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“Probably the most neglected friend you have is you. And yet every man, before he can be a true friend to the world, must first become a friend to himself.” –– L. Ron Hubbard
Date: 05.27.2098
Earth – Seattle, Washington
The night was still cool, despite it being late May.
“Look there, Toby, next to Virgo, but before Scorpius, those faint stars there,” the man crouched next to the little boy, as they both stared intently through the telescope at the sky.
“That’s Libra.”
“I don’t see it,” the boy whined, he shivered and huddled close to Daniel.
Daniel pulled off his jacket and wrapped it around Toby’s tiny frame. Daniel sighed, he knew he should have bought the more expensive telescope.
“You can’t go, Uncle Dan,” Toby nuzzled Daniel, dwarfed by the jacket, “You can’t go somewhere I’ll never see you!”
Daniel’s heart thudded painfully. He looked down at Toby’s mop of blond curls, knowing every moment he spent with Toby and Janine risked exposing their secret. Toby had a father after all, and Luke adored the boy. Daniel, on the other hand, was a third wheel at best. He was great at weekend visits and taking Toby to the circus and carnivals, good for filling the kid up on sugar and greasy foods. He thrived at spoiling him rotten at every opportunity. That was his job, after all. Be the indulgent uncle, the fun guy who swooped in and gave Mommy and Daddy alone time and looked like Toby’s very own personal superhero.
It wasn’t really his style to be a dad. That was what Janine had said early on when she had broken the news to him that she was pregnant and pretty damn sure it was his and not Luke’s.
“You aren’t really dad material, Daniel.” She had looked at the ground when she said it, “It just isn’t your style.”
“Luke doesn’t have to know,” she had said as Daniel struggled to think of something to say. “Besides, it was only once, and really, who would know for sure that Luke wasn’t Toby’s dad?”
Even though the brothers didn’t look anything alike, Luke was dark-haired, while Daniel was blond. But their mom had sported curly blond hair. When Toby popped out seven months later with the same curly blond looks as his paternal grandmother and his uncle, who was to say it wasn’t just a throwback to the past generation?
But Daniel knew. He knew it when he looked at Toby, when the boy sat with him for hours in the dark, peering at the sky. Beyond a doubt, Toby was his flesh and blood, his son.
The little boy leaned against him, “What’s it like up there on Mars?”
“I’ve never been. They live in domes, though, there isn’t any air, and won’t be for hundreds of years. It’s still pretty cold too.”
“Will it be cold on the spaceship?” Toby asked.
“Nah, they’ll keep it warm.”
So how could he go? How could he leave his own child behind? Janine had asked him that too. The “just this once” had happened again, moments after he had broken the news to her two months ago.
Afterward, as they lay naked in bed next to each other, sweat beading on their skin, she had begun to cry, “How can you leave us, Daniel? How can you leave your own son? How can you go so far away, and never return? My God, Toby will grow up without you. Why would you go to such a desolate place?”
Daniel’s tongue had felt thick and swollen. Telling her the truth was impossible. He loved her. But Luke loved her, had married her, damn it.
“And what about gravity Uncle Dan? Will you have gravity or just bounce around in the spaceship?” Toby was full of questions.
“There will be artificial gravity. The gravitational rings around the spaceship will make it so that, except for the far ends which are only used for storage, the entire ship will have the equivalent of Earth gravity.”
Luke deserved better than to hear that his wife had cheated on him with his beloved big brother, the guy he had looked up to all his life. He didn’t deserve to hear that Toby was Daniel’s kid and that Janine had married Luke when she got tired of waiting for her true love to stop traveling the world and return to her. Luke didn’t deserve the vision of Daniel and Janine in this bed, making the child he loved and believed was his own.
“Will Zarb...Zarb...” The little boy struggled to pronounce the word.
“Zarmina’s World?”
“Yeah, Zarbeena’s World, will it look like here, Uncle Dan? Like Earth?”
He ruffled the boy’s hair, “It’s different. The sky isn’t blue, more of a white to red, and some of the plants are nearly black. We can breathe the air though. It is tidally locked, as well, because it so much closer to its sun.”
“What does that mean?” Toby asked.
“Tidally locked? Well the planet only shows one face to the sun, kind of like our Moon or Pluto and Charon.”
Toby turned around and stared at Daniel in consternation, “But the Moon is either super-hot or super-cold!”
Daniel laughed, “That’s true. But Zarmina’s World is much bigger, and while there is a light side and a dark side, we won’t be living in either, we will live in the meridian, the half-lit space between the two.”
How could he explain that he had no other choice? That it would destroy all the trust and love and admiration his little brother had ever had for him?
I’m the screw-up here. Not Luke, not even Janine, and certainly not Toby. If I go, I can start again and leave them to their lives. They will be better off without me.
All of this swam through Daniel’s brain as Janine had lain there sobbing next to him. “He’s not my kid, Janine. He’s Luke’s and yours. We agreed on this eight years ago, remember?” His voice sounded remote and hollow. He sat up and gathered his clothes, slipping his jeans back on and searching for his other sock. He had to be gone before Toby and Luke returned from their fishing trip.
Janine’s voice had sounded fragile and child-like, “And you can leave me too, Daniel? So easily?”
Better to make a clean break of it. “Yes,” he said coldly and left her alone in the bed. He closed the door behind him, wishing he could not hear her sobs so clearly. That had been in March.
“Are there animals, Uncle Dan?” Toby asked, nestling closer, his bony little butt digging into Daniel’s inner thigh.
“Yes, the probes sent us back pictures of creatures that look a lot like deer, and a handful of other strange creatures. Most of them aren’t much bigger than mice.”
“Any dinosaurs?”
Daniel chuckled, “Sadly, no.”
For two months, Luke struggled to come to terms with it. His big brother planned to get on a spaceship and head more than twenty light years away to find out if a planet might be habitable. He would never return, never grow old with Luke and Janine or have a family of his own.
“Mom and Dad are gone,” Luke stared at his older brother in consternation, “and it’s just been you and me since eighty-five. Daniel, you can’t just leave.”
Daniel couldn’t look at his brother. He scuffed his shoe on the ground and looked up at the steady blink of the space station as it crossed the sky. It was the Gan De, the largest of the space stations and one of the oldest, named after a famous Chinese astronomer.
“I can’t explain it, Bro, I can only tell you it has to be like this. You’ve got Janine and you’ve got Toby. You don’t need me anymore. Not like you did then.”
That awful night when they had lost Dad, somehow they had stuck together, even in the face of well-meaning officials who told Daniel he would be better off letting them put Luke in foster care for a couple of years. Instead, he had applied for emancipation and then secured guardianship of Luke. He had refused to give up on his kid brother.
They had struggled, not so much financially, thanks to Dad’s savvy investments, but certainly emotionally, for years. But they had made it, together
Toby sighed, “Will you try and tame the animals, Uncle Dan? And if you do, could you send one back to me?”
Daniel closed his eyes, imagining a life without this little boy, this piece of him. “Sure Toby, I’ll do my best.”
They were both silent then. He felt the boy slip into sleep a few minutes later, his breathing even and deep.
Luke had not understood how Daniel could leave.
“We could go with you, Daniel. Maybe it’s not too late to apply. They would make an exception for family, right?”
Daniel smiled at his brother and shook his head, “As if Janine would go. Face it, bro, your place is here, with Janine and Toby. Mine is out there.”
There would be more questions, arguments even, and eventually, Luke had shut up and grimly accepted that Daniel was leaving.
