by Irene Gallo
What happens after Nathaniel dies? What do I have left here? More specifically, how much will I regret not going on the mission?
And if I’m in space, how much will I regret abandoning my husband to die alone?
You see why I was starting to wish that we had children?
In the afternoon, we were sitting in the living room, pretending to work. Nathaniel sat with his pencil poised over the paper and stared out the window as though he were working. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t but I gave him what privacy I could and started on one of my eagles.
The phone rang and gave us both something of a relief, I think, to have a distraction. The phone sat on a table by Nathaniel’s chair so he could reach it easily if I weren’t in the room. With my eyes averted, his voice sounded as strong as ever as he answered.
“Hang on, Sheldon. Let me get Elma for— Oh. Oh, I see.”
I snipped another feather but it was more as a way to avoid making eye contact than because I really wanted to keep working.
“Of course I’ve got a few minutes. I have nothing but time these days.” He ran his hand through his hair and let it rest at the back of his neck. “I find it hard to believe that you don’t have programmers on staff who can handle this.”
He was quiet then as Sheldon spoke; I could hear only the distorted tinny sound of his voice rising and falling. At a certain point, Nathaniel picked up his pencil again and started making notes. Whatever Sheldon was asking him to do, that was the moment when Nathaniel decided to say “yes.”
I set my eagle aside and went into the kitchen. My first reaction—God. It shames me but my first reaction was anger. How dare he? How dare he take a job without consulting with me when I was turning down this thing I so desperately wanted because of him. I had the urge to snatch up the phone and tell Sheldon that I would go.
I pushed that down carefully and looked at it.
Nathaniel had been urging me to go. No deliberate action of his was keeping me from accepting. Only my own upbringing and loyalty and … and I loved him. If I did not want to be alone after he passed, how could I leave him to face the end alone?
The decision would be easier if I knew when he would die.
I still hate myself for thinking that.
I heard the conversation end and Nathaniel hung up the phone. I filled a glass with water to give myself an excuse for lingering in the kitchen. I carried it back into the living room and sat down on the couch.
Nathaniel had his lower lip between his teeth and was scowling at the page on top of his notepad. He jotted a number in the margin with a pencil before he looked up.
“That was Sheldon.” He glanced back at the page.
I settled in my chair and fidgeted with the wedding band on my finger. It had gotten loose in the last year. “I’m going to turn them down.”
“What— But, Elma.” His gaze flattened and he gave me a small frown. “Are you … are you sure it’s not depression? That’s making you want to stay, I mean.”
I gave an unladylike snort. “Now what do I have to be depressed about?”
“Please.” He ran his hands through his hair and knit them together at the back of his neck. “I want you to go so you won’t be here when … It’s just going to get worse from here.”
The devil of it was that he wasn’t wrong. That didn’t mean he was right, either, but I couldn’t flat out tell him he was wrong. I set down my scissors and pushed the magnifier out of the way. “It’s not just depression.”
“I don’t understand. There’s a chance to go back into space.” He dropped his hands and sat forward. “I mean … if I die before the mission leaves and you’re grounded here. How would you feel?”
I looked away. My gaze was pointed to the window and the view of the house across the lane. But I did not see the windows or the red brick walls. All I saw was a black and grey cloth made of despair. “I had a life that I enjoyed before this opportunity came up. There’s no reason I shouldn’t keep on enjoying it. I enjoy teaching. There are a hundred reasons to enjoy life here.”
He pointed his pencil at me the way he used to do when he spotted a flaw in reasoning at a meeting, but the pencil quivered in his grip now. “If that’s true, then why haven’t you told them no yet?”
The answer to that was not easy. Because I wanted to be in the sky, weightless, and watching the impossibly bright stars. Because I didn’t want to watch Nathaniel die. “What did Sheldon ask you to do?”
“NASA wants more information about LS-579.”
“I imagine they do.” I twisted that wedding band around as if it were a control that I could use. “I would … I would hate … As much as I miss being in space, I would hate myself if I left you here. To have and to hold, in sickness and in health. Till death do us part and all that. I just can’t.”
“Well … just don’t tell him no. Not yet. Let me talk to Dr. Williams and see if she can give us a clearer date. Maybe there won’t be a schedule conflict after all—”
“Stop it! Just stop. This is my decision. I’m the one who has to live with the consequences. Not you. So, stop trying to put your guilt off onto me because the devil of it is, one of us is going to feel guilty here, but I’m the one who will have to live with it.”
I stormed out of the room before he could answer me or I could say anything worse. And yes—I knew that he couldn’t follow me and for once I was glad.
* * *
Dorothy came not long after that. To say that I was flummoxed when I opened the door wouldn’t do justice to my surprise. She had her medical bag with her, and I think that’s the only thing that gave me the power of speech. “Since when do you make house calls?”
She paused, mouth partially open, and frowned. “Weren’t you told I was coming?”
“No.” I remembered my manners and stepped back so she could enter. “Sorry. You just surprised me is all.”
“I’m sorry. Mr. Spender asked me to come out. He thought you’d be more comfortable if I stayed with Mr. York while you were gone.” She shucked off her shoes in the dust room.
I looked back through the kitchen to the living room, where Nathaniel sat just out of sight. “That’s right kind and all, but I don’t have any appointments today.”
“Do I have the date wrong?”
The rattle and thump of Nathaniel’s walker started. I abandoned Dorothy and ran through the kitchen. He shouldn’t be getting up without me. If he lost his balance again— What? It might kill him if he fell? Or it might not kill him fast enough so that his last days were in even more pain.
He met me at the door and looked past me. “Nice to see you, Doc.”
Dorothy had trailed after me into the kitchen. “Sir.”
“You bring that eagle to show me?”
She nodded and I could see the little girl she had been in the shyness of it. She lifted her medical bag to the kitchen table and pulled out a battered shoe box of the sort that we don’t see up here much. No sense sending up packaging when it just takes up room on the rocket. She lifted the lid off and pulled out tissue that had once been pink and had faded to almost white. Unwrapping it, she pulled out my eagle.
It’s strange seeing something that you made that long ago. This one was in flight, but had its head turned to the side as though it were looking back over its shoulder. It had an egg clutched in its talons.
Symbolism a little blunt, but clear. Seeing it I remembered when I had made it. I remembered the conversation that I had had with Dorothy when she was a little girl.
I picked it up, turning it over in my hands. The edges of the paper had become soft with handling over the years so it felt more like corduroy than cardstock. Some of the smaller feathers were torn loose, showing that this had been much loved. The fact that so few were missing said more about the place it had held for Dorothy.
She had asked me, standing outside the fence in the shadow of the rocket gantry, if I were still going to Mars. I had said yes.
Then she had said, “You going
to have kids on Mars?”
What she could not have known—what she likely still did not know, was that I had just come from a conversation with Nathaniel when we decided that we would not have children. It had been a long discussion over the course of two years and it did not rest easy on me. I was still grieving for the choice, even though I knew it was the right one.
The radiation, the travel … the stars were always going to call me and I could ask him to be patient with that, but it was not fair to a child. We had talked and talked and I had built that eagle while I tried to grapple with the conflicts between my desires. I made the eagle looking back, holding an egg, at the choices behind it.
And when Dorothy had asked me if I would have kids on Mars, I put the regulation smile on, the one you learn to give while wearing 160 pounds of space suit in Earth gravity while a photographer takes just one more photo. I’ve learned to smile through pain, thank you. “Yes, honey. Every child born on Mars will be there because of me.”
“What about the ones born here?”
The child of tragedy, the double-orphan. I had knelt in front of her and pulled the eagle out of my bag. “Those most of all.”
Standing in my kitchen, I lifted my head to look at Nathaniel. His eyes were bright. It took a try or two before I could find my voice again. “Did you know? Did you know which one she had?”
“I guessed.” He pushed into the kitchen, the walker sliding and rattling until he stood next to me. “The thing is, Elma, I’m going to be gone in a year either way. We decided not to have children because of your career.”
“We made that decision together.”
“I know.” He raised a hand off the walker and put it on my arm. “I’m not saying we didn’t. What I’m asking is that you make this career decision for me. I want you to go.”
I set the eagle back in its nest of tissue and wiped my eyes. “So you tricked her into coming out just to show me that?”
Nathaniel laughed, sounding a little embarrassed. “Nope. Talked to Sheldon. There’s a training session this afternoon that I want you to go to.”
“I don’t want to leave you.”
“You won’t. Not completely.” He gave a sideways grin and I could see the young man he’d been. “My program will be flying with you.”
“That’s not the same.”
“It’s the best I can offer.”
I looked away and caught Dorothy staring at us with a look of both wonder and horror on her face. She blushed when I met her gaze. “I’ll stay with him.”
“I know and it was kind of Sheldon to ask but—”
“No, I mean. If you go … I’ll make sure he’s not alone.”
* * *
Dorothy lived in the middle of the great Mars plains in the home of Elma, who was an astronaut, and Nathaniel, who was an astronaut’s husband. I live in the middle of space in a tiny capsule filled with punchcards and magnetic tape. I am not alone, though someone who doesn’t know me might think I appear to be.
I have the stars.
I have my memories.
And I have Nathaniel’s last program. After it runs, I will make an eagle and let my husband fly.
MARY ROBINETTE KOWAL is the author of historical fantasy novels, including the Glamourist Histories series and Ghost Talkers. She has received the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, three Hugo Awards, the RT Reviews Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and has been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, several Year’s Best anthologies, and her collections Word Puppets and Scenting the Dark and Other Stories. Elma’s story is further expanded in The Calculating Stars and The Fated Sky, both available from Tor Books. As a professional puppeteer and voice actor (SAG/AFTRA), Mary has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, and Jim Henson Pictures, and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve. She records fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow, and John Scalzi. Mary lives in Chicago with her husband, Rob, and more than a dozen manual typewriters.
Last Son of Tomorrow
Greg van Eekhout
What is there to do, when you have the power to do anything? John can fly; he can see through solid objects; he can take over the world and give it back again, but what he’s looking for is something else.… Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden.
John was born with powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men, and he often wondered why. But as a boy, it was simply wonderful to have those abilities. He could lift his father’s tractor overhead before he learned to read. He could outrace a galloping horse. He couldn’t be cut or bruised or burned. He could fly.
But his life was not a trading card with a heroic-looking photograph on one side and a convenient list of his abilities on the other. He had to discover himself for himself. It took him years to realize he could fire laser beams from his eyes. That he could force his lungs to expel nearly frozen carbon dioxide. And it wasn’t until his mid-thirties that he realized he’d probably stopped aging biologically somewhere around the age of twenty-two.
His parents weren’t perfect people. His mother drank, and when she did, she got mean. His father had affairs. But when they understood that the baby they’d found abandoned on the edge of their farm wasn’t like other children—was probably, in fact, unlike any other child who’d ever been born—they cleaned up their acts as best they could. They taught themselves to be better people, and then they conveyed those hard-won lessons to their son. They were as good as they could be. When they died while John was away at college, he decided if he could be half as wise, as kind, as generous as they were, then he could be proud of himself.
Driving back to the city after his parents’ funeral, he began his career. There was a commuter train derailment, a bad one, with a fully occupied car dangling off the Utopia Street Bridge, sixty feet above the Tomorrow River. John got out of his car and left it behind on the clogged highway. Fully visible in bright daylight, he leaped into the sky, and moments later, he had the train car resting safely on the bridge. He freed passengers from twisted metal. He flew those who needed immediate emergency care to the hospital, and then he returned to the scene of the accident. He thought it might be necessary to file a report of some kind with the police. With dozens of cameras pointed at him, microphones and tape recorders shoved in his face, questions being barked at him as if he’d done something wrong, he felt like he might suffocate. He wished he could turn and walk back to his car and drive to his dorm, maybe go out for beers with his friends. But he knew he’d never be able to do that now. He’d chosen otherwise.
He coughed nervously. The questions stopped. Everyone was quiet. Everyone was waiting. “I’m John,” he said. “I’m here to help.”
And for the next sixty years, that was just what he did.
It was the least significant period of his life.
* * *
John had an enemy.
Actually, he had many enemies, from the flamboyant nuts who were simply desperate for his attention, to the well-funded organizations who felt John threatened their political, financial, or ideological interests. But there was one man who devoted his entire life to vexing John. He called himself Teeter-Totter, of all the goofy things, and he wore an outfit not dissimilar to the jumpsuit John wore, made of a flexible composite material that could withstand the wear and tear of everyday battles and rescues and adventures. Teeter-Totter had no powers. John found that out when he punched him while foiling a bank robbery attempt and broke Teeter-Totter’s jaw, fractured his eye socket, cracked four ribs and punctured his lung.
“See?” Teeter-Totter said, once paramedics reinflated his lung. “I don’t need freaky powers to take you on.”
John felt just sick about the whole incident.
Their relationship, such as it was, got worse. Teeter-Totter graduated beyond bank jobs and jewelry heists and began committing acts that
were downright heinous. He burned Yosemite. He brought down skyscrapers. He drove a robot-controlled truck into Hoover Dam. And he made John feel responsible for all of it.
“What did I ever do to you?” John asked after Teeter-Totter successfully set off a massive genome-bomb in the Midwest. There would be a catastrophic crop failure that year, and not even John would be able to prevent starvation. “Really, I have to know. What did I ever do to you?”
“You exist,” Teeter-Totter said, as if the answer were so obvious he couldn’t believe John had asked. “And if it weren’t for me, you’d exist without limits. Jesus, didn’t you ever wonder why I call myself Teeter-Totter? It’s so you can be up only so long as I stay down, and that when you’re down, someone else is sure to be up. Hello? Is any of this getting through?”
“I’ll win,” John said.
“Oh, you think so?”
“Yes. It doesn’t make me happy, but I know so. In the end, I’ll win.”
Forty years later, John felt he was proven right when Teeter-Totter died of old age. But then he realized something. Teeter-Totter wouldn’t have done any of those things had John never been born. John wasn’t merely the motivation for Teeter-Totter’s crimes. He was the reason for them, as much as if he’d committed them himself. If his every act of heroism was countered by an act of evil, then how were the two any different?
John gave Teeter-Totter a respectful burial. “Congratulations,” he said over the grave. “You won after all.”
After that, John still helped people whenever things happened right in front of him, but he stopped seeking trouble out.
* * *
John quite naturally wondered how he’d come to be. He knew he’d been abandoned near his adopted parents’ farm, but he’d never found out why or by whom. He reasoned that he might be an alien. He’d even worked out a scenario: He’d been sent to Earth as an infant by his home planet’s science council, who had calculated that, free from Zethon’s heavy gravity (Zethon being the name he’d given his home planet), and free from the influence of the exotic star the planet orbited, the Zethonian baby would possess amazing abilities. Without a doubt, the orphan would rule Earth before he reached puberty, and then go on to conquer the surrounding space sector, the quadrant, and at least half the Milky Way galaxy.