BACK   

= FAR WARS =

a novel in the Empire of Time series

by John Argo

10.

The love story is one I have written down and filed among the screens and cables of Upholder libraries on Tellerine. We need not dwell much more on it here. Zara and I became inseparable. We would go running together on wet sand at the ocean's edge while dawn fog drifted over the thundering breakers, while heavy-breasted white sea birds screeched over the black, wet cliffs where they mated, and where they guarded their nests.

Zara was a tall, strong young woman with tight muscles and soft skin. We became lovers and pledged our lives to each other. "I love you more than I love my life itself," she told me on two occasions with that earnest look. Her eyes were blue as moon berries, white as milk, in skin the color of honey with just a berry flush on the cheek bones. She let me gather her thick, wild auburn hair in my hands, and readily let me pull her toward me among the sheets of her bed or mine in the turreted dorms of Tulearth university.

She was competitive, by her nature. Often our morning or evening beach runs became a race. The Upholder have a gesture for combat or competition. They raise their hands, palms facing forward, with the elbows close together and the hands parallel as if doing a pull-up; and they close their fists. It is the strapping-in of a pilot going to war in space. It is the athlete lowering herself into a steel sled for a competitive mountain run in snow and mist while the Tellerine sun glows like a tangerine ball among cotton clouds. It is a universally understandable "Let's go!" and "Follow me!" or a boisterous "Today we win or die!"

And of course she had the chopped laugh of her clan, the crazy war cry. "Come and get me if you can!" And off we went at whatever sport we decided to play there on Tulearth or later on Tellerine. We'd let each other win sometimes, or we'd go all out and beat each other to the goal. I think we were about fifty fifty for real wins, if you cut out the laughing, the jostling, the fake fighting, the play wrestling, and sometimes the stopping to grapple, throw clothes over our shoulders, and wetly and noisily screw on the damp, cold sand under gray dawn clouds. Even at that she was competitive, pounding away hip to hip from above or below, so that I felt like a boat in a storm at sea (and loved it to ecstasy).

We completed university about the same time, and grew totally in love with each other. I sent videx home to my family on Luxanne world, saying I would would not let them down, but I must take time from my plans to explore something very important. My family responded with some disappointment but with encouragement and solidarity nonetheless. For privacy reasons, out of sheer discretion, I did not mention that I was traveling to Tellerine in the Corduwaine system to propose marriage to an Upholder woman. The very idea would have frightened my mother. We were ordinary people, though we were exemplary citizens in our small town on Luxanne, System Mirmar, in the Sea of Colored Glass, on the Rifraf Arm of the galaxy. The long Inversion was over, humankind was free once again by treaties and commercial bonds, to travel and trade among our former enemies and oppressors. We were no longer a hunted species, but back in the mainstream of interstellar breeds. Life was still normal then, before the Kaarrk Swarm attacks. We thought our long night was over. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Ignore history, relearn it all over again the hard way.

TOP

Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.