Somebody Else's Space Program
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Chapter Fifty Three ". . .silently for me. . ."
"Strap in." Thoasis was shocky -- Envyss pushed her down into the chair and strapped her in before finding his own seat, none too soon.
The take-off was rough, and an impact in the rear of the plane jolted the passengers, throwing some of them to the floor. Thoasis jerked in her harness, Envyss rode with the impact, peering around the rest of the passengers, looking for visible damage.
Most of the others picked themselves off the floor and found seats -- there was one that lay still, his neck at a painful angle. Thoasis stared at him for a long moment, then turned to Envyss. "Thank you."
Envyss just nodded curtly. "We're lucky if that's the only one." He raised his voice, "Are there any other injuries?"
A babble of voices. "Hold." Silence. "Do we have anyone here with medical training? Start with medical students or actual doctors."
Two medical students spoke up, and one pathologist who hadn't dealt with a live patient in years. "Can you handle yourselves with the turbulence? Adding yourselves to the casualty list is not acceptable."
One of the other passengers yelled, "Who are you to be giving the orders around here?"
"My mother's father is Trefaldyn, lord protector of the hruss. If there is anyone here of equal rank or greater, let him speak."
_Lots_ of whispers. Thoais leaned over and said, "No body knew that. You're the king's grandson?"
Envyss smiled faintly, "We don't use your word 'king.' But, yes." He waited . . .
"We should elect us a leader. Are we going to let this kid boss us around?"
"Shut up, Bill. It's the kid's airplane. He just decided to let us tag along."
"What?"
"The people who took the airport were hruss. The ones who died getting your sorry ass onto the plane when they could have just grabbed 'the kid' and gone. Shut up. And let him sort things out."
---
Two broken arms, a broken leg, lots of bruises, but only one fatality among the students. And an escort of fighter planes that broke away at the border when they were met by more of Envyss's people.
Envyss came back from the cockpit and strapped himself in again. "No more pursuit. We're going directly to the capital -- my family will meet us there." He raised his voice. "There will be planes to take all of you home. I have a short list of people I would like to stay as my guests for a while, but there is no obligation -- you are free to go at once when we land."
"Have our families been notified that we've escaped?"
"The families we were able to reach, yes."
---
The landing was a bit rough -- the landing gear failed minutes after the plane touched down, while it was taxi-ing in. Crash trucks rolled up, with ambulances. And a limousine with, not the national flag, but Envyss's clan's banner flying. Envyss watched out the window as Ross helped Mairyonven out of the limo. Thoasis was going to have quite a shock.
The plane had lowered itself too much to use the standard roll-up stairs. Bill suggested just jumping down, Carl told Bill he was free to do so, but that for himself, he figured his luck was about as stretched as it was going to go, and it would be a real shame to break his neck getting out of a plane.
Thoasis nudged Envyss. "Is she here?"
"Pardon?"
"I saw you smiling out the window. Is she out there waiting for you?"
"Auryn Rhos? Yes." _Big_ smile. "And my mother, and some of my brothers and sisters."
"Ah... what about your grandfather?"
"No. He's very ill. He doesn't travel any more."
"I see."
---
A metal slide was improvised to exit the plane. Envyss stayed inside the plane until all the others were safely out, then slid. Thoasis helped him to his feet. "I want to meet her."
"No, you don't."
"Are you afraid she'll think you've acquired me?"
Envyss tried desperately to not laugh. He almost succeeded. "If you insist." He took a minute, scanning the crowd. Yes. Ross, waiting patiently for him. "This way."
She barely kept up with him. She was looking for someone his height or less, long blonde hair, his age, with a slight tan.
The last few steps were at a run, and Ross was braced for the impact. It still swung them around, embrace and a long, passionate kiss. Thoasis stood and stared... Well, the hair was golden, yes. Some tiny touches of silver as well -- "Auryn Rhos" was maybe twenty years older than Envyss. Nice looking man... obviously Envyss's partner. "Ah, Envyss...."
Eventually Envyss came up for air, although the embrace was still tight. "Yes?"
"You forgot one little detail when you were talking about Auryn."
"Oh. That. Yes. The Akshobhya wouldn't even have let me in the country if they knew my partner was another man. There really wasn't a good time to explain that to you. Not until we were on the way out,and by then..."
He was turned around in Ross's arms, Ross was nuzzling the side of his neck, nibbling on his ear. "How long has it been?"
"With the detention, two years since we've been together in private."
She laughed. "Then get out of here before he decides that the asphalt is soft enough."
Ross, "I wouldn't do that to him."
Thoasis started to make a snappy comeback, but the voice hit her. "Do you sing?"
A faint smile, "Everyone sings."
"No, I've heard you singing. Envyss? Is it possible?"
"Yes." Ross looked startled. "Jheraind recorded your singing, when you first went to work for him. I made copies of the songs and took them with me to school." Envyss pulled Ross's head down and whispered, "I have been using those recordings when I pleasure myself since I was twelve. I couldn't have you there with me, so..."
Ross blushed. Envyss put his face up, lips slightly parted, kiss me? Ross leaned down, kissed the tip of Envyss's nose, then his lips, but only lightly. Then he started whispering in Envyss's ear. Envyss giggled.
---
"And who are these others?"
A small, dark-skinned woman, "Adibud-Dha, a doctoral candidate in physics." A tall man, dark hair and eyes like the hruss, but nervous and abrupt, with none of the liquid flow, "Lunantishee, an engineering professor." Lunantishee nodded. "Ricamonte," a round man barely out of his teens? "flight medicine research fellow. And Valmiiki, who has been working on some interesting counter-acceleration drugs." Ice-blond, not golden like Ross, colorless eyes.
Ross smiled. "The Akshobhya are fools. You're free to return home, of course, but we are willing to provide you lab space and personnel, to continue your work."
"And you are?" Lunantishee asked.
"Ross Colburn."
"Doctor Ross Colburn? The same Ross Colburn who holds the current world's record for sending a man-made object into the stratosphere?"
"That was my team, yes."
Ricamonte grinned, "Are you planning to send a human some day?"
"As soon as we get something to stay up there, yes."
"Then you need me."
"Yes. We need all of you."
---
"You didn't open the safe."
Ross shrugged. "I thought it could wait until I heard you were actually dead. Your message sounded like a 'this is where I keep my will' to me."
Envyss grinned, "Well, that's in there, too, but it's in a sealed envelope, so it would not have ambushed you. I wanted you to look through the records of us."
"All three years of us, two and a half of which you haven't even been in the same country as me? Have you had cameras?"
"Centuries of us. Nearly a millennium of us." Envyss went to the wall and slid back a photo of Ross at one of the rocket tests. There was a safe behind it, with letters rather than numbers on a dial. "That's a lot of dialing."
"Except that the keyword this time is easy to remember. Nothing in here is actually valuable -- it's all copies of documents stored in much more secure locations. Even the recordings are copies."
"The recordings of my singing."
"The recordings of three generations of your singing."
"That's impossible."
"Perhaps."
The entire center of the safe came out, and Envyss carried the box to a table in front of a couch. "I'm going to read something to you. It's a rough translation -- I'm not an expert on archaic hruss forms, and I'm sure I miss some of the subtleties."
He took a breath... "And this is our charge to you, said the gods, the golden rose, that you find and cherish it. And in turn it will serve you, with joy and with deeds and with music. And this charge we give to your children and their children, until the world ends." Envyss ran his finger down the page, looking for the next piece, "And it was a thing that the hruss did not know of their own kind, a child with golden hair. And the laughter of the child was as gold."
Envyss giggled, "We won't mentioned that when the priest went to change the child's diaper, he got peed on."
"Does it _say_ that_?"
"No. but I've changed boys' diapers before. They usually store up a surprise."
Ross glowered, then grinned. "Where did the child come from, this 'golden rose'?"
"No one knows. We still don't. We don't know where you came from. Or your predecessor."
"I know where I came from!"
"Your aunt and your uncle, who were always full of stories about your parents... Both of them had brothers and sisters, but there are no missing children who could have been you. Your uncle never talked, and your aunt will not speak to us -- or likely to you, either, not now."
Ross had heard the word "thunderstruck" and was wondering why he didn't feel it, even now. No proof, of course. "Do you have documentation?"
"Jheraind had searches done. There were no missing children in your area at the time of your birth, no missing teenaged girls who might have given up a child. Just a birth certificate with your name on it, with the right date. A year to the day after Ivar MacCrossan died.
"I pity Jheraind. He was only ten when Ivar died, and then he had to wait for you to grow up... and then he missed you, by so little. By letting you stay in your own country -- if he had taken you home, you would have been together since you were sixteen."
"And where would that leave you?"
Envyss smiled, and the smile was sad and a bit haunted. "If he had lived, I would have been him, still in your arms, but for the last twenty years and more instead of the last three. And no school separating us."
"This is garbage."
Envyss shrugged. "Alright. It's garbage. It's totally trivial romantic garbage. I still pity Jheraind. He was so close to having you..."
"Change the subject."
"Alright. Recordings. Can you recognize your own voice when you hear it recorded?"
"I've listened to recordings of my press conferences, yes."
"Alright."
A coil of wire dropped into a machine. Sound... The first song was one that Ross remembered singing, a love song to no one in particular, more than mildly embarrassing now, since he knew that someone had been recording. "Is this you?" Envyss asked.
"Yes."
Further down the recording. Same voice, a different love song. And it sounded like Envyss singing with him. "I didn't take that one to school with me. Had to avoid even the suspicion of liking men."
"That can't be me singing. I don't know that song."
"It's Ivar. Recorded shortly before his partner's death. That was Hlindghessan. I think he was my grandfather's granduncle or something. He and Ivar were together forty years."
"You said you had three generations of my singing. That's not possible."
"It is, barely. There was a man who invented a method of recording voices. He died before he got funding, and his invention was lost. Except that he visited court before his death and made a recording of Aurhyn Rhos singing. It took years before we found a machine that would play it."
"You called me that."
"Close. Aurhyn is a woman's name. Auryn is masculine."
"And she has the same voice?"
"Nearly." Further along on the recording. the voice was higher in pitch, but it was the same as a recording Ross had heard of his church choir, the one time he was given a solo. His voice. All three times.
"Just birth records?"
"Photographs... then before that, paintings."
"Show me."
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