Humanity's Fight

Chapter Four

Chapter Four

It was getting dark. The sunset colors that had brightened the office where Kes worked had disappeared and the encroaching gloom alerted him to the lateness of the hour. He turned off his interface and slipped the device into a bag, then rose from his desk and stretched.

The office was empty. All of his colleagues had already gone home. He was the last to leave, as usual. He walked to the exit, going over the day’s events in his mind. He smiled and gave a slight shake of his head at the memory of his encounter with Wilder.

What secret lay behind that gasp she’d given? What was she up to? His young friend had clearly embarked on yet another project that skirted the border of legality.

Out in the hallway, Kes turned his steps toward the rear of the building. The front doors would already be locked and he would have to let himself out of the fire door. Not for the first time, his tired brain dwelt on how remarkably similar the shadowy, quiet building was to the kind of places he used to work at on Earth. If he didn’t look too closely, he might have imagined he was back there and the intervening centuries and light years of space were nothing but a fiction of an over-excited imagination.

Kes pushed on the bar that opened the fire door and let himself out into the coolness of late dusk. He descended the steps and walked out into the office parking lot, which he wasn’t surprised to see was empty of cars. They had all been taken by departing government workers.

Sighing, he sat on a low wall and ordered an autocar via his ear comm. As he did so, he saw three messages from his wife. A twinge of guilt hit him. He knew what the messages said and he didn’t answer them, deciding to cross that bridge when he arrived home.

While he waited for the ordered car to arrive, Kes wondered to himself about his growing sense of deja vu about his workplace. He hadn’t felt that way about any place on Concordia before. It had only been in what he saw as the second phase of his life there that his mental shift had appeared, after he’d returned from the trip to the Galactic Assembly.

Experiencing events that later turned out not to be real but a simulation artificially generated in his mind had had a profound effect on him. He’d felt psychologically destabilized and left with a distrust of what was real and what was not.

Then, when he’d returned to Concordia and discovered that the planet had moved on by more than fifty Earth years, he’d undergone another psychic shift. This second effect had occurred more slowly than the first. In the beginning, he’d been amazed and delighted. The colonists had worked wonders in just a few decades. And when he’d found out about the secret military depots they’d constructed in anticipation of the Scythians’ return, he’d been even more impressed.

But within weeks a sense of displacement had set in. The new Concordia was nothing like he’d imagined it would be when he’d signed up to embark on the colony expedition. He’d imagined a lifetime of enormous challenges, hardship, and toil as the generational colonists and scientists fought to survive. Instead, after returning from the Assembly, he found he was living a reasonably comfortable existence with all his immediate needs catered for.

He had a comfortable home, a wife and child as well as another on the way, and an office job. If it weren’t for the fact that he was studying alien sentient species, he could easily have thought he’d never left Earth.

The whirr of an autocar drew Kes from his musings. The vehicle pulled up in front of him and the doors unlocked. Kes shivered as he stood up. The evening was turning chilly. He looked up at the clear sky and overhanging starscape.

“You’re different,” he told the stars. “I can say that, but not much else.”

He opened a door and climbed into the car, telling it his destination. The interior was warm. The car’s heater had activated. It was yet another example of an Earth-like luxury, and it added to Kes’ sense of alienation. He would almost have preferred the car was cold, the windows stuck open, and rain pouring inside.

The autocar purred as it pulled away and set off in the direction of Kes’ home on the outskirts of Annwn.

Thinking about his life on the new Concordia and its similarity to his memories of Earth brought Kes to a sad recollection that often popped up unbidden when he sank into this mood.

When he’d returned from the Galactic Assembly, the first place he’d gone after emerging from the narrow Fila shuttle had been the Leader’s Residence. He hadn’t realized at first that the Leader was Meredith, Cariad and Ethan’s child. Cherry had been the first to spot that.

At that time, Cariad was still alive and living with her daughter, but age-related dementia had taken over her mind. Meredith had warned him before he’d gone in to see her. However, the knowledge hadn’t prepared him for what he encountered.

Against his expectation, she’d recognized him. Her eyes had screwed up to focus on him as soon as he’d gone into the room, and then her features relaxed in recognition.

“Kes, where have you been? Are you here to go into cryo too? I thought maybe you’d been taken to the OR already. Come and sit down.”

Kes perched on the bed next to Cariad, a little shocked at the toll time had taken on her appearance. He’d known she would look older, of course, but to see it with his own eyes was another thing.

Cariad beckoned him closer. He leaned in toward her. She clutched his arm and whispered, “Kes, please help me. I changed my mind, but they won’t let me leave. There’s a nurse here who hates me and she won’t let me go.” Cariad’s grip became tighter. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to go on the Nova Fortuna any longer. I want to give up my place to someone else. I can do that, can’t I? Someone can take my place. They can’t force me, right?”

Kes had heard that the best way to deal with the delusions of the mentally ill was to go along with them. Telling them the truth would only make them agitated and unhappy and wouldn’t help them at all.

He took her other hand in his. “No, they can’t force you. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“Good, good,” said Cariad, her hold on Kes’ arm softening. “I decided I can’t leave my family. I can’t do that to them, and I’ll miss them too much.”

Kes bowed his head. “I know how you feel. But don’t worry about it. I’ll speak to the doctors and tell them not to prep you for cryo.”

“Thank you, Kes. Thank you. I knew I could rely on you.”

Though Cariad appeared to have forgotten everything that had happened since she woke from cryo, her memory of the years leading up to the departure of the colonization expedition was vivid. As Kes sat and talked with her, she referred to many aspects of that time he’d entirely forgotten. The snatched moments of intimacy they’d shared, the utter exhaustion of the long days of work, office politics and gossip, and the escalating strength of the public protests.

By the time she’d become tired by their conversation and fallen asleep, Kes had been transported back into that time. He’d also felt anew the same doubt and indecision that now plagued Cariad’s aged brain.

If he had his time again, would he decide to remain on Earth? If he’d known how much his expectations would be thwarted, it was possible he would.

The autocar drew to a stop outside a small house fronted by a yard covered in the rubbery, low-growing Concordia ground cover plant that grew naturally in that area. Kes exited the car and walked up the path. The front door opened before he reached it and yellow light silhouetted the pregnant figure of Isobel, his wife.

She waited until he was inside and the door was closed before she began her admonishments.

“You promised,” she said. “You promised you’d be home early today.”

“I know, I’m sorry. Someone brought something into the office, and I had to—”

“I don’t want to hear it. Whatever it was, you could have at least comm’d me. You could have replied to my messages.”

“You’re right. That’s what I should have done. I got carried away, I guess. Look, why don’t we do something special this weekend? I want to make it up to you.”

“It isn’t only me, it’s Miki too. She hasn’t seen her Daddy in three days. You leave before she wakes up and come home after she’s gone to bed. Three days is a long time to a two-year-old.”

“I know.” Kes hung his head. “I’m sorry.” He reached out to hug Isobel, but she stepped backward, avoiding him.

“I’ve never said this before,” she said. Her chin began to tremble. “If you continue like this, always working, never making time for me or our children, our marriage isn’t going to survive. I know that sounds like an ultimatum, but it isn’t. It’s the truth.” Isobel turned around and walked into the kitchen at the back of their house.

He knew she didn’t want him to see her cry. Kes stood in the hall, his arms hanging loosely, feeling like an absolute asshole. What was going on with him? The amount of work he had to do was overwhelming. He was studying the available information on other members of the Galactic Assembly, learning as much as he could about the anatomy, behavior, environmental conditions essential for life, history, and culture of more than two dozen species. Realistically, it was several lifetimes’ work for everyone in his department, let alone himself.

Yet none of it was as important to him as his family. Why was he neglecting them?