Is it when he will kiss me with the gentleness of a feather?
Is it when he cries out for me when I am away?
What is it like to love?
To feel loved?
I don’t know.
“Teenagers, right?” He grinned. “I already have a lead on the writer.” He smothered a yawn. “I’m out. Get some sleep, Sako.”
He looked like he wanted to say more – maybe “I love you” or “I miss you” or “Thanks for the fuck” – but thought better of it. The screen flickered to black, and I was grateful. I didn’t want anyone to love me. I pulled a blanket off the back of the chair and wrapped it around me.
What is it like to love? To feel loved?
“A little on the nose, don’t you think? Wonder why you picked that one to translate.”
My mother’s entertainment system wasn’t expensive enough to respond. I closed my eyes and let the past few days of papers and goodbyes and packing push me into sleep.
Some hours later, I woke up with a sharp pain in my neck and my mother standing over me. She looked gray and tired. Her face was hard.
“Your father adored you,” she said.
My neck popped. It seemed impossible that I’d slept through her entire shift. “I loved him. He was a lovable man.”
“And a fool.” Her mouth tightened. “Even before you were born, he loved you. Before you were even a soul. He would have been happy to live in the worst part of the city to keep you.”
I crossed my arms. “And you wouldn’t have?”
“If it had come to that, maybe.” Her jaw tightened. “Look at you. Clean. Healthy. Educated. You’ve never known hunger.”
“I’ve been to La Merde, Mom. It’s not that bad.”
“You’ve been to the Square. As a tourist. That’s like going to the air ballet on Nov Tero and saying you understand the entire planet.” She loosened her uniform collar. “You’ll never have to know real want, and that helps me sleep at night in spite of everything. Did you eat?”
It was an old fight, and I wasn’t going to let her out of it so quickly. Not when I knew the next attack so well it was almost a reflex. “Your peace of mind comes at a cost.”
Her reflexes were pretty good, too. “Two years,” her face flushed. “If you don’t want to stay married after that, the contract is void. Two years of your life in exchange for everything you have. You won the lottery before you were even born!”
My blood rushed. I only ever fought with my mother, maybe only really felt alive when we were at each other’s throats. It was the only passion the contract had allowed. “I didn’t buy the ticket! You don’t think that I might have liked some kind of say into where I ended up?”
“The only choice I made in this life was to keep you.” My mother’s voice shook. “Everything before that was chance. Everything after that was governed by our efforts to give you the best life possible. Don’t you understand that?”
I did. Mentally, I agreed with everything she was saying, but emotionally I still couldn’t shake the unfairness of it all. She had chosen my father. Out of necessity and geography maybe, but she had made a choice. I couldn’t choose anyone. I didn’t pick Adem Sadiq any more than I had decided to be good at science and music.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” I said. “You’ve never told me the truth. Am I a splice? Did you have me hacked to fit the terms of the contract?”
“It was just a tweak.” She avoided my eyes. “We took you up to the station for it. It didn’t change who you were, just what you might be good at.”
“Do you know what that could have done to me? What it still could?” Cancer. Lowered life expectancy. Mutation. Every health teacher I’d ever had swam into my head and shook a finger at me. It didn’t even work! The tests showed I was only a near-genius.
“We were careful. It wasn’t a hack job. Every cent we had went to the genegineer. Your father was on pins and needles the entire time I was pregnant. He cried so hard when you came out pink and perfect.”
“You didn’t leave anything to chance, did you?” My teeth ground together. “You gave birth to your perfect little cash cow and sold her off as soon as you could.”
“How many times are we going to rehash this?” she said. “We gave you the best chance at a good life that we could. Maybe you’ll always hate us for it. But maybe you’ll realize that we gave you options that you never would have had otherwise.” She rubbed her face. “I’m tired. I worked ten hours while you mooned around and slept. I’m going to get up in a few hours and do it again. What are you going to do?”
“I’m leaving.” I picked up my reader to send a message. A few weeks in a private dome sounded perfect. “Thanks to you, Mom, I have options.”
ADEM
Gaul, Sept 29, 3260
The Hajj reached out an electronic hand to the Gaul worldnet and began to download information. The ship’s nearsmart sifted restlessly through twenty-four years of magazine articles, legal briefs, vid news programs, scholarly journals, and messages.
Adem was only interested in one thing.
Lucy put her hand on his shoulder. “If it’s a vid, and she’s naked, I want to see.”
Adem ran the search again. “She didn’t send anything. There’s only a message from her mother.” He opened it. “It’s instructions for the wedding.”
His bride was going to come aboard in less than a week, and Adem still had no sense of who he was marrying.
“Did you send something to her?” Lucy said.
“I didn’t know what to say.” Adem’s knuckles were turning white on the communications console.
“How about you start with, ‘I’m sorry. I’m an idiot. I should have worked out what to say a long time ago’?”
“I have no idea who she is.” Adem read his future mother-in-law’s message again to see if he had missed anything. “At least she has my picture and profile.”
“She’s had that since before she was born. Send her a note to remind her that she’s not marrying some dirty old man.”
“I’ll do it when I get off shift. She doesn’t even know we’re in the system, yet.”
“I want to see it before you send it out,” Lucy said.
“Naturally,” he lied. “What should I do with these wedding instructions?”
“Send them to Mother. Her partners on Gaul will take care of everything. Your job is to make sure your sweetie sticks around long enough to give me some nieces and nephews.”
“Mom wants this woman for what she knows, not for her uterus.”
“That’s just her money talking,” Lucy said. “What she really wants is for her baby boy to be happy and fill this old ship with kids.”
Adem laughed. “Mom hates kids. Remember how she kept threatening to leave us on Freedom until we were twenty-five and worth talking to? Sometimes I think Dooley is the only reason we’re still alive.”
“She just doesn’t like being nagged. She’ll love having grandkids. She’ll take all of the fun parts and leave you with the shit work.”
Adem looked up at the view screen. Gaul was little more than a dirty point of light. “It doesn’t bode well that she didn’t send me anything, does it?”
“Maybe she saw one of your Spaceman vids.”
Adem responded with the rudest gesture he knew, unmistakable in any of the languages spoken aboard ship. Lucy laughed. “She’s the one who has to give up her entire world. Show her there’s something here to replace it. Play her a song. She’ll probably think it’s adorable.”
Adem tried to rush through his to-do list, but a tricky loading-arm repair tripped him up. He could have put it off – they wouldn’t be docking for a few weeks – but he wanted some wiggle-room in case his welds didn’t hold. It was late evening before he scrubbed his hands, grabbed a sandwich from the cafeteria, and sat down with his guitar.
He ran through a few songs he thought his fiancée might like and realized they were the same tunes Vee asked him to play. He’d steered clear o
f her the last few weeks, but she had made it clear that she was up for a sleepover anytime.
An icon flashed on his reader. The nearsmart had found a couple of new bands that matched his interests. The first one was an anti-folk group that had formed on one of Gaul’s small moons. He listened to a few cuts: catchy but derivative. The second band was an all-girl proto-punk four-piece called The Sandcats. It was fronted by the most passionate guitar player he’d ever heard. She could make a song crawl in submission and rage like a beast in the same measure.
Adem directed the nearsmart to dig up information on the band’s origins and lost himself in history and music. A year before The Sandcats found its patron, there’d been a roster change. Before that it had been a five-piece, and the second guitarist had a weird classical flair that he liked. Her playing softened the band’s sound while making it sarcastic and subversive. The anger was still there, but it was more of a mocking smirk than a snarl. The guitarist had quit the band under a cloud and disappeared from the music scene.
Adem rubbed at the stubble on his face. His legs were numb from inactivity. He’d spent hours listening to The Sandcats and was no closer to sending a message than he had been when he’d left the bridge that morning.
He cleared his throat and ran his hand through his hair, which was a spiky mess from the work day and the hours spent listening to music. He told the nearsmart to start recording.
“Hello. I’m Adem.” He looked right and left for something intelligent to say. “I’m looking forward to meeting you. I hope you like music. I play sometimes with my father, but he’s only interested in a couple of different styles. Earth Primitive, mostly. It’s fun but…” He looked down. The guitar was a dead thing in his lap. “Never mind. It will be good to see you. I hope you’ll be happy here, and I will try to be a good husband. I’m pretty easy to live with. I hope you’re interested in meeting me.” He sighed. “I guess that’s it. I’m going to send this now. See you soon.”
He saved the recording before he lost courage and sent it to Hadiya Sasaki, the only contact he had. At this distance, she’d get it in an hour or so, but whether it would be her daytime or nighttime he didn’t know. He could ask the nearsmart to look it up for him but decided it probably didn’t matter.
Adem hung up his guitar and collapsed on the bed. He dreamed about The Sandcats. Marjani asked him to come up on stage to jam, but when he got there, he realized his guitar had no strings. “Play, Spaceman! Play!” the audience chanted while he stood there helpless. Adem stirred uneasily in his sleep but didn’t wake up.
Lucy caught up with him at breakfast. He had opened his eyes to a splitting headache, and his joints hurt from lack of sleep. He propped his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands.
“You look like shit, little brother. Did you go out drinking without me?”
“I worked late,” he mumbled. “Then I was listening to a new band and lost track of the time.”
“What did you play for your sweetie?”
“Nothing. I just talked. I can’t remember what I said. It was pretty late when I sent it.”
“You better hope you looked better than you do now, or she’s going to think she’s marrying a Bliss junkie.”
Adem filled his mouth with eggs so he wouldn’t be expected to respond.
“Have you looked at the guidelines for the ceremony?”
The eggs turned to dust in Adem’s mouth. “Do I have to learn lines or something?”
“Nothing. The matchmaker will conduct the ceremony. No human sacrifice. No invocation of god. Not even a toast. You’d think she’s not looking forward to getting married or something.”
“Can you blame her?” Adem said.
“Come on, it’s an adventure. A couple of years in space, a pocket full of money.” She drained her juice glass. “Besides, you’re not bad to look at, and Vee says you’re decent in the sack. What’s not to look forward to?”
“It’s not funny. I thought she’d at least give this a chance.”
“I’d throw a party or something for you two, but Mother probably already has one in the works. She’s not going to let her baby go quietly into married bliss. You’ll have a formal presentation of gifts and a shower of coins next thing you know.”
“I don’t want that,” Adem said. “If she doesn’t want that, I don’t.”
“Tell that to the captain. And you’d better tell her quick. She scheduled a call for,” she closed her eyes to check the ship’s time, “right about now.”
Adem shoveled the rest of his breakfast into his mouth and ran for the spine. He resisted using the emergency boost to get to the bridge faster only because he knew he’d be the one making repairs to the lift. He nearly tripped and fell through the bridge doorway in his haste. “Don’t change the wedding!”
“Why would I do something like that?” Adem’s mother pointed to the screen where the image of a woman in a severe uniform was buffering. “I’m talking to Hadiya right now. There’s a fifteen-minute delay so she has yet to receive proof that you’re ridiculous.”
“I thought…”
“That I would try to alter the ceremony? If the bride wants to keep it simple, there’s nothing I would do to change that. However, Hadiya and I are talking about the reception, which is up to the parents to plan. And I don’t believe we need your help.” She nodded at the screen where the image was still buffering. “Give your regards to the mother of the bride then go.”
Adem offered a formal bow to the screen. “Good day, Mother. It will be nice to meet you. I’m going back to work now.”
Adem took the lift to the engineering section, his face burning. He checked his to-do list and got caught flat-footed by a message from Lucy. Got you again, little brother.
The teasing didn’t diminish much over the next few weeks, but Lucy volunteered to come down the elevator with him and serve as Adem’s witness. She insisted on taking a cab to the matchmaker’s office rather than walk as Adem would have preferred. “We don’t need you to get broody before you meet your new wife,” she said. “By the time we got to the matchmaker your pockets would be empty and your mood soured for the rest of the day.”
Adem didn’t protest, and he let Lucy darken the windows. He mostly succeeded in not thinking about the boy he’d met the last time he was on Gaul. The boy would be close to thirty years old now or dead. “I feel like a stone skipping over the water,” Adem said.
“If that’s your way of saying you’re excited and nervous, welcome to the club,” Lucy said. “Mom says I have to help your lady acclimatize to the ship’s culture. What if she’s a handful? All you have to do is sleep with her.”
In minutes they were parked outside the office building Adem remembered from his last trip. The sidewalk outside was littered with trash and the pavement riddled with cracks. Down the street, the little green park had become a campsite filled with lean-tos and tents, the statue broken off at the knees. The matchmaker’s building was closed. Adem checked his reader. “She’s moved further out,” he said. They got back in the cab and rode for several more minutes before stopping in a better district.
“How do I look?” Adem said.
“Like you cut your own hair,” Lucy said, “but I suppose you don’t want to try to fool the poor girl into thinking you’re a stim star.”
Adem tugged at his collar. The suit he’d found waiting for him at the bottom of the elevator was stiff and uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure he’d gotten all of it on correctly, and Lucy had been no help. She’d watched him dress, not bothering to smother her laughter.
“I’ve never even seen this color before,” Adem said. “How does it look?”
“Watch her face when you walk in. If she looks horrified, Mother made a bad choice.”
Madam Toulouse met them in her office. She looked older, but not distressingly so. She’d settled into herself rather than aging. She patted Adem’s arm familiarly. “It’s good to see you again. It’s not often that I get to see this part.”
“Is she here?” Adem said.
“Right inside. Is this your mother?” She smiled at Lucy.
“Younger sister.” Lucy frowned. “My mother is probably yelling at everybody at the reception venue.”
Madam Toulouse lost a few degrees of unflappability. “Thank you for serving as a witness.”
The matchmaker led them down a short hallway. The door slid open on a medium-sized room with chairs lined up inside. “It’s a little ad hoc,” the matchmaker said. “We don’t do enough of these to make it worth maintaining a proper chapel.”
Adem was barely listening. Two women were sitting in the front row with an empty seat between them. Hadiya Sasaki had aged in a way that the matchmaker had not. Life had worn at her, and she had grown more solid in response. Adem bowed. “Mrs Sasaki, it is good to see you again.” His Turkish was poor, but he’d been practicing the phrase all the way down the elevator so he wouldn’t mangle it too badly.
Mrs Sasaki answered in Trader Esperanto. “I am no longer the uneducated girl you met all those years ago, Mr Sadiq. Is this your sister?”
While they introduced themselves, Adem almost absently let his eyes drift to the other woman. She was maybe a meter and a half tall, with a long face and strong nose. Her skin was a little lighter than her mother’s. She wore a fitted red dress, and her dark hair was up in a bun. Adem tugged his collar. It felt like it had tightened, but he’d given it no such instructions.
“I sent you a message…” Adem ran out of vocabulary.
“I don’t know much Turkish,” the woman said. “I speak French, New Portuguese, and a little German. I am also, per the terms of our contract, fluent in Trader Esperanto.”
Adem wrung his hands. “How are you? Who are you?”
“You’ll have your whole life to figure that out.” Madam Toulouse took his arm. “Adem Sadiq, this is Hisako Sasaki. Shall we begin?”
HISAKO
Age twenty-four
The matchmaker led us through the vows in French. I spoke at my cues; Adem spoke at his. Somewhere, the last payment slid into my mother’s savings account. She had offered it to me as a wedding present, but I refused so she’d have enough money, provided she kept working until she retired at eighty, to keep her little apartment, although I expected La Merde to claim it long before then. All her neighbors who could would move further out, and my mother would find herself among people she believed she’d escaped before I was born.
The Light Years Page 13