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Authors: Joe Pace

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Lost Harvest: Book One of the Harvest Trilogy (3 page)

BOOK: Lost Harvest: Book One of the Harvest Trilogy
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“When did he grow up, Mary?”

“Dad, come on.” James smiled, that small, sad smile again, and reddened the way his mom did when she was embarrassed.
He has her Irish blood
.

“I have something for you,” Pearce said, remembering. “In my bag.”

With a touch on the panel latch, the boy opened the long, cylindrical case. Carefully tucked in amongst the rolled clothes and toiletries was a wad of red cloth no larger than his fist. Pearce watched, looking forward to an excited gasp that never came. Instead, once he unrolled the cloth and saw the miniature starship fall into the palm of his delicate hand, James merely stared at it.

“It’s a toy,” he said dully.

“It’s a Greyhound-class sloop,” Pearce said. “The ships the Navy used to break the heliosheath at the edge of the solar system for the first time, back in ’97.” When James failed to react to this, Pearce frowned and glanced at his wife, but she looked down and did not meet his gaze. “We’ve been trying to find one for years, remember? It completes our collection of the pre-2100 models.”

“Your collection.”

James carefully set the exquisitely detailed miniature on the table. It was beautiful, sleek and needle-shaped, slate-gray, with a sweeping fin that ran underneath its entire length. Pearce had paid three times what it was worth when he found it in a New Indies trading shop, reveling in the anticipation of bringing it home. For the better part of a decade he had been seeking out the little ships, sharing them with his son, telling him stories of humanity’s earliest forays into the stars. There were hundreds of models in the series, and at least half were now lining the shelves in James’ bedroom, from the frail Lunar module that first reached the moon more than two centuries before, to the gargantuan modern frigates, the fortresses of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. With as much as Pearce had been away from home, this had been his one unbreakable link with James, their great shared passion.

And now his son walked away from it, without a word, into his room, and closed the door.

 

****

 

After dinner, after James went to bed, they made love, not without passion, and it had that special urgency that came when he was newly home. Afterwards, as he lay in the tangled sheets, she rose and swiftly pulled on a robe.
I wish she wouldn’t do that
. He thought she was beautiful, despite their passage beyond youth into the sagging solidity of early middle age. Mary had always been modest, to the point of shyness, even when they had been younger. She was a Kirkpatrick, a Catholic, and had been taught shame from the cradle. Their physical intimacy was always in the dark, and that had ever been a source of equal mild frustration and erotic mystery for Pearce. He somehow doubted that Christine Fletcher ever hurried to get dressed after her sexual encounters.

That’s damned odd
, he thought, and wondered what on Earth had made him think of her that way now, when he never did during all their time together in space.

“I love you, Mary.” He said it because he knew it would please her, but also because it was true. He also wanted to shake the stray thought of Christine from his mind. She glanced back over her shoulder, her hair unbound and wild, still more red than gray, and smiled at him. In the dimness of their bedroom, in the fading glow of the sex, he could swear she was twenty again, the fierce and desirable girl who had approached the young midshipman on the street and complimented him on his new uniform.
I must have been a fine figure of a man
, thought Pearce,
when I had a future
. Mary sat, pulling her legs up under her, and took his hand. She held it, gently, as if not quite believing he was there.

“When will you be going out again, Billy?” She said it lightly, as if she were just making conversation, but he sensed the tightness in her, and knew this to be the opening salvo in a more complicated discussion, one they’d had before.

“I don’t know,” he replied honestly. “As soon as I can.” He knew it wasn’t what she wanted to hear, felt the grip on his hand tighten, but he never lied to her. He knew she both loved and hated him for that.

“I’d thought…” she began, “I’d thought maybe you could stay for a while this time. For James…”

“I’m doing this for James.” His voice grew stern, just a hint of his quarterdeck bark. “Do you think I enjoy being out there so much, away from the both of you?”

“Yes,” she replied, quietly, her eyes beginning to brighten, as if she might cry. “I know you do, and so do you, William Pearce, so let’s not fool ourselves on that score.” He spread his hands, pulling the one from her grasp.

“Guilty, Mary. I do love what I do, and I’m damn good at it, and I won’t be made to feel ashamed of that. I’m not the Catholic here.” It was an unnecessary taunt, and beneath him, but they had been down this path before, always ending in tears, and a small, unworthy part of him resented the damned robe. She chose to ignore the remark, and persisted.

“James needs you here, Billy, not out there. You can’t help him out there.”

“Yes, I can. Damn it all, I can. This was a profitable trip, and a few more like this…”

“There could be ten more like it and it still wouldn’t make a bit of difference!” She interrupted him, taking his hand back in both of hers. “You’ve made enough money to make us comfortable, and to buy all the Common 2 meds in the world, but he doesn’t need any more bloody Common 2 meds!” She was crying now, the tears bursting free from her eyes and streaming down her freckled face. Pearce always looked away when she cried, hating to see it, but this time he couldn’t. Mary never cursed. Something had changed.

“What is it, love?” he asked, quietly. She fell into him, and he wrapped her in his arms and waited a moment, and then asked again. “What happened while I was gone?” He could feel her shaking against him, sobbing, and he stroked one hand against her back, cold terror creeping into his chest.

“The last round of tests,” she said wetly, muffled against him, still crumpled in his embrace. “Dr. Mendoza said the meds are having diminishing effectiveness.” She looked up, her damp face inches from his, her eyes shining with grief and impotent rage. “That’s what he said, ‘diminishing effectiveness’. Billy, he said that if James doesn’t have the procedure in the next two years, he’ll be…” Mary put a hand to her mouth and drew a shuddering breath in through her nose. “He’ll be dead in three years. He needs his father, not more money for meds.”

Pearce stared at her, trying not to process what she had said. He knew James was sick, of course, they had known that virtually his entire life. And he knew what the doctors had told them, that McNally-Fink killed before adulthood. But he had put that information somewhere else, somewhere he didn’t have to deal with it, and told himself that there were years and years before James became a teenager and approached that fatal threshold. With medication, the disease could be managed, the doctors had said. With medications, expensive medications, the boy could have a decent quality of life in the years that remained. What he couldn’t do was have access to the gene replacement therapy that could counter the syndrome and give him a future. It was massively expensive, and not available to commoners.
Mary’s right
, he thought, as his wife dissolved against him in another paroxysm of weeping. I could have twenty trips like this last one and never make enough to afford it. He thought then of the Greyhound model, still sitting abandoned on the table by the door.

“He knows.” It was a statement, not a question, and Mary’s head nodded silently against him. James had always been brave in the face of this disease. He had always spoken of how he would defeat it, how he would beat it back and grow up strong and tall and travel the stars like his father. All those illusions were gone now. His son knew there were only so many tomorrows now, that each day would be worse than the one before.
My sweet boy
. His mind flooded with vivid memories, of the day James was born, of carrying the infant boy on board the Drake, where he was blessed by Jane Baker herself on her last day orbiting Earth. By the time the ship returned home a year later, Baker was dead and James had been diagnosed. Pearce had been gone more than he had been home these last ten years, and now his son, his doomed son, was thirteen, and he had missed most of it. He wouldn’t miss any more.

“I’ll stay,” he whispered to Mary, burying his nose in her unkempt curls.

Three
 

Dreams

 

The summons had come via messenger, on actual notepaper, in a sealed envelope. When the brown-jacketed girl handed it to him at the door, he had known at once it had been sent by someone of great importance. Who else had access to such luxury? It felt like real paper, too, not the synthetics that some upper-class climbers used as a status symbol. In the service, it was tradition for captains to receive their sailing instructions from the Admiralty on paper, and he still remembered the packet that had come with orders for his final naval assignment, more than ten years before. That had been the last time he had seen – or touched – genuine paper.

For a moment his heart had quickened, as he thought this message might be along those lines, something unlooked-for from the Star Lord, some miraculous resuscitation of his career, but the girl had been a private courier, not a uniformed yeoman. On the front of the small envelope – too small to be an official communiqué anyway, he noted – his name appeared in flowing script, with his address. The reverse bore merely a simple, embossed red B superimposed over the sealed flap. He thought to ask the messenger girl who had sent it, but she was gone.

“Bill?” It was Mary, calling him from inside their small apartments. “Bill, who was that?”

“A courier, dear,” he replied, stepping back across the threshold. He broke the seal, splitting the B into two equal halves, and drew out the card within. The inscription, in the same flowing hand that had addressed the envelope, read:

 

Dear Lt. Pearce,

 

Please do me the favor of joining me at my Spring Grove home for supper on Saturday next. Shall we say eight in the evening? A private compartment will await your convenience at the Douglas Bay tube station at twenty minutes before eight. Please do bring your lovely wife.

 

Yours cordially,

 

Lord John Banks

Fifteenth Earl of Northumberland

Science Minister to His Royal Majesty

 

“Well?” asked Mary. “What does it say? Who is it from?” She saw the look on her husband’s face, and her heart skipped a beat. “Not the Admiralty.” It was a question, a statement, and a prayer. She knew it was unworthy of her, and that she should feel differently, but she dreaded the unlikely day when the Navy called her husband back to service.

“No.” Pearce closed the door, still staring at the paper, a deep crease in his brow. “No, it’s from Lord John Banks.”

“The Earl?” Mary knew who he was, of course, everyone did; the man was a celebrity, as much for being the handsomest bachelor in the Empire as for being perhaps the smartest man. “What does he want?” Pearce handed the paper to his wife, who read it rapidly, and then again as if she were dissecting each sentence into its elemental parts.

“He calls me lovely,” she said, a wry smile on her lips, “as though we’d ever met.”

“And me Lieutenant, a rank I haven’t held for years. You know these aristocrats, Mary. They learn their courtesies like we commoners learn to read.” He took back the paper, folded it into its envelope, and tucked it into his jacket.

“I’m going to need a new dress,” Mary said.

“You’ll go?” Pearce asked, a little surprised. His wife had been social enough when they were first together, Pearce a young Navy lieutenant. During his time ashore, they had enjoyed many dinners and parties with other young officers and their wives or husbands, but after James’ diagnosis, Mary had retreated. Now she made a sour face at Pearce’s question.

“This can hardly be an idle invitation, love. Something’s afoot. And regardless, when a member of the Privy Council says come, you come. I’ll arrange for Edith to check in on James during the night, and we’ll go.”

 

****

 

Saturday next came, and William and Mary Pearce were at the Douglas Bay tube station at twenty minutes before eight, he in a muted black suit and she in her new dress, indigo with white trim. Pearce tried vainly to recall the last time the two of them had ventured out into society. He dimly remembered a dinner in Old Soho with Colin Wilcox and his wife, right after both men had become Lieutenants.
Fifteen years ago? Maybe more
. They had all gotten drunk on an imported Centauri vintage, more than they could afford, but back then even a junior Lieutenant’s pay had seemed like all the money in the world. Pearce could still recall how good the stripes had felt on his sleeve, and how much he loved to look at the golden anchor embroidered on his hat. Mary had stitched it on herself, in an outdated display of pride and tradition. They had been impossibly young then, naïve and hopeful about the world. Pearce posted to the
Wyvern
, a science vessel mapping the Leitzel cluster under her taciturn old Commander Jemadari Okoye. Wilcox drew service on the
Furious
, a battleship engaged in the Altair suppression. Pearce had come home. Wilcox never did.
I haven’t thought about Colin in years
. He wondered whatever happened to his young wife, though he couldn’t picture her face no matter how hard he tried.

“It’s here, Billy.”

The hiss of brakes and a brief gust of wind in his face jerked Pearce from his reminiscence. Sitting on a cushion of air alongside the platform, fitted neatly within the curvature of the tube tunnel, was a round little compartment. Accustomed to the kilometer-long mass transit trams, Pearce hesitated, but after a moment, a seam in the car split, widening into a door. A man stepped out, dressed in deep-blue dripping with lace, stylized in a modern reinvention of old-fashioned livery, with a cap that he removed as he bowed to them in silence. Mary took the hand he offered, and allowed herself to be escorted into the compartment. Pearce followed. The interior was plush and comfortable, evidently one of Banks’ own private cars.

“Make yourselves comfortable, please,” said the driver, and the Pearces sat on one of the two soft couches inside. The door closed soundlessly, and with no prelude the car was moving down the tunnel, though far more smoothly than any public tram Pearce had ever ridden.
Faster, too
, he suspected. A shimmering, translucent screen had dropped between the passenger section of the compartment and the driver’s cab, and Pearce assumed this indicated privacy. He took Mary’s hand and smiled at her.

“I have no idea what the Minister wants, but this can’t possibly be a purely social call.”

“Social?” Mary laughed, and it was her old laugh, the one Pearce remembered from the years before James was diagnosed.
She’s enjoying this
, he thought.
And why not
? There had surely been little enough joy in her life lately. “That would imply we belong in society, love.”

“True enough. I suppose it is possible that he has need of a merchant captain, but it seems a lot of trouble to go to simply to arrange a commission.”

“Perhaps he just likes to evaluate his potential employees in person,” Mary offered thoughtfully. “Or he could be bored.”

“Nothing like commoners to liven up an evening,” Pearce replied. With a sudden chirp, the screen faded out, and the driver turned to face them.

“We’ve arrived,” he declared. In another moment he had debarked, to open their door from the outside.

“Six minutes from Douglas Bay to Isleworth Station?” Pearce asked, glancing at his wrist chronometer. It would have been at least a twenty minute trip on commercial tram. The driver assisted Mary out of the car, and then stood aside to allow Pearce to exit.

“Not Isleworth Station, sir,” responded the driver as he bowed. “This is the Minister’s private tube stop at Spring Grove. The public trams do not come here.”

Pearce stood alongside his wife and stared. A massive, imposing red-brick mansion filled his view, ancient Victorian in style and sprawling. At least thirty of his own apartment could easily fit into the house.
All this for a single man’s use
!

“So this is how the other half lives,” he murmured as they moved down the stone walkway, flanked on either side by low hedges and modest, but deeply green, swaths of grass. Pearce had never seen grass on Earth, and here was nearly a full quarter-acre, seeming all the space in the world. There was untrammeled sky above, rimmed on all sides by the glow of the city, but at the center, a patch of indigo, pricked by a single star. It was breathtaking. His life had always been bounded by cramped quarters on board ship, or cramped rooms here on Earth. This was unapologetic opulence.

“Not the other half, Bill,” said Mary. “The other one tenth of one percent.”

They arrived at the front door, and it opened before they could press the bell. Inside was a tall, spare man, well past middle age, dressed similarly to the driver, though his uniform was all black, and on his head was a powdered white wig. Pearce glanced at Mary, who arched an eyebrow in return. Lord John Banks had a reputation for eccentric devotion to anachronism, and Pearce was seeing it was well-earned.

“Mr. Pearce. Ma’am.” The servant nodded at each in turn, then gestured that they should enter. “Lord Banks awaits you in the parlor. Please follow me.”

Pearce did so, Mary alongside, trying not to goggle at the sumptuous luxury all around them. He had never in his life seen such riches on display, from the priceless oil paintings on the walls to the statuary in every corner. The floor was uncarpeted, a rarity. Instead they walked along on dark wood, true wood, he knew, hundreds of years old. Mary’s hold on his hand tightened, and he suspected she was not enjoying herself nearly as much as before. It was one thing to contemplate an invitation to dinner by one of the Kingdom’s leading citizens. It was quite another to find oneself in his home, surrounded by such obvious wealth.

“Down the rabbit hole,” whispered Mary in his ear.

Pearce had expected that everything inside the mansion would be huge, but in a moment the hallway opened into a room that was almost cozy. A fireplace burned in one wall – on closer inspection, he noticed it was an actual fire, not a holographic depiction – and this room was covered with a rug, of a design that he knew was Centari. He had imported them himself, more than once, and they were exceedingly precious. Several people were in the room, some standing and some sitting, but Pearce’s gaze was drawn to a long, low couch before a wall lined with books, hundreds of them, where the great man himself perched. As they entered, Lord John Banks, Earl of Northumberland, rose with fluid grace and crossed the room to greet them, taking Pearce’s hand with one of his own and grasping his elbow with the other.

“Ah, Lieutenant Pearce! So kind of you to join us this evening.” Even as he bowed his head, Pearce found the use of his old naval rank discordant.

“Simply Mr. Pearce now, my Lord. I have not been in the service for some years now.” Banks nodded and raised a hand in acquiescence.

“As you wish, my friend.” He turned his attention to Mary. “This, of course, is your ravishing wife.”

“Yes. Minister, may I present Mary Pearce.”
Ravishing
? He loved his wife dearly, but ravishing was not a verb he had ever thought to apply to her. More highborn courtesies, he supposed. Mary curtsied properly, and Banks released his grip on Pearce’s hand and deftly seized one of hers.

“You may. In fact, you must. How splendid. Your servant, mum.” He bent over her hand, brushing his lips against her fingers, and for the first time Pearce understood, in part, why the man was so universally revered. He was certainly overly formal, a bit antiquated in his habits, but it took one sideways glance at the rising red bloom in Mary’s cheeks to know that the touch of gentility was not wasted on her.
Probably not on most women
, he thought. He knew that Banks was not married, never had been.
If I had that effect on women, I’d probably never marry either. That, and if I were worth half the Crown Jewels of the King. And the hundred other ifs that apply to John Banks but few other men
.

“Mrs. and Mr. Pearce,” Banks went on, and Pearce thought he detected the smallest hint of amusement at his use of the common title. “May I present you to the rest of our company this evening? First, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Exeter, and the Duchess.” Pearce’s eyes widened as the stocky nobleman and his handsome wife came forward. The Star Lord was the supreme ruler of the entire Fleet, and to low-ranking officers like Pearce had been, he might as well have been God. Moreover, of course Pearce had heard of Admiral McKinnon, a legend in the service even before his elevation to the peerage. He stammered out his greeting and introduction of Mary, who was surely as struck as he was. Neither of them had ever met so much as a Count before, let alone so exalted a personage as a Duke, a mere step below the Royal Family. The Duchess Exeter was older, as her husband was, and portly as well, but she had a broad, pleasant face, and her eyes twinkled with charm and kindness as she kissed Mary on both cheeks.

“Such a relief that John invited another lady,” she said welcomingly. A necklace of blue gemstones, each twice as large as Pearce’s thumbnail, glittered in silver netting draped around her thick throat. “I was half afraid the entire evening would be spoiled by unremitting man-talk.”

“Oh, your – my – I’m no lady,” Mary said haltingly, her face now fully given over to crimson, up to the red roots of her hair. The Duchess waved a dismissive hand.

“Ladies are as they behave, child, not as they are born, and I am more than happy to extend the courtesy until you disprove it.” Banks, smiling, all culture and urbanity, was introducing the other two guests.

“The fellow over by the window is my particular friend, Sir Eustace Green, Knight of the Bath, and Royal Gardener at the King’s Botanic Gardens at Kew.” The man was round-shouldered and stooped, graying, but nodded cheerfully at them. “And skulking there by the fireplace is Doctor Adina Reyes, the Kingdom’s foremost xenobiologist, and a fellow Member of the Royal Society.” Youngish, olive-skinned and rather haughtily beautiful, Dr. Reyes arched one eyebrow by way of marginal greeting. “An eclectic bunch we are, but that always makes for the best conviviality, I find.”

BOOK: Lost Harvest: Book One of the Harvest Trilogy
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