Chains of Redemption

by Selina Rosen

  "And your hair represents that how?" Poley asked with all the patience of a man talking to a retarded child.

  "Because it's growing. I didn't tell it to, and yet it just does, even though it's totally unnecessary for it to do so. I don't need it to protect my head from attack or the elements, but it still keeps growing. Don't you see? It's the embodiment of the truth of nothingness."

  He didn't, and he said so, and then once again suggested the cryogenic chamber. He did that a lot. It was all because he was a robot and therefore incapable of comprehending the concepts she tried to teach him. Alan didn't understand because the blood never stayed in his brain long enough for him to comprehend complicated concepts, like that they could never really know anything, and that nothing really mattered.

  They seemed to think that she was spending too much time contemplating nothing, that perhaps the lack of activity was making her something less than sane. But wasn't that the way it always was with visionaries? They thought of crap, and other people told them all the reasons why what they thought was inconceivable.

  Alan went to the kitchen with her to help prepare the evening meal. Which would be what it always was, some ancient packet of food from the ship's stores and some chopped up plant life. He missed fish and meat. The stuff in the packets was supposed to be different stuff, but to his pallet it all tasted mostly the same.

  Of course as RJ would remind him—if he dared to say anything about it—the tastelessness of it should remind them of the fact that it didn't really matter.

  She truly thought he and Poley didn't understand what she was trying to say, and seemed totally unaware that the things she said were both completely insane and downright trite. Poley said she was working through her issues, whatever the hell that meant. It seemed to Alan that she was mostly walking around the ship doing maintenance work, playing with her plants, and talking to herself way more than could possibly be healthy. He didn't know what was wrong with her, and—unlike Poley—he didn't pretend to, but he did know that there was something wrong.

  And she wasn't getting any better.

  She would lay down in the middle of the floor anywhere, go to sleep and sleep for two days, then get up and run back and forth, up and down the corridors for a week at a time, barely stopping long enough to eat and take care of her plants. Then she'd sleep again.

  She'd go to the ship's workout hall and exercise for three days straight, then not look in the room for a month. There was no pattern or rhythm to what she did. She was living according to her new philosophy that, "nothing really matters, so I don't give a shit."

  Alan missed his friend, especially since she was the only one besides Poley to talk to, and Poley could be, well . . . a little mechanical. Alan had run out of programs to review. He had learned to speak the Reliance language in its entirety now, which was good, because the minute the ship had lifted off it had been as if both Poley and RJ had forgotten how to speak his native tongue at all.

  He knew way more about weapons and spaceships than he wanted to know. In fact, the more he knew about space flight, the more he wondered why they didn't just blow up or smack into a sun or planet, or why an asteroid or meteor didn't smack into them.

  In short he was still enjoying being with Poley, but the whole "flying aimlessly through space" thing was starting to lose its appeal. He wanted to be somewhere instead of feeling as if he were always between places.

  Halfway through cooking dinner Poley walked into the kitchen. Happy to see him, Alan walked over to him and kissed his cheek. Poley patted his back, and Alan felt the same warm feeling he always felt. At least Poley was the same. He couldn't have stood it if Poley had changed, too. Unless of course he could maybe be a little more demonstrative.

  "RJ, we have entered our own space."

  "That's nice," she said without looking up from what she was doing.

  Poley sighed. "Do you still want me to chart a course for Derma station? The ship has detected a jumpgate closer. Would you rather I redirected to that one?"

  "Whatever." She shrugged. "One place or no place is just as good as any other."

  "Fine then," Poley sounded almost snippy. He had told Alan that he was getting tired of RJ's attitude, too. That he was ready for her to snap out of it. "Aren't you even a little excited about a new jumpgate and station much closer? It wasn't there when we left. Aren't you even a little excited about the prospect of exploring this place and maybe finding out what has happened to the New Alliance in our long absence? Whether that station is inhabited by the Argy or the Reliance or New Alliance personnel?"

  She shrugged again. "It doesn't matter, it won't make any real difference."

  Alan looked at Poley, and Poley nodded and rolled his eyes.

  "I know you both think I'm crazy, but if you would just learn to embrace the truth you'd find the absolute peace I have found by just not caring so damn much about anything."

  "I'm very excited," Alan told Poley.

  "Thanks, Alan," Poley said, glaring at his sister. "You could at least pretend to care, RJ."

  "I do. In fact, I get exhausted from all the pretending."

  Poley sat on the bridge, and Alan sat in the chair opposite him and listened with excitement as Poley explained how close they were to the jumpgate and therefore the end of their voyage.

  "We will dock at the station in three days time," Poley said.

  "That soon? You didn't tell RJ we were that close." Alan was now even more excited.

  "If I had breath I wouldn't waste it on my sister right now. We'd just have to hear some more crap about how three days or a hundred is just as meaningless as forty months, or some such prattling nonsense."

  Alan laughed at Poley's joke. "Maybe she'll do better when we get her around other people like her."

  "There aren't any other people like her. Well, just one, and I guarantee that running into her wouldn't help RJ. I think that's part of the problem. What she is, I mean. I think there's too much data and she's trying to compress her files. I can simply download files of no importance to some deep memory crystal, and if I later find that the information is completely unimportant, I can delete it. She doesn't have such a system. She has no way to remove things from her memory banks, and I think her brain is too full of knowledge that doesn't compute."

  "But she just sounds . . . crazy," Alan said.

  "I know. I think going crazy may be how she goes about dumping files," Poley said. He sighed deeply and frowned. "I keep trying, but it still doesn't help."

  "What?" Alan asked in confusion.

  "Nothing," Poley was obviously thinking. "Calculating" as he sometimes called it.

  "What's wrong?" Alan asked.

  "Just trying to figure out what's going to happen if the station is filled with hostiles. How is RJ going to handle it? Is she going to go in swinging and blasting, or is she going to try to convert them to her new religion?"

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Baldor watched his mother's face on the screen, but didn't actually hear her words.

  "Baldor, are you all right?" Dax asked at his shoulder.

  "He can't be dead. I just saw him not three weeks ago, and he was fine," Baldor said to the picture of his mother, ignoring Dax. It was, after all, a stupid question. How could he be all right? "My father can't be dead, Mother, he can't."

  "I'm sorry, son," Janad said, and her grief made him see her real age for the first time ever. When had his mother gotten so old?

  While he'd fought dozens of battles on at least as many worlds at RJ's side, his sister had grown up, his childhood friend Two had taken his father's place on the throne of Beta 4, his mother had grown old, and his own father had died.

  Where the hell had the time gone? Hell, he was now nearly forty himself, not that he actually looked it. The doctors told him that his genetically altered DNA was causing him to age more slowly. In fact, they couldn't be sure just how long he might live, but they projected that he might well remain physically young and healthy till he was a hu
ndred and fifty. His father had lived a full life, but he hadn't lived any hundred and fifty years. Baldor wasn't prepared for him to be gone, and he had just seen him. To Baldor that made it all the more surreal. He had just seen him and he'd been fine, so how could he be dead now? He realized that his insisting that his father couldn't be dead because he'd just seen him wasn't any less stupid than Dax's, "Are you all right?" question.

  "It was quick and unexpected," Janad said. "Your father's heart had been a problem for years, you know that. I guess it finally just gave out."

  "Quick and unexpected beats slow and painful any day," RJ said in a voice that sounded more like she was talking to herself than anyone else. She sat a few feet away at another console. She actually appeared to be working; if she was affected at all by his father's death she wasn't showing it.

  "Yes, I suppose so," his mother said, though even across space and on the monitor he could tell that RJ's demeanor troubled her, too.

  "Do you want me to come home, Mother?" Baldor asked.

  "That's not necessary," she said, though her tone of voice spoke more clearly than she did.

  "We can ship you out to Beta 4 tomorrow," RJ said, and he realized then that she had actually been checking data on ships arriving and departing from the moon base.

  "How long can I take?" Baldor asked.

  "Take as long as you need," RJ said.

  "But we're leaving for Trinidad in twelve days," Baldor protested.

  RJ smiled at him then. "We can fight a small skirmish without you."

  The "small skirmish" she was referring to was going to involve the last of the hardcore Reliance, three hundred thousand strong, which had vowed to fight to the death rather than surrender to the New Alliance.

  This was what they had been doing for the better part of twenty years now. The Reliance as a power had been overthrown, but those still loyal to the Reliance, being mostly military and armed to the teeth, had retreated to different areas and dug in. New Alliance troops attacked one stronghold after another, and none of them had even really given the New Alliance cause to pause, but it had taken years to totally eradicate the Reliance.

  While they had worked long and hard to rid the New Alliance of the scourge of the Reliance, the New Alliance's "dignitaries" went to work on the Argy. It had taken ten years, but eventually a truce was called between the New Alliance held territory and the Argy. The aliens had been willing to give up their campaign against Urta in exchange for complete control of the planet of most contention—Stashes. The New Alliance for their part promised not to try to take claim of any Argy held planet, including Stashes.

  These last remaining Reliance idiots who had dug in on Trinidad were really the only obstacle between the New Alliance and real and lasting peace and prosperity. The promise of a new age. This could very well be the last battle he would ever have a chance to fight.

  And what else did he really know? What else did he have?

  He looked from his mother's face to the back of RJ's head. His mother said it wasn't necessary for him to be there, but he knew what she really meant. Don't come if you don't give a damn about me and your sister. She didn't need him, but she wanted him.

  When RJ told him she didn't need him, she meant it, and he knew that it was true. That hurt more than a little. They had been friends, closer than friends, they had been comrades at arms and at times even lovers. Though for as long as he could remember the only person that RJ had really loved was Pete.

  Pete had been in battle literally all of his life. You would have expected him to be a serious, brooding young man considering all he'd seen. He wasn't, though. He was a happy, carefree man with a penchant for practical jokes, an almost constant smile, and a way with the ladies. Pete was strange, if beautiful to look at. His dark hair hung in short, loose ringlets around his head. His six foot five inch frame was thin but well muscled. His skin was darker even than Baldor's own, and his eyes, well his eyes were damn near as blue as his mother's, and like his mother he always wore the traditional Fourer garb.

  Baldor wasn't really too surprised when it was Pete's words which decided him. He walked up and put his hand on Baldor's shoulder. "Go, be with your mother. Your father is dead, she needs you, and you need her. It's just a battle, like so many others we've fought."

  Baldor nodded; the boy was right. But he looked at RJ half hoping she'd insist that she needed him. She didn't even turn to face him. He sighed.

  "I'm coming home, Mom," he said, and watched the relief wash over his mother's tired features. He wondered momentarily what she thought he was going to do. How she thought he could help. Maybe she just needed to be with him the way he now felt that he needed to be with her and Sandra. Needed to be home, on the world he'd been born on, with his people.

  Baldor was packing his bag when she walked into his room.

  "I'm really sorry to hear about your dad," she said.

  "Really?" he spat back angrily. "It didn't seem that way to me."

  "I'm sorry for your loss," she said defensively.

  "What about you? He was your friend once. You started all of this together. When Mickey," his voice caught in his throat and he swallowed hard. "When Mickey died, you cried like a baby, you fell completely apart."

  "Actually I cried up till he was dead, and then I stopped," she said quietly.

  "Why?"

  "Because once he was dead there was no chance that he was going to suddenly get better, hop up and become Mickey again." She shrugged. "Because once someone's dead they just aren't there anymore."

  "Do you have no tears at all for my father?" Baldor cried. "He loved you, RJ, he loved you."

  "He didn't know me!" Jessica shouted back, and just for a second it looked like she was going to tell him something more enlightening than what she wound up saying. "I've spent much more time with you than I did with him. That was literally your lifetime ago. He and I grew apart."

  "As you and I will grow apart," Baldor said accusingly. "As you'll distance yourself from everyone and everything except Pete. I loved you, RJ, not as my father did, as a friend, but as a man loves a woman. I stopped on the day that I realized that you were never going to love me back. That I was more like a pet than a person to you. You cared for me, but you could live without me, and when I'm gone you'll only remember me because you can't forget, not because I meant one damn thing to you." He was hurt, and his pain allowed him to say things he'd never been able to say to her before, and he supposed because he was in pain she let him. "I still care for you, more than I want to. More than I ought to considering you treat me with little or no concern. I could have been what he was to you, your beloved Gerald. You and I might have shared a love as potent and as rich, but you wouldn't allow it. If you would have but asked it I would have deserted my mother, my family in their time of grief and flown across the galaxy with you to fight yet another campaign. But what would you do for me? What if anything do I mean to you?"

  "I cared enough about you not to fall in love with you," she said sadly. "Go back to your planet, find a woman who will love you the way you deserve to be loved." She walked over and kissed him on the check. "Think of me fondly from time to time, but never look back."

  She turned and walked out of the room.

  Baldor watched her walk away and a cold chill went up his spine. He knew he was never going to see her again. His thought was solidified when Pete, Dax and a dozen others showed up at the dock to see him off, but RJ was nowhere in sight.

  Pete was tearing up, no doubt because Baldor had been as close to a father as the boy had ever had. He held Baldor longer than he should have when he embraced him, and a whole lot tighter.

  Baldor looked hopefully around the dock, hating himself for doing it, then furthered his shame by asking Pete, who still hadn't let him go, "Where's RJ?"

  The boy leaned into his ear then and whispered something so astonishing Baldor almost fainted. Pete let go of him then and took a step back saying, "That's why she didn't cry when he died."
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br />   Baldor nodded. He knew it was a secret, and the fact that the boy would tell him something about his beloved mother that she obviously didn't want told let Baldor know just how much Pete cared for him. "I won't tell," he whispered, stepping closer to Pete for a moment. At least he had left a lasting mark on someone. "You take care of yourself, kid."

  Pete nodded, tears falling on his cheeks. "You take care of yourself. After all I'm a GSH, not much can happen to me. I'll come see you on Beta 4."

  So even Pete knew Baldor wasn't coming back again.

  Baldor boarded the boat and headed for the mainland and the transmat station. In a few hours he'd be boarding a ship headed for home. He watched as the island got smaller and the faces of his friends blurred till they were unrecognizable. Alsterase Island, it and the supercomputer it contained, had always been so important to their war effort. He wondered what would become of it when peace broke out everywhere.