Voyagers III - Star Brothers (36 page)

“My home is with you, Keith.”

“You won’t miss Vanguard? The power?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I will. But I want to be with you,” she said, her eyes searching his.

“Even out to the stars?”

“Even out to the stars,” Jo said. Then she added, “It
is
kind of scary, though.”

“Scary?”

“Flying out to the stars aboard a ship completely unlike anything that’s ever been built before. Don’t you have any doubts? And questions?”

Stoner wrapped his arms around her. “I think it’s time you received your very own star sister. Then you would understand much better than you do now.”

“I don’t need it now,” Jo said. “There’s no danger of the Horror here.”

“There’s no danger of anything here, except maybe an equipment failure. But the ship is self-repairing, self-regenerating. Just like me.” He waggled the five fingers of his left hand.

Jo was quiet for a moment. Then, “Keith, I can’t trust what I don’t understand.”

“But…”

“Let me finish.” She touched a finger to his lips. “I trust you. If you think I should have a star sister, I’ll do it. Not because I want it, but because you want me to.”

Stoner kissed her. “I’ll have to prick your finger.”

“Can’t you do it while we make love?”

He blinked with surprise. “I never thought of it…” His star brother smiled within him. “Yes, of course. If that’s the way you want to, why not?”

“I’ll get my star sister by injection,” Jo teased.

Stoner laughed and kissed her again.

Nearly an hour later, as they lay side by side staring up at the stars, a sheen of perspiration on their naked skins, Jo said, “I don’t feel any different.”

“You will tomorrow. And all the tomorrows afterward. The next time we make love, you’ll see.”

“Really?”

“The symbiotes can damp down on your emotions, when it’s necessary,” he said, grinning. “But they can also enhance them. You’ll see.”

“So that’s how…” Jo pursed her lips.

Stoner became serious again. “You’ll start to understand why I couldn’t let you kill Hsen.”

“That would have been an execution,” she snapped.

“It would have been a vendetta murder, and sooner or later you would have felt the full impact of its guilt.”

“The last of the warlords,” Jo muttered.

“What?”

“Hsen—he always reminded me of an old-fashioned oriental warlord.”

Stoner smiled at her. “Good analogy. Only, he wasn’t the last of the warlords, Jo. You were.”

“Me?”

“Not all the warlords were evil,” he quickly added. “Still…maybe it’s a good thing that you’re heading for the stars with me. You might have decided to make yourself empress of Earth.”

For some while she did not reply. They lay together and watched the stars.

“I’m sure you would have made a good empress,” Stoner offered.

Jo laughed softly. “Sure you are.”

“Want to go back and try it?”

Instead of replying, she said, “Everything always changes, doesn’t it? Whether we want it to or not.”

Nodding in the starlight, Stoner answered, “Some changes we deliberately cause, some we have to adapt to because we can’t avoid them.”

“Keith,” she asked, her voice suddenly urgent, “where does it all end? Where are we heading? What are we doing?”

He smiled at her. “We’ve helped the human race make the transition to the brotherhood of the stars, Jo. That’s the greatest achievement we or anyone else could have accomplished.”

“And now what?”

“And now we have the whole universe to play in. No matter what happens, we have each other and our children.”

“And the stars,” Jo said.

“And the stars,” he agreed.

She turned toward him again. “Keith…you could have gone on this journey without us.”

“Without you?”

“You left me once. For eighteen years.”

“That was a long time ago. A lifetime ago. I couldn’t leave you now. I love you, Jo. I want you beside me always.”

She smiled in the starlight and twined her arms around his neck.

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Jo said.

“You didn’t know?”

“I still like to hear you say it.”

Stoner kissed her lightly on the lips. Then he began to sing an old tune that Jo recognized from her student years. He’s never sung to me before, she thought. And at that moment all her fears disappeared like a rime of frost evaporating in the morning sun. Jo smiled, content to be with this man and their children, wherever their destiny would take them.

And Stoner sang, in a surprisingly gentle and romantic voice:

“If the world should stop revolving, spinning slowly down to dust

“I’d spend the end with you,

“And when the world was through

“Then one by one the stars would all go out,

“Then you and I would simply fly away.”

The epigraphs used in this novel are from Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” John Donne, “Holy Sonnet X” The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 5:21–22;
The Sacred Pipe
, by Joseph Epes Brown; the
Bhagavad Gita; Genghis Khan, Emperor of All Men
, by Harold Lamb; and
Caesar and Cleopatra
by George Bernard Shaw.

The lines quoted from David Gates’s song “If” are copyright © 1971 Colgems-EMI Music, Inc.

The concept of nanotechnology is best described by its originator and leading proponent, K. Eric Drexler, in his book
Engines of Creation
(Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1987). The basic work is his, but he is not responsible for the liberties that I have taken with his innovative ideas.