Certitude

An excerpt from Peripatetica, by M. K. Sebastien, Engr. ret.

Friday, 02 Dec 2518
Kuiper II Class, Summer's Gift
Northern Continent, Salisbury
Kalidassa (Xuan Wu) System
10:45 hrs., local time

        No one was waiting for me in the airlock. That suited me fine. I wanted to be alone. I needed to think. I marched right to the engine room with barely a glance at the crew, and shut myself in. Everything was as I’d left it.
        Nothing was the same.
        I swept the place once more for anything untoward and wasn’t surprised when I came up clean: I’d lost count of the number of sweeps I’d conducted since we’d boarded the Gift on Angel. Not so many I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t, but enough now to make the process almost routine. I came to a stop at my console, eyed again the gauges and the lights, the dials and buttons. Tidy and gleaming. Flawless.
        Unlike my parting with Mike.
        I pulled out my chair and sat, planting my elbows on the console and clapping my hands over my eyes, shutting out the distractions. What had he said to me dirtside, as the sun shone down on us and grass waved at our feet?
        I’m leaving the business, he’d said.
        Leaving the Resistance.
        The Feds had grabbed him off the street on Beaumonde and taken him prisoner. They had him for 60 days : 1,440 hours. 86,400 minutes. Over 5 million seconds. I had no knowledge of what the Alliance did to him during all that time—Mike wouldn’t say and I refused to ask—but I knew the end result when we sprang him free. Injected with DNA-altering drugs, Mike had been rendered incapable of withholding a truthful answer to a direct question and unable to resist a direct command. I couldn’t tally the wealth of information they’d wrested from him, but I could measure what it cost him.
        Everything he’d worked for might well be useless to the Resistance now. Over a decade of training, skill, and credibility in the clandestine circles just went up in smoke. No one would hire him and some would gun for him, for fear he was a mole. Mike had been burned, completely and irrevocably, and his life as a spy was done.
        And so he’d made his way to Salisbury, the place where he’d been born thrice over. First as a rancher’s son, second as a monk, and third as a spy. Disparate occupations, to be sure, yet in him it only made obvious the logical progression of one to the other. He was that rare genuine article, the true natural, and what he did came as easily as breathing. You could no more remove the instincts that served him so well as a spy than you could rip out my affinity for machines. We’re hard-wired for it. Deny us our talents and any suitable outlet, we’d both wither. Die by inches. Cut us loose and we’d gravitate toward them, like iron filings to a lodestone, without thought and needing no reason but that the Universe spoke to us so. His choice of Salisbury, therefore, was no surprise to me. Of all the places he’d choose to go to ground, it made the most sense it would be there. He had contacts there, who would take him in regardless of his condition, contacts that had made him what he’d once been, and could be again.
        Which made what he’d said to me next all the more unexpected.
        Marry me. Stay here.
        It takes three legs to make a tripod stable, or to make a table stand. I likewise had three legs to support my sanity: My talents, my work, and Mike. One leg had already been severely compromised, thanks to the Alliance, and if I accepted Mike’s offer, I would regain the one leg at the expense of the other two. Would that leg be enough? Or would it buckle under the strain? They say love conquers all, but could it overcome the internal imperative I had to tinker, to tune, to create with the metal and fire and energy of spacecraft, lest I, like that proverbial raisin, shrivel in the sun? Or like that dream deferred, explode?
        Stay here. Build a little home together. Raise some cows or sheep. Or vegetables. Just live normal lives. We can build whole new identities.
        Even if we crafted new identities so tight that no one would discover us, even if we found work at Salisbury’s biggest spaceport servicing the ships, even if I spent every day and night with him, being grounded dirtside with Mike would never be enough. I would have to leave and take to the Black again, or die.
        Marry me. Stay here.
        Dear God, what could I say?
        “Spin her up, Rina.” Nika’s voice over the intercom cut into my thoughts. Not a note of pity or sympathy colored her words and I was grateful for it.
        “You got it.”
        Dancers say that when the music starts, they lose themselves in it and their bodies become nothing but the medium the music moves through, that movement is the language it speaks. Singers say the same, that air and sound and pitch comes combined from their core, pours forth from their throats, and nowhere and at no time are they more alive than when they sing. Through my ears and my hands and the marrow of my bones, I felt the ship come awake as her engines fired to life and I knew I had made the right choice. And as we left the dirt I knew, as sure as I knew my name, that Mike had already known what I’d say.
        So why did he ask?
        The engines obeyed Nika’s hand on the throttle and they changed their tune, raised their pitch. I could feel them straining to run, like a thoroughbred at the gate, and I gave them a little more rein. Power flowed more sweetly and the dissonance of strain disappeared. All the gauges were well within normal and I let my mind go back to the problem at hand.
        If Mike had already known my answer, why had he asked me the question?
        We’d disembarked and crossed the meadow and stopped short of the tree line at clearing’s edge. He’d scanned the forest hemming us in and he’d muttered something the rustling breeze couldn’t quite mask from my ears:
        Might be a while before anyone’s here…
        He’d stood at the comms on the bridge, calling the ground below:
        Weather data….Mission coordinates….
        Not the language of a man getting out of the spy business. It sounded more like a man getting in. A man who could not afford the liability of a lover or a wife.
        Make no hostages to fate, I’d said to him once, back when he’d first asked me to marry him. At the time he’d seen the necessity of it. Now I have to wonder if he’d been relieved I’d been practical instead of sentimental, on both that day and when he’d asked me again, nearly ten years later.
        I’m not going out again. I’m just gonna bring pain where I go. The War’s over. Everything’s over in that regard. For me at least. But I’d be more of a liability than anything else if I were on the ship. I barely have this…stuff under control inside my head anyway.
        It smacked of self-pity and was such a departure from his character that I knew he was equivocating and it only lent credence to my suspicions.
        The War is over. Has been for nine years. But as my father was fond of saying: the fighting isn’t over when the shooting stops. And sometimes Peace is War without fighting. Mike was up to something, and he believed that only by burning my bridges with him could he protect me from it.
        The truth—The War’s over.—,wrapped in a lie—Everything’s over in that regard. For me at least—,cloaked with an uncertainty—I barely have this…stuff under control inside my head anyway—, and disguised as a proposal—Marry me. Stay here. Build a little home together. Just live normal lives—, had but one purpose.
        To get me gone.
        It worked, just as he’d known it would.
        You knew this was comin’, Irina, he’d said that day, with Angel fast approaching. His duffel sat packed on the bunk we’d shared and at the time I’d thought I’d known what he’d meant.
        I’d once told Nika that I had no faith, and by extension, no belief in God. That I believed only in tangibles that I could see and touch and measure. Concrete proof, I’d said, and that I accepted no substitutes. One could argue that the proof of His existence is how He sent Mike’s path across mine when I needed him most. Perhaps. What is inarguable, no matter what agency you subscribe to, is how Mike and I always manage to cross paths again. And again. And again. Across nearly a decade and with the entire ’Verse to get lost in, we would always meet up sooner or later.
        It would never be a matter of if, only when. All I had to do was outlast the Universe and inevitably, she’d relent. Our divergent paths would meet and we’d be together again. All past evidence supported it. Hard evidence, as hard as concrete.
        You’ll find me, he’d said, as the air of Salisbury wafted through his hair, and the sunlight picked out the gold in it. Somehow we always do.
        Well enough.
        So I went about my duties, finding solace in the ship and the song she sang. When Nika touched down at Salisbury’s main northern spaceport, I was able to face the crew with my head up and my eyes dry, and though I wasn’t entirely at peace with the situation, I was accustomed to it. After all, I’d done it before and I’d do it again. As often as it takes. Because while the Universe might sometimes throw you a bone, she never stops spinning and the trick to surviving is to keep up or get ground up in her gears.
        Damned if I’d let her win.


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