“About having a little brother or sister? No. I think it’s great. I just wish Heston didn’t have to try to run everything!”
“He’ll be all right once he gets the Gizmo going again,” Willa said, staring off into the distance, refusing to look in the direction of the two men and the sound of hammering.
“I wouldn’t bet on it!” Chris muttered grimly. Then he saw the crestfallen look on his mother’s face. Somehow it had become his job to cheer her up, instead of the other way around. Impulsively, he hugged her. “I’m happy, Mom. I really am.”
Heston’s voice summoned him back to work, and the moment was shattered. But the thought of being a big brother made him grin for the rest of the day. Even Heston’s mood couldn’t spoil that.
Only the Neworlders could. Flax Jonday had grown larger over the years, but no smarter. Silk confided in Chris that he’d smashed his computer and refused to bother with school, running wild with his cousins Sorrel and Sorghum, the two mouth-breathers Chris remembered from the voyage here. The sputter of a badly tuned internal combustion engine off in the hills meant they were joyriding, falling afoul of Council law for setting small brushfires, generally causing mayhem.
“I’d tell my stepfather to put some security around that Gizmo if I were you,” Silk said knowingly, her voice the only thing, still, that reached him from her cell phone.
“What do you mean, ‘security’?” Chris had been wool-gathering, thinking how much better it would be if he could see Silk’s face when they talked, and hadn’t been paying attention.
But the signal from her cell phone faded, and he lost the connection.
The following night around dinnertime something in the yard exploded, and Heston was right in the middle of it.
Heston’s eyebrows were singed, and from the chest up he looked as if he had a bad sunburn. He also had three broken ribs and a broken left femur. Willa shot him full of antibiotics, painkillers, and a tranquilizer from the emergency kit, and he was out cold before he could see Charlie come back in shaking his head. The explosive had been crude, probably homemade, but it had done considerable damage.
“How bad is it?” Willa whispered, watching Heston’s face to make sure he was really out of it.
“The weather station still works,” Charlie reported wryly.
The next day the doctor from the city clinic paid them a visit, put a regen patch on the leg and told Heston to stay off it for at least a week. Heston was hobbling around on the crutches she’d left before her ’car was out of sight.
He was too weak to work on the Gizmo. That didn’t stop him from keeping watch over it every night.
“Mom?” Chris could see Heston sitting in the yard, his back to the house, from his bedroom window. “Where did he get the laser rifle?”
“He usually only carries it when he’s traveling,” she said, not exactly answering his question. “Some of the places he’s worked have been a little…rough. Don’t worry—he’s got it locked on stun.”
“How long is this going to go on?” What he meant was, Why don’t you stand up to him? What’s going to happen when the starship comes back?
“Until he succeeds, or until Starfleet moves us,” Willa said, also looking down at the big man, diminished by the distance, ensconced in a rocking chair below the window, his crutches propped up against the upended Gizmo, the laser rifle across his lap. “He filed a complaint with the Council about what happened last night. Their response was that whoever sabotaged the Gizmo had probably heard the rumors that he was tampering with the volcano, which he had no authorization to do without a permit, and they weren’t going to issue a permit.”
“So in other words, they’re not going to do anything.”
“That’s about right.”
“And neither are we until the starship returns.”
Willa gave him a concerned look. Impulsively she hugged him and stroked his hair. He was old enough now to tolerate that again. “Has it really been so bad for you?”
Chris shrugged. “Not as long as Charlie’s here, and I can ride the horses.”
It wasn’t long before even that changed.
Worn out from his nightly vigils, Heston slept away the days now. Nobody seemed to mind. So one morning early, Chris was surprised to hear the deep resonance of a male voice, and Willa answering, coming from the kitchen. Did they have a visitor? He hadn’t heard a ’car approach. He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but couldn’t help himself.
“…I’d leave in a heartbeat if I thought it would help, Willa. I know how he feels about me. But with the two mares in foal, I can’t. And I’m concerned about the effect this is having on Chris.”
“And you think I’m not?” Willa’s voice was shaky, as if she was near tears. “I’ve noticed the change in him. He’s a man obsessed. The minute his leg heals, he’s going to be back tickling that volcano, and it’s one thing to do it from space with state-of-the-art equipment, but that damn Gizmo’s held together with spit and good wishes.”
There was a silence while she tried to control her voice, which had gotten shrill. “I’ve thought about leaving, at least until the starship returns, but I’m afraid he’ll get even more reckless without me around. But if I stay, he interprets it as encouraging him. Charlie, for the first time in my life, I don’t know what to do.”
“I’ll help you any way I can, Willa. You know that.”
Silent and unmoving, Chris tried to process what he was hearing. Young as he was, he sensed an intimacy in Charlie’s tone and his mother’s response that he didn’t understand, perhaps didn’t want to understand. He wanted to run away, to block out the words, but he couldn’t move.
“You and the boy could leave,” Charlie began. “Maybe take an apartment in the city, at least for a little while. Tell Heston the commute is too much for you, with the pregnancy. I have to stay for the horses, but I can ride herd on Heston, too.”
Chris could picture his mother shaking her head. “I can’t ask you to do that. And anyway, Chris won’t want to leave Maia…”
“He will if you tell him why. I’m concerned about your safety, Willa.”
“Oh, don’t be ridiculous! It’s not as extreme as all that.”
“I’m not saying he’d mean to hurt you, but he’s got tunnel vision. He’s an accident waiting to happen.”
Chris heard his mother sigh. He imagined her twisting the hair at the nape of her neck around her fingers, something she did when she was preoccupied or stressed.
“The starship’s due back at the end of this month,” she said finally.
“You think that’s going to solve anything, or only postpone it?”
“I don’t know!” Willa said sharply, slamming the palms of her hands on something—the table, the countertop—from where he was lurking, Chris couldn’t see. “I’m sorry, I…” When she spoke again, her voice was muffled. “Charlie? If anything does happen…”
Chris couldn’t listen anymore. Somehow he found his legs and bolted for the barn, where he buried his face in Maia’s neck and wept as he hadn’t since he was a very small boy.
6
Talos IV
“You thought they were having an affair,” Vina said knowingly. “Were they?”
“I don’t want to talk about that right now!”
“Ah, I see. Volcanoes and earthquakes and paranoid stepfathers and reactionary neighbors are minor annoyances. But when a boy finds out his mother isn’t perfect…”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it!” Pike said roughly. He’d been here, what? Less than a day, and already they were quarreling? He changed the subject. “Why don’t we talk about you?”
“We can if you want,” she offered.
“I have a confession to make,” he said suddenly. “After I left the last time, I…looked you up.”
“Looked me up?”
“In the library computer. Number One had researched Columbia’s crew after I was captured—”
“—so she could point out to you ho
w old I was,” Vina said incisively.
“Procedure,” Chris corrected her. “To determine whether you were real or entirely illusion.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, I know you were born in Paris, that you trained to be a dancer. I found out everything I could about you from the official records—”
“Procedure?” Vina suggested.
“Well, yes, but…” Chris stopped. This wasn’t going very well. “I wanted to know more, then and now. What were you doing when I was on Elysium?”
“You mean when I was almost twelve, or when you were?” she countered a little too quickly. She was not looking at him, but staring out to sea as the sun slipped below the horizon, as if this was the first sunset she’d ever seen, or the last. “You have to remember I’m that much older than you.”
“It’s only a few years,” he said, perhaps too honestly—she managed to look hurt for a moment—then stopped himself. He was picking on her to avoid talking about himself. He changed his tone. “Besides, what is time here? It’s meaningless. You can start your narrative at the same age as me, or even make yourself younger.”
She shook her head. “No. That wouldn’t be fair, don’t you see? I have to tell it just as it happened, match you year for year.” She eyed him curiously. “You were trying to discover if I’m vain. It was a test, wasn’t it?”
“And not a very worthy one,” he admitted. “I’m being defensive. And I still can’t wrap my mind around…All right, then. What were you doing when I was almost twelve?”
He watched her calculate the numbers in her head. “Let’s see…that was the year I signed on for my first deep-space voyage. But I’ll need to give you a little background first…”
As a child, Vina never realized what an advantage growing up in Paris was. The city was as much a center of culture as it had been since the twelfth century, and would continue to be well into the twenty-third, but to her it was simply home. She took it for granted that everyone spent their days in art museums and antique shops and bookstores and charming little cafés, their nights at the theater or the opera.
Her father was a dancer. Born in Brussels, he first danced with and later became choreographer for the Ballet Russe, and married one of the most famous pastry chefs in Paris. Her mother was what one of her patrons called “une petite dynamo,” a small blond bundle of energy who rose with the dawn every morning to supervise a patisserie that catered to some of the most important people in the City of Light, not least of whom were the many species who comprised the United Federation of Planets, whose diplomats lived and worked in and around the city-within-a-city that was the Palais de la Concorde. That large high-rise on the Champs-Elysées, the flow of aircars going to and fro, and the exotic looking creatures in their various coutures stepping in and out of it, was as mundane to the little elf-child with the winsome personality as the rest of the city surrounding it.
Following her mother from the time she could walk, Vina knew the grounds and corridors of those edifices well. One Federation President, struck by the fragile beauty and bright wit of the little girl with the spun-sugar hair and her father’s grace (she’d begun ballet classes at the age of three), had promised Vina a castle of her very own if she ever visited her homeworld, and even the very serious young Vulcan attaché could not hide the twinkle in his eye at the sight of her, solemn as a judge, carrying one of her mother’s special confections, all whipped cream and chocolate curls, into one of the reception halls.
Hers was a dream childhood marred only by schoolwork, which she did in between dance classes, growing up in a house where the most delectable smells floated up from the ground floor where the patisserie was, safe in the embrace of a loving family. It wasn’t that she wasn’t bright in school—in fact, the work came easily to her—there just wasn’t any particular thing she was interested in.
She had almost enough talent to be a professional dancer, her teachers told her father when she was twelve, but she lacked a certain discipline that would have taken her to the next level and, more important, she lacked fire. Her battements were technically perfect, but almost absentminded, and the tug between live performance and its replacement with CGI, which had begun before she was born, made her wonder if this was any kind of career. When, at seventeen, her teachers told her she didn’t have to continue, she was actually relieved. Though what she was going to do with the rest of her life suddenly loomed too large to think about, so she didn’t.
Instead, she fell in love with Theo.
TALOS IV
“I’d been involved with boys my age,” Vina explained. She’d gotten bored with the beach house scenario, and Pike had agreed to her suggestion that they take one of the hovercars out of the garage and go for a drive up the coast. “But they were just that…boys, all testosterone and desperation. Theo was older than I, stable, centered, and so very brilliant—a full professor before he was twenty-five. He knew who he was and what he wanted. I was impressed. It’s hard to impress a girl who grew up in Paris.”
“An egghead,” Chris Pike guessed, taking the ’car around a hairpin curve, enjoying its responsiveness beneath his hands too much to put it on cruise control. The ’car was an antique, of the kind that responded to road surfaces and hovered on a cushion of air less than a foot above the tarmac, requiring real hands-on skill which, in this reality, came naturally to him. “Somehow I can’t see you falling for an egghead. Or maybe I can. By the way, where are we? This looks like Earth, but I never thought to ask you where your aunt had her beach house. Or are we someplace else entirely?”
“It’s Earth,” she told him. She was wearing a long silk scarf that fluttered out behind her in the back draft from the open moon roof. “We’re in Lebanon, on the coast just north of Beirut. Do you smell the cedars?”
Chris Pike’s knowledge of Earth history beyond a certain point was eclectic at best. He remembered something about this part of the world being reduced to rubble in a series of wars some three hundred years ago, or was it two hundred? In any event, from what he could see around him—to their right a dark, stately evergreen forest dotted with white-columned houses built into the cliffsides and gleaming in the moonlight, to the left a sheer drop to the foaming Mediterranean below—the scars had long since healed over.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I interrupted you. You were telling me about Theo.”
Vina nodded. At first, immediately after the crash, she’d thought of him constantly—the Talosians had used her memories of him to gain access to her mind—but she hadn’t thought of him in years. She told herself she would not cry, not after all this time.
“I spent a few years after high school flitting around, unsure what I wanted. Learned languages, dabbled in theater, became a licensed pilot, would you believe it? Daddy offered to stake me to my own little charter company, but oh, no, that was too much responsibility for me! I didn’t want to be tied down to anyone or anything.
“So I flew other people’s ships, mostly on tourist runs to Luna. Most of my ‘customers’ were visiting diplomats from all over the Federation. For a while the junior Centaurian ambassador hired me as his personal pilot. We…became involved, briefly. When the affair crashed and burned, so did my flying career. I needed a change.
“So, being a creature of extremes, I registered at the university and became a bookworm. Took courses in everything, with no focus toward a career. The only reason I ended up in Theo’s geology class was because I registered too late and was shut out of something else. I couldn’t even tell you what that other course was…”
“And you fell for one of your professors,” Chris said, filling in the gaps. “Geology, though. That can be a very dry subject. Particularly for a cultured little prima ballerina who could have gone to live in a castle on a faraway world.”
Vina didn’t speak. She was watching the scenery flow by.
“I’m guessing the relationship went south a long time before you met me,” Pike said, then remembered she’d been alone on Talos
for eighteen years before his arrival. He winced at his own stupidity, but Vina didn’t seem to notice. Maybe there was someplace she went inside her own head whenever something painful happened that she didn’t want to deal with. “I’m sorry. That was crass.”
“It was a long time ago.” Vina smiled weakly, which told him she’d registered, and felt, everything he’d just said.
Pike watched the moonlit ribbon of road for a long moment, wondering what he could possibly say next that wouldn’t sound cruel.
“Ask you something?” he said finally, trying to make it sound light.
“Anything,” Vina answered.
“What the hell did you see in a rube like me? Really, what was the attraction?”
Vina laughed then, and he realized he’d never heard her laugh before. It was a sound like bells, but genuine, and it suited her.
“Someone who tried to hide his own intellect under the guise of being a rube,” she said. “A starship captain, a leader of men, at home on worlds all over known space. You were anything but a rube.”
“Then I’d suggest you don’t know my kind very well,” Pike said. “Some starship captains—”
“I didn’t fall for ‘some starship captains,’ just you,” Vina interrupted him. “Remember what you said about me so long ago? That I was exactly the kind of woman you’d be attracted to? The reverse was also true. You were exactly the kind of man I’d find irresistible.”
A troubled look crossed her face then. Even in the moonlight he could see it, or maybe only sense it.
“We can change the subject, if you want,” Pike suggested.
“No, let me finish,” Vina said, and the frown faded, replaced by a look of determination. “Once I’ve told the whole story…to another human…perhaps it will finally make sense…”
Objectively, geology might seem like a dry subject, but the gangly young professor with the wavy dark hair and a voice like velvet made it fascinating. Or maybe it was her fascination with him that made it interesting. Vina would never know for sure. After that one course with him, though, she transferred to other professors’ classes. She didn’t want either of them to run afoul of the ethics against faculty dating students. Because he was as interested in her as she was in him.
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