Free Voyagers III - Star Brothers by Ben Bova Page A

brought and stacking them up neatly on the long table beneath the big azalea bush in the corner of the patio.
    The guests were mainly family, Stoner’s son and daughter from his earlier life, Jo’s only brother and three sisters, and their various children. A few trusted members of Vanguard Industries’ headquarters staff, from the nearby city of Hilo.
    Stoner was happy to see the offspring of his first marriage. Deep within him he wanted the opportunity to try to settle their relationships, square their accounts. Almost as if he were afraid he would never see them again.
    He felt a puzzled tendril of thought tickling at the back of his mind. Why should I be afraid? he wondered. His star brother wondered, too.
    His son Douglas came up to shake his hand, warily, almost like a stranger. Doug was well into his forties now, but the wound that had opened between them when Stoner had left his first wife, a lifetime ago, had never completely healed.
    “I’m glad you could make it, Doug,” he said to his son.
    “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” said Douglas. “A free vacation in Hawaii for me and my whole family? Who could turn that down?”
    Douglas had grown to middle age. His blond hair was thinning, his eyes had lost much of their youthful fire. He had two sons of his own nearing twenty, but the bitterness was still there. Stoner saw it in his eyes, heard it in the tone of his voice. Douglas no longer fought with his father, no longer refused to see him. But the anger seethed just below the surface. And Douglas pointedly avoided Stoner’s younger children, the offspring of his marriage to Jo.
    Eleanor was friendlier, more relaxed. She had remarried a genetic surgeon in Christchurch after the death of her first husband, but they had divorced after two years. Now, a dozen years later she had a new husband and seemed at peace with the world. And with her father. Stoner felt immensely grateful for that.
    Stoner embraced Elly and her teenaged daughter, shook hands with her son and her new husband, a cargo specialist for Pacific Commerce’s space transport division. He was startled to sense that Elly’s daughter was pregnant. I’ll be a great-grandfather in seven or eight months, he told himself. It seemed strange; he did not feel old enough to be a great-grandfather. I wonder if Elly knows? I’ll have to talk with the girl later on.
    Aside from Elly and Doug, the only one among the guests milling around the swimming pool whom Keith had known back in his earlier life, before he had spent eighteen years in frozen suspension, was Claude Appert.
    The Frenchman was as dapper as ever despite his seventy-two years. Pure white hair and trim little mustache, jaunty double-breasted blazer of navy blue, pearl gray slacks, Appert was the very picture of the perfectly-dressed Parisian.
    “Claude, you’re looking very well.”
    “Not so well as you, mon ami . You seem ageless.”
    “I’m a year younger than you.”
    Appert laughed. “But you cheated! You spent eighteen years sleeping and not aging one minute!”
    Stoner shrugged like a Parisian.
    “Still,” Appert said, looking closely at Stoner’s face, “you do not seem any older than you did when you first recovered from the freezing. Shave off that black beard of yours and you would look no more than thirty-five or forty.”
    “How are you getting along?” Stoner changed the subject.
    “The same as always. It is lonely without Nicole, but there are any number of handsome widows who invite me to dinner.”
    “Paris is still Paris, then.”
    “Ah yes. The one thing that remains constant in this world of change.”
    “Things are changing rapidly, aren’t they, Claude? And for the better, I think.”
    “But yes! Even the government of France has agreed to stop exporting armaments. And there was hardly a peep of protest from the industrialists. That is how good the economy is, these days.”
    Surveying the assembled guests, Stoner realized that one man was