Burning Dreams

by Margaret Wander Bonanno

  “He was boyish,” she told Chris now. “More than a decade older than I was, but something about his enthusiasm made me want to mother him. I admired his mind, and I felt safe in his arms. It wasn’t some great passionate affair, but it was comfortable.

  “Can we stop here?” she asked suddenly, indicating a turnoff overlooking the sea. They never seemed to be too far from the sea. “I want to look at the stars.”

  Pike obliged, bringing the car to a gentle stop and sliding the convertible top back. They were far enough away from any city lights and, as if on cue, the moon began to slip down the sky, leaving them to the stars. Vina leaned back against the headrest, her head tilted upward, talking as much to the stars as to her companion.

  “We traveled together, Theo and I. I became his archivist and assistant. There were expeditions leaving all the time, stretching the limits of explored space.” She began pointing out specific lights in the sky, ticking off their names as she did. “I’ve been to that one, and that one and…oh, the other one’s only visible in the southern sky…Where is Elysium?” She was looking at Pike now. “I don’t think you told me the name of its primary.”

  “It only had a number then,” Chris said tightly. He’d hoped they could stay away from his memories for a while. Something else he’d noticed was that when either of them was reliving their own memory, the other couldn’t participate. He’d tried to see Paris through Vina’s eyes, tried to see her as a little girl, but couldn’t; he’d had to rely exclusively on her words. He wondered if it was his reluctance to show her everything about his past that excluded him from seeing hers. “After I…left…they gave it a name, but I don’t know if I ever found out what it was.”

  “You mean after you were accepted at the Academy?” Vina guessed. She doubted very much that a Starfleet officer would not know the name of Elysium’s star, but if he chose not to tell her, that didn’t matter. Chris’s hands tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. He was trying mightily not to go back into that particular memory just yet. Vina seemed not to notice.

  “I was just thinking, when you were talking about the earthquakes, that it’s too bad Heston never met Theo,” she went on. “He might have been able to offer him a second opinion he’d accept. Theo could be very persuasive, you might remember.”

  Her words brought Chris out of his reverie.

  “How would I remember that?”

  Vina wasn’t looking at him, but rather at the silk scarf, which she’d taken off and was twisting nervously in her hands. Her voice trembled slightly.

  “Of course, the man you met was just a projection of what he would have been like if he’d lived, but they did an uncannily good job…”

  “Theo,” Chris repeated the name, and finally the penny dropped. “Not Dr. Theodore Haskins—?”

  “—of the American Continent Institute…” they said together.

  Pike remembered his “encounter” with Haskins at the survivors’ camp—the illusion of a survivors’ camp—before the Talosians drugged him and secreted him beneath the surface.

  “He seemed like a nice old guy,” he said before he realized what he was saying.

  Vina wore a bemused expression. “That ‘nice old guy’ wasn’t quite so old when I knew him…”

  Suddenly everything he’d said a moment ago about being a rube seemed hopelessly true. Chris hadn’t felt this flummoxed in the presence of a female since Silk. He all but leapt out of the aircar, and strode to the edge of the fieldstone wall at the cliff’s edge and back before he trusted himself to speak.

  “Vina, I’m sorry. I don’t know where to put myself. Everything I say must seem designed to hurt you, but that’s the last thing I want to do. This whole time distortion of here and now and then and your being younger than me and older than me and…”

  “…and you struggling mightily to keep me from intruding into your memories,” she said.

  “Was it that obvious?”

  She nodded without speaking, patted the seat he’d leapt out of, and he stopped acting like a fool and came to sit beside her.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” she said. “I won’t pester you to tell me what terrible thing happened in your childhood—because there was some terrible thing; the way you reacted to the Talosians’ first attempts to control you made that clear—but you’ll tell me in your own good time. Now, we can be quiet and just drive back to the villa, or we can wish ourselves there in an instant, or go anywhere or do whatever you want.”

  “Or we can finish telling our stories.”

  “Or that. In my case, there isn’t much else to tell.” Her voice took on a dreamy quality. She lolled her head back and was once more studying the stars. “Part of Theo’s appeal was that, like my diplomats, he’d been everywhere. But in his case it was about exploring uninhabited worlds, worlds that might be suitable for colonies, just like Elysium. For all I know, Elysium might have been one of the worlds he mapped for the institute. He was a visiting professor at the university until the institute could get another expedition together. I was still finishing my degree when he hired me as his assistant. On most voyages, I was the youngest member of the team…”

  The teams might be composed of a dozen or more—geologists, astronomers, biologists and entomologists, paleontologists and zoologists and speleologists, oh my—under the aegis of groups like the American Continent Institute, the Olduvai Society, the Aldebaran Rock Hounds, and any one of a score of others, all under contract to the Federation to explore one uncharted planet after another, categorizing rocks and minerals, flora and fauna.

  A group would form at a starbase, bunk on a starship patrolling a region, visit a previously unexplored world, hitch a ride back to the starbase when the starship came by again, then go their separate ways, only to regroup—losing some members, adding others—the next time there was a potential colony, or source of mineral wealth, that needed cataloging.

  It was a gypsy life under the stars of worlds where no human had trod before, with tales told around campfires nightly to the tune of many human musics and the imbibing of various human beverages.

  “People think scientists are dull,” Vina said. “Nothing could be further from the truth. We worked hard by day, and partied hard at night. The stories I heard, the people I got to know…they were my extended family.”

  “Some of them were ‘there’ when my crew and I first beamed down,” Pike guessed.

  Vina nodded. “They kept me company during the early months, when I was too damaged to move. The Talosians saw to that. They exactly captured each of the scientists who was aboard Columbia, replicating them from the data they salvaged from the library computer, and from what I knew about each of them.”

  Her eyes glistened with tears in the starlight.

  “We were heading home. Theo and I had asked the captain to marry us on the return voyage. We were passing the Talos Star Group…”

  There was a long silence.

  “There’s something about ships named Columbia…” Pike said softly, not knowing what else to say.

  “Sometimes the biggest mistake we make when we’re young,” Vina said, her face turned away from him so he couldn’t read her expression, though her voice told him she was weeping, “is in thinking we have our whole lives ahead of us. If I’d known…”

  She turned toward him then. “You don’t know how painful it was to act out the illusion they created when you beamed down that first time. To see Theo as the mature man he’d never have a chance to be, while I had to pretend to be someone he thought of as a child…”

  Chris could picture the old man now, hear his voice, see him chucking Vina under the chin as if she were a favorite child: “This is Vina. Her parents are dead. She was born almost as we crashed.”

  “Your parents…” Chris said now, but couldn’t finish.

  “It was a lie, obviously. My parents never left Earth. For all I know, Maman is still delivering fresh croissants to the Federation commissary every morning, and
Daddy is planning yet another production of Coppelia. They’d be quite elderly now. The shock of seeing me, if I decided to return from the dead…”

  She shook her head, unable to finish the thought.

  “I told you the Talosians made mistakes that first time. They were so frantic to capture you, to win you over, the whole thing had an air of improvisation…”

  Chris really didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. The road among the cedars was becoming oppressive. “Would you mind if we ended this and did something else?” he asked finally.

  Vina shook her head. “Not at all.”

  The aircar dissolved around them; so did her silk scarf.

  He thought of the homestead on Elysium and immediately it took shape around him. He could see from the expression on Vina’s face that she saw it, too. He wondered how her presence would affect his memory of the place and what had transpired there. He searched his mind for an image of a petite blond woman—an adult when he was a child—and couldn’t remember her.

  As if he were walking through a gradually clearing mist, Pike saw the familiar half-timbered two-story ranch house take shape, though it seemed smaller than he remembered it. There were the flowering shrubs Willa had persuaded to grow around the foundation, and Charlie’s jellyplants. There were the outbuildings, the barn and the storage silos which, ultimately, were never used to store anything, the paddock for the horses, and of course the infernal Gizmo. What he saw next startled him.

  He was standing outside the scene with Vina, watching himself as a boy. It was like looking at a family video, though he couldn’t remember anyone taking images of him at this time, and even if they had, they’d have been lost in what happened later.

  “It’s the next phase,” he heard her say beside him. He didn’t remember how long they’d been holding hands. “The Magistrate and the others…they’re getting used to you. The first time you were here, you spent so much time fighting them, they never got a chance to really learn you…”

  As they watched, young Chris emerged from the house, the screen door slamming behind him as he raced across the yard to the paddock, where he climbed the fence and whistled to Maia, who was not yet sleek and fat with pregnancy. His glance moved inevitably toward the Gizmo, and he could see it was only a fraction of the size it ultimately became.

  So the tape has been rewound, he thought. This was before the bad things happened, maybe even before Charlie came.

  “Oh, look at you!” Vina said softly, a smile in her voice. “You’re adorable!”

  “Adorable—?” he snorted. “People said I was a good-looking kid, but—”

  “Adorable,” she repeated. “I want to just grab you and hug you and ruffle that gorgeous wavy hair!”

  “At that age I’d have hated it, but now…”

  “Shh,” Vina said. “Don’t spoil the moment.”

  Pike studied his younger self and saw a sturdy, cheerful small boy, exuberant and running free, not the anguished preteen whose nights were spent awake and watchful (hearing Heston shift in his chair just below his window, scowling at things unseen in the dark, the laser rifle across his lap), and whose days were spent overhearing things he couldn’t do anything about.

  The Talosians’ purpose, he supposed, was to have him relive this portion with Vina seeing it through his eyes, up until where he’d left off, and what happened next.

  “I don’t know,” he said, taking Vina’s arm and wanting to lead her—where? They could turn their backs on the homestead, but could they step out of the illusion? “I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to see this part.”

  “Why not?” she asked with a sudden intensity. “It’s what joins us, isn’t it? What we saw in each other’s eyes from the beginning…we’ve each had a baptism of fire…”

  Toward the final months of her pregnancy, Charlie put Maia entirely in Chris’s care. He fed her, groomed her, exercised her. His grades started to fall off, and Willa almost intervened, but watching him commune with the big chestnut mare over the eleven months of her pregnancy, she realized this was his greatest joy in what had become a fairly bleak existence for all of them, and she let him be. Even when, at Charlie’s suggestion, he began sleeping on a cot outside Maia’s stall during the last month, his mother had the wisdom to leave him alone.

  He wasn’t as lucky with Heston.

  “We’re going to solve this thing before the starship gets back,” the big man announced one morning barely a day after the doctor told Heston his leg was healed enough to walk on. Chris was alone in the barn, mucking out Maia’s stall. “You can finish that later. Come with me.”

  Chris opened his mouth to argue, but saw the dangerous look in his stepfather’s eye. He gave Maia a pat and the last lump of sugar in his pocket and followed Heston to the ’car. As they passed Charlie in the yard, Chris wanted to say something, but he wasn’t sure what. He was aware of Charlie’s eyes on them as the ’car lifted off and skimmed just above the low hills surrounding the homestead.

  The ’car seemed to be flying low, lumbering as if it were carrying more than the recommended weight. A glance back at the cargo compartment told Chris it was packed full of strange equipment whose function he couldn’t begin to guess. But he wasn’t at all surprised when Heston settled the ’car on a natural ledge near the rim of the still-steaming volcano and began off-loading various contraptions.

  Peering over the rim, Chris could see what Heston had been tinkering with all these weeks. He had no idea what it was supposed to do, but he couldn’t help noticing how far down inside the cone it was, and that parts of it projected into the side, and down beyond where he could see.

  “We’re not going down there, are we?” he said, forcibly keeping the fear out of his voice.

  “You bet we are,” Heston said, handing him a rock climber’s harness like the one he’d snapped on himself while the boy was peering over the rim. “Let’s not waste any time. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Heston showed him how to rappel down the treacherously sheer sides of the cone, bringing various pieces of equipment with them each time. Getting back up was harder, even empty-handed. The cone was the consistency of glass in some places, crumbling and scattering cinders in others. His stepfather had been doing this long enough to make it look easy, but Chris was struggling, trying not to notice the impatient way Heston scowled at him when he’d once again beaten him to the top.

  For the rest of the morning and well into the afternoon, he and Heston transported the contents of the cargo bay down to the construction point midway down inside the cinder cone. The ambient temperature grew hotter the farther down they went, and no matter how much he drank, Chris couldn’t replenish his sweat fast enough. He no longer wondered if he was imagining the volcano suddenly erupting, spewing lava toward them and swallowing them whole, or if it was really happening.

  Heston worked like a madman, stopping neither to rest, eat or drink. Every time Chris stopped for water or an energy bar to keep from shaking with hunger, Heston would glower at him, wiping sweat and black volcanic ash off his face, not saying anything, but implying that he thought Chris was weak for having to stop.

  “Mind telling me what we’re doing?” the boy asked sullenly after Heston had assigned him to bring the rest of the stuff down while he went to work, hammering and soldering, and the silence, punctuated only by banging and sawing and grunts of “hand me that” and “bring the red container down next,” had gone on for several hours.

  “Making a pact with Nature,” Heston said tightly, fitting an angled bit of pipe into place. “The Neworlders treat her like a jealous god, always tiptoeing around her. Me, I treat her as an equal. We understand each other, we work together, we both benefit.”

  “What’s the benefit to Nature if we harness the volcano?” Chris wanted to know, but Heston didn’t answer. He jerked his chin in the direction of the ’car.

  “You’re slacking. There are three more containers up there.”

  �
�How about I just secure them and lower them in a sling instead of having to bring them down by hand?” Chris asked.

  Heston scowled. “If your rig starts to sway and strikes the side, you can damage the container. Maybe rip it open and lose everything. Lazy as well as slacking. Get up there and get busy!”

  It was half in Chris’s mind to pull himself up to the rim, his arms and shoulders aching from the labor, find an accessible slope to get down to the base of the mountain, and keep walking, back to the homestead, which he’d estimated was only a couple of miles away, though working his way through the foothills would make it almost twice the distance. He wasn’t supposed to know how to drive the aircar, though he could in a pinch. But as if anticipating rebellion, Heston had removed the starter and sealed it up in a pocket of his shirt.

  Still, as he stood there for a long moment holding a case full of small parts and looking down at the now doll-sized figure of his stepfather scurrying and tinkering like some ancient caveman designing a trap for some unspecified prey, Chris was tempted.

  “What a bully!” he heard Vina say beside him. “I’d have told him to stuff it and gone home.”

  “Remember what you told me about how the Talosians kept at you and at you until they wore you down?” Chris said a little testily.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s your memory. I’ll be quiet.”

  Three more containers, he told himself, and then I’m gone. He can’t keep me here! He realized his stepfather intended to drill straight into the core of the volcano.

  “Special alloy…” he was muttering when Chris arrived on the ledge. “…can withstand temperatures that would melt most metals. Had to go through all manner of maneuvering to get it here, bribes to have it brought down in a shuttle instead of beamed in. Here, hold this.”