You can find Sharon online at www.sharonjoss.com or follow her on Twitter @josswrites.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Choong Yoon was born in Anyang, South Korea and moved to Seoul at the age of ten. He loved drawing animated characters and copying comic book panels, which helped him make friends in the new city.
But drawing became more than just a tool to make friends. His interest and passion for it grew until eventually his parents had to take him to a private atelier near his home so he could learn academic art at a young age.
Academic art lessons naturally led him to apply to an art high school. Studying art in high school naturally led him to pursue art in college. He studied fine arts in Seoul National University. In the art school, he was able to meet many people from different departments who were just as passionate about the craft.
His love of comics and animation never faded even though most students in the fine arts department were into gallery work. He was fascinated with the arts that involve narrative storytelling, scenes with characters and drama, so he transferred to the School of Visual Arts in New York to study illustration and learn how to tell stories with images.
After graduating SVA in May 2014, Yoon began working as a freelance illustrator in New York and he is developing a short animated film with his friends.
Stars That Make Dark Heaven Light
1
“Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.”
— Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species,
Posted in the communal dining hall of the grounded SS Dominion
A dull pounding at my temples told me to take a break. The rich oxygen mixture inside the colony’s greenhouses usually gave me a headache after a couple hours, but I was reluctant to quit just yet.
I liked being here. Diffused sunlight filtered through the translucent ceiling, and regular misting kept the air moist; a blessed relief from the arid climate. I stroked the pollen-laden hairs of my brush against a spray of brackenberry flowers. Unlike the younger kids, I enjoyed the quiet solitude of my daily hand-pollination chores; it was the only time of day I was free from looking after the children.
The rich scent of loam at my feet mixed with the sweet essence of the berry blossoms in my hand, a heady blend made richer in the still air. I stretched my neck, wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand, and resettled myself on the low stool among the vines.
From outside, I heard the pounding of running feet and clatter of excited voices coming closer, and knew immediately that I was back on duty again. I stood and slipped the pollen brush into the pocket of my apron.
Layfe came tearing into the greenhouse, shouting at the top of his eight-year-old lungs, a baby lapid clutched in each grubby hand. “They’ve hatched, Auntie Ettie! Look, they’ve hatched!”
Behind him, Gehnny, the youngest at five, shrieked with excitement. “Hurry up, Ettie! Or they’ll be gone!”
I grinned and grabbed a handful of coarsely woven sacks from the drying shed. We never knew exactly when to expect the baby lapids to emerge from their unmarked nests beneath Hesperidee’s surface, but when they did, every kid in the colony joined in the hunt.
No one ever tried to locate the nests ahead of time, as a midnight encounter with a broody female stone scorpion was almost always fatal. Lapids could inflict venom with both pinchers and two massive stingers carried scorpion-like above their armored backs.
But the big-eyed babies were adorable, and until their armor hardened, harmless. The other kids were waiting for us in the paved area between the children’s dormitory and the ship. I handed everyone a sack; then Layfe, eager to show us the way, led us screaming outside the Dominion’s barricades. The first day was always the best collecting day; by the third or fourth, the babies had either managed to scuttle off and hide amid the larger boulders out on the range, or had died of extended exposure to sunlight.
He led us to The Cliffs, an area about a mile from the colony, where an outcrop of crumbling boulders as big as a mountain jutted up through the planet’s crust. The rough surface of Hesperidee stretched around us in a stony plain, broken only by grey-green clumps of woody firebite bushes, so named for the blistering effect their oily leaves had on bare skin. Overhead, yellow clouds scudded across skies of palest lavender. In the middle distance, a series of gradually ascending plateaus marked the rims of distant craters.
The cartilage instead of bones in our skeletons necessitated that us kids spend at least six hours each day exposed to the light of the twin suns, Tesla and Newton. After the dry tutelage of the instructional archives and our shifts in the greenhouses each day, we were always eager to be freed from the confines of the colony.
“Got one!” Mia held up her prize.
Nearly all the dangerous predators on Hesperidee were nocturnal, so as long as I was there to supervise, we were allowed to roam anywhere within sight of the ship and barricades.
I clutched my sack to my chest as I scanned the broken surface beneath my feet, searching for the slightest movement. Mottled yellow and grey, the leathery shellbacks of newly hatched lapids exactly mimicked the stony surface that covered so much of the land close to the colony. The hatchlings’ instinct to get out of the sun kept them moving. Sometimes the very shapes of their bodies betrayed them. Their still-soft shells weren’t quite as sharp as the surrounding rocky soil. But usually, it was a plump segmented leg, waving as it searched for a foothold among the scree that caught my attention. There.
“I got one, too!” I called.
I picked up the lapid and grinned. About half the size of a ping-pong ball, eight maroon little legs waved at me in helpless lapid fright. A lovely yellow stripe ran around the outer edge of this one’s shell. I’d never seen a striped one before. I shoved it into my sack and kept hunting.
After the initial excitement of collecting, we headed back to Dominion and settled all three hundred and twelve of the babies into shallow bins meant to simulate their rocky habitat in the raising room of the children’s dormitory.
For the next few weeks, they’d be fed a crumbled mixture of soybeans, clippings from the gardens, and local lichens; which would accelerate their growth. After they entered their second pupal stage, we’d move them into the freezers aboard the SS Dominion, as the eight-pound pupae provided the colony’s only source of animal protein for the entire year. The sweet meat had a light flavor and texture.
But before we placed the babies into their bins, Gehnny and I, like every other kid in Dominion, each got to pick out one baby lapid as our very own pet for the season. Sometimes we traded amongst the other kids, but not this year.
This year, I chose the one with the lovely yellow stripe. I had no idea how much that one decision would change my life.
2
“All children are a gift of great value.
No child shall be favored over another.”
Posted in the communal dining hall of the grounded SS Dominion
The excitement of the lapid hatchlings paled against the announcement made by Mother Jean at dinner that night in the colony’s communal dining hall. She stood, tall and sere, her hand resting lightly on her twelve-year-old birth-daughter’s shoulder, until everyone stopped talking.
“I am proud to announce that Daughter Rae has begun her first cycle. She has become a woman. The first of her generation to do so.”
She stared right at me when she said that last part.
The announcement hit me like a physical blow. I blushed furiously. At seventeen, I should’ve been a woman, and a mother, twice over already, but my body hadn’t shown the slightest signs of puberty. My chest was as flat as a boy’s, and I stood no taller than kids half my age.
The whole room applauded, and I joined in, but my heart wasn’t in it. Rae basked in the attention, as each adult in the room spontaneously came forward to kiss her cheek and offer congratulations
. Our leader, Father Isaac, announced that Father Lyle would begin immediately to build a new dormitory to house the adults of the next generation.
Resentment flooded through me. In a few months, Rae would be artificially inseminated and move into her new quarters. She’d have her choice of work assignments. As a birthmother, she would have more prestige and a voice in colony decisions. It wasn’t fair.
It should have been me.
Gradually, the hubbub died down and the usual hum of dinner conversation took over.
Mother Bekke, the silver-haired woman seated across from me, leaned over the expanse of the long steel table between us and grasped my hand.
“Don’t look so sad, Henrietta.” Her five pale fingers curled lovingly around my brown, syndactyly-melded three. Among the adults of Dominion, Bekke was well-regarded as a pattern-maker and seamstress. To the children, she was our former full-time nanny and caregiver until five years ago, when the responsibility passed to me. “We have decided to celebrate your womanhood at the coming equinox as well.”
I sat back in my seat, relinquishing her tender touch for the rough pockets of my linen jumper. As the eldest of the first generation of children conceived and raised on Hesperidee, I knew my responsibilities.
“B-but I’m not a woman, yet.”
The excitement on Bekke’s face faded somewhat. “Father Isaac has recently discovered that everyone’s hormone levels seem to be dropping, possibly due to the environmental conditions here. He thinks that’s what may have happened to you.”
I glanced at the head table, where Father Isaac sat. He was the oldest man in Dominion and the colony’s geneticist. He’d been born on Earth, and was the last survivor of the original colonists.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“When we lost power to the cryo unit last summer, no one fully appreciated what the loss of the sperm and egg bank would mean to the colony. But he thinks once you are bonded with a partner, your hormones will wake up. We simply cannot wait any longer.”
I clutched the wadded cloth napkin in my lap for dear life, unable to believe she was serious. All my life I’d looked forward to the day when I’d be declared a woman, with the right to choose artificial insemination or a partner. I’d already decided to choose artificial insemination for my first child or two. In a few years, I’d marry one of the boys. Layfe or maybe Simon, as soon as they were old enough.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I felt the walls of the crowded dining room closing in on me.
I looked around the room, searching for the truth in everyone’s face. The unnatural yellow light from the ship’s power source gave everything a sickly, jaundiced cast. Every one of the colony’s ninety-six adults looked old and tired; most of the men and all the women had grey or silver-shot hair. Even before the loss of the cryo unit, no children had been conceived in several orbits. Gehnny, the baby of the colony, was now five.
The SS Dominion and the dining room in particular were showing its age too; a fact which couldn’t be blamed on the lighting. After forty years, the portraits of Charles Darwin, Thomas Jefferson, and the great space explorer, Beroe Dunmore had faded; lost their intensity. Less formal, but equally dingy and yellowed inspirational plaques admonished us to remember our priorities:
You cannot escape the responsibility
of tomorrow by evading it today!
Where there’s a will, there’s a way!
We’re all depending on YOU!
“But none of the boys are men yet, either,” I pointed out. The oldest boys, eight-year-olds Layfe and Simon and seven-year-old Kole were too young to father children.
Father Isaac approached our table.
Bekke’s husband, Father Torov, took a deep breath, as if he needed to brace himself for what he had to say. He nodded to the two men sitting next to him. “After testing all the men, Father Isaac says Robert and Lyle have the most viable sperm. You may choose whomever you prefer.”
Both men stood and bowed, red-faced. Stooped and sallow Father Robert, who worked in the ship’s power plant, and slab-faced Father Lyle, the builder. They smiled at me uncertainly.
Father Isaac stood between them, smiling broadly; his mahogany skin crinkled in deep creases around his eyes and along well-worn smile lines in his ancient face. “The important thing is that you spend time with them. Allow them to compete for your affections.”
I fought unsuccessfully to suppress a shudder. The room had gone eerily quiet.
The fourteen other children in the room stared at me in wide-eyed silence. The whole room was watching me. The adults must’ve already known about this.
The sign on the wall above Bekke’s head shouted at me.
BE THE EXAMPLE!
They were depending on me to accept this. I did want to be a mother; I wanted children. If dating two men old enough to be my grandfather was what it took to wake up my hormones and become a woman, I had to try, no matter how queasy I felt about it. The future of the colony depended on it.
It had to work. I had to go along.
It took all my effort to smile, but when I did, the tension in the room seemed to evaporate.
Mother Bekke patted my arm. “Good girl.”
I had never felt so alone.
The rest of the evening passed with interminable slowness. I couldn’t eat. I shoveled beets back and forth across my plate, unable to make eye contact with anyone, least of all, well, anyone. Bekke watched me like a hawk—so did all the other kids.
During dessert, Father Isaac announced that I didn’t have to address Robert and Lyle as “Father” any longer, since they were now suitors for my affections. Kind and well-intentioned as Father Isaac was, he was not a child of the colony. He hadn’t been raised on Hesperidee. He couldn’t possibly understand what I was going through.
I’d known both Father Lyle and Father Robert all my life. The adults raised us to treat all the men and women of the colony as our parents, whether they’d birthed us or not. One big happy family. Considering either of them as a romantic partner was … unthinkable.
Would I be expected to kiss them? Oh god.
If I thought my humiliation for the evening was complete, I was wrong.
I sat, frozen to my seat as Robert bowed and presented me with an ancient book on Desalination Engineering. Not to be outdone, Lyle kissed my hand with his whiskery stubble and offered me a sun-baked bit of clay he’d modeled into the shapely figure of a woman. Not the head or legs; just the body.
I thought I would die of embarrassment.
I thanked them for their thoughtfulness, but couldn’t think of anything else to say. Bekke came to my rescue, and let them know I’d be pleased to spend time with each of them on alternate evenings here in the dining room.
I was finally able to slip away by saying the oxygen saturation in the room was making me dizzy. Bekke knew I was heading outside and said she’d come with me.
After she suited up, she followed me back through the dimly lit grey corridors leading outside while the rest of the colony remained in the dining room, playing games and telling stories to the children.
“Talk to me, Ettie. I realize now that tonight’s announcement must have come as a bit of a shock,” she began. “But we thought it was time. You’re certainly old enough.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Isn’t this what you wanted? To join the adults?”
“Yes, but it feels wrong.” In so many ways.
I waited for her to put on her oxygen helmet. Only four of the adults in Dominion colony had gills; Bekke and Lyle both did. But as children, they’d slept onboard the Dominion in oxygenated quarters, and their lungs never fully adapted to hydrogen, so although they could venture outside for short periods without an oxygen mask, they couldn’t function well, and would die if deprived of supplemental oxygen for more than twenty minutes.
The adult’s dependence on oxygen kept them separate from us most of the time. As frozen embryos intentionally infected with an aggressive transmutation gene virus, Bekke and her peers had been transported to Hesperidee from Earth to help subsequent generations adapt to alien environments at an accelerated pace. The entire mission of Dominion and other space colonies was to pioneer settlements of the human race on other planets.
In contrast, I and all the rest of the kids who’d survived infancy had been born with gills and two sets of lungs, which also enabled us to breathe the hydrogen-rich atmosphere on Hesperidee. None of the children of our generation born without gills had survived more than a few days. Dozens of Dominion’s children had died in infancy before the adults learned this lesson. Father Isaac predicted that all future generations of humans born on Hesperidee would have gills, and no one would think us any different for having them.
We’d been taught to celebrate the differences between us. It was a good thing, which would ensure the survival of the human race. Father Lyle and his crew built the children’s dormitory outside the ship to encourage our bodies to adapt to this planet’s atmosphere, rather than Earth’s.
We looked so different. Sometimes, like now, it was hard to believe we were the same species.
“I know my responsibilities to the colony. I get it. Survival of the human race and all that.” I pushed the panel to release the inner door lock. “But I always thought I’d marry Layfe. Or Simon. They’re more like me.”
She nodded, her expression pained behind the mask.
“I thought so too.” The mask muffled the tone of her voice, sapping all the emotion from her words. “But Robert and Lyle are good men.”
“How can I possibly look at Father Robert or Father Lyle in that way? It can’t work.” I shook my head. “It’s sick. They’re my parents!”
“Technically, Robert and Lyle are not your parents. Yes, we’re to blame for encouraging all of you to think of us that way. Given our current situation, that was a mistake. And I’m sorry for that. But I’m afraid you’ll just have to get over it. You kids are our future, the future of the human race. We’re teetering on the edge of extinction here, Henrietta. There’s no guarantee the boys will mature in the timeline all of us expected. I mean, look at you—”