Free King of the Worlds by M. Thomas Gammarino Page B

years; the Tau Ceti System had been using them for the equivalent of almost ten thousand Earth years already.
    The keyboard appeared. Dylan began to type.
    Dear Ashley,
    I’m sorry to be so late in the reply. I wonder if you’d like to have lunch with me at the Inner Harbor this Saturday at noon?
    â€“ Dylan Greenyears
    He hadn’t known he was going to do this until he did it, but then he hadn’t known he was losing his mind either. If cum was befogging his thoughts, well then so be it—the fog was life too. And much as he believed in the sanctity of marriage, he did not, it turned out, believe in it at the expense of the sanctity of his life itself, which somehow had a whole new urgency to it.
    He chose Saturday for good reason: he happened to know there was some big K-12 conference in Minneapolis this weekend. He wasn’t scheduled to go, but a few of his colleagues were. He’d been invited to this sort of thing a few times in his early years at the school, but in the interim he’d earned a well-deserved reputation as a bona fide exile; unlike most of his Terran coworkers, he hadn’t returned to Earth even once since they’d come up here (Erin, by contrast, made it home once every two or three years), and until now he’d been thoroughly convinced he didn’t want to. He’d been so wounded by his home planet that he’d forsworn it altogether. But then he’d been wounded by this planet too, however gradually. Or maybe that was just the ineradicable memory of that other place intruding on this one—you can’t escape the fourth dimension by moving along any of the first three. Indeed, if there was anything to the old truism about time healing wounds, those that didn’t outright kill you anyway, then why was it depicted as an arrow? Why not an unfurling roll of gauze or some such thing? The IV drip of time?
    In any event, Dylan didn’t get what was so important about physically traveling to a conference now that the omni could bring it to you and/or you to it, but his colleagues relished any excuse to take a trip—and now he would too.
    â€¢ • •
    Back at home, he found Erin nursing Junior on the sofa and gave her the bad news: “Get this. Cindy called. She’s quote-unquote ‘highly recommending’ I go to this conference in Minneapolis this weekend.”
    â€œ The Minneapolis? On Earth?”
    â€œDo you believe that?”
    â€œAt the tail end of your paternity leave? Can I assume you told her no?”
    â€œActually I told her I’d check with you and get back to her.”
    â€œShe didn’t say you have to go, though, did she?”
    â€œNo. She implied it, but fuck her. I’ll tell her I can’t. I’ll tell her you need me here. It’s just a job after all.”
    Erin looked up at the ceiling, face pinched with thinking.
    To be sure, it was more than just a job, and Dylan knew she thought so too. It was a symbol, or something. For their first nine years out here, he had taught English to the native population at a cram school, which was the gig he’d been recruited for. He liked the work less and less each year, but it allowed them to stay and paid his tuition while he worked at night toward finishing his BA from Temple via omni, and then his MA in Modernist and Postmodernist Literature from Yale, also via omni. He’d been crazy busy, but he’d wanted it that way; the last thing he needed was time to get sucked into the black hole of what-might-have-been. Erin, meanwhile, picked up a gig teaching human biology full-time at the American School. She made good money and enjoyed working with high school kids so much that she coached cross-country and choreographed the musicals too. When he finished his degree, Erin tapped her connections and got him a job in the English department at the school, and for a handful of years they’d enjoyed living on pretty much identical