A Trip to the Stars Read online

  Published by

  The Dial Press

  Random House, Inc.

  1540 Broadway

  New York, New York 10036

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2000 by Nicholas Christopher

  Excerpt from Tiger Rag copyright © 2013 by Nicholas Christopher

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.

  The Dial Press® is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Christopher, Nicholas.

  A trip to the stars / Nicholas Christopher.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79988-3

  1. Boys—Fiction. 2. Kidnapping—Fiction. 3. Adopted children—Fiction. J. Title.

  PS3553.H754 T75 2000

  813’.54—dc21 99-056181

  Cover design: Flamur Tonuzi

  Cover art: ceiling of Scala Bologna (detail),

  Vatican Palace (Scala/Art Resource, N.Y.)

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1. The Planetarium

  2. New Orleans

  3. Brooklyn

  4. Spiders

  5. The Abandoned Factory

  6. The Hospital Ship

  7. The Hotel Canopus

  8. The Hôtel Alnilam

  9. The Education of Enzo

  10. Islands

  11. The Sky-City

  12. Kauai

  13. The Stardust

  14. Naxos

  15. The Hotel Rigel

  16. Dead Letter

  17. Honolulu

  18. Ice

  19. Houston

  20. Fire

  21. A Trip to the Stars

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Tiger Rag

  I saw a child carrying a light.

  I asked him where he had brought it from.

  He put it out, and said:

  “Now you tell me where it is gone.“

  —HASAN OF BASRA

  1

  The Planetarium

  We had voyaged far into space and now we were returning. Before leaving the solar system, we orbited the moon and several planets—skating along Saturn’s rings, probing Jupiter’s red spot, and skimming the icy mountain ranges of Uranus. We trailed a comet and threaded a swarm of meteors. And after Pluto, we were out among the stars: glittering clusters, bracelets, and crescents that swirled around us. We followed the long curve of the Milky Way, past Alpha Centauri, the first star beyond the sun, and witnessed the explosion of a supernova and the collapse of a neutron star into a black hole. Traveling two hundred light-years to the red star Antares, we took a long look at the next nearest galaxy, Andromeda, and then reversed course.

  In the darkness, to the jagged strains of electronic synthesizers and the roll of timpanis, the crowd was hushed, padded seats tilted back, necks craning, as we made our return journey at the speed of light. I clutched the armrests of my seat and blew away the motes of dust tumbling around my head. Against the spectral glow from the overhead projectors, my aunt’s silhouette shone black. Her hair smelled fresh, even in the stale metallic air of that windowless place. It was cold there too. I had my coat buttoned up to my throat and inside my boots was curling my toes to keep them warm.

  Finally the blue and white sphere of the earth reappeared before us, suspended in the void, and the godlike voice of the announcer thanked us for taking “A Trip to the Stars,” which was what they had called this show, running from Thanksgiving to Christmas. There was a burst of applause and a clatter of seats snapping into place as everyone stood and the houselights came up and the great domed ceiling went black. The electronic music faded away, replaced by a slow ragtime waltz as the ushers opened the doors in the back.

  Pulling on my cap, I preceded my aunt to the nearest aisle and felt her hand lightly on my shoulder, guiding me. We had come to this old planetarium at the northern tip of Manhattan to celebrate my tenth birthday. The show had been sold out and the large crowd, closely packed, buzzing with conversation, poured up the narrow aisles of the circular room. We slid into the stream of bodies and were carried along with it. I could see nothing but people’s backs and hands. Scents of perfume and sweat filled my nostrils and then the smoke of cigarettes as people began lighting up.

  When we reached the back, my aunt took my hand and picked up her pace. Her grip was gentle, but firm, her suede glove soft against my palm. It was only when we had stepped out into the pale winter light—the wind on the sidewalk swirling dry snow, ticket stubs, and programs alike—that the crowd dispersed enough for me to look up at her in order to speak.

  And then I could not say a word.

  The woman, who was pulling me hard now to a blue sedan idling at the curb, was not my aunt. Until she opened the rear door and pushed me in, I thought she must have mistaken me for another child. Then, before stepping in after me, she looked me full in the face and betrayed no surprise.

  A man was behind the wheel wearing a brown coat and a brown homburg tilted low. Even before the woman had pulled the door shut, he threw the car into gear and sped away.

  “Hey!” I cried. But as I coiled up to dive for the left-hand door, the woman flipped open her handbag, fished out a black atomizer, and hurriedly squirted a cloud of perfume into my face. My eyes stung and I started coughing. A scent like Easter lilies caught sharply in my throat. I felt woozy, and my heart slowed to the point that I could hear its beats in my ear, broadly spaced, like a distant drum. Everything blurred, as if a gauzy filter, woven of shifting colors, had been placed over my eyes.

  “Stop crying!” the woman snapped, not at me, but at the man behind the wheel, as she removed her gloves. They were black suede, like my aunt’s.

  My hands and feet tingled, then felt heavy, as if my bones had turned to iron. My tongue was thick. When my eyes cleared a short time later, I stared out the window trying to read the street signs. Even if I could have, it wouldn’t have mattered: our route, filled with twists and turns, was impossible to follow. We had entered a factory district of narrow streets, rusted loading ports, and broken sidewalks. Pigeons lined the eaves of the warehouses. In the vacant lots bums rubbed their hands over the jagged flames in oil drums. I still felt light-headed, but my vision was less blurred. And already my heart was speeding up and the heaviness was draining from my limbs.

  The woman beside me was a complete stranger. She was young—older than my aunt, but still in her twenties. And she was pretty like my aunt, tall and slim with long, light brown hair; but my aunt’s eyes were bright blue, and this woman had brown, nearly black, eyes that were darkly made up. I thought again of diving for the far door at a red light or when we slowed for traffic, but we ran every light and there was no traffic on those streets.

  We pulled up abruptly at a white brick building beside a vacant lot. The building occupied half the block. Caged windows sealed and dirty, it looked like another factory that had closed down a long time ago. The large doors at its loading zone were chained and padlocked. Its paint was peeling, but the whiteness of the building’s facade stood out among the dark gray buildings
that lined the rest of the street. The sign over its entrance had been corroded by the elements: only the letters CHINE—the fragment of a word—remained legible. A man wearing a white coat and oversized gloves was crisscrossing the vacant lot with a metal detector, stepping gingerly over the shattered glass and strewn twisted rubble. He peered back at us over his upturned collar, then turned his eyes back to the ground.

  Our driver, frozen behind the wheel, lit a cigarette. His smoke filled the car. He had never turned his head, and I had failed to glimpse his reflection in the rearview mirror.

  The woman opened the door and gripped my hand again. “Don’t be afraid,” she said, her first and only words to me. But her face, rigid and severe, did nothing to allay my fears. My heart was racing now, and the moment I was on my feet, stiff and weak-kneed, I had trouble catching my breath. I wanted to bolt, but managed only token resistance, yanking my arm briefly from the woman’s grip and feeling utterly helpless as she led me me into the building through an unlocked metal door that slammed shut behind us.

  My first sensation was the smell of burning tar. The air was just as chilly as it had been outside. I felt the small clouds of my breath condense on my cheeks. But I could see nothing. As the woman led me by the hand, I stumbled every so often and she pulled me that much harder. We made successive ninety-degree turns along a dank, narrow corridor, with fine cold dust swirling by us. I heard wind howling faintly in a distant shaftway.

  Suddenly we stopped and a door slid shut behind us. We were still in pitch-darkness, standing in a large room that was descending through space. Its floor hummed beneath my feet, cables whined overhead, a distant generator whirred. I started shivering. Where was this woman taking me? And where was my aunt now, I asked myself as the elevator carried me deep beneath the abandoned factory, little knowing that it would be fifteen years before I saw her again.

  2

  New Orleans

  I had a gift for dead languages. Latin, Greek, a smattering of Phoenician. Every night the first year he was gone, I dreamed of Loren. And in the dreams with a piece of charcoal he was writing letters to me in Latin on a long white wall. Cara Alma, he began each one, in his rounded script, trying to tell me where he was. But I could never translate fast enough to make sense of the contents, and what I did remember when I woke up made no sense at all.

  Though I am not the kind of person who ever cried herself to sleep—not when my closest relatives died, not when people hurt or left me—on some of those nights, when I woke suddenly, I drenched my pillow thinking of Loren, whom I had hardly known.

  The police were of little help. From the start, they told me that a determined kidnapper, professional or otherwise, was among the most difficult criminals to thwart. And that I was a victim too—a ripe target since I was young and unaccustomed to having children in my care. The wariest adult, they said, when properly distracted—I had merely been tapped on the shoulder, only to find no one behind me and Loren gone when I looked down again—could have a child plucked away from under her nose. None of this assuaged me. On my own I kept looking for him. I dropped out of school, though I was in my last year. I had some money—about four thousand dollars—that I had inherited from my mother. It was she who had raised Loren after my sister Luna and her husband Milo Haris were killed nearly three years earlier. Luna and Milo had been itinerants, living in over a dozen different cities in the seven years after they adopted Loren in Reno, Nevada. The next city would have been Pittsburgh, but they died on its outskirts. As a baby, Loren had known only the road. They had adopted him, and now, somehow, I was his only surviving relative.

  I used most of my inheritance to hire a private investigator after Loren disappeared. In two months he came up with only one thing: a woman fitting my description exactly had been seen getting into a car with a boy fitting Loren’s description—navy pea coat, black watch cap, plaid scarf. After that, nothing. It had been very cold that day, and he and the woman had vanished like the vapor of my breath. The fact that the woman so closely fit my description did not make things easier with the police. Especially when no ransom note, phone call, or message of any sort arrived from this look-alike kidnapper. The police had begun to look at me askance, with a mistrust bordering on suspicion—of, at the very least, my sanity.

  Beginning to doubt the latter myself, I walked around the city carrying Loren’s photograph for weeks. It was the only photograph of him I possessed, taken one summer at Coney Island: wearing a sailor cap aslant, hands on hips, he was squinting into the sunlight. My mother didn’t believe in photographs. She said they didn’t preserve memories, they diluted them. She had other such odd, but firmly held, beliefs. Like her proud claim that she never dreamed. And that a dreamless sleep was the sign of a clear conscience.

  Radiating outward in circles from the planetarium, I showed the dog-eared photograph to everyone I could think of—taxi drivers, storekeepers, workmen, doormen, dog walkers—and then, in desperation, to people who couldn’t possibly help me, like random pedestrians and obvious transients. No one had seen anything. Before my circles reached the city limits, the photograph had crumbled, days, then months, had blurred away, the seasons had run their cycle, and finally, exhausted, I gave up my search. The police gave up, too. “It’s an open case that is never going to be closed,” they told me. “ ‘Inactive,’ we call it.”

  During that year, all of 1966, I stayed in my mother’s house in Brooklyn. I slept not in mine but in Loren’s bedroom, which had been my sister Luna’s room before she ran off with Milo. At night I lay on his small bed, under the blue quilt, with his things around me, and for hours in the dark I went over and over the last day I had spent with Loren. From the little I had seen of him, I had drawn a strong impression. In his pea coat and cap he walked with something of a rolling gait, like a sailor. He was a wiry, athletic kid with the straight posture and the intense, direct gaze of someone who, on his own too soon, had grown up too fast. As, strangely enough, often happens in these cases, he had ended up looking a good deal like my sister, his adoptive mother: symmetrical features built around wide cheekbones and a straight nose, and the same dark wavy hair and gray eyes. But while Luna had nervous hands, quick gestures, and a staccato way of talking, Loren was steady and unhurried. Perhaps with such peripatetic parents, this had been his only recourse—a positive development.

  That last afternoon, before going to the planetarium, we had stopped at a diner nearby. I drank coffee and Loren picked at a western omelette. This was only our second time out since my mother’s death. The night before, we had gone to the movies. Though I was nominally his aunt, not only did Loren and I hardly know each other, but we shared almost no history together. Before my mother’s death, I hadn’t seen him in nearly a year. And suddenly I was the only person between him and an orphanage. Two months short of my twenty-first birthday, with a cramped studio apartment in Boston, three hundred dollars in my checking account, and my secondhand Impala, I now had a ward to care for—by default.

  My mother, robust all her life, had died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage while getting ready for bed. Loren had discovered her the next morning. After calling for an ambulance, he had sat on the floor with her head in his lap. Though the police operator had instructed him not to move her, Loren told me he had known right away that she was dead, and, after holding the mirror in her compact under her nose to make sure, he couldn’t stand the idea of just leaving her there like that, on the cold wooden floor. After they took her body away, and telephoned me in Boston, the police wanted Loren to go stay with one of the neighbors, but he refused to leave the house. The woman next door came over and cooked him dinner and then sat up in the living room after he went to bed. When I arrived in the evening, I found Loren in my mother’s bedroom. He was lying on his back in her bed, still dressed and on top of the covers, with the lights off, gazing into the darkness. I switched on the lamp and sat down at the foot of the bed. His eyes were bloodshot and his face grief-stricken. But whatever crying he had
done was behind him and his voice was composed.

  “What will I do now?” were his first words to me.

  “You’ll be okay,” I said, keeping my voice steady and pressing my hand to his cheek. Though I had been asking myself the same question—on his behalf and my own—all during the drive from Boston, I did not yet have a real answer for him.

  When I went to the bathroom to get him a glass of water, I closed the door behind me, buried my face in a towel, and cried—not for my mother, but for Loren. As much as I felt I had gotten a raw deal when it came to family matters, it didn’t compare to what he had been through: twice orphaned and now orphaned again because of an untimely death—all before the age of ten.

  My mother and I had been estranged for three years—since I had left for college, just months before Loren arrived at her house. Our estrangement was the culmination of the eight years since her own mother’s death in which we had lived alone together, in an atmosphere that alternated between suspiciousness and outright hostility. I never knew my father. He enlisted in the Marine Corps at the height of the Second World War and was sent to the South Pacific in June, 1944. At the time, Luna was eight years old, and my mother didn’t know that she herself was barely a month pregnant. I was born the following February, seven months after my father was killed in the battle to liberate Guam from the Japanese. Posthumously my father had been awarded a Silver Star for valor, which my mother kept framed in the living room. My mother never remarried, and the three of us lived frugally on her salary as a salesclerk at Macy’s and the veteran’s benefits she received for my father. For the first ten years of my life, until her death, my mother’s mother moved in with us, to help out. Not surprisingly, my mother never spoke of it (an aunt from Staten Island filled me in on the story) but my grandmother had been a drunk. My mother always told Luna and me that our grandmother, the long-suffering widow of a fireman, had died of “a broken heart”; but according to this aunt, the toxic agent at work in my grandmother’s bloodstream when her heart gave out one night had been, not love, but Seven Roses rye, which she drank from a teacup. So I was raised by widows, in a house of women seldom visited by men.