Arkwright (31 page)

“I thought it was because he wanted to build a starship. That's what Mom told me.” I might have added that my father told me the same thing too, but it had been so many years since the last time I'd seen him that I seldom even thought about him anymore.

“Oh, I'm sure that was a reason too. Otherwise, he would've had us digging bunkers.” Grandpa shrugged. “But going to the stars says something that digging a hole in the ground doesn't. It says you've got hopes for the future that goes beyond mere survival. Maybe it's because he was a science fiction writer that he saw things that way, but … well, at any rate, he was ahead of the curve.”

“But the human race isn't going to get wiped out,” Robert said. Then he added, with just a touch of uncertainty, “Is it?”

Grandpa didn't say anything for a moment. Instead, he gazed down the hill. It was a lovely afternoon; blue sky, no clouds, warm breeze, fresh leaves on the trees. Hard to believe anything bad could ever happen to a world as perfect as this.

“Probably not,” he said at last. “We survived the global climate change of the last century, what with droughts and superstorms and coastal flooding and all that. The world lost a billion and a half people, but it took decades for the population to drop. Humans are adaptive creatures and pretty resilient when push comes to shove.” He picked up a small log we'd just cut and idly began to strip off the bark. “This is different. Even if they manage to evacuate everyone from the coastal areas before the tsunamis come in, Na's going to vaporize a lot of seawater when it hits the ocean. That's going to cloud the upper atmosphere and in turn cause a climatic chain reaction.” He looked up at the sky. “We may not have another day like this for a very long time. And not everyone has a greenhouse out back.”

“But
Comstock
might still succeed, right?”

Grandpa and I shared a look. We understood the physics of the situation better than most people, my partner included, so we knew what a crapshoot the asteroid-deflection mission really was. “Sure … sure, it's got a chance,” Grandpa said, and then he dropped the log and bent down to pick up the chain saw. “Well, c'mon, this wood isn't going to cut itself.”

We spent a couple of more hours on the firewood, and then Grandpa and Robert went back to the house and took the truck to Joni and Brett's house to start loading the shingles they were giving us. We'd soon be repaying the favor by helping them bale hay for their horses. There was a lot of high grass growing in the mountain meadows abutting her property and ours, so the seven horses she owned would have enough to eat. They would be useful if and when there was no longer enough sunlight to adequately recharge the solar panels of our cars and the truck. And although no one spoke of it, we all knew that, if things got bad enough that we couldn't feed either them or ourselves, Joni's beloved horses might have to serve another purpose, as well.

I finished stacking the wood we'd just cut and then went back up to the house. I was about to go inside and start work on dinner when I heard a vehicle coming up the road. It was still out of sight around a bend and behind the trees, so at first I believed it was Grandpa's truck—which was a little odd; it takes time to load several pallets of shingles. Then it came into view, and I saw that it was a big black sports van.

No one we knew drove anything like that, so I raised my wrist phone and called Mom. “We've got company,” I said when she answered. This was something we always did, giving her a chance to hide if she wanted to. My mother never liked unexpected visitors.

“All right,” she replied. “Tell me when they're gone.”

By then, I could see that it had tinted windows and light-blue all-state plates. I walked down the front path to the end of the driveway and waited until it came to a stop. The driver's-side door opened, and a young guy in an air force uniform got out.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

He seemed to hesitate, as if uncertain who I was. “Are you Chandraleska Skinner?”

An odd question. It was rare that people mistook me for my mother. We bore a certain similarity, but you could only mix us up if you hadn't seen her in quite a while, and most people hadn't. “No, I'm her daughter, Dhani.”

He said nothing but instead went to the back of the van, slid open the rear door, and spoke to whoever was seated in back. I couldn't hear what he said. A couple of moments passed, and then two people climbed out. One was a heavy-set woman with ginger hair, who wore a pantsuit that, like the van and its driver, looked government issue. The other was a middle-aged man with white hair, thin and slightly stooped. He came out last, and for a long time, he simply stared at me, as if waiting for me to say something.

“Dhani,” he said at last. “You've grown up.”

If he hadn't spoken, it might have taken me a couple of minutes to recognize him as my father.

 

12

At the same moment, relativistically speaking, that I was looking at my father for the first time in fourteen years and trying to figure out what to say to him,
Galactique
was trying to bridge a communications gap of its own.

The spider-bots had taken only a few days to repair the laser array; it was just a matter of taking a little extra cable from the ship's spare-parts supply and splicing it into the main bus. Once power was restored to the lasers, the array was redeployed to the outer hull, where a quick test confirmed that the system was back on line.

Now came the hard part: locating Earth's position so that communications could be restored.
Galactique
's planet of origin, along with its sun and all its neighboring worlds, had vanished into the cone of darkness that lay behind the ship; the Doppler effect caused by the ship's .5c velocity had rendered them invisible. To further complicate matters, no navigation updates from Juniper Ridge had been received during the blackout. So the ship had to rely entirely upon itself to determine Earth's location and send a laser pulse in that precise direction—a feat roughly equivalent to a sharpshooter with a high-powered rifle trying to hit a sparrow sitting on a tree branch ten miles away while wearing a blindfold.

Fortunately,
Galactique
's quantum AI had something our hypothetical sharpshooter didn't have: detailed star maps that included the precise locations of known pulsars in the galaxy. Since each pulsar emitted radio beams on a unique frequency, the ship was able to use them as beacons, sort of like interstellar lighthouses. Together with superb sense of direction based upon the ship's current position and estimated trajectory and the internal chronometers accurate to the nanosecond,
Galactique
had the ability to predict where Earth and the Moon would be located, not just then but also in the future. All this involved a very difficult set of parallel calculations in four dimensions. It may have even taken as long as two or three minutes.

Then it fired off a message and waited for a reply.

 

13

It hardly needs to be said that I wasn't the only one who was stunned by Dad's return. When my mother walked into the living room to find her husband, whom she'd all but given up for dead, sitting there along with me and the two people who'd brought him back to Juniper Ridge, she didn't do anything but stare at him with wide, unblinking eyes. Her mouth opened, shut, opened again; I could tell that she was having trouble breathing, let alone finding anything to say. She swayed back and forth on her feet, and for a moment, I was afraid that her legs would give out from under her. As I rose from the couch, though, so did my father from the armchair that had been his usual place many years ago.

“Chandi … I'm home.” Stepping toward her, he started to raise his hands. “Honey … I'm so, so sorry. I—”

“Don't.” Her left hand shot up, palm open and facing outward. “Just”—she looked away, her hand trembling—“don't. I don't want…”

“Mom?” I headed for her. “Mom, are you okay?” Stupid question. Of course she wasn't okay.

“No … no…” Looking away from both Dad and me, she wheeled about and staggered away. My mother never had a drink for as long as I knew her, but just then, she looked just the way Dad did those nights when he came home late from the Kick Inn. “Just … everyone, just leave me alone.”

Then she was gone, stumbling back through the door from which she'd just emerged, heading back to the observatory, where she'd been until I'd made the awful mistake of asking her to come over to the house without telling her who was waiting for her. I wasn't trying to be mean, and it wasn't as if I'd meant to say, “Surprise! Look who's home!” It was simply that I'd had no idea how to tell her that Dad had suddenly reappeared, and I decided that maybe it was best if she saw it for herself. Which only goes to prove that you can be intelligent and still be pretty stupid.

I turned to Dad. He was still standing there, face as white as his hair had become, hands still raised to embrace his wife. He looked at me and said, “Dhani, I didn't … I don't…”

“Shut up.” I've never hit anyone in my life, but in that moment, all I wanted to do was deck him. Somehow, I managed to control myself. “Sit down,” I said, pointing to his chair. “Now talk … no, wait.” I took a second to use my wrist phone to call Grandpa. “Come home at once,” I said when he answered. “Dad's come back.” I didn't wait for a reply but simply clicked off. “Okay … start talking.”

“Perhaps it would better if I explained,” said the woman who'd shown up with my father. She and the air force officer were sitting on the other side of the room. “I'm Cassandra O'Neill, and this is Captain Philip Jensen, and we're—”

“No. Him first, and then you.” I didn't even look at them; my attention was solely upon my father. “Go.”

Dad dropped his hands and let out his breath, and then he slowly lowered himself into his chair. “Dhanishta, I don't know where to begin, but…” He shook his head. “All right, I'll try.”

Fourteen years ago, he and the woman he'd met in town—it took a while for him to even speak her name, Sally Metcalfe—had taken off for what he originally thought would be no more than a few weeks, maybe a few months at most. Their destination was Denver, her hometown, where she'd told him that she still had friends, family, a job, and something like a future.

But first, they decided to have a little adventure. After abandoning his car in Boston, they'd boarded the transtube and used it weave their way across the country, getting off the maglev every now and then to sample the nightlife in the places where they landed. In this way, they'd drifted from bar to bar, motel to motel, eating in crappy restaurants, nursing hangovers, doing all the things two people did when they were on a long binge and running away from whatever it was they had left behind.

It may or may not have been fun, because Dad had little memory of that time. Blackouts were part of the ride, I guess. The next time he was able to think clearly at all, it was when he woke up to find himself in a jail cell in Denver, with no recollection of how he'd gotten there. Sally was gone, and somewhere along the line, his belongings had vanished, as well. He never saw her again.

The biggest shock, though, was discovering that seven months had passed since the day he'd walked out of my life and my mother's.

Dad was picked up by the Denver cops after he was found on the sidewalk outside a downtown wino bar. Someone had taken his wallet and what little money he had left, so being charged with vagrancy and public drunkenness was only the least of his problems. He was homeless, and just to put the icing on the cake, he began to suffer the DTs within hours of waking up in jail.

“Being taken to the hospital was probably the best thing that could have happened to me,” Dad said. “After I got out and had my day in court, the judge realized that I needed treatment more than jail time. So I was sent to a substance abuse center and—”

“You're still not telling me where you've been for the last fourteen years.” I didn't mean to be cold, but I was becoming impatient with him. “Not to mention why you've picked this time to come back.”

“Maybe I can answer those questions,” Grandpa said.

He and Robert had come into the living room so quietly that I hadn't noticed either of them. Dad looked around as he spoke. “Hi, Papa,” he said quietly. “Good to see you again.”

“You're looking better, son. Staying off the bottle, I hope?”

“Clean and sober for thirteen years.”

“Glad to hear it. And the new job's working out?”

“Well, it's not so new anymore.” Dad smiled just a little. “I've been there about—”

“Wait a minute!” I stared first at Dad and then Grandpa. “Am I getting this straight? You knew where he's been all this time?”

Grandpa slowly let out his breath. There were no vacant chairs left in the room, so he leaned against a wall, folding his arms across his chest. “Robert, do you think you could make some coffee, please? Thanks.” Robert nodded and left the room, and Grandpa went on. “I heard from your father shortly after he went into treatment. He wanted to come back, but I didn't want to have a repeat of what happened here.”

“Which is probably what
would
have happened,” Dad said. “If I'd returned, it would've been only a matter of time before I became a barfly again.” He couldn't look at me as he said this. “I'm sorry, Dhani, but I'd hurt you and your mother enough already, so I took your grandfather's advice and stayed away.”

“I didn't let either you or your mother know,” Grandpa said, speaking to me, “because you were both in a lot of pain, and it would take a long time for the wounds to heal. So I quietly kept in touch with him while he rebuilt his life, and when he was ready to leave the halfway house…”