by Joe Pace
While his mind ruminated, Pearce’s feet moved of their own volition, carrying him down the well-known corridors of Spithead. There were other orbital stations, of course, dozens of them, and he knew many of them, but he considered this his home port. He used a wall comm console to send word ahead to Mary at their apartment on the Isle of Man. The name was a historical curiosity, as no open water remained between Cumbria and Ireland; the entirety of the British Isles had long since become a single teeming mass. Still, he was a Briton, and Britons clung to their traditions and their artifacts. Spotting a transparent section of station wall, he paused to gaze down at the rotating orb below. Home. Not just to him, but to thirty billion people, all of them technically Britons, subjects of His Royal Highness, King Charles V. But the Pearces were ethnically Britons, counting as ancestors those who had lived under a King whose reign was limited to the islands, at a time when they were islands in truth and not just convention. Commoners we may be, he thought, but British commoners, at least.
The ferries left for the surface every hour, so there was only a short wait once Pearce arrived at the personnel terminal, duty bag over his shoulder. Four or five others sat in the rounded metal chairs, each plugged into his device, filament-thin cords trailing from their ears to their laps. One was familiar to Pearce, a young merchant officer he had seen at Spithead before, but he knew better than to nod, or wave, or make any sign of recognition. It would have been useless, not to mention rude. The man’s eyes were closed, his brain pleasantly swamped by his specific neuro-customized mix of words and music. Pearce had never quite gotten the hang of them, though many of his fellow-officers swore by the things. Maybe I just don’t know how to relax, he thought. Or maybe I simply haven’t hit on the right formula yet. The shuttle came then, a portly, doddering oil-eater. Filing in with the others, Pearce closed his own eyes and let his mind drift to thoughts of home.
About an hour later, the shuttle touched down at the Douglas Bay modal hub, and Pearce felt Earth beneath his feet for the first time in four months. Some star-mariners swore they could feel the world spinning underneath them when they weren’t in space, but he thought that was mostly just talk. On-board artificial gravity and environmental systems were so advanced now that they simulated not merely diurnal patterns but seasonal rhythms, and unless you looked out a port glass, you would never have known you were in space. But you do know. You never really forget that the void is inches away. He felt heavier ashore, and, strangely, trapped. They were above him, below him, his neighbors and fellow subjects of the King, in teeming numbers. Here, he was one of tens of billions, and he felt a momentary pang of longing for the sense of freedom and elbow-room of a cramped starship parsecs away, for the intimacy of a crew at work, for the elation he felt while doing what he knew he was made to do.
Mary understood that about him, God bless her, and he loved her as much for that as for anything else. She knew he was drawn to that void, and that he was more at home among the stars than with her. He had never been unfaithful to her, at least, not with another woman. Sometimes he wondered if that would be worse or better for her than sharing his heart with the stars. It was not an experiment he ever intended to carry out.
He was in the Gray Apartments then, the vast cluster of fifty-story buildings that housed millions. They were comfortable places, and not cheap. As he walked down the forty-fifth corridor of building twelve, he noted with pleasure the clean, well-lit floor and walls. He had grown up in far less affluence. His own parents had shared their rooms with two other families, rooms that smelled unremittingly of the agrifactories where his father worked. Pearce had gone into the Navy as soon as he was old enough, to get away from that odor as much as the overcrowding. There are no smells in space, he thought, and then he was at his own door. He keyed in his access code, the door slid open, and he stepped inside.
“Dad!”
James was taller than Pearce remembered, but not much. At thirteen, the boy still only stood a little taller than a meter and half. And he moved stiffly, with none of the kinetic restlessness a child his age should have. His eyes were prominent in his pale face, so much like his own, and they were intelligent eyes, curious eyes, that right now reflected only joy at his father’s homecoming. Pearce dropped his bag and crossed the room to embrace his son, unable to ignore how thin he was. After a moment, he broke and held James at arms’ length, hands on both his shoulders.
“Looking good, son,” he lied. “Before I know it you’ll be ready for a ship of your own.” It was what he always said when he first came home, and it never failed to light the boy up from inside. Until now. This time James merely smiled, just a little, and that joy in his eyes dimmed.
“Sure, Dad. Why not.” There was a heaviness in his son’s voice that had not been there before, and it chilled Pearce’s heart. The boy had always been cheerful, even through all the procedures and surgeries and tests that he had undergone. Each year he grew slower and weaker and smaller than other boys his age, yet there was a durable optimism, a seeming imperviousness to his own progressive erosion, that gave James a fierce, infectious charisma. Pearce looked for some hint of that now, some echo of the boy who always joked with his doctors and thought the full-body scanners were an adventure. But he looked without success.
Tell me he hasn’t given up on himself, Pearce thought. Tell me we have more time than that.
“Billy.”
Mary Pearce stood in the doorway to the kitchen, hugging herself with white arms. Her long red hair was up, not quite as fiery as it once was, and there were lines creeping across her sharp features, but Pearce loved her, and went to her. She smelled of synthed olives, and something flowery, and nothing the least bit like the agrifactories. He kissed her, as long and deeply as he dared in front of James, and brutally shoved aside his concerns. His arm still around her waist, holding her against his hip, he turned to face their son.
“When did he grow up, Mary?”
“Dad, come on.” James smiled, that small, sad smile again, and reddened the way his mom did when she was embarrassed. He has her Irish blood.
“I have something for you,” Pearce said, remembering. “In my bag.”
With a touch on the panel latch, the boy opened the long, cylindrical case. Carefully tucked in amongst the rolled clothes and toiletries was a wad of red cloth no larger than his fist. Pearce watched, looking forward to an excited gasp that never came. Instead, once he unrolled the cloth and saw the miniature starship fall into the palm of his delicate hand, James merely stared at it.
“It’s a toy,” he said dully.
“It’s a Greyhound-class sloop,” Pearce said. “The ships the Navy used to break the heliosheath at the edge of the solar system for the first time, back in ’97.” When James failed to react to this, Pearce frowned and glanced at his wife, but she looked down and did not meet his gaze. “We’ve been trying to find one for years, remember? It completes our collection of the pre-2100 models.”
“Your collection.”
James carefully set the exquisitely detailed miniature on the table. It was beautiful, sleek and needle-shaped, slate-gray, with a sweeping fin that ran underneath its entire length. Pearce had paid three times what it was worth when he found it in a New Indies trading shop, reveling in the anticipation of bringing it home. For the better part of a decade he had been seeking out the little ships, sharing them with his son, telling him stories of humanity’s earliest forays into the stars. There were hundreds of models in the series, and at least half were now lining the shelves in James’ bedroom, from the frail Lunar module that first reached the moon more than two centuries before, to the gargantuan modern frigates, the fortresses of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. With as much as Pearce had been away from home, this had been his one unbreakable link with James, their great shared passion.
And now his son walked away from it, without a word, into his room, and closed the door.
****
After dinner, after James went
to bed, they made love, not without passion, and it had that special urgency that came when he was newly home. Afterwards, as he lay in the tangled sheets, she rose and swiftly pulled on a robe. I wish she wouldn’t do that. He thought she was beautiful, despite their passage beyond youth into the sagging solidity of early middle age. Mary had always been modest, to the point of shyness, even when they had been younger. She was a Kirkpatrick, a Catholic, and had been taught shame from the cradle. Their physical intimacy was always in the dark, and that had ever been a source of equal mild frustration and erotic mystery for Pearce. He somehow doubted that Christine Fletcher ever hurried to get dressed after her sexual encounters.
That’s damned odd, he thought, and wondered what on Earth had made him think of her that way now, when he never did during all their time together in space.
“I love you, Mary.” He said it because he knew it would please her, but also because it was true. He also wanted to shake the stray thought of Christine from his mind. She glanced back over her shoulder, her hair unbound and wild, still more red than gray, and smiled at him. In the dimness of their bedroom, in the fading glow of the sex, he could swear she was twenty again, the fierce and desirable girl who had approached the young midshipman on the street and complimented him on his new uniform. I must have been a fine figure of a man, thought Pearce, when I had a future. Mary sat, pulling her legs up under her, and took his hand. She held it, gently, as if not quite believing he was there.
“When will you be going out again, Billy?” She said it lightly, as if she were just making conversation, but he sensed the tightness in her, and knew this to be the opening salvo in a more complicated discussion, one they’d had before.
“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “As soon as I can.” He knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, felt the grip on his hand tighten, but he never lied to her. He knew she both loved and hated him for that.
“I’d thought…” she began, “I’d thought maybe you could stay for a while this time. For James…”
“I’m doing this for James.” His voice grew stern, just a hint of his quarterdeck bark. “Do you think I enjoy being out there so much, away from the both of you?”
“Yes,” she replied, quietly, her eyes beginning to brighten, as if she might cry. “I know you do, and so do you, William Pearce, so let’s not fool ourselves on that score.” He spread his hands, pulling the one from her grasp.
“Guilty, Mary. I do love what I do, and I’m damn good at it, and I won’t be made to feel ashamed of that. I’m not the Catholic here.” It was an unnecessary taunt, and beneath him, but they had been down this path before, always ending in tears, and a small, unworthy part of him resented the damned robe. She chose to ignore the remark, and persisted.
“James needs you here, Billy, not out there. You can’t help him out there.”
“Yes, I can. Damn it all, I can. This was a profitable trip, and a few more like this…”
“There could be ten more like it and it still wouldn’t make a bit of difference!” She interrupted him, taking his hand back in both of hers. “You’ve made enough money to make us comfortable, and to buy all the Common 2 meds in the world, but he doesn’t need any more bloody Common 2 meds!” She was crying now, the tears bursting free from her eyes and streaming down her freckled face. Pearce always looked away when she cried, hating to see it, but this time he couldn’t. Mary never cursed. Something had changed.
“What is it, love?” he asked, quietly. She fell into him, and he wrapped her in his arms and waited a moment, and then asked again. “What happened while I was gone?” He could feel her shaking against him, sobbing, and he stroked one hand against her back, cold terror creeping into his chest.
“The last round of tests,” she said wetly, muffled against him, still crumpled in his embrace. “Dr. Mendoza said the meds are having diminishing effectiveness.” She looked up, her damp face inches from his, her eyes shining with grief and impotent rage. “That’s what he said, ‘diminishing effectiveness’. Billy, he said that if James doesn’t have the procedure in the next two years, he’ll be…” Mary put a hand to her mouth and drew a shuddering breath in through her nose. “He’ll be dead in three years. He needs his father, not more money for meds.”
Pearce stared at her, trying not to process what she had said. He knew James was sick, of course, they had known that virtually his entire life. And he knew what the doctors had told them, that McNally-Fink killed before adulthood. But he had put that information somewhere else, somewhere he didn’t have to deal with it, and told himself that there were years and years before James became a teenager and approached that fatal threshold. With medication, the disease could be managed, the doctors had said. With medications, expensive medications, the boy could have a decent quality of life in the years that remained. What he couldn’t do was have access to the gene replacement therapy that could counter the syndrome and give him a future. It was massively expensive, and not available to commoners. Mary’s right, he thought, as his wife dissolved against him in another paroxysm of weeping. I could have twenty trips like this last one and never make enough to afford it. He thought then of the Greyhound model, still sitting abandoned on the table by the door.
“He knows.” It was a statement, not a question, and Mary’s head nodded silently against him. James had always been brave in the face of this disease. He had always spoken of how he would defeat it, how he would beat it back and grow up strong and tall and travel the stars like his father. All those illusions were gone now. His son knew there were only so many tomorrows now, that each day would be worse than the one before. My sweet boy. His mind flooded with vivid memories, of the day James was born, of carrying the infant boy on board the Drake, where he was blessed by Jane Baker herself on her last day orbiting Earth. By the time the ship returned home a year later, Baker was dead and James had been diagnosed. Pearce had been gone more than he had been home these last ten years, and now his son, his doomed son, was thirteen, and he had missed most of it. He wouldn’t miss any more.
“I’ll stay,” he whispered to Mary, burying his nose in her unkempt curls.
Three
Dreams
The summons had come via messenger, on actual notepaper, in a sealed envelope. When the brown-jacketed girl handed it to him at the door, he had known at once it had been sent by someone of great importance. Who else had access to such luxury? It felt like real paper, too, not the synthetics that some upper-class climbers used as a status symbol. In the service, it was tradition for captains to receive their sailing instructions from the Admiralty on paper, and he still remembered the packet that had come with orders for his final naval assignment, more than ten years before. That had been the last time he had seen – or touched – genuine paper.
For a moment his heart had quickened, as he thought this message might be along those lines, something unlooked-for from the Star Lord, some miraculous resuscitation of his career, but the girl had been a private courier, not a uniformed yeoman. On the front of the small envelope – too small to be an official communiqué anyway, he noted – his name appeared in flowing script, with his address. The reverse bore merely a simple, embossed red B superimposed over the sealed flap. He thought to ask the messenger girl who had sent it, but she was gone.
“Bill?” It was Mary, calling him from inside their small apartments. “Bill, who was that?”
“A courier, dear,” he replied, stepping back across the threshold. He broke the seal, splitting the B into two equal halves, and drew out the card within. The inscription, in the same flowing hand that had addressed the envelope, read:
Dear Lt. Pearce,
Please do me the favor of joining me at my Spring Grove home for supper on Saturday next. Shall we say eight in the evening? A private compartment will await your convenience at the Douglas Bay tube station at twenty minutes before eight. Please do bring your lovely wife.
Yours cordially,
Lord John Banks
Fifteenth Earl of Northumberland
Science Minister to His Royal Majesty
“Well?” asked Mary. “What does it say? Who is it from?” She saw the look on her husband’s face, and her heart skipped a beat. “Not the Admiralty.” It was a question, a statement, and a prayer. She knew it was unworthy of her, and that she should feel differently, but she dreaded the unlikely day when the Navy called her husband back to service.
“No.” Pearce closed the door, still staring at the paper, a deep crease in his brow. “No, it’s from Lord John Banks.”
“The Earl?” Mary knew who he was, of course, everyone did; the man was a celebrity, as much for being the handsomest bachelor in the Empire as for being perhaps the smartest man. “What does he want?” Pearce handed the paper to his wife, who read it rapidly, and then again as if she were dissecting each sentence into its elemental parts.
“He calls me lovely,” she said, a wry smile on her lips, “as though we’d ever met.”
“And me Lieutenant, a rank I haven’t held for years. You know these aristocrats, Mary. They learn their courtesies like we commoners learn to read.” He took back the paper, folded it into its envelope, and tucked it into his jacket.
“I’m going to need a new dress,” Mary said.
“You’ll go?” Pearce asked, a little surprised. His wife had been social enough when they were first together, Pearce a young Navy lieutenant. During his time ashore, they had enjoyed many dinners and parties with other young officers and their wives or husbands, but after James’ diagnosis, Mary had retreated. Now she made a sour face at Pearce’s question.