Earth, 2078

Mom was still at work when Chris came home from school - chemistry was one of the few classes that still required actual student presence, mainly because Mrs. Paulson loved to use the lab. It meant that someone else had to pick up Helen from kindergarten and babysit her until either he or Mom came home.

Chris passed Anita on his way to the kitchen; their au pair lay on the couch, a holovisor clamped over her face, her arms jerking in a seemingly random manner. Chris suspected that she was playing that zombie apocalypse shooter everyone was crazy about in the chatrooms. He was totally out of the loop with these things lately... he had to cram too many physics lessons into his head to have time for gaming. It made him an outsider even among the nerds.

He shrugged and scooped an extra spoon of peanut butter on his bread. He'd never stopped being the new guy in that school, and it wasn't as if he'd been out to seek friends anyway. Chris had graver things on his mind.

A slice of cheese on top of the peanut butter completed his creation; the combination always provoked a disgusted look from Mom and some muttered comments of "unnatural," and "abominations." Chris grinned at the memory; he knew she wasn't really serious, even if she refused to even try a bite. Those looks were just part of the joke. Not like... not like the others. His smile faded.

Sometimes Mom looked at him as if the sight of him was painful to her. It was because he looked more and more like Dad the older he got. Everyone said so: Chris looked like his dad, while Helen took after Mom, with her dark hair and eyes. So whenever Mom looked at him, she was reminded of Dad, and then she missed him.

Chris swallowed heavily around the sandwich in his throat. He knew that feeling - you could go on for days and feel normal and then suddenly something reminded you, and your whole insides were grabbed by this terrible yearning and you felt you had to run as fast as you could to get that tension out of your system again. He'd tried it out, but running hadn't made a difference.

He knew that Mom didn't mean to hurt him when she looked at him like that, but it still felt like being punched in the gut every time. It wasn't his fault that he looked like Dad. It wasn't his fault that he wasn't Dad.

He threw the sandwich in the trashcan and went back into the living room.

"Where's Helen?" He had to pull the earphones out of Anita's skull to get a reaction.

"Ahh! Don't do that! You give me a heart attack!" She blindly batted at him as if he was a mosquito.

"Where's Helen?" Chris repeated, not letting go of the ear piece.

"Up in her room. Sleeping." Anita tugged at the cord. "I read her a story. She is a very nice child." Unlike you, was the unspoken message. As if he'd care. Chris left her to her game and went up to his room. He had a bucketload of homework to do, but first he'd review the lesson that professor Hasslein had sent him on their secured channel-

He froze in the door. Helen stood on his desk, on her toes, head tilted back, arms stretched out towards his ships...

With two swift steps he was at the desk and grabbed her around the waist, frightening her into a yell and violent sobbing. He'd wanted to yell himself, but then she would've probably fallen off the desk and smashed her head in.

Instead, he grabbed her by the shoulders and brought his face nose to nose with hers. "You know you're not allowed in here," he growled. "And you mustn't touch my stuff!" Especially not his model ships that were hanging from the ceiling, safely out of reach of little grasping hands, or so he'd thought.

Helen was still sobbing, more from surprise than for fear of him. "I didn't touch the ships!" Her lip was trembling. "I just looked!"

"Yeah, looked with your fingers!" Chris let her go. "I saw where your hands were!" He shoved her towards the door as gently as possible.

Helen's whole body went rigid as she dug her heels in. "Noo! I wanna see Daddy's ship!" She was weighing a ton all of a sudden, and Chris felt the last shreds of his patience evaporate. He pushed harder, and Helen fell on her butt and began to cry for real. For a second, Chris didn't know if he was relieved that Anita was lost in zombieland and couldn't tell Mom about the drama upstairs, or annoyed that she didn't come up and take care of the baby. That was her job, right?

"Stop the drama! And get. out!"

But now Helen had clasped herself around the leg of the desk. Whenever Chris managed to pry a pudgy hand off, she had already attached herself again to the furniture with her other arm, or her legs. Tears were rolling down her reddened cheeks. She was saying something, but Chris didn't understand anything among the blubbers and hiccups, except for one word:

"Dadd-dyy!"

Chris felt heat rise into his face. "Dad would spank your butt for that tantrum! Why you're calling for him, you don't even know him! He doesn't know you ! He's never even met you!" He clenched his fists, wishing for Dad to be here and take care of this mess, make this noise and turmoil go away-

"I'd exchange you for Dad any time! I wish he was here instead of you!"

Helen's wailing stopped as if someone had pulled the plug, and the sudden silence pounced on Chris like a living thing. They stared at each other.

It wasn't the trembling of her lip that made him feel sick to his stomach, or the tears that were still rolling down her baby face. It was the look in her eyes that made his own eyes burn and water. That wide-eyed shock and hurt that he felt every time Mom looked at him as if he was Dad's ghost, or a pretender, not the real thing. When she looked at him wishing for someone else.

He crouched down and tried to hug her, but she still clung to his desk, and the haunted look in her eyes didn't go away. "I'm sorry," he said, "I didn't mean it. Really, I didn't. I just want Dad back." It made his throat tight to say it out loud; and it embarrassed him a bit, made him feel as if he was just three, like Lennie. He awkwardly stroked her hair and she finally let go of the desk and crawled into his lap.

"So," Chris said, "want me to show you the ships?"

Helen sniffled, and nodded, and he got up and sat her on his hip so that she had a better view. He pointed. "That's the Daedalus. That's the ship they're building right now, the one that'll go looking for Dad." He pondered for a moment if he should tell her that he'd be commanding that ship, then decided against it.

"And that's the Hyperion. That was the prototype..." He realized that Helen wouldn't understand the word. "That's the first ship that had... that was so fast it could travel to the stars." He took a deep breath and pointed to the last ship, smooth and white like an egg, the ring with the HFG generators hovering around it like the rings of Saturn. "And that's the Icarus."

"Daddy's ship," Helen whispered.

Chris swallowed. "Daddy's ship."

"It looks nice," Helen offered.

Chris said nothing. He loathed everything about that ship, its shape, its color, and he knew it was dumb, the ship hadn't malfunctioned, it had been sabotaged, but still... "You don't say 'it' to a ship," he corrected her, "you say 'she'."

"Whyy?" The long, drawn out 'why' that was the only warning of a battery of 'why's' incoming any moment now...

"It's tradition." He stopped the next 'why' with a quick "Do you know which star Dad went to see?"

Helen shook her head, and he set her down on the floor again. "I'll show you."

He drew the shades down and closed the door, then switched on the holographic planetarium.

It had been Dad's last Christmas present for him. They had marked the flight path of the Icarus, from Earth all the way to Alpha Centauri. He and Dad had lain on the floor of the living room, stars floating all around them, and had played around with the thing, identifying constellations, and zooming in and out of stars and nebulas, until Mom had threatened to spend the rest of the holidays with the dolphins at the institute.

The look on Helen's face made him forget the tightness in his chest - Chris couldn't help but smile at her round eyes, and round mouth, frozen in a forgotten 'oooh'. She looked like this was her first Christmas, her first Christmas tree in all its glory, only better. Infinitely better.

She pointed at Alpha Centauri, floating at the end of the lime-green streak of the Icarus' flight path. Chris felt like crying every time he saw it, but he couldn't bring himself to erase it - Dad had marked it with one sweeping motion. He'd been so eager to go.

"Daddy's star," Helen said, and Chris found that his throat was tight all of a sudden, and there was a tingling in his nose that made his eyes water, so he just nodded, and Helen chatted on, oblivious of his silence, "That's Daddy's star. Where he lives, and he has giant wings from a billy and then he takes the wings and flies back to here. And then he tells me stories. And then he flies back because he has to let the ponies out and then he gives them hay. And carrots. And... and sugar."

Chris stared into the holographic representation of local space and for the first time, didn't see the stars. Instead, he saw the emptiness between them, the vast blackness where one could get lost forever. Professor Hasslein had said that he had enough data to reconstruct the Icarus' flight path after her jump, but it was still just a guess...

"And then Daddy has to cook for the princess and then he has to play games with the princess. Because the princess is sad, because she is in her room all day and draws pictures. And she doesn't wanna draw pictures anymore but then the ankleman comes in and wants to buy the pictures and-"

"What?" Chris cleared his throat and switched off the hologram. "What's an ankleman?"

"The ankle man," Helen repeated, as if that would explain everything. "He wants to buy the pictures."

"Whatever," Chris muttered. "Look, I've got loads of homework," actually he wanted to go over Professor Hasslein's stuff, "you can stay here if you're quiet." There was no use asking Anita to entertain Helen; she'd just glue another holovisor on Lennie's face like a space squid and tranquilize her with The Bobos.

Or with the zombie shooter. With Anita, you never knew.

He gave Helen some old-fashioned crayons and a stash of paper and set to work. When he looked over to her after an hour or so, she was deeply engrossed in her artwork. It was crude and childlike, but he'd recognize the shape no matter how distorted it was:

Icarus, boldly shooting toward the stars.