Desert Stars (46 page)

Chapter 22

“
We owe you our lives,”
Jalil said, giving Nash a trembling handshake that soon turned into
a brotherly hug. “We can never repay you.”

“
That won’t be necessary,”
said Nash, clapping a hand on his shoulder.

Jalil returned the gesture and smiled.
He glanced over at Michelle.

“
You too,” he said,
nodding to her. “If you hadn’t come back, we would all be dead
right now.”

Michelle smiled at him with sad eyes.
“Yeah,” she said, her voice distant. “Anytime.”

“
This isn’t the end—I
refuse to believe that it is.”

“
No,” said Nash, “it’s not
the end.” He put his arm around Michelle’s waist, pulling her close
in a reassuring embrace. “For us, it’s the beginning.”

“
God-willing,” said Jalil,
smiling at Mira. “God-willing.”

* * * * *

Jalil found Tiera in the
engine room of the
Bridgette,
chatting with Michelle. As the door hissed open
and he stepped through, she glanced up and rose to her
feet.

“
Jalil,” she said, smiling
broadly. “You’ll never believe the news—Michelle and Nash have
agreed to take me on as one of their crew!”

“
That’s—that’s great,”
said Jalil, a little surprised by her enthusiasm. He wished he
could share it, but recent events had left him feeling as if a
heavy weight had been placed on his chest.

“
Are you all right?” Tiera
asked, a look of concern coming over her.

Jalil sighed. “To be honest, I don’t
know.”

“
I’ll leave you two
alone,” said Michelle. She smiled at him before heading out the
door, shutting it behind her. Once she was gone, Jalil and Tiera
both sat down on the floor.

“
It’s about the others,
isn’t it?” Tiera asked.

Jalil nodded. “I just—I wish I could
have saved them!”

Tiera reached up and put an arm around
his shoulder. In some ways, the feel of her touch did more to
comfort him than words ever could.

“
You did all you could,”
she said. “You showed them the way and they made their choice.
There was nothing you or I could have done.”

“
That’s what’s so
frustrating,” said Jalil. “Why wouldn’t they come? Why would they
choose to die?”

“
The camp was their world.
They never would have left it, not for anything. It’s enough that
you came back and tried.”

“
I suppose.”

“
Besides, you were able to
save some of us, right? We’d all be gone if it weren’t for
you.”

Jalil nodded. As Tiera rubbed his
back, the tears slowly trickled out—tears of pain, tears of
healing.

“
So you’re going to stay
on the
Bridgette?
” Jalil asked.

“
Yeah,” said Tiera.
“Michelle says she can take you and the others as far as you need
to go, though.”

“
That’s kind of them. Now
that our home is gone, though, I don’t—”

“
What are you talking
about?”

He looked up and saw Tiera frowning as
if to scold him.

“
Our—our home,” he said.
“The desert, Gaia Nova—”

“
That’s not our home,” she
said, jabbing her finger at Jalil’s chest. “Home is right here—it’s
you and me. Home isn’t a place; it’s family. Am I
right?”

Jalil smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I think
you are.”

* * * * *

The moment Jalil stepped through the
door, Mira leaped to her feet and threw her arms around him. For
several moments, they just held each other, saying nothing. Mira
closed her eyes and let the comfort of Jalil’s touch soothe her
pain and sorrow.

“
It’s just us now,” she
whispered.

“
I know,” said
Jalil.

“
What will we
do?”

“
Nash is setting a course
for New Rigel,” he said. “All the other refugees have fled that
direction, so it might take us a while to get past them, but
God-willing the Hameji won’t follow.”

His talk of war and refugees, of names
like “New Rigel” and “Hameji” made little sense to her.

“
But what will we do once
we get there?” she asked.

“
I don’t know,” he said
softly. “Find another world, settle down, start over.”

She nodded. “Do we know where
yet?”

“
No, but we’ll find
something. For the time being, we’ll stay here on the
Bridgette
—she’s a little
cramped, but she should be enough of a home until we can find a
more permanent place to live.”

Mira smiled. “You mean build a new
camp? Start a new family?”

“
Yes,” said Jalil, giving
her a worried look. “That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

“
Of course,” she said,
stepping forward and putting her arms around him again. Their lips
softly met, and she melted in his embrace.

“
I’m so sorry,” he
whispered, his mouth close to her ear. “I’m sorry about the
others.”

“
I know,” she said,
feeling the tears return to her eyes.

“
Are you
afraid?”

Jalil’s arms felt warm and comforting,
like a well-made cloak in the cold desert night. She thought back
to the night they’d shared the blanket on Sarah’s balcony, beneath
the light of the stars and satellites.

I could spend the rest of
my life with him, and be happy.

“
No,” she answered. “Not
as long as you’re with me.”

Jalil looked down at her and smiled.
Somehow, she knew she’d said exactly the right thing.

Outside the observation window, the
stars shone ten times brighter than Mira had ever seen them. Their
soft light illuminated Jalil’s face, making him glow like an
angel.

“
Strange,” he said. “The
stars seem somehow… empty.”

“
What do you
mean?”

Jalil sighed. “I don’t know. Perhaps
it’s just me. But whenever I see them, I can’t stop thinking of the
Temple of a Thousand Suns. To think that the holiest shrine in all
the universe is gone now—it’s as if Earth itself has somehow been
destroyed.”

“
Perhaps,” said Mira. “But
isn’t it true that there is holiness within us?”

He glanced down at her and smiled.
“Perhaps.”

As he leaned into her, she lifted her
chin to meet his lips. They closed their eyes and kissed again,
bathed in the light of countless stars.

Author’s Note

This book was a long time in coming.
Even though the first draft started to take shape in the fall of
2008, I feel as if it really began in late 2005, when I came home
from my mission.

From 2003 to 2005, I volunteered as a
full-time missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints (also known as “the Mormons”). For two years, I spent almost
every day focused on religious service and spiritual things. The
missionary program handled all of our housing and transportation,
and periodically dispensed money from our families so we didn’t
need to work or really even keep much of a budget. I’d already been
accepted to Brigham Young University, and the school had deferred
my enrollment for two years, so I didn’t have to worry about that
either. In fact, I was so focused on the missionary work that even
though I served in Silicon Valley, I didn’t know what a flash drive
was until I came home.

Soon after coming back, I
began to re-immerse myself in my favorite works of science fiction
& fantasy. For a couple of months, however, I felt really
depressed, because none of these fictional universes had room for
my religious beliefs. I was a little bit like Dan Wells in season 1
episode 27 of
Writing Excuses (World
Building Religion), who said he didn’t like
Ender’s Game
as a boy because the
mother was Mormon in a world in which Mormonism, as he knew it,
couldn’t be true.
It wasn’t that any of
these stories were actively anti-religious, or that I was
disappointed because they didn’t explicitly vindicate my beliefs. I
was just looking for a secondary world where I could immerse myself
without having to set aside the religious part of my life that I’d
come to cherish
.
After a couple of months, I found a balance and got over it,
but the experience gave me a desire to write something that
countered that trend.

This isn’t as much of a problem in
fantasy, but in most science fiction and space opera, the universe
is actually our own universe fast forwarded some two or three
thousand years. The trouble with this is that most religions,
especially Western religions like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam,
have at their core a story about Earth: its creation and
beginnings, its relationship with God as a dwelling place for
humanity, and its future destruction and millennial rebirth. Of
course, mainstream science fiction cannot incorporate any aspect of
this religious cosmology and remain mainstream—the moment it does,
it simply becomes religious fiction. However, by presenting a
far-future universe in which the Earth has not been transformed,
mainstream science fiction almost gives us a universe in which none
of these religions can be true. I wanted to find a way to do both:
to present an acceptably mainstream far-future universe in which no
religion was explicitly true, but any of them could be.

I proceeded in 2006 to attempt such a
task, but the novel turned out so badly that I abandoned it
unfinished and never picked it up again. A couple of years went by,
in which I wrote a generic far-future space opera that didn’t
bother with any of these issues, and trunked it as well.

Then, in 2008, I had the
spark that became
Desert Stars.
I was in Amman at the time, participating in an
Arabic study abroad program through BYU. I was walking from the
University of Jordan down Queen Rania street, toward my home-stay
at Al-Dustour, when the phrase “Temple of a Thousand Suns” came to
my mind. Perhaps it was some combination of the weather (sunny and
hot, like most days in the Middle East) and the story ideas that
were bouncing around my head at the time. In any case, the phrase
immediately stuck out to me, and I began to wonder what kind of a
place this temple was. Of course, it would be a place dedicated to
humanity’s future out among the stars—but also, it would be a place
dedicated to the memory of Earth, a place that now existed only in
legend and fable. And therein lay the answer to my conundrum. By
transplanting humanity far enough away from Earth so that they had
lost all contact, the major religions in my universe would be free
to believe that the Earth had passed through the prophesied end
times, while I as an author would be free to leave such questions
sufficiently open-ended.

That was how the Gaia Nova universe
began to take shape. I spent the next few months working out the
details: how the first colonists of Gaia Nova came from Earth after
spending millennia frozen in cryo, and that the universe had
changed so much that it was impossible to locate the old Earth. I
imagined that these colonists, living on a harsh world not quite as
habitable as Earth, would do everything they could to preserve the
environment, and thus enclose their settlements in giant domes
which would eventually become as large as continents. I imagined
that a handful of people would rebel against this form of
enclosure, and thus establish a culture far away from the confines
of civilization, out in the desert wastes. And from my experiences
with the Bedouin in Jordan, I began to world-build that culture,
which immediately began to suggest the characters and conflicts
that featured in the novel.

Jalil’s storyline came quite
naturally, but Mira’s gave me a lot of trouble. In the first couple
of drafts, I actually didn’t see her as a love interest—I only
included her because I wanted to give Jalil that horrible moment of
disillusionment where he realizes that there’s nothing left for him
on Gaia Nova. But as the story began to take shape, so did Mira’s
character and their relationship with each other, and despite all
of my best efforts they began to fall in love with each
other.

I’m something of a
discovery writer, which means that my creative process works better
when I don’t know how things are going to end, rather than when I
have a firm outline to follow. However, I’d written myself into
something of a hole, and this question of Jalil and Mira’s
relationship had me completely stumped. Instead of writing through
it, however, I ended up putting the project on hold for a year and
a half while I wrote
Bringing Stella
Home
. Taking a break to work on other
things ended up being the best thing I could have done. I learned a
lot more about Jalil’s parents’ background, as well as the
merchanters who eventually took him in, but more importantly I
learned how the book needed to end: with the destruction of Gaia
Nova and the Temple of a Thousand Suns.

Lois McMaster Bujold made an
interesting comment on a science fiction romance panel at Worldcon
in 2011: she said that when women write romance, they write about
love and life, whereas when men write romance, they write about
love and death. Maybe that’s why things clicked for me when I
realized that everyone was going to die. It also gave me an
excellent character arc for Mira, building up to that moment when
she has to choose between staying with her family on a doomed
planet, or leaving everything she’s known behind in order to be
with Jalil. I tend to be discovery writer, but I also work best
when I have some idea of how the story will ultimately end. Once I
had that, the story came much easier.