"Are these your books?" asked Arcturus as Valerian finished showing him the junk he'd pulled from the riverbank.
"Yeah, they were Mum's, but she gave them to me to keep."
"May I?" asked Arcturus, reaching for the books.
"Sure."
Arcturus lifted the top volume, a thin picture book on archaeology, complete with diagrams of animal skeletons and geological strata. He remembered reading this book as a child and seemed to remember giving it to Dorothy.
As he examined the next book, Valerian said. "That's my favorite. Mum gave me that for my last birthday."
The book was leather-bound, its cover edged with gold thread and its title printed in elaborate, cursive script.
"Poems of the Twilight Stars" read Arcturus, opening the book and turning its pages. The interior was filled with color plates depleting fantastical beasts and verses of escapist nonsense that talked of ancient beings that walked between the stars in ages past. He read one of the poems, a ridiculously trite piece composed of numerous rhyming couplets that used childishly overblown similes.
A quick flick through the book revealed that every single poem was similarly hokey and worthy of nothing but utter contempt. This was what Valerian was reading? A quick examination of the spines of the other books revealed one to be a guide to understanding your inner soul, while the other was a history book of Umoja.
At least that was something worth reading.
"This is yours?" asked Arcturus, holding up the book of poems.
"Yeah, I've read them all, but that one's my favorite. Mum reads it to me before I go to sleep at night."
"And this is the sort of thing you like? No military books or adventure stories?"
"I'm not allowed books like that. Mum says that the galaxy's a horrible enough place as it is," said Valerian. "She says I don't need to read that kind of thing. She says it'll just upset me."
"Does she now...?"
"Yeah, she likes that one too."
"But you're a young boy: you should be reading action and adventure stories. Space battles and heroes. My father gave me Logan Mitchell—Frontier Marshal when I was about your age. It's a classic. Have you read it?"
Valerian shook his head. "No, what's it about?"
"It's about a man called Logan Mitchell who keeps law and order on one of the fringe worlds. Lois of guns, lots of girls, and plenty of shoot-outs with corrupt officials. Logan's a hard-talking, hard-fighting man who always gets the bad guy. Pretty simple stuff really, but it's good fun and full of blood and guts."
"Why would I want to read about blood and guts and shoot-outs? That sounds horrible."
"I thought most boys liked reading things like that."
"Well, I don't," said Valerian. "I don't like guns."
"Have you ever fired one?"
"No."
"Would you like to?"
Arcturus saw the gleam in the boy's eyes and smiled.
Like most people who professed to dislike guns, Arcturus figured, Valerian had never actually fired one and had probably not even ever held a firearm. There was something about firing a weapon that appealed to the primal urge in everyone, male or female, and even avowed pacifists couldn't deny the thrill of unloading a powerful weapon—even if only into a paper target.
"Come on then," said Arcturus. "I've a gauss rifle and a slugthrower on the Kitty Jay. It's time you learned something about being a man."
Valerian lay back on his bed, struggling to hold back tears of frustration and disappointment as he rubbed analgesic ointment into his shoulder where the butt of his dad's gauss rifle had bruised him black and blue. If Valerian hadn't already hated guns, he would have learned to despise them thoroughly during the time his father had spent with him.
The last seven days had to rank as the greatest and worst week of Valerian's life.
The greatest because his dad was here and he was just as he had pictured him: tall, strong, and handsome. Everything his dad said sounded clever and important, even if a lot of it was beyond Valerian's understanding.
The worst because nothing Valerian did seemed good enough for him.
Valerian had greeted every day as a chance to win his dad's approval, and every day he hoped he was going to grow up just like him. He found himself trying to adopt his dad's mannerisms, his walk, his posture, and even his speech.
It was just a pity that his father paid little or no attention to Valerian's many acts of devotionm seeming only to notice the things he couldn't do.
The lessons with the gauss rifle and slugthrower had been a disaster, the savage recoil of the rifle knocking Valerian onto his back and the bucking pistol spraining his wrist. The guns were loud and even when he managed to hold them straight, he couldn't hit any of the targets his dad set up at the edge of the river.
Every failure seemed to irritate his dad, but no matter how he concentrated, squinting down the barrel and pressing his tongue against his upper lip, he could not get the hang or love of firing a weapon.
Not only that, but his favorite books had been consigned to the trash and replaced with freshly uploaded digi-tomes of economics, history, technology, and politics—things he wasn't interested in and which didn't have any aliens in them.
They were confusing and used big words he didn't understand. None of them had any stories in them, apart from the history ones, but even they were really boring and didn't have any pictures of the bits that sounded like they might have been exciting.
The one thing Valerian did enjoy was the sparring with wooden swords, which he and his dad engaged in on the lawn before the house. The weight of the sword was unfamiliar, but his dexterous hands could move it quickly and nimbly around his body. Though he was bruised and sore at the end of each of these sessions, his dad would look at him without more usual expression of disappointment and nod.
"You're fast," said his dad, taking his arm and squeezing it hard, "but you lack power. You need to build up your strength and stamina if you're going to be a swordsman."
"But why do I need to be a swordsman?" Valerian had protested. "Surely no one fights with swards anymore now that we have guns."
"And if you find yourself without a gun, or you run out of ammunition? What will you do then? Anyway, learning how to use a sword isn't just about fighting with one. It also teaches you balance, speed, coordination, discipline. All things you sadly lack, I'm afraid."
That had stung, for it was harsh and unnecessary. His grandpa had argued with his dad after Valerian told him what had been said. Valerian had heard them shouting at each other from behind the closed door of his bedroom.
Grandpa had left the house yesterday, and though Valerian didn't know what was going on, he had seen that his grandpa looked really worried. His mum told him that the Ruling Council of Umoja had been called to an emergency sitting (whatever that was) and that something very important was going on.
She didn't say what that might be, but Valerian could read his mum's moods as easily as if she had spelled them out, and he could tell she was worried.
As well as what was worrying her about Grandpa, he knew she wasn't too pleased with his dad, either. But she had kept her opinions to herself, as far as Valerian knew.
At leasl, he hadn't seen them argue.
With Ailin Pasteur gone from the house, Arcturus helped himself to another measure of the man's brandy and sank into one of the leather seats before the fireplace. He sipped his drink, its taste pleasant enough, and remembered his first sip of brandy: the night the Confederate assassins had come to kill them at the summer villa. Thinking back to that night, Arcturus remembered sitting in the dining room and talking to his father, and felt a sudden, and wholly unexpected, pang of nostalgia for those long-ago days.