Levi's Rock - Chapter Zero - Fyodorim's Child

Chapter Zero: Fyodorim’s Child

In the thin, inadequate atmosphere of Kiyos, there were no shooting stars.

Sarah Lynne Fyodorim lamented this fact as she sat by her son’s bed, smoothing his warm forehead and looking out the window at the stark sky, impossibly clear in her opinion, after living so many years on a planet with a thick and polluted layer of gases, water vapor, and smog. The stars never twinkled, either—so much for that lullaby, she thought dully—and they were out all the time. There was never a first evening star appearing on which to wish.

She briefly considered actual prayer, but she almost feared what it would bring. The last time she had prayed, almost two years ago, her sister Miriam had showed up at her houseport the very next day. Apart from her own battles with Miriam, Lynne had no desire to subject her husband to the type of high-toned, sanctimonious barrage that Miriam would be bringing with her when she came.

If she came, Lynne reminded herself. As spooky as Miriam’s last visit was, it could have been a fluke. A coincidence, her husband called it.

Yet she knew it wasn’t. Lynne had known before she got down on her knees—by her son’s bedside, just the way she was now—that if she raised one word to the heavens for help, it would come in the form of her overprotective and zealously pious sister.

The boy in the bed stirred. His six-year-old body squirmed between the sheets. He was uncomfortable, and she couldn’t do anything about it. She saw his eyelids part ever so slightly.

“Mommy?”

“Spencer? I’m here.”

“I’m cold.”

Lynne hurried to pull another blanket up, and she tucked it carefully around him as he curled up on his side. There was a little sweat on his forehead, and she wiped at it while whispering to him, urging him back to sleep.

As soon as he was back to sleep, the love and protectiveness took a backseat to the fear again. It wasn’t just fear for his health, either. It was fear of what he was becoming, what was happening to him—fear of why he was lying here in the first place.


Two years ago, when Spencer had just begun school, it had happened for the first time. Spencer had fallen down at play and become unresponsive. The doctor at the school had called it a seizure; Spencer was unconscious, he had developed a high fever, and he hadn’t woken up from it for almost twelve hours. He hadn’t exhibited any symptoms that led them to believe it would recur, but it had been frightening enough as a single event. At the eleventh hour of his coma, Spencer’s shaking, hysterical mother had knelt by his bed and prayed for the first time since their arrival on Kiyos.

Miriam had arrived the next day to take care of her.

Miriam was not there to take care of Spencer, who appeared perfectly healthy the next morning and required no assistance to do anything. He ran about the house, played and shouted, and generally enjoyed an extra day home from school—especially with his father home—and Greg Fyodorim told Spencer that he had taken the day off just to be with his favorite boy, which had been true when he had contacted the mining office.

The next day, however, Greg played absently with Spencer while keeping an eye on his wife—and his sister-in-law.

Miriam was serene and steady, but her manner was incisive and her tone unforgiving as she investigated her nephew’s experience. She asked Lynne a thousand questions, and she went to town to see the school doctor—and Spencer’s instructor—with a thousand more.

Greg had only one question: why had Miriam shown up? Although his wife insisted it was a coincidence, he didn’t really believe it and neither, he was sure, did Lynne.

Miriam’s home on Serpeset was more than a week’s journey and required at least one change of destination—it sometimes took her two weeks to arrive after she announced her intention to “drop in” on them. And yet she didn’t arrive two weeks after Spencer’s seizure. She arrived the very next day. She must have left long before the fact.

But what was even more disturbing was that she had announced herself at the houseport—speaking through the airlock as the taxi uncoupled and skimmed away—as having “come to attend to her nephew,” and not simply to inquire after his health. In order to have known about Spencer’s health, she would have had to be in contact with Lynne or Greg—or the school or the doctor—during transport, which was a rare luxury, even for someone as wealthy as Miriam had become.

Greg was certain that she had somehow known about the whole incident before she arrived, but he never did find out how. He questioned so many people about it that he began to get huffy answers.

“For cryin’ out loud, Greg! What do you think we do—sit around and talk about you behind your back? Who even knew Lynne had a sister?”

“I never heard of your sister-in-law before last week, and I hope I never hear of her again—she’s a little creepy, to tell you the truth.”

“Greg, we’ve been through this already with her; nobody called anybody or did anything except the doc, and that includes Spencer’s instructor, Miss Laudáme.” This was from the director of the school, trying to head off Mr. Fyodorim before he attempted to interrogate Spencer’s already rattled teacher.

But Miss Laudáme did have a story to tell them, and it was one that would affect them all differently.

It would frighten Lynne initially, and then unnerve her every time she recalled it, which was infrequently as she had a tendency to push it from her mind.

It would infuse Greg with remorse and a strange sense of relief—and bring him closer to his son than he might have otherwise been.

It would send Miriam away with a triumphant secret, and cause her to announce before she left that she hoped she would be seeing them again soon.


Miss Laudáme’s story was very similar to the one told Lynne today by Spencer’s new instructor, Mister Guth. Yes, Spencer had smelled a smell in the room that no one else could smell—oranges about to go bad—and, yes, he had passed out.

However, before he had passed out, Spencer had spoken somewhat lucidly for about three minutes—expounding extemporaneously about mankind’s journey to the stars. To his four-year-old classmates, it was gobbledy-gook, but to Miss Laudáme—and then to Mister Guth two years later—it sounded not only coherent but elaborate and philosophical. Miss Laudáme had commented that he might have been quoting a teleplay or an informational lecture he’d heard; she suggested that he had fallen into a hypnotic state or begun reciting from photographic memory. Mister Guth, when pressed by Lynne, admitted that this idea sounded plausible, with one detracting point: “If he was repeating something from memory, I’d like to know where it’s from; I’ve never heard anything like it in my life.”

Both times, Lynne had asked that Spencer’s instructor write down as much as they could remember of the speech, and when Miriam had come to visit the first time, Lynne had presented her with Miss Laudáme’s attempted transcription—the paper folded and unfolded and crumpled from being read and re-read all night as Lynne sat, sleepless by the window of Spencer’s room.


Tonight, as Lynne sat by Spencer’s bedside, she found herself folding and unfolding Mister Guth’s version of the speech. As she knelt resignedly by the bed, she let it fall to the floor, where Miriam would find it the next day.


Greg Fyodorim stood in the dark hall just outside the door in a tempest of indecision. He had never spoken to Lynne about the visions he’d had. He didn’t think she would want to hear about them now—and he certainly didn’t want Miriam finding out. It was the kind of revelation that would surely put them in almost daily contact.

Miriam, he thought with a mixture of weariness and contempt, would seize on this strange ability with religious zeal. He imagined, with a sick stomach, her incredulous joy at discovering father and son shared the ability.

“So you both are granted visions of the future? And you say yours come after periods of deep meditation? Is that like prayer—are you saying they come when you are praying? Do you realize what you are saying? Have you discussed your revelations with your son?”

The real worry was not that Miriam would visit more often; she was not, after all, unpleasant or troublesome. She spent most of her visits chatting with Lynne and praising Spencer, and she frequently had kind words for Greg.

What got his hackles up was her inevitable foray into religious education for his wife and child. Miriam could suddenly steer the conversation from any topic rather abruptly to its religious origins. She wasn’t proselyting for one faith, but rather seemed to be an expert on a thousand different forms of divine interpretation.

Miriam had had no difficulty at all equating Spencer’s seizure with some kind of holy demonstration—an act of God incarnate. How much more clear to her would Greg’s description sound: “Ever since I first went into the mines as a boy, I have practiced staying calm and slowing my breathing, keeping myself prepared for any emergency. Sometimes when I am sitting very still and breathing very slowly, I see things. Then those things happen.” He might as well simply say to her, “I have dreams, and those dreams come true.”

Not for the first time, Greg made the decision not to talk to Lynne or Miriam about it.

But he made himself a different promise: that on Spencer’s twelfth birthday, when he was of legal age to begin working the mines, Greg would talk to him about the visions.

He hoped that by then these seizures would be dim memories.