by Allen Steele
“Hello, Papa.” She didn’t seem to notice Jorge as she strolled through the trellises; instead, she walked over to the chaaz’maha and bent low to give him a kiss on the cheek. “Sorry…am I interrupting?”
“Not at all.” The chaaz’maha grinned as he accepted the kiss. “I’m done here, so”—he stood up from the bench—“I’ll leave you two alone. I think you have some things to talk about.”
Inez watched her father walk away, but said nothing until they heard the greenhouse door open and shut. “How long have you been there?” Jorge asked.
“Only a few minutes.” Inez sat down on the bench beside him. “Of course, my father knew I was there long before you did.” An amused smile. “It’s almost impossible to sneak up on a telepath, you know.”
“I suppose.” For the first time, Jorge felt wary in her presence. “So…um…you must have heard us talking about you. About the two of us, I mean.”
“Uh-huh. I hope you realize that I couldn’t have hidden that from him either, even if I’d wanted to. Oh, I could have shielded my thoughts…you can’t grow up in The Sanctuary without learning how to…but as soon as I saw him…” She looked down at the floor. “Well, that wasn’t something I’d considered. I’m sorry if I caused you any embarrassment.”
“Don’t apologize. He learned it from me, not you.” Jorge let out his breath. “So you also know he’s refusing to come back with us.”
“He’s already told me. I don’t think it was ever an option…not for him, at least.” Inez looked up at Jorge again. “If you’re wondering…yes, I support his decision. His work here is too important to leave behind. Coyote doesn’t need him anymore, but Earth does.”
“Yeah, well…” Jorge couldn’t help but frown. “We’re going to have a hard time explaining this once we get back home. Our mission…”
“Jorge…” She hesitated, then reached out to lay a hand upon his. “I’m not going back either. I’m staying here, with my father.”
For the second time in as many minutes, Jorge felt as if his heart had suddenly stopped beating. His mouth fell open as he stared at her in mute surprise. “You’re not?” he finally managed to say.
“No.” Inez looked him straight in the eye. “And that’s my choice, not his. He and I have talked it over, but…really, I think I’d made my decision the second I saw him.”
“What…why?” Jorge struggled to find the right words. “How could you…?”
“Because I need him, and I think he needs me, too.” Inez sighed, shook her head again. “Maybe it’s hard for you to understand, but…look, you grew up with both of your parents, so you’ve never known what it’s like, going through your whole life believing that one of them is dead. I had my mother, sure, and I love her very much, but…”
“Now that you’ve met your father, you want to spend time with him.”
“That’s it, yes. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and we can’t do that in just a day or two.” Turning her head, Inez gazed around the greenhouse. “Also, I think he could use my help. You said it yourself…he’s taken on a big job. Perhaps he could use someone by his side.”
“But back home…”
“What’s there for me? The Corps of Exploration?” She looked back at him again. “Do you remember what we talked about, that night when we were flying back to Liberty? About how I’d joined the Corps partly because everyone who knew that I was the chaaz’maha’s daughter expected me to follow in his footsteps?”
Jorge nodded, and she went on. “Here, I won’t have that problem. Oh, I’ll still be his daughter, all right…but there won’t be quite the same degree of expectation. I won’t have to call myself by another name, or spend my life telling people that I don’t want to be a spiritual leader. And I can use the skills I learned in the Corps. There are a lot of places on Earth that need to be reexplored. Maybe the Terra Concorde has more room for me than the Corps ever did.”
“I have a hard time believing that.”
“Maybe, but…well, there it is.” Inez paused, a slight frown appearing on her face. “Now, there’s something else I want to say to you, and this is going to be a little hard for you to hear, so…just wait until I get it all out, all right?”
“Okay.” Sensing that this was bad news, Jorge braced himself.
“All right, then…” She took a deep breath. “Look, I know how you feel about me. I’ve known that for a long time. And, to be honest, I love you, too…but not the way you want me to.” She slowly let out her breath. “We can be friends, even close ones, but…we can never be lovers.”
A cold stone settled itself in the pit of Jorge’s stomach. It was almost the very same thing her mother had said to him; hearing it again, he felt a surge of anger and sought to put a clamp on it. “Great. So last night…”
“Please, no…don’t be angry.” Her hand tightened upon his as she moved a little closer to him. “Try to understand…last night, I thought we were about to die. I needed to reach out to someone, and you were there. I’m glad you were. I have no regrets about what we did, and I hope you don’t either. But…”
Inez looked away again. She seemed to be trying to find the right words. “That was last night, and this is today. I simply don’t share the same feelings for you as you do for me, and that’s never going to change.”
“If you gave it a chance, maybe…”
“You don’t follow the Codicils of the Sa’Tong-tas, but I do…and the Second Codicil holds that I must never do anything that will cause harm to myself or to others around me.” When she looked at him again, Jorge was surprised to see tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes. “Jorge, if I tried to love you the way you want me to, I’d only hurt myself…and in the end, the situation I’d put you in would inevitably hurt you, too. So I have no choice, really. We can be friends…but only that. Do you understand?”
Jorge wanted to argue with her, yet deep inside, he knew that Inez was right. And the last thing he ever wanted to do was hurt her. “Yeah…yeah, I guess I do.”
He started to withdraw his hand from hers, but she refused to let it go. “All right, then,” she continued. “Now here’s the other thing I have to say to you. You need to go home. Back to Coyote.”
“I wasn’t…I mean, I wasn’t planning to do otherwise.” He shook his head. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You need to go home not because it’s part of your mission, but for the same reason that I’m staying.” Inez hesitated, then went on. “That night on the Monroe, when we were talking on the observation deck…you said something about knowing what it’s like to have a famous father. Remember?”
“No.” Jorge shook his head. “Your memory must be better than mine.”
“It probably is. I don’t forget conversations like that.” A quick grin that promptly faded. “I don’t know for sure, but I think you were trying to tell me that you’ve also had to deal with the expectations of those around you. Your family, friends, the Corps…everyone believing that you should be like your parents, your grandfather and grandmother, even our great-grandfather.” She paused. “It’s always been something of a burden to you, hasn’t it?”
Jorge stared at her, astonished to hear this. “Are you sure you don’t know how to read minds?”
Inez didn’t laugh. “It’s not hard to tell. Even before we became…um, close…you were my commanding officer. I could see how you were having trouble, trying to live up to the family name and all that.” A slight frown. “Just between you and me…did you ever really want to belong to the Corps?”
Now it was Jorge’s turn to look away. “Not really, no. You’re right…it’s something that seemed forced on me, from the very beginning. I don’t think I ever had a choice.”
“You always have a choice. But…what else would you have done with your life, if not become an explorer?”
Jorge shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe become a writer, like my grandmother…”
“Your grandmother wrote her memoirs because she
was an explorer, not the other way around.” Inez impatiently shook her head. “Don’t you see? Maybe this isn’t what you wanted to do…but all the same, perhaps it’s what you were meant to do. Just as I was meant to be here, by my father’s side.”
“Are you trying to tell me that I…?”
“I’m not trying to tell you anything that you don’t already know yourself.” Inez smiled at him again. “I’ve watched you over the last few days, and what I saw was someone who was much stronger than he himself realized. Anyone less strong would’ve given up trying to get here, to this place, long before you did. But you didn’t, and that’s why you need to go home.” Again, she paused. “But it’s still your life and your choice of what to do with it.”
Jorge didn’t quite know how to respond, yet he knew that what she’d said was true…all of it. He could be her friend, but their relationship would never be more than that. And his place wasn’t on Earth, but on Coyote.
“Maybe you’re right,” he murmured.
“Think about it awhile. You’ll know I am.” Letting go of his hand, Inez stood up. “That’s enough for now. I think Papa is waiting for us to have dinner together…and I’ve been told that Hugh will be there, too.”
Jorge realized that he hadn’t thought about McAlister in many hours. “He’s okay? They’ve let him out of the hospital?”
Inez nodded, and grinned. “Still upset about finding Sergio at the controls, but…well, he’ll have his ship back soon enough.” The grin faded. “Sooner than he thinks. Jorge, you’ve done everything you can do here. It’s almost time for you to go home.”
Without asking why, Jorge slowly nodded. She was right about that, too, whether he liked to admit it or not. There was no place for him on Earth, and the time was coming for him to return to Coyote.
Standing up from the bench, he let her slip her arm inside the crook of his elbow. Then they walked down the center aisle of the greenhouse, two friends going in search of others with whom to have dinner.
Part 8
SHALL WE GATHER BY THE RIVER?
On the bright winter morning of Anael, Gabriel 30, Wendy Gunther passed away.
As usual, she woke up shortly after sunrise, getting out of bed with the assistance of her aide, Tomas Conseco. Her dog Campy watched from his place on the bedroom rug as Tomas helped her put on a robe, and once she was seated in her wheelchair, he pushed her across the house to a small dining nook adjacent to the kitchen, where he’d already prepared a breakfast of oatmeal and strawberries. Tomas put Campy outside, then he and Wendy sat down at the nook table and had breakfast together while listening to the morning newscast from Liberty.
Wendy wasn’t very hungry that morning, but she ate a little bit of her oatmeal while she and Tomas chatted about politics; even after retirement, Wendy hadn’t lost interest in affairs of state. Tomas then wheeled her into the living room, where he left her at the desk comp with a cup of hot tea. As she went about reading and answering the day’s mail, he returned to the kitchen to clean up.
Campy returned shortly after that, scratching at the kitchen door to be let back in. By then, Tomas had already put out a bowl of kibble for him, yet he noticed that the dog didn’t go straight to it but instead hurried to the living room. Tomas didn’t think much of this; he finished washing the dishes, then began an inventory of the pantry, preparing a grocery list that he planned to take with him when he went shopping in Bridgeton later in the day. He’d just finished writing the list when he heard Campy barking from the other side of the house. A second later, there was a faint crash, and Tomas dashed from the kitchen to the living room.
He found Wendy collapsed in her wheelchair, her face ashen as she struggled to breathe. The crash he’d heard was her knocking the tea-cup off the desk; Campy was standing beside the wheelchair, barking frantically at his mistress. Tomas quickly picked her up from the wheelchair and gently laid her on the carpeted floor. Discovering her pulse to be weak and erratic, he proceeded to administer mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Her pulse didn’t get any stronger, though, so he placed his hands together upon her breastbone and compressed her chest, repeating this a dozen times in quick succession before planting his mouth against hers again to force air into her lungs.
Despite his best efforts, Wendy didn’t regain consciousness. Tomas took a moment to stab at the Vox button on the desk comp and make a call for help, but by the time a gyro from the university hospital landed on the ridgetop near Traveler’s Rest, she had slipped into a coma. As Campy frantically ran back and forth, barking the entire time, Tomas helped the paramedics load Wendy onto a stretcher and carry her to the waiting aircraft. Leaving the dog behind to fend for himself, he rode with her to the hospital. Tomas held Wendy’s hands in his own as he quietly spoke to her, begging her to please not leave.
It was no use. A few minutes before the gyro touched down on the hospital’s landing pad, the electrocardiograph flatlined, and stayed that way. Wendy Gunther died within sight of the very hospital she herself had helped found. Doctors would later pronounce the cause of death to be a severe coronary seizure.
Within the hour, local news media issued the first reports of the death of the second president of the Coyote Federation. To the end, Tomas acted as Wendy’s aide; borrowing a suit from a hospital administrator, he dried his tears and composed himself, then walked into a reception area crowded with reporters and, calmly and deliberately, issued a public statement. His voice cracked at one point, and it seemed for an instant that he’d break down, yet he managed to perform this one last official duty to the woman he’d served for so many years.
Wendy’s family was quickly informed of what had happened. Her daughter Susan and son-in-law Jonathan were in Liberty; Susan would later blame herself for not being with her mother at the time, having instead decided to return to the city for a few days. She and Jon arrived at the hospital just as Tomas was preparing to meet the press. They didn’t join him, though, going instead to the room where Wendy’s body lay. The doctors closed the door behind them, allowing them a few minutes of privacy.
Marie Montero was told about her sister-in-law’s death a short time later, yet it barely registered upon her. From deep within the abyss of her senescence, Marie’s only visible response was a flickering frown, the slightest batting of an eyelid. Her caretakers at the hospice where she lived said that it was probably just as well that she wasn’t fully aware of what had happened. Nonetheless, it was lost on no one that Marie was now the last surviving member of the Alabama party; it had only been a couple of days earlier that Chris Levin had been murdered in Defiance.
As significant as Wendy Gunther’s death was, the importance of the life she’d spent was not overlooked. Long aware that she was dying, the editors of the Liberty Post had already researched and written a long obituary for her, which they issued as part of a special report. Her place in Coyote history couldn’t be understated. One of the small handful of children who’d traveled to 47 Ursae Majoris aboard the URSS Alabama, the daughter of a Liberty Party loyalist who’d attempted to kill Captain Lee shortly after arrival. Wife of legendary Carlos Montero, and mother of the first child born on Coyote. Member of the first major expedition to leave New Florida and explore the Great Equatorial River. Participant in the resistance movement that revolted against the Western Hemisphere Union and eventually succeeded in expelling its occupation forces from Coyote. Doctor, diplomat, former Federation president, author of the memoirs that became the first and, in many ways, most reliable account of the colonies’ early years…there seemed to be no aspect of life on this world that she hadn’t touched.
By noon, President Edgar issued a statement of his own from Government House, expressing regret on behalf of the Federation and ordering all flags to be flown at half-mast. He also stated that President Gunther would be honored by an official state funeral, details of which would soon be made public. It was noticed by some in the press that her family didn’t respond in kind, instead maintaining a neutral silence. N
o one said anything about it, yet a few political observers had already taken notice of the fact that there had never been any great affection between the current president and the former one, and that Wendy’s family reportedly didn’t like President Edgar very much either.
In the midst of all this, almost no one paid attention to the return of a Federation Navy shuttle, the CFS Mercator, through Starbridge Coyote.
A cold wind from the north was whipping across the concrete field of Liberty’s municipal aerodrome as Sawyer Lee watched the government gyro from New Brighton come in for a landing. Its rotors were still in motion when the side passenger hatch opened and Jorge Montero climbed out. Sawyer raised his hand as Jorge ducked beneath the spinning blades to trot toward him, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
“Welcome home, Lieutenant.” Ignoring the perfunctory salute from the younger man, Sawyer extended a gloved hand instead. “I’m just sorry that the circumstances couldn’t be better.”
“Same here, General…but thanks anyway.” As Jorge shook his hand, Sawyer noticed that he wasn’t wearing his Corps uniform. Which was just as well; neither was Sawyer, although most likely for different reasons. Jorge glanced around the airfield, looked back at Sawyer again. “Not that I’m unhappy to see you, sir, but…where’s my father?”
“Still at the hospital, last time I checked.” Sawyer grimaced. “I’m afraid your mother isn’t taking this very well. She had to…well, rest awhile.” He wanted to avoid telling Jorge that Susan had broken down at Wendy’s bedside; Sawyer was reluctant to let Jorge know about this, or at least so soon after he’d returned. Things were hard enough already. “I think your family plans to eventually get together at your grandmother’s house, but right now…”
“Yes, sir. I imagine everything is pretty much a mess.” Jorge glanced past Sawyer at the coupe parked nearby. “Is that for us?”
