Chapter Text
Satellite
The first snow of the year had just begun to fall when word came that Doriath had launched the world’s first artificial satellite. Maedhros and Maglor ran home from school, burst in the front door, and yelled to their mother that they were going sledding.
There was no immediate response, which was not so unusual. But when Maedhros stepped into the backyard, he found Celegorm, hatless and mittenless, alone with his plastic bow-and-arrow set. The baby and Nerdanel were nowhere to be seen. On the line, clothes hung forgotten, gathering snowflakes.
Maedhros saw that the shed door was ajar and figured Nerdanel had gotten caught up in another project. He dashed over, calling out, “Mom, we need the sled.” He yanked the door open.
Nerdanel and Fëanor stood, shoulders touching, over the shortwave radio on the workbench. They did not acknowledge Maedhros. Caranthir napped on a blanket in the corner.
It was unusual to see Fëanor before dinnertime. Usually, he stopped by the house for a quick bite of tuna noodle or meatloaf and mashed potatoes, then returned to the campus observatory after sunset, not to be seen again until breakfast. On the rare nights he stayed home, he and Nerdanel usually disappeared into his office or the shed, leaving the boys to their own devices.
On this particular afternoon, however, the shortwave was emitting an unusual sound. A high-pitched, regular beep, beep, beep.
“They’ve done it,” Fëanor said, shaking his head in wonder. “The clever devils have gotten there first.”
Maedhros forgot about the sled.
That evening, the TV newsman said that the Iathrim called the satellite Randir, which meant “wanderer” in Sindarin. It orbited the world once every ninety-six minutes, far faster than the fastest airplanes in the world. The newsman also said that in about fifteen minutes, it would be traveling across Aman again and would be visible to the naked eye.
The snow had stopped falling. It was cold, clear, and dark. They could see the cloudy river of the galaxy shimmering across the sky. Maedhros stood in his front yard, his family with him. The entire neighborhood, the entire city, the entire nation, it seemed, was outside, too, watching what the Iathrim had done. Just at the time they said, a tiny light appeared at the western horizon and glided over their heads.
Some of the neighbors cried. The mother next door let out a shriek and made her little boy go back inside. Maedhros barely noticed. He stood in awe next to his father.
Later, Maedhros was too excited to sleep, and he was reading space comics in the rec room. The phone kept on ringing: other professors from the college, Grandpa Mahtan, a local newspaper asking for Fëanor’s commentary. Everyone wanted to talk about the satellite.
The last time it rang, Nerdanel answered in a clipped voice, out of patience with the late-night calls. As the person on the other end spoke, though, she softened. Maedhros crept closer to listen in when Fëanor came down to take the phone.
“I suppose you’re not calling to congratulate me on the baby,” Fëanor said.
There was a tone in his voice that made Maedhros feel tight and sad inside. He knew that if Fëanor didn’t want to talk to someone, he just wouldn’t come to the phone; he’d had Nerdanel deflect several callers already. But he didn’t sound happy, either, with this person.
“I’m not sure what you think I can do for you, Nolo. Well, certainly not for them, either. I haven’t taken orders from Valimar since the Darkening. And neither should you, if you knew what was—” Fëanor abruptly stopped talking. Someone on the other end had cut him off. Maedhros was shocked.
“No, I wouldn’t call it an opportunity, I’d call it a chain. I have no interest in Aman’s national security interests. I can’t understand how, after what happened to Finwë, you’d feel any differently than I on the matter. Actually, come to think of it, I’m more inclined to defect to Doriath at this point, at least they’ve got the foresight to….” Fëanor paused again, listening to the person on the other side.
When Fëanor spoke again, he was softer. “Did you see it, Nolo? Like a new star crossing the sky. They’ve beaten us, and good. Boy, I’d love to get my hands on the tech in their cosmodrome, wouldn’t you? Maybe I’ll call up—”
This time, it was Nerdanel who interrupted, her voice a warning. Maedhros couldn’t quite make out the words, but her meaning was clear: Shut up, smarty-pants!
“Of course,” Fëanor returned to the phone, reverting to his clear, didactic tone, “I’m exaggerating for effect, as I’m known to. I would never defect or betray my country…. No, Professor, you won’t. I’m afraid you’ll need to handle this one yourselves. I will not be bought, and I’ll be much obliged if you don’t call with such offers again.”
After Fëanor hung up, Nerdanel started in on him. “Did you have to be so flip with Nolvo?”
Fëanor sighed. “Don’t start. You know how he gets a rise out of me.”
“I should hope I’m the only one allowed to do that,” she said with affection. Maedhros strained to hear as their voices lowered.
“I won’t work for the G-Men again,” Fëanor said. “And he shouldn’t, either, but he’s long stopped listening to me. Do you have a light?”
“Here.”
The sweet smell of pipe-smoke began to waft through the house. “So, you just told him where to shove it,” Nerdanel said. “You could stand to use a little diplomacy, is all I’m saying. These days, you can’t just say whatever fool thing comes to mind around the wrong people.”
“You think Nolofinwë counts as the wrong people?” Fëanor asked.
“Of course not, just… you make yourself an easy target. They’ll tear you down if you let them.”
“I thought you married me because I’m too easy,” Fëanor said, Nerdanel laughed, and their voices dropped too low for Maedhros to hear any more.
Their father took Maedhros and Maglor to the college the following evening, to look at the satellite through the giant telescope.
“You won’t see much detail,” Fëanor cautioned. “Just a bright little traveler in the sky.”
It was so cold, Maedhros could see his breath. The grad students were humming with excitement, swarming Fëanor like bees on a sunflower. He waved them off, leading Maedhros and Maglor up a narrow metal staircase and across the catwalk to the observation cage, where the main eyepiece assembly was mounted. Fëanor warned them not to touch anything else and trotted back down to the control panel. Maedhros spun around on the stool in circles, watching his father flash through his field of view once a rotation, as he scribbled out some calculations on a notepad.
“Hey, Professor!” one of the students called out. “Buzz here has been working on Randir calculations all night, let him do that for you.”
Fëanor shook his head, not looking up, pencil flying. “No need!” He punched some buttons on the control panel, and the telescope whirred, clicked, and hummed as it moved into position. Fëanor checked his watch. “Now, it’ll be in view in about two minutes,” he called up to the boys. “I’ll give you a countdown!”
Maglor was pressing his face so hard to the eyepiece, he’d end up with rings around his eyes, Maedhros thought. He let his little brother have ten seconds to look before shoving him aside.
The satellite, viewed through the telescope, looked like a fast-moving star. It entered from the western sky, streaked across the field of view, glittering and bright, and then, all too quickly, it was gone.
Maglor sighed dramatically. “All that for a few seconds?”
Maglor fell asleep in the station wagon on the way home. In the front seat, Maedhros felt important and grown-up when Fëanor explained that the satellite itself was too small to see, even with a powerful telescope. What they had seen instead was likely the rocket booster.
“You’d need something a lot more powerful to see something as small as Randir, with an optical telescope,” Fëanor said. “Now, radio, that’s another story. Why, with just our shortwave at home, we can hear her, clear as day,” he continued. “The signal can’t travel much farther than Arda, though. You’d need a stronger transmitter to send a signal to another world, like Carnil.”
“Would that really be possible?” Maedhros asked.
“Well, you could send a signal, with strong enough technology, sure. But nobody’s there to receive it. Out in the stars, though? Who knows?” Fëanor continued talking, mostly to himself, working through the technical challenges of interplanetary communication, throwing out frequency ranges and signal capabilities before answering himself, musing about cosmic interference and interstellar distances.
Maedhros didn’t understand half of it, not really, but he let himself pretend. He imagined that one day, he would be the one who could answer Fëanor’s hypothetical questions and work with super-powerful radio telescopes, strong enough to hear from the stars.
After Randir, the world changed. Maedhros was too small to understand most of it until later, but the Space Race had truly begun. Though Doriath had a head start, the two superpowers remained nearly equally matched. The Amanyarin government ramped up technological and scientific initiatives, and soon, were sending their own satellites into orbit. The mood in Valimar was one of cautious optimism in the eventual reestablishment of Amanyarin supremacy.
At the same time, a reactionary movement of religious traditionalists began to gain support. Not everyone believed that the Eldar had any business launching rockets into Ilmen and beyond. The Stars of Varda held sacred secrets meant for the Ainur alone. Churches across the world, which had been in a long, slow decline ever since the age of reason, began to attract new members, as well as regaining attendance from among the lapsed.
At school, they started doing duck-and-cover drills. If the sirens blared, you were meant to get inside, go to the shelter, and get under a table. Be sure to stay away from windows and doors.
Maedhros tried to teach Celegorm about duck-and-cover, but he hated being made to go inside. So, he taught him what to do if the flash came when you were outside. You were supposed to drop down on the ground, wherever you were, find shelter if you could, and cover your head. The film reel at school showed a child riding a bicycle home, diving off, cradling his head until a gentleman came to tell him it was safe to get up.
“What are you doing, boys?” Fëanor asked, watching them in the backyard.
“Duck-and-cover,” Maedhros said. When Fëanor looked blank, Maedhros explained, inwardly quite pleased to know something his father didn’t.
“If you’re hearing the sirens, it’s already too late,” he said, then went into the shed without saying another word.
“What does that mean?” Maedhros asked his mother, who looked like she’d rather be ducking-and-covering herself.
“It means your father’s too lost in bad memories to think about anything else,” Nerdanel said. Then she shook her head. “I’m sorry, love, it didn’t mean anything at all. Look after your brothers, darling,” she said, and followed Fëanor, shutting the door behind her.
His parents were working on a new project in the shed. It was unheated and poorly insulated, and as winter settled firmly upon them, Maedhros dreaded going out there to ask about dinner. The cold didn’t bother him as much as his parents’ faraway stares. Occasionally, Nerdanel would look guilty and come inside, which made Maedhros feel bad. So, mostly, he made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or heated up a can of soup for himself and his brothers. (His parents did, at least, usually remember to swaddle up Caranthir and take him out to the shed, which saved Maedhros from having to figure out bottles.)
Sometimes, after the little boys went to bed, Maedhros brought a couple of plates out and stayed to watch them work. Ever since the first night after Randir rocketed into space, Nerdanel had started keeping a notebook. Every ninety-six minutes, she turned on the shortwave, fiddled with some dials, and wrote down figures in tiny, neat columns. Fëanor wasn’t allowed to write directly in the notebook, so if he was the only person awake to check the satellite’s progress, he wrote down his observations on looseleaf and Nerdanel transcribed the data the next day.
If Maedhros was very quiet, and the work was going well, one of them would eventually beckon him over and show him something. That was how he learned that Randir was falling.
Right now, the changes in its orbital period were tiny, just a few microseconds each orbit, hardly measurable. But over time, eventually, the satellite would drop too low and hit the upper atmosphere. It would drag, heat up, slow down, and burn all away long before it would ever reach the ground.
“If we’re lucky,” said Fëanor, “it might fall while we’re in range. We’ll likely lose the signal as it enters the atmosphere, but we could see it consumed by flame.”
When they weren’t tracking satellite beeps, they were working on Fëanor’s latest invention. The idea was, what if you could use satellites to relay signals from one place on the ground to another? What if you could talk to someone who had crossed the Belegaer, from the other side of Aman? You wouldn’t need wires to connect phone calls at all. The invention would rely on electromagnetic waves, bouncing between antennae all over the world and in near-orbit, until they reached their destination.
Maedhros liked the idea of talking to friends all over the world. So far, they had moved three times, every time Fëanor took a new job. He didn’t even remember when they first moved out of Grandpa Mahtan’s house, it had been before Maglor was born. But each time, they packed up and left his teachers and friends and the grad students who followed Fëanor around like puppy dogs. They didn’t have any other family, it was just the six of them. It was lonely, and he missed the people they left behind. Maybe, if they could really build electromagnetic wave phones, it wouldn’t be so hard to stay in touch.
As predicted, Randir’s orbit decayed enough that it fell into the atmosphere. It happened when Maedhros was at school. It would have been too bright to see in daylight, anyway. Maedhros was disappointed.
When Nerdanel told them, Maglor turned white and hid under the piano bench.
“What’s wrong?” Maedhros asked, crouching down.
“I’m afraid it’s going to fall on our house,” Maglor finally admitted.
“Don’t be stupid. It’s all burned up, dummy,” Maedhros said reassuringly.
He was right. Nothing fell on the house.
A few weeks later, Doriath launched a second satellite: Randir 2. They said on the news that it carried an air conditioning system, research equipment, food supply, and an experimental animal (canine).
“Dog,” said Celegorm, and shot an arrow at Maedhros. He missed by a few inches.
Maedhros would not learn the full details until much, much, later, as executor of the will, when it came time to sort Fëanor’s affairs. Within a year of Randir’s launch, Fëanor had filed a patent application for the satellite phone. The Amanyarin government immediately came calling, and offered, first politely, then with increasing sternness, to buy it. Fëanor told them where they could go.
Eventually, he sold the patent to an electromechanical firm and took the whole family on a three-week vacation to Alqualondë. They stayed in a bubblegum-pink house on stilts right on the beach, swam in the warm sea every day, and learned how to crack crab-shells to get the sweet meat inside. Everyone got sunburns. A jellyfish stung Celegorm. Maedhros and Maglor slept in a hammock on the porch, and every night, before bedtime, Fëanor named the stars.
It was the nicest vacation Maedhros ever had. Long after the magic of the beach faded for Maedhros, he would unfold the memories, the smell of seaweed and zinc oxide, collecting shells in the sand, and falling asleep warm against his brother, swinging gently in the breeze. His father’s voice, low against the background of crashing waves, speaking of white dwarfs, black holes, and supernovae, spinning in the void, hundreds of millions of light-years away.
The fëar of chickens and Eldar
One day, Celegorm came home from school with three fluffy chicks snuggled into his jacket.
“Ta-da!” He beamed as he unzipped and revealed them. “The teacher said I could keep them!”
Nerdanel was startled. But after she called the school to confirm that Celegorm had not, in fact, absconded with the class pets, but was rightly allowed to claim them after the egg unit ended, she smiled and said, “All right, let’s make them a warm bed.”
Maedhros and Maglor, sick with jealousy, helped Celegorm find a cardboard box and stuff it with old newspaper. Nestled along headlines saying REVOLUTION IN RHÛN, THE DAY THE TREES DIED, and TREATY OF ENDÓRË, the three little chicks cheeped happily.
“You can help take care of them, if you like,” said Celegorm magnanimously.
Maglor cradled one to his chest, enraptured. “I’ll be your mama,” he told it.
The chicks lived in the box under a lamp while Fëanor and Nerdanel built a coop in the backyard.
The boys took their job of tending the chickens very seriously. Everywhere they went, their little birds were at their heels, peeping.
Every morning, Maedhros rose to the sound of his cartoon mouse alarm clock and let the chickens out of their coop to forage and play. He made sure they had enough water, cleaned their coop, and gave them fresh straw.
Celegorm fed them by scattering cracked corn on the ground and even let them peck it from his hands. He cheeped right back at them. Sometimes, they—birds and boy together—found worms for dessert.
Maglor nuzzled them and told them they were good chicks and sweet chicks, and he made up songs to sing them.
Caranthir stayed inside. He did not care for the chickens, whose pecks scared him.
Before long, the chicks became pullets. One silver-laced white, one red-brown, and one black with a flashy red comb.
“Soon, they may begin to lay,” said Nerdanel.
“Calcium,” said Fëanor. “We should add eggshells to their feed, so they’ll lay strong eggs.”
One morning, Maedhros found a smooth, brown egg nestled in the silver-white hen’s straw bed. He put the warm egg against his cheek, then rushed inside to show everyone.
Every night, Maedhros made sure that the chickens were tucked safely in their coop. As they cooed and clucked themselves to sleep, Maedhros would latch the coop door and carefully shut the gate behind him before going inside.
Late one night, Maedhros woke to a clamor. There were squawks and unsettling bumps from outside. His heart beating, he pulled on his boots and crept outside to check on the birds. The night sky was big, the moon was dark, and the stars were hidden by the clouds. Maedhros wished he had woken his father to keep him safe from the things in the shadows.
Celegorm had arrived before him. He stood in the open door of the coop, staring.
The floor was clouded with feathers, and Maedhros counted two frightened chickens cowering in the rafters, the red-brown and the black. The silver-white was nowhere to be seen.
Maedhros burst into tears. Before he knew it, strong arms scooped him up and he cried into his father’s shoulder like he had not done in years.
Inside the house, Fëanor sat on the kitchen linoleum, Maedhros curled next to him, tears still pouring down his face. Celegorm crawled into Fëanor’s lap. Maglor, rubbing sleep from his eyes, came and scrunched in with them.
“What took her? A fox? Did it kill her?” Celegorm asked.
“It’s not fair,” Maedhros sobbed.
“Shh, shh,” said Maedhros’s father. “What might seem unfair to you might make sense to a fox.”
“What do you mean?” Maglor asked.
“The fox who took your chicken lives in the woods,” their father said. “He works hard every day to bring food to his babies. Some days he doesn’t find any, so he has to go home with nothing, and the babies are hungry. Sometimes, they’re very, very hungry, and when that happens, he does everything he can to find something for them to eat.”
Maedhros sniffled and looked at his father.
“He didn’t know that it was our chicken he took,” Fëanor continued. “He just saw a chance to feed his family. I know you are sad, Nelyo, Káno, Turko,” he said, cupping a hand over each of their cheeks in turn as he spoke their names, “but you wouldn’t want the baby foxes to go hungry, would you?”
“No,” said Celegorm immediately.
“No,” agreed Maglor.
Maedhros thought about it for a long time. “No,” he said finally. “I guess not.”
“The fox does everything he can to take care of his babies, just like your mother and I do everything we can to take care of you. We make sure you are happy, your bellies are full, you have a warm, safe place to sleep. And you did everything you could to make sure your chicks were happy and their bellies were full and they had a warm, safe place to sleep. Because you love your chicks like I love you. Like the fox loves his babies.”
“But the chicken wasn’t safe,” Maedhros said, eyes filling again.
“Come, let’s go back to bed,” said Maedhros’s mother, and took Maglor and Celegorm each by a hand, leading them upstairs.
Maedhros’s father put his arm around him. “You were very brave, do you know that? To hear trouble and come running to help. There was nothing you could have done differently to protect the chicken. It was just her time,” he said.
Maedhros cried a while longer. His father wiped his face and stroked his back.
When he thought he was out of tears, he sighed and closed his eyes.
“Now,” Fëanor said, “you are getting big and strong. You take care of the others. They look up to you in every way. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks,” Maedhros said.
“And that is why,” Fëanor said, “you cannot let them see you cry like that ever again. No matter what happens. Not if your heart is broken. Not if every chicken gets taken. You must be brave like you were when you first heard the noises. If you have to cry,” Fëanor said, with great tenderness, “you can go hide in your closet and close the door.”
The next day, each of the boys, even Caranthir, picked out a stone and laid them out to mark a grave for the chicken in the corner of the backyard. They remembered their hen who had been soft and silvery-white, who had loved worms, who had laid the first warm brown egg.
“A bird who was loved,” Nerdanel said, looking down at the bare ground.
Maedhros’s heart was heavy. But as he mourned the chicken, he thought too of the happy baby foxes with full bellies, living in the woods.
Fëanor repaired the broken siding of the coop where the fox had gotten in. Nerdanel added support beams and diagonal bracing. “We should dig a trench and bury the fence a foot or so into the ground,” she said.
The boys remained vigilant in caring for the other two hens. They made sure they had enough water. They cleaned their coop and gave them fresh straw and scattered cracked corn for them to eat.
Something was bothering Maedhros. He tried to let it go, but he couldn’t.
After a few days, he asked his parents. “Where did the fëa of the chicken go, after its hröa was killed and eaten?”
Fëanor and Nerdanel exchanged looks.
“Well,” Fëanor said, “Chickens do not have fëar.”
“Living things die,” Nerdanel said. “Some creatures live for a long time, some for a short time. But we loved her while she was here.”
“She had a body and a heart that pumped blood and a brain that could think, just like us,” Fëanor said. “When she died, her brain stopped working. So, she couldn’t think or hurt or be afraid.”
Maedhros thought for a moment.
“Is that what happened to Grandmother Míriel, before I was born?” he asked.
Maedhros’s father didn’t say anything. He pulled Maedhros close, squeezed him tight, took a breath. He swallowed twice, then looked to Maedhros’s mother.
“Probably,” Nerdanel said. “She was very sick. Her body stopped working, just like the chicken’s. After we die, some Elves believe that our fëar go to the Halls of Mandos. An imaginary place,” Nerdanel clarified. “It makes some people feel better, after they lose someone they love, to think they might see them again.”
Fëanor would not meet their eyes.
“So, it’s not real,” Maedhros said.
“We have no way of knowing what happens to Elves after we die,” Fëanor finally said. His voice was strange. He looked up at the sky. “No one has ever come back to tell the tale.”
Sunday School
When Maedhros was just beginning to turn the corner from childhood into early adolescence, it was time to move again. He was unhappy to leave the chickens behind, but as instructed, did not cry about it in front of anybody.
This time, Fëanor had taken a position at a university so remote, it had more telescopes than the town had traffic lights. There was one five-and-dime, one shabby soda fountain, and one school, which all four boys attended. There was no baseball field, just a dirt lot where the big kids played by day and smoked by night. There was no library, no picture show, no candy store, and four churches.
After a few mind-numbing months, Nerdanel decided something had to change. Out of sheer boredom, on Sunday mornings, she began taking them to church. She would coax them into their button-up shirts, dress trousers, and shiny shoes, comb their hair with water, and load them into the station wagon. Fëanor refused to have any part of it, even when Nerdanel insisted it was one of the more reasonable, mainline denominations. His custom was to spend Sunday mornings sleeping in after staying out half the night at the observatory.
Nerdanel would point the boys toward the Sunday school classroom and waddle her way to the ladies’ circle, desperate for anything that could pass for conversation and coffee, even if it was weak and bland.
Maedhros had never seriously encountered religion before. For several weeks, he remained unimpressed. Fëanor’s pronouncements on the subject had led him to believe the holy tales were essentially children’s stories—boring, but harmless.
He was, therefore, pleasantly surprised when the Sunday school teacher, the minister’s wife, began reading to them from the Book of the Akallabêth. He knew the basic story, of course: the men of the mythical island of Númenor grew too proud and tried to sail into the lands of the Valar, and they were punished accordingly.
But he had never heard it told like this! The evil king took Míriel to wife against her will, started worshipping the Lord of Darkness, and sacrificed people in the great temple. The men of Númenor slew each other for little cause. Listening to the tale, Maedhros’s eyes grew wider and wider. His brothers, uncharacteristically silent, were just as eager.
After the reading, the teacher instructed them to make models of the White Tree from toilet paper rolls and twigs. Celegorm got white paint all over himself. The models had to stay behind to dry before they could attach leaves, but the teacher said they could bring them home in a few weeks when they were completed.
Maedhros already felt embarrassed. He wouldn’t mind showing his mother, who at least acted pleased about these kinds of things. But he had long ago learned to show Fëanor only his best efforts. He did not think cardboard arts and crafts qualified.
When they returned to Sunday school the following week, the minister’s wife continued the story of the Akallabêth, and Maedhros became concerned.
The gruesomeness of Númenor’s destruction began to upset him. He understood that the tale was meant to frighten the children away from wickedness. Don’t be like the men of Númenor, who broke the Ban of the Valar and sailed into the forbidden seas.
But he could not stomach Ilúvatar’s reaction. To sink an entire continent into the abyss! Even the children and maidens and ladies proud! And his heart hurt to picture poor Queen Tar-Míriel, so beautiful and resigned, drowned beneath the cold green wave. He could not understand why she deserved to be swept away.
He was very quiet for the rest of the morning. The minister’s wife praised him for being such a good example for his brothers.
As they were leaving, she told Maedhros that his White Tree model was the best in the class. He thanked her, took Caranthir by the hand, and threw his Tree into the trash as soon as she wasn’t looking.
When they got home, Maedhros went into the study and took an old volume off a high shelf. His fingers made prints on the dusty burgundy cover. He opened it, careful not to tear the onionskin pages.
Within minutes, he had several questions.
What was the Flame Imperishable?
What did “raiment” mean?
He found a dictionary, which helped a little, but it did not explain how two lamps could possibly illuminate the entire world.
As he read on, his distress grew. He suspected that the world, according to this book, was supposedly flat. The “walls of night” seemed to be some kind of enclosure. The idea of a world that predated the Sun seemed preposterous. How could plants and animals grow? In fact, without the Sun, how could anyone even know what a year was? If there was no Sun, then the meaning of a year was simply arbitrary. He flipped ahead until he found the chapter where the Valar created the Sun.
And he started to laugh.
How could anyone believe that the Sun was made out of a fruit? The actual Sun, he knew, was a star, a massive flaming sphere of gas, millions of miles away.
This was simply a fairy tale for children, Maedhros decided. It could not possibly be believed.
Yet the book was so terribly violent, too. Maedhros did not quite understand what was meant by “all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs, for they had life and multiplied after the manner of the children of Ilúvatar,” but reading it, his stomach curled with a sick, shuddering feeling, a wrongness he could not explain.
He felt further unease at the origin story of the Dwarves, who were themselves blameless, yet were nearly struck down by their creator as they cowered, begging for mercy.
What kind of book was this?
Returning to Sunday school the following week, Maedhros was eager for clarification. He raised his hand and waved it around before the teacher could begin the day’s reading. He started with what he thought was a simple question.
“Did the people who wrote this book really believe the world was flat?”
The minister’s wife blinked at him before remembering to put on her smile. “Well, the true author of this book is Eru Ilúvatar himself, my lamb. And of course, the world is indeed flat.”
For a beat, nobody spoke. Then Maedhros laughed out loud. His brothers, who had been watching intently, joined in.
The minister’s wife stopped smiling. Maedhros felt a pang of guilt.
Later, he realized that he probably should have stopped when it became clear that the minister’s wife believed the book was literally true. But in the moment, the rest of his questions came pouring out. He asked about the Flame Imperishable, how trees could survive without photosynthesis, the length of a year, the composition of the Sun, the origins of the Orcs and the Dwarves.
Once he got started, he couldn’t hold back. The teacher grew increasingly impatient, answering his questions by simply reading back the passages he had already puzzled over. He clenched his jaw in frustration. He could read; he didn’t want to hear the same bits regurgitated over and over. He wanted answers.
He looked at a poster on the wall, a colorful illustration of Varda creating the stars. In the picture, Varda was luminous, gowned in deep blue and black, with radiant sparkles in her hair. She loomed across the dark sky. In a single moment, Maedhros realized something that he had perhaps always known in his heart but had never thought all the way through before: Varda Elentári was no more real than dragons, vampires, or the Big Bad Wolf.
“How the heck could someone make all the stars in the universe in a few days?” he demanded. “The universe is billions and billions of years old!”
Well, the minister’s wife certainly wouldn’t stand for swearing in her classroom.
After he was kicked out of Sunday school, Maedhros dreaded going home and explaining what had happened, especially to his father. But to his surprise, Fëanor only laughed and hugged him—a rare gesture of affection since Maedhros had grown out of short pants. He sat down at the breakfast nook, patted the vinyl seat next to him, and bade Maedhros tell the whole story from the beginning, every detail.
Fëanor’s silver eyes danced when Maedhros questioned the teacher about the Sun-fruit in the sky.
“And right you were to ask!” Fëanor said, his voice ringing like a hammer on steel. “An astronomical absurdity!”
Nerdanel still made Maedhros go to church the following week, but, as it turned out, the adults had discussed the situation and agreed that he would either help out in the nursery or join the high-schoolers’ choir. Maedhros chose choir.
Maglor, upon hearing this, briefly pouted, then formulated a plan. He picked his own fight with the teacher about how big the dragon Ancalagon the Black was supposed to be, anyway. And he was promptly hustled out to choir practice, too.
A few months after the Sunday school incident. Nerdanel deposited a bottle, a can of formula, and the screaming baby into Fëanor’s lap, and announced that she couldn’t take it anymore. She was going on the Pill and going back to school.
To his credit, Fëanor only paused a moment before he nodded and began soothing-shushing-rocking-patting Curufin. “Where would you like to go?”
As it turned out, it was easier for Nerdanel to get into the top graduate schools of aerospace engineering in the country, than it was for Fëanor to secure a tenured faculty position. Nerdanel’s own academic background was studded with accomplishments, albeit over a decade past. And with her famous spouse writing a letter of recommendation, giving his permission, every department eagerly offered her acceptance letters.
Fëanor himself on faculty, though? Well, that was a different story. Certainly, he was welcome to guest lecture. Everyone liked hearing him speak. But by now, Fëanor’s reputation for disagreeableness, his frankly outlandish research interests, and his political contrarianism made him a tough sell for a permanent position. He was a live wire, and it was too easy to set a campus on fire these days. It was why he had taken increasingly remote and undesirable positions over the past several years, when he should have been the one running the whole program over at Tirion. He was a genius, nobody denied that, but a genius who refused to take on any but the most promising graduate students, fought with colleagues over resources, failed to secure grant funding, and joked too freely about subjects that got other men blacklisted. There was only so far that “prized student of Finwë, may he rest in peace” could take him.
But Nerdanel made it clear that, with or without him, she would be moving to the West Coast to finish her degree. So Fëanor swallowed his pride, put on a charcoal gray suit, got a haircut, and flew out to Formenos to meet with the dean. Turned out, the Dean of the Formenos Institute of Technology had a sweet, if a bit dull, nephew, who had been plodding through his dissertation for years. A man in desperate need of a mentor—or at least, someone to hand-hold him through finishing the thing. Fëanor agreed to supervise the kid (and teach three sections of freshman PHYS 101).
Come fall, they were moving to Formenos.