Holographic Convergence_A Space Fantasy Page 14

  Now that was fair enough.

  Mom lightly pushed me out the front door and down the walk toward the town car. I stumbled but made my way.

  The driver opened the door and I deposited myself inside, where I stared blankly out the window, unable to get my brain to do anything particularly useful.

  A couple of minutes later, Ilara and Jordan got in the car with me, still carrying their cups. Jordan was carrying a mug I’d seen my dad with a thousand times.

  Jordan smiled and drank. “He told us to keep the cups.”

  Of course he did. It’s not like my parents were going to need their cups once they left with us. Once my parents traveled to another planet with me.

  Just when I thought my mind couldn’t be any more blown, I was proven wrong. I wasn’t going to be making any more bets with myself. All bets were off.

  Life and the world would never be the same. Not for me, and now, not for my parents either.

  I buckled in for the ride.

  20

  As Jordan predicted, it didn’t take long to deal with his responsibilities at the dojo. He transferred them to his senpai, who was apparently the equivalent of the next in the line of command. Jordan said the guy was ready, and believed he was leaving his students in capable hands. He only looked nervous about the magnitude of the step he was taking when he didn’t think anyone was looking.

  He’d had less time than I had to adjust to the idea that his lover wasn’t who she said she was, and that he was following her to another planet. And yet he seemed to be handling the prospect with enviable calm.

  I, on the other hand, was numb. I could no longer tell exactly how I felt about much of anything, and I thought it was probably better that way.

  I discovered that, beyond my parents, I could leave the world just as I was. I didn’t have a home of my own. I carried my day-to-day possessions in suitcases in the trunk of my car, parking in motel after airport, chasing storms across the world. Maybe they’d impound my car and apply its value toward my student loans. If they didn’t, well, it wouldn’t be my problem anymore—not after I boarded Yudelle’s space shuttle.

  Jordan had resolved his affairs in an afternoon, and after sleeping that night in Boston, we were back in Chicago to pick up my parents. They boarded Yudelle’s private jet carrying no more than a small tote bag between the two of them. They’d distilled the entirety of more than fifty years of life into one small bag. If I hadn’t been so freaked out they were coming with me, I might’ve been proud of them.

  “This is so elegant,” Mom was saying as she buckled into her seat for takeoff. “I’ve never been on a private jet before. Whose did you say it was?”

  “It’s Yudelle’s,” the Princess said, flipping me out even more by acting the part of the gracious hostess. “Yudelle is Tanus’ mother.”

  “Oh that’s nice.”

  “Yeah,” I added, “she abandoned him and left their home planet for Earth when he was eight. He only just reunited with after... all this time.” I’d been about to say centuries, but now that my parents had decided to come with us, I didn’t want to freak them out by dumping the more dumbfounding details on them all at once. I’d have a long time to catch them up on the more insane aspects of my life, and everyone in it.

  “Well then I’m not sure I’m going to like her so much, if she abandoned her son,” Mom said.

  Dad snapped his buckle and put a hand over hers. “Marcia, you know better than that. There’s always a story behind people’s actions, and we never know exactly what a person has gone through until we walk in their shoes. We shouldn’t judge too harshly, lest we also be judged by that same standard.”

  “You’re right, Jack, I’ll try to keep an open mind.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  A flight attendant entered the cabin to offer us champagne for takeoff.

  “Oh yes, please,” Mom gushed. “Isn’t this exciting? Champagne and everything.” She sounded like she was going to summer camp, not Planet Origins.

  Another heavy sigh escaped me. I wasn’t used to this level of frustration, and it was time to put an end to it. For better or worse, my parents had made their decision. It was time to start supporting them in it. “I’ll take some too,” I said, and smiled at my mom.

  When the flight attendant left, and we were all facing each other in luxurious seats, sipping champagne, Mom said, “It really is remarkable. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.”

  “What’s that, Mom?” I asked. There was a whole long list of things she’d have to adjust to once we left Earth.

  “How much you and the princess look alike. It’s astounding, really. You look as similar as any identical twins I’ve ever seen. Are you wearing contact lenses too?” she asked Ilara.

  “Aye, I’ve had to, even though on my planet covering your eyes in any way is forbidden. I didn’t even know how to conceal my galactic eyes at first, but then Jordan advised me to get these. Thankfully, they work quite well and didn’t extinguish the eternality within me as Oers believe.”

  “Then your eyes mirror the cosmos, just as our Ilara’s eyes do?”

  “Yes. It’s a trait that’s occurred only one other time in my bloodline, the Andaron Dynasty. Another one of my ancestors had eyes like mine. But outside the two of us, there’s never been another occurrence on all of O.”

  “And yet our Ilara has the same eyes, how... interesting. I wonder what it all means.”

  “There’s a lot to wonder about,” I said. “There are so many synchronicities between our lifetimes that it’s difficult to understand. Certainly, I think we can all agree that there’s nothing random to the events that link us.”

  “Obviously not,” Jordan said. “But it’s going to take some adjusting, even for me.”

  “I imagine so,” I said, sympathetic, remembering how long it had taken me to accept the idea that there might be another me—or several mes—out there. Hell, I was still adjusting. “So you saw Ilara first without contact lenses on? That must’ve been wild. I know firsthand how most people react to seeing eyes like ours.”

  “Since I first saw Ilara, not a single thing has been ordinary, I assure you of that.” He laughed. “I didn’t know what to think when I saw her eyes, but by then I was being propelled toward her. The eyes were just a detail of many I’d learn to accept about her. I never figured I’d end up with a steady woman in my life, but I did know that if I ever did, she’d be extraordinary. Ilara certainly is that.”

  “Undoubtedly,” I said, immersed in the feeling of Jordan’s words. The appreciation for the woman at his side was in every one of his expressions. I wondered if Tanus looked like this when he spoke about me.

  “Tanus feels the same way about you,” Ilara said, yanking me out of my reverie.

  “Holy shit, can you read my thoughts even when I’m not purposely broadcasting them to you?”

  “No,” she smiled mischievously, “but I can read your face. What you were thinking was written all over it.”

  “She’s right,” Jordan added. “You’re a goner.”

  “And what do you mean by that?” I said, perhaps a little too sharply.

  “I mean that you’re deeply in love.” He held up his hand. “Don’t even try to deny it. You look like a teenager thinking about her first crush.”

  “Oh yeah? Well then so do you.”

  “I know it.” He grinned.

  I groaned at his cheese-licking expression, but maybe I was taking the wrong approach to all this. Maybe it wasn’t a weakness to love a man.

  As the plane started taxiing down the runway, I said, “There are a few things I need to settle before my parents and I get on that shuttle.”

  Mom started to protest, but I stopped her, and she seemed to understand this was something I needed to do for me and them.

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?” the Princess asked.

  “I should have done it sooner, perhaps, but things have been a bit crazy lately, wouldn’t you say? I ha
ven’t been reacting as quickly as I usually would because there’s a lot to consider. But now that I’ve had the chance to think things through a bit more, we need to talk, because I’m not getting on that shuttle until we do.”

  “It wouldn’t be bad for me if you don’t get on that shuttle.”

  Jordan gave Ilara a stern look. “That’s not nice, Ilara, and you know it, and you’d better not be implying that you don’t want her to come because then you can have your way with me and Tanus, because if you think that, then you can go on ahead without me too.”

  “Of course I didn’t mean that, silly,” she said, but I suspected she had. She was playing the part of the amiable princess, but from the little that Tanus had told me, I knew that wasn’t the way she usually behaved. But people changed, and she’d been stranded on a planet foreign to her for years. Then again, as my dad liked to say, A zebra is still a zebra, even if you take away its stripes.

  I narrowed my eyes at her. “What?” she said. “I was only playing with you.”

  Yeah, right. I was starting to feel like a fool. This princess didn’t play unless it was in the bedroom.

  With even more reason, I continued what I’d started, pausing only when the plane took flight. “I need your personal assurance that what you’ve said about my parents is a promise you will keep.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked over the rim of her champagne flute, violet eyes wide with innocence.

  “I mean that my parents will be protected and cared for. They’ll have their own estate as you said, they’ll have guards if they need them, they’ll have roones or, even better, pure sand to supply all their needs.”

  I hadn’t thought of it, but now I made a mental note to load the space shuttle up with as much pure sand as we could. If I was going to go live on a foreign planet, I might as well do it rich. “They’ll have horses and anything else they might enjoy or desire for their comfort.”

  “All right, I can agree to all that. I’m pretty sure that I already have.”

  “They won’t work unless they want to, and they won’t be paraded around, pretending to be royalty, unless they want to. Basically, they have everything they could possibly want or need, and they don’t have to ask for it, it’s given to them freely.”

  “Okay, I’ll agree to that so long as it’s in my power to give them these things.”

  “That’s a big disclaimer.”

  “What do you want me to say, Ilara?” She injected an edge of danger into my name. “Not a thing in my life has been in my total control for a very long time. I left my planet, my home, because people were trying to kill me. I’ll do what I can, but I can’t be held to a promise that’s not in my power to keep.”

  “See?” I told Mom and Dad. “Do you see what we’re heading into? There is no guarantee that things will go as we expect them to.”

  “They rarely do, honey,” Dad said, “But that goes for life on Earth too. Your Mom and I have discussed it at length, and we understand the risks we’re taking.”

  “And we’re okay with it,” Mom added, “really, we are. As long as we face things together, your father and I will be all right.”

  My parents. I’d misunderstood them my entire life. I hadn’t seen them for the individuals they were beyond their roles as my parents. “Okay, okay,” I said to them. “If you’ve made up your mind, then I’ll let it be, at least I’ll try, I promise.”

  I turned back to Ilara, to that familiar face, the one I knew by memory, every indentation, every curve. “Then I need you to do something better than just agree. I need you to do a binding with me.”

  I watched outrage cloud those violet eyes, suddenly fierce. “I realize I’ve been relaxed since you and I met, and that I haven’t been acting the princess. I see now that was a mistake, and that you believe this is the person I always am. I am a princess of the Andaron Dynasty. In fact, I’m the only living princess. I’m the next in line to rule Planet Origins. And I don’t do bindings. If anything, my subjects do bindings for me.”

  I waited to see if the hard look on her face changed at all. But it didn’t. “Then I won’t let my parents go, and I won’t go either.”

  “Fine then.”

  “Fine. I guess I’ll go tell the captain to turn the plane around.”

  “As you wish,” she said, sitting tall, regal in her seat. She looked out the window, and when Jordan’s hand went to hers, I decided to wait.

  The princess might have a hard edge born of necessity in the life of royalty on O. But I’d seen how she looked at Jordan. She was trying to act as if nothing had changed, as if she could go back to being the same person she’d always been. Maybe she even thought she had to.

  I just didn’t know if it was possible anymore. “I’ll wait to tell the captain until we’ve reached cruising altitude.”

  But I was really waiting on Jordan to work his magic on her.

  21

  “Is this really necessary?” Dad asked as the Princess slapped her contact lenses into their case with a simmering fury.

  “You tell me, Dad,” I said, gently pulling my own contact lenses out, discarding them on a napkin. I wouldn’t be needing them anymore, not on O where it was believed that they’d extinguish my life force. Not when another had eyes like mine. “A binding is essentially a contract. Wouldn’t you say it’s smart to have a contract in place before flying over to another planet? You always told me to trust people all I wanted, but to make sure that trust was deserved. Well, I’d like to think that the princess is worthy of my trust, and I hope that will end up being the case, but I barely know her. How can I trust someone I don’t even really know?”

  “Oh, maybe because you’re just like me,” she said through clenched teeth.

  “Or maybe it’s you who’s just like me.” I enjoyed the fire that flared up in her eyes, even if I realized it was dangerous to provoke it. “You might be a princess, but I’m me, and I have no intention of taking second seat to anyone, not even you.”

  “As a citizen of O you will be my subject.”

  “No, I don’t think I will.”

  “But you must be.”

  “No, I mustn’t, and before you go getting any grand ideas about how to go about ensuring my subjugation, let me tell you that just because I refuse to be your subject, doesn’t mean I’ll be doing anything subversive to your rule. I want you to rule O peacefully and successfully, I really do. I was there long enough to see that there’s a real need for a ruler who’s willing to look out for her people and put the corrupt elite in their place. I’ll be happy if that person is you. I just have no intention of subjecting myself to your rule, just as I wouldn’t for anyone else. But I will promise you that I’ll do everything to support your wellbeing and rule, so long as it’s a benevolent one.”

  “And will you do a binding to me affirming that?”

  “Of course. I’m not trying to play you. I’m only trying to set safeguards in place for me and my parents. But you have my word that I’ll live with integrity while on your planet, and I’ll do as is best for you, within reason.”

  “And if I should require you to act as princess, would you do that?”

  “I’d consider it, certainly. Ilara, no matter what planet I’m on, I’m in support of the wellbeing of the people and all life, really. I want the planet, its animals and plants and such, to thrive. I want the good people of O to thrive. And if you want me to do a binding promise as to that effect, I’d be happy to, since you’re being kind enough to do it for my parents.”

  She wasn’t doing it out of kindness, but because Jordan had talked her into it. But soft, heartfelt words could go a long way with people, and I was certain I didn’t want the princess as my enemy. I might even enjoy her as a friend, once I got past the weirdness of it.

  Ilara was angry, her cosmic eyes, now revealed, swirled madly. I smiled at her. “So this is what it’s like when people stare into my eyes. No wonder it weirds people the fuck out.”

  She looked like she was abou
t to smile, thought better of it, didn’t, then decided to do it anyway. “Trust me, I know what you mean. Even on O, where people understand it’s a sign of my royal blood, they can’t stop gaping at me when I talk.”

  Jordan said, “That might have a bit to do with that fine figure you have, that you both have, really.” Realizing he was safer not including me in his statements, to her, he added, “I doubt any man or woman can take their eyes off of you without effort.”

  This much was true, I knew it from experience, and we owed the attention we received no matter where we went, and whether we wanted it or not, to more than our eyes. There was a certain irresistible spark to Ilara, I could see it, even as she worked to subdue her anger. And just as clearly as in this woman who was my mirror, I possessed it too.

  Suddenly, I realized that I very much wanted this Ilara as my friend. There was no one else—beyond another holographic me—that could understand what it was like to live in my body and mind better than she.

  Time to course correct. To her, I said, “Growing up on Earth, I was always the odd one out. The one everyone liked to stare at and admire, but were too intimidated to befriend. And then, once I was old enough for the guys to really notice me, well,” I looked to my parents, “I imagine you know what it’s like.”

  “I do, I really do. At least you were lucky to have the parents you do. Growing up with my father wasn’t easy.”

  “No, I don’t imagine it was,” I said, with appropriate admiration for the strength she must have had to endure a royal pimp. I thought about what it might be like to have a father who ordered me to seduce courtiers for his scheming purposes. I really felt what it must have been like for her, and the rigid edges to my posture, the ones I didn’t even realize I had, melted.

  I looked at her, and she saw the sympathy in my eyes, and I thought she understood its source, because her body tightened even more. I tried to fix it. “You’re strong.” But she only pulled away more. “Sorry,” I said, more to myself than to her, and turned to the window.