II Ranatra's Party

The sun touched the horizon somewhere on the far side of the Olympic Peninsula. From the west-facing Seattle apartment window, Ranatra Badak observed it through smoked glass. It looked unreal somehow. The window had not been designed to open, though she looked a long time for a latch or a lever. She sighed and turned back to the gathering of people inside.
There were about twenty-five, a mix of men and women, all well-dressed, well-fed, and smiling. They gathered around long tables of food and drink: great piles of tropical fruit, pots of simmering spicy soups and curries, fluffy white rice, sticky black rice, lime-pickled shrimp with whole cloves of red garlic, spinach leaves in peanut sauce, roast fish, tender slow-cooked goat, and many other delicacies. A big broad red-and-white Indonesian flag decorated one wall, and there were other symbols of Indonesia: Javanese shadow puppets, Balinese masks, wooden figures from the Celebes.
Ranatra had become a celebrity and a symbol for the island nation. They were only now beginning to re-emerge from the devastation wrought by a tremendous volcanic explosion two years ago. Everyone knew someone who had perished in that explosion; some islands were completely depopulated by the poisonous ash-fall and tsunamis that followed. But now, the restive Earth had stabilized, and a shaky hope was building. That a woman from one of the poorest islands in the country was now an international hero destined to travel into space was a beacon that the people of Indonesia eagerly looked to.
She did not look to herself for this role, though. It had come to her without her seeking it out. She had been struggling to do the right thing, to repair her family, to ease the suffering in her village, and to earn a better life for her young son. She had never seen herself as a hero, only as a mother, a daughter, and a sister. She often questioned the peculiarity of fate that had led her here, and she often wondered if this was the right course.
She looked at the group who had gathered to honor her. They were mostly Javanese, all of them wealthy, and few of them had been at home when the disaster struck. These people were well-fed and big-boned, and did not know want. Their teeth had never been loose in the gums, their sores healed quickly, they had slept in beds or at least had the option to do so, every night of their lives. They were well-acquainted with dentists and doctors, lawyers and bankers. She told herself that she did not resent them, but she could not help feeling a little bit jealous of their riches and opportunities, and a little bit contemptuous of how easily they took it all for granted.
There was nobody here from her island, Sumbawa, which had been one of the hardest-hit by the disaster. She had sent repeated messages to her village, and had finally travelled there herself, but had found only an alien landscape of death and wreckage, and no sign of her family. Nor had she seen any person she recognized, nor any structure, plant, tree, rock outcropping, or any familiar landmark. The devastation was absolute.
Her son, Kuriktas, was supposed to have been on the island of Tanimbar, further away from the epicenter, but still in the path of fury. There was no word from him or any of the people he was supposed to be with. Ranatra’s entire blood-network had been wiped from the face of the planet in a few minutes. She had escaped harm, barely, and blamed herself for it.
Until that day, her life had balanced at the intersection of a variety of threads: she was a scientist, a long-absent daughter, an unredeemed mother who still held out hope for a family life. But now all the threads had snapped, except one, and this one connected her to wonders beyond imagining. What scientist does not dream of exploring the stars? Her luck, for good or bad, had brought her to this juncture with nothing to hold her back, and she was ready to leap.
Still, her inner voice, and the memory of her mother’s and grandmother’s voices, whispered to her in quiet moments. What if? What if Kuriktas was still alive? What if he needs you? Tuan Kudah, the financier who was bankrolling the space expedition, had guaranteed a life of ease for all the astronauts’ families. Should Kuriktas ever emerge alive from the ruins of Tanimbar, he would be free of monetary anxiety for the rest of his days. Ranatra, who had been very poor for the vast majority of her twenty-five years, was practical enough to draw comfort from this guarantee, but still she wondered how he would fare without a mother’s love.
Glowing, beaming faces pressed toward her, full of adulation. Perhaps she was not so different from these people. Everyone had known loss, everyone was asking the same questions of themselves and each other, holding out hope that some loved one might surface in a refugee camp or on some distant island. Ranatra realized that her journey into space was something these people could count on, a defined platform they could rest their optimism against, and she did not want to deny them that. She allowed herself to be drawn into the bright bustle of faces and food and laughter.