Sons from Afar Read Free Page A

your homework?” he asked.
    â€œWhat I don’t get done tonight I can finish on the bus.” James shrugged: Sammy just didn’t care about grades. He just didn’t know how important they were; he didn’t care about knowing things either.
    â€œYou know,” Sammy’s voice said, “it always looks like the stars are coming out, even though they aren’t.”
    â€œThey’re really suns,” James told him. He looked up at the sky then. It was black, silky black, with no moon yet so the suns burned clear out there. James picked out the constellations he knew: Orion, by his belt, he could always always find Orion; the big dipper, like a geometric figure, like a rhomboid; the little dipper, a smaller rhomboid, his eyes searched it out. Then the North Star, Polaris. The Pleiades, the sisters, crowded together, the seventh sister burning faintly. “Every one of them is a sun, a mass of burning gases. Do you know how hot the sun burns?”
    â€œSo what,” Sammy’s uninterested voice said.
    â€œNeither do I,” James admitted. He used to know, but he’d forgotten. Sammy’s laugh sounded friendly. “Tell you a story,” James offered. “You want to hear a story?” Sammy always liked being told stories.
    â€œGood-o.”
    James identified the story’s source, first. “This is from Greek mythology. There was an inventor, named Daedalus, a famous inventor. Everybody knew about him. So when King Minos of Crete wanted a labyrinth built—a maze—where he’d keep his son, the Minotaur, in the middle—”
    â€œI remember the Minotaur,” Sammy interrupted. “It was in my book of monsters. It was half man, half bull.”
    â€œYeah. So Minos hired Daedalus to design and build thislabyrinth. Daedalus took his son Icarus with him to Crete. But when the job was finished, Minos kept them prisoners in a high tower.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œBecause they knew how to get out of the maze and Minos wanted that to be a secret. In the tower, they had to haul their food up in baskets, and they had candles for light. The only things that could get into the tower were birds. They were prisoners there for a long time. There was no way to escape, but Daedalus figured out a way. See, when the birds flew in they’d shed their feathers. So he and Icarus collected the feathers. They stuck them together with wax, to make huge wings. When they had enough—it must have taken years—they were ready to fly out, away, to fly free. Before they left, Daedalus warned Icarus that he shouldn’t fly too close to the sun, because the heat of it would melt the wax that was holding the wings together. But Icarus didn’t pay attention. Or he forgot, maybe. Because when they were out and flying, he went up, and up, until the heat was too great. His wings fell apart and he fell—he fell out of the sky into the ocean. He drowned.” James never could tell a story the way it should be told; when he told it, he could hear it sound like a series of facts, like a history book, not like a story.
    â€œI can see why he did that,” Sammy said. “If you could really fly, you’d always want to go higher, once you started flying. Wouldn’t you?”
    Not if he’d been warned against it he wouldn’t, James thought, and explained why. “He should have listened to his father. His father knew.”
    â€œThat’s an interesting story, even if the air actually gets colder as you go higher, even if they’d need more than wax. Even if—” Sammy sat up suddenly. “Okay, James, what is it? You figure that if we had a father he could tell us what we should do?”
    â€œWe have a father,” James said. Now that Sammy was willing to talk about it, and they were facing one another, James wasn’t sure he really wanted to talk. He looked over Sammy’s shoulder to the night