“You're awfully quiet,” Uriel said to him over the thrumming of the chopter blades. “That's not a good note to end your visit on.”
Jhoe shrugged, then realized Uriel couldn't see that, so he grunted. Not loudly enough, though, to be heard above the chopter noise. “Yeah, I guess,” he finally said.
He was leaving, forever, but the goodbye with Luna had not gone well. He'd shared her home for nearly a standard year, and after Lars had gotten him that ferry-driving job and he finally had some money... Well, Luna hadn't let him pay for her ruined car, so instead he'd spent the money on himself, accumulating quite a surprising amount of junk. Some of it, the things he'd grown attached to and felt he couldn't part with, he'd stuffed in a trunk which would ride with him back to Earth. Other things he had given away, and a few he had left behind, so that the inside of the house had a sort of motheaten look to it. As if burglars had broken in and stolen a carload of random, valueless things.
And Luna, limping and wincing with her latest cancer scars, had railed at him, railed at the notion that Jhoe could bear to leave her, as if she held no more importance to him than the beryl drinking mug he had ill-advisedly bought with his first paycheck, or the rubber sandals and hat he'd bought with his third. “You might like Earth,” he'd said many times. “I think you would.”
But this suggestion had not mollified her. “I have responsibility here, Jhoe!” she'd screamed at him. “I'm important, I'm somebody. On Earth, even you are nobody.”
And that had stung him terribly, and so he'd stomped out without another word.
“I love you, Luna,” he whispered now, inaudibly. He imagined the whirling chopter blades cutting the sounds up, strewing and scattering them across the sandy hills.
And that thought merely underscored his failure. He had met the Unuan people, lived and worked and loved among them, and yet he knew nothing of them. Their insides, their secret hearts remained as opaque to him as on the first day he'd stepped off the lander. What will I tell the people of Earth? I've come from Unua, where the sky is dark and folk are a wee bit strange? Would the people of Earth even care?
“For someone who's going home you don't seem too happy,” Uriel observed. She seemed mellower than usual today. Older, quieter.
“How very true,” he agreed. “And how nice of you to notice. I feel... I think you and I could have been friends.”
“I think we have been,” Uriel said. “I think we are.”
He watched the city lights down below, fading up to the dark horizon and the darker sky above it.
Uriel flew smoothly, delicately, as if afraid to jostle him, as if afraid he might shatter. “I guess you'll miss this place,” she said. “At least every now and then.”
“Yes.”
“But once you leave it you can never come back. Even if you tried, even if you climbed right back on some ship the moment you got to Earth, the Unua you've seen here would be centuries gone. You'd just be stepping into the amber again, letting the universe pass you by, even more than it already has.”
“Uriel, have you got a point to this, or do you just want to make me unhappy?”
Uriel turned for a moment, flashing him an exaggeratedly innocent look. “I didn't make you unhappy, Doctor. Not listening to your heart is what makes you unhappy.”
“My heart is a muscle,” he said. “I've listened to it before, and it... it just makes you crazy. It just makes you lose your mind.”
“Aha,” she said, nodding. “and if you listen to your mind instead? What does that make you lose?”
He thought about that for a while, as the yellow-orange city lights rolled by underneath them. He found he couldn't argue with her logic. He found he couldn't argue with anything she'd said.
He turned to her, almost angrily. “How did you get so wise, little girl?”
She snorted. “Old people think they have some kind of monopoly on wisdom. It isn't true, though. Personally, I think we're born with it.” She paused, then spoke, gently: “Doctor Freetz, do you want to stay on Unua? Do you want me to turn the chopter around?”
“Yes,” he said, and found, with some surprise, that tears had begun trickling down his cheeks.
“Happy day!” she beamed. “I guess there's space on Introspectia, then. Can I have your ticket?”
“What?”
“Oh, I won't stay on Earth for long. Just look around some, then hop on colony ship and head for the frontier. Someplace new, someplace that really needs me. What do you say?”
He gaped at her, aghast. “Did you say all that just to swindle your way into the starship?”
“I don't know.” She shrugged lightly. “Maybe. If what I said is true, what do you care?”
A spasm of anger came and went. Jhoe found, once again, that her logic precluded any sensible argument.
“All right,” he said, giving in. “All right. Your people skills have certainly improved. Just take me back, okay?”
“As you wish, Doctor.” Her grin looked wide enough to split her head in two.
~~~
“At last, Captain Chelsea,” Jafre said into the telkom screen, “I have the chance to speak with you in real time.”
Chelsea nodded. “Yes, I gather you have waited a long time for this.”
“Much longer than you think,” he said. Bitch, he added mentally, but found there was no real force behind the thought. “It was I who called you to Malhela in the first place. I've been waiting to speak with you for over eighty years.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Really? Well, you have my attention now. What can I do for you?”
“Take me to Earth,” he said, simply and unceremoniously.
Lin Chelsea blinked at him. “Did I hear you correctly? You want to leave Malhela?”
“I despise Malhela. The dark, the scarcity of resources, the scarcity of people... One more decade here will kill me, I swear. I was meant for more than this. Please, Captain, take me away.”
“But you have responsibility here,” Lin Chelsea protested. “You have position, you have authority! That must mean something.”
“Better to rule in darkness, eh? Forsaking Paradise forever? I think Milton was overly romantic and underly clever, and he sure as damnation never had to live on Unua. I'll... take my chances in the light, thank you.”
The captain's expression was skeptical. “Jafre Shem, or should I say 'Mister President?' I have a hard time with this concept. Surely you can't just walk away?”
“Why not?” He attempted a shrug, attempted a casual smile. Neither one felt particularly successful, so he put on a serious expression instead. “Captain, as you so frequently point out, I have no authority over you. I can only ask you, I do ask you: will you rescue me from this awful place?”
Chelsea seemed to lose her stiffness somehow, as if a tight belt or harness around her had suddenly been released. She sighed theatrically. “I have no objection, I suppose, though I warn you I will not be held responsible if you later regret your decision.”
Jafre sat silently for a moment, savoring his victory. Strangely, he did not feel exhilarated, nor even particularly victorious. Was he just slinking away, after all? Could his long years of scheming really have led up to something so small and so fundamentally petty?
“Thank you,” he said to the captain, in quiet voice that felt drained of power, drained of everything. “I'll resign my office in the morning.”
“Will your wife accompany you on the journey?”
Jafre sat up in his chair. The question had taken him by surprise. Asia! He knew been leaving something out in his planning, but... Asia? “Oh, darkness. I guess that's two things I'll have to resign from.”
~~~
Miguel stepped up into the Malhelan lander, then turned, offered Beth his hand. She accepted this with good grace, and let him help her inside.
“Well, so much for shore leave,” he mumbled at her.
She nodded. “Yeah. I enjoyed it very much, though. Thank you.”
“My own pleasure, uh, darling.”
He had found, to his amusement and minor dismay, that that was the pet name she wanted him to call her by. She called him 'Ace' in return, though, and he liked that. He liked much about her company. Indeed, their week on Unua had passed in a sort of haze of mutual affection, and he felt sure that in later years he would recall little of it besides the sound of her laughter, the feel of her hair in his hands on a hot, dark night... or a hot, dark day, for that matter. It made little difference, here.
Together they stowed their bags in the indicated compartment, and moved back to find their seats among the other passengers.
“Hey!” A young woman called out, looking at them and smiling. “Hey, Solar Commercial uniforms! I'm going to be riding on your ship!”
Beth led Miguel to the row of seats in front of the young woman, and sat him down in the window seat, taking the aisle for herself.
“Hello,” she said, sticking her hand back in a friendly way.
“Um, hello,” the young woman returned pleasantly. She looked at Beth's hand uncertainly, then clasped it in both her own. “My name is Uriel Zeng.”
“Beth Lahler. And—” she aimed an elbow at Miguel “—my... my boss, Miguel Barta. Chief Technical Officer aboard the Solar Commercial Starship Introspectia. It pleases us to meet you. Now, what's this you're saying?”
Uriel grinned, obviously pleased with herself and with her circumstances. “I'm riding back to Earth on your ship. As passenger, I mean. Taking the place of Doctor Jhoe Freetz.”
“Huh,” Beth said. “I don't believe I know him. Miguel?”
“Uh, I think Tomus Kreider knows him.”
“Ah.”
Uriel turned, raised a finger to point. “See that guy back there? That's the President of Unua.”
“Ex-president,” the man called up. He sounded tired. He looked tired, and a little bit shrunken, like an inflatable dummy with a good bit of the air removed. “I'm going to Earth as well.”
The man seemed at war with himself for a moment, as if agonizing between two difficult decisions. But then he offered a wan smile, and rose from his seat, and moved three rows forward to sit down across from Uriel. He crossed his arms, held them out toward Beth.
“Jafre Shem, refugee. Salutes.”
Politely, Beth took the Ex-president's hands and shook them. “It pleases me to meet you,” she said. She cast a wide glance that took in Jafre and Uriel both. “You must feel very brave, going away like this. Miguel and I were born on Earth, and even we don't know what we'll find there when we return.”
Jafre smiled a little more sincerely. “Eagle among the turkeys, that's me. I've got to get away from here, find some place where I can stretch my wings.”
“Earth has quite a lot of turkeys, too,” Miguel said, perhaps a little unkindly. He instantly regretted his tone, but then, nobody else seemed to have noticed. Or else, in the spirit of the day, they'd let it pass.
“I feel the same way,” Uriel said, her eyes glittering. “I may not stay on Earth. I may move on as soon as I get there. But you're right.” She turned to Jafre. “Stretch my wings, yeah, that's exactly the way I feel.”
She made light fists of her hands, and then crossed them, and then offered them to the Ex-president of Unua.
Miguel had the sudden sense that he was observing an event of some significance. A kind of tension crackled in the air, as if lightning might soon strike here. Human lightning.
Jafre stared down at Uriel Zeng's hands for a second or so, and then, though he did not look like a man who often felt happy, an expression of genuine delight broke out across his face. “Salutes, my dear,” he said, taking Uriel's hands in his and shaking them, warmly. “I don't believe we've met.”
~~~
The gangway had crowded up with people, people of varying heights, varying speeds and directions of movement, and with voices of widely varying loudness.
“So that's it then,” Asia said, bitterly. She had been crying earlier, but her eyes were dry now, and her voice fairly steady. “Eighty years, over like that.”
“I guess so,” Jafre said. “Such ruts we get into, it's nice to break out. But you make it sound so small, so petty. Can't you be happy for me?”
“Not likely.” Her tone fierce, indignant.
And from the other direction:
“...really won't see anything in the raw centrokrist that resembles an ordinary atom, but Tomus and I have worked out most of the subatomic structure, and it seems likely that, given time, we can duplicate it in—”
And:
“...with the collision in the Aurelo we should be finding new veins for the next hundred years. Screw the tin and niobium and all that other crap, we can re-outfit for some real prospecting again. You know, helping science and making a little money at the same—”
And:
“Such busy little children we've managed to produce. It makes me proud, let me tell you—”
A sort of collision took place, a dozen bodies attempting to occupy a space not big enough for half that many. Everyone stopped.
And then, suddenly, in one of those rare gestaltic moments, everyone in the small crowd looked up and recognized someone else they knew.
“Tomus!”
“Captain.”
“Tech Officer. Tech Chief.”
“Jack-Jack!”
“Oh, darkness. Don't tell me he's coming—”
“Children, look at you all!”
Everyone paused again, and then Jack-Jack seized the initiative and, with his eyes on Jafre Shem, began speaking in an elevated voice: “My boy, I'm not here to board the ship, but rather to bid farewell to these children of Earth, who stood by us so bravely in our moment of peril.” He whirled on Tomus Kreider and Miguel Barta, trapped them with a gaze and a grin. “And what wonders have they found? What final news have they got for us? Come on, don't be stingy.”
“Uh,” Miguel said, looking around him, surveying the faces, marking those known and un-. He did not recall ever having met this man, this “Jack-Jack,” but he sensed an importance about him that compelled an answer.
“Well, sir, we may have cracked some of the final secrets of centrokrist's internal structure. Reproducing it, even in small quantities, seems far beyond us right now, but... Well, according to my calculations, the next emergence will take place in 784 standard years. By then, quite possibly, we can return to Malhela in centrokrist ships of our own. Shielded from inertia, shielded from gravity... I wonder if they could ignore us so readily.”
“We'll use it better than they have, I daresay,” Tomus Kreider broke in. “Centrokrist strikes me as a technology of exploration, meant for looking outward, not in. Truly, I wish Yezu had lived to see this day.”
Beside him, Lin Chelsea spoke up, in a peculiar tone that did not sound like her at all. “Their armor have we stolen, their secrets do we keep. Corrupt as ancient gods in frozen amber do they sleep, unaware that their age has already passed.”
“How lovely!” Jack-Jack exclaimed. “How very charming a quote. Where did you find that?”
“I made it up,” the captain said, sounding embarrassed. “I don't usually... Well I couldn't sleep last night, and it just sort of...”
“A poetess, then.” Jack-Jack winked at Miguel, and at Beth. “I'll bet you never suspected such talents of your captain. Guard her well.”
“Old man,” said Jafre Shem, his tone at once spiteful and amused, “Why don't you go find someplace to sit down, and leave the rest of us alone? You'll be dust and gone before the eggies come out of their hole again.”
“And so I will,” Jack-Jack agreed, turning and beaming down at Jafre, several paces below him on the ramp. “The old will always dry up and blow away, and the young will always inherit. But wisely, my boy, if they've taken note of their elders' mistakes. And now, I think I will sit down. The excitement, you know. It wears an old man out. Good day to you all.”
Jack-Jack squirmed through the crowd, past Jafre Shem to the bottom of the ramp, and strode off down the corridor. To the watching eyes behind, he did not appear particularly tired.