by Allen Steele
Although I’d long since learned the truth—there wasn’t a little boy aboard Galactique; it was just a story my father had made up—deep in my heart, I always believed that Sanjay was real, if only in a metaphorical sense. But when my father broke my heart, he also broke what little faith I still had in that childhood fantasy.
My family was shattered by the loss, but we did our best to pick up the pieces. Yet things only got worse. Six weeks later, Uncle Win and Aunt Martha came to Grandpa and Grandma with news of their own. While they were at the conference, Uncle Win had learned about a teaching position that was opening up in UC–Davis’s physics department. The job was tenure track, with a salary considerably higher than what he was earning from the Arkwright Foundation; without telling anyone except his wife, Winston had quietly submitted his résumé. Now the position was being offered to him, and the Crosbys had come to the conclusion that this was an opportunity too good to pass up.
I could be cynical and say that Winston Crosby’s idea of the Galactique Project being a sacred trust apparently had an expiration date, but in hindsight, I can’t blame him or Martha. Their titles as my aunt and uncle were honorary, after all, and although we’d always thought of them as family, they’d been on Juniper Ridge for almost eighteen years. Like Dad, they were pushing forty. My mother and grandparents didn’t want to see them go, but they reluctantly agreed that the time had come for them to move on. Their car was the next to leave Juniper Ridge, never to be seen again.
Since the observatory was now staffed by my family alone, Grandpa and Grandma decided that I needed to take on some of the work in the MC. Perhaps it was just as well. Mom had become even more reclusive, if that was possible. A borderline agoraphobic by then, she seldom left the house anymore, and when she did, it was only to putter around the greenhouse that was attached to the main house, a silent communion with the cucumbers, radishes, and tomatoes she planted after Dad went away. In many ways, she was an invalid, but it was even worse than that; heartbreak had made her a ghostly presence, a specter of the woman she’d once been.
I was old enough to look after myself, though, and since there wasn’t much else to do besides watch my mother silently suffer, I gratefully let my grandparents teach me what I needed to know: how to monitor the communications equipment, how to rotate the radio dish so that it could properly receive signals from the lunar tracking station, how to interpret the coded messages that periodically appeared on the screens. Grandpa still reserved for himself the crucial task of calculating the astrometric updates that occasionally needed to be transmitted to Galactique, but we both knew that responsibility would eventually become mine, as well. Despite the retrotherapy he and Grandma had undergone when they were younger, it was clear that the years were finally catching up with them. Their hair was graying, their postures were becoming stooped, and there were times when their short-term memories for little things weren’t as sharp as they used to be. Perhaps they’d never leave Juniper Ridge, but they wouldn’t outlive Galactique, either.
But I was getting older too, and I was no longer sure I wanted the role that was being put upon me.
6
My teens were not an extension of the idyll in which I’d spent my childhood (and it really was a happy time, all things considered). Although I was smarter than most kids my age, Mom had done me no favors by keeping me out of school. By the time I was sixteen, I’d become painfully aware that I was not only mostly friendless but also rather naïve.
I wasn’t entirely lonely. I’d established my own online social network, and although I’d never met any of the other kids with whom I communicated, I knew who they were and what they were up to. They often hid behind avatars and screen names, but I realized that their daily lives were much different from mine. I knew nothing of what it was like to be in homeroom with a cute boy whom they really liked, and when sex came up, I had to pretend to be just as wise about it as they seemed to be (they probably weren’t, but I didn’t know that). They bought their clothes in malls; I went shopping maybe two or three times a year, and a big day for me was when I’d get a new winter parka. They dropped casual references to sock bands of which I was only dimly aware, let alone seen. Yes, I could explain the Drake equation or the Doppler effect, but how many teenagers want to hear about that? Next to them, I was either a country bumpkin in bib overalls or a virgin princess locked in a castle tower, depending on the way I felt that particular day.
Naturally, I began to rebel.
I lost the argument with my mother about going to school, but she couldn’t stop me from using my feet. In the afternoons, I started walking down the road to Joni and Sara’s house, where I made a deliberate effort to cultivate their friendship. The twins were both fourteen by then, but in some ways, the three of us were the same age; I’d learned to dumb down a little bit when talking to them, and in return for helping them with their homework, they introduced me to music and movies and girl stuff that I wouldn’t have been exposed to otherwise. Sara continued to be a bit snooty—the Ogilvys had money, as she seldom missed an opportunity to remind me—but Joni and I became close friends. In years to come, that friendship would become valuable.
And I introduced myself to sex. Let’s be honest about this: I had no interest in being a thirty-year-old virgin. I wanted to get laid and wasn’t very particular about how I’d go about it. Which was just as well, because the only likely prospect was Teddy Romero. His father was another regular habitué of the Kick Inn, and Ted himself was just a few years away from elbowing up to the bar alongside his old man. He had the necessary equipment, though, and that’s all that really mattered. He was a bit surprised when I started coming down the road to the double-wide where he and his father lived and practically threw myself at him, but he obligingly took me out on a couple of dates and didn’t mind too much that I wouldn’t drink with him (liquor was something I’d shun my whole life, for obvious reasons). Two or three nights like that, and I finally got what I wanted from him; he drove me out to an abandoned granite quarry on the outskirts of Crofton and did the deed.
Losing my virginity wasn’t the rapturous experience I’d been led to believe it would be. Ted fumbled with my bra until I helped him open it, and he ruined my nicest pair of panties; he had beer on his breath, and he handled my breasts like they were wads of dough. I was glad I’d insisted that he wear a condom. Altogether, it was messy and rather degrading, but at least my curiosity was satisfied. Yet I had to brush my teeth twice to get the taste of his mouth out of my mouth, and I came away from the experience wondering why everyone made such a big deal about sex.
That was it for Ted. My mother was locked in her own little world, so she was unaware of my brief affair, and my grandparents obligingly looked the other way. I think they knew what I was doing and why, though, because when Ted showed up at the observatory a couple of nights later, Grandpa chased him away and told him not to come back again. I saw Teddy a few times after that, and he’d favor me with a leer and a wink, but after a while he lost interest in me, and in years to come, I’d occasionally spot him while I was in town, usually when he was lurching in or out of the Kick Inn.
By then, I had other things to worry about.
7
When I was eighteen, two things happened: I left home, and the Arkwright Foundation got in trouble.
College was both inevitable and welcome. I’d earned a GED after passing the state exams with such high scores that the local board of education made me take the tests again, this time under close supervision, just to make sure that I wasn’t cheating. They had a hard time believing that a girl who’d been homeschooled since age six could still manage to land in the top 1 percent of all students in a state known for the quality of its public education. Not only did I ace the GED exams but also the SATs, and those scores got me into UMass.
I would have liked to have gone to school a bit farther away than Amherst, but my mother wasn’t willing to loosen the leash quite that much. So I compromised with her; I’d sp
end two years at UMass, and if my grades held up and I still wanted to move on, she’d let me transfer to an out-of-state college if I could get into one. Which was fine with me. I intended to major in physics, and I had my eyes set on UC–Davis. Although the Crosbys had long since left Juniper Ridge, my family had kept in touch with them, and Uncle Win promised me that he’d put in a good word for me with the admissions office.
Try to understand: I’d lost interest in Galactique. I’d grown up hearing about the ship, but it had been years since I’d believed in the little boy I’d once thought was aboard. For me, the Arkwright Foundation was something that was started by my great-great-great-grandfather and now belonged to Mom and my grandparents. I’d be an old lady by the time Galactique reached Gliese 667C-e; the last thing I wanted was to find myself still sitting around the observatory, waiting for a weak signal from a distant star. My father was gone, the Crosbys had moved away, and now it was my turn to do the same.
So I packed my bags and kissed Mom and Grandma good-bye, and then Grandpa drove me down from the mountains. Compared to where I’d come from, the UMass campus was like a major city, and the dorm I moved into was more alien than the starship now a little more than nine light-years from Earth, but within a few weeks, I’d almost entirely forgotten about Galactique.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world didn’t do the same.
I’d settled into undergraduate life and was making friends with my fellow students—I was shy at first but soon discovered that I wasn’t that much weirder than anyone else there—when the Arkwright Foundation found itself receiving unwanted attention. A couple of years earlier, Grandpa had come to the realization that the foundation was beginning to run low on funds. From the beginning, it had depended on investments made into various private enterprises, mainly the space companies that had developed the technologies upon which the Galactique Project depended. The seed money for those initial investments had come from the royalties and licensing rights of Nathan Arkwright’s work; the foundation derived its start-up income from the Galaxy Patrol books and movies, and for a long time, the cash flow had been sufficient for the foundation to pursue its objectives.
But Galactique’s enormous development, construction, and launch costs had drained the funds. Since then, the investments that once provided a stable source of income had dried up when the supporting companies either folded or were bought out. The plan to lease the foundation’s beamer to private industry fizzled when several companies in the United States and China formed a consortium, SolEx, to build its own beamer in geosynchronous orbit. Although not as powerful as the foundation’s, the SolEx beamer was closer and easier to service than the old one at L-4. The Arkwright Foundation had hoped that the Galactique Project would spur the development of the solar system, but it was only partly successful. SolEx used its new beamer to venture out into space, but it went no farther than Mars, with commercial asteroid mining operations remaining close to Earth.
To add insult to injury, even the Galaxy Patrol franchise had sputtered into oblivion. No one but old people remembered Hak Tallus anymore. Nathan Arkwright became a writer many people had heard of but few actually read.
For a short while, there had been talk of building Galactique II, but the money simply wasn’t there. And although the foundation no longer had to pay for anything except Juniper Ridge, even those costs had become burdensome.
So Grandpa, who’d become the foundation’s president and chief financial officer as well as Galactique’s mission director, decided to take the unprecedented step of approaching the federal government for financial assistance. He’d made a request to the National Science Foundation for an annual grant of $500,000 on the grounds that Galactique was an interstellar probe launched for the benefit of all humanity and that the world would benefit from whatever knowledge we eventually learned. Galactique was well known to everyone, of course—the book Grandma had written about the project had been a bestseller—so the NSF had no trouble agreeing to Benjamin Arkwright’s request, and soon Juniper Ridge had a new source of funds to support itself.
Then some tightwad junior congressman from a red-dust state caught wind of this particular line item in the federal budget, and although $500,000 was barely worth a mention in the grand scheme of things, he decided that it was worth investigating. He claimed that the money would be better spent on drought relief in his district, but I suspected that he was looking for a way to bolster his own political career. In any case, he sicced his staff on the foundation, and they dug deep into its history, and within the dim shadows of the past, they discovered a dirty little secret: it seemed that the Arkwright Foundation had once bought a senator.
My grandparents didn’t tell me about the subpoena they’d received. They were worried that it might distract me from my studies, and besides, they didn’t take it very seriously. And my mother, of course, was mostly oblivious to the whole thing. So I was unaware of what was going on until my advisor happened to read about it in the news, and when he told me about it, I immediately called Grandma.
“What the hell is going on?” I demanded.
“Oh, it’s nothing to worry about,” she said as breezily as if we were talking about the unseasonal nor’easter that had just dumped six inches of snow on our part of the state. “Some fool in Washington sticking his nose where it doesn’t belong, that’s all. You shouldn’t be concerned about it.”
“It’s a subpoena, Grandma! It means you and Grandpa are going to have to testify before Congress!”
“Just a subcommittee hearing, dear. Grandpa’s doing the talking, and he’s getting a lawyer to help him with the testimony—”
“A lawyer!” The only time my family had ever hired a lawyer was when a contractor had done a lousy job installing a new septic tank for the house. We’d smelled trouble then, and I was getting the same kind of stench again.
“Just to give advice. Honestly, Dhani, it’s—”
“And what’s this about the foundation paying off a congressman to get an exemption from”—I stopped to glance at the news article I’d pulled up on my slate—“the Domestic Space Access Act? No one ever told me about that.”
A pause. “That was a long time ago, and it’s not what it sounds like. The press have got it all wrong, and so does the subcommittee.” Another pause. “Honey, I really can’t talk about it. Besides, you know how bad the phones are out here.”
The phones at Juniper Ridge had always worked fine. Grandma was giving me a hint that she suspected they might be tapped. Something cold slithered down my back. “Do you want me to come home?” I asked. “I can get out of classes and take the bus back if you—”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s necessary.” Another pause; this time, I heard Grandpa say something in the background. “Well, it would help if you could come back for a few days and keep your mother company when we’re in Washington. Do you think you could do that?”
“Sure. Of course.” After Dad went away, we’d been careful never to leave Mom alone for very long. My mother’s mental state was too fragile for us to expect her to take care of herself. “When do you want me to come home?”
“Two weeks from tomorrow.” Grandma’s voice brightened again. “Really, Dhani, it’s nothing to worry about. We’ve got the situation well in hand.”
A couple of weeks later, I took a few days off from school and returned home, catching an omnibus from Amherst and getting off in Crofton, then hiking the rest of the way to the observatory. My grandparents had left for D.C. only a few hours earlier, and Mom was already beside herself; it took an hour or so just to calm her down and convince her that she hadn’t been abandoned. Besides gardening, the one thing she was still capable of doing on her own was standing watch in the MC, but I checked anyway to see if there were any new messages. The last was a routine status report transmitted nearly twenty years earlier and received just the previous week. All was well. I went back to the house and made dinner for Mom and me.
Next morning, we sat toge
ther in the living room and watched the subcommittee hearings. They were being carried live on one of the Fedcom sites; I put it up on the holo, and it was almost as if we were in seated in the hearing room. As Grandma told me, Grandpa was the one doing the talking; a young woman not much older than I was seated at the witness table beside him, and while only a handful of people were visible in the background, I spotted Grandma directly behind Grandpa and his attorney.
They were outnumbered by the members of the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee. The chairman wasn’t the same congressman who’d made the accusations against the foundation; that was Representative Joseph Dulle (pronounced “doo-lay,” unlikely as that was), a moon-faced guy with a flattop haircut who looked like he’d probably spent his adolescence yanking up the underwear of smaller kids.
The chair yielded the floor to Representative Dulle, and he opened with a broadside attack. After it had come to his attention that the Arkwright Foundation had been the recipient of over $1 million in federal outlays—“for a project of dubious value even in terms of scientific research”—his staff had investigated the matter and discovered that, even though the foundation was claiming to be a nonprofit organization, it had derived most of its income from investments in some highly profitable enterprises, “making its nonprofit status suspicious at the very least.” To make matters worse, his staff discovered that, during the 2036 presidential election, the foundation had contributed $400,000 to the presidential campaign of late Senator Clark Wessen when he’d unsuccessfully sought his party’s nomination. Wessen, in turn, had not only publicly come out in support of the Galactique Project—“an unusual thing for a presidential candidate to be addressing when there were far more important matters on the agenda”—but also introduced and pushed through a Senate bill granting the foundation an exemption to the Domestic Space Access Act, thereby allowing it to use the Ile Sombre Space Launch Center instead of U.S. launch sites “as another means of avoiding having to pay federal taxes and user fees.”