look up at the stars while the playlist moves on to several classic songs from the Twenties.
Danae is immersed deep in her own little world, which leaves me free to get lost in my own.
When I am on retrieval, I cannot let myself get sentimental. My mind shifts into the time-tested coping mechanism used by warriors and doctors, who deal with survival under intense pressure. I lock my emotions away where they cannot interfere with staying alive, which is perhaps why I prefer staying in the field.
Now I make an unprecedented exception and crack that box open for a moment.
The brilliant red disc that is Mars hovers just above the horizon and I think about Sarah, closing my eyes and trying to picture her in my mind. The only image I have left of her after all these decades is my memory of her long, flowing blond hair, fine and soft as down. Her lips are thin but always dance with life, and she wears her emotions on her mouth the way most others wear them in their eyes. But the anger in her lavender eyes can pierce Kevlar armor. It did the night I left her.
After that I was trapped on Earth with no way to return home, so I should have moved on. Sarah surely believed that I had died, and had moved on herself, but for the first few years, I kept hoping to find a way home.
The years passed, but I never stopped holding out for Sarah, until it was safer to hold onto her memory than to surrender to the pain of accepting that what we had was gone. My most recent lover at the Archives told me that, the bitter winter night when she broke up with me, and she was more right than I care to admit.
A year later, she married Wally.
I cannot even remember the last time I let myself say my wife’s name. Now I whisper it, a forlorn declaration of longing floating upward toward that red dot in the sky.
“Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.”
The syllables are like a spell as they leave my lips. For years I felt a constant connection with her, but like my old photographs, that also has faded. Can she sense me softly speak her name, across the millions of miles? It feels like a foreign word as it comes off my tongue, but her name calls forth such a deep ache inside me that I want to curl into a ball.
Decades have passed since I let myself believe that I might hold Sarah in my arms again. I buried that option long ago. But in the cave behind me, a stone’s throw away, is a device smaller than my head which might change everything. It is still a long shot—one hell of a long shot in fact, because we have absolutely no idea yet how the damn thing works. But this is the real debt that I owe Doc.
That just maybe, someday, I will get home.
Chapter Five
Morning does not so much break as gradually materialize around us. During the pre-dawn hours a wave of low clouds rolls in, enveloping us in a dense gray fog. A thin sheen of moisture clings to everything, and the thick air deadens the sound around us.
My breath hangs before me when I toss a few handy chunks of wood into the fire, which I fed throughout the night. I am naturally a light sleeper on retrievals, subconsciously alert and drifting in and out of sleep, but I always feel far safer beside a good fire in the wilderness than within any human habitation.
The genuinely dangerous animals are the two-legged kind, because they are the unpredictable ones. It is much better now than it was the first few years after the Crash. Nowhere was safe during the Demon Days, when roaming bands of starving humans wandered the countryside, preying on whatever they could kill and eat. Other humans made the easiest prey during those days.
I stretch carefully, because during the night Danae crawled over and slipped under my blanket. Neither of us offered, nor gave, anything more than human warmth. She sleeps with her back pressed against me, so when I arise she stirs and murmurs briefly while I tuck the blankets back around her. Then she turns over and settles back to sleeping. She looks so peaceful that I resist a
Danae is immersed deep in her own little world, which leaves me free to get lost in my own.
When I am on retrieval, I cannot let myself get sentimental. My mind shifts into the time-tested coping mechanism used by warriors and doctors, who deal with survival under intense pressure. I lock my emotions away where they cannot interfere with staying alive, which is perhaps why I prefer staying in the field.
Now I make an unprecedented exception and crack that box open for a moment.
The brilliant red disc that is Mars hovers just above the horizon and I think about Sarah, closing my eyes and trying to picture her in my mind. The only image I have left of her after all these decades is my memory of her long, flowing blond hair, fine and soft as down. Her lips are thin but always dance with life, and she wears her emotions on her mouth the way most others wear them in their eyes. But the anger in her lavender eyes can pierce Kevlar armor. It did the night I left her.
After that I was trapped on Earth with no way to return home, so I should have moved on. Sarah surely believed that I had died, and had moved on herself, but for the first few years, I kept hoping to find a way home.
The years passed, but I never stopped holding out for Sarah, until it was safer to hold onto her memory than to surrender to the pain of accepting that what we had was gone. My most recent lover at the Archives told me that, the bitter winter night when she broke up with me, and she was more right than I care to admit.
A year later, she married Wally.
I cannot even remember the last time I let myself say my wife’s name. Now I whisper it, a forlorn declaration of longing floating upward toward that red dot in the sky.
“Sarah. Sarah. Sarah.”
The syllables are like a spell as they leave my lips. For years I felt a constant connection with her, but like my old photographs, that also has faded. Can she sense me softly speak her name, across the millions of miles? It feels like a foreign word as it comes off my tongue, but her name calls forth such a deep ache inside me that I want to curl into a ball.
Decades have passed since I let myself believe that I might hold Sarah in my arms again. I buried that option long ago. But in the cave behind me, a stone’s throw away, is a device smaller than my head which might change everything. It is still a long shot—one hell of a long shot in fact, because we have absolutely no idea yet how the damn thing works. But this is the real debt that I owe Doc.
That just maybe, someday, I will get home.
Chapter Five
Morning does not so much break as gradually materialize around us. During the pre-dawn hours a wave of low clouds rolls in, enveloping us in a dense gray fog. A thin sheen of moisture clings to everything, and the thick air deadens the sound around us.
My breath hangs before me when I toss a few handy chunks of wood into the fire, which I fed throughout the night. I am naturally a light sleeper on retrievals, subconsciously alert and drifting in and out of sleep, but I always feel far safer beside a good fire in the wilderness than within any human habitation.
The genuinely dangerous animals are the two-legged kind, because they are the unpredictable ones. It is much better now than it was the first few years after the Crash. Nowhere was safe during the Demon Days, when roaming bands of starving humans wandered the countryside, preying on whatever they could kill and eat. Other humans made the easiest prey during those days.
I stretch carefully, because during the night Danae crawled over and slipped under my blanket. Neither of us offered, nor gave, anything more than human warmth. She sleeps with her back pressed against me, so when I arise she stirs and murmurs briefly while I tuck the blankets back around her. Then she turns over and settles back to sleeping. She looks so peaceful that I resist a
Similar Books
