“So the Sundays are O’Neals and nobody knows why.”
“Yup. Nobody human, anyway. Oh, apparently something about what Granpa did or didn’t do or something made them think he meant to adopt the Sundays, and over some length of time occasionally an Indowy would ask Granpa a strange question that didn’t seem related to anything and Granpa would just answer it without thinking about it much, and we never knew if they asked Tommy anything they thought was significant. Not anything Tommy could remember, anyway. But yep, there it is. It’s an Indowy thing. Aliens. Go figure.”
The man in the hotel bed had dark hair and recognizably Asian features, but it would have been impossible, even for someone from Fleet, to place exactly what part of Asia his ancestors had originally been from. The typical response would be, and had been, to shrug and assume his parents had been of mixed extraction before the war and that, in all the chaos and global upheaval of that time — upheaval that the world had never seen the like of before that horrible catastrophe — the records and even family legends had simply gotten lost, as they had for so many. Nobody would have guessed that the “Asian” man had begun life as a Latino gang leader named Manuel, and finished it, after a fashion, as an Anglo Fleet Strike general named James Stewart. Nobody but the stacked blonde in the sheer red pegnoir crossing the floor towards him from the suite’s bathroom. With the silvery highlights of her hair caught in the glow of the lamplight, the room otherwise darkened by the heavy drapes drawn across the windows, she looked like a fourteen-year-old boy’s wet dream of a Scandinavian goddess. He rolled up onto one elbow to watch her better, brushing a stray wisp of hair back from her cheek as she climbed into his bed.
“I never really thought I’d end up in a marriage that would feel so much like an affair,” he said, not for the first time. For either of them.
“I know,” she said, kissing his cheek and trailing her kisses back up around his ear. “I’m glad you could make it down for the weekend.”
“God, I missed you, Cally.” Stewart turned his face into her kisses and took her in his arms, giving himself up to the moment of having his beautiful wife in his bed again, no matter for how short a time.
Later, he tried to keep his damned eyes from misting up as they watched the latest home holos she’d brought him of the daughters he’d never been able to meet, who had and would grow up believing their father dead. Somehow, Cally always arranged it so that she could be in the holos with the girls. He wondered if she suspected how many lonely hours he spent, late at night, playing over those bits and scraps of the lives of his family, again and again, until he could see them behind his eyes as he dreamed. Many of the dreams were not pleasant. They were, in fact, about what you’d expect. On the whole, those were less painful than the happier dreams that put him in the holos with Cally and Morgan and Sinda, only to wake up alone in bed in the perpetually recycled air of the moon, with the metallic tang of machinery at the back of his throat. He’d thought about getting a dog, but it was hell getting them through quarantine, and getting a puppy from a licensed breeder was expensive. He’d do it when he got back though. It was no substitute, but at this point… He shook his head and reminded himself of his oft-repeated resolution on these visits, never to leave in his head until the visit was actually over. The time was too precious to be eaten up with regrets. He felt a deep sympathy with Mike O’Neal in bearing his curse. He was often thankful that, even though unlike Mike he knew he was in hell, at least he could look forward to the occasional weekend pass in heaven.
They were about fifteen minutes into the latest pack of holos — she must have hidden cameras all over the place, because she always brought hours of them, even though they only watched a few together — when dinner arrived from the seafood place across the street. Yes, the room would smell like fish afterwards until the filter in the air unit cleared it all out, but one thing he had learned about Cally over the seven years of stolen moments that comprised their marriage was that the woman loved seafood more than any three other people. He had decided to try some bizarre local dish called shrimp and grits at her behest, but spent most of his time feeding her strips of calamari just to feel her lips close over his fingers as she took each tidbit. The shrimp dish certainly wasn’t bad, but he had never understood why anglos from this part of the U.S. had to call polenta something as undignified as “grits.” His own colleagues in Noble Lion Tong tolerated his unusual fondness for Italian cuisine with a certain degree of amusement. Mostly, he’d learned to cook it for himself, although it did occasionally require him to import some unusual ingredients from Earth. She was right. He did like the shrimp dish. With the polenta.
“I feel guilty, a lot, for the girls growing up without a dad,” he said.
“It’s hard. But there’s nothing we can do differently, so I try not to think about it,” she said, looking away and picking at the worn bedspread that would never have passed muster in a decent prewar hotel.
“I’m just glad you live with your grandparents. At least they’ve got a grandfather around.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “It’s not the same, though. Growing up I always missed Daddy, and I never really got over losing my mom. But for having been a kid in the war years, I had it really good.”
“I noticed a lot of the clothes you and the girls were wearing had seen better days. Same with Papa O’Neal and Shari.” He didn’t like broaching such an awkward subject. But having grown up poor himself, he couldn’t let it lie. This was his family. “Are you guys having money problems? What’s happening? It looks to me like those people aren’t paying you nearly enough for what you do. Okay, there isn’t enough and I wish you’d quit, but I understand why you can’t. Almost. Still, how bad is it?”
“Money was pretty tight for awhile. The salaries took a severe dive after I got back, for various reasons. They’d pay more if they could. Anyway, we just had a windfall and things are better now. For awhile at least. Enough to get everybody some decent clothes and stuff. Besides, there’s not a lot we could do if they weren’t. They’re extra paranoid about people with too high a lifestyle for their salaries, what with Jay’s defection.”
“Sorry about that.” Stewart winced. He hadn’t turned Jay, but he had provided the money to keep him turned.
“Not your fault. He would have found someone to buy his information. Traitors do. Anyway, we made a commission on finding a buyer for something for them. Brokering isn’t usually in the scope of what we do and the sale was too much money to argue that they couldn’t afford the commission. It was… large.”
“Cally, what do you think would happen, really happen, if your organization found out about me?” he asked.
“Uh… bad things. They’re really paranoid right now and they’d probably believe you were on deep cover for the Darhel and I was compromised. I’d probably be able to keep any of it from spilling over onto Granpa or anyone else in the clan, but, well, don’t ask.”