A Solid Core of Alpha (41 page)

He had some trouble with it at first.

For starters—names. Anyone named Katherine, Catherine, Kate, Kit, or Katy, Robert, Lisa or Risa, Alex, Leonard, Peter, Henry, or Aaron was automatically suspect. It was the silliest, simplest goddamned idea, but he and Molly and Jensen had spent hours looking at work profiles and folders of job applicants to try to decide if the people in the folders were qualified, or if Anderson just had an automatic bias because he missed the people on the holodeck now that he’d (mostly) chased them out of his head.

The schedule was difficult. Anderson had started medication and still had therapy, and keeping to his routine was vital. He’d missed his time to swim after a prolonged phone call once and had spent the rest of the day locked in his old room at the center, arguing with Kate over whether or not the phone call had been necessary.

That was a setback, and not the only one, but fortunately there was medication, and it was a godsend. Anderson was even more grateful when Jensen told him that when medication for mental health problems had been in its infancy, very often the cure had been almost as bad as the condition.

“It used to stifle about everything,” Jensen said, taking Anderson’s vitals. “Creativity, brain function, libido—”

“Libido!” Anderson—who had newly discovered the joys of his sex drive—had been horrified. “I’d rather die!”

Jensen hadn’t laughed. In fact, his face had been grim and deadly serious. “For people on twentieth and twenty-first century Earth, it came down to that.”

Anderson had subsided then and adhered to his medication regimen with gratitude and fervor after that, and the medication had helped him deal with the schedule disruptions and the constant barrage of people outside his usual social circle. In fact, the little project that he and C.J.’s dad had cooked up together seemed to be coming along just fine.

Well enough that Chris Poulson helped Anderson shelve most of his work for the month of C.J.’s leave.

“You mean I’m not going to meet any of your new friends?” C.J. complained when Anderson had come to get him at the shuttle port.

Anderson shook his head. “Nope. I’m afraid everybody has a job to do, a month to do it, and they’re getting back to me the day after you leave.”

C.J. slanted a look at him then. “You know, uhm, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you made them up.”

Anderson laughed long and hard at that one, threatening to pull their personnel files and have C.J.’s father over for dinner just to prove that his new friends were
not
all in his head.

They
had
invited C.J.’s parents over for dinner, but not before C.J. had laughingly, and thoroughly, demonstrated how very, very real everything Anderson believed in was true.

They spent the entire month together, including three days on the beach and an overnight trip to some caves on the Topaz continent in the southern hemisphere that C.J. had never seen either. Anderson had loved that trip. C.J., who had such an adolescent, little-kid look at the world, had been doubly precious when he’d been awestruck by the glittering caverns, miles deep beneath the surface of the planet, sprouting precious gems like a tree would sprout leaves.

“I see why they named the planet after a jewelry store now,” Anderson said fervently, and C.J. had turned to him and kissed him in the glittering darkness.

“What was that for?”

“Being as much of a dork as I am.”

Anderson wondered how C.J. could possibly think that another person could appeal to him, could live in his heart the way C.J. did. There
was
no other lover who could vie for even the memory of C.J.—not even in the flesh.

One man tried, though.

Anderson had managed, against his better judgment, to hire a guy named Leonard as part of his marketing team to get the word out for the grand opening of the project’s culmination.

Leonard was quiet, with a dry sense of humor and a rather cynical way of looking at the world—and a secret desire to be pushed around that Anderson had sensed from a mile away.

Anderson worked him—and worked him hard—in his job as the head of PR for the memorial foundation, and they spent a couple of late nights together, sometimes coordinating with the graphic artist on the team and sometimes not.

It was on one of those nights when they were alone that Len had kissed him.

Anderson had been surprised, of course—and missing C.J., and human contact in general. In about two seconds, he’d had Len pushed against the wall, panting, begging, one leg wrapped around Anderson’s slim body, his erection grinding shamelessly into Anderson’s groin.

“Wow,” Len moaned. “What else you got for me?”

And for a moment, Anderson had a vision of Len, on his hands and knees, bound and begging, and he almost came from the thought.

Then he closed his eyes and tasted, and took a deep breath, and stepped back.

Len was real. He tasted real. His erection had felt real against Anderson’s stomach. But he wasn’t C.J., and it wasn’t fair to treat him like a holo-dummy, something to just work out his sexual needs on, when he wasn’t the man Anderson wanted in his arms.

“I’m sorry, Len,” Anderson apologized—and it was sincere. “I think… I think you’re great. And I think we could probably have a really good time.”

Len thunked his head back against the doorframe. “But…?”

“But the love of my life is stationside, and he might not even have a problem with this, but I would. It’s not fair to you. I can’t use you like that.”

Len gave a faint, dry laugh as he tried to right his pants and his clothes. “Use me! Use me!” he joked, and Anderson couldn’t even smile.

“Never again,” he said soberly, and Len caught the idea that this wasn’t an option.

“Okay,” he said. “Nothing personal. I get it. I… I knew you were attached, you know. You must mention C.J. twice an hour.”

“So you made a move because?” Anderson was a little pissed, actually, but Len just shrugged.

“Because, kid, you’d be
so
worth it.”

Anderson shook his head and said, “That’s our cue for you to go home for the evening, okay?”

And it was. Len didn’t make another move—and Anderson wasn’t really tempted again.

But the work—the frantic work, since Anderson had given an almost impossible deadline—was worth it.

By the time C.J. came home for his leave, everything was in place.

T
HE
day after C.J. arrived home from leave was spectacular. It was early summer, and the sky was so blue it seemed to fracture the heart. The air was fragrant—Anderson had learned that the Emerald Continent was known for its flowers, and he’d even planted some in C.J.’s backyard—and there was a slight breeze to keep things from being too uncomfortable.

Big, puffy clouds scudded across the sky, and the clearing of land that Anderson had purchased and developed was lovely and peaceful and sweet.

Or it would have been peaceful if it hadn’t been for the two hundred or so people gathered on a plas-crete circle at the foot of a makeshift stage.

Anderson stood on the stage, a microphone clipped to the lapel of his rather fashionable suit—one piece, with large collars, and a tie, which he’d never seen before in his life until Jensen had taken him shopping. Behind him was a most unusual sculpture.

It was simple—it was a family.

Anderson had given the artist the picture, the one from his tablet, of his family gathered together at a time of celebration, and asked her to recreate it in bronze, and she had.

He’d thought a lot about the sculpture, and he’d gone back and forth with C.J. about it. An exploding planetoid? A shuttle? What did he want to stand in front of the Cancer Nebula Memorial Library and represent all of the things that he personally and the universe in general had lost that day?

In the end, he told C.J. that he was too self-centered at the moment to think about what the world had lost. He wanted what he had lost to be what people saw.

C.J. told him that it was a good idea. Once they saw what one person had lost, the loss became personal. It was perfect.

So Anderson stood in front of the family he’d lost and the boy he hadn’t been in nearly twelve years and waited to address a crowd of people who were most definitely real. In the background, one of the mining colony’s singers was breaking his heart with a voice so plaintive and yearning that it seemed to shadow the sun.

The song ended, and Anderson began speaking.

“Hello,” he began, and was surprised as hell when everyone stopped talking and listened to him. He looked out at the crowd and saw C.J. smiling at him, wearing a suit of his own as he stood by his family. He looked… God. He looked handsome and proud and joyful and everything Anderson might have dreamed about when he was a boy and had first dreamed about kissing a boy who brought him tablet stylus covers just because.

Anderson smiled back and then began speaking again. “I’m so glad you all could come,” he said, smiling at them with what C.J. called his sunlight smile. “My name is Anderson Rawn—and no, nobody calls me Andy. My parents were James and Caitlin Rawn, and my family lived on the Cancer Nebula mining colony, which had 2,128 residents at the last census.

“Two thousand, one hundred and twenty-seven of those residents were killed nearly thirteen years ago, including my parents and my sisters, the oldest of whom threw me aboard a ship and ensured my survival.” Anderson had since seen the recording that C.J. and Cassie had seen, and he’d spent a good week cursing Melody’s name. He’d spent the next month tearing up if he even heard it. Oh, God, Mel—but she’d known he loved her. Just like he knew that she loved him, unequivocally, with the same fierce protectiveness that Cassie loved C.J. That was the way of things. Even the best of love had to hurt sometimes.

“I spent the next eleven years on a shuttle, talking to myself,” he said now at the memorial that Melody would probably have yawned through. He waited for a moment and was gratified when the crowd gave an appreciative little laugh. “And one of the most pressing matters aboard the shuttle was the preservation of the things you will find in this library.”

He paused then and looked at C.J. one more time. “My soon-to-be husband, C.J., says that if I saved one song that makes it across the quadrant, I’ve successfully saved the memory of my entire people. I saved more than that, and it’s beautiful. The Cancer Nebula mining colony had been in place for over two hundred years. It was one of the first places populated in this galaxy, and between farming on the smaller asteroids and developing its own atmosphere, it was one of the prototypes that every other mining colony in Trading Federation space uses for its other colonies, and as a people, we had developed a small but singular culture, and music….” He smiled and remembered his family singing after dinner, singing during their chores, the music that had permeated his dreams in the shuttle.

“Music was our language. It was our hallmark, and it’s one of the things that we’ve preserved here, for you.”

He spoke some more. He talked about his family, his gentle mother, his shy, kind father, and his irrepressible little sisters. He talked about Melody, and the sacrifice she had made to make sure that one person—her little brother—survived to tell their story, to make sure the colony survived, even beyond the explosions that wiped it out of existence.

“I didn’t know what to make for the memorial,” Anderson finished. “But C.J. said to make it personal. I know that there are thousands of smaller colonies scattered out between here and the Cancer Nebula, and I know that there are fatalities every year that will simply be lost in the void of space. But all of those people, I think the one thing they had in common was people to care about them, and that’s why I put my family here as a memorial. This is to commemorate loss in the vastness of space. I know it’s hard to believe, but every mortal soul is missed.”

He finished speaking, and there was a silence, and then the crowd erupted into tearful applause. Anderson beamed out at them, dry-eyed, and then looked out to C.J., who was not so dry-eyed.

Okay
, he thought as the grief for his family finally settled into his heart like a comfortable blanket.
Okay
. The world knew what he had lost. It was no longer a terrible wound festering in his own heart.
Now
he could move on.

T
HAT
night after the reception, he and C.J. lay with the covers shoved down to the foot of the bed and all of the windows open to let in a cooling breeze as they recovered from their lovemaking. C.J.’s dark skin was still paler than the night and his dark blue coverlet, and his light green eyes picked up the light of the three yellow moons as they slivered in through the windows. He looked… amazing, beautiful, and other-worldly. His high-cheekboned apple-cheeks gave him the absolutely wicked air of a child who had done something unforgivably rotten.

The thought made Anderson grin smugly. Well… it had been
bad
, but it certainly hadn’t been
rotten
. C.J.’s body was marked, inside, outside, every side, with Anderson’s blatant possession, and Anderson was proud of it.

Of course, Anderson’s body was marked in a similar way, right down to a love bite at his collarbone that proclaimed to any other Lens out there that Anderson was officially claimed.

“So,” C.J. said now, “you said something about getting married?”

Anderson laughed. “You mean when I was up in front of two hundred people and you couldn’t argue with me?”

C.J.’s smile was perfectly content. “I wouldn’t have argued, oh mighty man-leader, but I’m thinking you’ve got something in mind.”

“Yeah,” Anderson told him. “I figured a small ceremony before we go up to the station at the end of leave.”

C.J. rolled over onto his stomach and raised his eyebrows. “We? As in both of us?”

Anderson nodded and placed random kisses on C.J.’s shoulder, his ear, his cheek. “Yeah—now that the foundation’s been established, your dad can run it and ask me questions by monitor, and you and me, we can… you know. Work. Live. Have a life. A real one, together.”