The Paradox Initiative (14 page)

“
I’m honored you let me play this,” he said as Jim set his banjo down and got to his feet.

“It was an honor to hear you!” Jim said as he took back his instrument, and the other men agreed.

“Glad to have met you,” Wolfe stuck his hand out again. Jim grasped it, his brow furrowing.

“This isn’t goodbye then, is it? Are you getting off at a stop, soon?”

Wolfe hesitated.

“Well, no, we’re going all the way to the Triple Star System…”

“Then come back tomorrow evening, mate, if you’re not busy!” Jim invited. “In fact, any evening! Play some with us! And bring your pretty girl!” He winked at Kestrel. She blushed. Wolfe laughed.

“Thank you,” he gripped Jim’s hand and shook it. “Thank you, we’ll try to come.”

“Goodnight!” Kie called.

“Goodnight,”
Wolfe waved to all of them.

“Goodnight, April,” George bid her. “Come back to see us!”

“I will!” Kestrel promised, and together she and Wolfe left the pub. They walked for a while in silence, the tunes still ringing through Kestrel’s memory. Finally, she lifted her head and looked at him.

“That first song,” she said, her voice quiet. “That was beautiful.”

He shrugged, smiling.

“I’m a little rusty
.”

“Didn’t sound like it,” Kestrel said. “I could listen to that all night.”

His smile broadened, though his head stayed down.

“Thank you.”

“I’ve never heard the song, though,” she remarked. “Where did you learn it?”

He sighed, lifted his head and glanced at the ceiling in thought. He put his hands in his pockets.

“Hm. I don’t even remember. I must’ve been pretty young—thirteen or fourteen.”

“What’s it about?” Kestrel wondered.

His eyes grew distant.

“It’s about…” he said slowly. “About leaving home. About leaving a
familiar place…familiar people. And never seeing them again.”

Kestrel swallowed. And she eased just a little closer to him as she walked. His arm bumped her shoulder. They didn’t say anything for the rest of the
short jaunt back to their level—but he didn’t move to distance them.

The next day
took a different turn. Kestrel actually slept well in her bed—woke up at nine o’clock, a vast improvement from five or six in the morning. She and Wolfe got ready and trundled down to the second level to eat at a pancake place for breakfast. There, they happened to overhear some other passengers discussing ship tours, so they headed down to the concierge to inquire, then booked an afternoon tour of the Map Room.

It was spectacular. Like nothing Kestrel had ever seen. With a group of twenty other peo
ple, they entered a pitch-black dome that soon illuminated, with a flick of the tour-guide’s finger, to form a three-dimensional map of this quadrant of the galaxy. Marveling, she and Wolfe literally wandered among the stars, listening as the guide talked about the different planets—most of them inhospitable—and the great fleet of space stations that moved with the speed of tectonic plates between the celestial bodies. They could touch the space stations, pinpoints of floating light, and their names, populations, trades and sizes would pop up above them, along with rotating portraits of their governors.

Then the guide pointed out
the
Exception’
s route, activating a blue laser line that shot out from Earth, cut across a good portion of the room, and ended at the other side. She showed them where they would stop tonight: the Argoth Station, and then the Darrow Station, where they would be stopping several nights down the way. Wolfe passed by those stations without a glance and headed straight for the terminus of the line. His eyes, reflecting the light of the laser, fixed on the Gain Station.

“It orbits a planet,” he noted.

“Yes,” Kestrel said. “Alpha Centauri Bb—actually, people just call it Alpha. And
it
orbits the star Alpha Centauri.”

“Can you live on it? The planet?” Wolfe wanted to know.

“It used to get hotter than a thousand degrees,” Kestrel said. “But now there’s a planetary heat shield, and a lot of scientists who work on the Gain Station have homes there. I heard they’re making a jungle, and they’re working on an ocean.”

“Hm,” was all Wolfe said.

They continued with the tour, Wolfe growing steadily quieter, brooding. The guide led them back out into the bright swimming pool room, thanked them and dismissed them. The crowd dispersed, and Kestrel’s hearing filled with the racket of all the hundreds of kids splashing in the swimming pool, under the light of the orange-and-red window far above.

“Want to look through the vendors?” Kestrel suggested. Wolfe blinked, coming out of some sort of reverie, and nodded.

Kestrel started forward, maneuvering around the fake palm trees and rows of deck chairs by the pool, toward the first little red vending tent. She slowed down in front of it and folded her arms, casually eyeing the silver jewelry laid out on black velvet. She felt Wolfe sigh behind her, but didn’t turn. Not until she heard a plaintive keening sound coming from down around their knees.

Kestrel
spun—and her eyes went wide. Standing in the middle of the walkway next to them was a tiny boy. He had light hair, wet and plastered to his head, and he wore tight black swim trunks with pictures of sharks on them. He held both arms up, bent at the elbows, and his face contorted with an impending scream.

“A baby!” Kestrel cried. “What—Where are his parents?”

Just then, the child burst out bawling, tears spilling down his cheeks. But nobody swooped in to rescue him—nobody came darting across the plaza.

Wolfe moved.

“Hey, hey there, little man,” he soothed in his deep voice, stepping to him, bending down and scooping him up. Kestrel stared. Wolfe set the baby easily against his side, wrapping his right arm around him and smoothing his wet hair away from his forehead. “Where’s your Ma and Pa, hm? Easy, easy. Yeah, I’d be screamin’ too.”

“Guh,” the little boy choked, rubbing at his eyes, then he opened them—they were bright
green and watery, and he pouted hard.

“You bet,” Wolfe nodded, as if he understood him. “Here, let’s go see if we can find your folks.” And he strode off in the direction of the reception desk. Kestrel instantly
caught up with him.

“He can’t be more
than a year and a half old,” she whispered urgently. “What are his parents thinking of, leaving him alone like that? He could have drowned, or been kidnapped!”

Wolfe didn’t answer, but his
look darkened and she knew he’d been thinking the same thing.

“Excuse me,” Wolfe said to the tall receptionist. He turned his head and hefted the child lightly. The baby calmed down to a whimper. “We seem to have found someone’s kid.”

The man’s eyes went wide.

“Oh, wow. Thank you, sir—let me just make a quick call.” He picked up his communicator and spoke rapidly into it, occasionally studying the child. Kestrel stepped closer, reaching up to stroke the back of the baby’s head.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she cooed, tilting her head and smiling so he could see her. “We’ll find your mom soon. Don’t worry.”

“You want to hold him?”
Wolfe asked. She met his eyes. Wolfe was looking at her with some interest.

“Is
n’t he all wet?” she wondered.

“Yeah.”

She shrugged, her smile broadening.

“Sure.”

He gently leaned toward her and handed the little boy over. Kestrel rested him on her left hip, snuggling him closer, wrapping both arms around him. The boy watched her, and mumbled something to her that didn’t contain any words, but Kestrel nodded fervently.

“Oh, I know it,” she said. “This is the pits.”

The boy sniffed, more tears leaking out, and he let his forehead head
thunk
forward onto her shoulder. Kestrel shot a stricken, sympathetic look at Wolfe. He lowered his head and grinned.

A cry rang out through the lobby. Wolfe straightened and turned
around. Kestrel caught sight of a man and a woman racing toward them, dodging between the tables and chairs, the woman in the lead. She had strawberry-blonde hair that flew out behind her—the man had dark hair and wide green eyes.

“My baby!” the woman yelped—in Romanian. Kestrel hurriedly held him out to her. She snatched him up and pressed him to her with all her might. The man, her husband, clutched them both, breathing hard. After a panicked
moment, the woman found Kestrel and tearfully spoke to her, again in Romanian.

“Thank you so much! We had no idea what happened—he was with us one moment and gone the next.”

“Oh, it was no trouble,” Kestrel answered in the same language. “He was a little frightened, but I think he’s all right!”

“Thank you, thank you,” the husband said as well, taking Kestrel by the hand. “We are indebted to you.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Kestrel assured him. “We’re just glad he’s safe.”

The couple thanked them dozens of times more, then hurried away, their son in their arms.

“Bye, little man,” Wolfe said quietly, waving to him. And the child, leaning over his mother’s shoulder, lifted his hand and waved his fingers. Wolfe chuckled, and stuffed his hands in his pockets.

“You’re right,” Kestrel sighed, glancing down at herself. “He
was
all wet.”

Wolfe chuckled
louder, then started to head back toward the lifts.

“You hungry?” he asked.

“I could eat,” Kestrel answered. Together, they boarded the lift, and waited for it to rise to the commerce floor.

“What language were they speaking?” Wolfe wanted to know.

“Romanian.”

“You speak Romanian?”

Kestrel nodded.

“I speak
quite a few languages.” The doors opened. They stepped out.

“Where did you learn?”
he pressed.

“I had a language and literature emphasis all the way through secondary school,” she said as they walked. “Then I went to the
Missouri University for Linguistics and Literature to be a manuscript technician at a museum.”

“What’s a manuscript technician?” Wolfe asked as they detoured around a large group of babbling teenagers.

“They preserve and translate old documents,” Kestrel explained, matching step with him again. “I think it’s fascinating, all those ancient stories.”

“So you read a lot,” he concluded. She grinned.

“I suppose so.”

“
And what’s your favorite ancient
story, Brown Eyes?”

“Hm…” she thought a moment. “Probably
Rip Van Winkle
by Washington Irving.”

Wolfe barked out a sudden laugh.
She turned to him, startled.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “It’s been a long time since I’ve read that one.”

Kestrel thought for a moment, then risked a question of her own.

“Do
you
know any other languages?”

He straightened as he walked, then spoke in a low, purposeful tone.

“Accipere quam facere praestat injuriam.”

“Latin!” Kestrel realized. “‘Better to suffer an injustice than to do an injustice.’”

He nodded.

“Is that why your tattoos are in Latin?” she ventured. “’Justice’ and ‘Vengeance’?”

His jaw tensed for an instant, and he looked the other way. He cleared his throat.

“A while back,” he began, keeping his voice down. “I did a stint as a cage fighter. Only took me a couple times of getting my hand broke and my face spat on for me to learn that if I didn’t have at least two tattoos…” he shook his head. “None of
the other guys would respect me as one of them.”

Kestrel let that sink in
. Then, she turned to him.

“Why ‘justice’ and ‘vengeance’?”

“They’re the same thing, Brown Eyes,” he said frankly. “Just coming from different angles.”

“Hm. I suppose…
” she murmured. She thought a moment. “I don’t really have much experience with either.”

“Good,” he declared, and they kept walking.

They found a place to eat an early dinner. Wolfe didn’t seem inclined to talk much, though Kestrel watched his pale face the whole time. They finished, and she suggested going to the pub. He brightened up at that, and they started walking that direction. But halfway there he had to stop, press his hand against the wall and catch his breath.

“Sorry, Brown Eyes,” he said, shaking his head. “
I’d better go back to the room.”

“Are you all right?”
she asked, stepping nearer.

“Yes
,” he assured her, nodding firmly. “I just don’t think space travel is agreeing with me. I need to lie down for a little bit.”

“Okay, let’s go,” Kestrel said, waiting for him to start back to the lift.

“Why don’t you go on to the pub?” Wolfe urged. “Don’t let me spoil your evening. That bass player was looking forward to seeing you.”

Ke
strel blinked.

“George?”

“Right, that was his name,” Wolfe tried to smile. “Don’t want to disappoint him.”

Kestrel looked at him a moment, trying to decide if he was serious.

“No, thanks,” Kestrel decided. “We’ll both go some other time.”

“Fair enough,” he murmured, looking whiter. And they headed back to the room.

As soon as they arrived, Wolfe took off his jacket and eased down on his bed, closing his eyes. Kestrel paused for a moment, squeezing her fingers together, then decided to just go in, take a long shower and go to bed early.

Kestrel opened her eyes. The ro
om was dark. She took a breath and lifted her head.

1:07

Something inside her turned over. She rubbed her face…

And heard it. The sound that had woke
n her up.

Coughing.

Hard, rattling, violent coughing.

Punctuated by
short, desperate gasping.

She threw her covers off herself and darted to the door in her pajama pants and shirt, never minding about her robe, her
long braid lashing her back. The door hissed open—

She skidded to a halt on the edge of the step. The standing lamp was on to a quarter power, but Wolfe wasn’t in the bed. She
opened her eyes wide, trying to see through the darkness…

A light. A sliver
of light at the bottom of the bathroom door.

More coughing barked through that door—ragged, frantic, full-bodied. Kestrel hopped down, stumbled through the dark room, felt her way behind the chairs and slowed to a halt right outside the door. She put her fi
ngers to her lips.

He
stood just on the other side. She could feel him. His watery gasps shivered through her, his coughs echoed like slaps.

He
suddenly choked.

Kestrel’s heart jolted. Her hand flew up to beat on the door—

“
Gah
,” he grunted, swallowing audibly. She heard him shuffle, perhaps turn around…

Hissing broke out from the shower
.

Kestrel frowned.

Wolfe began taking deep, purposeful breaths in between his spasms of coughing. And she felt heat radiating through the door.

His coughing eased. The heat increased.

And she realized what he was doing.

He had turned on the hot water, letting the steam fill t
he little bathroom and relax his muscles.

Within a few minutes, his fit had subsided. She heard him clear his throat once in a while, bu
t that was all. The knots in Kestrel’s stomach slowly untied themselves.

Gradually
, she pulled herself back away from the door and slipped back to her room.

She bit the inside of her cheek and got in bed
, pulling the covers up to her shoulders. She turned onto her left side, so she could see the glow of his lamp through her door. She listened as the bathroom water ran and ran. She listened as it eventually turned off, and the door opened. She listened as he sat on the edge of his bed and turned off the lamp. And it was only after she heard him settle down into his bedding and lay quietly that she could relax and drift off.