Reunion: Chapter 3

  Kathryn stepped out of the presidential residence’s front doors onto the street in front of it.  The chilly air she was greeted with compelled her to wrap her coat more tightly around herself.  She’d never liked the cold much.  She didn’t particularly care much more for the heat, but she could more comfortably suffer heat than cold.  Heat was easier to ignore than the cold, which always felt like it immediately penetrated down to her bones.

  She was a little stunned as she stood on the street.  She barely noticed the bustle and noise of the major throughfare.  An unusual wave of faint suddenly came over her and she momentarily had to brace herself against a street signpost.  The reality of what had happened was finally falling on her more fully.

  A reunion… they’d actually made contact.  The existence of the other colonies had by this point become practically myth to them, the idea as lost in the fog of time as anything else Earth related.  They’d long ago lost any real hope of ever coming into contact with any human beings anywhere else in the galaxy.  Most presumed Earth had somehow died, and there was no reason to believe any of the other colonial projects they were aware of had succeeded considering how barely they had themselves.

  Anyone being out there had always seemed unlikely enough, let alone the prospect of somehow establishing contact with any of them.  Some fringe elements of their society had even begun to conceive the conspiracy theory that humans had in fact evolved on Haven, and that the whole distant origin theory was just a myth.  It was preposterous of course, but it betrayed just how alone and isolated they felt.  Given how hard it had been for their own colony to survive here let alone flourish, most assumed at this point that they were the only surviving colony.  Either way, even if there were other humans out there… there’d never been any way to find out nor any real prospects for developing a way to.

  Then today happened.  In one day, one moment really, their whole world flipped on its axis.  This morning they were alone in the universe.  Now they had a sibling civilization, several of them by the sounds of it.  Everything had changed.  Haven had been alone at the top of the Significance Mountain, but they’d fallen down the slope somewhat.  At least they had company there.

  On top of everything she herself had been the one to make that contact.  She had earned the privilege of being the first person to return to the New Horizon, sometimes that alone was hard for her to process, hard for her to square her relatively modest view of herself with the scale of the position she now occupied in her people’s story with just that honour.  Now to pile on having been the first to make contact with other humans, and then now to possibly be the one charged with leading the expedition, it was overwhelming to say the least.

  Her fiancé Tobyn pulled up to the curb in their classic big red car, the heavy pseudo tank kind of car they just didn’t make any more.  She opened the passenger door and climbed in.

  “Hello sweetheart,” he said as she latched her safety belt.  Kathryn noticed that his short brown hair and mustache had been trimmed.   With his slightly pudgy face she always thought he’d look better with longer hair.  “It’s so good to see you home safely!  I was so worried!”

  “Yes I know…” she replied listlessly, while trying to not appear too dismissive.

  “Well at least they’ve waived the two-week quarantine, I sure wasn’t looking forward to having to wait that long to be with you again.”

  It bothered her how much her work distressed Tobyn.  It had always kept a divide between them.  Her work was challenging enough without the added burden of having to worry about him worrying about her.  Nothing in the universe mattered to her as much as her job, and it was the biggest issue he had with her.  She found herself wondering why they’d gotten engaged at all.  He’d known who she was and what her priorities were.  She wasn’t looking forward to the fight they were going to have when she told him she might be leading the new mission.

  They’d been quite in love once, but that seemed like a long time ago now.  In her heart she’d known for some time that they were heading to some sort of ending, but it was hard for her to confront that reality to herself.  She was already at the point of only putting in whatever minimum effort and attention was required to delay facing the hurtful end that was coming.

  And then he proposed.  What was he thinking?  Could he really be that blind?  Or was it a sort of Hail Mary for him, trying to reignite something which he knew on some level was already dead or dying.  She was never sure; she just tried not to think about it most times.   It was getting harder and harder to ignore things.

  And then there was the family thing.  She shook her head in frustration at the thought as they drove.  Although she’d never written off the possibility completely, having children and all that went along with that had never been much of a priority for her.  Ever since she could remember she’d had one goal, the life and career she was in the middle of living out right now, today of all days.  Having children still felt like something which would just get in the way of what was really important to her.  She’d still never written it off entirely though.  Some part of her, perhaps the parts which cherished how important her own family had been to her when she was young herself, forbid her from saying never outright.

  Tobyn on the other hand, was as focused on starting a family as his priority as she was on her career.  He knew how she felt about it though.  So why did he stay?  Was he holding out hope that her ‘not necessarily never’ would somehow evolve into an ‘okay forget everything else and let’s do it now’?  It was hard to be too harsh on him; she felt guilty as well.   In the past, when things were good and they were newly in love… it seemed like such an immaterial difference between them.  Now it felt like a heavy weight on her chest whenever she looked at him.  What the hell were they even doing at this point?

  She looked out the window as she thought, watching the world go by so she didn’t have to look at him.  Nothing had changed, why was she admitting all of this to herself now out of the blue?

  “Still, it’s good to have you back…” he said, sounding unusually unsure of himself.   “And it’s so exciting what happened to you up there, the whole city is buzzing about it!  Nobody’s quite sure what to make of it!  Tobyn stopped for a red light at an intersection, and they could see a crowd gathered around an electronics store, watching President Sato give a speech on the demo television sets.  Noticing this, Tobyn switched on the radio to the public broadcaster.

  “…you should all be as proud of Commander Barnes as I am.”  The light turned green and Tobyn started moving again.  “Her professionalism and dedication is why I have selected her to lead the expedition to the planet Eta Cassiopae at the invitation of our new friends…”

  Kathryn switched off the radio and stared forward blankly.  When Tobyn pulled into a stall in the first available parking lot and shut the car off, she folded her arms with a sigh and looked up at the ceiling of the car.  They both kept the silence for too long.  “Is that true?” Tobyn asked.

  In response Kathryn pulled the door handle and got out of the car.  She was still just wearing her flight suit with a winter coat overtop of it and it was getting progressively colder out as the sun sank on the horizon.  She wrapped the coat around herself as tightly as she could and looked out into the multi coloured dusk on the horizon.  They happened to have stopped in an industrial area, and the silver canisters and tubing of the manufacturing plant they’d pulled into partially obscured the grey concrete vehicle overpass behind it, all back dropped by the moody orange sky.  Tobyn likewise extricated himself from the vehicle, and then came around to lean against the car with his arms folded as he looked at her.  “Well?”

  She didn’t answer at first, instead studying the horizon for answers.

  “This isn’t going to work,” she finally softly answered.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, seemingly oblivious.

  “You’re really going to make me say it?” she asked.  He couldn’t be that thick, she figured.  After a sigh, she came out with it.  “I can’t do this anymore.  I can’t pretend anymore that it’s ever going to get better between us.  I want out.  I’m leaving you.”

  “What?”  He should not have been as surprised as he seemed to be.  How could he be?

  “Come on Tobyn, you had to have seen this coming.  Things haven’t been working between us for a long time now.”

  “But Kathryn no!  I mean…”

  “Stop it.   Please just stop.  I’ve made up my mind.  I think on some level I did a long time ago.  I’m just sorry it’s taken me this long to admit it to myself.”  She took a deep breath and turned around to face him.  She gingerly made her way over lean beside the car beside him.  “You’re a good man Tobyn.  I don’t want to hurt you anymore than I have to, any more than I already have.  It’s just… my job is hard enough worrying about myself, without having to worry about you worrying about me too.  We want different things.  We’re going in different directions.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?  You really mean it.”  He was too surprised, but he at least knew her well enough to know that if she really had made up her mind then there was no arguing with her.  There was no changing her mind now.  He’d tried many times before but had only ever met with frustration and failure.

  “I am.” she said in more of a whisper than she’d intended.  “I’m sorry, I just can’t do this anymore.”

  “Fine.” Tobyn said through gritted teeth.  She could tell he was as angry as she’d ever seen him.  “How much time do you need to clear your shit out?”

  “Come on Tobyn, don’t be like that.”

  “How long?” he demanded with cold fire.

  “Just the… just the night” she said, trying to turn cold herself.  She felt awful.  She wished he’d look at her.

  “Fine.”   Tobyn went back around to the driver’s side of the car.  He got in and slammed the door closed.  The engine roared to life and with a smoking squeal of tires he was off, and she was alone.

   

  “That sucks, I’m sorry… but I had a feeling you two wouldn’t last much longer.  To tell you the truth I’m a little surprised it lasted as long as it did, you know?  I kept it to myself though… didn’t want to say something I couldn’t take back if I was wrong.”

  She was back at her and Tobyn’s apartment with her friend Felix Parker.  When Tobyn had left she’d called him to come pick her up and bring her here.  They’d been best friends since elementary school.  Felix never being interested in girls blessedly allowed them to skip the awkwardness of discovering interest in each other as adolescents and they only became closer as they became adults.  Today he was a Lieutenant Commander working with her at the space agency.  They often worked out together, leaving him as physically fit as herself, and he always took better care of his appearance than she cared to.  His sandy blond hair was always perfectly spiked out the way he liked whenever she saw him, and his civilian clothes were always form fitting to accentuate his physique.

  Kathryn had always found it hard to make friends.  She found she didn’t have a lot in common with other women; she’d always been so focused on the military and her career, she never thought much about her appearance or anything ‘cutesy’.  She tended to get on with men more, but it had become exhausting waiting for them to inevitably get around to trying to sleep with her.  She’d still try sometimes but ever more rarely.  She’d make friends with a guy who seemed cool, but he’d inevitably proposition her and she’d be left wondering if any of it had ever been genuine or if it had all been just a painfully elaborate and drawn out attempt to get in her pants.  Then everything that came before was made to feel like subterfuge.  It had become hard to let men in at all if she didn’t have prima facie sexual and/or romantic interest.  She’d had that with Tobyn at first, but when that gave way she was afraid she just stayed because it was easier than leaving.

  Felix she was closest to and there was a big distance between him and number two.   They just got each other.  There was none of the rivalry she often felt with other women, no pressure to be more feminine, and no concern that he would eventually try to fuck her.  She could be absolutely secure in the authenticity of their friendship, and it was precious to her for that reason.  He was her best friend and that was that.  He knew her better than anyone else in the universe, to the point that she sometimes wondered if he knew her better than she knew herself.  She sometimes reflected on how bad people are at understanding themselves, how much better others can understand us sometimes without our biases about ourselves.  There are just so many blind spots, so many wishful delusions…

  “I didn’t plan on it,” she said, “it just sort of… came out.  Yesterday he accepted the mission I was on and I figured things would be fine.  I was expecting to be grounded for a long while after such a big mission.  Hell, I figured we’d be married by the time I went up again and that maybe he’d have mellowed out about it some.”

  “But?”

  “But…,” she bobbed her head, “when he found out about my new assignment, the look in his eyes… well, I knew I couldn’t have both him and my career anymore.  I had to choose.  It was just such a blatant dichotomy between how excited I was and how upset he was about it.  I was so rightly excited about this opportunity, and to him it was something terrible.  Everything just became way too obvious in that moment.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, obviously much more sympathetic than disappointed.

  She shrugged.  “Meh, it is what it is…”  She continued haphazardly stuffing clothes into her luggage.

  “What all do you have to pack up here?” Felix looked around the room and asked.

  “Not much,” Kathryn said with a shake of her head and an angry thrust into the suitcase.   “Most of it is just… stuff.  Replaceable stuff.”  She looked around.  “All of my irreplaceable are still in my deep storage boxes anyway.  I just need my clothes.  He can keep the rest.  I can leave him that at least.”  She zipped up her luggage.  “That’s it.”

  She’d stay with Felix for now, he had an extra room anyway.  “Want to be on my team?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

  “I’d stop being your friend if you didn’t ask,” he said with a big grin.

  “Best friend or not you’re still the best engineer at the agency.”

  He nodded his acknowledgement of the compliment as modestly as he could.  It wasn’t just her opinion, and he was aware.   Most of the time he was humble enough to not let it get to his head.

  “What’s our next move then?” Felix asked as he held the door open for her and she rolled the luggage out into the hallway and locked the door behind her.  She started to walk away, but a thought occurred to her and she returned to the door.  She removed her building and front door keys off of her key ring, then bent down and slipped them under the door.  “After that move?” she asked Felix as she started down the hall again.  

  He winced a little with half of his face.  “I meant-“

  “I know what you meant Felix,” she said as she pressed the elevator door.  Her and Tobyn had lived about halfway up one of the taller towers a bit out from the downtown core and towards the water.  She was going to miss the apartment at least, she reflected.  From their balcony they’d had a great view of the ocean.  She took a moment to silently chastise herself for having such shallow thoughts when she felt she should instead be missing Tobyn himself.  It made her sad to think that she would probably miss the apartment more than Tobyn.  She shrugged and forgave herself.  The mind wanders.

  “We get ready to receive Jaren when he lands and prepare to return to the New Horizon with him,” Kathryn said as the elevator door opened.

  “I’m sure we’ll be expected to participate in the welcome ceremonies when he arrives.”

  Kathryn wrinkled her nose.  “Of course.”   She didn’t care much for that part of her job, but with Jaren involved, it didn’t seem all that bad.