Penny was silent for a long time. Everyone was silent. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything.
Penny drew a deep breath. “I can’t tell you,” she said. “I promised Dr. Towner… I promised everyone, we all promised… that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the find. The significance will be obvious once we go public, but before then… No, I can’t tell you, Daddy.
“If you can’t let me stay without knowing…” and she let out a big sigh, “…then I’ll just have to go.”
Penny stayed.
Sure, she’d played the martyr. Sure, Penny had put on for effect. But she was being honest, of that we’d had no doubt, and somehow in our years apart she had cultivated a nobility that I knew I’d never match.
That last meal had been an all-around family epiphany.
I’d love to be able to say Dad cheerfully relented when Penny so self-sacrificially stood her ground, but the fact is he grumbled and groaned and complained the whole time while he went to send a message to Rodney (the man now in charge of Dad’s company) about setting up a fund for Penny to draw upon. “We could have put a big entertainment center in your room if you’d just spoken up,” he told Penny. “Damn workstation in there cost a fortune,” he muttered.
But it was that he let her stay that counted, and Penny stood beside me on Carver’s Peak as we watched Ashley’s Charm depart.
You all know what happened.
Five months later the news broke. The archeologist Towner and his crew of graduate students had found, underneath a seventy-thousand-year-old layer of lava, the remains of an alien base. Absolute evidence that somewhere in the Universe another species had survived the Phinons and achieved star travel.
Penny’s face was right next to Towner’s on all the news shows.
A month after that word came from Tau Ceti that Ashley’s Charm had failed to arrive, though three months later still a debris cloud from the right direction showered the star system.
No one ever figured out what happened. Malfunction? Phinons? The debris yielded up no secrets.
It’s hard for me to believe Dad is dead.
I mentioned earlier that I sometimes wonder if my parents ever understood me. Now I wonder if I ever understood them.
In reading back through this I notice how Mom seems to play such a minor role. It wasn’t really like that through our lives together, but at that time and in that place, it was the ultimate relationship of a father with his children that had to be sorted out. During those last days together, Dad behaved in a way that, I now see, was typically Dad, though at the time Penny and I had misread him entirely.
Penny is “Doctor Penny” now, and she runs her own digs. Another alien site was discovered near Olympus Mons on Mars last year. She was terribly excited.
Penny and I inherited the family fortune, but I still work and I’m chief loadmaster with my own office now. Though all the passengers on Ashley’s Charm were declared dead, I sometimes wonder if that’s true.
Ships like Miss Michiko were quite something. Though the drives were not balanced for hyperflight, they had sufficient power to propel the ships to near-light velocity. Could the passengers have known what was coming? Could they have fled Ashley’s Charm before the calamity?
Could Mom and Dad be on their way back home?
Small ships do not carry hyper-waves, nor radios capable of transmitting billions of kilometers, so no word would have come from Miss Michiko. But it would have made far more sense for Dad to have gone on to Tau Ceti if he and Mom had somehow survived.
Still, I like to go up on Carver’s Peak and watch the big ships come in.
But now I look for little ones, too.
Editor’s Note: This story takes place a good while after “Sunshine, Genius, and Rust” (May 1993), and “Young Again” (December 1993).