2082
"You know, this isn't how I envisioned my Prom night."
Gina's face was hidden in the darkness, and Chris couldn't decide if that undertone in her voice was one of annoyance or amusement. He didn't come to a final conclusion; Gina had a talent for delivering her blows in a deadpan way that always left him floundering. He was sure she was doing it on purpose.
"Well, we did all the things - drank their non-alcoholic punch, danced, had pictures made..." He had a defensive undertone in his voice; he could hear it himself. "And I didn't know any of these people. Who were these people?"
"They're the class of '82," Gina said dryly. "Our class mates."
"About ten percent of our courses required physical presence," Chris scoffed. "So you can hardly call us 'mates'."
"Well, I knew most of them," Gina said lightly. "You know, there's something called 'talking to people' before and after those presence courses, or meeting to study together, or just hanging out together... socializing. You should try it some time."
"Yeah, well, I hardly see the point now," Chris muttered. "School's out for good."
"Maybe, but the prom wasn't over yet," Gina pointed out. "And do you have any idea how much that dress and the hair, and makeup and... everything. How expensive that was?"
Chris was pretty sure by now that she was annoyed. He gripped the steering wheel harder. The car drove on autopilot, but just for this night, he wanted to pretend that he was the driver. "We can go back, if you want..."
Gina turned around in her seat until she fully faced him. Chris kept his hands on the wheel and stared straight ahead. The road was a pale cutout from the night around them, racing towards him and vanishing under the hood of his car.
"Well, that depends on where we're going now," Gina was saying. "If you came up with something more spectacular, I could forgive you. Maybe."
Chris relaxed his fingers and smiled. "I told you, it's a surprise. You can tell me if it's more spectacular when we're there."
When they did finally roll into the parking lot, the doubts were back in full foce. Yes, he found the sight spectacular, and he never missed coming out here year after year, but maybe Gina wouldn't think so...
Well. Only one way to find out, right? With a deep breath, Chris climbed out of the car, and went to open the passenger door for Gina. She gathered the skirt of her dress with one hand, and accepted his help with the other, and he used the opportunity to pull her close for a moment.
She looked up to him, and his eyes had adapted enough to the starlight to see that she was smiling. "Well, this is an impressive parking lot..."
He grinned back. "We're not there yet, Miss Impatience. Come on."
The beach started right behind the parking lot, and Gina took her shoes off - so that the sand wouldn't ruin them, Chris supposed. He gave her his jacket when she shivered - it was already pretty hot during the day in late April, but the nights were still cold.
"Watching the stars, Mr. Virdon?" Gina said, sounding amused, when they finally settled down in the dunes.
"They're much better than the ones you'd have seen after drinking the punch," Chris said. "I saw some guy spike it..."
"I think I'd have a better view if I didn't freeze to death here, all on my own," Gina said suggestively, and snuggled up to him. He slung his arms around her and for a long while, just enjoyed the sensation of her warm body against his.
"So, when does the show begin?" Gina asked finally.
"It's already begun," Chris murmured, without lifting his chin from her head. "Look south-east, there," he pointed. "Shooting stars, all for you. The Lyrids."
They weren't as spectacular as he had hoped; only now and then one of them flashed across the sky, but when they did, they dragged a satisfyingly long tail behind them, clearly visible even to Gina's untrained eye.
"Ooh," she said, and then slightly turned around in his arms. "And all for me? But that wouldn't have been necessary..."
Chris laughed and gave her a quick kiss on the nose. Not for the first time, he wished for a witty comeback to her teasing. Instead, he just said, "Dad and I came out here to watch the meteor showers whenever he was at home. The Perseids, the Leonids..."
He could feel her sigh, her ribs moving against his. "Can we have a single thing that is not about your father, for a change?"
"Sorry," he mumbled, but couldn't help feeling slightly miffed. This had been his and Dad's 'thing' before it had become his and Gina's... well, it wasn't a thing yet, but it could become one. Maybe.
Gina turned back to lean against him, and for a while they watched the Lyrids silently shooting across the sky. But the mood was gone. Somehow, he had managed to spoil Gina's prom night... twice.
"I'm sorry," he murmured again, into her hair, and she patted his knee in response.
"It's okay. It's just... this really is a special day. School years are over. A whole..." She stretched her arms out, hands apart, as if she was measuring an invisible fish. A spectacular catch. "A huge chunk of our life has ended. We're about to go and conquer the world!"
Chris snorted, and she joined his laughter. "Okay, so maybe not conquering a lot of world." She twisted around to face him, and he instantly missed the warmth she had radiated against him. "But this is the last day of our old life, and there's this whole lot of future waiting for us. And it's about us, Chris, not about our parents. Not about the past. Have you ever thought about what you'll be doing after school?"
It was a question that had been strangely absent from his conversations with his mother. After that day when she had cried into his chest in their kitchen, Mom had tried to talk him out of his commitment for the Daedalus project. God, they'd had millions of discussions at that kitchen table.
At some point during the last year, though, she had given up. Now she talked just about surface things, like the weather, or Helen's school projects, or the neighbours... And he should've felt triumphant. He'd won, he'd stay on the project, and he'd go into space one day.
But instead he had felt punished. As if he wasn't worth real talk anymore. As if he had defected to the enemy, and now his mother and his sister had closed ranks, and all the real talk, and the real closeness happened between them, and he was an outsider.
Gina was still waiting for an answer.
Chris shrugged. "Keep on doing what I'm doing, I guess. ANSA has been cutting the budget for our project yet again, and we need to find some private sponsors to..."
"Chris," Gina interrupted him. "Have you never thought about getting a formal education? You're good enough... no, you're brilliant enough - every university would accept you. You can't stay with Hasslein forever! Once his project his through, you'll be on the streets empty-handed. Where do you want to work after that, without a degree?"
"Once that project is through, I'll be up there," he pointed to the sky, "looking for the crew of the Icarus, just like I said I would."
"What if you don't find them?" Gina challenged him. "This search and rescue mission will have a time-frame, and if you haven't found them by then, they'll call you back. What are you going to do then?"
She didn't wait for his answer. "Or what if you find them, but they're dead?"
"Then we'll bring them home for a proper burial," Chris said quietly.
But Gina wasn't satisfied. "And then? With no degree, no credentials, do you really think ANSA will give you another, unrelated project?"
"Apart from Hasslein himself, I'm the one who knows his theory, and the Hasslein drive best," Chris reminded her. "Trust me, ANSA will give me another job. They need the drive for the colony ships."
Gina let out a frustrated groan and jumped to her feet. "You just told me they cut the budget again, Chris! They don't believe in your master's grand plan, and-"
"Cut it out!" Chris jumped to his feet himself. "You're out of line, Gina!"
She was silent for a moment. Behind her, the Lyrids were silently rushing through the void.
"I'm going to California," she said.
Chris blinked.
"Why?" he asked when he had found his voice again.
"I was accepted at San Diego State University. You knew I wanted to study biology."
"Yeah, but... why not here?" This was so totally out of the blue. Chris tried to remember if Gina had ever mentioned going away for her studies, and came up blank.
"They have a really good program," Gina said. "They specialize in bioengineering, and molecular biology, and... and I need to get away from this for a while, Chris." She waved her arm at the beach.
"From this," Chris repeated slowly. "From me, you mean."
Gina sighed, and hugged herself, and looked down the beach. "You're obsessed," she said at last, her voice so low that he almost didn't hear her over the surf. "Ever since I met you that day. I was always an afterthought, and don't get me wrong, Chris, in the beginning, that was completely okay for me. We were children... well, I was a child, at least. I think you stopped being one the day they called you out of class."
He wanted to tell her that it wasn't true, that things had changed after his mother had found out about Hasslein. Once that tension had lifted, once it hadn't been necessary anymore to be always so vigilant, to let nothing slip, their relationship had become much more relaxed, more playful, more... just better.
But the mission still had come first. Not Gina.
"I'm not a child anymore," Gina said. "I'm not okay anymore with being an afterthought. I want a future, Chris... you... you could come with me."
Years ago, his mother had taken him, Gina, and Helen to an amusement park, in a desperate attempt to make up for her job-related absence with high-intensity quality time. Chris felt as if he was on that rollercoaster again, taking one unexpected turn after the other.
"I'm not going to study biology," was all he could say.
"You could study phyiscs there!" Gina stumbled through the sand towards him and grabbed the fabric of his shirt. "We could have a future together, Chris, a real life!"
He stepped back, which forced her to let go of him. "This is real!"
"You're forever chasing after the ghost of your father!" Gina said, her voice now louder than the surf. "That's no life, Chris, that's floating in limbo! Have you ever considered that the Icarus was lost because there's something fundamentally wrong with Hasslein's theory? That maybe that's the reason ANSA is cutting off the money?"
"There's nothing wrong with his theory, or the technology!" Chris said heatedly. "It's bureaucrats and politicians who don't understand the first thing about physics, who prefer to throw our money into their already bloated defense budget, to stave off the waves of refugees coming up from the South! And guess what, those people are fleeing because they're being cooked alive down there, which is the main reason Professor Hasslein has been researching this hyperspace drive for the last twenty years! Because it's not just about the Icarus, it's about all of us!"
"Don't fool yourself, Chris, for you, it's all about your father." Gina bent down to pick up his jacket and slung it over her shoulders. Chris could hear her teeth clatter when she spoke, though he suspected it was because of anger, not the cold.
"It's been seven years now - if there was a way back, don't you think they'd have found it by now?"
"Depends on where they landed," Chris said, trying to calm down. "If it's an uninhabited planet... or if they jumped back in time, into the Iron Age, or something, they wouldn't have the technology to do anything. And if they jumped through time, they couldn't even send a signal. The Icarus hadn't been outfitted with Iris probes." The Daedalus had them - probes that could tunnel not just through space, like the Hermes comm satellites, but through time. If they took a wrong turn, they could at least call for help from beyond the void.
"What if they jumped through time, but not through space?" Gina wanted to know. "Then they'd have ended up over Callisto, which is uninhabitable, no matter when they'd reappear."
Gina was asking all the wrong questions tonight - questions that had haunted Chris in those sleepless nights in his room, when the darkness had taken on physical weight, until he had no longer been able to bear it, and had gotten up again and poured over Hasslein's physics lessons.
"And maybe you can only jump in one direction," Gina continued relentlessly, "and not in the other - and then you'd be stranded, too. Chris, don't be on that ship! Hasslein won't be on board, either, so why should you? And you're a scientist, not a pilot - let someone else fly the ship, it would still be your victory!"
"But someone needs to operate the modified Hasslein drive, and I'm the expert for that," Chris argued, "so I'll be the mission specialist. They'll still need me. And the calculations say that you can jump in either direction."
"Yeah," Gina retorted, "they'll wait another ten years for you to grow up! You're seventeen!" She started to move up the beach, back to the parking lot.
Chris followed her at a distance. He tried not to feel as if this scene was somehow symbolic - as if Gina wasn't just putting distance between them as she was walking back to the car, but walking away from him, out of his life.
But he couldn't shake that feeling, and it scared him. Gina was... it was good to have her near him. She was calm, and cheerful, and alive. His connection to the normal world-
Does that mean my world isn't normal?
Yes, Chris admitted to himself, that was exactly what it meant. Gina had been right - he had been dedicating himself to finding his father for almost half of his life. He had denied himself the life of a normal teenager, and had spent it in a dark, star-dotted niche instead, one that was filled with dread over his father's fate, filled with equations that went over most people's heads, and with secrets and lies to his own mother.
For a moment, he could see the life that Gina wanted for him - a bright, sunny morning in their kitchen, somewhere in California; Gina fussing over their baby, while he was brewing coffee, or making pancakes, and they were talking about the day ahead. Gina would be at her institute, and he would be giving a lecture to the new students, and Gina was joking about him having to climb down into the elementary school of Newton physics...
A strange warmth was spreading in his chest, and it took him a long moment to identify it - he felt happy. He would be happy in this life. Dad would be happy for him. Maybe his father would want this life for him - becoming a father himself, instead of just existing for Hasslein's project...
And then the scene winked out, and instead of the golden glow of early morning, there was just the vast blackness of space, and the pale face of Callisto, and an overwhelming sense of loneliness in his heart.
If I got lost out there, Dad would do the same for me. He wouldn't give up on me, ever.
They drove home in silence.