No Going Back

by Mark L. Van Name

  I wasn’t wrong. It was a mission, and I’d do damned well to remember that fact.

  Yet it was a mission no one was asking me to undertake. I could ignore Pimlani’s messages. In a few years at most, she’d almost certainly be dead, and the problem would have taken care of itself. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that I owed her. Once, all those years ago, at least for a couple of years I had been sure we loved one another. We’d been together almost all the time, and for the most part the experience had been great. I hadn’t lived with a woman since that time—I didn’t count bunking with squad mates on combat or training missions—and I sure hadn’t let myself get that close to any other woman.

  I shook my head to clear it. I’d been over this ground before. All I was doing was wasting time. I also wasn’t paying attention to my surroundings, which is never wise. Walking while lost in thought and mostly blind to the world around you is a good way to get hurt, particularly in a big city.

  Most large cities follow similar layouts, but not York. York was an urban testimony to the power of very old money. Part of the usual layout more or less existed: Downtown areas crammed with skyscrapers gleaming with corporate logos held the center of the city, with neighborhoods of varying degrees of wealth sprawling all around it. What made York so different was that scattered through it were the estates of the seven families that had managed to hold onto their wealth and influence from the time of Haven’s colonization to today. The smallest of those estates was over fifty hectares, and most ran to a hundred or more hectares. These great wooded private areas were walled off from the rest of the city, protected by both machine and human security systems. They were as much parks as residences, though people lived in them to this day.

  Omani’s family resided in the very largest of them, most of its multiple houses and the grand main building constructed during the first decade humans were on Haven.

  Kang and many members of his family also lived in one of the estates. Fortunately, it was on the far side of York from Omani’s home.

  I was walking in a commercial area that was rapidly transitioning to a tourist and residential district. In every big city on every world I’ve visited, the same human currents ebb and flow. A part of the city runs down and turns poor and dangerous. Those in power initially ignore it and try simply to contain its troubles; as long as what happens in it stays in it, even the police give it only token attention. Over time, of course, the problems of any area spill over into nearby zones, so politicians start making speeches about it, and the city sends in more cops. Meanwhile, the cost of living in the city keeps rising, so a few intrepid souls, lured by low prices in the bad parts of town, buy and move in. If all goes well, more follow them, and gentrification turns the district from dangerous to funky, and then from funky into a shopping and eating destination. Tourists come both to partake of the offerings of the vendors and to watch the natives, who marvel that somehow they’ve become attractions. The lucky districts stop their transformations there; the unlucky ones continue to morph from interesting to bland and ultimately become indistinguishable from others like them in any city on any world.

  From the looks of this area—restaurants and shops inhabiting buildings that were new when I was here over a century ago, cute beige and curlicue signs that told me I was in the Swanson District, the bags of pedestrians fighting for attention as they displayed the acquisitions of their proud new owners—we had reached the full-on gentrified stage and were at the tipping point for the possible slide into blandness.

  For my purposes, it was perfect. Hotels would be nearby, and crowds would ensure that I didn’t draw any particular attention to myself. Enough of the people I saw on the sidewalks were old that at least some parts of Swanson were bound to cater to them. The large outdoor market I’d once frequented abutted Swanson, so I was confident that somewhere in those two I would be able to find what I needed.

  I thought about the old men at the auction. Many used exoskeletons. All were well dressed. Some, such as Kang with his cane, affected more traditional tools of the elderly. Kang moved in the same money circles as Omani, so he would make a suitable model.

  The afternoon sun was on its way down, the day heading toward night, but from Lobo’s research I knew that both the shops here and the outdoor market’s stalls stayed open well into the night. I had time.

  I hailed a taxi and had it drive me slowly toward the market. I’d hoped for a SleepSafe, but none was anywhere close to Omani’s estate. When we were a block from the market, I had the taxi take a slow loop around it toward the estate. We were still a few kilometers away when I spotted a three-story local hotel wedged between two equally tall buildings. It called itself the Swanson Market Inn. The holos on its street-facing walls proclaimed it to be a local tradition with the capacity to hold any size party.

  I went inside and rented a small suite with an additional bedroom that connected to it, a room I said I would need as soon as my grandfather and others of my family arrived. I left the pack and the change of clothes and headed on foot to the market.

  It was time to make me an old man.

  124 years ago

  York City

  Planet Haven

  CHAPTER 16

  Jon Moore

  The day I first kissed Omani Pimlani, I was preparing to meet her father.

  “Is this really necessary?” I asked. We were standing outside her house after work one day. I was washing my face and hands in a sink those of us who worked outside used to clean our tools and ourselves.

  “Meeting my dad?” she said.

  “Yes.” I’d heard a lot of stories about him, and he was one of the richest and most powerful men on Haven, so I was nervous. I’d been spending a lot of time with his daughter over the past couple of months, nothing that I thought of as romantic, simply being together, but from what Liam and the others at work had said, no father believes any time a man spends with his daughter is innocent. That made it worse. Worse still, even being around anyone so powerful was directly contrary to my goal of maintaining a low profile.

  Against all that, was the ability to spend time with Omani, who stood in front of me, staring into my eyes, and who was the best part of every day I got to see her.

  “Yes,” she said, “it is necessary. He has no ability to require it—I’m thirty-eight years old—but he doesn’t see things that way. Plus, every other man I’ve ever dated has met him on the first or second date.” She paused, stepped back, and looked away for a second. “I think at least half of them saw me as the easiest way to meet him, because they always ended up wanting something from him.”

  “Are we dating?” I said. I’d never thought of it that way. We met after work most days, ate some dinners in parks together, talked, listened to street musicians, walked around the giant market, and so on, but I’d never thought of it as dating.

  She laughed and put her hand on my cheek. “You are so adorable.”

  I blushed.

  She laughed again. “See what I mean?”

  “I’m getting that sense of being a pet again,” I said, “and I can’t say as I like it.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “I meant it as a compliment.” She paused. “Is it bad that we’re dating?”

  It wasn’t good for remaining unattached and ready to move on, but I loved the time we spent together. “No,” I said. “It’s just... I’ve never spent this much time with a woman before, and I’ve never dated anyone, so I don’t really understand it.”

  She hugged me briefly and, as she held me, said into my ear, “Don’t worry. I do.”

  As I often did with Omani, I had the unnerving feeling of walking into the middle of a play and, even though I was hearing the lines the actors were saying, having no clue what they meant.

  She stepped back. “Are you ready to go?”

  “Yes,” I said, “though only because you say we have to.”

  “You could go home and change if you wanted.”

  “Why?” I said. “I’m clean
enough not to track dirt into your house, and it’s not like he doesn’t know what I do.”

  She smiled. “Is there nothing you want from him?”

  I shook my head. “Not a thing. Why would I?”

  She smiled again. “Let’s go.”

  She led me around the front of the main building to the far side, through a door there, and up an elevator to the top floor. “Daddy’s office is the entire top floor of the house.”

  “That’s more room than most well-off families have in their whole houses,” I said.

  She shrugged. “He likes a lot of space, and he likes the view.”

  It was my turn to shrug. I’d never lived anywhere with more than a bathroom, a living area, and a bedroom. Many places I’ve stayed merged all of those into one room. “He can afford it,” I said.

  She simply nodded.

  We stepped out of the elevator into a wide, shallow waiting room with no windows and a lot of security cameras. Omani stepped to the door directly across from us, but it didn’t open.

  She glanced back at me and whispered, “Great. He’s in a mood.” She stared up at one of the cameras and said, “Daddy, I’d like to introduce you to Jon, the man I’ve mentioned.”

  “Come in,” his voice boomed from multiple speakers around the room. “I’m down with the computers.”

  The door opened. She stepped closer to me and whispered, “He meets people there when he wants to show off. Just act impressed.”

  “Why?” I said.

  She stared at me for a second. “I always say that, but I guess it’s to make him happy. Act however you want.”

  I nodded.

  We walked across the vast single open room that occupied three-fourths of this floor. Shelves of ancient books filled much of the area, rows of them leading from either side of this central aisle. Here and there, small groups of chairs and tables stood like oases in a sea of books. Pictures and photographs and odd constructions of clay and rope and paper hung on the ends of bookcases and on walls. I’d never seen anything like it. I’d read about libraries, but as historical artifacts; any reader could get you anything you might want, were you the sort of person who liked to read. Most didn’t.

  Near the other side of the space, we walked through an open archway into a room within a room, its walls full of displays. Some of the screens showed information I recognized as news; financial data filled most of them. The man I assumed to be her father stood across from us and stared out a window in the side of the house. He couldn’t be doing anything useful from there, so I figured he was trying to make a statement, showing that he would face us when he was good and ready. I had no particular desire to be there, so that was fine with me.

  Omani, though, seemed concerned. She cleared her throat before she said, “Daddy, I’d like to introduce you to Jon Moore, the man I’ve been seeing.”

  He turned around. He looked barely older than Omani, though that meant nothing. People with money tended to look the same from their mid-twenties into their sixties or seventies, until whenever the best medtech available could no longer make their skin appear young. He was shorter than Omani by almost a head, so he had to look up to meet my eyes. He stared at me for a few seconds, stepped toward me, and waited.

  I stepped forward to meet him, stuck out my hand, and said, “It’s nice to meet you, sir.”

  He waited a few seconds, then closed the rest of the distance between us and shook my hand. His grip was strong, but his hands had the smooth, soft feeling of a person who didn’t use them in his work. The handshake was brief.

  He stepped back. “I’d ask what you do,” he said, “but of course I already know.” He stared at Omani for a moment, then back at me. “My daughter seems to like to annoy me with her choice of men, but she usually aims rather a bit higher.”

  “Daddy!” she said.

  I felt the anger rising in me, but I worked to keep it under control as I said to her, “It’s fine, Omani.” To him, I said, “Mr. Pimlani, I don’t know what you think is going on, but all we’ve been doing is spending time together for a couple of months. I also don’t know why you want to annoy Omani or insult me, but neither one seems like a good use of your time.”

  He put his hands behind his back. “What exactly do you want?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Omani told me it was time I met you, so here I am.”

  “You have no great scheme you want to propose to me? No art you’re creating at night and would like me to see, no story about how your job as a laborer is just a way to feed yourself until your genius is recognized?”

  I laughed. “Omani said other men had used her to get to you. Are those some of the things they wanted?”

  For the first time, he smiled, though only slightly. “Some of them. Many wanted far more.”

  I shook my head. “I like Omani. We eat and talk and listen to music and spend time in the parks. I didn’t know until right after work today that we were dating. That’s it.”

  “So what do you picture for the two of you in the future, you the laborer and she the heiress?”

  “I’ve never considered the question,” I said. I never assumed I would stay anywhere long, because the sorts of jobs I sought were always temporary. “I’ve never made plans longer than the duration of the job I was doing.”

  He studied me for a moment. “What are you afraid of?”

  Of being imprisoned again as a test subject, I thought but could not say. Of people finding out about the nanomachines in me. Of people around me dying, as Benny and others had. “Nothing in particular,” I finally said. “I’ve just never cared about the future. I grew up—” I couldn’t explain that I had spent the first sixteen years of my life mentally challenged, unable to advance past the mental age of a typical five-year-old boy, so I groped for the closest explanation to the truth that I could use. “—without any real chance to learn, so right now I’m happy to work as I must and spend the rest of my time reading and learning and thinking.”

  He faced Omani. “We all enjoy time off, and we all enjoy those years we get to spend without responsibilities, simply doing as we will. In the end, though, we crave more. You will, too.” He looked back at me. “I’m sure she finds your lifestyle romantic now, but it won’t last. She’ll want more of a partner one day, particularly given that she’s my only child and eventually this estate and most of my holdings will be hers.”

  “Daddy!” Omani said. She was clearly struggling to control her temper.

  Getting in a fight with him would cost her more than it would cost me, so I stepped closer to him and shrugged. “I have no clue how this whole dating thing works. I’ve never dated anyone. What I do know is that Omani says what she thinks, and she thinks a lot. If she decides she doesn’t want to spend any more time with me, I’m sure she’ll say so. I’d do the same if I felt that way. I don’t see, though, why either of us has to make any of those decisions right now.”

  I paused. His attitude angered me, but I also found it sad, bordering on pathetic. “I’ve never had any children, of course,” I said, “but I had a younger sister I used to try to take care of.” I paused again. Though younger and smaller than I, Jennie was both vastly smarter and also a healer, so she’d spent more time taking care of me than I had of her. I always wanted, though, to protect her, and it still hurt me that I’d been unable to stop the men from Pinkelponker’s government who took her away so she could heal only the people they considered important. “I know that if I ever got to see her again—I don’t know where she is right now—I’d never talk to her the way you’re speaking to Omani. I don’t know why you feel you have to be mean, but you don’t. I can tell you just from the way she talks about you that like everybody else, she’s scared of you, but unlike the other people I see working for you, she’s your daughter, and she loves you.” My face burned, partly from anger at him, partly from embarrassment at talking so much about things I understood so little.

  He stared at me for several seconds, his face under tight con
trol.

  I couldn’t read his expression at all, other than to know that he was keeping it neutral. I had the sense that he had learned long ago to make sure that other people couldn’t make him show his feelings when he didn’t want them to.

  Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Omani. I worry about you, and I want to protect you. I also owe you an apology, Mr. Moore. As I said, most men who have come before you have wanted something from me. Most people do. It’s... unusual and a bit refreshing to meet someone who does not.” He took a deep breath. “At the risk of sounding again too much like either an overprotective father or an old man, I have to tell you that one day you will want more from life than what you’re doing now, that if you’re any sort of man at all you’ll want to do things you believe in, try to improve a world, maybe many worlds, take care of the people you love—all of those things.”

  Each of those sounded like a high-risk proposition to me, ways to draw attention to myself and end up getting locked again in some lab somewhere, but I had to admit that the more I learned, the older I grew, the more I wanted to do something more significant with myself than simply move from one low-end job to the next.

  “I expect you’re right, sir,” I said. “I’ve begun to have some of those yearnings.”

  He nodded. “So does your lack of planning extend to today?”

  I tilted my head at him in question. “Sir?”

  He smiled. “Do you have any specific plans for what you’ll be doing this evening?”

  I laughed. “Sometimes we do, but not today. If I want something in particular, I say so, but usually I don’t, so I ask her. Omani never lacks for ideas.”

  “I’m right here, you know,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I meant that as a compliment.”

  She took my arm. “We’re going to the market, Daddy, to buy some food for a picnic. Then we’ll find a place to eat and talk, maybe find some music to listen to later. That’s about as wild as we usually get.”