The Light Years

by R. W. W. Greene

  “We said that.” She stretched, and the thin sheet slipped down her body. “Things change.”

  “I have a gig to play in about an hour.”

  “Ninety minutes. I checked. You’ll even have time for another shower if we share.”

  He pulled the Martin off the wall. “I was going to restring this.”

  “Don’t. You know that will make it sound flat.” She got to her knees and grabbed him by the towel he’d wrapped around his waist. “Come here.”

  Adem sat on the bed next to her. She kissed his neck. “I love how you smell coming out of the shower.”

  “I smell like soap. You’re lucky I wasn’t working in waste management today.” He’d had to scrub like a madman to get all the cooking grease out from under his fingernails.

  She stroked the short hairs at the base of his skull. It was his “spot,” maybe the most erogenous of his zones, and it bothered him a little that she knew it. He pulled his head away. “You know, you’ll have plenty of money after this trip. You could get off at Gaul, sell your share, and set yourself up nice.”

  “Worried that I am going to be a problem for you and the new wifey?” She smiled. “I’ll go if you do.” She put her finger on his mouth before he could say anything. “I’m just kidding. I know you won’t leave the ship. But I’m not leaving, either.”

  “This can’t keep happening.” Almost unbidden his hand slid down the length of her back. “It’s wrong.”

  “Wrong by what measure?” She reached for the back of his neck again. “She’ll be here soon, and I’ll find someone else to keep me occupied. Shut up and stop worrying.”

  Adem barely had time for that second shower, but he made it to Terry’s in time for a quick sound check.

  “You want one?” Dooley waved a glass at him. It was glowing gently from whatever cocktail he’d created for the evening.

  “Just a beer.”

  Dooley put a glass on the bar and slapped a package of beer beside it. “We’re getting short. We’ll be down to piss and vinegar in another couple of weeks.”

  Adem made his thousandth mental note to try his hand at brewing beer. It couldn’t be much harder than distilling spirits and might save the crew a few hangovers. “Good thing we’ll be making planetfall soon.”

  “Be real interesting to see what happens after that.”

  “Depends on whether the Sasakis held up their end,” Adem said. “She could be a poet for all we know.”

  “A poet with a face like a bulldog.” Dooley grinned.

  “Sounds like a song.”

  “Write it fast, and you can sing it at the wedding.” Dooley nodded toward the door. “Your girlfriend is here.”

  Vee slipped through the door. She waved to a group of friends and sat down at their table.

  “Ex-girlfriend. I called it off.”

  Lucy came up behind Adem and stole his beer. “Was that before or after you fucked each other’s brains out in your suite a few minutes ago?”

  “Voyeur,” Adem said. “Both. This time it’s going to stick.”

  Lucy pouted. “Where is the fun in that, little brother? I was hoping to bond with my new sister about what a brat you can be.”

  “I’m sure I’ll give her plenty of fodder for that without committing adultery.”

  “Oh, I’m sure.” Lucy flipped the tab off the beer pack and filled the glass. “Oh, was this yours?” She walked off and joined a table of friends.

  “And she calls me a brat.”

  “You are,” Dooley said. “But you don’t have the market cornered. You ready to go on?”

  “Let me check the sound and the recording gear one more time. Pour me another beer, will you?”

  The acoustics in the little bar left a lot to be desired, but the audience would help. Nearly everyone who was awake and off shift had packed into Terry’s Place for the show and many of those still working would tune in. There weren’t many recreation options on a ship the size of the Hajj, and the crew seized every opportunity for something new.

  Someone at Vee’s table chanted, “Spaceman! Spaceman!” and it spread. Adem told the nearsmart to start recording. Dooley handed Adem a glass of beer. They mounted the stools set up on the bar’s tiny stage.

  Dooley cleared his throat. “You need no introductions, even though it’s been a few years since we played together.” He forced his accent broader with every syllable. “But for you poor folks who only get to watch this on your wee vid screens, this is the Spaceman.” He pointed his thumb at Adem. “And I’m the Spaceman’s da.”

  There wasn’t much room in Terry’s for dancing, but they did their best. At the end of the first song, Dooley set down his drum and picked up a tin pipe.

  “Before we play another one,” Dooley said, “I’d like to make a toast.” He waved to the woman he’d corralled to serve as bartender. “Give us a drop of that poison you’re pouring there.”

  He held the drink to the light. “This is my first drink in all my fifty-two years of life, and I’m drinking it because we’re about to expand this little band of ours by one.” He waited for the crowd to settle down. “The truth is my boy Adem here is pregnant.”

  Adem heard his sister’s cackle above the rest.

  “Come up here, Auntie Lucy. It’s sure to be an ugly baby, but I hope you learn to love it.”

  Lucy climbed onstage, and Dooley put his arm around her waist. “Adem, your sister and I want to wish you the best of luck. Marriage is a serious business, and you’re getting into it for all kinds of wrong reasons. But if anyone can make it work, it’s Mr. Fixit.” He held up the glass. “To Adem and his missus.” Dooley took a single sip and passed the rest to Lucy. “Now let’s get back to the party.”

  Adem switched to hard alcohol midway through the show. They played a twelve song set with two encores then gave the stage over to anyone who wanted to give it a go. Once they’d rested, they went back on stage, and the music continued long into the night.

  Waking up was a different story. Adem did not remember leaving the bar. His head was painful and thick, and his tongue seemed to fill his entire mouth. Vee was in the bed next to him, and so was one of the men from her table.

  Adem ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. Good thing I made the bed bigger.

  HISAKO

  Age twenty-two

  My newly minted master’s degree disappeared under a pile of clothes as I emptied my closet onto my narrow bed. Two years living in a geostationary orbit above Versailles City was coming to an end.

  “Are you looking forward to moving home?” Britt said.

  Britt TerVeer, my extremely well-meaning boyfriend of convenience, sat in my single chair between two boxes. One of the boxes was marked “keep,” the other was marked “trash.” I had heard the question, but I didn’t know how to answer just yet. “What?” I said, both stalling for time and sending him a message that I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Are you happy about moving back down to Gaul?” He reached for the printouts I was holding and tugged them from my hands. “What are these?”

  “Pictures of my old band.”

  His eyes widened as he leafed through the stack. “You were in a band with Marjani? How come you never told me about that?”

  “It was a long time ago.” I rubbed my temples, hoping to prevent the headache building there. Maybe I just needed some water.

  “What happened?”

  “Grad school. I’m contractually obligated to be an expert in useless things.”

  Marjani had stolen my band out from under me and went off to make it better than I ever could, but he didn’t need to know that story. I still heard from Ramona occasionally. She and Marjani were expecting a baby. I reclaimed the pictures and tossed them in the trash box.

  He looked down at them mournfully “You could probably get some money for those. She’s getting pretty famous.”

  “Be my guest.” I didn’t wait to see if he picked them up. The next pile of crap beckoned. It was
sort of amazing how much I’d accumulated in the little studio apartment. Mostly I’d been using it as a place to sleep between classes and time in the physics lab. Weird little souvenirs like my android finger went into the trash box; my growing collection of kitchen gadgets were diverted to “keep.” After a moment’s thought I moved the finger to “keep,” too.

  “What’s this?” Britt held up a hand-bound book from my bedside. It had been there for two years, and he’d never expressed interest in it before.

  “It was my father’s.”

  Years of breathing silica in the oxygen works caught up with him at the end of my junior year, and he had died gasping. He’d insisted that I focus on my studies rather than come home from my semester in New Berlin to see him. I did not argue long or hard. My mother sent the book to me about a week after his cremation.

  “It’s in English,” he said, thumbing through the slim volume. “I learned it for my thesis.” He read to me.

  I am the marionette

  The doll all dressed in white

  A blank smile drawn on a china face

  Limbs posed perfectly at the altar

  Thank you, Father

  Your support has yet to falter

  You praise my blank stare

  Speak as I move red lips

  I could never lie well

  But I promise not to stutter.

  “My father was nuts about poetry. He used to read it to me from that book when I was a kid.”

  “He sounds like a romantic.” He flipped more pages in the book.

  “It got him two years in prison. Not the poetry,” I added, noting the question on his face, “the romanticism. He started hanging out with the revolutionary wackos in La Merde and ranting about how some of the colonies had been designed to fail in order to create a slave class.”

  “That’s not such a radical theory. My brother wrote his dissertation on it.”

  “Your brother is a EuroD academic. He can afford to believe that.”

  “Now who’s the conspiracy theorist?” He adjusted the cuffs of his tailored shirt. “We’re not all bad. Some of us try to help.”

  Britt was a member of any number of do-good groups that provided aid to refugees, and he’d spent a semester teaching in La Merde and rebuilding homes after a sandstorm nearly buried the place a few years ago. He was handsome, healthy, tall, and came from a long line of EuroD wealth. He’d spent the six months living in his family’s flat on Versailles Station to “gain perspective.”

  Britt slung his arm over the back of the chair. “You should spend the summer with me. My family has a private dome halfway between the cities. It’s a little rough, but it’s comfortable. It’s a great place to relax, maybe fool around with your music. I know you haven’t been playing much.”

  I avoided looking at the pile of instruments near the door. I hadn’t spent more than a couple of hours on any of them since the beginning of the semester. I’d had the fortune to get the university’s mad professor as my thesis adviser and did two years of hard labor trying to recreate the technology the UA used to manipulate gravity waves. We failed completely, but we shared authorship of a paper about it. “I need to go home. I haven’t seen my mother since my father died.”

  “Spend a couple weeks with me, then.” The smile on his face was heartbreaking. He thought he was in love with me.

  My eyes rolled against my will. “I’m leaving the planet in two years, and I probably won’t be coming back until you’re in your fifties. There’s no future for us, Britt.”

  His smile faded. Whatever flavor I delivered the reminder in, and I’d done it enough to serve it in several different ways, it always had that effect. But Britt TerVeer was nothing if not an optimist. He believed a little bit just might be enough, and his smile fought its way back to the surface. “That doesn’t mean we can’t hang out. Might help you get your head together between here and there. Or there and somewhere else if you want to see your mother first.”

  It was tempting. I couldn’t imagine it would be easy living with my mother again. The shabby little apartment would echo with my father. “I’ll think about it.”

  He picked up the poetry book again and started making scans of it with his reader. “Do you mind? Maybe I can use some of them in my thesis. Do you know anything about where it’s from?”

  “The man who gave it to my father used to be a teacher in La Mur, but he was living in La Merde for some reason. The poems were written by one of his students.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “It was French.”

  “A project will keep my parents off my back about getting a summer job.” He also scanned the picture stored inside the book and put the little volume in the “keep” box. He helped me finish packing, and I had sex with him to say “goodbye and thank you” and “maybe, but probably not.” It seemed to satisfy him, and he was wearing a different sort of smile when he dropped me off at the top of the elevator.

  I bought my ticket down and took a walk. The first four months I’d lived on Versailles Station had felt claustrophobic, but now it was almost home. The population was a mix of EuroD wealthy, students, and station maintenance workers. I stopped for a coffee at my favorite shop and visited the local parks and sculpture gardens. It didn’t take long. Versailles Station had started life as a pair of evacuation ships parked above the city. Over time, thirteen more ships had been added to the structure. Retired Trader vessels mostly, although one of Gaul’s battleships had joined the mix three hundred years before I was born. The sensitive areas had been sealed off, the weapons taken elsewhere, and the ship’s rooms and hallways converted into luxury apartments.

  The descent to Versailles City took two days, and I was stuck at the bottom for another six hours because a shootout had locked down the cabs and trolley service. When the smoke cleared, an armored taxi with blacked-out windows whisked me away. The driver asked me if I was serious about getting out at the address I supplied and sped away when I told her – twice – that I was.

  A cluster of shacks and humpies had sprung up around the apartment building, narrowing the street to a single lane. I pushed through a crowd of beggars to get to the door. The lift was out of order, and I climbed through a family of six that had taken up residence in the second-floor stairwell.

  My mother opened the door of the apartment in her work uniform.

  “You look good,” she said.

  I don’t know what she saw, but I found myself wondering when my beautiful mother had been replaced by a middle-aged woman. There had never been enough of her to thicken, but her body had solidified, almost like a brick in the efficient uniform. Her hair was cropped short, and grief or weariness had etched lines in her face.

  “I have to go into work because of the attack,” she said. “I made some dinner for you. It’s in the kitchen. If you get up early, we can have breakfast together.”

  Her brusque energy felt like spurs rubbing against my fatigue. “I’m so tired I’ll probably go right to sleep,” I said.

  “We kept your room as you were, not how you are now, but it’s clean. I have to go. I’ve already lost money for being late.”

  I blinked, and she was gone, leaving only displaced air in her wake. The tidy little apartment was achingly familiar, but it no longer felt like home. I felt like a ghost, present but unable to affect my surroundings. My father’s armchair beckoned. He’d plunked it in the corner when I was a kid, mended a few damaged spots with tape, and dubbed it his reading chair. Somehow we both fit into it, and we read together. Sometimes him to me and other times me to him. It had been retaped several times, but it was still the most comfortable thing in the house. I sank into it and almost felt his arms around me again.

  On a packing crate beside the chair was a family photo taken for my fifteenth birthday. My mother had saved up to have it taken by a professional. She had wanted to throw me a party, too. She must have understood why I refused because after that initial flash of hurt in her eyes, she hadn’t
asked again. In the photo, my parents were dressed in their best, and I was exhibiting the first stages of my asteroid-punk phase. They were smiling, and I was wearing what passed for a pleasant smirk. My mother and I had two arguments on the way to the photo shoot and one knock-down, drag-out row in the studio. My father and the photographer sat and drank from my father’s flask while my mother and I fought over whether the photo I was now considering would ever exist. I had not cared about the photo as much as I wanted to deny my mother a victory. She claimed the win in the end but not until making promises and concessions that I spent the next three years making sure she kept to the letter.

  “Little bitch.” Past Hisako didn’t care or was beyond listening to anything I had to say.

  I put the photo back down on the crate and stretched out in the chair. It reminded me so strongly of my father that I wondered if my mother didn’t come home from work every day just to be held by it. In my earliest memories, my parents had been silly, almost giddy, around each other. I couldn’t remember when they’d lost that.

  My reader pinged, and I used my mother’s cheap entertainment system to access the message instead of getting up. Britt’s face smiled at me from the screen. “I translated one of the poems,” Britt said. “I got home and didn’t have anything else to do.” He displayed the stanzas on the screen as he read it aloud in French.

  I’ve wondered what it’s like to fall in love.

  Is it like gliding through clouds of cotton?

  Or tumbling down a hill of thorns?

  I want to know what it’s like to make love.

  Is it magical and romantic?

  Is it savage and violent?

  I want to know what it’s like to have heartbreak.

  Do you cry in anguish then forget?

  Or do you hide what you feel and always remember?

  I want to know what it’s like to fall in love.

  Will my heart race when I see him?

  Will butterflies shoot from my mouth when he touches me?

  I want to know what it’s like to be loved.

  Is it when he will bring me gifts of gold?