Starglass

Ronen’s hands and turned on the heels of my boots. “I’m out of here.”

“Terra!” my father called as I went to grab my bag from the coatroom. “Terra, come back here!”

But I ignored him, leaning my hands against the heavy doors, hustling down the long hall toward the lift. Who did he think he was, anyway? Rachel was my friend, my oldest friend. I slammed my palm hard against the lift’s lock, waiting in the dim light for the doors to come shuddering open.

Footsteps sounded down at the far end of the hall.

“If you’re here to lecture me . . .,” I began, turning. But my words puttered out when I saw that it was not Abba who hustled toward me. It was Benjamin Jacobi, of all people. The librarian.

“Mar Jacobi,” I said. My words sounded thin, annoyed. I suppose that I was. “What are you doing here? Don’t you already have a talmid?” I thought he did, at least. A redheaded boy. He’d been in Ronen’s class.

“I always attend on Vocation Day. It’s a mitzvah, you know.” His dark eyes sparkled like he was making a joke. But I didn’t get it.

“I know,” was all I said.

And then there was a burp of awkward silence. Mar Jacobi reached over, pressing his hand to the lift panel—as though I hadn’t just done so myself. “Do you mind if I join you on your trip down? I hate all of this chitchat. I’m really very eager to get out of here.”

I couldn’t help but smile at that. I let out a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding. “Oh!” I said. “I hate it too.”

“I suspected you might,” Mar Jacobi said as the door at long last dinged open. He held it open for me. “You’ve always been remarkably like your mother.”

Momma! I felt a stab of emotion. She’d seemed so composed, so charming. Nothing at all like me. We stepped into the huge lift. Our voices echoed against the walls.

“She hated small talk too?” I asked. Mar Jacobi let out a chuckle.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “Of course, you would have never known it at first. But she used to say that you can’t really get to know a person until you’ve broken bread with them.”

“You must have known her pretty well,” I said, less a question than a statement. I remembered him there, of course, on the night of her funeral.

“Alyana was . . .” He stumbled over his words and was able to recover only after swallowing hard. “A dear friend of mine.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. I nodded.

“She would be so proud. I’m sure you’ll be able to do great things as a botanist,” he offered at last. I gave my shoulders a shrug, clutching my bag in front of me like my life depended on it. I hadn’t given any thought to my new vocation. I wasn’t sure what a botanist even did.

“How, planting flowers?”

“Perhaps.” He gave a grin. His teeth were yellow and crooked. When I didn’t smile back, he added: “I think you’ll be truly working toward tikkun olam. Are you familiar with the term?”

I let out a snort. “It’s all Abba—I mean, it’s all my father ever talks about.”

“Duty always was important to Arran,” Mar Jacobi said. He leaned back on his heels, staring up at the lights set into the ceiling. “But you know, Terra, there are many ways to do your duty, to work toward carving out a place in the universe for humanity.”

“Are there?” I glanced down at the polished floor. There was something hungry about his voice, like he’d been waiting for this conversation for a long time. I didn’t like the intensity behind it. It made my cheeks warm.

“Well,” he said, “when our ancestors left Earth, they thought they were saving mankind. The Council will tell you that the way to fulfill that mission is to do your duty, to work hard and marry and raise happy children and obey the captain.”

Behind him the door dinged open, revealing a fury of green, tangled space. A rush of air wafted in, perfumed by the clover from the pastures and the wildflowers from the forests below. Neither of us moved.

“Yes,” I said sourly, “I know. They taught us that in school. How we have to do mitzvot for the good of the ship or it’ll fall out of space or something.”

Mar Jacobi’s eyebrow ticked up. He was looking at me closely now, the pupils in his brown eyes shrinking down to pinpricks. “I used to talk about tikkun olam with your mother. She always thought there were other ways. Alyana said we needed to protect our liberties, too. Otherwise mankind was never worth saving.”

“What do you mean, ‘our liberties’?”

Mar Jacobi stepped aside, offering the open door to me. After a moment I stepped through. “I’d be happy to discuss it with you sometime. If you’ll stop by the library, I could give you some books to read. I’m sure it would do your mother proud to know that you’re considering what’s truly necessary to work tikkun olam.”

My lips tightening into a frown, I trudged past him. “All right,” I said. But I felt uneasy as I walked out into the dome.

The librarian only waved a hand at me. “Mazel tov, Terra,” he offered. I saw him press his hand to the button, and then I watched as the door slid shut again.

“Thanks,” I mumbled in return. But a thin birdsong was the only thing that answered.

* * *

I found a mossy incline spread out between a pair of trees. The artificial daylight was feeble, spotty; the ground muddy from the latest rain. Everything seemed cool and brown. But near my feet there was a flash of purple: a crocus head pushing up between the gravel. As I fumbled for my pencils, I gave the flower a wistful smile.

A spring flower, I thought. But it won’t last long. Spring will be short this year.

I turned to a blank page near the back of my book and ran my hand over its bumpy surface. When I first started drawing, I tried to draw people: Ronen and Rachel, my father. Momma. But in the dim light of my room, their faces looked all wrong—the eyes uneven, the mouths too wide. So I’d given up on that. It was only away from home, in this solitary space, that I had begun to look—really look—at the flowers and branches in front of me. Now my hands and my pencils confidently sketched the right shapes. I found my mind clearing, my heartbeat growing steady again. There was only color. Violet with yellow undertones. A touch of green where the petals picked up the shade of the moss around it. And I found myself happy, or something close to it.

I drew the crocus—how the petals folded in on themselves like the pleats of a purple dress. The way the green stem was thin and delicate and stately, like a woman’s slender neck.

I worked until it was too dark in the forest to draw anymore. In the distance the clock bells rang out. I pulled myself to my feet, tucking my pencils back into my bag. In the fading daylight I squinted at the image of the flower one last time. There it was, preserved for all time inside my book. I smiled, touching the crosshatched shadows with my index finger. Then I closed the cover and stumbled back toward the lift.

* * *

Dinner at Rachel’s was always an improvement over dinner at home. Though her quarters were the same shape as ours, they were different inside, warm and comfortable, decorated with paintings of fruit and lit with glass-shaded lamps. Her parents chatted amicably as they cooked together. Rachel and I poured drinks and set down plates. Even her little brother helped, laying out the tarnished silverware, chanting, “The spoon and knife is husband and wife.” He didn’t even complain about it. I don’t think Ronen had ever helped with dinner without whining.

It was nice, really. It let me forget about the weird run-in with the librarian, if only for an hour or two.

Before we ate, Rachel’s mom took down a pair of electric lights from her cupboard and set them in the center of the table. It was something that was done once a week in her household. Her mother was so grave about it, serious. When we were little, Rachel had asked me if my mother did the same thing. I’d only frowned, given my head a shake. Momma hadn’t done anything like that. Rachel said that it was something that the women in her family had always done.

“Will you join us, Terra?” her mother asked now. “My mother always said it was a mitzvah for a woman to