Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Hunter of Stars ^{Nava Semel}

The night all the stars winked out, I was born. This is why nobody in our family paid any attention to what was going on outside, why none of them witnessed this world-changing event. They were all busy waiting outside the delivery room for my first scream, and Mom claimed I wouldn’t stop screaming, as if I’d already known that the world I was coming into had become completely dark.

Mom and Dad, and Grandpa, and my two spinster aunts, none of them rushed, crazed, into the streets or fields, like all the other people in the world, to see a sky that went completely black all at once; none of them cried out for the stars to come back.

Except for them, there’s not a single person in the world who can’t remember what they were doing at that terrible moment, which is called in history books the Obscuration of the Minor Lights. Until this very day—ten years have passed since—people are holding massive rites; even a special prayer was devised for the return of the lost lights. I remember nothing of that night, of course, ’cause a tiny little baby can’t tell day from night and knows nothing about stars or heaven. All this I was told by Grandpa, who also found out only the next morning that the world had turned upside down just as they were naming me.

Neri, that’s what they named me.

Mom, who breast-fed me with inoculation-enriched milk, said that I wouldn’t stop screaming for days on end.

The world got used to it. At first people cried, then they didn’t cry so much, and Grandpa says that people get used to bad things just as they get used to good things. In school we were taught that this was an ecological disaster no scientist had anticipated, and unlike those who claim that this was God’s curse, Grandpa says that this was people’s curse. All those toxic gases they were releasing into the atmosphere for centuries had made the air lose its clarity, and now no starlight can penetrate the black tire that surrounds us. And even though all means of transportation are driven by solar energy nowadays, the air is still sick, and the scientists have found no way to repair this heavenly short-circuit.

My science teacher claims that what happened to our planet was in fact a blessing, because now it is clad with a defensive shield preventing evil aliens from discovering and hurting us. But if earthlight can no longer spread out into the distance, I’m afraid that if God should happen to look for us from high above, He won’t know we exist.

On every birthday, before the annual rite for the return of lost light, I go out on the balcony and whisper to Him, so that no one else can hear: “We are still here. Do not forget us.”

Even on ordinary days, I keep nagging at Grandpa: “How did the world look with stars?” And he sits down in the special old folks’ armchair, tailor-made for his one-hundred-twenty-two-year-old body, that delivers healing currents, and tells me how when he was a kid he always waited for a shooting star to make a wish. Once he even saw a meteor shower, but I’m not sure he didn’t invent this one.

Even if these stories are the products of Grandpa’s wild imagination, I envy him ’cause he got to live in a star-spangled world, for now even the moon is rarely seen—a dim patch, you really need to make an effort to see it—and only when it is full.

Its picture as a thin crescent, rocking in the sky like a hammock—Grandpa calls it “a light banana”—can be seen only in natural history museums or at the planetarium.

Today is my birthday. On the cake Mom had baked before she left with Dad for the annual rite of prayer, my best friend Sheli arranged candies to look like the constellations Big Dipper and Orion the Hunter, and at the edge of the cake she stuck Polaris, the northern star that used to accompany Grandpa in navigation hikes when he was young, in the army—believe it or not, we used to have a military once—and the northern star always showed him the way.

Sheli is short for Shalhevet, “flame,” and she knows by heart the entire star chart, which only select astronomers get to see through their most advanced telescopes. I find it sad that most people chose to forget this chart, and for them the stars are like the dinosaurs that got extinct millions of years ago, or like those peoples mentioned in the Bible—the Babylonians and the Assyrians and the Amalekites; they, too, ceased to exist a long time ago. For them, that’s how things are, and if the Universe keeps changing anyway, the time has come for the stars to disappear as well. So long as the sun is still there, says Sheli’s mother—and never mind if its light is drab and grayish. What’s important is that its rays are there, and we can go on living.

Sheli and I have studied together since our first teaching day, when we were three. Most kids study on their own, facing the computer wall that connects them with their study groups, what used to be called in Grandpa’s old days a class, but Sheli and I persuaded our parents to allow us to be in the same room so we can talk face-to-face, not just through the computer. Every morning we take our hoverbikes and go either to her home or mine, and what I like most of all is to hear her whisper “Neri” in my ear when she asks for help in her homework.

On our common screensaver we are met every morning by Orion the Hunter in a picture taken from an ivory bas-relief created thirty-two centuries ago. At the back of this relief there are eighty-six slots, which is the number of the days of a woman’s pregnancy, and someday I’m going to count them one by one, when I’ll go to see this bas-relief at the Beijing Observatory.

Sheli is fond of the ancient legend about Artemis, the moon goddess of Greek mythology who’d fallen in love with the brave hunter, so much that she’d forgotten to light up the moon. Her brother Apollo, the sun god, got mad at her and decided to kill the hunter. He made her shoot an arrow at him by mistake, and Orion was killed. Poor Artemis placed her lover in heaven beside her, and this is how he lives forever, and since the days of Greek mythology, Orion’s light was the brightest in the sky. When Grandpa was a kid, it could be seen from everywhere on Earth. On my birthday cake Orion doesn’t look like the shiniest hunter in the world, but I forgive him, ’cause you can’t copy everything using candles.

We were waiting for our guests. Grandpa was napping in his special old folks’ armchair, and we promised to wake him up when the guests arrive for the party, but nobody came.

“Why are they so late?” I asked Sheli, hiding from her my fear that someday everyone I love will disappear suddenly, just like the starlight.

I put on the phosphorescent shoulder pads that always make us seen in the dark, and I put on the phosphorescent headband we also have to wear at night, and we went out to the balcony.

Sheli tried to encourage me: “Perhaps this will be the night when all the stars decide to light up again?”

From Tel Aviv’s artificial seaside came to us the noise of the crowds as they were stirring, and we could hear them praying all together: “…and bestow light for blessing on all the face of the earth.”

The sea looked like a blank tabletop made out of marble on which nothing was reflected, and from the balcony my birthday cake looked like a forgotten block of basalt. I was so disappointed. I thought that they forgot my birthday because of the annual rite.

We were leaning on the balustrade, watching the Heavenly Body Substitute Searchlight that lit up exactly at midnight to swing its mighty beam across the empty dome above us.

I asked, “Sheli, do you think that maybe on another planet there are two kids like us wondering where Earth has disappeared to?”

Sheli replied that she was sure that the universe was full of curious kids, even if they didn’t look like us. Alien children—that’s what she said—have hearts, and even if they cry without tears, they are just as sad as we are and just as happy, and they too discover ancient heroes up above and tell legends about them.

We almost fell asleep on the carpet when they finally arrived, Mom and Dad and my aunts, one of them with a new boyfriend, and some more friends from the Horsehead Nebula neighborhood where we live. Around Orion, on the cake, they stuck ten candles plus one, and I tried not to blow them out all at once so that some light could remain.

Then I opened my presents. Mom and Dad gave me TriDi spectacles that simulate the entire Milky Way galaxy, and one spinster aunt got me bedsheets with a Big Dipper pattern, and from Grandpa I got a phosphorescent soccer ball you can play with in the dark, and Grandpa promised me that we were going to score many goals with it. And from Sheli I got a computer game in which I’m an astronomer, discovering a lot of new stars and naming them. The first one we discovered she named after me, “Neri’s Star.”

Only my other spinster aunt gave me a massive book about extinct rhinos in Africa, saying shrewishly, “You’re a big boy now, Neri. It’s time to grow up. Enough already with your fascination with the stars. A whole lot of good they were, one should think. Just a decoration, that’s what they were.”

Auntie had met her new boyfriend at a demonstration of the Movement against Star Worship. Her headband bore a sticker with the inscription “Stars belong only in movies.”

Grandpa was a bit miffed with his wayward daughter and made a wish for me that on my next birthday all the stars will light up again, and he felt certain that I won’t miss that moment. He also wished that he, too, will still be with us then.

If it won’t happen on my next birthday, then maybe on the following one.

When all the birthday leftovers were cleared, Mom and Dad sat together with Grandpa, and my two spinster aunts with their new friend went to sleep. I went out to the balcony again, this time without my phosphorescent shoulder pads and headband. I was swallowed by darkness. Sheli came out after me, and we reached out and held hands.

I whispered into the black sky: “Orion, my shining friend, I will always follow you. Like you, I will be a hunter of stars.”