Выбрать главу

love you for your soul. my soul. Our soul. decades of searching before we found Us again. i felt the touch of your essence years ago, but never knew that i would find myself within you, that perfect soul resonating with my own, all pieces of one returning to the eternal, two souls traveling the same path for the moment, the perfect moment.

i love You for your Love.

How we deny. That moment. Within stillness and cold, how we deny.

Never had a dog. Our neighbor had a dog. And a baby. For a while.

Do you know of silver? What she told us, the ice, the wind, a blade? Do you know? Believe?

There are things we know, resident memory, special memory, species memory coded into us. We know. Just because. There are things we’re told. To read, to watch to be. I read of lions and witches and robots, a desert, a jihad, rabbits and a warren, a submarine, boys on an island. Arch had no Piggy. I read, Mommy read to me, and I liked the stories, although the room shook, the sky was fire. I liked those stories before bedtime, although sometimes they made me think too much, too much to sleep, to breathe. I knew of broken glass: and blood.

We read of Ender because we were supposed to. There were girls on his ship.

I read about Hank years before I met him, many years before he died. I never knew he was real.

Those stories…A different dust, a different wind, a different showdown at noon. Hank was

How he’d stand, hand poised, brow furrowed, staring, staring down. Hank didn’t wear a white hat, but he killed men in black. Primitive. I can’t imagine

a lifetime without you, yet it stares me in the face right now

and he smoked. I’ve never. Smoked. He chewed tobacco sometimes. Spit on the desert floor. Disgusting process, but

why do i enjoy it so much?

How the hell did Hank end up in this? Anachronism, fictional character made popular by a return to traditional values after the war of the turn of the century. Hank, last-name-less Hank, on billboards and action figures and prime-time pay-per-view. Hank. He. Was good. For the world.

A painter, a cowboy, a ghost, a child, a warship, a

Love.

Know? Believe?

that I didn’t want her to shiver besind me, hated that it was so cold, that my skin crawled with silver infestation, that I had to keep shielding in that cramped cockpit so that I wouldn’t

Her smile was so sad.

We found a school of unknowns on screen and raced

like vultures to the

toward them, hoping beyond hope that air would last.

I tried to breathe less, slower, but I knew that she didn’t really need the air anyways, hybrid of silver and something, calm to my rage, cool to my heat, heart to my heart. Target locked, we flew. I let the system drive. We huddled together as best as shielding and timing allowed, allowing precious hours to slip by unprotected until the jabbing started along fingers and wrists, behind eyes, and I retreated behind liquid glass.

Can you appreciate the touch of a lover not marred by distance, flesh to flesh, swimming into, entering, not echoed through phase, cold, wet, not shivering and yet feeling the same pang, the same pain, the same

The realization of distance physical.

I was so scared that the galleons wouldn’t be friendly.

How I miss home, or the idea of home: safety, family, parents still alive, teddy bear unburned, cartoons on the television, no grocery store walks past a little girl, waving. I miss an idea that would have prevented this love. Which life would I choose?

Better to have loved and lost…Is bullshit.

I’ve killed her. Weight of body, smell of sweat, tack of blood. I’ve killed

Lies since birth, all that they taught, all that they taught. I’ve known truths, but I’ve assembled them myself from fragments of Us. I’ve known the silver, the stillness, the loss, the night. I know. i Know. You. Do you? You?

Focus. Inhale. moment

It isn’t like books or movies, holograms or

a boy a girl and the end of the

No words.

A mind dissembles.

I’d passed out by the time we were in range. Lilith activated the beacon, mindful that it might draw unfriendlies too. There was nothing more we could do, dead ship, cold and silver onset within me. I remember snap of static and gush of warmth as they released the cockpit seal in the galleon hangar, shadowed images, old men in miner’s jumpsuits, jaws agape at my passenger. Woman. Shielded.

Weakness: they lifted me up, out. Conversation like waves, echoes, forth and back. I knew it wasn’t English. French.

I remember fever: slurred speech, sweaty brow, cool floor, a man squatting beside me, looking from his shipmates to the sick destroyer captain and his companion. Deactivated my shielding, let me breathe deeply of old air, taste of ore, reach out to Lilith, please, just let me hold

She was uncomfortable. Center of attention, moreso than I was. Because. Just because.

A new man, my vision fading from black to

Silver was retreating.

He knelt, touched my cheeks, forehead. Spoke to his shipmates with foreign tongue.

Lilith: standard? english? anyone?

oui. yes.

I don’t remember what happened after that, but waking up in their sickbay. Warm. Normal, stabbing gone, heart regulated. Rested. I panicked but she was at my side, shielded but there. I wanted to hold her hand, but knew that it was getting too close. To time. The time. When we could no longer be together. She kept her distance, a distance that I knew could only grow. You know. You do. grow.

She’d spoken with the man in broken Standard. Told him everything. Incredible story, but she was the proof. She. was the proof.

It was a group of three galleons, miners. They worked around the periphery of a single system where they’d found the closest approximation to Sol that they could. Dead system, planets harvested of almost everything, but still breathable atmosphere, a little water. Nothing left but desert, flattened cities, a spire…Three ships, a few hundred crewmen. When she asked where they came from, they told a story as incredible as ours, yet there it was, intersections, intersections, paths crossed in the night.

Many of the colony came from rogue Fleet vessels. Soldats perdus. And now I knew, and I knew.

His name was Berard, and he’d known my father.

There are histories hidden between these stars, histories that die before revelation. I feel them; they bring poignant tears to tired eyes.

out of the hell of whatever it was

Do you know of France, interior struts of Guerra’s midsection, wine country converted to bulkheads? Do you know of Paris, the war, the hole in the earth that led to

Berard served under Jean Reynald and Joseph Windham after the war, during Mother’s rise. He knew Whistler, the original projection. He was responsible for the Paris Compound. He was the Pierce de Paris, taking his boys to the sky when the “alien” invasion began, for a while turning them into good little soldiers, later breaking target and killing angels and leaving the master plan of the jihad. Berard saw through the plan. Maybe Pierce did too.

They hid. Found a home. Became soldat perdus of a friendlier persuasion.

He knew of her beginning, those precious secrets held by precious few: ice, wind, blade. He knew. Maybe she saw it alclass="underline" intersections in the night. Maybe she let him escape.

He said I looked like my father.

Joseph Windham was the strongest man in the world. I saw tears in his eyes once, that day that he left and I knew he would die only months and centuries later, in the cold of this, bathed in a bridge sea, bubbles of gelatin glass, the sound of cracking shell, an instant of

My father never trusted his path, chose to tell a small circle of his officers that which he’d seen in Mother’s eyes. He wanted them to distrust. He needed them to distrust, because he knew.