“Your injuries must have been severe.”
He raises his bandaged hands. “It will be months before I can lift a glass again.
“Abdera’s fling with me was deliberate. She went after me because of reloquere!” He can surely see the confusion on Jor’s face. “The Venerians not only take apart their physical world before the Sunset of Time … they also dissolve their relationships. We’ve already seen the clans and fleets realigning. We shouldn’t be surprised that it extends right down to … boyfriend and girlfriend.”
Jor is in no mood to argue. Though it is close to comforting. “She could have told me.”
“Yes,” D’Yquem says, “but remember how long-lived the Venerians are … how sophisticated they are in their choices and actions. I think she wanted you in a … a dangerous frame of mind. Angry. Driven. Eager to prove yourself.”
“Why?”
And here D’Yquem smiles with what might be genuine warmth, as if acknowledging a difficult truth.
“So you would be tempted to be a hero.”
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born science-fiction author. His work has been translated into sixteen different languages. He has published some fifty short stories in various magazines and anthologies, and has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and Campbell awards. He’s the author of the Xenowealth series, consisting of Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, Sly Mongoose, and The Apocalypse Ocean. His short fiction has been collected in Nascence and Tides from the New Worlds. His most recent novels are Arctic Rising and a sequel, Hurricane Fever; his most recent collection is Mitigated Futures. Much of his short work has recently been made available as Kindle editions.
In the harrowing story that follows, he shows us that some atrocities seem to repeat themselves down through history—even on another world.
Pale Blue Memories
TOBIAS S. BUCKELL
1.
I GRABBED THE ARMS OF MY ACCELERATION CHAIR AS WE spun, our silver bullet of a rocket ship vomiting debris and air into the cold night of Venus’s stratosphere. Commander Heston James, Sr., flung himself from control panel to control panel, trying to regain control of our craft, but the Nazi missile had done its nasty work well.
From a distance, the great pearly orb of Venus had been a comfort to us. Our exciting destination. A place that beckoned adventure.
We would land, for our country. And strike a great blow against the German Reich, proving that the war machine of the United States of America was more powerful. The great Space Race that grew out of the guttering stalemate of the Great War saw Nazi moon-bases and stations matched by Allied forces in the final frontier. Now the race was on to claim a planet.
But the sneaky Nazi bastards, unable to beat us to the sister planet’s surface, shot us out of the sky with a missile that had boosted behind us from Earth, hiding in our rocket ship’s wake until right as we deorbited.
“Charles!” Commander James shouted at me, looking back over his shoulder. “Do we have communications?”
I’d been flipping switches and listening to static for the last ten minutes of terror. The faint, steady, reassuring pip from Earth was nowhere to be found. And our tumbling meant it would never be found until we stabilized.
Or it could mean all our antennas were snapped clean off.
“Charles!”
I shook my head at him. “No, Commander. Everything is off-line.”
In radio silence, we continued to fall out of the sky.
Commander James strained against the g-forces snapping at us to continue working his panels, fighting for control of his ship all the way down. A hero to the last breath.
Out of one of the small portholes I watched the expanse of white clouds beneath us spin past again and again.
All this was a punishment, I thought to myself, as the blood continued to rush up against the inside of my head and dizzy me. Like Daedalus, I’d flown too high and been burned. Now I was falling.
And falling.
People from my kind of family didn’t end up becoming astronauts. My kind of family had aunts and uncles who had to drink from the other fountains and couldn’t order stuff from the front.
My dad came from Jamaica, towing behind the rest of his family. They came looking for jobs and ended up working out in the Illinois countryside. White folk could tell Dad wasn’t white, but they weren’t sure what exactly he was, due to his kinky hair and skin that browned when he worked outside too long.
Dad said that back home they called him “high yellow,” which meant he was mixed race but looked more white than black. Folk up North were more uneasy about the idea of mixed-race people. In some ways, that made it harder for Dad. He was a living, walking example of miscegenation. A child of a white father and a black mother.
If you were one or the other, in America, he said, everyone knew exactly how to treat you. But being stuck somewhere in the middle left him pulled in directions that I couldn’t fathom.
He married a white woman: an even greater sin. We wouldn’t have been able to do that in the South, but in the North, as long as we kept to ourselves and didn’t “flaunt” it, people pretended it didn’t exist as long as my mother and father didn’t go out together.
And as for me, I took after my mother.
I remember sitting in front of the window, looking at my reflection, trying to get my father’s comb to stick in my hair like it did in his. But instead it would just slide out of my straggly, fine strands and fall to the floor.
My fair-skinned mother would find me crying in front of the mirror and ask me what was wrong. I never had the words to explain to her, and that would sometimes upset her more.
When I was five, my father sat me down. “I want to tell you where you came from,” he told me, his face serious, his gray eyes piercing my fidgety five-year-old soul. “Because it’s only once you know where we are from that you can understand who you really are.”
I nodded, like I understood the wisdom he was dropping on me. Mostly I was excited to be let into this circle of trust he was drawing around us. Because these were things we had to keep close to us, as if they were horrible secrets. And yet, in fact, it was just the truth about how we’d gotten where we were.
Sometimes simple truth was radical.
“Your forefathers come from the Ivory Coast, in far-off Africa. From across the seas,” he told me.
He taught me their names, and the name of the tribe his forefathers had once belonged to. “I once knew the dances, and some of the words, as they were passed on to me from my grandfather,” he told me with sad eyes. “But I have forgotten them. But I have not forgotten where I came from. And you can’t either. Your skin is pale, son, and that will be to your advantage in this world. You might go on to do great things here. But you have to know who we are.”
“Will we go back?” I asked, excited.
He looked at me for a long time. “I don’t know if there is a back to go back to, son. We live here. It is what we know. And what we need to know is how best to survive, and more importantly, thrive. Because a man should be able to live anywhere in the world and not suffer, do you understand? This is our home because we are here. And we are with each other.”
I don’t know if he believed it. But at five, looking up at his broad shoulders, the lesson embedded itself deep in me and took root.
Thirteen years later, I would be flying trainer aircraft and pushing myself to beat everyone around me. More kills, more daring stunts. I’d been training in languages while in school but left to help fight the Great War and Hitler’s minions.