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Chapter Twenty-four

Baldor looked up at the sun and then spit in the dust. Digging and planting, planting and digging. Farming was no life for a warrior. He began to understand why his ancestors had listened to the priests when they told them there was to be a time of war. It broke the absolute, total monotony of living a normal day-to-day life on a third class planet like Beta 4.

His people had been hunters and gatherers for the most part, farming and raising livestock just to help subsidize what the meager land had to offer. When there wasn't enough food, the priests would just insist that God had told them to fight, and so they'd hold a war until enough people had died that there was plenty of food for everyone else.

Baldor didn't see why that was so evil, especially now when his days were filled with digging and planting, and planting and digging, and plants grew but they really didn't flourish, even with fertilizers and irrigation and a dozen other things commerce had brought to Beta 4.

His sister had taken a mate, and they were raising children. She daily pleaded with him to do the same thing, but he knew that was no life for him. He stayed and helped them with their farm and bit his tongue instead of telling them just how absolutely dull and colorless their life was. That he'd rather die in a fiery pit in hell than copy their lifestyle and make it his own.

He didn't really know what he was going to do or how. His mother's death had left him feeling empty and alone, but he didn't think taking up with the first willing female and having the state's suggested two kids was the answer.

No normal woman was ever going to be able to take her place in his heart.

He remembered what Mickey had told him as he looked up at the relentless sun. "You can never go home," he muttered under his breath.

It had been good to see Pete, spend some time with his old friend, and catch up on what was going on back on Earth with RJ and Dax and his other friends. But Pete had returned to Earth too soon, and now he just missed his friends and his mother all the more.

He bent over, stuck yet another plant in the ground and pretended like it was a land mine. They were on Urta fighting a ground war, just cleaning up a few straggling Argy who hadn't quite gotten the idea that it was time for them to go home. They were placing the mines to secure their perimeter. Suddenly he was surrounded; he raised his shovel like a blaster and started making blaster-firing sounds. When he swung around to check his rear flank he almost slapped his chuckling sister upside the head with his shovel. He lowered it to the ground, feeling the blood rushing to his face.

"Hey, commando! Let the cabbage live. There's word from headquarters," Sandra said with a laugh.

"Huh?" Baldor asked.

"Two wants to see you at the palace," Sandra said.

Baldor sighed. There was only one thing in this universe more boring than farming, and that was going to the palace, pretending to be interested and that you actually understood what the hell they were talking about. He certainly didn't see why they needed him there. Baldor was supposed to be in charge of defense, but the whole, "we must have a strong defense," thing was kind of a non-issue since there was no fighting in the whole system, much less on the planet. Which was of course why he, the head of defense for Beta 4, was planting cabbages.

Still, there was always hope that some minor battle had sprung up somewhere that might need his attention. Maybe some Fourers fighting with some Earth-born settlers.

"Did he say why?" Baldor asked hopefully.

"No, just that he needed to see you," Sandra said, being her usual completely unhelpful self.

Baldor sighed, threw down his shovel and started for the house, mumbling. Two had probably gotten his father's fake hands bronzed or some equally absurd thing. He was like a small child, always wanting you to see everything that he'd done and praise him for it.

His sister moved up beside him and put her arm around him. "Baldor, you have got to find some joy in your life. You can't just go on living like this, feeling nothing," Sandra said in a concerned voice.

"Don't you understand, Sandra? Everything is pointless; nothing really matters. You help win a battle, and when there's peace . . . You're obsolete and no one needs you. So what have you really done? Nothing."

She sighed, no doubt because she was tired of hearing it, and mostly wanted to hear him say that he'd fallen in love with some ordinary woman and was ready to sit back and hoe the cabbage while she spit out those kids.

Hell, he couldn't stand Sandra's kids; he sure as hell didn't want any of his own.

He took a bath and dressed, then got in his solar powered vehicle with the mind-boggling top end speed of twenty-five miles per hour, and thought it was a good thing they were only ten miles from the Capital. If it had been any further the bronzed hands would have tarnished before he made it to the palace. He flipped some tunes on in the computer and took off. He sang along tunelessly with the music as he drove. For the moment at least, he was just enjoying the fact that he wasn't planting cabbages, and that there might actually be something wrong.

He had a momentary flutter of excitement when he saw the skiff parked outside the palace. Then he sighed. No sense getting excited, it's most likely a shipment of cloth or some really exciting new fertilizer. If there really is some god living in the generator, please strike me dead right now if Two just wants to share some new agricultural product with me.

He got out of his car and entered the palace without fanfare. He walked right to Taheed's throne room and stopped dead.

"RJ?"

"Hi," she said.

He ran across the room and hugged her as tightly as he could, so glad to see her that he couldn't contain himself. She didn't hug him back, just looked at Taheed and said, "He certainly is a friendly cuss."

 

RJ looked uncomfortably at the man who held her like she might get away at any minute.

The king coughed, looking embarrassed and said, "He thinks he knows you. Ah, Baldor . . ."

"Baldor?" RJ asked. She looked at the young man and saw her old friend's eyes looking back at her. She smiled. "You're David and Janad's son. He named you after Whitey."

Baldor released her then, stepping back to arm's length. "My gods! You're not her, you're really . . . Well, you."

"You knew?" Taheed asked.

"Yeah, Pete told me." Baldor looked long and hard at her face, no doubt trying to see if she was exactly the same.

Love, that's what she had felt in his embrace. He had loved Kirk. It had felt good to feel love again, even if it hadn't actually been for her.

He looked around her at where Poley and Alan stood and he smiled. "That must be Poley, but this can't be Levits, he would have to be . . ."

"He's dead, and he was human. Alan isn't either." She smiled. "You look so much like your father."

Baldor laughed. "I'm a little darker."

 

After they'd eaten dinner with the king, Poley and Alan had retired to their quarters and RJ had walked out to the palace gardens. They were even more beautiful than they were when she'd last been there. Of course there'd been all the shooting, bombs, and death then. When she introduced her plants to this world, it would finally really bloom.

She both heard and felt him, so she wasn't too surprised when he started talking.

"So . . . Why did you come here?" Baldor asked from where he'd walked up behind her. "I mean besides to bring us these miracle plants of yours?"

"Truthfully?" she asked turning to face him.

"Yes."

"Because this world was the last place where I was ever truly happy. The last place where I seemed to know just exactly what my role in the universe was."

"Kirk . . . did you . . . is she?" It was obvious what he was trying to ask, by the fact that he was afraid to fully ask the question. He didn't want to hear the answer if it was the wrong one.

She sighed. "We fought, I won, and no I didn't kill her. I realized that taking her life away wasn't going to bring mine back. Kirk's halfway to a planet in the Argy quadrant by now, ready to whip a little Argy ass. She seems to know just exactly what she wants to do with her life. If you ask me, I think she just finds peace as boring as I do. I won't lie to you, I really, really wanted to kill her. But when it came right down to it, I just couldn't do it."

Baldor laughed. "She inspires those feelings in people. So, what do these plants of yours do that's so amazing?"

RJ smiled broadly. "Well, they adapt. It's harder than you think."

THE END

 

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