The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

traveled far for this diamond-clear view. Dr. Manday had taken out a notepad on which to record the meteors, and he walked among them all with an old man in gold brocade— the sultan himself, who murmured and scratched his slippers against the rock, talking about the repairs he would make to the overlook’s wall, which had been damaged during the war. There was no wind. People were whispering. Denise had chattered for a while, but seemed to be asleep beside Eli now, her headache beginning to fade. Eli listened for his wife’s voice across the parapet. There was no sound but the whispering, the sea, the flutter of bats’ wings. He stared at the sky, then over to the wall, where he saw that a gecko had crawled onto the whitewashed surface. Eli could hear it faintly croaking, a quasar in the night; he stared and wondered if they were all wrong about him.
    He was lucky to be brilliant—his father had been so brilliant, a lawyer in Seattle, and everyone had watched Eli to see how this egg would hatch. Would he be ordinary and forgettable and safe in blue-collar Washington? Afterward, as an older boy, he had found a copy of
Action Comics
and felt just like that, like a death-kissed superhero with the parents peering over the crib to see if he might be human or extraordinary, if they should bother sewing capes. But he passed this test—his mother came home one day when he was three to see the letters
ELI
written in crayon on the wall. Had they really held a party for that? As if it were a true passage into genius, like the sailors passing the equator and pouring milk joyfully over one another. He had sweated after that, to live up to their prophecy.
    But they were wrong. He had so easily conquered the scientific math, of course, shone so brightly as a student that even Swift remembered his name soon after Eli became a BADgrad—and wasn’t he one of the two fellows picked for this trip? Hadn’t he, finally, been tapped? But Denise, silently, was more brilliant. No one could see it but him. She had taken her preliminaries a semester early, and now was ready for her qualifying. Was anybody watching? Didn’t they see her there, with no praise, no support or notice, calmly jerking her slide rule through its motions until she had the answer before the rest of them? She didn’t raise her hand or speak, but she was first. Didn’t they see her?
    Eli, on the other hand, was fading. He felt it fading, his brilliance, at twenty-five, like an aging actress feeling her once beautiful face. And somehow, in Eli’s mind, as he stared at the pale wall and tried to see the tiny lizard crouching there, croaking, the equation was simple and true: If Denise was brilliant, then he was not, and they were wrong. QED.
    He turned toward his station again, and there above him was the constellation he had described to Kathy the other night: Centaurus. High in the southern sky, hidden from their usual vantage in California, it spread out hugely above him, the body of the creature drawn from the star Menkent and east toward the Southern Cross, where the imagined human head looked down. But there was nothing there, no meteors anymore—an empty vessel held before them all, or a magician’s hat which might (a childhood hope if anything) produce a rabbit all in fiery shards tonight. This he could see with his eyes. It was so clear here, and it was still so new to him that he could make out for the first time the stars of the Southern Hemisphere: the Southern Cross, Menkent, that open star cluster NGC 3532 just to the east of where the meteors would fall—wasn’t it amazing! All his life some curtain had been held up at the horizon, and here it lifted, as in a carnival tent, to reveal this museum of oddities—southern stars unknown to the ancients, named after objects in the sixteenth-century world: clocks, telescopes, air pumps.
    But you could not describe these things to Kathy. You could try; you could name the stars and draw their lines on scraps