Sisters - The adventures of Samantha and Buffy Anne Carter

Introduction

Sam first realized how deep in trouble she was when her father turned on her as soon as he had taken her into his office.

"Damn you, Sam. What did you think you were doing?"

"Doing? What are you... That, that, that THING as good as propositioned me, and you're getting mad at ME?"

"Sure. And so you go and humiliate him in front of a roomful of colleagues. Girl, haven't you heard of discretion? Why do you think I'd told you to be careful and mind your words around him?"

"What, you expected him to hit on me?" Sam was outraged.

"I know him, Samantha. Better than I know you, I guess. And what you don't seem to realize is that he is not only a first-rate lecher, he is also incredibly thin-skinned. You don't tread on his corns, for any reason. And with all that, he has enough charm that many people excuse him. Plus, those four stars on his collar mean that those who don't tend to keep it to themselves. Do you think that any of your spectators were indignant at him? Hell no! Most of them would be "There goes old Sal again." and a few may well be annoyed at you for making a fuss. Kiss your career goodbye, Sam. It was nice while it lasted."

"You can't mean it!"

"I can probably keep you from being shitcanned. But don't expect to be promoted in a hurry. And as for becoming an astronaut, forget it."

1. "Buffy"... and the stars

Life in her family had never been easy. Samantha was Jacob Carter's eldest daughter, born in 1968, and even then he was 30 and his wife was 26. In 1969 Jacob was shot down over enemy territory . Mark Carter came along three years later, in 1971.

These were bad years for professional members of the US Armed Forces. Sam had grown up in the shadow of something called "Vietnam", and long before she knew whether it was animal, vegetable or mineral, she had known that it embittered her father like a disease. He would sit alone, brooding, with some newspapers or letters scattered around him. Never a communicative man at the best of times, on those occasions he would shut himself off from his family, the prey of an anger so evident that she could almost see it blazing inside him.

She discovered that the best way to get through to him, to have some real contact with him, was to ask him to spar. He had taught her and her brother martial arts since they were children, and the shared skill and practiced routine gave them both a way to meet. Without realizing it, she was building up a remarkable skill; but even had she realized it, it would have mattered less to her than the peaceful, intense hours spent with her father and her brother, being the family they never otherwise managed to be. But you cannot spar all day long, however much you want to; and off the tatami mat, Jacob Carter was a different man, silent, morose, unresponsive. And while Samantha managed to make him open up a little because she was interested in everything he was, learning martial arts from him and talking about a career in the Air Force, Mark had grown a whole different set of interests; he had no time for his father's passions, nor his father for his. More and more often, Mark, and often .Samantha too, found reasons to spend time with Aunt Joyce and her husband.

Then came the false dawn of 1980. The worst of the post-Vietnam political stuff had worn off. Jacob, who had clung to his career through it all when many of his best contemporaries opted out into the private sector or early retirement, was made General, and was soon gaining good opinions from both subordinates and colleagues. Suddenly the air around the house was lighter, and Samantha did not have to seek for sparring sessions to be able to talk with her father. And it was perhaps because of this new mood that one sweet, sunny summer day, Samantha's mother found that she was pregnant.

Jacob's first reaction was nervousness. He was 41, his wife was 38, and raising a child was – he knew already – no job for ageing part-timers. He never did consider abortion, however, even before he had seen Samantha's delighted reaction and Mark's thawing. He did not regard himself as the kind of man to run away from a duty. And as the child grew visibly in his wife's body, the presidential campaign had thrown up a candidate he approved of after so many years of drift and self-inflicted damage. The child would be born within a few days of inauguration; and when Jacob Carter's favourite, Ronald Reagan, won, it seemed like an omen. He watched the decisive votes with an arm around his pregnant beloved, sometimes feeling the little one within her stir and kick, and he grew almost sentimental in his happiness.

Debra gave birth on the eighteenth of January, very suddenly. It seemed as though only a few minutes passed between the first symptoms, the breaking of the waters, and the swift, almost popping appearance of the precious little bundle.

As Jacob, Mark and the doctor – who had been taking his own sweet time about coming – cut the cord and looked after the mother, it fell to Samantha to hold, and wash, and clean, and comfort the pink, wrinkly, blind little thing. Her heart went out to her at once; not even thirteen, she suddenly knew what it was like to be a mother. The girl felt so tiny in her arms, and Sam felt a love for her that had something of fear about it, as if a blast of wind could blow those minuscule limbs away. She did not know how, but she desperately wanted to protect her, to keep that fragile little body from harm. She cleaned her with soft cottonwool, stain after stain all the while whispering and singing at her, till she saw that that strange and wonderful thing – her own sister! - was asleep.

She was trying to find a word for what she felt, for what her sister was – so little, and round, and helpless, and adorable. "She's so funny, Dad, she's so little! She's so... so... she's so buffy!" And everyone laughed. It did not mean anything, and if it meant anything at all it was not what Sam had tried to say; but from then on, Buffy it was, except for the official documents that were still, for a while, to call her Elizabeth Anne Carter.

Perhaps it had been too much to hope to be together, to be happy, to have a future as a family; for within two years everything had gone to Hell. It began with a small matter: General Carter was held up on duty when he should have been picking up his wife, and she had to take a taxi home. The taxi crashed, and both the driver and the passenger were killed.

Jacob was grief-stricken, and dealt with it the only way he knew – the worst possible way. He shut down completely. He would not even spar. Irrationally, Mark, and to a lesser extent even Samantha, grew angrier and angrier at him.

At the funeral there was a dreadful, public scene. With all other relatives present, Jacob asked his sister Joyce to please look after Buffy, for he had neither the strength nor the time. Mark had been stewing in his frustration at his father, and this was the last straw. He started ranting and raving. Sam started by backing him up, but in a few minutes it became clear that he was out of control, and she was trying to calm him down. Horrified uncles, aunts and cousins heard the son of the woman they were burying tell her husband that he had never cared for any of them, that they were no better than obstacles to his career. When Mark got to the point where he was accusing his father of being happy that his mother was dead, Jacob efficiently knocked him out with two punches and strode out, his fury tangible.

The rest of the family melted away. It took Mark hours to convince Uncle Peter and Aunt Catherine to let him in for a while, which soon turned into a permanent stay. (They were surprised, as time went on, at how easy they found it to get on with him. Clearly he and his father just rubbed each other the wrong way; away from Jacob, Mark was a personable young man.) Hank and Joyce, however, found a way to approach Jacob – with Samantha hovering miserably on one side – and, after a long talk, and a long tender hug from Sam, took away the baby with them.

Sam would have gone too. But she had this obstinate, instinctive loyalty to her father. She did not want to be the last to leave him. With no Debra and no Mark, the house was a hollow shell; the emptiness was the strongest presence there, towering over the two remaining inhabitants. It was all so wrong. All she had been wanting was to tell him that she loved him and she wanted to share his grief; all he had been wanting to tell her was that he did not want her to be around him to suffer for his mistakes. But Samantha Carter, who could expound a difficult problem in astrophysics in half an hour with no projections or props, did not know how to talk to her father; and Jacob Carter, who could explain a plan or an order so that the thickest private understood, did not know how to talk to his daughter. So they moved as if avoiding each other, and rarely spoke. And yet they would not leave each other.

Sam spent more and more time with Joyce and Buffy. There was the life that had gone out of her own home: in Joyce's warm smile and ready empathy, in Hank's goofy grin and unpretentious attitude, so very unlike her father's; and above all, in an endearing, action-packed, "buffy" little bundle of fat arms and legs and smiling eyes and white milk teeth. As Buffy grew (slowly, so slowly! Whatever had happened to those tall Carter genes?), Samantha experienced the eternal surprise that is the lot of parents and carers. The fist time she handed something to her – the first time she saw her pick up her spoon and eat by herself – the first time she spoke – each were a break, a change; and Buffy was changing all the time, yet somehow she was always the same, the same smile, the same eyes. Jacob's visits were less frequent, but he, too, was always taken with the toddler. On one memorable occasion, he tried to express a tongue-tied gratitude to Hank and Joyce for the wonderful job they were making of parenting her; a moment of such embarrassment that everyone was relieved when Hank cut it off with one of his patented silly jokes.

Meanwhile Sam was storming through high school, every subject's mistress, every teacher's darling. She did not even have to suffer the usual penalties that go with academic success among jealous teen-agers; after a few attempts to bully her had ended in disaster in the face of her martial arts skill, the class bullies had decided to leave her alone. It helped that she had proved a competent sportswoman, keeping up good averages in athletics and softball, and eventually making the senior squads in both; nothing starry or outstanding, but enough to make a substantial contribution and be seen not merely as a lonely egghead.

There was no magic in it, she kept saying to admiring and slightly envious friends. It's just about work and trying to keep ahead of the teachers so you know what's coming. But that was not altogether true. She did work hard, but she worked hard because she was in love with learning. Finding things out had a magic for her that nothing else had. No, not even boys, not even... well... perhaps Buffy did. Perhaps she mattered as much. She was not sure. But apart from sports and science clubs, she had no social life. She rarely went to parties. She did have girls she called friends, but not the kind others had, always in and out of each other's homes and on the phone to each other. And Sam wasn't stupid – that was the last thing anyone could have said of her, then or afterwards. She began to be aware of the difference. She saw her fellow high schoolers go around in sociable shoals, spending all the time outside school together at malls and parties and movie shows, chattering about events that she had not attended and might sometimes never even have heard of. Most of the time she was too busy to care, but sometimes she did feel a twinge of jealousy, and a sense that she might be missing on something.

There was a night when she found herself outside, looking at the stars. She had just seen off two couples of her friends, after a pleasant dinner of family and friends for Buffy's third birthday. And it was night, very clear and bright, and the stars shone above her.

She looked up. She thought of all she knew of those things of indescribable wonder and near-eternal fire. She thought of what she was beginning to understand, the magnificence of their mathematics and chemistry, the grandeur of this beautiful universe. And suddenly she somehow knew that there was a choice before her. She could follow the enormous truths lying hidden in the infinite sky above her, however long and hard it might be, with no guarantee that it might even turn into a job, let alone of achieving anything worth the work, and with no time for a social life, or a family, or children; or she might go back to a different kind of happiness, the one she had seen at the birthday party – a woman with her friends and her family, a mother with her beloved children as they grew up, a worker, a friend, a normal person. There would be no shame in it, and many joys she might never otherwise have. But that night, under the vaulting sky, Samantha Carter chose the stars.

…...

Four years later, Samantha entered the Air Force Academy. The selective obstacles in the way of would-be cadets had melted in front of her exam results, her SAT scores, and the fact that she was the daughter of a two-star general. The required political sponsor had been found, and Cadet Samantha Carter had entered the Academy with great promise and hope.

The only problem had been Buffy. When the seven-year-old understood that her Sammy was going to be away for several months, she had thrown a monumental tantrum. It had lasted for most of a day. Aunt Joyce, Sam, Uncle Hank, even Jacob, had taken turns trying in vain to calm her down, to explain to her that she would be seeing her again, that Sammy wasn't deserting her, that she would come visit her in a few months. To a child of seven, a week is a long time, a month an eternity; four months were beyond any horizon visible to her. To deprive her of her Sammy for four months was something she could not conceive. Her anger did not really die down; she just fell asleep in the middle of it, her pillow wet with tears and snot.

Samantha looked down at her with the intense, compassionate love that her tiny sister always roused in her. She gently removed her shoes and socks, leaving her other clothes on, and covered her with a blanket.

"She's so scared, poor kid," said Hank. "If only we could spare them this sort of experiences."

"We can't," answered Jacob in the same tone. "We'd do anything..." - and he fell silent. After all, he had trusted his own parenting so little that he had given Buffy to Hank and Joyce.

…...

That same evening, Jacob took his daughter home and sat her down, and told her, for the first time, in detail, of what she had to expect at Colorado Springs. After her triumphant passage through high school, he was worried that she might underrate the difficulty and demands of the Air Force Academy, and then get discouraged.

For years later, Samantha would admit that this was one of the wisest things her father ever did. She went to Colorado Springs with a proper sense of the hard time she would get, and managed to get through first year without too much trouble. The classes were great – some of the teachers were world class – and she surprised herself by how well she did in martial arts.

By the second year she had begun to excel. She had taken – of course – every science course she possibly could, and her work was reaching such a standard that some of her teachers started to involve specialists from outside universities. By the third year, Samantha was corresponding with three or four leading astrophysicists and had set into motion a PhD in Astrophysics and Planetary Science at CU-Boulder.

Buffy had got over her tantrum, and started looking forward to every visit. She would tag along with her Sammy wherever she went, even listen in to discussions about astrophysics with a rapt and uncomprehending face. One week-end in second year she delighted Sam by turning up in a tiny, perfect-in-every-detail Air Force Cadet uniform, and they played Air Force all morning. Sam taught her how to stand at attention, at parade rest, to march, and to salute. (Poor little Buffy got rather lost when Sam tried to explain the intricacies of rank and precedence.)

To Sam, the times with Buffy were moments of stolen happiness, of going out of the everyday world into light and sunshine – something she felt almost guilty about, because it was all so unearned and wonderful. Her kid sister was the extra element in her life, the happiness she had done nothing to deserve – laugher and running around in the meadows and pulling strings and chasing cats and pigeons, and laughter, and laughter. In her memory, those visits were all sunshine, with no rain at all, and in winter only enough snow to shine under the sun. Samantha had imposed her growing burden of work – study, research, military training, sports – on herself, and throve under it; but even so, there was a delicious sense of release and joy about a day with her sister doing nothing but mess about and laugh.

It would only be later that she would realize that all was not well at home. Hank's smile, after a time, started looking rather forced. Joyce seemed to always be hiding an anxious air, as if afraid of saying or doing something ill-omened. And even Buffy's delight in her... she wondered, later, whether there hadn't been something of relief in it, getting away from her adopted parents' shadows.

It was the year of her graduation that things visibly began to go south. First there was the discovery that Jacob had cancer – breast cancer, which Samantha did not even know that men could get. She was terribly anxious throughout her final exams, and while her grades did not significantly suffer, it took all the pleasure of her success for her. He was operated – successfully, it was thought.

Then there was the change in Buffy. Hank and Joyce ascribed it to her "having discovered boys," but Samantha was not quite sure. Buffy was now ten, and all through the summer Samantha saw the coming teen-ager emerging from the child – and she did not like what she saw. Buffy was growing aware of social status among schoolgirls, and spending more and more time on clothes and make-up – not because she wanted to look good, which Samantha would not have minded, but because she wanted to look better than her fellow schoolgirls. She was starting to be obsessed by status, popularity, social dominance. Samantha had loved the artless creature of the previous ten years; of this budding princess, she was not so sure.

And then she was back in Colorado Springs, but as a full air force officer, preceded by her reputation, hitting the ground running. She was heading for a swift promotion and transfer to her chosen specialty – when her career struck that certain four-star general, and there was that scene... and her father's anger.

"I can probably keep you from being shitcanned. But don't expect to be promoted in a hurry. And as for becoming an astronaut, forget it."

She could not believe it. She could not get her mind to believe it.

"I can probably keep you from being shitcanned. But don't expect to be promoted in a hurry. And as for becoming an astronaut, forget it."

Then there was