Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “I’ll be doing tectonics, just as I did on Earth,” Heston explained, pleased that the boy was interested. “Elysium’s a fairly young planet. There’s still a lot of volcanic activity. And in my spare time, I’m going to plant hardwood forests and turn grasslands into croplands, the way humans have done on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years. By the time you’re grown, Elysium won’t need to wait for freighters to bring her supplies; she’ll be entirely self-sufficient. There’ll be millions of colonists in dozens of cities. Maybe they’ll even name one after your mother or me.”

  Willa had shaken her head in bemusement. She was a quiet person, given to letting her work speak for her. Heston was the one who’d insisted that the Elysium Council hire him and Willa as a team, because one wouldn’t leave Earth without the other.

  “We’ll be the city mouse and the country mouse,” was all she had to say about Heston’s grandiose dreams.

  “Oh,” Heston added, “Did I mention I’m going to raise the finest herd of horses you’ve ever seen?”

  It was on the tip of Chris’s tongue to ask if he could have a horse of his own, but he didn’t know Heston well enough yet to ask.

  “He’s a very smart man,” Willa told Chris the night Heston proposed, her eyes shining almost as brightly as the engagement ring that had suddenly appeared on her finger. When they’d met on the deep-sea project over a year ago, what began as mutual professional admiration had gradually evolved into romance.

  “Is that why you’re going to marry him?” Chris had propped himself up on one elbow in bed, where he’d dashed at the last minute when he’d heard Willa keying the door code; he’d learned how to reprogram the timer on the child minder so it wouldn’t give him away. “Do you love him?”

  It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen it coming. Even at his age he could recognize that misty look adults got when they were “in love,” whatever that meant. At nine, he still considered girls to be some species of alien, scarier in their own way even than Klingons. Nice enough aliens, but as far as he was concerned there wasn’t a universal translator made that could help him understand them, especially when they stood around in groups and giggled.

  “The answer to both of those questions is ‘yes,’” Willa said, kissing his forehead and tucking him in. “And I’m so happy right now I’m even willing to pretend I don’t know that you’ve been up all night.”

  Chris had managed to look just guilty enough as she turned out the light. Lying there in the dark, he wondered what this was going to mean, his mother’s marrying Heston Prescott. For as long as he could remember, it had been just the two of them, mother and son, traveling from one site to the other all over Earth. They’d been to Antarctica and the Serengeti and most recently to South Sulawesi for the deep-sea project. In between they lived in the little town of Mojave, in a house based on one of Willa’s earliest designs.

  Moving around so much meant Chris usually took his lessons from the teletutor instead of attending a real school, and while he made friends easily and had gotten to know kids his own age all over Earth, it was hard to stay close to anyone. Still, he couldn’t imagine what it was like to be stuck in one place your whole life.

  But now there was a third person in the equation, and he wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  Anytime he asked what had happened to his father, Willa had always answered, “when you’re older,” but apparently he still wasn’t old enough. And now Heston Prescott was going to be a permanent part of their lives. Chris knew that meant some things would change; he only wondered how much.

  He knew Heston traveled a lot, needing to be onsite for each new project, even though most of his work consisted of creating terrasims on a computer while others did the actual hands-on work. Maybe he’ll be gone most of the time, Chris thought, and Mom and I can just go on being Mom and me.

  So when, barely two months after they’d married, Heston came home all but bouncing on the soles of his feet with excitement to announce that they would be relocating on a colony world named Elysium, Chris was dumbfounded.

  He had never been off Earth before. Well, unless school trips to the Moon and the various space stations counted. Never been out of the Sol system, at least, never traveled on anything bigger than an in-system ferry. Still, living on another planet couldn’t be that much different from Antarctica or the Serengeti, could it?

  He liked Heston, in a general sort of way. He was one of those adults who knew enough not to talk down to a kid or try to be a pal, a big, sandy man with a soft everyday voice that could go loud when he wanted it to, and a laugh as big as he was. Beside him even Willa, who was tall and active and athletic, seemed tiny, almost delicate. Until Heston came along, she’d been the strongest person Chris had ever known. He didn’t like the idea of her suddenly seeming small, because it made him feel even smaller.

  “I don’t expect you to call me ‘Dad,’” Heston said as if reading Chris’s mind, once it was clear that he and Willa were serious. “Unless you want to. I figure a big guy like you who’s managed just fine for nine whole years without such an appurtenance can decide for himself. My friends call me ‘Hes.’ That’ll be fine.”

  Chris had wanted to ask what an “appurtenance” was. Instead he whispered the word to himself so he’d remember to ask the dictionary about it later.

  “I haven’t decided,” he said when he realized Heston was still looking down at him expectantly. “Sir. I’ll let you know when I do.”

  “Fair enough,” the big man said, the corners of his mouth quirking in amusement.

  But that had been nearly two months ago, and here they were aboard a space vessel leaving Earth, a family of three and a potential herd of horses off to set up a homestead, and Chris still hadn’t decided. He went out of his way to avoid the possibility of ever having to call Heston anything, making sure he was right up close to him when they talked so there’d be no mistaking who he was talking to. It was awkward; it couldn’t go on indefinitely. He’d have to make up his mind.

  “Urbans!” was how Cotton Jonday, the head of the Neworlder congregation, had labeled them, not bothering with niceties, when they’d come aboard the intercolony ship and Captain Zameret had introduced them. Cotton was nearly as tall as Heston, and bulkier, his almost waist-length beard making him seem even bigger somehow. “Desk jockeys. Never worked with your hands. Soft, not like us. You won’t last!”

  Chris could tell Heston didn’t care much for the man’s arrogance. It was the Prescotts’ first unpleasantness with the Neworlders, but it wouldn’t be the last.

  The Neworlders were agronomists, but of a rather old-fashioned kind. “Luddites,” Heston called them, another word Chris planned to look up when he got a chance. They clung to what they considered “natural” ways which, to them, meant pre-Millennial. They shunned transporters and aircars, used devices called cell phones instead of comm units. Any technology created or even refined after the end of the twentieth century was anathema, sort of. They made exception, for example, for interplanetary travel, which baffled anyone outside the sect who tried to understand them. Insular and suspicious of strangers, the Neworlders liked it that way.

  Heston Prescott had no patience for them. He wasn’t hostile, he wasn’t openly derogatory, but Chris could always tell when he was “having them on,” as he put it. It was a secret they shared, and it raised Heston even further in his estimation.

  They’d arrived aboard the big intercolony ship a full day before she was due for departure, and the shuttle bringing them to her was about as tame as the lunar ferry. Chris sat quietly in his assigned seat by one of the viewports, peering back a little wistfully toward Earth. In the seat beside him, Willa was rummaging in their carry-on luggage for something. She nudged Chris’s shoulder gently and handed him a small box.

  “What’s this?” he asked, though the shape of the thing gave him an idea.

  Willa didn’t say anything. She settled back in her seat and closed her eyes, humming a tune she’d been hummin
g for as long as Chris could remember.

  Refusing to be cheered up, Chris opened the box and found his favorite lunch—a chicken-tuna sandwich with the crusts cut off the way he liked it, a crisp McIntosh apple and some carrot sticks, a container of chocolate milk, and two homemade brownies.

  He looked at his mother, but she had her eyes closed. Still, the message was clear. The good things would remain the same.

  The internal workings of the ship fascinated him. Captain Zameret had given her new passengers “the two-dollar tour,” as she called it, and Chris found himself lingering in engineering, curious about all the conduits and gauges and doodads, wanting to know what everything was for. Captain Zameret had turned him over to her chief engineer, who took the boy under his wing for the next hour, showing him how everything worked while his parents got stowed away in their cabin.

  “He’s awful smart for a kid his age,” was the engineer’s comment. “Are you sure he’s only nine?”

  Chris knew there were families who lived their whole lives in space, kids who grew up on ships or space stations because their parents worked there. He wondered what it must be like.

  When the big ship’s engines powered up for departure, he could feel them through the deck plates, from the soles of his shoes almost to the top of his head. And the sight of Earth and the rest of the solar system moving away from them—or so it seemed—took his breath away. Once they were past the outer planets, though, he did find all that open space a little scary. He preferred to watch from a rear port as the star field sped away behind them.

  “What do you think?” Willa asked when she’d gone looking for him and, with a mother’s instinct, knew where he would be.

  “It’s better than a holo,” Chris reported seriously.

  “Better than taking the shuttle to Sulawesi?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, unable to take his eyes from the star field, thinking of all the things he’d learned about distances in space and the properties of stars, nebulas, black holes, quarks, and so on. The facts seemed to slip away from him as quickly as the stars, leaving only beauty and a sense of wonder.

  If no one else was around, he would close his eyes and hold out his arms like wings, imagining he was the ship, and he could soar through space all by himself.

  He was doing that the first time he saw Silk.

  She’d been watching him for a while before he saw her, and had had sense enough not to tease him. Still, once he opened his eyes and saw her watching him, he lowered his arms and scowled, feeling not a little silly at being caught, and by a girl at that.

  Silk was as tan as Chris was pale, as blond as he was dark-haired. Even her eyelashes were blond, almost white, which made her dark brown eyes that much more startling. She was his age, but taller, as girls often were at nine. She might have been pretty, if her hair wasn’t pulled back into two stark braids and she was wearing something other than those drab Neworlder clothes.

  The intercolony ship had little room for passengers on this voyage. She was mostly loaded with supplies and equipment needed by those already on Elysium. The Prescott family and the Neworlders—several families interconnected into an extended clan, half of them children—were the only civilians aboard.

  Willa had explained to Chris as much of the Neworlder philosophy as she understood and, knowing his tendency to blurt out whatever came to his mind, asked him to go easy on them.

  “They’re leaving Earth because they think it’s too…tame,” she began judiciously, “and because they object to a lot of the technology we’ve surrounded ourselves with. They want to make a fresh start in a true wilderness. Many people head for the colonies for that reason, Chris. It’s not all that different from what we’re doing.”

  “We don’t make fun of people who don’t think the way we do!” Chris had pointed out. Something in his tone told Willa there’d already been a confrontation in the ship’s corridors or the many common areas where her son might have encountered members of the clan.

  “They’re a little…different, Chris,” she explained patiently. “They have a different way of looking at the universe than we do.”

  Heston’s assessment was a little harsher.

  “It’s like a religion for them,” was his view. “No point arguing with them, son. Zealots are always right.”

  It had been Silk who first made the fuss about the horses.

  “It’s against Nature,” she said, looking as if she was going to cry at the sight of the mares in their stasis chambers. Chris had brought her to the lab to share something special with her, and all she could do was find fault. “That’s what my father says. Freezing them like that is against Nature.”

  “Hes—my stepfather—says horses are more sensitive to space travel than most animals,” Chris said importantly. “It’s for their own good. Besides, they’d need too much feed during the voyage. There wouldn’t be enough room.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have brought them. It’s not Natural,” Silk scolded.

  From the day they’d first eyed each other at the aft port without speaking, Silk seemed to seek Chris out, getting too close to him, close enough for him to smell the scent of her, which was like new-mown grass, and feel the warmth of her breath against his face. It made him nervous.

  “It’s not Natural,” she repeated in a singsong, turning her back on the horses as if she couldn’t bear to look at them, and flouncing out into the corridor.

  “Neither is space travel!” Chris called after her, following her in spite of himself. “Right now you’re on a spaceship traveling thousands of miles an hour away from Earth to another planet. That’s not natural, either.”

  Silk stopped and turned back toward him, her hands on her hips. “You’re not very smart, are you, Chris-to-pher?” she said in that know-it-all voice most girls he knew seemed to have been born with. “The planets move through space all the time. We’re doing the same thing they do. That’s perfectly Natural.”

  “Planets don’t have engines!” Chris shot back, but Silk was gone, skipping away from him, the closest thing she could do to running in these corridors, since Captain Zameret had very strict rules against running.

  “I’m not listening to you!” she called over her shoulder, her braids bouncing against her back.

  Girls! Chris thought. But Silk was only the beginning of his troubles.

  “Christopher Prescott,” the largest of the three Neworlder boys had said, looking him over as if he smelled bad. Behind him, the other two sniggered and elbowed each other knowingly. If they weren’t twins, they could have been, and both were mouth-breathers. “What’s a Christopher?”

  “It’s my name,” Chris said warily, his hands in his pockets so the three wouldn’t see that he was clenching his fists. He had good instincts about people usually, and something about this kid told him to be careful.

  “But what does it mean?” the big kid persisted. “My name’s Flax. That means something.”

  Chris knew Neworlders chose names related to agriculture. Only Willa’s teaching him to accept people kept him from snickering the first few times he’d heard some of the names. But now this kid was implying that his name was somehow odd. He wasn’t sure how to answer that.

  He shrugged. “It’s my name. That’s what it means.”

  “What if I decided to call you Seepy?” Flax challenged him. “’Cos that’s your initials…CP.” The big kid nodded to himself, as if every time he had an original thought that was the only way he could remember it. Chris suppressed a chuckle. He’d seen Heston’s horses do that, but never a human. This goofy kid was like a big dumb horse, he thought, but kept his mouth shut.

  “Yep,” the kid said. “That’s what I’m gonna call you. Seepy.”

  The other two sniggered, watching Chris to see his reaction.

  “Suit yourself,” Chris shrugged, turning to walk away. The best way to avoid a fight was not to be there when it started. “Just don’t expect me to answer to it!” he called over his shoulder.
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br />   The rest was sort of a blur while it was happening. It was only later that he’d remember it, and wish he could forget.

  “You said they were different!” Chris muttered into his pillow, refusing to look at his mother. “You bet they are—different as in crazy!”

  “You didn’t fight with them, did you?” Willa wanted to know.

  He rolled over and sat up, the dark eyebrows above those startlingly blue eyes all but meeting in the middle at the memory of it. “Yes, I did!” he said, sounding not at all contrite.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” Willa said, determined not to pass judgment until she’d heard the whole story. Chris told her.

  “…then Flax ran up behind me and punched me in the back,” he finished without rancor. “I heard him running, but I figured if I turned around or even flinched, that meant he’d win.”

  “Did he hurt you?”

  “No!” he said grimly, just as she knew he would.

  “And then what happened?”

  The boy’s jaw clenched and he swallowed hard. “You told me never to hit first. And I never do. But you also said—”

  “—that if you had to defend yourself, you should do the best you can,” his mother finished for him. She was almost afraid to ask the next question. She knew the Neworlder boy was older, nearly eleven, and big for his age. “What did you do?”

  “I turned around and yelled at him first,” Chris said, the defiant look replaced by something more ominous, an expression that said he’d figured out this early on that sometimes life was just plain unfair. “I told him he was a bully and that fists couldn’t solve what words could.”

  Willa almost smiled. She’d taught him that, too.

  “He had to think about that. He’s not very smart—”

  Willa bit back whatever response she might have had to that.

  “But I figured he was going to hit me again, so I was going to duck and then clobber him if I had to, but then…”