told me something important that night, under the glittering stars in our Solarium.

“Whenever you feel like there’s no hope, look up. Remember she’s healing. Just look up.”

And after a lifetime studying the stars, I can say with a glowing smile that I have done exactly that.

-0-

This story is dedicated to my dad.

For teaching me about my passions before I even knew I had them.

Sending you all my love, Dad!