Starplex

EPSILON DRACONIS

Keith hadn’t seen Glass reenter the docking bay, but when he looked up, there he was, coming closer, transparent legs carrying him over the fields of grass and four-leaf clover. His walking was fluid, beautiful, giving the appearance of being in slow motion even though he was moving at normal speed. The hint of aquamarine—the only color in his clear body—was eye-catching.

Keith thought about rising to his feet but instead simply looked up at the transparent man, sun glinting off the latter’s body and egg-shaped head.

“Welcome back,” said Keith.

Glass nodded. “I know, I know. You’re frightened. You hide it well, but you’re wondering how much longer I will keep you here. It won’t be long, I promise. But there is something else I want to explore with you before you go.”

Keith lifted his eyebrows, and Glass sat down, leaning his back against a nearby tree. Whatever his body was made of wasn’t glass. His tubular torso didn’t magnify the patterns of the bark on the other side of it. Rather, they were seen with only slight distortion.

“You are angry,” said Glass, simply.

Keith shook his head. “No, I’m not. You’ve treated me well so far.”

The wind-chime laughter. “No, no. I don’t mean you’re angry with me. Rather, you’re angry in general. There’s something inside you, something down deep, that has hardened your heart.”

Keith looked away.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” said Glass. “Something that has upset you greatly.”

Silence.

“Please,” said Glass. “Share it with me.”

“It was a long time ago,” said Keith. “I—I should be over it, I know, but…”

“But it festers still, doesn’t it? What is it? What changed you so?”

Keith sighed, and looked around. Everything was so beautiful, so peaceful. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d sat outside among the grass and trees, and just enjoyed the surroundings, just—just relaxed.

“It has to do with Saul Ben-Abraham’s death,” said Keith.

“Death,” repeated Glass, as if Keith had used another unknown word like “quixotic.” He shook his see-through head. “How old was he when he died?”

“It was eighteen years ago now. He would have been twenty-seven.”

“A heartbeat,” said Glass.

There was silence between them for a moment, Keith recalling his reaction when Glass had dismissed his two decades of marriage in a similar fashion. But Glass was right this time. Keith nodded.

“How did Saul die?” asked Glass.

“It—it was an accident. At least, that’s what the HuGo decided. But, well, I always thought it was swept under the rug. You know: deliberately suppressed. Saul and I were living on Tau Ceti IV. He was an astronomer; I was a sociologist, doing a postdoctoral fellowship studying the colonists there. He and I had been friends since our undergrad days; we’d been roommates at UBC. And we had a lot in common—both liked to play handball and go, both acted in student theater, both had the same tastes in music. Anyway, Saul discovered the Tau Ceti shortcut, and we sent a small probe through it to Shortcut Prime. New Beijing was a mostly agricultural colony back then, not the thriving place it is now. Of course, it hadn’t yet acquired the New Beijing nickname. It was just ‘the Silvanus colony’ then; Silvanus is the name of Tau Ceti’s fourth planet. Anyway, they didn’t have many sociologists there, so I ended up in charge of trying to figure out what effect the discovery of the shortcut network would have on human culture. And then the Waldahud starship popped through. A first-contact team had to be hastily assembled; even under hyperdrive, it would take six months for people to arrive from Earth. Saul and I ended up being part of the party that went up to meet the ship, and…” Keith trailed off, closed his eyes, shook his head ever so slightly.

“Yes?” said Glass.

“They said it was an accident. Said they’d misinterpreted. When we came face-to-face with the Waldahudin for the first time, Saul was carrying a holographic camera unit. He didn’t aim it at the pigs, of course—no one could be that stupid. He was just holding it at his side, and then, with a flick of his thumb, he turned it on.” Keith sighed, long and loud. “They said it looked like a traditional Waldahud hand weapon—same basic shape. They thought Saul was readying a weapon to fire on them. One of the pigs was carrying a sidearm, and he shot Saul. Right in the face. His head exploded next to me. I—I got splattered with… with…” Keith looked away, and was quiet for a long moment. “They killed him. The best friend I ever had, they killed him.” He stared at the ground, plucked a few four-leaf clovers, looked at them for a moment, then threw them away.

They were quiet for several moments. Crickets chirped, and birds sang. Finally, Glass said, “That must be difficult to carry around with you.”

Keith said nothing.

“Does Rissa know?”

“She does, yes. We were already married at that point; she’d come to Silvanus to try to fathom why it didn’t have any native life, despite apparently having conditions that should have given rise to it, according to our evolutionary models. But I rarely talk about what happened with Saul—not with her, or with anyone else. I don’t believe in burdening those around me with my suffering. Everyone has their own stuff to deal with.”

“So you keep it inside.”

Keith shrugged. “I try for a certain stoicism—a certain emotional restraint.”

“Commendable,” said Glass.

Keith was surprised. “You think so?”

“It’s the way I feel, too. I know it’s unusual, though. Most people live, if you’ll pardon me my humor, transparent lives.” Glass gestured at his own see-through body. “Their private self is their public self Why are you different?”

Keith shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve always been this way.” He paused again, thinking for a long time. Then: “When I was about nine or so, there was a bully in my neighborhood. Some big oaf, probably thirteen or fourteen. He used to pick up kids and drop them into this thornbush in the park. Well, everyone would kick and scream and cry while he was doing this, and he seemed to feed off that. One day, he came after me—grabbed me when I was playing catch, or something like that. He picked me up, carried me over to the bush, and dumped me in. I didn’t struggle. There was no point; he was twice as big as me, and there was no way I could get away. And I didn’t scream or cry, either. He dumped me in, and I simply got myself out. I had a few scrapes and cuts from it, but I didn’t say anything. He just looked at me for about ten seconds, then said, ‘Lansing, you’ve got balls.’ And he never touched me again.”

“So this internalizing is a survival mechanism?” asked Glass.

Keith shrugged. “It’s enduring what you have to endure.”

“But you don’t know where it came from?”

“No,” said Keith. Then, a moment later, “Well, actually, yes. I suppose I do. My parents were both quite argumentative, and had short fuses. You’d never know when one of them was going to blow up over something. Publicly, privately, it didn’t make any difference. You couldn’t even make polite conversation without risking an explosion from one of them. We’d have family dinners together every night, but I always was silent, hoping we could just get through it, just once, without it being unpleasant, without one of them storming away from the table, or yelling, or saying something nasty.”

Keith paused again. “In fairness, there were other issues in my parents’ relationship that I didn’t understand when I was a child. They’d started as a two-career family, but automation kept eliminating more and more jobs as the years went by—this was back before they outlawed true artificial intelligence. The Canadian government changed the tax laws so that second income earners in a family were taxed at a hundred-and-ten-percent rate. It was a move designed to spread out what work there was amongst the most families. Dad had been making less than mom, so he was the one who stopped working. I’m sure that had a lot to do with his anger. But all I knew was that my parents were taking out their anger and frustration on everyone around them, and even as a kid, I vowed never to do that.”

Glass was rapt. “Amazing,” he said. “It all makes sense.”

“What does?” asked Keith.

“You.”