The sky shifts bluer, then darker. As if surfacing from the deepening night, a star appears: the evening’s opening move in a game of constellations. I stand hip-deep in the shallows between the shore and the stilt-town, pondering my reply. A few boaters have floated out to watch the play unfold and I can hear them whispering. Bets are running in favor of the sky.

I played the constellation game for the first time when I was 17-- patched together my first drysuit out of old inner tubes, insulated it with hand-me-down sweaters and sealed the seams with wax from the stub ends of a dozen candles. Soon as I waded out, of course, the seals leaked. So I got wet; I got cold. Darkness seemed forever in coming.

Now, years later, a little over-snug in a pro suit that fit better two decades ago, I’m back for one more game and wondering if I know what I’m doing. I suspect my daughter, Iris, two steps behind me, is wondering the same thing.

The stilt-town balconies are filling fast with casual fans and the after-dinner-cocktail crowd. Their chatter’s already louder than the waves. No doubt some of that has more to do with my back-up, five-time coastal champion Albert Oldfield, than it does with my coming out of retirement. I don’t envy him up there on the beach, waiting around to step in if the game starts to look hopeless. After cooking in the sun all day, the stagnant pools among the rocks smell like hot mud and old eggs and the water’s edge is ankle deep with half-fermented kelp. I turn to give Al a wave. He’s signing an autograph while jogging in place and doesn’t seem to see.

The Chinese lanterns up on the balconies gutter down to their dimmest setting, ready for the beginning of the game. Everyone stands still and quiet while a recorder trio in one of the boats plays the remembering song. I find I can’t pause like I usually do, to think of Sophie, my parents, and hers, and so many others dead in the years of moondust winter; my head’s all full of my pre-game mantra and I can’t stop it running, a quote from Nemers, the old-time master: no cause, no effect; neither action nor reaction; your eyes neither higher nor lower than the horizon; moment, only moment. I was never this edgy back when I used to play, not even when I was a rookie. The recorders shrill apart then rejoin in a final harmony. It’s time for my first move.

I light a sparkler and pitch it. It skips, hissing, crest to crest over the waves. I send another after it. The first is green; the second, blue, and the third-- which I throw as high up overhead as I can-- red. Iris and I wade clear while the red sparkler spirals back down. The pink comet finishes its fluttering descent, whistling into the water right where we’d been standing.

I've never been able to match those above for subtlety; it's been years since I bothered trying. So what if my playing is a little loud, a little garish? It keeps their attention.

I get a little chilled waiting for the response, but eventually we see it: seven satellites glowing, drifting calmly in a ring around the top of the sky while an aurora shimmers sea-green and rosy lavender halfway up from the horizon. An elegant reply, and one that made no reference to my sparkler combination. The satellites take a while to smolder out, and I use the time to take a few sips of cocoa. Warms me up some. I hand the mug back to Iris, who’s serving as caddie. She echoes my nod of thanks.

"Nice colors," she says. I don't know if she means my move or the reply from above; I don’t ask.

We never talk much anymore, us below and them above. Whether they’re angels or aliens, artificial intelligences grown too wise for us or humans who’ve ascended into being something else, we can’t understand what they’re trying to say. Even so, from time to time, on these long moonless nights, they indulge us in a game. The exact rules remain a mystery, but the stakes are clear: the sun doesn’t rise until someone wins.

Usually, it seems the sky wants us to win, but that doesn’t make the game any easier.

“Never start thinking you know what the rules are,” I’d told Iris just that morning.

She and I never talk much anymore either.

“After you play a few games, you start to think that maybe the rules are constantly shifting, getting rewritten by every move that you or the sky make.”

She didn’t give me any answer beyond a sour face that seemed to say she’d be able to figure it out, given a chance to play her own games. I’m sure I thought the same thing, before I’d learned the cold dread of being the playmaker in a game that’s stretched out to where you’ve used up all your strategies and you’re watching a finisher wade out to take your place and seeing him or her not do any better.

The worst was a match that was legend already when I was a kid-- dragged on for 23 hours, through three finishers and a second shift by the original player before the first hints of dawn seeped over the horizon. The kicker was that, after an hour of feeble daylight, the sky wanted to go again. The newspapers called it “the surprise solstice” and the league stripped all the players involved of their licenses.

Well, no, actually, the game where they blew up the moon for a grand finale-- that was worse.

I try not to look toward stilt-town and particularly not toward the officials’ table on the uppermost balcony. I beckon Iris over and rifle through the gear she carries in her caddy-vest’s pockets.

I read her expression: she knows I’m just wasting time, stretching out the lag between moves. Normally, she’d talk back, but she knows the whole reason I’m out here courting hypothermia and embarrassment is to get her a foot in the door, so she can break into the world of the game backing up Albert or one of the other big-name pros. So she just gives me a couple sure-Dad’s and whatever’s and plays along while I sort through the gear: a half a dozen flares, astrolabe, fiber optic netting, flashlight, laser pointers in three colors, luminescent skipping stones, zip-bags of biodegradable glitter, jar of genetically engineered fireflies.

I can just barely hear Albert back on shore, doing his breathing exercises and humming through his nose. He always was one for drama. We used to play doubles occasionally, back when we were hardly older than Iris is now. I inevitably wound up playing ground to Al’s figures.

“Naw,” I finally say, “Let’s just stick with the plan.”

Iris rolls her eyes and gives me an exasperated look her mother used to use.

We float candle boats into the waves. There's an art to being in the right place at the right time, to lighting the boat and letting go one-handed, dropping it right where the surface of the water is about to be. I count waves; Iris reels out string; we launch the burning boats.

I can see she’s enjoying this, the way she’s grinning and breathing through her teeth, the way she’s concentrating. Forget the dawn and play for the moment, that’s what my old coach would say.

One by one, our boats swamp and flicker out. We move together, Iris and I and our teammates further out, setting the next pattern afloat before the first has been completely extinguished. Green flame here, violet there, blue between, scarlet to one side... Lines of waxed string hold the boats in their patterns, at least for a few minutes. Then the cardboard boats soak through and the lines pull loose, the image twists and jumbles.

The sky, meanwhile, has invented a new zodiac and played it in a belt that arcs across the sky: a sphinx, a dragon, a four-winged bird, what looks like a bear covered with eyes, and a trio of interknotted wrestling hydras. Hard to beat all that with a bunch of paper boats.

That the sky has me feeling so small means the game’s escalated to where I can make a grand misstep, force Albert to step in and give Iris her chance to shine. I give a long whistle in my headset, and the team answers with their one-by-one roger’s.

For my next move, I unstop a battered thermos, pour an oily liquid out in a slow semicircle. After a few seconds, the water begins to glow around me, the plankton nudged into luminescence by my libation. The light spreads as plankton further out, prompted by their neighbors, begin to light up as well. The glow ripples out from me. When it’s seeped halfway to the horizon, I uncap another thermos and gave its contents to the waves. The light changes, shifting from yellow to blue. Iris has four more thermoses ready, plus a cracked plastic punch bowl and pair of ceramic pitchers back up on shore. I pour each one out at just the right moment and more colors ripple out from me: red, then white, orange, yellow again into green, then purple and finally a summer’s noon sky blue.

Once I’ve handed the last pitcher back to Iris, we wait for our accomplices in the boats further out to do their part. Iris watches a satellite’s-eye view on her handheld monitor. She stares, rapt, the reflected colors playing over her face.

“Here,” says Iris. She pushes forward against the waves to hand me the screen. “It’s started.”

My friends begin to dump their own triggering liquids into the water around their boats. Ripples of color are crossing, colliding, deflecting, absorbing, or simply passing right through each other. From above, this corner of the ocean looks like a puddle into which raindrops are falling, a puddle with rainbow water. I hope those strange angels up there appreciate it.

I hand the display back to Iris.

“You’ll want to watch this,” I say.

The design resolves into a circle of white, then smudges of black and gray appear on the bright disk as the plankton go out and leave areas of dark water. Again a pattern of overlapping circles, but craters now, not ripples. This vague design might be a rabbit, might be a face. Even some of the bystanders who are old enough to remember it take a moment to recognize the design. I hear shouts from the boaters-- both the bettors and my teammates-- while behind me, Albert the five-time champ is laughing as he wades out to replace me.

No one’s used pictures as moves since the first few years of the game. It’s considered bad form, and I’m sure I’m losing all kinds of points with the judges up in the stilt-town. I’m about to lose more.

I hear Iris’ breath catch and I put a hand on her shoulder.

Her mother’s face looks out at her from the water-picture moon on the screen.

There are tears on my daughter’s face as I’m sure there are on my own. The water turns red around us, the world flickering scarlet as she hugs me.

“Sorry to interrupt,” says Al. “I think I should probably play it out from here.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “I’m done. It’s their turn now.”

The sea gutters out and the lightless night seems colder. We don’t have to wait long for an answer. Three flares of light-- shooting stars, probably-- one green, then a blue one following the same course, then a red one off at a right angle. And at the end of that meteor’s arc, another red shots back along the same line. As if a single red light had fallen down, then fallen back up to the top of the sky. My own opening sparkler move, mirrored in the heavens, as prelude to a ten-minute shooting star display. Flares bounce off the outside of the atmosphere to sketch a grid of colors down the sky, then the grid thickens into a moving tapestry, populated with twitching glyphs and shapes that melt and blur and flirt with recognizability like the silhouettes of secret somethings on the other side of the sky.

Quite a show. The expression on Al’s face is one I haven’t seen since we were kids, watching firework displays until we had cricks in our necks that didn’t go away for days. Some of the people in the boats have video cameras, and they’re swinging them around in all directions, trying to catch it all. Tonight’ll keep the government decipherment teams busy for years.

Iris is behind me, repeating “aha! aha!” like a mantra.

For a moment I think we’ve strayed out into the deep water, then realize I’ve fallen to kneeling, head tilted back, almost pillowed on the water.

What breaks me out of my awestruck reverie, what makes me laugh and stand up and shout, waving, at the sky, is the last move the angels make, after the sky’s gone back to nothing but quiet stars and we all think it’s over.

At first, I take it for the sun’s edge slipping up over the horizon. But the glow isn’t bright enough. For a long, mad moment, I think it’s those above-- aliens or robots or little green men-- finally showing themselves. Then I realize what that icy marble-white disk in the eastern sky is and the moon rises, full, bigger than the treetops, fresh-faced and craterless.

This is not the dawn I had expected.

The End

Story copyright Rudi Dornemann, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com