The Omni Lighthouse

A short story about a refugee girl solving a tech problem in a weather crisis world.

If you consider SFWA rates, this story is worth a minimum of $710 for first serial rights. If 8 of you become paid subscribers, annualized your subscriptions could cover the work. If you find this piece valuable, help me write more pieces by subscribing:

---

In the lighthouse nook, she had built her great pillow fort and from there she could see the Big Wreck's treasures. The lighthouse had lain derelict before she’d arrived: all surface travel like boats and planes had grown costly and redundant after those stupid reusable rockets, but for the smallest vessels fashioned for hobbyists and the rich. Not even refugees used piddly boats anymore: why do that when you could ride a giant space bus? A space eighteen wheeler? And without those piddly vessels, who needed an automated lighthouse for rockets?

She'd heard most floating planes stayed up in archipelagos to navigate the smaller isles and islets. Yet the great storms made it harder for vessels with no more than radar and satellites to guide them.

The first crash helped her see the real need. The Big Wreck.

The sound alone: so much friction-welded stainless steel punching stone crags. The sand it'd thrown into the air. Her ears still rang with it, she felt like puking first. The racing heart came later. Even the racing mind and drippy palms beat its beats. Should she approach the crash site to see what treasures it contained? Or keep tucked in her cozy tower in case more crashed?

She'd come here in the wake of the Bad Bad, what had happened to Mom. Few places on the island had stuck out so vibrantly in her memory as this one had. Before the Bad Bad, Mom had taken so little time off for them both to get away from their own museum. So few vacation spots and so dangerous to travel very far from the Riverhead.

The lighthouse... the lighthouse she had remembered when the Bad Bad had happened to Mom. So she had come from her and her mom’s Riverhead museum — what with its rusty train cars and mysterious machinery and other junk — to this other museum of broken down stone and dying light. She wondered if she could carry the fire further.

Few museums stayed open after the mass exodus. Most closed overnight. Now she at least knew from the writings on the wall that the lighthouse had been a museum. Probably, like with their train car museum, the lighthouse foundation endowment's earnings had grown too slow to keep up with the costly maintenance in this planet’s turbulent weather, this country’s taxless tribal bands. Hard to pay staff at a government lighthouse.

Who wants to scrub salt and barnacles off brick when you could see the stars? Or at least work on that billionaire’s space farm as the new age, new world white trash? Who wanted to chase away those purple jellybirds that clung to the white stone in the storm? Those flying jellyfish seemed fine with these hotter waters.

She realized it's very hard to wear down some steel, some stone. A castle at the eastern point of Amerigo, at the end of our pointer finger gesturing back homeward east, that's what the lighthouse was. Had been.

And maybe could be for her, at least, once more? A gesture towards some home she’d never known?

Why leave the lighthouse fort to see a crash outside? She wondered about this from the safety of her empillowed nook, looking beyond the nautical flagpole that refused to fall to the crash site.

And yet... the big lighthouse might hold treasure...

Not long ago she had dusted off the old exhibit, she'd seen from its map how many seaborne ships the lighthouse had once saved. How many hadn't been saved? How many had left great treasures on the bottom of the Atlantian Ocean? How many had wrecked before they put the lighthouse out there? Some lady named Georgia Washington had commissioned it. Hard to read the name of this strange patron on the plaque under the truncated flagpole. Looked like Georgia.

They were long dead, whoever they were. The lighthouse had a cistern still to catch the rainwater (which it caught all the time, leaving it often full) and plenty of wildlife nearby in the woods all along the point. She still had her bow and razor-tipped arrows. She still had her traps. She still had her harvest basket.

After weeks at the other museum, she had realized her museum's and her downtown's emptiness wasn't a fluke, but a new status quo. That Mom wasn't coming back to her. Not there, likely, and not any time soon anyhow.

So she had packed up whatever could be useful -- whatever was left -- and had headed alone eastwards towards the lighthouse. A castle would be stronger, safer. Cozier than a bunch of busted down rail cars.

It had never occurred to her to climb up the great tower to turn the spotlight back on. Why would it? She had the solar cells and wind and tidal generators and battery packs. Even the deep freeze still worked. (Though she had yet to properly stock it with any of her kills. She hadn't killed enough to justify a backstock.) A lighthouse seemed a silly thing in a world of rockets and storms, its little light.

Yet this rocket had still half-sundered, despite digital navigation. From the deep nooked window in the tower she had watched it crash. Heard the clanging on the crags, the colossal clap of stainless steel on sand.

Fuel spent from the long journey, its shipment had crashed with it. That had given her a clue. Before that moment she had already slowly stockpiled various supplies from the small towns along the way, using a horsedrawn boat trailer outfitted with old boardwalk where the hull might have gone had there been a boat to haul. It worked like a flatbed: boards forming a level bed on the trailer, the trailer hitch latched to harness. Slow, yet sure.

More supplies she'd sought only on obviously clear days. And then she found cute things from other parts of the lighthouse outbuildings to fill up the room directly beneath the tower, close to the cistern, and near the tower’s entrance.

Something was missing, though.

From her great pillow fort in the lighthouse nook, she had had seen the rocket fall clean out of the sky in the windstorm. It had used landing thrust to land on its tail and stand straight up. However, it had not accounted for the change in the weather. Nor the wind differential at this sharp island point of Montauk where all seawinds met.

Nor its high tide that, according to the exhibits, had once been well used in surfcasting.

And how all of these things had completely shifted and cracked the landing platform from the last takeoff. Before it even touched the platform, the sea had destroyed the water cooled steel plate that the world’s landing pads used to absorb heat from takeoff and landing. So the rocket by landing thrust had shattered the platform itself.

When it tried to compensate for a cracked platform to land in the midst of the storm and the fog, the navigation hadn't done what two good old human eyes in a command tower might have done. Had she a radio or communication array, she would have warned the rocket. It hadn't seen the rocks. And like the wooden hulls of old boats, the friction welded stainless steel had rammed into them and plummeted downwards. Stainless steel is so much cheaper, but so, so much heavier than aluminum and carbon composites. It hit.

Hard.

After minutes of staring at The Big Wreck from her lighthouse nook, ears ringing, the smell of hot filings in the air, she had thought she had seen the subtle shape of a spine or maybe spines in the window of the vessel.

She hadn't been sure, certainly not at that distance even with the binoculars. Imagination plus the glimpse was enough to make her decide: treasure, not coziness. Throwing on her high weather gear. Down to see the great hull of the thing.

It lay sprawled out on the beach rocks and sand to the south, the length of the entire property. Laying there like that, one unfamiliar might conclude someone had poorly tried to fuel the entire island using propane and had abandoned their attempt when the bad weather had cracked the long tank.

But she wound down from the stillgreen hillside, along the rocks and brambles to the beach, found a boulder that would let her perch high enough to see inside. The climbing was slick. Yet her grip held.

Up close and with her face in the main viewing window, she confirmed it: stacks and stacks of spines.

Leathern and buckram spines.

She gasped:

Books.

She'd never seen a book before. She'd learned to read, of course, but only with scratches of chalk on chalkboards. Mom had also taught her to read using the text on the museum signs and street signs they'd hoarded in the Riverhead railroad museum. That museum amounted to little more than so many abandoned railroad cars of various eras filled with so much obsolete junk.

She'd only heard of books. Real ones. Nothing like this. No, nothing like this.

This shipment had been meant to jumpstart a library in the wake of all those late-twenties book bonfires. A library somewhere in the desolate isle. Having run a museum -- even one so small and crappy as theirs -- she knew that anywhere from 90% to 99% of artifacts remained in storage. Especially art museums and hyper specific history museums. Theirs had hid inside a boxcar.

At any given point only a small fraction faced the public. Their storage of a kind had been a redundant train car mostly on site for its exterior looks: it had once hauled pallets and did so again. Storage for the 99%.

The same, she assumed, was true of library storage. Especially big ones. Old ones. They're mostly archives with a small portion usable, a small portion checked out at any given point for research. Or pleasure. Or both.

And her world didn't have any libraries anymore. They were lucky to get a video call, let alone a book. So maybe someone had sent their storage? Their backstock and stacks?

That reminded her: who had driven the ship? Or ridden?

Were they okay?

A massive crack in the middle of the hull was letting in the rain and the waves. A voice in her head not her own said, Not in the rain and the wet. That was bad, bad for books, she'd once heard from Mom at the other place. (Mom, she whispered). But she wanted to check for survivors, since books, at least in her mind, were written and kept by people and were meant to draw you towards other people -- even long dead people -- in truth and love and beauty.

She climbed into the thing, cut her hand on the hull bad.

Her mind clouded by the sight of all that water on the pages, but pain in the palm won out. She put pressure on it by ramming it against her thigh and searched in her pack for some butterfly stitches. Rather she had a blue zipper and red surgical glue. The glue worked. She pushed against the two sides of the palm together in a red squish and used the liquid stitches on either side. Then slapped the zipper on. Added liquid stitches to the middle -- the wound itself -- and literally zipped her palm meat shut. Then she wrapped it in gauze. Gloved the whole hand and wrap for protection.

Looking up again from her first aid, she assessed the inside.

None of the white inside walls had locked their various compartment doors. Whoever thought all-white was cool had never been on their feet in a museum or selling apartments for most of their life: the paint job gave her headaches. It felt to her like the inside of a boneyard held up by a scaffold made of bones.

They had lined the insides of this rocket with circular shelves that clearly worked better when upright or in space. Most of the cargo ties on the bookshelves had held the volumes inside and secure. On impact with the hard truth of cold beach, many ties on the opposite wall -- now the ceiling overhead -- had broken loose from inertial torque.

Now piles of books had clustered and clumped like so much silt in the Riverhead. They had found whatever purchase -- walls, another shelf, a seat, another pile of books -- they could find. From that first purchase, they stacked and stacked. So much literary plaque in the artery of that mechanistic fuselage.

Which meant she needed to not only climb over architecture inside the hull of the crashed spaceship to get to the cockpit. She also needed to climb over books themselves.

Some of the blood from her palm got on one of the covers, a smaller volume. It made a pretty blood pattern. After admiring it a few moments, she then ignored the bloody title and moved on.

She slipped on a stack that tumbled down the curved wall-turned-floor. It felt like trying to climb through the world’s cleanest, brightest, biggest clogged sewage pipe. The pile of books that had slipped stabilized soon. But she had to get to the cockpit -- to the flight deck. What if someone inside was hurt worse than she?

It took ducking underneath the seats that hung overhead, climbing over others that obstructed her path (bordered on both sides by books). Others she passed uneventfully, hanging as they were from the ceiling. Two more ingresses. One of the doors stuck half-irised like the eye of a giant who had fallen of natural causes on the battlefield. It would take some doing to get through. One of the door’s spiral teeth seemed stuck in a bent, outward position.

She looked around.

There, on the floor, a tiny paintbrush. Undipped. She took the handle of it, jammed the pointy side into the bend. No luck.

She looked around again. There was this weird male plug for some sort of hard drive or something hanging from the wall. It was huge. It probably could handle so much information all at once. So many digitized books. She cut it loose and used it something like a crowbar, what with that taper either manufactured or bent into the tip.

That worked.

Through the dead door, then, she climbed. Through another.

She knocked on the door to the flight deck. No answer. It was, from her perspective, about 30° up the wall. She tried pushing on it, expecting some awful smell to meet her.

It not only came open, it came open easily. She climbed in.

And no one was here either.

Wait, what?

No one to save?

No one had flown this ship?

She looked back down the whole length of the thing, clearly designed for human habitation. Travel. Her chest tightened. The world's most beautiful mobile library…

Empty?

It tightened even further. A catch in her throat, holding off the tightness.

That... well that wasn't what she had wanted at all. She'd expected someone to be in the thing, living or dead. She'd hoped, well, she'd secretly hoped Mom had returned, almost magically. She wanted someone. She wanted her Mom. Especially after the Bad Bad.

But no, Mom was not here. Mom was not coming back. And there was also no one like Mom here. After weeks at the other place, she had realized her museum's and downtown's emptiness wasn't a fluke, but a new status quo. And she realized it now again: Mom wasn't coming back to her. Not any time soon anyhow. It didn’t matter that she could hunt. It didn’t matter that she could harvest. It didn’t matter that she’d taken great advantage of the cistern and the tower and the rest of it. Her palms sweated against the pounding in that tight chest.

It hurts to hold back that many tears for that long. She let one loose. She couldn’t help the pressure of it, she figured she’d haggle with the emotion. It trickled down her nose and pooled right at the end of it. Alone, just like her. On the edge, just like her, that tear. She half punched it away from her cheekbone.

With her cut hand.

Which hurt like a wildfire-hot brand she hadn’t meant to grab.

Blood on her nose from her hand. She was angrier, so she punched out with her other hand and a dull tonk resounded. As if the stupid ship were laughing at her.

So now what?

Well... at least her palm was fixed. She could go ranging again. But then she looked back the whole length she'd climbed over books and seats and things. She saw again the great organic stillicide formed by the busted metal hull, water pouring in on the pages. How could she fix that?

Was it worth it?

The vision of it went blurry. Not from the water without, but the water within. She pretended it hadn’t. Mom would have loved seeing these books. She wished she had a way to show Mom. But that, that was a bargain no one would accept, were there a one here to accept it: Mom was still gone.

Surely. Surely it was worth it, fishing the stillicide, saving some of those pages? She hadn't ever seen a full book, however much she'd been trained to read on rusted signage. Let alone this many.

Her heart caught in her chest, thinking again of what all that water and salt would do to them. It caught too as she took in the sight of them all. What that many books could teach her fellow humans.

This hull of books was priceless.

She jumped back down, sniffling, pretending to herself she hadn’t cried more in meditating on the books, on the waterfall ruining so many, and hustled over to the main breach where the water was coming in the fastest. She had her satchel. She had her backpack. She'd brought her harvest bucket. Those three, in searching below, she tried to fill by picking out what titles looked oldest. Wisest.

Perhaps rarest, but how could she know for sure?

Particularly when all of them felt rare to her?

She could only read the titles and only had enough trouble to judge them by their covers: not all the oldest looked the oldest, not all the oldest were the best, not all the newest had withstood the test of time yet. A Marius Victorinus stuck out to her beside its brother, Gregory of Nyssa. But so did The Secret and The Prayer of Jabez. Sappho and Hildegard of Bingen and The Divine Comedy and Les Miserables caught her eye. But so did A Modest Proposal and Mein Kampf.

Some looked pretty, some ugly. Some most excellent and beautiful, some downright evil and dangerous in the wrong hands. She knew she’d pick wrong eventually. She may have already.

An ancient copy of Toni Morison looked out at her alongside some random title for… she guessed it was for the feeling of the end of summer, a sort of Augustine state? Or maybe the confessions of the month of August? How could a month of the year confess anything?

She chose as best as she could from among them, favoring curiosity and reverence for wisdom, gathered her haphazard selection in the bags as much as she could and clambered out and ran to the lighthouse.

She went to the freezer, which was still empty, and dumped the sopping wet books in there. Then tried to stack them nicely.

For the return, she brought to the rocket bolts of plastic and duct tape she'd found in her lighthouse.

About a dozen more trips it took to fill the freezer with what she -- completely arbitrarily -- deemed precious. She'd have to figure how to dehumidify them from the ice, but at least the freezer would keep out bugs and mold for now.

On the return to the hull, she added staples and a couple of rugs.

Then boards. She chose one-by-fours because of the weight and her size. It still took forever just to get the boards down there. She wished, then, she had more of a water polo build than a runner’s.

The first round, both for the backend of the breach and the larger end that included the cockpit, she rigged up a great makeshift air and water lock. Sounds more convoluted than it really is for a twelve year old: she did this with the plastic and duct tape.

That was actually easier than the boards, the biggest hefting came from the plastic roll. But the horse had helped with that. It didn’t make it easy, just possible.

Like most things when they try to help most things.

Returning with a dry bag covered by her thick all-weather poncho, she picked out an entire set of Harvard Classics and ferried those back to the lighthouse. She made up simple shelves out of ancient layered fruit baskets (the ones with wooden shivs and tiny nails). She lined one entry wall of her brick nook with those. She had another big shelf she made from a few hollowed out MTA electrical wire spools, wooden ones. That shelf she left in the main hall.

That first night, she read for hours. She quickly learned some books would take so, so much longer than others. They were dense like trying to eat an acorn straight. But she devoured them, page after page after page. Some went down quick as berries, some as slow as deer jerky.

The one about August turned out to be about a man who recounted his whole life in terms of fessing up: of everything he’d gotten wrong, everything that was his responsibility to fix. Things he needed help with. Things he could mend in his own character. The Mein Kampf one did the opposite: the man acted like the victim of society. She judged the latter by the light of the former: she wanted to be the kind of person who could freely say “my bad” than one who blamed others.

It didn’t make her happy that the evil man had taken Mom. She was still livid. But she couldn’t control that. And even if she had, would doing back to the bad men what they’d done to her Mom make her any better?

She’d still be stuck with herself. She fumed.

What could she fix?

She fell in somno.

She woke in the lighthouse nook. The rusted white naval flagpole clinging in the morning, the gossip of a couple of real green parrots on migration from Greenwood and any poets hiding there, five jellybirds clinging to the white outbuilding until the clanging scared them away. They flew off billowing. She had to spend half the day reading. She had wanted to fix the thing, but she had also wanted to learn.

When she read, she felt a bit guilty that she wasn’t saving more books. When she was saving more books, she felt a bit guilty that she wasn’t reading them. She opted for half a day reading by the dim light, half a day saving by the good light.

In the dim light, what with charcoal on the white walls downstairs first, then using a fountain pen on a journal she'd found, she transcribed what she could. How did she use a pen? Ink she'd read up on and made from lamp black holding a plate over a candle, collecting soot, adding it to a blend of some of the water-resistant pine resin she'd hoarded for firestarter, she thinned it with an old can of turpentine, wild honey, and a seagull egg. Best version she could muster of a recipe she’d found. Using ink, she copied down what she'd read to get a feel for writing it. The other half, she spent securing the fuselage and getting as many books into the tower as possible.

It took weeks of work. Weeks.

Not long after that, a drone ship topped with a landing pad crashed on the other end of the point, down a ways. Its landing pad shattered as well and the second rocket missed and fell into the sea. It had not been empty, but rather exploded in hell and fury.

What in the world?

Again?

She stood, shocked at it. Not nausea this time, though the ringing in the ears followed the sound of the crash. This time it felt like a thousand ants crawling on the underside of her forearm skin. Up and down and up and down with the high pitched ringing.

Her lighthouse tower was then pocked with shrapnel. Those sounded alternatingly like tools falling on stone floors, like lesser mud landing in greater mud, and like so much ice cracking and breaking. A window shattered somewhere above, letting in the storm. She’d have to fix that. Sighed.

It smelled like the world’s largest fart on fire.

Which sounds funny, until you consider the scale. Then it’s not funny anymore. “The world’s largest fart on fire” in the mind of a twelve year old girl prompts the kind of throw-your-head-back laughter that exposes the neck for the slitting.

She stopped laughing and sobered herself immediately.

A couple of trees much closer in the middle distance were felled in the blast. That created a second and third crash.

A small brushfire started.

Luckily, the rain put a stop to that rather quickly.

She realized, then, that unless she did something, this would grow into a common occurrence on the island’s point. And she wouldn’t get this lucky with the brushfire again. Perhaps it had been happening all up and down the island and she hadn't known.

Perhaps shipments had been trying to get to them for a kind of rescue from without, a rescue from the ashes of civil society and they hadn't known. Perhaps, judging by how awkwardly the things tried again and again to land. To readjust. To learn the better way to land. Something bigger had to be going on. Some greater catastrophe beyond her knowing, her doing, her seeing. Something had gone terribly wrong.

That.

Or:

The rockets couldn't handle the weather on Montauk point anymore.

To get a little light on again meant a twofold problem. First, normal boats travelled more or less on a two dimensional plane. The plane itself might rise or fall with the weather, but a boat moved along either the north-south or east-west plane of access. For a boat, the lighthouse's beacon only needed to spin a beam along a horizontal axis.

Spaceships move through space. All of it. So that added at least a third dimension. A rocket wasn't like an airplane that needed static lights down a series of telephone poles. These rockets came in quick, hot, straight down or with some ridiculous curvature and would likely miss the point if they didn't have some sort of visual for the onboard cameras. The lightning alone in the area created all kinds of infrared noise for the infrared cameras.

You needed to see to move forward. You could from portholes, right?

Lighthouse nook reminded her of the port holes in most of the spaceships: she could see whole universes from inside the nook -- first in the books, then from whatever else may try and land out the window.

And with the three-dimensional problem, she needed to think of how they could see clearly to try and land.

Light needed to pierce an even thicker cloud than in eras past. They had a dozen backup Fresnel lenses of different sizes from the exhibits when this thing had been a museum. She had mostly used them, with their hinges, as pretty crystalline cabinets.

But now with the problem she had, she unburdened them of the fresh apples and heartwood pine. After unloading, squirrel-like, one of them of nuts; unloading another, bear-like, of berries; a third, mechanic-like, of spare springs and pistons, she ended up with six large lenses at the base of the tower.

She hooked all the wires back up. The ones she knew to hook up anyways -- to the battery, to the extension outlet, to the light itself on top. She held her breath. Flipped the switch.

It didn't work.

She checked all the wires, all the hookup, and then realized a different circuit managed the higher wiring than the one in her nook. She flipped the breaker. That worked. For a lighthouse meant to help seaborne vessels.

But anyways, it still worked.

At least no boats would crash. She looked out the main window. It was a howler of a day and she would soon go through her routine. But to the south, on the drone ship that had already failed for the one rocket that exploded, another started to land.

"No, no, no, no," she said into the northeast, the other shore.

Her pleading mattered little. It was clear at the last second, the pilot or autopilot had seen the light from the tower: emergency boosters had activated. But by the time it was low enough to see the horizontal beacon, it had hit the pre-destroyed drone ship and fallen to its doom, adding a great drum and cymbal clang to the howling of the wind.

She decided to join it in her grief.

High wind turned the entire lighthouse tower into a woodwind instrument. On those days, the various harmonic waves, the positive integers of the fundamental frequency -- the resonant frequency -- of the tower and its accidental soundholes (doors, windows, cracks) sounded out depending on windspeed. A perfect octave. A perfect fifth. A doubled perfect octave. A just major third. Another perfect fifth. A septimal minor seventh. Now and again it would sound out a Pythagorean major second or a lesser undecimal tritone, but those were exceedingly rare.

It was, in short, its own chorus.

And so she'd pulled out the old plastic recorder she'd found and played second fife to the lighthouse's first pipe. It had taken some practice, but eventually -- together -- she and the lighthouse had sounded something like the world's largest bagpipe.

An elegy. A threnody for her rockets. For their mothers, if the rockets had been born out of the parts of other ships. For their makers who had either died or failed them.

For her Mom.

For the lost books too, lost embalmed minds.

It stirred her soul. To make that much music while the world outside howled and raged and struck down trees with its fire and brimstone and thundered along leaving everything damp and moldering. What with the crashing of dead rockets.

A stillness came. To her and the tower.

Her ears rang in the wake of the crash and the howl. When they settled down, she could hear a subtle churning up top, up where the spinning shadows of the light danced. The lighthouse motor turning on.

She needed to get the lenses up.

She read and read about lighthouses -- of Captain January and Storm Catchers and The Lighthouse at the End of the World (which resonated way, way more than she'd like) and Annihilation. The P.D. James one. The Light Between Oceans. One called Lighthouses of the Mid-Atlantic Coast helped her a good deal as did another one that was more of a mechanic manual.

The first thing she did was to get some clear plastic as protective shielding and put a smaller lens on top of the black roof of the tower. The wet roof went smooth as dewey glass under her boots. She almost fell the first time and immediately realized her need for a harness.

Then she did fall.

The first belay snapped off. She fell further. The second, the one on the black railing leading from beneath the glass and stairs, held. She had time enough to grab the railing with her zippered palm. Fire. Hell. Shit. All three entirely possible if she fell then, entirely likely. She hadn’t ever hated heights, but then, just hanging, with fire and hell and shit at the end of her arm — good grief, she hated them then.

She breathed in, breathed out, breathed in and held it. Then yanked herself up and in against the burning in her palm.

Tea.

Yes tea for a bit. A long bit.

A good long bit with a book or three. It was bleeding again through her palm onto the cover. She unzipped it. It was healing. Would have a gnarly scar. She added more of the surgical glue.

Zip.

That zip hurt worse than the first. Sheesha.

Once a bit calmer, she went back out again. This time securing the harness again. Out in the rain and the winds, she got the lens secured up there. How it hadn't fallen itself was beyond her, but grateful for the serendipity, she fortified it further with a sort of wooden cage.

It looked like a parabola, the wooden cage with the plastic on top.

Where had she seen that before? That parabola?

It stuck out in her mind. She went back to her fallen rocket library and pulled out a manual on photography. It had a series of lighting rigs, but one of them was an adjustable parabolic reflector. She looked back up the hill: she could barely make out the fuzziness atop the spinning light.

A parabola?

But how?

It took a few days of searching, but she eventually found an old body shop in a nearby ghost town with what she needed. She filled her back with eight cans of the chrome spray paint. Then made it back to the lighthouse for dinner and Dickens.

The next day was awful. So rainy, so windy, so foggy, she couldn't even see the railing outside the lighthouse window. So she masked up and sprayed chrome on the sailing canvas she'd found in storage. She wasn't going to be sailing anytime soon. She slicked that up. Polished it.

Halfway through work, an eerie noise perked her ears. A slight trembling of her table.

Another rocket had exploded somewhere at sea not far away.

She really hoped none of the lost rockets had people aboard.

She feared some had.

But once the canvas was painted and dried, the next day gave her a full hour of sunlight. She used it to climb the tower in the calm and rig up the canvas to the parabola that already secured the heaven-facing lens. She put a light in the bottom of the parabola. So she had both a heavenward Fresnel lens and a parabolic reflector.

In the days ahead, she added two other Fresnel lenses at key diagonals. The end result looked something like a star in comic books: spinning light on the yaw axis, a great upward beacon out the top of the roll axis, and two directly opposed beacons steady on either end of the pitch axis.

It was the best she had. But it wasn’t a mere horizontal plane anymore. It gave off far, far more than thrice the light. It was her omni lighthouse now.

In the lighthouse nook, she had built the greatest pillow fort where she inspected treasures from the Big Wreck and waited for spaceships to emerge that she might warn them with those great Fresnel lenses. She read and read. She filled up her lighthouse with her favorites from the fallen rocket. That took weeks and weeks to get as much as she could, but she could still only bring in so many books.

The rocket was gigantic.

She probably only had ten percent of the books it contained. It was a massive set of stacks. So she more or less weatherized the rest of it in stages and used the rocket as an active library.

Of course the weatherization took an absurd amount of time for a twelve year old girl working on cracks of an artifact that large. And of course she used things like glued insulation where welding should have gone. But she did leave it better than she found it, day after day after day. It was haphazard. But it was happily hers.

She read and read some more, some days spending the night in the rocket, some days trading out books in the lighthouse for the ones in the rocket. Some of the stories reminded her of Mom. She didn't want to think about that.

Until, of course, the worst storm came. The high tide had trebled in the tempest. And the wind had howled worse than ever: one of those lesser undecimal tritone days. The storm had turned the tower into a horrific, hellhound of a train whistle. When she heard the great grinding like the sound of a giant's tricycle on a mountainside, she couldn't help but leave the safety of the inner room and climb the stairs to the beacon.

There, down on the beach, the sea had risen up and lifted her rocket library.

A civil society of books, taken from her.

"No. No, please."

But it was already floating away. Worse than floating. The crack in the hull had taken on water and now the thing was sinking down and down. She had slept in that thing, dear God. What if she had drowned?

It wasn’t just tears, then, it was like feeling that fear of falling — of Mom getting taken away again — and being helpless to stop it from her vantage in the tower. She felt a panic as if the entire place had been filled with noxious fumes. Somewhere in the rocket’s plunge, both ends in the break had hit the bottom.

Now it stuck in the sand and half of it remained above the waves. Taunting her. A half submerged library tower with a third of its books ruined and none of the good ones accessible through that waterlogged… well it might as well have been a cave. She only had what she had in the tower now, book-wise.

It felt like losing Mom all over again.

The bad men had come not for the train museum. They never do. Nor their little classroom Mom had set up. The LIRR museum Mom and she had kept, even improved, however much junk and however few printed sentences. But the bad men hadn’t come for any of that. They'd come, of course, for the ammunition and for the medicine and for Mom. Or Mom’s body. They'd taken Mom while she watched, hiding, in the unusable train car bathroom like Mom had told her to do. But when they came, they'd taken Mom and most of the others downtown. The rest must have fled because when she'd finally emerged from the train car bathroom to check on the status of it all, she'd found not a soul. No sign of mom.

And now?

Losing her rocket library to the ocean felt like losing Her all over again.

Perhaps, with the lighthouse, she'd come back. But the books--

A spark in the sky.

A flash.

A rocket.

The real test, then. The real one. The first major test since she'd turned on the Omni lighthouse. It came down as hard, as heated as any of them. And she noticed, down there, a space had been made on the sand. Just large enough. The space where the library had rolled -- steamroller-like -- and flattened the beach.

That rocket was coming in too hot.

But then...

It saw the omni light of her tower. The rocks. The storm. The quickly approaching land. It slowed much, much faster. Adjusted for the missing landing pad in a hover. It redirected to the beach, there in the light.

It landed. No crash.

Engines off.

Once it cooled, the ramp descended.

People started pouring out of it. Waddling.

She threw on her clothes, fast as she could. She ran, ran down to the beach to meet the people. Down the hill, down the trailhead, down around the underbrush to the beach.

She saw them.

Pregnant women. All of them. A ship of mothers. Not her mother. No not hers. But mothers all the same. Storage for the 99%, the rest of us shipped out of sight, out of mind. Books were written and kept by people and were meant to draw you towards people and she felt drawn to such as these.

But there were so many.

And she was just a girl still.

She didn't know anything about delivering a baby. Or feeding an army. Or any number of things.

What could she do with them all? Or for them?

She was only twelve. And she missed her own Mom. What could she offer so many homeless pregnant women? Refugees? She wasn't some scholar. She could barely stack pillows and stay alive. She looked at the lighthouse: a light on in the nook. Books remained. She had filled the lighthouse and the outbuildings with many books.

In the glow up there, somewhere, hid a small volume titled On Reading the Old Books. A brown stain on its cover: old blood. She looked down at her zippered palm. It'd long healed. She looked up. With new eyes she saw buildings holding things saved from the wreck, great might-not-have-beens, both her and the books, gifts inexplicably existing in the abyss of storm and sea and dark:

A whole archive of the greatest minds in history.

And her. Who had learned. Who hadn’t blamed someone else, but faced her flaws and fears. She had saved the books, then this rocket. She could again.

She turned to see new minds before her, new minds in new wombs. They would stand on the shoulders of giants if and only if they chose to climb. Maybe she didn't have to be a genius or the best? Maybe deference was enough? Maybe all she needed to know was that she didn't know? It wasn’t like she had saved herself. She’d merely taken the chance of being saved from a wreck to save others from other wrecks. She didn't have to be the path for these mothers. She didn't have to be their life. She didn't have to become the great radiance of the sun for them, to solve all the problems in this terrible, terrible world gone awry.

It was enough to turn on a little light in the storm.