I swiveled the Siteazy I was in to face him and pushed the Devscreen aside. The Devscreen folded itself back into the arm of the Siteazy and I, folding my hands across my stomach, asked the most important question.
“Who am I?”
Gabriel sat up straight on the sleeper. I got the sense that he had fully prepared what he was going to say, perhaps even rehearsed it.
“The name given to you by our father, Philip, is Mark Anthony, and our family name is Zumar. We are the last two surviving members of our family. I can tell you about our father, your mother and why you were taken. I can tell you about who we are descended from as far back as the fifteenth century. That’s all I’ve been able to factually trace. Who you are — your character, role, purpose — I can’t tell you that. It’s up to you.”
Suddenly tears came to my eyes as I thought of the warmth stolen from me with the loss of my natural parents. The sadness that I had at growing up having been told that my parents had been killed in car accident when I was just a baby, suddenly replaced with grief for the murder of the father I hadn’t known. The tears welled up and rolled down my face. I asked Gabriel with a choke in my voice, “Please tell me about my father and mother, and tell me about you, my brother, and when we can be together again.”
Gabriel leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees, fixing me a with a look over the steeple that his hands had formed, almost as if in prayer, and said in a low voice, “It may be many weeks, perhaps even months, before we can meet again in person, and even then it may not be possible for us to have the time to talk about our family history. For now let me tell you very quickly a little bit about our father and your mother and the circumstances that led up to you being stolen from me.” I got up from the Siteazy, walked over to the sleeper where Gabriel was sitting, and sat down beside him, wanting to be as close as possible. Gabriel smiled at me and taking my hand continued in his soft clear voice.
“Our father, Philip, was an intellectual who played a significant role in the formation of our Nation. It was he who wrote many of the speeches that propelled the Global Fellowship for Peace to prominence in the time following the Great War. The speeches that swept the people towards the world we are familiar with today may have been delivered by Bo Vinh, but they were crafted for the most part by our father.
“Once the nation had been formed, Philip remained an advisor to Bo Vinh and to the first Global Council that is the forefather of our General Assembly today. As the council expanded, he lost motivation and in recognition of his contribution to humanity, Bo Vinh put forward and had granted by Popvote that Philip receive a grant for the development of ideas that would improve humanity. He was given the task of simply being among us an observer, a commentator of humanity.
“Philip took to his new role with a passion. He wrote poetry, philosophy and produced papers that promoted different ways of realizing the value and potential of all levels of humanity. He looked a lot like you. His skin was a light tan, slim build and tall at one hundred and eighty-six cent. Blue-green eyes, very similar to yours, and you share the same nose and chin. There’s an image there on the Devscreen if you want to see.” Gabriel pointed to the Devcockpit where he had been sitting earlier.
I looked at the full length image of my father walking with his head bowed and his hands in the pockets of his outers as he talked with Bo Vinh. The two men suddenly stopped and Philip waved and smiled in the direction of the camera. A little boy ran out to him and jumped up into his arms to be lifted high, but Philip protested and I could tell he was laughing and telling the boy that he was too big to be lifted that high anymore. I knew without being told that the little boy was Gabriel.
“I’m ten in that image,” said Gabriel, his voice almost a whisper, “but I can remember everything that happened at that time. The next two years were the happiest of our lives. My mother, Rebecca, had died of Leukemia just after I was born, and I don’t really remember her, so life with our father was all I knew. We had a happy life, but I sensed in him a sadness, maybe it was just loneliness. He tried to shield me from how he felt, I know that, but I would catch him when he wasn’t aware my presence, staring off at nothing, and sometimes he would have a little sad smile to himself as though remembering a past event.” I put my hand on Gabriel’s shoulder and gave it a light squeeze. Despite his self-control I got the feeling that talking about the past was not easy for him. He put his hand over mine and, squeezing back, smiled slightly.
“Please go on,” I said.
“We had just moved to the Geographic of Australia. Philip wanted to study the telepathic abilities of Aborigines, and it was there in December of 2073 that Philip met Mariah. They met at a party held to celebrate the first manned landing on Mars. It had been broadcast at the Opera House. I remember how he looked when he came back that night to the hotel room we were staying in. I too had stayed up late to watch it, in the company of the hotel’s childcare staffer. I hadn’t seen our father that way. It was almost as if he had become younger in the time that he had left me to the time that he had returned.
“Later, much later, after he was killed, and when I was already a man, I met a woman who had been at that party and was a close friend of our father’s. She said that it was obvious to anyone within five meters of the couple that they had fallen in love at first sight. The normally reticent, and perhaps even shy, Philip and Mariah, found in each other a place where they could simply be themselves and in being themselves were exactly what the other needed and wanted.
“I met her the next day, and when introduced I was shy, and I normally wasn’t a shy child, but she was so beautiful that her beauty made me afraid to reach out and shake the hand that she offered me. I made a shield out of our father, but she knelt down to my level and the warmth of her smile brought me into her arms. We went sailing that day out into Sydney harbor and then on beyond the Heads. We sailed for a long time, eating sandwiches that the hotel had prepared, and then we anchored off Scotland Island. I fell asleep in my bunk that evening, early as it had been a tiring day, to the sound of them talking in a low murmur and the occasional low laugh from one or the other. The last image I have of them for that day is them blowing me a kiss from their seat in the cockpit of the boat down to where I was looking up at them from my bunk in the cabin, our father with his arms around your mother.
“They never spoke of Sir Thomas in front of me, but once I heard half of a conversation between our father and Bo Vinh. What made me stop and listen was the serious expression on our father’s face as he said he would be careful and that he understood that his affair with Mariah had caused him to become an enemy of Sir Thomas. They didn’t discuss this in front of me, but I found out later, much later, that Mariah was Sir Thomas’s wife when she met our father. Mariah left us for a short while, it was a week, as I found out later when I studied that time, and when she returned we left the hotel in Sydney and moved to a place called Byron Bay. Here we rented a house next to the beach.
“My mother was Sir Thomas’s wife?”
“Yes, and I think that played a part in your being stolen. Your mother became my wonderful step-mother. She wrapped me in her love and told me every day how much I meant to her and that her love for me was equal to her love for our father. The only time that I saw our father sad in that year was with the death of Bo Vinh. He went to the funeral, and the image of him at the funeral is the only one that exists in the public domain — all others have been deleted and purged by Sir Thomas. Wearing black, and I remember our mother packing the suit in his carry on, he is crying at the funeral of the man he helped to bring to prominence.
“Returning from the funeral, his mood stayed somber but our mother drew him out and within a month, the news that she was going to have his child, you, lifted his spirits and we lived in a state of pure joy for that year. We took long walks on the beach and drives into the countryside, often eating on a rug spread out on a dune or a hill. We talked of everything. I was never denied an answer by either of them, they took the time to explain things to me.