by Joe Pace
It was, now, for his only son.
The thought made him ache. For himself, for James, but for Mary, too. She had never been happier, he knew, than when she was pregnant and when James was tiny. Pearce knew why. The child was with her, always, the constant companion that the father so rarely was, with his frequent and long absences. When James was born, his mother’s affections centered on him totally, completely, unabashedly, to the point that Pearce himself found it hard to build a relationship with his son, or maintain one with Mary.
Do all men lose their wives to their children?
He touched the panel, and the door slid open. It was black inside, and Pearce’s long shadow stretched out into the shaft of light that stabbed into the room. Finding the interior light control, he inched it up just a couple of centimeters, and the resulting dusk was gauzy and unreal. James was asleep in his bed, a tangle of arms and sheets and legs. The room itself could have been that of a teen boy anywhere, anywhen, clothes strewn across the floor, vidreaders, controllers for a variety of computer-interaction consoles, moving digital pictures of cricketers, and the few toys that had survived the transition from boy to pre-man. Pearce’s eyes went to the shelves on the long opposite wall, shelves he had built himself, loaded with more than a hundred of the small collectible model ships. They were indistinct in the gloom, colors flat and muted, mostly indistinguishable from one another, but Pearce knew by heart where and when he had found most of them. He moved to the shelf and picked up one of the largest, a Raleigh-class methane tanker from the previous century.
“Dad.”
Softly murmured though it was, the word startled Pearce. James was still lying down, but his eyes were open, and they were looking at his father. Pearce smiled, a sad little half smile, and put the miniature tanker back on the shelf.
“You know the truth,” Pearce said without preamble.
“Yeah.” The boy’s eyes began to brim with tears, but Pearce thought they looked more angry than sad. He sat next to his son on the bed. So big, he thought, small as James was for his age. He still imagined him sleeping in that crib, the way he had last seen him before leaving for Cygnus with Jane Baker.
“I’ve been asked to go to space again,” Pearce began, haltingly.
“Mom said.”
“Did she tell you that there is a chance if I – if the trip goes well, that – that there’s an operation, Jimmy. A procedure that isn’t an option for us now, but might be if I succeed.” Was this a mistake? Was the boy still too young for this kind of discussion?
“I might be cured?”
Pearce nodded. “There is that chance. The…the only chance, James. But I won’t lie to you, it’s a dangerous trip. I might not return. Even if I do, the results might not be good enough to earn your surgery. It’s a slim chance…”
“But still a chance.” James sat upright. The tears were gone now, replaced with a steely look in his son’s eyes, a man’s glare that Pearce had never seen there before.
“Yes,” he replied softly. “A chance. The other option is that I could stay. We can manage your pain, we can still have some good years together. We can get to know each other…”
“Why?” asked James. He stood now, kicking free of his blankets. “What good is that to me? I’m sorry, Dad, but I want to live. I know you’ve been gone so much because you think it might help me, but you’ve still been gone, and Mom and I have done fine by ourselves. What’s the point of a year with you now? So you can feel better after I’m dead?”
“Jimmy…” Pearce wanted to reach out, to touch his son, but James was out of arm’s reach, standing with his small fists balled, staring at his father with that same fierce, flaring look in his eyes. His mother’s look, Pearce realized.
“I want to live,” James repeated, his voice rising. “If there’s a chance, I want to take it. If you don’t, I…I’ll never forgive you. And you’ll never be my father, not really.”
There was a stony silence in the room then, James’ words hanging in the air like the haze after a storm. Finally, Pearce rose. He placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder and looked down at him. So small, so frail, and yet so filled with determination to carry on, to survive, to endure. Through his own pain and shame, Pearce felt the licking flames of intense pride.
“James,” he said, and his son met his gaze. “I’ll go. And though Hell itself might bar the way, I will come back and we will make you whole.” A lump filled his throat, and he was barely able to whisper the next words. “I promise.”
Days later, when he unpacked his gear on board the Harvest, Pearce found, wrapped in his socks, the very first model he had ever brought home for his son. It was a tiny, perfect replica of Jane Baker’s Drake, blue-gray and dignified and perfect, the ideal starship, just as he remembered it the day he had joined her crew. Fingers trembling, Pearce set it on a shelf in his cramped quarters. Each night, as he fell asleep, he would stare at it, and he would promise to bring it back to James, along with all the rest of the days of his life.
Four
Space
The island was crowded, like everywhere else on the planet, but here, at least, you could see sky, a sky that was still mostly blue by day. It was night now, and that sky was black as Christine Fletcher stood on the veranda of her grandfather’s bungalow on the once-island of St. Kitts. Looking up, through the spreading glow of the city of Basseterre, a handful of stars were visible. She didn’t know how Bill could stand it in the heart of the teeming megalopolis of old Britain, with all those people and buildings on every side. How does a star-mariner live where he cannot see the stars? She took a swallow from the glass of newly-imported opal rum in her hand, and savored the pleasant tingle that filled her body. It was a cool night, and the liquor was a welcome fire in her belly. One of the benefits of a career in the merchant marine, she thought.
The warmth of the rum and the familiarity of the place induced a wave of nostalgia. Fletcher had grown up here, a child of the islands, a concept that was far more cultural than geographic. Humanity’s hunger for housing, and the vast agrifactory complexes that nourished them, had swallowed up most of what had once been the Caribbean Sea. The great reclamation projects of the early 22nd century had transformed the face of the Earth and now, instead of a string of islands, the Lesser Antilles were merely the eastern edge of the massive single continent that dominated the western hemisphere from pole to pole. Patches of water remained, ponds, really, black and lifeless, little more than detention tanks for industrial effluvia. Perhaps a mile distant, Fletcher could see one now, from the veranda, a flat dark hole in the otherwise unrelenting lights.
She had seen the holovids, of course, with footage from long before her birth, showing St. Kitts as a true island, along with the others – Nevis, Monserrat, St. Martin, Barbados, and many more – that were now neighboring land-locked cities in the Caribbean district of the United Kingdom of Earth. As a young girl she had been endlessly fascinated by the green, forested hills that her native land had once been, surrounded by an endless rippling turquoise, teeming with life. Fish, she thought, remembering the word from old lessons as she pictured the odd looking creatures she had only seen on vid.
Still, to the extent she had one on Earth, this was home. This was where she had played as a child, climbing Mt. Liamulga, dodging the ancient combustion automobiles that still ran in the back alleys of the city, writing her daydreaming poetry. This was where she had gone to school, first kissed a boy, and first broke a boy’s heart. She had been happy here, mostly, but had left when the first chance came. She was back now, and still mostly happy, but knew she would leave again soon. And where will you go then, Christine?
A sound came from behind her, a glass door sliding open, disturbing her reverie. Her grandfather closed the door and walked out to stand beside her at the railing. He was older, she noticed, but still a robust, arresting man, straight and erect, with silvery hair and coppery skin. His loose-sleeved white shirt was unbuttoned halfway down hi
s chest, a white-black thicket bristling into the gap. In one hand was a glass much like hers, in the other, the bottle of opal rum, orange-yellow in the half-light. He refilled her glass and then his own, and held his out in salute.
“Good romo, girl.” His voice had the old, lilting accents so many islanders clung to, a rare mark of identity in a homogenizing global Kingdom where everyone watched the same vids, ate the same foods, spoke the same language. At least they could make that language their own. And if their islands were no longer truly islands, all the more important to sound like true islanders. Miguel Diego Ochoa held the drink under his nose for a moment, his eyes closed, then slowly took a sip. The delight was evident on his face, and it made Fletcher smile.
“Anything for my Papi.” She took another drink herself. A quiet voice from within told her to take it easy, but a louder voice laughed at the caution. This was hardly her first drink. She was an officer on a commercial cargo ship, after all, and often had a tot or two with the crew. Besides, she was home, and there was hardly a safer place for her in all the galaxy than in this house. Her mother’s father was the only parent she had ever known, and along with her sister, the only person in the world she truly loved. He leaned against the railing, looking at her from underneath bushy eyebrows, studying her, and in that moment Fletcher felt that she might be twelve years old again.
“You’re unhappy,” he said, and she laughed.
“Of course not, Papi.”
“Girl, please.” His rich baritone was kind and loving, but firm. He took another swallow of the rum. “You can lie to whomever you want, your sister later tonight, yourself even, but don’t try it with me. I raised you from a baby, and I know your lying face.”
“I’m not unhappy,” said Fletcher, and she meant it. “I’m just…just…restless, maybe?”
“That, too.” Ochoa smiled, and his teeth were as white as hers. “You always were a spranskious thing, Christie. I can still remember that boy you brought around when you were what, sixteen? Nice boy, good family, but he never stood a chance. He might as well have tried to wrap his arms around a hurricane. Do you remember him?”
“John Crawford,” she muttered with a sheepish smile.
“Yes, that was it. He knocks on my door one night, this John, and he says, ‘Mr. Ochoa,’ – polite boy, this John – he says, ‘Christie’s not like other girls.’ Polite boy, but maybe not that bright, I remember thinking. I told him, ‘No, there’s none other like her on this spinning Earth.’ He replies, ‘I know, sir.’ Then – and this is the part I’ll never forget – he says, ‘Do you think she’ll ever settle down for me?’”
“He said that?” Fletcher asked, horrified.
“He did. He did. And I said to him, ‘No, son, she won’t. But don’t feel bad. She won’t settle down for me, either.” They both laughed then, and drank their rum, and looked at the stars they could see.
“Poor Johnny,” murmured Fletcher after a while. I haven’t thought about him in years. She wondered, idly, what might have become of him. Married, most likely, with children of his own by some nice, proper girl. “He was very sweet, but oh-so-dull.” She noticed that her grandfather was looking at her with that same penetrating, denuding stare.
“And have you yet found anything, Christie, in this wide galaxy, that isn’t?”
The silence that followed was thick, as she digested his words. Her Papi had always understood her, always. When her schoolteachers found it impossible to control her, and asked Ochoa why Christine Fletcher couldn’t be more like her well-behaved older sister, Isabelle, he understood, and asked them why the sun couldn’t be more like the moon. When she refused to take the muscle drugs that would have elevated her from Caribbean champion sprinter to the All-Kingdom Games, he understood. When she wanted to go to the stars, and the very thought of it broke his heart, still he understood. He was, to her mind, the very definition of noble, not just by birth and title, holding the familial Ochoa baronetcy in the Antilles, but with his strength, his warmth, his compassion.
“Christie, you never knew your mum and dad.”
“No,” she whispered. “No, I was a baby when they left.”
“Well,” he continued, “I’ve told you before that you’re a lot like your mum. So is Isabelle.” Fletcher snorted at that.
“Isabelle and I are nothing alike.”
“And?” Ochoa shrugged. “None of us is just one thing. Your mother was your wildness, Isabelle’s maturity, and more. She was my daughter. Anyway, this Sam Fletcher…he was a hell of a man, your father. Nothing less could have won your mum. And the two of them, together…” he paused, gazing out over the lights of the city, and in that moment Fletcher saw him as an old man, nearly ninety, despite the youth in his eyes and voice. He had spoken of her mother before, but rarely of her father. She waited, and after a moment he continued. “Well, together they were magic. I never saw your mother more alive than when they were together. I wish you could have known them, Christie.” He sighed, deep and shuddering, the sigh of a man who had lost the best part of himself. “They could have had whatever they wanted on this world, for themselves and their two perfect little girls, but it turned out what they wanted wasn’t on this world. When the chance came to join the colony project on Jactura, off they went, with instructions to send the two of you along once they were settled.” He smiled at her, but his eyes were moist. “But they never made it, did they? Perils of space travel, we were told.”
“Papi…” she reached out a hand and took hold of his arm. That’s why it hurt him so much when I left Earth. She had been blind not to see it before.
Voices came then, from inside the house. It was Isabelle, with her family. She hadn’t seen her sister, or her brother-in-law and niece, in months. Still, she hesitated. Her grandfather had never been this candid with her before, and a large part of her wished that they had more time alone. But whatever it was, the rum or the stars, the rare wistful mood of Miguel Diego Ochoa had passed, and he was again, suddenly, the strong and impenetrable man who had raised the both of them. The moment was gone.
****
It had been years since St. James Park had been a park in anything more than name. Once, it had been a spreading green expanse of more than fifty acres, frequented by the residents of London, with a long pond, frequented by ducks. At one end of the pond there had even been a spit of land called Ducks Island. The entire swath of openness had stretched from Buckingham Palace, the residence of the King, in the west, to Whitehall in the east. It was an arrangement, the ancient saying went, that allowed the Royal Family and Parliament to keep an eye on one another.
Lord Rajek Djimonsu stood on the wide balcony on the western face of His Majesty’s Treasury building, ten stories from the street below. His offices comprised the entire tenth floor, the top of this august and imposing white-brick structure, and this balcony was his alone. Sometimes he would stand here, as he did now, as the day was waning, and try to imagine his predecessors from long ago, standing in the same spot, peering across the greensward at the Palace. It seemed undignified, somehow, unseemly, as if the thought of so much grass and water and sky were not already enough to make him shudder. There was still a St. James Park, but it was so much more efficiently used now. Not for the first time, the Lord Chancellor of the Exchequer lauded the wisdom of those planners who converted all that useless space into retail stores and commercial offices and housing for the ever-teeming Londoners. The buildings rose high overhead, nearly touching at their apex, a tiny square of darkening blue at the top. It was progress and commerce and rents, and Lord Djimonsu loved it.
Eventually, he retreated through massive glass doors to the interior. If he was not the most powerful subject of the King in the whole of the Empire, he was in the conversation, and there was always more work to be done. One does not control the world by daydreaming on balconies. The doors shut behind him with an audible click. They were old doors, and he liked the way they made that sound of finality as they c
losed, proof positive that a barrier existed between him and the outside. The gentle hiss of automatic sliders was so much less satisfying.
Djimonsu moved to his desk, a silvery metallic island in a sea of sharp edges, reflective glass and white furniture. When he first ascended to this post, he had found his immediate predecessor had left behind an office weighed down by the traditional wood-paneling and leather-upholstery that was so favored by the upper officers of Government and the old moneyed class. He had ordered it all torn out at once. He had seen enough of that staid taste as a young man in the India Department, where all the bureaucrats tried so hard to out-British the British. It was always the nineteenth century somewhere in New Delhi, always the past. Here, in the beating commercial heart of the United Kingdom of Earth, the future was what mattered.
The Lord Chancellor stood, as he always did while working. He did not like the feeling of being motionless. His dark eyes tracked the twenty monitors arrayed around the walls of the long, narrow, gleaming office. Each display was tuned to constant analysis of the most important markets across the Empire, both here on Earth and across the known galaxy. Graphs flashed past, highlighting textile production in the East Asia Department, mineral commodities in Africa, luxury pharmaceutical imports from Sirius, worldwide agrifactory output. Djimonsu touched the panels on his desk, moving the Crown’s resources into one sector and out of another, manipulating a price here and dumping a rotten stock there. This was his primary element, the high purpose to which he was eminently suited. If he had been forced to develop a certain political aptitude to enhance and enable his economic genius, so be it.
