August 21, 2008
THE SUN
| DAMIEN G. WALTER |
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Marian took a train out of the city as the day grew bright. She had been back on Earth for over a year, but had avoided the light of the sun, even filtered through London smog. She ignored occasional glances from the other passengers. Her scars and her celebrity were so entwined she could not tell which attracted the eye.
‘What do you feel for him, now?’ Her councilor had asked that morning. Marian gazed out of the high windows overlooking St James Park, at the hundreds of people walking through their own lives, and realized she could not answer. She got up and left without a word.
From a cafe on the Westgate Rd she e-mailed Emilio Palmer at the Gates Foundation with her resignation, renouncing all contractual entitlements owed to her. He responded, before her coffee had cooled, with a plea for Marian to reconsider. She folded the laptop closed, passed it to the bemused Algerian behind the counter, and began to walk.
They had walked London’s streets together. Eighteen months of mission training and if asked Marian would have said they were just friends. Between mission simulations and specialist training, they found a thousand momentary fragments of time and conversation each to learn the other inside out. But they never gave a voice to the feelings they found for each other. The word was always too difficult.
Marian left the train at a small town surrounded by countryside. She traipsed through fields of wheat, and splashed across a shallow brook. In a field of long grass a boy and a girl rode on the back of a white stallion. She let herself wonder how their children might have looked.
At the crest of a low hill, Marian sat for a long time staring up at the sun. It seemed unreal that he had died there. She remembered the heat burning through their shielding, eating their ship from the nose up as the first Sol mission ended in catastrophe. The sun that had scarred her so badly was the same sun that now warmed those scars. In that moment of illumination Marian found the answer to the councilor’s question.
‘I love you,’ she said.
Damien G Walter is a writer of weird and speculative fiction. His stories have been published in Electric Velocipede, Serendipity and many other magazines as well as BBC Radio, and numerous anthologies. He reviews for The Fix and blogs for Guardian Unlimited. He is a graduate of the 2008 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy workshop at UC San Diego.