The Shadow Captain

by Pete D. Manison

Illustration by Alan M. Clark

Cara Wainwright had long since grown accustomed to the looks she got from the others, looks that said, “What can you offer a Captain that I cannot?” or, “You think you’re better than us, you and your Captain,” or, “Watch your back, sister. Perhaps I’ll take your Captain from you.” It didn’t usually bother her. But today, out in the village and at the market, she couldn’t help noticing the way they watched her, some with only curiosity in their faces, others with open hatred. It made her alone, loving a Captain. But that love was worth any price, and she hoped this was the answer those others saw in her eyes.

“Will that be all, honey?”

Cara focused on the vendor, a middle-aged woman who smiled at her in a way that made her feel not so isolated. This had been her home for twenty-seven years; perhaps she was imagining things.

Carrying her vegetables in a pouch over her shoulder, Cara left the market and started up the slow hill that led to the top of the high bluff. She could have bought a car, with all the money Rafael was always insisting she take. But she already felt conspicuous for the house he had bought her. And she liked walking.

It got harder all the time, Cara thought, harder to maintain the larger-than-life front that being the woman of a Captain demanded. But Captains were larger than life. They were the brightest and strongest of humanity’s children. They alone could choose their destinies out among the stars. And only they could bestow that privilege on others.

Cara giggled suddenly. She must have been holding it in the whole time at the village without even realizing it. Now she couldn’t stop, and she finally had to step off the path and set down the pouch and laugh and laugh until it had run its course.

He’s coming!

The message had been brief, almost cryptic. Be there soon. Tell no one. But Cara had only seen that he was coming, coming soon, and then the feeling good had started and it had just gotten better and better as the days had passed.

And now it was the day.

Cara stopped when she reached the big oak that shaded the road from the hot midday Sun. Standing there and looking out at the sea, she remembered so vividly the way it had been, right here under this tree, the first time he had come to her. That seemed a magical time now, almost as if it had happened in a movie and not in real life. She had been overwhelmed that a Captain could take an interest in her. And then she had learned to know him as Rafael instead of Gregor or Captain, and she had known at once that her heart could never again belong to a mortal man.

“Hi, Cara.”

“Warm this afternoon, isn’t it, Cara?”

Cara turned. Two young girls from the village—she talked to them often and could never keep their names straight—walked past her on the path back from the market. She smiled and waved, and after they had walked on she saw them bend their heads together to whisper something and then draw apart, laughing.

She waited for the girls to get some distance ahead before she went on.

Clean house, cook dinner, get dressed, get ready, clean house cook dinner get dressed.… It was always the same, before her Captain arrived. Her thoughts danced faster and faster until they finally made her dizzy. And then the other thought happened, as it always did, and her heart pounded cold in her chest.

What if he didn’t come?

But they said a Captain always kept his word.

Darkness took the sea as Cara stood on the balcony watching for fishermen in the bay. It had been outlawed, but she had seen boats almost every day. Whenever she could get a good enough look at one, she reported it. She wasn’t sure if it did any good.

“Hurry home, my Captain, hurry home to me,” she whispered, holding her hands together beneath her chin and swaying slowly from side to side. They were the lyrics of a popular song, and sometimes the tune was too bittersweet for her and she cried, but not tonight, not when he was coming tonight.

She tried to remember what she had thought of the Captains before she had fallen in love with one. The Captains ruled wisely and benignly—she had never doubted that. But sometimes she had wondered why they kept the gates of heaven closed to the rest of humanity. Were they hoarding the wonders beyond for themselves? Or were they protecting the world from the dangers that existed out there?

The bell chimed.

Cara started, then she turned. She took two steps before she froze, fear pulsing out from her heart to her whole body. Why was it always like this when he finally arrived?

“Cara?”

The hair on the nape of her neck stood up, and just then her legs came unstuck and she walked through the living room to the door, all the while chanting over and over, “OK, OK, OK, OK….”

Then she was opening the door, and he was standing there, looking just as she remembered him in his navy blue uniform, tall and dark with black hair and beard, and bright blue eyes that spoke of sights beyond the imaginings of ordinary men.

“Cara,” he said again, his voice softly cupping the name. She stood there staring at him for several seconds. Then he smiled, and without conscious thought she flung herself at him and hugged him so tightly her arms ached.

“Rafael,” she whispered, “you’re here.”

She felt his hand in her hair. “Yes,” he said, “I’m here.”

Cara drew back slightly, looking up at him. Her Captain was a tall man, as Captains tended to be, and he was solid and strong. As he looked down at her now, his hair brushing his shoulders and the half-moon insignia that unnecessarily signified his status, she thought as she often did that this was the most lovely creature built by God, that perhaps it was envy that had made Him create so few.

“I missed you, Rafael. I never stopped missing you.”

He smiled, that bright beaming smile that he brought from the sky just for her, but now there were shadows at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes looked deep into some space within her that she hadn’t known was there.

“Cara, there’s something…” He stopped, looking down. It was the first time she had ever seen him—seen any Captain—show uncertainty, and for some reason it felt like a cold hand squeezing her heart.

“Don’t,” she said, leaning into him again. He rocked her head against his chest for a while, and Cara thought that this must be how Siva felt as he danced the dance that created the Universe one moment to the next. Only Siva’s dance was eternal, and Captains never lingered so long.

“Sometimes I thought you wouldn’t come back,” she whispered into his ear. His hands took her chin and gently tipped her face up to his.

“I couldn’t go on without stopping to see you,” he said, and then his lips on hers awakened something in her chest that burned with an intensity she had never felt. She tugged at his hair as she felt his strong arms encircle her and lift her from her feet. After that it was all like a movie again, or like a dream, as he carried her out to the balcony and made love to her on the oaken deck with the sound of the surf pounding on the rocky shore below. It wasn’t loud enough, though, to drown out Cara’s cries of delight as he brought her first to one climax and then to another.

She must have slept for a while after that, because when she opened her eyes the Moon had risen. He’d found a blanket and wrapped her in it, but when she reached out, he wasn’t there. She turned her head.

Her Captain stood looking out at the sea, his knuckles white where they gripped the balcony railing, and in the light of the Moon Cara could see that his face glistened with tears.

In the morning, gulls greeted the two solitary figures as they walked arm in arm down the beach. Cara felt soft and quiet and perfect, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her waist. The wind made his hair wild, and the way his eyes watched the watery horizon, almost searching, made her wonder what it was he saw when he looked out there.

“The sea is our soul,” he had told her on his first visit, “and the stars our destiny.” She wasn’t sure whether it was a poem or not. Whatever he said was poetry enough to her ears.

Two dolphins leapt out of the water not far from shore, mist spewing from their blowholes, and turned in unison to dive back beneath the waves. She could almost feel his awe at this sight as he took a sudden breath and held it.

“Beautiful,” he murmured. “I must never forget.”

They walked on for a time before he gestured and they moved toward a trio of boulders that lay propped up against one another not far above the shoreline. In the shade, small animals rustled as they approached but were gone by the time they got there.

“It’s a perfect day,” Cara said, turning to tug on his hands and marvel at the way the sunbeams brought out such strength in his face. Other girls dreamed of Captains, as she once had. They watched them walking in the streets of the village, on their rare appearances, those girls who giggled and pointed, their pink nipples straining against their blouses, and perhaps they went home telling each other stories of how it would be to love a Captain. What did they know? What could they know of this kind of love?

“Rafael.”

They’d been hunting sand dollars, and the basket she carried smelled of kelp. He grinned as she went through the collection, separating the broken ones and discarding them.

“I brought you something,” he said.

She looked up from the basket. He was smiling, his eyes flashing as they had the night before. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small box.

Cara’s heart pressed against her throat. Her hand trembled as she reached out. He opened the box. She sighed, more surprised than disappointed.

“It’s called a Rohn stone,” he said.

Cara reached out and picked it up. It was a sphere about two inches across, and it glowed a milky blue in color. Its light was very bright when she held it cradled in her hand in the shade of the boulder.

“One of a pair,” he said. He pulled out another such stone, which was attached to a chain he wore around his neck. “The brighter they get, the closer together.”

Cara looked at the stone again. “Magic?” she asked.

He smiled. “Natural tachyon emitters. They resonate when brought into proximity.”

It only dawned on her slowly. “Then I’ll always know when….”

They held each other for a long time, sharing the cool air and the sound of the wind rushing through the grasses that lined the hillside.

“Last night, you said something.” Cara spoke softly, not looking at him until after she had begun. “What did you mean?”

She was wearing a red T-shirt tied off above the midriff. His windbreaker was unbuttoned down the front. As he held her tight she could feel a thin stretch of his exposed abdomen pressing against her own bare skin. His skin was warm and slightly moist over hard muscle where it touched her, and somehow that touch was the most sensual feeling she could imagine, even more so than the ways he had pleased her the night before. This was more mysterious, like him, with so much more left to the imagination.

To love a Captain was to love a shadow, it suddenly seemed to her. For who but a Captain could ever fully know what it was to be a Captain?

He had not spoken, and she feared she had offended him. One never asked things of a Captain. Favors were bestowed. To ask was unthinkable. But the message, the pain beneath the joy in his eyes….

“Rafael? Is it someone else?”

He looked at her blankly for a second, as if that were the last thing he had expected her to ask. Then he laughed. For a whole minute, he laughed, that robust series of explosions from deep inside him, his head thrown back and his mouth open wide, that had first made her fall in love with him. For a man to live so fully each moment, for him to feel so intensely alive every second of every day. Was that the gift of being a Captain? Or was it just Rafael?

Finally he looked down at her again, smiling. “No, my love, it’s not that. It’s not that.” By now his laughter had faded to a smile, and as he spoke even that faded until he was staring into space, his expression vacant.

“There’s something out there, Cara. It… wants something from me.”

She waited, listening hard, searching between the words for something that would tell her more. Then the moment passed, and her Captain took her hand and pulled her with him as he moved away from the shade of the boulders.

“Let’s take the boat,” he said.

The water was choppy, and not many boats were braving the high wind that often came in the late hours of the afternoon this time of year, but Rafael handled the catamaran with ease, taking them far out into the mouth of the bay where you could see forever until the world ended and the sky began. Only the horizon, dotted with agriforms and roving eco-patrols told her that they weren’t alone on all the seas. Captains loved their worlds, cherished them like precious jewels. It comforted Cara to know that what intrusions she could detect existed to maintain the ocean as near to its natural condition as possible.

“It’s so simple,” he said once, cutting the boat into the waves just so, sending it flying from the crest of one to the crest of the next. “Like skipping stones.”

She wondered how it was out there, what rudder he used to guide him through the sky, what sails could run on starlight and dreams. She asked him, but he only laughed and held her close as he trimmed the sails and took them even farther out. Finally, when the lighthouses alone were visible as dull gray blobs on the ocean horizon, he brought the boat about and lowered the sails.

They drifted, watching the Sun set.

“It’s so good to be here,” he said quietly after a few minutes had passed in a silence that almost lulled Cara to sleep. “I wish it could last forever.”

There it was’again. Never before had her Captain’s voice held such pain. She lay beside him on the deck, and now she turned toward him and propped her head up with one arm. “It is forever, Rafael. Each time, it’s forever.”

He stared up at the darkening sky, his gentle smile tinged at the edges with a regret so bitter that it stung in Cara’s eyes. Still, he told her nothing, and only one incident gave her any hint that her Captain was not the same man she had known on his earlier visits.

They had just rigged the lights and started in when the boat entered a large school of jellyfish swimming near the surface. They glowed translucent blue in the lights of the boat, their bodies pumping and their tentacles floating like red hair all around them.

“Gods!” Rafael hissed. He hoisted the mainsail and turned the boat into the wind with such abruptness that Cara was nearly knocked overboard. Only when they’d traveled far from the jellyfish did he turn again toward shore. His face glistened with sweat, and she was certain she saw his hands tremble as they pulled on the lines.

“You’re still working at the institute?” Rafael asked from the kitchen.

Clad only in denim cutoffs and a sweatband, he was preparing dinner while Cara sipped wine and looked through the album of holograms he’d taken on an iceworld somewhere in Canis Major. The holograms showed hexagonal crystalline structures like snowflakes but a million times bigger, bigger than mountains.

“Yes,” she called. “But they promoted me to supervisor of my department.”

“Congratulations! You know, if you applied—”

He stopped, because he knew he didn’t have to say the rest. He’d asked her about it on each of his visits. There were as many female Captains as there were male ones. But Cara shook her head now, as she had before. On every world, young men and women aspired to be Captains. They put themselves through the training and then the tests. It was a five-year investment just to reach the point of being chosen for the program or passed over, and the vast majority were always passed over. Few indeed were selected to become Captains. And the Captains rarely commissioned a new starship to be built.

That would change us, she thought, holding the wineglass to the light and watching the burgundy reflections dance on her wrist. Why didn’t he just ask her to go with him? she wondered again, as she always did. But he didn’t, he never did, and it wasn’t a question one asked of a Captain.

Dinner was delicious. Rafael had prepared grilled salmon and wild rice, a simple meal but in his hands a gourmet’s delight. For dessert they nibbled fresh berries collected from the nearby fields. Then they kissed, their lips purple from the berries, and for a while Cara pretended that everything was normal.

“On Holder’s Relay they fry airfish in volcanic vents that give the meat a flavor like bacon. And they live on the eggs of dinosaurs who change color with the seasons.” His voice took on that quality whenever he spoke of the wonders he’d seen, soft and wistful and full of hidden tones and possibilities. But it always sounded like he was leaving out most of it, like there were no words to express the things he found out there among the stars.

“Rafael,” she asked later, after the Moon had risen with Cassiopeia low in the north, “what was it you were going to tell me?”

He looked at her in that way that sometimes made her feel like a small child. “I have to go away again,” he said, his tongue so nimble on the words that killed her. “Longer than before. Maybe a lot longer.”

She listened numbly, remembering how he had spoken similar words before. But she could tell at once that it was different this time.

The silence stretched out, and Cara held her breath. When he didn’t speak at all, she reached out and took one of his hands in both of hers. She lifted it to her mouth and lightly kissed his palm. “Whatever it is,” she murmured, “you can’t leave me not knowing.”

His eyes flared quickly. Not since his ascension to Captaincy, perhaps, had another human being told him what he could or could not do. But then his face gentled. When he looked at her again, his eyes sparkled with a forced amusement that seemed to cover something deeper. “Thank you, Cara. Thank you for being the strong one. I think I lacked the courage, alone. But if 1 hadn’t told you, I would have regretted it forever.”

She stared at him, knowing her astonishment was plain on her face. The Captains didn’t feel fear.

Then he told her the story, and she found herself wishing he had lacked the courage after all.

Drifting easily into orbit of the new world, careful not to disturb the lifeforms that have already been detected on the surface. Gregor takes the scout craft on manual, easing his speed until the transition is complete. Farprobe 7 hangs in geosynchronous orbit above an island whose offshore reefs reflect the greatest concentration of biomolecules. But it isn’t only this that has drawn him here, out of this wide system of asteroid belts and still-forming planetoids. It’s also the dreams. It’s mainly the dreams.

He reports none of this back to the mother ship, Paracelcus. He’s a Captain, and Paracelcus is his ship, and they can hear what he wants them to hear when he wants them to hear it.

He lets the landing computer put him down on the island.

All around, green oceans roil to the horizon. The planet has a single large moon, and the tidal effect is very pronounced. An Earth boat wouldn’t last five minutes out in that, even if the air were fit to be breathed.

“Computer,” he orders, “prepare probe for undersea mode. And scan biomass.”

“Probe ready,” it answers momentarily.

“And the biomass?” he asks.

“Scan underway. Available biomass for scanning is seven point nine trillion tons.”

“How much?”

“Seven point—”

“Captain’s interrupt. Scan a small slice of the biomass and report findings.”

“Reshuffling data. Analysis complete. Twenty-two thousand plant and animals species recorded.”

Gregor feels the thick hair of his forearms standing on end. But how stable is it? Has there been time?

“Computer, display the most highly advanced animal lifeform.”

The diving mode instructional screen drops off, replaced by a 3-D of something that makes Gregor gasp, his eyes widening in wonder, as he falls back into his seat. It’s huge—bigger than a humpback whale. But its shape is round, its body undulating, and it trails long tentacles behind it. It looks almost like a jellyfish, but the internal structure of the body is something never designed for human eyes to comprehend. Air bladders puff out along the outside—that much seems familiar. But within these lies a membrane full of tiny diamond-shaped holes, and underneath that are numerous tiny organs—some brown, some black and some red or green or blue. They all pulsate, and though they vary in size and shape they all have tubes that emerge from the creature’s body, pulsing with the passage of fluids through their lengths, and curve up to merge with the head. The head itself is as big as a living room, and inside the transparent membrane is something that looks like sand, colored in swirls from all the tubes that feed into it. The sand shifts and turns in living cyclones inside the animal’s head, sometimes in a frenzy of activity like a Martian dust-storm, sometimes slower and softer, like it’s dreaming.

“Look at that brain capacity,” Gregor says. His voice echoes off the walls of the probe. “If that is a brain.” But he’s laughing, his eyes moving up and down the length of the creature’s body, his smile making him look like a fisherman who’s finally gotten the one that got away.

He sleeps three hours, and then he takes the probe beneath the waves.

“I made contact with them almost at once,” Rafael said. Cara lay with her head in his lap looking up at his face as he spoke, and the depth of his voice made her imagine twisted shapes rising out of the alien sea, strange fourwinged birds circling overhead, and ghostly sails billowing from the decks of oddly-crafted ships.

“They must be very far away,” she murmured, looking past his face to the stars that sparkled across the sky now that the Sun had set.

But his voice was cold. “Not far enough.”

In the probe’s cramped interior, Captain Gregor programs the ascent sequence. He has already inflated three tug-alongs and filled them with biosamples, and now the probe is at maximum capacity and he’s almost ready to take it back up to orbit.

Almost.

The Hur’klee are fiercely territorial. They have conquered all the lower species, as humanity has on Earth, and the climb to the top of the planetary ecosystem has left them just as aggressive and inquisitive and possessive. Gregor fears for his life until he realizes there is nothing he possesses that could be of any value to them. Only his knowledge.

Three weeks he has spent among the Hur’klee, and now they have asked him to participate in a ritual before his departure. He hopes it will shed more light on their culture than the dances he has recorded. That is the only way they tell stories—by dance—and it takes a Hur’klee most of its eighty-year adolescence to master the nuances of the medium. The computer has made rough translations since the first week, but they’re literal translations only; good enough for rudimentary communication but insufficient for the decoding of myth and custom and law that weave the fabric of a culture.

Gregor sighs. Such is the fate of a Captain. Always to discover the new and the alien, never to be given time to learn what strange truths pulse beneath the glistening exteriors of the lifeforms and the artifacts that pass so fleetingly through his hands.

At the ceremony, he meets a Hur’klee named Tur’taya. This is a male, Gregor observes, and somewhat larger than the norm. Tur’taya has been a dark presence lurking in the background through much of Gregor’s visit. Others of the Hur’klee avoid him. They seem to fear him, and whenever he draws near, their minds close up and Gregor’s translator goes offline.

Now a large school of them has encircled Gregor and Tur’taya. Tur’taya extends his tentacles out in every direction until he’s like a starburst filling the ocean, and even through the probe’s windows it is a sight that makes Gregor think of hot gasses rushing into some primordial sun that’s about to ignite. He holds the probe steady, drifting with Tur’taya. It’s only when he feels the gentle wind blowing through his mind that he remembers the dreams.

Someone calling, someone searching, someone cast adrift among the stars. And here, others crying out, their voices not quite so strong, probing among the waves for rocks and predators and dangers that lay hidden behind the veils of the sea. But some, the strong ones, projecting themselves farther, searching along other kinds of horizons.

Now Tur’taya fills Gregor’s being with his alien thoughts—flashes of color and flavor and other things too hot and fast for Gregor to understand. He can feel Tur’taya’s mind encircling his own, but that mind is strangely vacant. Gregor twists in the Mindtouch. Ripples sweep out through the medium that connects them.

[Listen,] a voice seems to say.

And then he hears them. Six, nearby—voices on the waves. And through them, thirty-six others, slightly fainter but in solid contact. And beyond, by multiples of six, until the whole superpod floats there in Gregor’s mind, each a tiny part of this web of their collected minds.

And Gregor senses it at once: hunger. The Hur’klee have spun a vast mental framework—so vast that even all they have learnedfills only a tiny fraction of it. It is a mind that needs more than it can reach, one that has grown twisted and dark as it has been forced to feed on itself.

And loneliness. Nowhere else is there a mind to match its own.

The images stop. Blackness engulfs Gregor’s mind, but then he feels it return, the grasping pressure of the Mindtouch feeling somehow different this time. He understands at once that it is just Tur’taya now, his mind alone, and that there is something he desperately wants.

Mindtouch.

Tur’taya wants to enter Gregor’s mind. He wants to probe for himself this new curiosity that has drifted into the range of his senses.

Gregor feels his body lay back in Farprobe’s command chair, senses that he is breathing through his mouth as if in a deep sleep. But he’s awake, and Tur’taya is here, experiencing the sensations of this body, of this mind, and then moving on to deeper places that Gregor is scarcely aware exist within him.

Tur’taya finds Cara.

Here she is, a living entity in Gregor’s mind. More than a hologram, more than a memory, there is an entire universe encoded here through the eyes of the Captain’s love for the woman who waits for him even now on some lonely shore far from these waters. She’s lovely, swimming and running in the surf, her chest swelling and shrinking under the exertion. And then he’s tackling her, the two of them rolling at the edge of the waves. Tur’taya pushes the contact deeper, until it isn’t about people any longer but about two candles flickering in the darkness, clutching each other close for a time and then parting. Always stronger when they are joined.

Tur’taya experiences all of this, which is so much of Gregor that he cries out against having it glimpsed by another mind.

And then Tur’taya cries out as well, his bellowing wail thundering through Gregor’s mind and bringing the Captain to the edge of madness. He feels Tur’taya’s body, for an agonizing moment, as if it is his own. And then he understands. Within the alien’s mind, splintered into shining fragments spread throughout his own darkness, hang other minds as well—others of the Hur’klee and of the lesser related species that swim these waters.

That, he learns, is how a Hur’klee male loves. It loves through consumption, by making the object of its love a part of itself. And he sees through the eyes of the beast, sees the long and lonely search for something new. Tur’taya is ancient. He has absorbed every mind and soul he has found, yet his hunger remains, his desire unsatisfied. Nothing is new; nothing is different.

Until now. Through Tur’taya’s mind, Gregor sees himself—so strange, his frail and tiny body. Yet so beautiful and new. This one is male, he feels Tur’taya think. Then there’s a tentative tug at his soul, a hungry clutching, then the blessed release of rejection.

No, a male will never do.

But in this tiny mind, Tur’taya has glimpsed another.

Now Tur’taya’s mind slowly withdraws from his own, and the Mindtouch fades to only a remembered tingle. Gregor takes the probe’s controls in his hands and jerks them savagely. The probe begins an emergency ascent.

But Gregor knows that it is already far too late.

“Forgive me,” he said, stroking back a lock of hair that had Men across her cheek. “I felt that thing fall in love with you, Cara. It happened in a heartbeat, faster than that. The same way it did for me. The same way.” His voice trailed off again, and he stared into space as he had before. Cara trembled in his arms until he rubbed warmth back into her.

“It was a survival mechanism,” Rafael said. “The jellyfish that can leave its body to spot approaching danger has that much more chance of living long enough to procreate. And it can find food the same way. Soon the jellyfish that can’t project are starved into extinction. And the ability just keeps developing, spiraling higher, until the range is almost limitless. Until it can reach out into space and touch the stars.”

Cara stiffened. “You mean it can… leave its world?” Something in his eyes gleamed cold and terrifying now, and if he didn’t speak she felt she would go mad.

“Not in its body, no. But it can Mindtouch. And Cara, it loves you. As deeply and completely as I do. It found your perfect image in my heart, and its hunger was too great for its mind to control. You may have been alien to it, but you were beautiful, different and new. It wants you. It needs you. And its love is something too terrible to contemplate.”

She was sitting up now, watching his face for the tiniest indication that he knew. The dreams—she hadn’t wanted to mention them to him, hadn’t wanted to even think of them.

“He’s coming for you, Cara. Tlir’taya followed me into space, his mind chasing my ship and searching for the signature I had carried inside me, the signature of your soul glistening like a pearl inside his sickly shining head. All he can think of now is having you, of consuming you, of swallowing all the bits of you until they are nothing but bright spots scattered inside his greater darkness.”

She was sitting now, her legs curled underneath her. Somehow, she still felt safe, as long as he was here. But now she felt something cold, too, something that searched for her through the stars, its mind sharp and untiring while its body drifted in alien seas and dreamed the stolen dreams of their love.

“You came back,” she said a little time later. “You came back to me.”

His fists were balled up in his lap, and now he was staring at the ceiling. “God forgive me, yes. I couldn’t launch out there without seeing you one more time. And I think I have an answer, too. Last night while you slept, I took an imprint of your brainwave patterns and your body’s electromagnetic signature. If I’m right, I can use a tachyon emitter broadcasting those patterns to lure Tur’taya away from Earth, far out into space, somewhere so far away that he can never find his way back.”

“What makes you so sure it will follow you?” Cara heard her own voice ask, strangely distant.

Rafael’s eyes turned inward, questing, a worried frown on his brow. “I wish I could be sure,” he finally answered. “During the voyage to Earth, I studied the Hur’klee—their sensory organs, the characteristics of the tachyonic selves’ they project into space. I’ll amplify the recording and broadcast it from the ship as I travel. I can only hope that’s enough to fool him, to drown out your true mind-print and make him come after me instead.”

“And then?” she asked, reaching for his hand, hesitating.

Rafael sighed. “And then it will be done. Tur’taya will have lost.”

Cara listened for long seconds, sensing the lie but not knowing what it meant. Then she took his hand.

“Take me with you,” she said.

Rafael looked at her, and for the first time she saw that solid wall that is the will of a Captain. This was the side he projected to others, but never to her. This was the unyielding barrier no mortal could hope to puncture.

“I can’t, Cara. I can flee from this thing, and maybe 1 can outrun it if I push the tau far enough. I’ve commandeered the fastest available ship. But this is my responsibility.”

“We’ll take our chances,” she blurted. “Don’t leave me like this!”

She expected anger from him. It was actually a crime to speak to him as she had. But he only smiled sadly, smiled and shook his head. “Now I know why I love you, Cara Wainwright. It’s because you alone see me as a man, not only as a Captain. That is the greatest gift you could have given me.”

“A going away gift?” she asked, feeling hot pressure behind her eyes but not wanting to give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.

“Cara, I couldn’t go on living knowing that I’d brought you into danger. And every minute that I remain brings the danger closer.”

She sniffed, pushing herself back into the couch a body’s width away from him. “So that was the only reason you came back, for the recording?”

His eyebrows drew together. For a moment his blue eyes looked almost gray, clouded with thoughts his mind was too disciplined to reveal. Then they were clear again, and Cara knew in that moment that she had lost him.

“I came back for the recording, Cara, yes. That is the best way for us to remember it.”

It was raining that morning, a cold rain that blew off the ocean and pattered dully against the roof. They stood on the front porch. His cab had hovered to a stop a few minutes earlier, its robot driver patient as the hills when Rafael told him to wait. Huddling under the edge of the roof away from the rain, they clung to each other and spoke in deep gazes of how it might have been, and also of how it was, which in the end is always more important.

“You showed me how to live my life for every moment,” she said to him, and that made him smile. But inside, she was crying, and even the terrible thing that stalked her seemed trivial beside the fact that she was losing him, she was losing her Captain, that he was flying away for the last time and neither one of them had the courage to admit it.

“Maybe I’ll make it back by Christmas,” he joked, wiping the raindrops from her face. “She’s a fast ship.”

Cara nodded once, but her eyes dropped from his face, and she, knew better than to believe in dreams. Her whole life had been a dream since meeting him, and now the dream was over, and the waking Sun was harsh and unforgiving.

“Remember me,” she whispered. She lifted up onto her toes and kissed him. His lips were moist but firm. His mouth spoke of a person inside him that was no Captain, no ruler of worlds or traveler among the stars. It was just him, just Rafael. And then she knew what all those girls in the market and on the streets could never know. To love a Captain was simply to love, and there was really nothing more to it than that.

“I’ll watch the stars every night,” she vowed. “And every time I look, I’ll know that I’m looking at you.”

Worry creased his face, and she wasn’t sure what he was thinking. She started to speak. He shook his head and turned away. Then he was moving, a stiff shadow cutting through the rain toward the cab, and she was watching, watching as the door slammed shut, watching his face in the window until the rain reduced it to an oval of warm colors and then to nothing at all, as the cab disappeared into the rain.

Cara went inside. After that, whenever it rained, she felt that same hot pressure behind her eyes, and sometimes she cried, and sometimes she laughed at the remembered joy of what it had been to love a Captain.

Years passed, and Cara handled the transitions of time with what grace she could, always living in that tiny village by the sea. Often she would sit on the balcony at night, watching the sea and the stars and wondering. Had Tur’taya found him in the end? Then why hadn’t it come for her? And if Rafael had prevailed, why was there never any sign from him? Did he have to go so fast in his flight from its alien love that when he slowed down again her life had come and gone, leaving only the buried ruins of the village to remind him of her?

Only one clue ever came to her, and it didn’t come until seven years later. She was sitting alone at an outdoor cafe when she spotted a man watching her from a shop on the other side of the courtyard. It was too far to make out details, and he was dressed in the common garb of the townfolk, but something about the intensity of his eyes beneath the shadows of his hood tugged at her. He radiated turmoil, as if two powerful forces warred within him. She got up from the table and paid for her meal, but when she turned back he was gone. It never happened again, and she was never certain it had really been him. The dreams had long since vanished. Only one tangible remnant of her Captain remained.

When she got home after the encounter, Cara went immediately to her jewelry chest and opened it. There, hanging from its chain, was the stone he had given her. It was glowing strongly, so bright it lit up the whole room. That glow brought it all back to her, how it had been to love a man who walked among the stars, the thrill of indescribable excitement but the fear that was almost as strong, that was sometimes stronger.

For the next few nights, the stone shone dimmer and dimmer each time she looked at it, and one day it ceased to shine at all. But Cara remembered it. Even after she had married a man and borne him two children, she remembered.

Content

The Shadow Captain
by Pete D. Manison