Starhawk

Chapter 25

FOR JAKE, THE good life had arrived. He loved spending time with Alicia, whether it was in the Ferrante Club in Roanoke, or wandering through the woods, or watching movies at his place. He went to the Hawks’ games, at home and on the road. She claimed she played better when he was in the stands. “You provide a little extra energy, Jake,” she’d told him one night after they’d won on her last-second jump shot. The reality was that no woman in his life had ever affected him the way she did.

Everything else was falling into place also. There was a Thursday poker game in town, which he attended except on those evenings when the Hawks were playing. Several of the local schools asked him to talk to their students about spaceflight. He put together a show that included a virtual trip to some of the local stars, and to Iapetus. He made a change in reality, though, by coordinating it so that Iapetus was no longer in tidal lock. That allowed the students to gather on a ridge and watch Saturn rise in the east, with those magnificent rings jutting vertically into the sky.

He became a volunteer at the local animal shelter (where, coincidentally, Alicia also served). He went for long, solitary walks, and felt the difference immediately in his muscles, which had absorbed too many years in low or zero gravity.

The food was considerably better than the fare to which he’d become accustomed. He never ate in the cabin, though, unless Alicia made the meal. He visited every restaurant within sixty-five kilometers. And for the first time since he was about twelve, he played occasional bingo, with Alicia, at one of the local churches.

He had blundered into a golden age. He’d always expected that, when he retired, he’d sleep late and spend most of his time just lying around. Maybe do some bowling. But Alicia wasn’t a bowler, and he just didn’t have time.

She took him to an indoor swimming pool in Roanoke. The woman looked glorious in the water, smooth and synchronized, moving swiftly, leaving Jake to manage as best he could. Jake could swim reasonably well, but he’d fallen out of practice. “I’m going to suggest to the people on the Wheel that they need one of these,” he said.

Both The Roanoke Times and The Christiansburg News interviewed him and did stories. He became a local celebrity.

* * *

NEVERTHELESS, HE’D BEEN there barely three weeks before a disquieting restlessness set in. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he missed the interstellars. Missed looking down on other worlds. Missed the admiration that the silver-and-blue uniform commanded from passengers and anyone else who happened to be in the neighborhood.

He missed the occasional voyage during which he started with no idea what waited at the other end. He missed the simple things, the exhilaration that came during the first minutes after launch, when the acceleration pressed him back into his seat. The shocked reactions of passengers who were, for the first time, looking out the portal at an alien moon or a star cluster or a passing asteroid.

And as the weeks went by, he became more aware of what had gone missing from his life. But there was something else: He had not been able to let go of Joshua Miller.

It was not that he was still overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. He’d been able to convince himself that he had probably not been aware of what Joshua had intended. But even if that were so, he knew that somehow, a set of scales were out of balance.

Whatever the exact nature of what he was experiencing, he was unable to keep it hidden from Alicia. She knew something was wrong. Life was not going off the track completely, but rather it was out of sync. “Are you okay?” she would ask occasionally, even when he was not conscious of contemplating whether he needed to feel the push of the star drive, or perhaps owed something to Joshua. “Is everything all right, Jake?”

It wasn’t.

But he assured her it was only her imagination. I’m fine.

When he was alone in the cabin, however, he felt the weight of solitude as he never had when he was riding the interstellars.

* * *

LIBRARY ENTRY

What we do is who we are.

—Marissa Earl, Narrow Roads, 2025