Kissed a Boy and Ran Away (part one) There had been a time— (…long ago, and far, far away…) —beneath the Gossamer and near the flanks of Olympus, where Vásíl found refuge in grimy understreets and back alleys dusted and cluttered with what the winds carried across the plains. There had always been something: weaver husks, as crinkly as paper, and leaves of newsfax thickened and black with gossip and horoscopes. There were occasional strips of currency: banknotes escaped from the pockets of unwary miners. Those, Vásíl remembered, were rarer: hard to find and harder to keep. Long ago and far away were the same, remote place now…but separate and hellish as memory bubbled from its deep-brain niche, defining one and then the another, and throwing him backwards (in subjective time and subjective space) to the days of his youth. He’d taken to life in the East Flank township because he could hide there, as if from Aresians, though they were gone: erased by war and by thermonuclear heat. He’d seen the blast (though he’d been too young to understand it) and cowered, like everyone else, in the ant-hill tunnels beneath Pavonis Mons. Even in death, the Aresians held sway: they’d had sympathizers—quiet, furtive men, wives and children—who harbored Aresian thoughts, and called them propriety. Aresians were hatred as old as humankind, and though they were erased in name and in faction, their impulse remained. Vásíl understood. He loved his parents. He loved his sisters. For a time, he hated himself for the ways in which he betrayed their faith in the natural order, the balanced scheme and the rightness of their world and its assumptions. He didn’t belong there. He wasn’t one of them, despite his efforts to be what they were and what they wanted. He fought with himself, until—once—he kissed another boy…and fled, three days later, into the backstreets and alleys, the underground warrens and ramshackle slums of East Flank Township. Hell and refuge had been the same thing for him. But he taught himself things, learned things from others, and found his way out. “I wanted to respect your privacy,” Márina said, snatching him away from long ago and another world. “I didn’t come looking for you. Not initially.” Vásíl shrugged, smiled, dropped his gaze downward until it met him—reflected—in steaming, black tea. “It’s okay,” he said as gently as he could. “I’ve missed you.” “Really?” “You always listened.” “You never talked much…so listening was easy.” Vásíl smiled, glancing up from tea and steam. Dinner had been a quiet affair, tense, and heavy with years of unspoken words. It was true. He’d missed Márina: the way she laughed and dissected puzzles with her gaze alone. He watched, now, as she dissected him—gently, of course—guessing at the meanings of this gesture or that evasion. She was—he knew—as aware of the restaurant around them: the soft, ambient lighting in warm, incandescent colors. Of music drifting from overhead speakers as subtle as white noise: music, you could never hear unless you listened specifically for it. He’d helped tweak the system: fine tuned the backchannel sensors and imbedded a vocabulary of gestures into the governing AI brain. It was all sideline work. More hobby than profession, and now—as his after-dinner tea cooled in its cup—he wondered if Márina noticed what she was hearing. More likely, he thought, she’d tuned into the waiter, hovering just out of sight with an unspoken question, plastered to his tongue. Will there be anything else, Mister Ježek…? Ježek was a name that meant something on Jupiter Station: in the bars and in the offices, in the swanky restaurants on any of the decks. It was Vásíl: Mister Ježek muttered in a polite half-whisper, behind the sound of clicking heels and a faint, bow common to interworld spaces, where names were currency and reputations were hard and fast marks of character. Ježek meant hard work and tight-lips allergic to gossip, and—always—good tips and tabs paid up front. In a place like Overton’s—as rich a restaurant as any in the Gold Quarter of Jupiter Station—Ježek was a friend in name and in other ways, and so Vásíl always had an open table, always had prompt service, and at the end of each month, a free bottle of the restaurant’s best Callisto vintage. “You see?” Márina said. “You’re doing it now: being very easy to listen to.” Vásíl laughed, a short, soft bark of a sound. “I don’t know what to say.” “A lot’s happened. Mami and Papa…they….” “I’m sorry I didn’t come.” The words spilled, maybe too quickly. “Hanka despises you for that.” “And you?” “I did at first, but then—” silence. A sip of coffee and a delicate forkful of cake. “And then?” “Do you remember Joseph?” —and three days later, he’d fled into the backstreets and alleys, the underground warrens and ramshackle slums of East Flank— He nodded, eyes closed. “He has a senate seat and he’s allied with the Opositionist Party. He has charisma, a bit of charm…but he sees Aresian ghosts wherever he looks. You’d think he lived through the Erasure itself.” With eyes still closed, memories burning through the back of his mind, Vásíl sat back and flattened his fingers to the table top. “He was born at the end of it, before Eartluna and the rest of the Insystem Alliance nuked Tharsis.” “The Diaspora is still going on. Even now. He never left Olympus City.” “Running was never his style.” “But you left.” “I ran, you mean.” “I never knew why. Oh, maybe I’d guessed, but I never believed it.” “When Mami and Papa were born, Olympia was still called Mars, and it was a harder place to live…harder even than the Kuipers are, now. You had to be something else in order to survive on the world they knew. By the time Hanka was born, we had the Gossamer and Mars, now Olympia, had radiation belts like big mama Earth, and aurora-lights dancing around the poles. But people like Mami and Papa had already been shaped; they couldn’t change as quickly as their three kids were born, and so…” A lump kneaded itself in his throat. Márina sat in rapt, contemplative silence. “So…rather than force them to live with the idea of two daughters and a mutant, I—” —“Kissed a boy,” she said, laughing nervously. “And ran away.” “Yeah.” “And now?” “Now what?” “You’re here. I found your records—which is how I found you. Your Olympian expatriate status was rescinded and you’re a Jove citizen by marriage. Because you surrendered your Olympian citizenship, you can’t set foot on Olympian-sovereign soil or any Olympian territorial holding for another seven Sol Standardized years. You’re a shaper. Ironic I think in that you call yourself a mutant. It’s a complicated mess, isn’t it, Vásia. Mami and Papa would have sent you to a reshaping clinic for genetic restructuring. They’d have killed who you are and had the son they wanted. And now—way out here—you work as a shaper.” He listened for bitterness in Márina’s words and heard none. He sought reproach on her face, but her features (pale in a neat cone of overhead light) revealed nothing more than Mami’s fine, aquiline nose and supple lips. Her eyes were as blue as Papa’s and as fiery with incomprehensible passions. “There are shapers,” he said. “And there are shapers.” “And which one are you?” “I’m a lifestyle architect—I bud synaptic constellations. I erase traumas and restructure memories. I don’t change anyone. I don’t tweak genes.” “And there’s a need for you, all the way out here?” “I work with a lot of Interworld Resource Authority people…haulers, prospectors, people like that. I enhance particular memories. It gets pretty lonely between Jove and Kuiper. The Outer System’s still pretty big Life goes by you on one world or another, and so I make lives, or at least the memories of them…I give people things the natures of their lives deny them. It’s a job, Márina, like any other, and I like to think I do it well.” “But you’re still a shaper.” Vásíl shook his head. “Not like that,” he said. “Not like the ones who agree—if even by accident—with the Aresians.” “Like our parents…” It might have been a question. It might have something harder: an accusation. But Márina spoke calmly and quietly, and so Vásíl felt the weight of interpretation placed firmly on his shoulders. “The Aresians were extremists. Gene purists, ethnic politicians or whatever we’re calling them in the history databanks these days. Mami and Papa were never like that, and it would hurt them—their memory—to think that they were; they were colonists and the colonial imperative has always been the same: make babies…adhere to the breeder norm, because if you don’t, your fledgling population dies. That’s different, Márina, from what the Children of Ares demanded of Mars.” An expression of relief broke across Márina’s face. “So,” she said. “You don’t hate them?” “No,” Vásíl said, surprised at the intensity of his feeling. “No,” he said again. “I thought, once, that I did.” Márina toyed with her fork, her cake, and then—slowly and contemplatively—sliced it, delicately, and raised the portion to her mouth. She ate, Vásíl thought, like a geisha: impeccable in her manner, and with far more grace than he’d ever manage. He laughed at the thought of himself, mincing through behavioral protocol, starving himself to death from eating slowly and barely touching his lips to the tines of a fork. “So,” he said, shifting the subject from himself. “You’re the official Olympian Consul for Ganymede…” “Yeah.” “So why are you here? You don’t need a Jupiter Station transfer. Ganymede is in an Olympia-compatible orbital phase right now. Transfer is an added expense.” Márina shrugged. “I’m in the neighborhood,” she said. “It’s been more than twenty years since I saw you, and I just wanted to know what you’re like…what kind of a man you are. I looked for you—off and on—and it was just coincidence, really, that I found you here.” There was more to it than that. He could hear it in her tone. He saw it in the sudden evasion shadowing her downcast gaze. “And here I am,” he said. “You look well,” she said. “So do you.” “You’re married,” she said. Another lump knotted itself in the hollow of his throat. “For nine years now.” “Who’s the lucky…guy?” “His name,” Vásíl said, “is Hadrian. He’s a xenobiologist…he studies…little critters. Germs, mostly.” “Xeno,” Márina said. “That means the germs he studies aren’t exported from the Inner System, they’re not descended from any Terran base species.” Vásíl nodded. “Europan natives, clinging to the underside of surface ice,” he said. “Extremophiles. Odd little buggers. Ugly as sin. Europa’s swimming with ‘em.” “There’s such a thing as cute germs?” “To hear him talk about the subject, yeah.” “Can I meet him?” “He’s on station. Yeah.” “I’d like that,” she said. A lull descended. Vásíl sipped cooling tea and listened to the babble of random talk around the table. Overton’s was never truly crowded, but there were always ships in dock: big ships from the Kuiper Run, and a few quasi-interstellars in from iceball colonies Shen Shin and Volga, where heliopause screamed at the edge of human-inhabited space: solar winds battering themselves against in-falling radiation wafting through the interstellar medium. The quasi-interstellars never went far in-system, never farther than Jove, and their captains, their senior crews—the living embodiments of exotic—were a familiar presence in places like Overton’s, where the light was dim and the sounds of human language were fat with Callisto brogues, glottal, sonorous Olympian accents, and the sing-song cadence marking any speech from the blue gas giant world-systems of Neptune and Üranüs. “I have a question,” Márina said, snatching Vásíl’s thoughts back to the confines of the restaurant. “Yeah?” “As a shaper,” Márina said. “You could…conceivably implant memories, correct?” “Yes. Provided I have an accurate map of a native synaptic mesh.” “How easy is it to acquire such a map?” “It’s easy. I can do it in my sleep.” “I’d like to know what happened during the two decades we were strangers to each other. I don’t want your memories, Vasia…but I want to know what you’ve been through, what you’ve done. You could just as easily tell me, I know…but, I want something else. Whether I like it or not, you’re an alien to me. I know in theory that you’re my brother, but for two decades, I’ve lived without a brother, and I’d nearly forgotten what it’s like to have one.” “You want missing time,” Vásíl said, suddenly cold. Márina closed her eyes, as if reading prompts to an answer behind her lids. “Yes,” she said. The word was soft: nearly a whisper. “That’s not as easy a thing to accomplish as you’d think,” Vásíl said. An evasion, yes, but the truth as well. “It’s not like painting by numbers. I’d be shaping your mind, Márina and I have to be honest…I’m not sure I’m qualified to do that.” “You’re a shaper,” Vásíl. “You’re qualified.” He nodded. “Technically, yes…but ethically, I’m not so sure…not in this case.” “You have something to hide?” “No.” “Then think about it. That’s all I’m really asking.” She reached across the table and clasped his fingers in hers. “I’ve missed you. I listened to everyone say how you were a bad son for not attending the funerals of both your parents. I’ve heard Hanka all but disown you. Throughout all of this, you were silent…absent, and there was no one—not even Joseph, after only one kiss—to speak on your behalf. Your side to that story is as important as the sides I’d heard. Your experiences on the days of two funerals are just as important as the funerals you missed, and I want to understand that, and I want to know what it was like and words aren’t enough. So please, Vásíl. Think about it.” …to be continued… I can’t remember how or why I woke up at 4 in the morning, three mornings ago, but I do remember words echoing (rather chaotically) though my thoughts. Three words. A name. An event. “The Aresian Erasure.” I had no idea what that was or why I’d thought (dreamed?) it, and my muse was only telling me to write. Write what? I wondered. Something! my sometimes-pushy Muse said. This is the end result. There is more to come, obviously, and hopefully you’ve enjoyed this opening segment. *** Special note on the image: It took me four days with interruptions (work) to compose the image accompanying this text. It took two days and a caffeine buzz to write the story. The “character” pictured is a kit-bash mash-up from various photos I’ve taken. I went crazy with layers and filters. The background image is simply a serious tweak of the circuit board appearing earlier in my gallery. The text is…well…text layers created with The Gimp.