LEAVING ELYSIUM
The fires ultimately consumed hundreds of thousands of acres, killed countless wild creatures, and displaced several settlements before it was contained, though mercifully there were only two human casualties. As the starship left orbit, the path of the conflagration was visible even from space. Chris insisted on seeing it.
The ship’s surgeon released him from sickbay as soon as his hands were healed. Charlie came to pick him up. He was wearing a Starfleet uniform, and carrying another.
“I guessed at your size,” he said, holding the unadorned gold shirt up against the boy’s chest. Charlie’s shirt, Chris saw, was red. “Captain has invited us up to the bridge once we’ve left orbit.”
Chris shook his head vaguely. “Do we have to?”
“I told him you were grieving. Maybe in a day or two.”
Too numb to question anything, he followed Charlie down the half-deserted corridors, where passing crew members murmured, “I’m sorry for your loss,” and he thanked them. His mother would have wanted it that way. He wondered if any of the other colonists had been evacuated and whether they were on the ship, or if he and Charlie were the only ones. He had a thousand questions, but was too tired to ask them. When Charlie keyed in the combination to open the door into a two-man crew member’s quarters, Chris took the bunk farthest from the door and jerked his chin toward the comm unit.
“Can I—May I watch us leave orbit?”
Charlie knew what the real question was. “Are you sure you want to?”
Chris nodded. “I want to see how bad it is.”
He watched the planet recede with a kind of leaden resignation. The destruction was visible even from this distance, a vast charred scar across a once-pristine landscape. Chris stared until the ship shot into warp, his mind’s eye filled with fire and his last glimpse of his mother’s face. He wished he had died with her.
Seeing the look on the boy’s face, Charlie wondered if he’d done the right thing. But he told himself it was better for Chris to see the reality, fix it in his mind, than to have it hidden from him so that for the rest of his life he would imagine it far worse than it actually was.
As if anything could be worse than losing your mother at such a tender age, Charlie thought grimly. He would keep his own loss to himself for now.
When there was nothing but the warp effect to see, Chris flicked off the commscreen, rolled over with his back to Charlie, and tumbled into a sleep like death.
8
2231: Somewhere in Space
He had no idea how long he slept curled in a fetal position with his face turned toward the bulkhead. When he woke, he found that Charlie had left him a note on the comm saying he’d be back at eighteen hundred hours, but Chris was to feel free to roam about the common areas of the ship, or ask a crew member for directions. The idea held no appeal for him, and he went back to his bunk, where he sat with his knees drawn up for a very long time, staring at nothing.
When Charlie did return, carrying a tray full of covered dishes, Chris barely glanced at him. Something smelled wonderful, but he didn’t feel like eating. Charlie sat at the desk that doubled as a table for meals and broke the silence.
“How you feeling?” he ventured, trying to make it sound casual.
“How do you think I feel?” Chris’s voice was raw and surly.
Charlie was doling out something Chris would later learn was called Engine Room Stew, its ingredients a never-ending mystery as each shift added new ingredients from the food dispensers, or from planets they had visited. “My guess is you’re afraid to feel. Got it all sealed up inside, telling yourself you’ll get to it later, hoping later never comes.”
“That’s not true!” the boy said too quickly.
“I had a word with the ship’s surgeon,” Charlie said, keeping his voice casual. “She says if you’d like to talk to somebody…”
“You mean a shrink? So I can feel better about what happened? I don’t want to feel better!”
Charlie let that go. “There’s something you need to know about your mother…”
“Don’t you dare talk about my mother!” Chris snapped. “You don’t know anything about her!”
Or maybe you know too much about her, and I don’t want to know how much you know! was his next thought. What did it matter, if his mother was dead?
He turned away again, but Charlie could hear him crying. When the sound devolved down into a kind of soft hiccuping, he ventured into the room and sat on the edge of his bunk. The boy felt the weight and shrank away from him. Charlie touched his shoulder lightly and he shrugged him off.
“I’m sorry, Chris…” Charlie began, but got no further.
“You had no right to drag me out of there!” Chris’s voice was muffled by the pillow. “I hate you!”
“Do you still think you could have saved her?”
Chris sat up abruptly, fury in his face. “Yes! No…I don’t know…but it was my choice to make, not yours!”
“And because it would have been easier for you to die trying to rescue her than live knowing you couldn’t,” Charlie said quietly.
“Somebody should have done something!”
“You’re right!” Charlie agreed, an edge to his voice. “Your stepfather should have acted like a responsible adult, and when it was clear he wouldn’t, someone should have intervened. Maybe I should have reported him to the Council. Or your mother should have left him and taken you with her. Heston would be just as dead, but she’d still be alive.”
“Don’t you dare try to blame this on my mother—!”
“I’m not!” Charlie said, loudly enough to make the boy twitch, then lowered his voice to its usual soft-spoken level. “Adults make mistakes, Christopher. All of us should have done things differently. I thought of leaving as soon as the first foals were born. I stayed because I thought I could do something. We all failed you, Chris. There’s no way around that.”
Chris had no answer for that.
“One thing’s for certain, though,” Charlie went on, “and it’s that none of what happened is your fault.”
Chris started to say something, then forgot what it was. What sense did it make for him to blame Charlie for saving his life?
He thought about those last moments before the house caught fire, remembered the trembling weight of Tango leaning against him, his eyes rolled back with fear, his nostrils flaring against the smoke. He’d been just about to release him, send him and Maia out ahead of the fire…
Too little too late. Maia was gone, Tango was gone, the homestead destroyed, and his mother dead. All he had left was Charlie.
Leaving him alone to sort things out, Charlie had gone back to dishing out the stew. Suddenly Chris realized how hungry he was. When had he eaten last, and what? Everything had tasted like ash in those last few days. His legs as wobbly as a newborn colt’s, he staggered over to sit on the other side of the desk from Charlie, and began to eat, cleaned his plate, and helped himself to seconds. The fog he’d been under since he woke in sickbay began to clear, and he realized he needed the answers to an awful lot of questions.
“How many of the other colonists are heading back to Earth?”
“Just a few,” Charlie said. “Most just took temporary shelter in the city. They’ll be going home as soon as it’s safe. The Neworlders decided to stay.”
Silk was safe, then, if growing up a Neworlder could be considered safe. Chris realized they’d never be able to communicate again.
“So Heston was right. They’re going to take over the whole planet.”
Charlie shrugged. “Maybe. That’s not our concern.”
“Is that why we’re going back to Earth?”
“Not exactly,” Charlie said, watching with approval as Chris finished his second plateful. If he could eat, he could heal, and the wonderful thing about youth was that, nurtured properly, it could heal quickly. “I started to tell you about your mother…during the last month or so, after Heston was acting so smug about
taming the volcano…she and I had a little conversation about you.”
That’s not the only thing you had a conversation about! Chris thought, but tried mightily not to let it show on his face.
“She asked me…if anything was to happen to her—and by that she meant her and Heston—if I would see that you got back to Earth. She even had a legal document drawn up…you can read it if you want to…” Charlie dug into his personal kit and produced a computer disk.
Chris shook his head. He doubted he could make sense of some long-winded official document.
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “What happens when we get back to Earth?”
“I understand you’ve got an aunt and uncle in Argentina…”
Chris had met them a few times, found his aunt clingy and neurotic, his uncle domineering and disapproving of his mother’s lifestyle. Their visits hadn’t been pleasant ones.
Charlie watched the despair return to the boy’s face. “It’s not a decision you have to make right now. Your mother named me as your guardian. When we reach Earth, you can stay with me while you think it over.”
A few minutes ago, Chris had been running from a horrific past, into an unknown future. Suddenly the future seemed to have some sort of definition, though he couldn’t entirely see what it was. Still, he had choices, which was more than he’d had an hour ago.
“In the meantime,” Charlie broke into his thoughts, “after you’ve showered and dressed and we maybe track down the ship’s barber to do something with that hair, there’s someone I’d like you to talk to.”
“Not a shrink!”
“No, not a shrink.”
“The ship’s captain?” Chris guessed. “Guess it’s been pretty rude of me to avoid him all this time.”
“We’ll meet with the captain eventually,” Charlie assured him. “As my commanding officer, he’s been rather insistent on it.”
Chris’s eyes widened. Suddenly the gold uniform made sense.
“This is your ship?”
“Was, is. Sometimes. Starfleet occasionally offers a dispensation for idle types like me who have a particular skill.”
Chris was about to object to that—on the homestead, Charlie had done as much work as any two men. Idle was not a word he’d have applied to him. Maybe what he meant was that he wasn’t one of those spit-and-polish types who signed on for long missions and devoted their entire lives to Starfleet, but—
Charlie broke into his thoughts again.
“You asked about other colonists. There is another youngster aboard. Lost his mother in the fire, too. He’s a lot younger than you, and it’s hard for him to understand what happened. I thought maybe you could…”
He left his thought unfinished. Chris got to his feet immediately. His mother had taught him many things, valuable things he would carry with him all his life. One of the most important was to lend a hand whenever he could. A trace of the carefree kid with the lopsided smile peeked through his overburdening sorrow. “I can get a haircut any old time. Let’s go!”
He couldn’t believe his eyes. “Tango!”
The little colt had been housed in a hastily constructed straw-lined pen in the ship’s arboretum. Unharmed by the fire, he nevertheless looked bedraggled—his coat dull, his eyes without luster, his head hanging forlornly, and he looked as if he’d lost weight. When he heard Chris say his name, he raised his head and nickered softly. Chris knelt in the straw beside him and put his arms around him, and the colt nuzzled him gratefully. The warmth of him, the smell of him, the sheer normalcy of the moment anchored him to the here and now, and the assurance that tomorrow would somehow take care of itself.
TALOS IV
“I see now why Tango was so important to you,” Vina said. “And why the Talosians made another mistake in thinking they could just pull him out of your memory and make you respond positively.”
Pike nodded, lost in thought. “We’d bonded from the moment he was born, but the fire forged it. He hadn’t been weaned yet, and he refused to nurse unless I held the bottle. I became his surrogate mother, his whole world, and he and Charlie were mine.”
“So you didn’t go to live with your aunt and uncle?”
Pike shook his head. “Charlie adopted me. He and his wife had a ranch not far from where my mother and I had lived in Mojave. I thought he’d seemed familiar the first time I saw him…”
At his request, they’d forgone one level of illusion, the one he thought of as the outermost one—the one in which they could be in a villa on the Lebanese coast, or on Rigel VII, or in an intergalactic trader’s harem—the one which the Talosians in their haste thirteen years ago had tried to wrap around his healthy, robust self without understanding who that self really was. Absent the outer illusion, he and Vina faced the reality of Talos’s underground metropolis, its miles and miles of corridors crudely hewn out of the native stone, interconnecting like the tunnels of some vast anthill, yet not uncomfortable overall, somehow heated and cooled and provided with breathable air and ambient light. It was his curiosity about how this subterranean world functioned—a curiosity he hadn’t had the luxury for the last time—that had brought them here.
For reasons of practicality, though, he and Vina retained the core illusion that both were still young, healthy, attractive and, in his case, ambulatory. But those idealized selves, which Pike thought of as the innermost level of illusion, were extant in the here and now, in the subterranean corridors of Talos IV, where its people had lived for thousands of centuries following their near self-destruction.
Penned in a cage the first time, Pike had seen only a minuscule portion of that underground world. This time he had asked Vina to be his guide in seeing the real world where he had chosen to spend the remainder of his days.
“So you went to live with Charlie,” Vina said as they studied the zoo specimens—the animals and plants and, in some cases, creatures that, like Charlie’s jellyplants, were both and neither—that were housed in preparation for someday being reintroduced to the surface. “And you and Tango rode out every morning. By the time you were, oh, about fifteen, there was probably a different girl every week…”
“Don’t get ahead of the story,” Pike teased her, studying the ostrich-sized bird with the parrot-like head in the cage in front of them. “What’s this one called?”
“It’s a moabird,” she said, indulging him. “Native to the southern hemisphere. There are several hundred unhatched eggs in another chamber. Radiation levels in some spots have gone down almost enough to reintroduce them, but there’s still some concern about radiation drift weakening the integrity of the shell structure. In another hundred years, maybe…”
“Don’t they know about molecular scrubbers?” Pike wondered. “For such an advanced civilization…”
“For which so much data was lost in the holocaust,” Vina reminded him, tugging his hand to lead him to the next cage. “I’m just realizing a common theme. Fire, again. For you, your mother’s death. For me, Columbia’s destruction. For the Talosians, their entire world.”
“That’s too poetic for me!” Pike said, moving on. In reality, he supposed she was pushing his wheelchair. The illusion was much nicer.
“Yes, of course!” Vina demurred, not half believing him. “You’re a rube, not an egghead. I keep forgetting.”
“Tell me more about the Talosians themselves,” Pike prompted her. There was a sense of déjà vu to his questions; they were not too different from the questions he’d asked the first time. “Were they always androgynous?”
“They only seem that way,” Vina explained. “Their…sexuality…is less rigidly defined than ours. Each is a balance of male and female traits, but most lean slightly to one side of the spectrum or another. When you get to know them better, you’ll be able to classify each individual as ‘male’ or ‘female.’ If you want to. After a while, those distinctions seem less important.”
“I hope that doesn’t mean those distinctions will seem less important to y
ou and me.”
“Never!” she assured him.
He wanted to ask if there were children. Had they reproduced at all since the holocaust, or had it frightened them into keeping their population static until the last of them died out? And that was another question: How long did they live? Had their life span been affected by the ambient radiation? Had these same Talosians been alive all those thousands of centuries ago?
He wouldn’t pester her with those things, but would ask the Magistrate, or one of the others. And, come to think of it, it was time he got to know some of the others.
While all of this was spinning in his head, they’d arrived at the next habitat, where several members of a species of three-eyed lizard the size of a house cat had made their home amid a number of the singing blue-leaved plants Pike remembered from the surface. The lizards remained motionless, all but blending in with the foliage, but their eyes followed Pike in a kind of sequential synchrony that made him want to laugh out loud. A Talosian he didn’t recognize was tending the plants, and nodded to them as they passed. Pike nodded back.
“Kerinithis,” Vina named the lizards. “Much more adaptable than the birds. Some have already been reintroduced in the equatorial regions, and they seem to be thriving…”
2231: MOJAVE
“Collared lizards,” Charlie whispered, indicating with his chin rather than pointing, his voice just loud enough to carry over the desert wind. He and Chris had been camping, and the early morning desert was full of surprises. Lying on their bellies peering over a small grassy hummock, they were watching life pass them by. “Three of them in the shade of that piñon, see? Now, over there’s the sidewinder. See how he camouflages himself? He can stay that way without moving for hours, breathing only once or twice a minute, because if the lizard sees him, he’s gone. What else do you see?”
Behind them, well-trained enough to stay without being tethered, two of Charlie’s saddle horses grazed peacefully. When one of them, possibly sensing the presence of the rattler, shifted its feet on the hard soil, the snake, deaf as all snakes were, but feeling the vibration, raised its head slightly and slithered off. The movement caused the lizards to scatter in all directions, and Chris tried hard not to laugh. Whoever had called this place a desert hadn’t known what they were talking about; it was anything but deserted.
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