For a space, at the beginning, it was dark. In the first moments before the doctors brought him to his mother, before thought, before sight, before speech, it was dark. And then, in her arms, unknowing unseeing unspeaking, in the cold sterile blue light of the Medacility, came the answer to her nine-months’ whisper I hold you in my heart. A single wail, hunger cry, first in his world.

I hold you in my heart as well.

For six years he learned to read, write, walk and play, but mostly read and write. Two halves of his heart, father-read mother-write, pumped life through his skin and lungs and striving bones. In the sixth year, the light intensified. He was no longer a son; he was a brother.

Father-read and mother-write created a girl for him, to hold her hand, light the lamps along the way; he would be the big one. Where mother-write and father-read had pumped before, nestled into his left lung, sister-teach now pulsed.

And for fourteen years he waited, waited for the darkness to overtake him again. He worked, he’s working, he will work, for a passion, a need, an indefinable pull toward the dream father told him to seek. And it’s good, it keeps the darkness away, the piercing light of that first day is now the trademark of his home of corridors and numbered rooms and plastic tubes on wire racks. Beep-beep-beep and mechanical clicks fight with the ruder, wetter sounds of human bodies in distress.

Until he sees her off, the shuttle to the deep side of a planet he doesn’t know. Toothbrush, hairbrush, extra sweaters. A cottony sari for the warm days, a thick kimono for the cool ones. Her favorite book, The Aero-Harmonization of Tropical Plumage . She’s never seen an ocean.

He didn’t like it, even before the letters. He didn’t like it because, while he knew it was the right thing for her, it took her away from him. The best intentions can’t eliminate the stab of a brother’s jealousy when he has to cede his sister’s education to trained authorities.

That stab of darkness, a cynical s