The Sunspacers Trilogy

by George Zebrowski

  The person staring back at me from the night seemed thin for five eight. His muscular arms were pale in the sleeveless blue shirt. He stooped a bit, and some of his light-brown hair fell over his right eye. His lower half faded away into the city rights.

  —Why should I bother going to graduation?

  —You were looking forward to it.

  —No big thing. College is more important.

  —Morey will expect you.

  —He doesn’t need me to graduate.

  —But he’s your best friend.

  Maybe that was the only reason I was going off-planet to school. That and to get away from my parents. I was sick of them not getting along. So I would have to work a bit harder than Morey—so what? I would see a new way of life, human beings building new worlds among the stars. If it meant studying physics for a career, then I would do so. I was looking forward to being on my own, to not having to worry about anyone else for a while. I needed a big change, and this was going to be it.

  I stepped closer to the window, feeling a bit lost; the floating figure disappeared.

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  2

  Graduation

  I got up the next morning, put on the one-piece blue corduroy suit Dad had bought me for the ceremony, and rode the boost tube up to the Educational Center on 210th Street West. It was almost 10:00 A.M. when I arrived on level two above the street and came out into a hot, sunny day.

  I felt lost as I looked out over the emptiness of the giant square around the hundred-story pyramid. Its east face caught the sun with a million windows, giving the structure the appearance of a cheerful ornament, but I wasn’t in any mood to appreciate it. Maybe Mom and Dad had shown up at the last minute and were waiting inside. I would have missed them if I hadn’t come, I told myself.

  I wandered down the ramp and marched across the deserted square, working up a sweat by the time I reached the main doors. They slid open and I went into the lobby, loosening the stick seal on my collar as I looked around at the crowd.

  I turned and saw Morey with his parents.

  “Good morning, Joe,” Mrs. Green-Wolfe said. I noticed some familiar faces behind them, but everyone was so dressy I couldn’t be sure.

  I nodded absentmindedly to Morey’s mother. She always seemed to be smiling as if she knew some silly secret.

  “Where’s your folks?” Mr. Green-Wolfe asked loudly. Nearly everything he said sounded as if he were asking you whether you wanted a dessert. It was obvious where Morey got some of his manner from, except that he was smarter than his father.

  I continued scanning the crowd. “Oh … they’re here somewhere, with some relatives, I think. They were coming back late from a trip,” I added, preparing the excuse I might need later.

  “Your dad’s a sharp econometrist,” Mr. Green-Wolfe said, looking around as if he expected to get some business advice from him. “Your mother is a charming woman,” he added. “I’ll be so glad to see her again.” He put his arm around my shoulder. “Do you think you boys will be able to stand sharing one dorm room together?”

  “Sure,” I managed to say, realizing that my parents weren’t here. My face was flushed, and I felt cheated. Suddenly all their excuses from other times added up into one big pain. I took a slow deep breath and tried not to show it, but it hurt just the same.

  “Good!” Mr. Green-Wolfe said. “You two are real pals.” The time came to go into the auditorium. Scholarship winners sat together near the front, so I just tagged along automatically after Morey, not paying much attention to anything as we took our seats. Parents sat in the balconies, like elder gods gazing down on their creations. Maybe Mom and Dad were up there, but I was afraid to turn around for even a quick look.

  Holo cams cast 3-Ds of speakers and students above the stage during the ceremony. Havelock “Burning Bush” Bearney, our red-bearded principal, delivered a dull talk about brains and courage and leadership, though he seemed to want us to opt for cooperation if we couldn’t be leaders. Toshiro Saada, the class president, whispered a speech about sacrifice that seemed to exalt self-punishment. Elene Chen, valedictorian and math prodigy, gave a vague but well-organized address on setting your mind toward the right individual goals. My mind wandered as our names were read out in reverse alphabetical order.

  “Joseph Sorby!”

  My name echoed through the auditorium. Morey nudged me when I failed to react.

  I went up to get my diploma, sleepwalking all the way. A giant image of me gazed at the blue ceiling as I marched up and took the tube of silvery plastic from “Burning Bush” Bearney. He shook my hand and grinned at me with threatening teeth. Strangers applauded for me as I went down on the other side. I imagined Marisa making fun of me from her seat among my nine hundred classmates. Morey clapped me on the shoulder as I sat down, and that made me feel good, but I was still anxious to get it over with.

  We finally marched out into the lobby. The doors slid open as the picture taking and gift giving began, and the whole show pushed out into the glare of the noon sun. No one noticed as I slipped away toward the station.

  The tubeway boosted me down to 125th Street in a few minutes. I changed for the local and floated over to West 87th. Anything would have been better than going home just then; I was mad and getting madder by the second.

  A cool breeze was blowing through Central Park when I came up to street level and started down the block to our housing complex. I came to our outside elevator doors and pressed my palm on the print lock. The doors slid open, and I stepped inside, feeling apprehensive as the elevator climbed the side of the building. I would be angry if my parents were home, angrier if they weren’t. The breeze rolled the tops of the trees in the park. Afternoon sunlight cast sharp shadows between the tall buildings. The elevator rushed to the ninetieth floor, and the inner doors opened.

  I hesitated, staring southward to the blue ocean beyond lower New York. Finally I turned away and went inside, wandering slowly down the brightly lit hallway to our apartment.

  Queasiness flooded my stomach as I thumbed the lock plate. I didn’t know what I was going to do or say if they were home.

  Mom jumped me as the door slid open. “I’m so sorry, dearest!” I tried to step back, but it was too late. “We just got back.” She hugged me.

  “Missed a connection,” Dad said.

  “Sure,” I mumbled. My arms hung at my sides.

  “Congratulations,” Dad said.

  Mom was looking into my eyes. Her black hair was piled on her head in a strange swirl. Her face was pale, sad, without makeup, and her eyes were slightly red.

  They had tried to get back, a part of me said, but I wanted to hurt them for making me feel like nothing, even though I could see that they had already been hurting each other.

  “There are messages for you,” Dad said as I pulled free of Mom and went past him into the living room.

  “Thanks, I said coldly, suddenly grateful for something else to do. I sat down by the phone and pressed in my thumbprint. The wall screen lit up with my first message:

  MR. JOSEPH SORBY:

  PLEASE REPORT JULY 1, 2056,

  BERNAL HALL, DORM ROOM 108,

  O’NEILL COLLEGE,

  DANDRIDGE COLE UNIVERSITY AT L-5.

  —OFFICE OF THE DEAN OF STUDENTS

  JUNE 21, 2056

  The second message appeared:

  DEAREST JOE: [FLASHING LETTERS]

  CHEERS FOR OUR FAVORITE

  GRANDSON! WE CALLED EARLIER.

  HERE’S SOMETHING TO HELP YOU

  ON YOUR WAY, RIGHT INTO YOUR

  NEW ACCOUNT #000-112-2-34789.

  WE’LL CALL YOU WHEN YOU’RE SETTLED

  AT SCHOOL. LOVE,

  —ANTONIA AND JOHN SORBY

  LONDON, JUNE 21, 2056

  “Can I see?” Dad asked. The message flashed three times and blinked off. “Oh—is there anything from your mother’s parents?”

  END OF MESSAGES

  I ignored him.
The screen went dark.

  “There will be one along,” Mom said, sitting down on the arm of my chair. “I told them.”

  “Don’t,” I said as she touched my shoulder.

  “We love you very much,” she said with difficulty, leaning back next to me and closing her eyes. I remembered playing with her when I was small, sitting on her belly and shouting for her to surrender. She still seemed as beautiful, but she wasn’t the same person.

  There was a long silence. Dad stood nervously in the center of the room, as if waiting for something.

  “Your mother and I will be separating,” he said finally. “Sorry to have to tell you now.”

  Mom sat up and looked at me. “We waited until you were ready for college.”

  “Why?” I demanded, feeling my anger rising again. “So it would be easier on you? Maybe you were planning to leave me a message about it?” It was obvious to me that they were still concerned solely with each other, and I was just another obstacle.

  “You’re older now,” Mom said, ignoring what I had said. “You’re ready to be on your own. The marriage contract happened to expire now. You can understand that.”

  I looked at Dad. He seemed lost. I wondered again why he had been so opposed to my going off-planet to school. Maybe he had thought that if I had gone to Columbia or NYU, it would have helped keep the marriage together.

  “When you come home,” Mom continued, jumping past any consideration of my feelings, “you’ll come here for part of the time, and to your grandparents in Brasilia, until I get a place of my own there. Eurico and Agata were very excited when I told them you would visit them.”

  “We’ll always be here for you,” Dad added tiredly.

  Mom let out a deep breath, and I could tell that she was relieved. Dad wasn’t about to start arguing again.

  “When do you have to leave?” she asked me. Her lid was on tight, and nothing was going to blow it off.

  “About ten days,” I said, struggling to control myself.

  Dad slumped down in the sofa. “How was the ceremony?” He was emotionally drained and physically exhausted from the trip. There was no fight left in him, and I saw my chance.

  “Pretty boring. You didn’t miss much.” I tried to sound as sarcastic as possible by putting myself into Morey’s million-year-old man mood, but it went right past them.

  “We should have been there,” Mom said sternly as she stood up. She looked thinner in her slacks. “We know and we’re sorry. You don’t have to excuse us.” She sounded as if she were talking about some other people.

  Dad was looking down at his feet. “Nothing can excuse it,” he said as if he were speaking to Mom. I might just as well not have been in the room. “We’ll make it up to you.…”

  “Sure—how are you going to do that?” I demanded, feeling crushed. “You don’t listen to each other or to me. It was shitty of you not to make sure that you would be back in time. You could have done that! Do you hear me?”

  Dad looked at me in surprise.You don’t need us anymore , his eyes seemed to suggest,so it doesn’t matter what you say . Well, maybe he wasn’t thinking exactly that, but I was sure that he had no energy left to worry about me or my feelings. A small, distant part of me wondered if I had ever listened enough to understand their problems; but it was too late for me to care. In ten days I would be free.

  “You probably didn’t have any breakfast,” Mom said.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “I’ll make lunch,” Dad said as he got to his feet. I sympathized with him for a moment. Why should he bother listening to me, or facing up to anything, when in two weeks we would all be apart?

  Clouds covered the sun in the window, and we became shadows in the pale daylight. Mom followed Dad into the kitchenette. I watched them going through old, familiar motions, and remembered those times when I had felt warm and secure, knowing that little would change for a long time to come, and maybe never. Those bright, endless afternoons seemed far away now. An awful fear rushed through me. In a few years Mom and Dad would only be people who had once been parents. Would we like each other as adults? There was no way to know, so I tried hard not to care, and pushed the problem away.

  Mom swore as she dropped something. I heard Dad take a deep breath. “Eva …” he started to say.

  “Don’t begin, John,” she shot back. There was a long silence, as if they were standing perfectly still. “Joe!” Mom called to me. “We’ll have lunch in here on the counter.”

  The sun came out and filled the room with light. I got up, realizing that not much would have been different even if they had come to graduation. I would still have wanted to get away. Their problems were not about to disappear overnight, and my being around wouldn’t help much.

  “Joe?” Mom called again.

  “Coming,” I managed to say. Maybe we all needed to lose each other for a while.

  |Go to Table of Contents |

  3

  Going

  “Are you very sure?” Mom asked me.

  “I’m sure,” I answered without looking at her. It was almost time for me to go. I knew that they were relieved about my going, but it made them feel guilty, so they were repeating their old questions to make themselves feel better. I had gotten my way because they were too wrapped up in their problems to worry about me. If they had tried to force me to go to college while I lived at home, I would have complained against them under the Youth Rights Act of 2004.

  “It’s what he wants,” Dad said as firmly as he could, more to settle Mom down than to support me.And you’ll be stuck with however it turns out . He didn’t say it out loud, but it was there in the tone of his voice.

  We wandered toward the door. Mom held her hands together and tried to smile. “Are you sure the scholarship will cover everything?”

  She knew it would, so why was she asking again? I had to admit that it couldn’t just be guilt. She cared about me, as much as she could, I realized. “He’s had expert help in the choice and planning,” Dad said, standing there, hands deep in his loose pants.

  Mom looked at him, then at me, unable to speak.

  “Just a kid,” Dad muttered. “Sitting on my arm only yesterday.”

  The lump in my throat surprised me as I picked up my small bag.

  “All set with your trunk?” Dad asked in a quavering voice.

  “Three days ago,” I croaked. “You were here when they took it away.”

  He gave a strained laugh. “Right.”

  Mom sniffled, ready to cry.

  “Well, good luck, son,” Dad said loudly and held out his hand. It was no time to think or make judgments. I shook it and tried to smile, then gave Mom a long kiss on her wet cheek. Slowly I turned away.

  It took forever for the door to slide open.

  I walked down the hall to the open elevator, stepped inside, and turned around to look back. Dad had his arm around Mom, and suddenly I wished very hard that they would solve their problems and stay together.

  “Sure you don’t want us to come to the airport with you?” Mom called out.

  I shook my head. They waved as the door closed, and I dropped toward the street, feeling lost and alone, disliking myself for being so soft as I held back tears.

  Thoughts of Marisa distracted me as the subway shot through the boost tube. I had liked her loops of the old Grant Wood landscapes—the leaves fluttering on the trees, the grasses waving, the sun shining into farmhouse windows, the clouds moving in over the horizon like the black soles of a giant’s shoes, the rain and lightning flashes. She could create her own animations, good enough to display in shows, not just for covering walls and windows in apartments. Maybe there was a good art school in Hawaii.

  Local stations flashed by in the darkness. I tried not to think. “You imagine that you’ve swallowed every mind around you,” Dad had once said, “but there’s a lot you don’t know.” I had felt angry that he should be critical of me for wanting to know things.

  “Maybe not all,”
I had replied, “but much more than you.” He had looked at me with his dark brown eyes, and I couldn’t tell whether he was going to laugh or cry. I felt guilty thinking about it. It seemed now that I had expected him to know everything, and had been disappointed when I found out otherwise. I should have told him how excited I was about the things I was learning; and he should have taken more of an interest in what I was doing, shown more appreciation, something he had never done. I realized now that he felt bad about it, that he knew his chance to have been a better father was gone, but it was too late.

  Memory is a bridge to the past, and to the future. Each of my earlier selves had been looking forward to me, pushing me across that bridge as I worked to do what they had only dreamed; but I had to build each section of the bridge as I went, just to have a place to go. What worried me was that I couldn’t see myself on the other side. Maybe no one could do that, because the bridge was everything, and we all betray our past selves.

  Who was I looking forward to being? Suddenly I knew what I was afraid of: I would be making my own mistakes now. Mom and Dad had made quite a few. Who was I to think that I would do better? But I had to do better, I told myself. It was a pact I had made with my earlier selves. I would never forget anything, and that would make the difference.

  Then it hit me again that I was leavingeverything , my parents, New York, Earth. Nothing would be the same again.

  The boost train glided into Kennedy-Air and slowed to a stop. I sat there for a minute, getting a grip on my fears and doubts.

  Morey boarded the shuttle from New York to Brazil’s Equatorial Spaceport and marched down the aisle to where I sat, about halfway in.

  He sat down roughly, nudging me with his elbow, but I was glad to have a friend going with me.