Kissed a Boy and Ran Away (Conclusion) * “You haven’t told her yet, have you?” Hadrian asked, a voice in the darkness; he was a comfort, pressed to Vásíl’s back, like the shell of a turtle: protective and comforting. His hands meandered—palm down—across Vásíl’s stomach and across his chest. His fingertips brushed gently, as if reading Braille. Vásíl adjusted himself beneath the bedcovers, finding a warmer position in Hadrian’s spooning embrace. “No,” he said, reeling through the paradox of exhaustion and burning, restless energy; he’d been jittery all day, though work hadn’t been so bad. There were ways to burn of excess energy, ways to focus on one client or another, or the challenges inherent in the profession of mental editing. In God’s-honest truth, he’d simply buried himself in observation reports. Work had been easy and too-quickly over. Now, in off-shift darkness, cradled—naked—in Hadrian’s embrace, he savored the wordless eloquence of Hadrian’s touch, and Hadrian’s breath softening the back of his neck with humid, living warmth. “Are you going to?” “I don’t know.” “She’s looking to reestablish a link. I know she didn’t follow you out here, but she did make an effort contact you. It’s no short jump from Olympia to Jove, no easy adjustment to go from planet life to life on an orbital station.” “She’s not staying. She’s going to Ganymede.” “Still…it’s no easy trip. I’m guessing she thinks it’s a good thing to have a brother out here, a familiar face—even if you’re a stranger to her. You’re blood. Minus twenty Sol-standardized years, you’ve got a history together. When you left home, she probably found the porno stash you kept under your mattress. That’s gotta mean something, right?” “I don’t know,” Vásíl said, “how to talk to her.” Conversation had been easy enough in Overton’s and in the South Polar observation hub. For three days, they’d talked. Laughed. Remembered. She hadn’t mentioned the request she’d made. She’d made pleasant small-talk with Hadrian during a lunch-hour visit, and all of that had been easy. Effortless. But Vásíl couldn’t say what he’d tucked away behind all conscious thoughts, couldn’t tell her about Hadrian’s promotion and immanent departure for the way-out regions of the Sol System reach. There were things out there, in the ice fields of Nix: life by the accepted definition of the term, but a challenge to the concept in relation to diminutive Nix and the environment there. “Just talk,” Hadrian said. As if it was that easy. “I turned my back on everything in my past. I left Olympia. Márina is the first member of my family I’ve seen in more than twenty years. How do I tell her that I’m about to vanish again, that I’ll be a ghost to her for just a little while longer?” Hadrian’s embrace tightened. His arms clasped Vásíl, clenched at his stomach. He spooned closer and touched the back of Vásíl’s neck with a light, pecking kiss. “You simply tell her,” he said. “And then you stay in touch. Send her pictures. Write email. Find her in the datasphere and chat with her.” “Just like that, eh?” “Yeah, Vásilek…just like that.” Vásíl closed his eyes, shifted—with bed-disturbing effort—and faced Hadrian in the darkness, caressed the side of his face, reading the narrow set of his features beneath splayed, brushing fingertips. He stroked the wiry, springy growth of Hadrian’s hair, cut short now and like coarse wool to the touch. “She wants me to edit her synapses, so that she can remember some of the things I’ve done.” A shrug. “Lots of people do that. My own sister’s got—what?—three distinct edits: one of em’s our wedding.” “That’s different,” Vásíl said. “How?” “She’s an archaeologist; she was digging up the ruins of old New York: working in a restricted area on a very tight timetable. She couldn’t just leave.” “And this is different, how?” “You never ran away, never disappeared. No one in your family ever thought you might be dead, or wondered if anyone would ever find your body.” “And that,” Hadrian said. “Is all the more reason to tweak your sister’s mind. Give her your experience and trust that she’ll try to understand it. That’s what she wants, you know…little reflections of your humanity: proof that she has a brother and not just a ghost who keeps vanishing.” Another warm kiss found Vásíl’s cheek. Hadrian shifted, slowly and languorously, the crests of his toes finding—and stroking—the under-pads of Vásíl’s own. Lust leavened the flesh south of Vásíl’s navel and he smiled at the thought of Hadrian, holding him…talking…listening, and maybe—later, and in the right mood—doing provocative, playful things. Silence. “She’s a Member of State…the Olympian Consul to Ganymede. She’s a citizen, and I surrendered my citizenship when I took your last name. By Olympian immigration law, I can’t set foot on Olympian soil or Olympian protectorate territories. I think, by extension, I’m not allowed to go poking around in Olympian brains.” “You’re copping out, Vasilek…one third of your clients are Olympian. Some are survivors of the Erasure. You don’t have a problem with synaptic realignment procedures with them…Is Márina really so different?” Vásíl closed his eyes against the threat of sudden tears. “I’m afraid, “ he said, quietly. “I can give her what she wants, but if I do that, I’ll wander through those memories, too…the parts with you are good, and I like that…but I spent a long time in the East Flank Township at the foot of Olympus Mons. I don’t want to relive that, I don’t even like mentioning it now.” “You don’t have to relive anything. Your synaptic maps are on record: numbers in a file…overlay patterns, ion balances, electrical potentials and whatever else: living memories, yes…but they’re not the memories living in your head. Make copies of those and give them to her.” “It’s not that easy.” “Isn’t it?” “My life was a secret for just over two decades.” “And that’s it, huh…? Secrets. Nothing big, nothing world-shattering, but secrets nonetheless: stuff you hid from your parents, from your family, and now…your sister is here, asking to learn about everything that she’s missed.” With his eyes still closed, Vásíl nodded, his cheek pressed and rubbing on the pillow beneath it. Hadrian touched his face, traced the contours of his nose, his cheekbones, his chin. Vásíl smiled into the gesture, pressing closer. “You don’t have to give her everything, Vasilek…just give her something…and tell her that we’re going to Nix. Your parents are dead. You have no uncles or aunts: none who matter at any rate…you and Háná are all the family she’s got left. Don’t let her go to Ganymede thinking she’s lost you again. Please, Vasilek…don’t do that.” “You care about her that much?” “I care about you Vásíl…she’s a part of who you are, and so—yes!—I care.” * Twelve million souls perished during the Aresian Erasure. Untold millions scattered: from the cities of Olympia, flinging themselves in-system as far as Venusia, and outward to the Plutonian Orbital Field and the scattered arcologies spinning in the vast, cold darkness of Kuiper and Oort. Vásíl left Olympia long after the Aresian Faction shattered, scattered, and died; he was one of the scattered. Since his grandparents’ childhood, Olympia had been home to the Children of Ares…the Aresians. They claimed superior culture based on superior genes; they’d bombed the Gossamer, viewing it as a folly, as a force of weakness. There was no way, they said, that children of Mars should live beneath a cloud of gleaming satellites, shaping a immense magnetic field in the service of recessives, dilettante-intellectuals, and other weakling breeds below. Mami and Papa would never have sided with the insane offspring of Olympia, but they agreed in accidental ways with the extermination of recessives, never once thinking that their vanished son lived deep within recessive ranks, that he ran away to save his life: because he’d kissed a boy. And now, shielded against the virulent spill of radiation spewed from the heart of Jove, Vásíl watched Márina—at rest—in a recovery suite. “Yes,” he’d said to her, long, long hours ago. “I’ll do what you ask,” and it had been simple. It was work he got paid to do. He did it for Márina,: not some easy client. He’d done it free of charge, and off the record. He’d explained the process. How it worked. He showed her the chapeau…the hat: the flexible network of scalp-piercing electrodes. “You won’t feel any discomfort,” he’d told her. “You won’t feel much of anything.” He’d told her about the complex brew of drugs and the ways in which he’d get into her head and tweak her neurochemical balances, ion potentials, and somatosensory receptors. “Thank you,” she’d said, moments before he injected unconsciousness into her bloodstream. It took five hours. And now, she slept, and Vásíl sat beside the recovery bed, scanning data on a hand-held slate and eyeing biometric telltales on wall-mounted flat-screens. Hadrian stood beside him, something like a predator’s curiosity, smoldering in his gaze. “You don’t have to stay with me,” Vásíl said, quietly, worried that Hadrian had other responsibilities. “It’ll be a while before she wakes up, and after that, I’ve got tests to run.” “I’ll stay,” Hadrian said in his normal, rolling baritone; it was a warm sound, comforting. “You’re sure?” “I’m sure.” There was silence for a while, as much as Jupiter Station might provide with the thunder-hum of rotation motors and the whisper of air through the ventilation cyclers. Márina breathed deeply and steadily; she spoke—once, and once again—in dreamer’s mumbles, and shifted to her side. “She won’t know everything at once,” Vásíl said. Hadrian stepped behind him, quietly, and kneaded a slow massage into the flesh of Vásíl’s shoulders and neck. “You were far away, a moment ago,” he said. “Where were you?” “On Olympus…” Vásíl said. “In the past.” He inhaled and hugged himself against a sudden chill. “She’s there now…where I was.” Silence. Hadrian’s kneading massage continued. His silence prompted sound in Vásíl’s throat. He released it, and for a moment, talking felt like breathing. “The Aresians”—he said—“didn’t believe that Mars was a hostile world.” A tickle fluttered in his throat like the urge to cough. “They’d bombed the Gossamer and tore great holes in the magnetic fields generated in the satellite cloud. They objected to renaming Mars. Olympia, they said, was a weak name, unworthy of a planet. They objected to shaping the world as well…in the way the first colonists had foreseen. They didn’t want the Gossamer; they didn’t want oceans. They didn’t want to calm the dust storms. They worshipped Mars as a baleful, glowering god. Vásíl paused and drew a deep breath. “My mother and my father were children at the height of Aresian influence; they had a strange relationship with them. They didn’t agree with the bombing of the Gossamer or the pogroms…the Erasure, but they agreed with a lot of Aresian principles. Like the Aresians, they believed in survival through strength.” He paused again. “If they were to ever find out about me…they would have seen me as a weakness.” Hadrian nodded, slowly. “They would have reshaped you.” Vásíl nodded now, and glanced at Márina. “For my own good. That’s what they would have believed. She might have suspected that; they weren’t very quiet about their sentiments. But now…she’s remembering the things I heard them say…about me…though they couldn’t have known. It wasn’t me they were talking about, after all…it was non-breeder recessives: a direct threat to the grandchildren they wanted.” He closed his eyes. Hadrain’s massage faded as his hands drifted from Vásíl’s shoulders and neck and slid—leading an embrace—down his arms, under them, and around his chest. “I ran away, Hadrian…because of what they thought, and because of what I am. I wanted to be their son, and I didn’t want to surrender my body to the stranger they’d put in my brain after yanking me out.” He shrugged and tried to laugh; the sound was bitter, thin, and hollow. “I’m glad we’re going to Nix,” he said. “I don’t want to see Márina’s face when she starts to remember the things she’s experiencing now.” * There had been a time— (…a few days ago…) —When Overton’s was quiet, and when Márina sat at the end of dinner, pecking at cake and sipping coffee from a fine, porcelain cup. She’d gleamed and shimmered with excitement at the head end of her tenure as Consul to Ganymede. She’d been a shock: a stranger with a sister’s memories, and she’d been gentle in her refusal to voice recriminations or questions with difficult answers. Now— (…Overton’s was crowded; there were long-range haulers nestled in hard dock and crews at liberty…) —she sat across from Vásíl and Hadrian, pecking at a salad. It was two days since her time beneath the chapeau. She hadn’t experienced anything immediately, but now, Vásíl knew…she felt the decompressing mass of memories that weren’t there before. He’d told her, today, about the mission, about the things living there, and about his journey, and Hadrian’s journey there: the way they’d planned it and what they hoped for. “Nix,” she said, contemplatively. “It’s considered a place?” Hadrian grinned. “In the most liberal definition of that word.” “It’s nothing more than a pebble, but it’s full of germs; interesting ones, and so naturally, Hadrian would want a good, close look at them.” Vásíl said, happy for the crowd and the babble of foreign voices around them. “It’s so far.” There was wonder in Márina’s voice. There was dread. “We’ll only be there for a year,” Hadrian said, sipping wine as dark as ink in the soft, overhead light. “And then?” Vásíl shrugged. “Back here.” “I’ll be on Ganymede when you return,” she said. Vásíl nodded. “It’s a nice world.” “You’ll visit me, won’t you?” Hadrian nodded. Vásíl nodded. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll visit.” Márina smiled and sipped wine. She sat back and considered the remains of her salad. “I think,” she said, “I’ll need that. I think I’ll need to talk to you. Both of you.” She touched the side of her face with one hand, the tips of her fingers migrating absently to her temple as if to rub away the throb of a headache. Aware, suddenly of her gesture, she blushed, dropped her hand to her lap, and with her other hand, forked salad greens from one side of her plate to the other. “Vásíl reached forward, beckoning her hand into his. “We’ll talk,” he said. “I’d like that.” THE END I’m sure there will be more to this; I’m quite—excited—after all, at the prospect of exploring the worlds and cultures that exist as hints and whispers in the story you’ve presumably just finished. I think there’s more Vásíl needs and wants to say. As always, thank you for reading and commenting, and I hope you’re having a great weekend.