Sispyhus Rising
…under the same big sky…
Upon their return to Merewether, Sarika and Taylor split off in different directions – Sarika to the porch swing on the first floor balcony with her datapad, and Taylor to one of the student bedrooms that Constance had insisted they take while they were in Five Points. His room had as its focal point a large window that looked out across the grounds at the rear of the mansion, toward a greenhouse, a herb garden and an oak tree. He had so much he needed to work through and attempt to make sense of, and for that he needed privacy and quiet.
Finding out that he was Sarika's ancestor had been a massive shock, even more so than finding out he had been catapulted into the future had been. It was some small measure of comfort that he still had family so far into the future, even if it seemed that aside from himself the Hanson family name seemed to have died out.
A quiet knock sounded at his bedroom door not long after he had secluded himself, and he looked up from tinkering with one of his inventions. Strictly speaking, it wasn't his original concept or design – rather, his inspiration had come from a toy owned by one of his nephews, itself a toy prop from a British science-fiction series.
It was a sonic screwdriver. The second Taylor had seen it in action, he knew he wanted one of his own – and he knew that he wanted a real one, not a toy. He had subsequently gone online, sought out the original prop's design schematic, and built his own version. A ruby, his wife's birthstone, substituted nicely for the diode that was in place in the toy and (he assumed) the original prop, and he had even managed to wire it up so that it functioned as it did in the show. It had saved his sanity many a time, especially whenever he managed to lose his keys and lock himself out of his house or his car.
"Qingjìn," he said almost absently as he set the sonic screwdriver in its case, closed it, and wrapped his tools up in the knife roll he had bought as a teenager – needle-nose pliers, soldering iron and its various bits, Swiss Army knife, two small spanners each barely the length of the palm of his hand, two small adjustable wrenches, and a number of jeweller's screwdrivers. Just as the door opened, he grabbed his messenger bag and slid his knife roll inside.
"Is everything all right?" Constance asked as she stepped into the room.
Taylor nodded, not looking up from buckling his bag closed. "Yeah, I'm fine. Just needed a little time to myself – I've barely had a moment's peace the last few weeks."
"That's completely understandable. I spent a few weeks on the ship with Jared and Shannon after they bought it, not long after Jared graduated from flight school, so I can see where you're coming from." She sat down on the bed next to Taylor and took the strap of his messenger bag out of his hands. "You're a long way from home, aren't you?" she asked, her tone gentle.
Taylor looked up sharply. "How did you-"
"Jared explained the situation to me in a wave a week or so ago." Constance paused for a couple of moments. "Not only that, but I've become quite good at reading people. I've had to since I've become the headmistress here. It didn't take me very long to realise that the ‘Verse isn't home to you." She studied Taylor briefly. "How far from home are you?"
"I honestly don't know," Taylor answered quietly. "I never thought to ask anyone if they knew." He raked his hair back off his face. "My home planet is Earth, from about five hundred years in the past."
"Goodness me," Constance said, sounding quite shocked. "You must have gotten quite a fright when you arrived."
Taylor let out a sharp, almost bitter laugh. "To be honest, I was in pain a lot more than I was scared. It took asking Jared what year it was for me to start freaking out. When he told me that it was 2512…that did me in completely. I could hardly believe it."
"I can understand that. I believe that's called ‘culture shock', and it sounds as if you've been hit with a pretty bad case of it." She tilted her head slightly to one side. "I hear you've been settling in well, though."
"Well enough," Taylor allowed. "Sarika's been teaching me to swear and insult people in Mandarin – she seemed to take it as a personal affront that I didn't know any when I arrived. And Jared and Shannon are going to teach me to defend myself."
"Not with knives, I hope," Constance said. "One knife-fighter on that ship is one too many."
"Jared?" Taylor guessed, having only seen Shannon with guns around the Sisyphus.
Constance nodded. "He's very good with his knives, but they make me horribly nervous. I understand that in their work it's bì bù ke shao zu chéng, but all the same I wish it wasn't."
"I think I understand. I've got kids of my own – two daughters and a son. Found out today that my wife had our third child, my second daughter, after I came here." He forced a smile. "Sarika comes from that branch of my line, as it happens."
Constance also smiled, hers more relaxed than Taylor's. "I'm glad you've found family here," she said.
Taylor was just about to respond to this when another knock sounded at the door. It opened just enough for Sarika to stick her head through. "Jared and Shannon want to talk to you," was all she said before she disappeared again.
Well, looks like I'm not the only one who's freaked out by us being related, he thought as he left his temporary bedroom and headed downstairs, hands in the pockets of his cargo pants. Waiting for him in the kitchen were Jared and Shannon, both of them looking unusually solemn and stern. "Zenme le?"
"Have a seat," Jared said, motioning to the head of the table. Taylor frowned, slightly confused, but drew out a chair and sat down. The brothers in their turn seated themselves across the table.
"I'm going to guess that you've been worrying a little about what would be happening to you, now that you've healed up," Jared continued.
Taylor nodded quickly. "Started worrying about that not long after I got here. Figured that I'd better not let myself get too comfortable, seeing as I knew there was no guarantee whatsoever that I'd be welcome once I wasn't hurting anymore." He shrugged. "And I haven't. Let myself get comfortable, that is."
"Before we continue, though, mind telling us what's got Rika in such a mood?" Shannon asked, his tone almost conversational – but Taylor knew better. He knew very well that the brothers considered Sarika to be something of a little sister, and that his answer could have a lot of bearing on his continued existence.
"She had a trace done on her bloodline this afternoon," Taylor answered. "Part of it was trying to see if I still had family so far into the future – for all I knew my line could have died out during the Exodus."
"And it hasn't," Jared guessed.
"It hasn't," Taylor confirmed. "Sarika is my many-times-removed granddaughter, from the branch of my line that starts with my youngest daughter." And here he allowed himself a genuine smile for the first time since the ride to the restaurant, one that disappeared quickly. "I was hoping for another little girl, to be honest, and I wish I'd been able to meet her."
"You might still be able to," Jared reminded him gently. "But back to business.
"Before we got to know you and came to understand how far you had come to get here, we were more than prepared to let you go on your way once you were ready to. Finding out that you were a Traveller, and seeing how well you've settled in…well, that's changed our minds."
"And if you are open to it, because I know of a place or two here if you'd rather stay planetside, we'd like for you to join our crew," Shannon added. "You'll have your own bunk in the crew corridor, full run of the ship including access to the bridge, and you'll get a cut of the take from each of our jobs."
Taylor thought this over for a short while. Realistically speaking he knew he had very little chance of making it home any time soon, and to his mind seeing the universe sounded like the perfect way to spend his time. It was time for him to begin letting go of the past and start living in the moment.
"I'd like to stay on board," he said at last, and was rewarded with looks of satisfaction from both Jared and Shannon.
"We were hoping you would." Jared stood up from the table, with Shannon and Taylor both following his lead seconds later. "Come on. We'll give you a proper tour of the ship and get your bunk set up."
On Saturday morning after breakfast, Taylor got his first look at what was essentially the Sisyphus' heart – its engine room. Out of respect for the shipboard rules he hadn't even considered going anywhere near it during his time as a passenger, but now that he was crew he could go anywhere on the ship that he liked.
"This is what keeps us flying," Jared said, putting a hand on the ship's engine. "She's driven by your standard radion accelerator core, powered by two trace compression blocks and a bunch of thrusters."
"It's a big engine," Taylor commented. He ran a hand along part of its housing, mindful that he didn't put his fingers anywhere near anything sharp.
"Specs say that her engine is sixty-two feet and eight inches long, twenty-eight feet and four inches wide, and twenty-nine feet and six inches deep. That's just a tiny fraction of the ship overall, though, as I figure you've probably gathered by now – she's two hundred and sixty-nine feet long, a hundred and seventy feet wide, and with the landing gear fully extended she's nearly seventy-nine feet tall. She can carry a total payload of nearly a hundred and sixty-five thousand pounds, and provided she's completely fuelled up her range is four hundred AUs. Forty-four if a full payload is on board. Since we're not a cargo ship, we can go a fair way between refuellings."
"How long have you had her?" Taylor asked. He was down on his knees now, and had twisted himself around to look up into the exposed part of the engine from below.
"About seven years or so. Her keel was laid in 2459 as one of the first Series 3 Fireflies, so she's older than both Shan and I. She still flies well and true, though, and provided she's taken care of she'll outlive us all." He gave the engine housing an affectionate pat.
"So what is it that you and Shannon do, if you don't carry cargo?"
Jared cast Taylor's back a questioning look, one eyebrow raised. He had half-expected the question to come up long before now. "We're bounty hunters. When we picked you up we'd just accepted a job and were on our way to the rendezvous to find out the specific particulars. Sarika pitches in on our jobs occasionally, but for the most part it's just Shannon and I."
Here Taylor stood up, dusting off the knees of his cargo pants before straightening up. Not for the first time he noticed that he was a few inches taller than Jared, and he was conscious of the fact that he had to be careful not to speak down to him. "Would you expect me to come along on your jobs?" he asked.
"Not unless you wanted to. Certainly not right now, considering you're not trained just yet, but once you're able to handle a staff we'd definitely welcome an extra pair of hands. Your choice whether or not to join us at work will have no bearing whatsoever on the cut you get from our final payoff. However, we do expect you to pitch in around the ship – that will have a bearing on your cut."
Taylor nodded. "Yeah, of course."
The communicator that Jared wore on his belt chimed, and he unclipped and opened it. "Wèi," he said, and listened intently to whoever was speaking to him. "Okay, we'll be inside soon," he informed the caller, before snapping it closed. "Sia is on her way here to meet you," he told Taylor. "She'll be here in around fifteen minutes."
"She's the person who invented the wormhole tech, right?"
"One of them," Jared confirmed. "Though you need to remember that she can't make any promises on whether or not she'll be able to get you home."
"I understand."
Slightly more than a quarter of an hour later a Mayfly-class public transport shuttle touched down in the front yard of Merewether. A tall, redheaded woman wearing glasses and carrying a briefcase stepped out of the shuttle, turning back briefly to speak with the pilot before walking across the lawn to the mansion's front porch. Sarika was watching from behind a curtain at a window of the ground floor's front room, ducking out of sight as soon as the woman stepped up on the front veranda.
"We got company!" she yelled as she pelted into the kitchen. Jared and Shannon, both of them used to Sarika's outbursts by this point, didn't so much as react as she burst in from the corridor. Constance and Taylor, on the other hand, got quite a fright – Constance dropped a glass on the floor and shattered it, and Taylor nearly broke the stylus of his new datapad, which had been a ‘welcome to the crew' gift from Jared and Shannon.
"Gorram it Sarika!" he snapped, by now completely irritated. "Guaiguai lóng de dong?"
"A transport shuttle just landed on the front lawn," Sarika explained, completely ignoring Taylor.
Jared and Shannon looked at each other. "That'll be Sia," Jared said. "Let her in, won't you?"
Sarika nodded and turned back into the corridor, returning moments later with the redheaded woman. Both Jared and Shannon rose from their seats when she entered the room.
"It's good to see you both again," Sia greeted the brothers, accepting a hug from them each in turn. Soon enough her gaze shifted to Taylor. "And this is your Traveller, I can assume?"
In response, Jared moved to stand beside Taylor. "This is Taylor," he replied.
Sia stepped forward and extended a hand. "Gaoxìng jìandào ni, Taylor," she said, but not expecting a response other than a nod.
"Likewise," Taylor replied, his bad mood dissipating as he stood and shook Sia's hand, and Sia shot Jared a smile over Taylor's shoulder.
"I like this one, Jared." She released Taylor's hand and sat down at the table. "I've been told a little about your circumstances already," she said as she unlatched her briefcase, "but I believe it would help me quite a bit if you could tell me whatever you can think of. Anything that comes to mind about how you got here, or any other details that you think would be a help. The aim here is to get you home if we possibly can, and for that to happen every little piece of information is absolutely essential."
Over the next half-hour, Sia listened and transcribed Taylor's words into a new file on her tablet, slowly but surely building a picture that she would eventually be able to work with. As she skimmed through everything that Taylor had told her, she realised that she had to do everything in her power to get him home. He had so much that he had left behind – his family, his friends, his career…his entire world.
"I think I have everything I need to know," Sia said once she was done reading. "Is there anything you wish to know about the wormhole tech?"
Taylor nodded. "How would you send me back?"
"There are basically two ways it can be done. The first is to generate enough power to open a wormhole for just long enough to transport a person back to the time they left behind. The second is to send that person back as nothing more than an echo of who they were, for a very limited period of time."
"To say goodbye," Taylor guessed quietly, and Sia nodded.
"I am going to do all that I can to get you home," she promised. "I lost my world too, during the war."
"Shadow?" he guessed, and Sia nodded.
"My dad and my brothers fought for Independence, during the Prairie Battles in 2508. I was away at tech college when war broke out, on one of the Core Worlds. I nearly got expelled when my Physics instructor found out I supported the Browncoats and told the college Chancellor. The only reason I even graduated was because I was coerced to renounce the Independents and to support Unification. I had no choice – my family knew and understood why I did it, but it still hurt me badly. I did a complete about-face as soon as I'd left the Core.
"And then…" Here Sia drew in a deep, shaky breath. "Halfway through my third year of college, my mother waved me from here on Athens. She told me that our home was gone, the planet destroyed and reduced to a blackrock, and that my dad and all but one of my brothers had been killed in the Battles. She and Haden – that's my youngest brother – had barely managed to escape the planet on a rescue shuttle before our town was destroyed. I joined them in Cobbham when I had graduated college. And, well…I've been here ever since. I haven't left the planet once, let alone the system."
She sat back in her seat, her story finished. As Taylor thought it over, he realised that he and Sia weren't all that much different. They had both lost their whole worlds, but in the end had found new ones. Both their families were gone, all save for one or two members – Sia had lost hers because of war, and Taylor had lost his because he had been slingshot into the future, with time in his absence doing nothing more than following its natural course. And he knew that Sia was completely sincere in her promise to do her best to get him home.
Sia and Jared went off into another room not long afterward and Shannon returned to the ship, leaving Sarika and Taylor alone in the kitchen. Neither of them spoke for a while, with Taylor finally breaking the tense silence.
"Sarika, do you have a problem with me or something?" he asked.
"Why would I have a problem with you?"
Sarika's answer was innocent enough, but her tone was enough to irritate Taylor all over again. "Ever since we found out that we're related, you've been avoiding and ignoring me. The second we got back here from the clinic you went and sat up on the first floor balcony. You didn't even think to say a word to me until Jared and Shannon asked you to come and get me from my room. You don't look at me during meals, and you've only been speaking to me when it's absolutely necessary." He got up from his seat and walked around the table to where Sarika sat. "We were getting to be such good friends until this got dropped on us. And I want to know just what the hell has got you all worked up. Because it sure as fuck can't be that I'm your grandfather from twenty generations back."
"You led me on."
Sarika's answer was spoken so softly that Taylor wasn't sure he had heard her at first. "Shénme?" he asked.
"You led me on, Taylor!" she almost yelled. "I liked you, all right? I really did. And I honestly thought something good could happen between us."
Taylor let out a quiet groan of frustration and ran his hands roughly through his hair. "Sarika, I need you to understand something that I consider to be very important? Okay?" When Sarika nodded, he continued, "Do you see this?" He lifted the necklace holding his wedding band away from his chest.
"Yeah," Sarika said quietly, her tone sullen.
"This means that I am married. I have been married since June tenth, 2006. To be completely honest, unless I am given a very good reason to do otherwise, and even though my wife died more than four hundred years ago, I intend to stick to my wedding vows for as long as humanly possible. One of those vows was a promise that I would love her until the day I died. I am still alive, and so that vow stands." He took the necklace off and unknotted the leather, letting it fall onto the table so that he could unthread his ring and read out the inscription that had been engraved on the inside of the band. "Jordan Taylor Hanson + Caroline Rhiannon Winthrop – 06/10/06 until forever," he recited. "I still love her Sarika, and I always will. And I frankly don't think it's fair on me or on anyone else if I don't give them all of my love and all of my heart. Caroline still has them both."
He threaded the ring back onto the leather, knotted it again, and slipped his necklace back over his head. "Something good did happen between us, you know," he told Sarika as he fiddled with the necklace, making sure that the knot was at back of his neck. "We became friends. And I still want us to be friends. I'm sorry if you thought I was leading you on, because it certainly wasn't my intent and I never saw it that way."
"I want us to be friends too," Sarika said softly, her voice nearly a whisper.
Taylor smiled, and he scooted his chair closer to Sarika's. "Then let's be friends, yeah? There's still a lot I have to learn about the ‘Verse, and I want you to be the one who teaches me. This is your world more than it is mine."
"It's your world too, Taylor," Sarika said as the two of them embraced. "Even if you make it back home one day, it always will be."
+++
Translations
Mandarin
qingjìn: come in
bì bù ke shao zu chéng: [an] absolute necessity
wèi: hey
guaiguai lóng de dong?: what the hell?
gaoxìng jìandào ni: pleased to meet you
shénme?: I'm sorry?; what?
Slang
Exodus: the exit of the human race from the planet Earth
AU: astronomical unit, generally considered to be the distance between the Earth and the Sun (equal to approximately 149,597,871 kilometres or 92,955,807 miles)
payload: cargo