Free Deucalion by Brian Caswell Page A

remembered her boarding the flyer a few hours earlier. She’d been smiling then, and talking twenty to the dozen with a young woman who’d looked enough like her to be her mother. Vaguely, I wondered how the two of them had ended up on the J-man’s private flyer, but this wasn’t the time to bring up the subject. Instead, I just slid my arm around her shoulder, and let her lean against me. I didn’t know if she would take any comfort from the gesture, but she didn’t pull away, so I figured at least I wasn’t doing any harm. After a few minutes, she reached out and placed her hand on my wrist. I looked down at the tiny hand; at the total contrast of her white skin against my black. Her hair was golden blonde, and hung down in ringlets just past her shoulders.
    I was about to speak again, to try to break through, when I realised her breathing had slowed to the deep, regular rhythm of sleep. Worn out by the terror of the last few hours, she had taken refuge in the oldest form of escape. Her hand went limp and slipped from my wrist, and I laid her gently down in the shade of the rock. I didn’t know how long we could let her sleep there, but I hoped it could be a few minutes, at least. I didn’t want her to have to wake and relive the horror all over again.
    I watched her lying there. And suddenly it was like looking back in time at my little sister, Kirby.
    Kirby was five years younger than me, and of course she wasn’t really my sister.
    When I was three, my parents’ house caught fire. Someone pulled me out of the blaze. Smoke inhalation and a few third-degree burns, but I made it. Both my parents and my three sisters died, and I was left alone. Until the adoption. I don’t remember anything about my birth parents. I have pictures, and some legal papers, but they don’t count as memories. No one’s quite as alone as a three-year-old orphan.
    But by the time I was four, I had a new family. The doctors had told my new mother she would never be able to have children, so she and her husband had started looking for a child to adopt. And I was it. I didn’t realise until years later just how lucky that made me. For every set of parents looking for a child, there were at least four or five kids – abandoned, orphaned, whatever – looking for parents. With unemployment running at thirty-five per cent and social services cut to the bone, there were too many people with no way to look after their kids. I’d been in foster care for almost a year when my new parents found me. Four years old, black, not particularly bright, but for some reason they wanted me.
    My new parents were never well-off, but my father always had a job, even in the worst times.
    Then, when I was five, Kirby arrived. She wasn’t supposed to. There wasn’t supposed to be any way she could . . . happen. She was just the sort of ‘miracle baby’ the magazine programs on the tube love to use as ‘fillers’ between the traffic smashes and the political scandals.
    Kirby was everything I wasn’t. Cute. Beautiful. She had long golden hair, huge blue eyes, and a smile that lit up a room. And she was as sharp as a laser. I never knew anyone who didn’t love her at first sight. We had her for five years. There wasn’t a thing I wouldn’t do for her.
    I was just ten and a half when she got sick and died. The doctors couldn’t really say what it was; they called it ‘environmental’. Which on Old Earth could have meant anything.
    Three months later, we were in stasis on the freeze-liner, heading for Deucalion. It wasn’t so much that they were running away. There was just nothing left to stay around for.
    It’s been over fifty years since she died, even though I only remember the twelve that have passed since we got here. Sometimes, I wonder what she would have been like as a teenager, or even as an old woman. I’ll never know. For me, Kirby will