Ricky was sitting at his desk, which had a world map laminated into its surface. He was drawing something with pencil crayons, his tongue sticking out and up from the corner of his mouth in the quintessential childhood look of concentration. “Dad,” he said, acknowledging me.
I looked around. The room was messy but not a disaster. Some dirty clothes were on the floor; I usually remonstrated him for that, but would not do so today. He had several small plastic dinosaur skeletons that I’d bought for him, and a talking Qui-Gon Jinn action figure he’d received for Christmas. And books, lots of children’s books: our Ricky was going to grow up to be a reader.
“Son,” I said, and I waited patiently for him to give me his full attention. He was completing one of the elements of his drawing — it looked like an airplane. I let him do so; I knew how gnawing unfinished business could be. At last he looked up, seeming surprised that I was still there. He lifted his eyebrows questioningly.
“Son,” I said again, “you know Daddy’s been awfully sick.”
Ricky put down his pencil crayon, realizing we were moving onto serious ground. He nodded.
“And,” I said, “well, I think you know that I’m not going to get better.”
He pursed his lips and nodded bravely. My heart was breaking.
“I’m going to go away,” I said. “I’m going to go away with Hollus.”
“Can he fix you?” Ricky said. “He said he couldn’t, but . . .”
Rick didn’t know that Hollus was female, of course, and I hardly wanted to go off on tangents now. “No. No, there’s nothing he can do for me. But, well, he’s going on a trip, and I want to go with him.” I’d been on numerous trips before — to digs, to conferences. Ricky was used to me traveling.
“When will you be coming back?” he asked. And then, his face all cherubic innocence, “Will you bring me something?”
I closed my eyes for a moment. My stomach was churning.
“I, ah, I won’t be coming back,” I said softly.
Ricky was quiet for a moment, digesting this. “You mean — you mean you’re going off to die?”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry to be leaving you.”
“I don’t want you to die.”
“I don’t want to die, either, but . . . but sometimes we don’t have any choice in things.”
“Can I — I want to go with you.”
I smiled sadly. “You can’t, Ricky. You have to stay here and go to school. You have to stay here and help Mommy.”
“But . . .”
I waited for him to finish, to complete his objection. But he didn’t. He simply said, “Don’t go, Daddy.”
But I was going to leave him. Whether this month, on Hollus’s starship, or a couple more months down the road, lying in a hospital bed, tubes in my arm and nose and the back of my hand, EKG monitors softly bleeping in the background, nurses and doctors scuttling to and fro. One way or the other, I was going to leave. I had no choice about leaving, but I did have a say in when and how.
“Nothing,” I said, “is harder for me than going.” There was no point in telling him I wanted him to remember me like this, when really I wanted him to remember me as I was a year ago, seventy pounds heavier, with a reasonably full head of hair. But, still, this was better than what I would soon become.
“Then don’t go, Daddy.”
“I’m sorry, sport. Really, I am.”
Ricky was as good as any kid his age at begging and wheedling to get to stay up late, to get a toy he wanted, to get to eat some more candy. But he realized, it seemed, that none of that would work here, and I loved him all the more for his six-year-old wisdom.
“I love you, Daddy,” he said, tears coming now.
I bent down, lifting him from his chair, raising him up to my chest, hugging him to me. “I love you, too, son.”
Hollus’s starship, the Merelcas, looked nothing like what I’d expected. I’d grown used to movie spaceships with all sorts of detailing on their hulls. But this ship had a perfectly smooth surface. It consisted of a rectangular block at one end and a perpendicular disk at the other, joined by two long tubular struts. The whole thing was a soft green. I couldn’t tell which end was the bow. Indeed, it was impossible to get any sense of its scale; there was nothing that I could recognize — not even any windows. The ship could have been only a few meters long, or kilometers.
“How big is it?” I asked Hollus, who was floating weightlessly next to me.
“About a kilometer,” she said. “The block-shaped part is the propulsion module; the struts are crew habitats — one for Forhilnors, the other for Wreeds. And the disk at the end is the common area.
“Thank you again for taking me along,” I said. My hands were shaking with excitement. Back in the eighties, there had been some brief talk about someday sending a paleontologist to Mars, and I’d daydreamed that it might be me. But of course they’d want an invertebrate specialist; no one seriously believed that vertebrates had ever inhabited the red planet. If Mars did once have an ecosystem, as Hollus contended, it probably lasted only a few hundred million years, ending when too much atmosphere had bled off into space.
Still, there’s a group called the Make-A-Wish Foundation that tries to fulfill final requests of terminally ill children; I don’t know if there’s a comparable group for terminally ill adults, and, to be honest, I’m not sure what I would have wished for had I been given the chance. But this would do. It would certainly do!
The starship continued to grow on the viewscreen. Hollus had said it had been cloaked, somehow, for more than a year, making it invisible to terrestrial observers, but there was no need for that anymore.
Part of me wished there were windows — both here on the shuttle and on the Merelcas. But apparently there were none on either; both had unbroken hulls. Instead, pictures from outside were conveyed to wall-sized viewscreens. I’d loomed in close at one point and couldn’t discern any pixels or scan lines or flicker. The screens served just as well as real glass windows would — indeed, were better in many ways. There was no glare whatsoever from their surface, and, of course, they could zoom in to give a closeup, show the view from another camera, or indeed display any information one wanted. Perhaps sometimes the simulation is better than the real thing.
We flew closer and closer still. Finally, I could see something on the starship’s green hulclass="underline" some writing, in yellow. There were two lines of it: one in a system of geometric shapes — triangles and squares and circles, some with dots orbiting them — and the other a squiggle that looked vaguely like Arabic. I’d seen markings like the first set on Hollus’s holoform projector, so I assumed that was the Forhilnor language; the other must have been the script of the Wreeds. “What’s that say?” I asked.
“ ‘This end up,’ ” said Hollus.
I looked at her, mouth agape.
“Sorry,” she said. “A little joke. It is the name of the starship.”
“Ah,” I said. “Merelcas, isn’t it? What does that mean?”
“ ‘Vengeful Beast of Mass Destruction,’ ” said Hollus.
I swallowed hard. I guess some part of me had been waiting for one of those “It’s a cookbook!” moments. But then Hollus’s eyestalks rippled with laughed. “Sorry,” she said again. “I could not resist. It means, ‘Stellar Voyager,’ or words to that effect.”
“Kind of bland,” I said, hoping I wasn’t giving offense.
Hollus’s eyestalks moved to their maximum separation. “It was decided by a committee.”
I smiled. Just like the name for our Discovery Gallery back at the ROM. I looked again at the starship. While my attention had been diverted, an opening had appeared in its side; I have no idea whether it had irised open or some panel had slid away. The opening was bathed in yellow-white light, and I could see three other black wedge-shaped landers positioned inside.