Starfire

by Unknown

  On a corner two blocks away was a bar called the Big Foot, named not for a mythical anthropoid but for a historical Texas Ranger, Big Foot Wallace, who had been real enough even if the tales they told about him weren’t all strictly true. The Big Foot had once been real itself, having catered to legislators and visiting ranchers and oilmen and microchip wranglers for over a century, men who enjoyed the spaciousness of its lofty pressed-tin ceilings, its checkered black-and-white marble floor, its crudely carved bar, its good whiskey and overcooked steaks. Then entrepreneurs got hold of it. The tables got tablecloths, the waiters started wearing Western costumes, and the grub became cuisine. Japanese mushrooms. Garlic mayonnaise. A wine list you couldn’t pronounce.

  Travis used to like to go there anytime, but now he mostly liked to go there when he was in a bad mood. He’d sit at the end of the long bar and complain to Alex, the leathery old bartender who’d been kept on by the new owners because he looked like a cowboy, although he was a reformed pimp. After his fourth or fifth bourbon Travis might start to raise his voice a bit, which could be disturbing to the Big Foot’s nouvelle clientele of tourists and real estate sales types and young professionals. Usually before that happened, Alex, just to keep his hand in, would have managed to introduce Travis to any unescorted lady who happened to be drinking that night, and everybody would go home happy, or at least quiet.

  This night’s lady needed no introduction. She was his mother.

  “I don’t intend to knock that drink out of your hand unless you make me,” she said. Under her steel hair her eyes were agates.

  “Why’ld you do that?” he asked, querulously, fear and the urge to grin somehow becoming one as he peered at her.

  “To keep you from taking one more sip. Ever.” She moved closer, until her glittering eyes were inches from his. “The universe gave you what we’ve been praying for, with a little help from the video. And Al got to Fassio,” she whispered. “I tried to call you to tell you that. But it all amounts to horse manure if you’re the boozer Al says you are.”

  “Hell, Ma,” he said, his grin jerking at the corners of his mouth. Maybe to test her, or maybe because he was so far gone, he started to raise the glass.

  She stumbled against him with surprising force, and the heavy glass splintered on the marble floor. “Oh, goodness gracious! I’m mortified,” she said for the benefit of the bartender, and to Travis, “I’m so terribly sorry, I believe I must have caught my heel…”

  Scandalized waiters surrounded them, dabbing at his jacket—twittering like fag ballet dancers in their tight denims and rayon cowboy shirts, so Travis thought, as he considered swinging at somebody. But some reality-tracking portion of his pickled brain urged him to remove himself quietly. He tossed a fifty on the bar—“Thanks furvrthn’, Al”—and aimed himself gingerly at the door, supported on one side by a twenty-one-year-old refugee from the road company of Billy the Kid and on the other by his sixty-seven-year-old mother, both of them in better physical condition than he was.

  They shoved him into the back of her white Cadillac, waiting at the curb with blowers whining. His older brother was at the wheel.

  “Drivin’ the getaway car, Sam?” Travis demanded. “Whatsamatter, no guts?”

  “Ma said you’d probably want to swing on me,” Sam said. “Anytime is okay with me, shithead.”

  Edna May got into the front seat. “Your mouth, Sam,” she said. “Close it. There’s to be nothing of this in the news.”

  “How long can you keep him out of it?” Sam grumbled, steering the lumbering luxury hydro into the traffic.

  “Two weeks,” she said. “While he dries out he’s going to disappear. After that, if he crawls back into the bottle, no member of this family knows him.”

  “Hey, Ma,” said Travis from the back seat, grinning again even though nobody was looking or listening. He started to cry.

  “And I don’t want you talking to him, Sam,” she continued, her eyes fixed forward. “Not when he’s like this. As long as he’s like this, he doesn’t exist.”

  That was two weeks ago. The clinic was on Baja California’s coast, north of La Paz, facing east toward nothing at all except salt water and the desiccated mountains of northern Mexico. Here near the beach a palm oasis had stood since prehistory in a cleft of the parched, banded rocks, visited only by iguanas and coyotes and huge black bees and indígenas, until taken over a few years back by a silver-haired homeopath with an elegant European accent and a following of ladies from Beverly Hills and Dallas. The suave doctor had built a stucco village, its style vaguely Indian pueblo, vaguely Greek island, astonishingly white in the merciless sun. He’d added a nine-hole golf course, planted a great many more palm trees, and expanded his services to include therapy for drug and alcohol abuse. The clinic did a booming business among those who needed a quick, anonymous boost back onto the wagon and could pay well for it. No statistics were kept on recidivism.

  Travis was sweating hard, breathing hard, running hard along pearly sand. The unshaded desert sunlight was a weight on the crown of his unprotected skull. As his pace slowed, a fat drop of perspiration fell into his left eye, stinging mightily. He was put in mind of a time when he had been falling fast through hot thin air in a thermoplastic escape pod, thrilled to be courting death.

  The secretly nourished thrill had resurfaced. Philosophers and doctors who had once struggled to make everything rational in terms of the Will would have called it a death wish. Travis thought of it as a parasite, an invasion he could never defeat, although—by exposing it to sunlight—he could perhaps suppress it long enough to keep it from killing him prematurely. He was willing to admit that his longing for elbow room fed his addiction, set him up for escapism, but he was not yet willing to admit that there was nothing to be said for the void.

  Still, he had taken a first step away from the abyss. For the time being, he had dropped the booze. But it was easy to stop drinking in a setting so utterly unlike the normal context of his life. How easy would it be when he got back?

  Travis’s heart pumped fully, strongly, having responded to two weeks of abstinence, exercise, and solar radiation. Rationally, he felt good. Rather sadly good. He slowed to a walk, his chest heaving, hot sand roasting the tips of his toes, and headed for the palm-thatched cabana where one of the staff—white uniformed, quaintly reminding him of a launch technician—was handing out fruit juices and sparkling mineral waters.

  A woman was waiting for him in the grove of palms near the cabana. He looked twice to make sure it was really her, his least expected visitor. Why would she come here? Why not overbearing Sam or his mother? But it was Bonnie.

  “Hey, you look good,” he said softly. And she did, muscular and brown in snug shorts and a yellow halter top, with a floppy straw hat casting a net of shadow over her blue eyes. He leaned forward to kiss her. She let him.

  She looked at him seriously. “You too. Best I’ve seen you in a long time.”

  “I was stinking for a while.”

  “That’s over,” she said firmly.

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Oh, Travis…I’m sorry.” She seemed momentarily speechless. “What’s it been like? Was it…hard?”

  “Yes and no. Not the way I expected. I’ll tell you about it.”

  “We’re all on your side.” It was a fervent avowal.

  “I know that. I appreciate it.” He raised his eyebrows. “So? How come I’m so lucky?”

  “I came to take you home.”

  “You’re not who I expected.”

  “It had to be me, because there’s a reporter been askin’ questions about you, tryin’ to talk to Sam and Edna May.”

  “Maybe I should just talk to him.”

  “Oh, Travis, after all this, everything everybody’s done…” She stopped, confused. “Sorry. You’re what’s important.”

  “I know what you meant. Let’s walk.”

  They took two bottles of water from the white uniformed boy in the cabana and head
ed down the beach, kicking at hot sand with sandaled feet. To their left aquamarine water scintillated in the hard midmorning light, the Sea of Cortez, across which the conquerors had sailed in search of the mythical golden island of California.

  “It’s a her,” Bonnie said.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “The reporter. A woman. She’s from public video.”

  “Oh. The one who broke the Apollo-object story. That was sort of a scoop for her, I guess. She’s probably trying to do me a favor.”

  Bonnie looked at him, concerned, from the shadow of her sun hat. “She may already know you’re here. She won’t be doin’ you any favors if she puts that around.”

  He was quiet again, stooping to pick up a bleached, broken sand dollar. After inspecting it, he tossed it into the surf. Ten meters offshore, on a black volcanic boulder emerging from the blue water, a lean cormorant held its wings delicately open to the sun. “You know what that bird’s doing?”

  “Looks like it’s takin’ a sun bath.”

  “Right. Makes a living catching fish, practically flying underwater. Every once in a while it has to dry out its wings.” He gave her a lopsided grin and let her draw the analogy for herself. After a pause, he said, “You asked me what it was like down here. The hard part is, you get to do a lot of thinking. The other folks, uh, encourage it. And I have.”

  “About?” Apprehensive, she waited for him.

  “Hard to get it all out at once.” He was quiet a moment. “What I’m wondering is, do I really belong up there in space?” He cut off her nascent protest. “No, listen, that stunt I pulled when I bailed out. It made me kind of a movie hero…but by the odds I should have killed myself. It’s occurred to me that maybe that’s what I had in mind.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “I think I do mean that.”

  “I don’t like to hear that kind of talk. You made a bold choice, took a calculated risk. You acted like a man.”

  He laughed, genuinely amused. “My mother chose well, sendin’ you. You sound just like her.”

  “Your mother’s an admirable woman.”

  “I do admire her. But is it fitting for a man to arrange his life to suit others? Even his mother?”

  “You always wanted to go into space, ever since I first knew you,” she argued.

  “There’s other things I wanted, since I first knew you.” He stopped and pulled her into his arms. She resisted, and he held her in tension, his gnarled hands clasped across the smooth, sun-warmed small of her back. “But you know something, Bonnie? I finally got it through my head that you really aren’t gonna divorce Sam and marry me. Ever.”

  She avoided his eyes. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “What does that have to do with gettin’ you a ride on that rocketship?”

  “This: I can stop waiting for you—living that part of my life for your sake. And I can stop tryin’ to get back into space just to give my mother another trophy to nail up beside the shotgun…”

  “Travis—”

  “I can start living for myself—really do science. Or hell, maybe even go into the business with Sam, if he’ll have me.”

  She was still in his arms, and he didn’t know whether she was deep in thought, or starting to cry, or rigid with fear or anger. Almost imperceptibly she relaxed, and her body grew heavy against his. Suddenly she pushed into him with startling energy. Her face came up, eyes closed, and her mouth sought his, open and wet.

  Desire inflamed him—

  —but after a moment settled into a kind of aching solidity, and then, as he had half expected would happen should this moment ever come, his desire slowly and completely dissolved, leaving a hollow in his breast. He separated himself from her with surprisingly little effort.

  “How did you get here?” he asked.

  “Drove to Del Rio and met a company helicopter. Pilot’s waiting on the pad.”

  “Del Rio’s a long drive from Austin.”

  She hesitated. “I don’t have to get home tonight.”

  He gripped her arm and walked her toward the clinic. “Bonnie, I don’t know what I’m doing…about anything. And I can’t see any way out. You oughta go back home by yourself.”

  “Whether I go or stay, it won’t change what just happened, Travis.” Her voice was no longer a whisper, but so low he had to bend close to her to hear. “I do love…Sam. But I have to set my mind to it. With you, I always had to set my mind against it—ever since that first summer, the day you went back to military school without sayin’ a word to me. I thought it would get easier. It gets harder.”

  “What kind of life could we have if I quit doin’ what I do? What kind of life could we have if I keep on? Somethin’ has to change for me, deep down.”

  “Somethin’ did change. You want to be up there, even if you’re tryin’ to talk yourself out of it. Now you’ve got the chance.”

  “I didn’t do it for myself.” Even as he said it, he was aware of the undercurrent of petulance.

  “You didn’t bring yourself into the world, either.” She stopped and faced him. “Grow up, Travis. Your mother can’t make you do what you don’t want to. Nobody can.”

  He studied her, watching minuscule beads of perspiration collect on the almost invisible down of her upper lip, refracting the sunlight into radiant miniature rainbows. He was conscious of the sweat trickling down his own back and arms, and his head felt light—whether with sunstroke or with unfocused possibilities, he would not have bet.

  The frown muscles bunched around her transparent eyes. “You think I’m tryin’ to bribe you, Travis?”

  He flinched. “You know me too well to say that.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” The hardness turned to puzzlement. “I think you are changed. Maybe you put away too many dreams.”

  He took her hand. They walked toward the village, which gleamed an illusory white through the palm grove.

  The chopper bored through blue daylight, northeastward toward the Rio Grande. On final approach to Del Rio, Travis turned to Bonnie and asked for her car keys. When she gave them to him, he said he wasn’t going back with her; he wanted her to let the chopper pilot take her on to the ranch, and he’d deliver the car later. They had things to talk about, he acknowledged, but he thought it would be better to talk about them later.

  “So you’re turnin’ me down.” She looked at him sadly. “Guess I oughta be thankful. What are you gonna do, Trav?”

  “As the saying goes, I’m gonna take it one day at a time.”

  8

  Fidgeting, Robin leaned forward on the beige couch in Stith’s outer office to paw through the pile of faxzines on the coffee table: Newstime, Aerospace Technology Weekly, JSC’s own Space News Roundup. Waiting irritated her—this meeting was unscheduled, and it was interfering with training—but she assumed she was here to learn why there had been such a long delay in the official announcement of her crew’s appointment.

  “You can go in now, Commander,” said the secretary.

  Stith was leaning against his desk, his arms crossed across his rep tie, studying her morosely. His office was as spare as ever, but wide, as befitted the director of the Johnson Space Center. Among its furnishings was a conference table laid out with yellow pads and fiber-tip pens, and in the middle, a portable CADPAD chartboard. Behind the table, a leathery, suntanned man wearing whipcords and a checkered cowboy shirt was getting to his feet as Robin entered.

  “Robin, I’m sure you recognize Travis Hill.”

  “Oh yes,” Robin said, smiling. “I was Capcom the day Professor Hill decided to test the emergency de-orbit system.” She leaned across the conference table and thrust out her hand. Travis gripped it hard.

  “You gave me a very lucky star, Commander Braide,” Travis said, showing his teeth. “Even though it did have a strange name.”

  “People make their own luck. We were all proud of you, Professor Hill. In the corps.”

  “Name’s Travis, like it was before.”

  “I’m Robin.�
��

  Stith cleared his throat. “Well, since we all know each other…please, let’s sit down. Coffee?”

  Robin and Travis declined the coffee. The three of them sat at the conference table, Stith at its head. “Professor Hill is here to explain his proposal to include a rendezvous with the recently discovered Apollo object, 2021 XA, in Starfire’s operational mission,” Stith said, in what sounded like a rehearsed speech. “He and I have already discussed this at some length. Since it materially affects the mission plan, Robin, I would like you to get the gist of it at an early stage.”

  Again Stith studied her with that oddly flat expression, and even as she waited for him to say more he seemed to shrink back, sinking into his chair.

  Robin’s antennas were quivering; she noted that Stith had not suggested she was here to give advice, but only to listen. “Well, I’d certainly like to hear what, uh, Travis has to propose.”

  “I’ll get right to it, then. Hope you’ll go easy on me for repeatin’ a lot of stuff you already know.” He turned to the CADPAD’s control board. “Let’s see if I can make this thing move.”

  Travis pushed his chartboard around so that Robin could see it better: a yellow disk in the CADPAD’s meter-square display represented the sun; four tiny white points close to it were the planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars, and much farther away, almost to the margin, a brighter point was Jupiter.

  “I want to stress how peculiarly interesting this rock is. When Rouse and Kline spotted it, it was already well inside the orbit of Jupiter.”

  A pale orange point appeared between Mars and Jupiter.

  “We tracked it for a few days and extrapolated its orbit. Inclination’s only about three degrees, eccentricity’s an incredible point nine nine three. The damn thing is falling practically straight into the sun.”

  An orange line, representing the asteroid’s track, reached out to kiss the solar disk.