She wondered if she’d be able to see the photos he was taking at some point. After she returned to Earth, for sure, but she would like to see them earlier. Even though they were no longer a couple, she still followed his work whenever she knew about it.
She also wondered if he’d been thinking of her during the launch.
Probably not. He’s too much the professional.
Karen had spent the past two years working on the moon project.
The radio waves that had been intercepted initially seemed to stop shortly afterward. That initial burst had six hours of data. It was a stream of binary, 1s and 0s, that streamed out into space from a relatively tiny crater near the Moon’s south pole but on the far side.
With the limited data stream, Karen and hundreds of other scientists around the world had a wonderful puzzle to solve. Everyone assumed aliens had initiated the broadcast, but nobody knew what it said or why they had sent it.
Karen loved the challenge. The idea of creatures from a faraway planet nestled so close to humanity made her curiosity almost burst.
Another part of her, though, wondered how it could be possible. If God made mankind in His own image, who made the aliens?
It was a passing thought that sometimes woke her at night.
Another: how would the aliens react when she and the rest of the crew landed near the tiny crater Daedalus.
After that initial radio burst, a new satellite was launched and sent to orbit the moon.
It was more finely tuned and scientists quickly realized the radio beacon sent from Daedalus was focused like a tightly-wrapped cone. It had never been noticed before because a receiver had never been in the right place. The new satellite fixed that.
A steady stream of data was captured after that, six hours every day.
It was being sent in the direction of the star Gliese 581, which was assumed to be the home of the aliens.
In the two years since a complete set of data had been tapped, nobody, including Karen, had made the slightest bit of headway in understanding a single word.
“Maybe they’ll talk to us in person, though,” she’d told herself. “Just maybe.”
She’d be one of the first to find out.
Chapter 3
My grandmother’s name was Ariela Abelman. She was ninety-two years old, and her whole life was defined by a single six-month period when she was thirteen.
Everyone called her Mrs. Abelman except me. I called her Grandma or sometimes Ariela. I was one of the few people left who knew she was never a Missus, had never been married, had never even had a serious love interest in her life. That six-month period ruined her for all that.
When I arrived at the hospital, she was a crippled old woman. She lay in her rickety hospital bed, quietly gasping for each breath of precious air, sucking in what little she could.
I knew what to expect, because I’d been here to visit her prior to heading to Cape Canaveral. That didn’t make it any easier, though. Grandma was the one constant in my life, the one person who had loved me, without condition, from the day I was born.
Her eyes were blurry and weepy, not from fear but from the aging that had finally brought her to her final hours.
She was ready to die and to meet her God.
When I entered the room, she didn’t immediately notice me. It took all her energy to concentrate on getting air.
Grandma had told me she’d signed a DNR, so when her body started to fail, nobody would go to any extraordinary measures to keep her alive. She hated the thought of having a machine breathe for her, or having some other contraption extending her life for no purpose.
“When it’s my time, God will take care of me.” I remember her saying that my whole life. She’d already been old by the time I could understand aging and death, and I was fortunate to have had her in my life as long as I did.
That wouldn’t make it easier to say good-bye to her for the last time.
“Grandma?”
She jumped at my voice, but only for a moment.
“David,” she whispered.
She’d known I’d be there, of course. When she texted me earlier in the day, it probably used the last bit of energy she could manage.
How many ninety-two-year-old women can text while on their deathbed? Grandma was nothing if not resourceful. One more of a thousand reasons she meant so much to me.
She stared, same as she always had, making me feel a tinge of embarrassment as I wondered if my hair was combed or if I had a speck of food on a tooth. She was my biggest critic and my biggest supporter.
Ariela. I love the sound of her name. I’ve never known another woman with that name, and perhaps never will. This one was enough. She rocked my life.
“I came as soon as I could. I was in Florida, taking photos of the spaceship blasting off and…”
She nodded. She always knew my schedule as good as I did. She insisted on that.
I thought about telling her more about the lift-off. She always loved to hear about what I was doing. I’d always talk to her about my trips around the world to record whatever important scientific event was happening. I think it made her feel like she was traveling alongside me.
Grandma kept every magazine my work had been published in, which amounted to a large stack in the corner of her small living room.
Her voice was thin, only a pinch above being no sound at all. “I’ll never go home.”
I took her hand and leaned over to kiss her cheek. She smelled like disinfectant.
I hate hospitals. I especially hated Grandma being stuck there to die.
Over the years, she’d told me in bits and pieces about her life. She could remember the tiniest details of everywhere she had lived, from the small basement apartment with her parents in Hungary when she was little, through various other apartments and small houses. She finally bought the house she would live in most of her life—a small bungalow in Minneapolis. It wasn’t much, 1,500 square feet, with two small bedrooms, one of which she used for storage.
She loved it until she got too old to manage the garden in the summer and the snow in winter, at which point she moved into the apartment she had so recently vacated.
“I needed to see you before I die,” she whispered.
I leaned in close so I could hear her better.
She’d lost so much weight that her hand felt like a bird’s claw. She’d never felt ashamed about that, or anything else about her appearance for that matter. She just needed to go to sleep forever.
She blinked to get my face into focus again and tried to smile. She was so tired, though, and before she could say anything more, her eyes drifted shut, and she fell asleep.
I stayed in Grandma’s room. The hospital was a horrible place, but she needed to be there. Terrible thoughts crossed my mind, because I wasn’t sure if I hoped she’d pull through and live another day or if she should die quickly and avoid any further pain.
This was the first time I’d experienced death up close. It wouldn’t be the last.
Her face was still tight, her body still fighting the pain while unconscious. It couldn’t help but make me remember what she’d gone though when she was only a young teen. It was like two bookends of horror with her calm life spreading between.
“You’re my whole family,” I said as I held her hand.
The most positive part of my life was about to end, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do about it.
My mother was Molly Abelman. She died when I was five years old. She’d been forty-four at the time, overweight and lazy, and she’d had a massive heart attack. I remembered the incredible loss, although it had trickled away to almost nothing. Sometimes I look at photos of her, unsure if I remember her, or other times looking at photos.