Tears were rolling down Darling’s cheeks. “I loved him. I truly did. And he treated me worse than dirt. He turned me into this”
“He may be my father,” Jade blurted.
Darling coughed and sputtered, cleared his throat, wiped at his eyes. “What did you say?”
Shocked at her own admission, Jade sat there in stunned silence. She had not intended to tell Darling what she had learned, what she now feared was true. She had intended to remain silent, to keep her secret to herself and share it with no one.
Instead, her voice trembling, Jade said, “Sam and Jean Margaux had a fling aboard the Bosporus. Jean stayed on the Moon for nearly a year. I was born at Moonbase. An orphan.”
“But that doesn’t mean …”
“How could someone be orphaned at birth in a place like Moonbase?” Jade demanded, painful urgency in her question. “It was a small town in those days, only a few hundred people, and most of them were retirees. The medical staff didn’t allow pregnancies to come to term there; as soon as they found that a woman was pregnant they shipped her back to her home on Earth.”
“But you were born there,” Darling whispered, the truth slowly dawning on him.
“You’d have to have a lot of money to get away with it,” said Jade. “Money to keep the medics quiet. Money to erase the computer records. Money to pay off the woman who … who adopted the abandoned baby.”
“Jean Margaux … ?” Darling seemed stunned.
Jade nodded bitterly. “Twenty years later, when she heard there was a reporter looking into the time she’d spent at Moonbase, when she found out who the reporter was, where she’d been born, how old she was—she told her chauffeur to take the day off, and then drove her car off a cliff.”
“My God.”
“I’m really an orphan now,” said Jade. “Sam died off at the end of the solar system, and I killed my own mother.”
Suddenly she was crying uncontrollably. Her world dissolved and she was bawling like a baby. She found herself in Darling’s arms, wrapped and held and protected by this strange man who was no longer a stranger.
“It’s all right,” Darling was crooning to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “It’s all right. Cry all you want to. We’ll both cry. For all the love that we never had. For all the love that we’ve lost.”
She had no idea how long they cried together. Finally, though, she disengaged herself gently from his arms. Darling pointed to a door in the opulent room and suggested she freshen up. She saw that tears had runneled streaks down the makeup on his face.
By the time she returned to the main room a small meal sat steaming on the low table in front of her host and Darling’s makeup had been newly applied. Although she felt anything but hungry, Jade sat on the cushions set up opposite Darling. He poured her a cup of tea.
“Are you all right now?” he asked softly.
Jade nodded. I’ll never be all right, she knew. I made my own mother kill herself. She killed herself rather than face her own daughter. Killed herself rather than admit she had a daughter—me.
“There’s the matter of your promise,” Darling said as he uncovered a bowl of diced meat chunks. She saw that the bowl next to it was filled with bubbling melted cheese.
“Yes. My promise.” She almost laughed. Nothing he could do to her could bother her now.
“I had intended,” he said, spearing a square of meat deftly on a little skewer, “to demand that you never reveal anything you heard on Sam’s disks.”
She looked up at him. “That was going to be it?”
“Yes.” He smiled at her. “What did you think?”
Glancing at the erotic scenes on the tapestries, she smiled back. “Something more physical.”
“Dear me, no! Not at all!”
“I can understand why you’re sensitive about Sam’s disks.”
“Yes. Of course you can.”
“But I’m a reporter….”
“You don’t have to convince me. You can have the disks.”
For a moment she was not sure she had heard him correctly. “I can have them?”
Darling nodded, and a tide of ripples ran across his cheeks and chins to disappear beneath the open collar of his robe.
“It’s strange,” he said wistfully. “You nurse your own pain until there’s virtually nothing left in your life but the pain.”
“That’s a terrible way to live,” she said. But a pang of loss and sadness and guilt pulsed through her.
“When I realized how much you’ve suffered, it made me see how I’ve been flagellating myself, blaming Sam for what’s become of me.”
“I’ve got my work,” Jade said, as much to herself as Darling. “I’ve got a life.”
“And I don’t. I’ve become a hermit. I’ve withdrawn from the human race.”
“It’s not too late to come back.”
“Like this?” He looked down at himself, layer upon layer of bulging fat.
“Endocrine imbalances can be corrected,” Jade said tenderly.
“Yes, I know,” he confessed. “It’s nothing but an excuse to keep myself hidden away from the rest of the world.”
She smiled at him. “You’d need some discipline. Or a thick hide.”
“You still owe me a promise. You said you’d do whatever I asked.”
She felt no fear now. “I remember. What do you want?”
Darling took in a deep breath. His eyes studied her face, as if searching for the courage to make his request.
“Will you be my friend?” he asked at last. “You’re going to be on the Golden Gate for months. Will you come and visit me and … and help me to come out and meet other people?”
“I…” She had other commitments, a career, a longing for love and fulfillment, a gnawing guilt that burned sullenly within her like a hot coal. But in that instant of time she realized that love takes many forms, and that saving a man’s life bears an obligation for a lifetime.
She saw an automobile tumbling off a cliff into the angry sea below. She saw Sam Gunn’s round, slightly lopsided face grinning at her. She saw Raki’s darkly handsome scowl and Spence Johansen’s heart-fluttering smile and the tearful last memory of her adoptive mother as she left the Moonbase hospital forever. She saw Rick Darling staring at her with his entire life in his eyes.
“I’d be happy to be your friend,” she said. “I need a friend, too.”
The two of them—enormous overweight man and tiny elfin woman—leaned across the low table and embraced each other in newfound charity.
Asteroid Ceres
Jade celebrated, if that is the correct word, her twenty-first birthday alone.
Rick Darling had thrown an immense party for her the day before she left the Golden Gate at the farthest point in its orbit and took the bulbous shuttle craft to the surface of Ceres. Nearly half the population of the huge bridge ship had poured into Darling’s posh villa, eating, laughing, drinking, narcotizing themselves into either frenzied gaiety or withdrawn moroseness.
Through it all, Darling had remained close to Jade’s side, his new figure almost trim compared to his former obesity. At first Jade thought he stayed near her because he was afraid of the crowd. Slowly, as the party proceeded and Darling played the genial, witty, gracious host, Jade began to realize that he wanted to protect her.
Jade tried to relax at the party and have a good time, but she was still haunted by the thoughts of her newly discovered and newly lost mother. Despite the happy oblivious crowd swirling around her, she still saw the automobile plunging over the rocky cliff and into the unforgiving sea.
Now, more than a week after Darling’s party, it was her birthday. Twenty-one years old. An entire lifetime ahead of her. An entire lifetime already behind her.