IGMS Issue 17 (2 page)

A few months later the corporation offered me an opportunity to take the newest long-range Renkinn to the Oort Cloud, just over a light-year from the Sun.

I worried about missing more of the girls' early years, but Janet was very convincing.

"Don't worry darling," she reassured me. "
You'll
still be young enough to enjoy the girls when you return."

The return trip was just as debilitating as the trip out. The only advantage was that, thanks to improved medical care, my recovery didn't take half as long.

After they released me from the hospital in Heinlein City, I discovered that not only was I several more years out of touch, but my not-so-blushing bride was pregnant with another man's baby. Our divorce was quick and mutual.

The settlement gave Janet the house and custody of our now pre-pubescent girls, who barely knew who I was. Most of my bonus was used to set up a trust fund that would support the two of them for the rest of their lives. After I paid the lawyer, I invested half of what was left, and spent the rest on whatever helped me forget what a fool I'd been.

When I sobered up, I signed up for any wink that I could survive.

Six months after my divorce was final, the first Centauri Renkinn successfully winked home after a nine year round trip. Four of them had been launched at six-month intervals -- the first with the construction crew and their supplies, while the next two carried supplies and equipment. The last carried the scientists and engineers who'd volunteered to be the permanent crew.

Unlike my own trip outside the solar system, everything had gone exactly as planned. The first pilot to return reported from his hospital bed that construction of a permanent station was underway when he'd left, four-and-a fraction real years ago for us, about a day for him.

Eleanor was the other returning pilot. It was a surprise when I visited her. Discounting the issues that wink syndrome brought on, she still looked almost the same age as when we started -- maybe a year or two older -- even though it had been over a decade since we first signed up.

Somehow I'd never thought much about how Renkinn drivers would age differentially. It stood to reason that those who made the longer winks would age even slower than those who did not. Still, it was disconcerting to face that fact when someone you knew was suddenly seven years younger than you.

With Centauri station as a modest step to the stars, other longer and more ambitious winks were planned. If humanity had successfully conquered the solar system, why not the universe?

Because I was a senior driver and had already survived a long wink, they offered me the opportunity to be modified again so that I could take a group of scientists and engineers out to Pavonis. Apparently what had happened to Eleanor and the other Centauri pilots made them rethink a few things about the longer winks.

Those "few things" meant that I had to have more surgical modifications and endure a few more physiological tweaks and changes -- nothing that would bother my sex life, they kidded, as if the augmentations alone wouldn't send most nubile young ladies screaming into the night.

I doubt that even that avaricious bitch Janet could have pretended she didn't mind them.

By the time I returned from Eridani, I was a much modified twenty-eight-year-old whose once-young wife was ashes in the wind, and whose daughters were senior citizens in a nursing home outside of old New Phoenix.

The "girls" introduced me to their friends at the home in a vague way, as if they couldn't get their minds around exactly who I was. Some of the other residents thought I was a great-grandchild come to visit or maybe that nice staff attendant who brought the
good
medicines. My augmentations didn't seem to bother the senior citizens, many of whom were half machine themselves.

Despite that, I didn't visit often. Everything had changed so much that I always seemed to be asking the point of a joke or for an explanation of something that happened. At every turn I was reminded of how much change could take place in eight short decades. In social situations I was completely at sea; everyday cultural references that seemed obvious to everyone else were unfathomable to me.

I was thirty-one when my last surviving daughter, by then an incredibly ancient woman, died. I immediately volunteered to take three thousand colonists to an as-yet-unnamed planet orbiting Beta Hydrae, 128 light years away. From Hydrae I winked to Tanae, another hundred light years further out.

I didn't like the four patronizing
aultrachvolk
, who declared in broken English that they were responsible for assimilating the original Renkinns back into society, but after one look at their shuttle, I felt like an aborigine come ashore on a wooden raft and knew it was necessary.

The solicitous quartet escorted me down to a gleaming city floating in the middle of the Pacific and set me up in an "authentic" twenty-second century apartment where a black rotary dial telephone sat beside a hideous Victorian couch, over which hung an old-fashioned plasma television screen. The "authentic" toilet facilities are best not described.

None of my investments, or even the institutions that held them, had survived my extended absence. I was, for all intents and purposes, a ward of the Collective until I mastered some basic social skills and could again take my place in the world.

It took me very little time to resent my orientation specialist, a so-called expert in antique languages. His lisping attempts to speak the "Englishii" of my time grated on my nerves as much as his misperceptions of my "amusingly fractured subculture," and he seemed completely disinterested when I corrected him on some important points about how things really worked "back in the day."

The ImPimp, as I thought of it, gave me access to what I later discovered was a children's version of history. A portion of the text concerned scientific advances, describing some significant events whose bases and outcomes were even less understandable than the science behind them. I couldn't grasp the economics of how the Renkinns were used to establish star-spanning economies, and I wondered why anyone would undertake trade whose results would take decades or even centuries to be realized.

Eventually the committee must have decided that I was incapable of integrating properly into their society, so they offered me a chance to wink some supplies for a group of explorers who had departed a century earlier. I wondered about the depth of their compassion -- for me
or
the settlers -- when I found out that the destination was nine hundred light years away.

Without delay they refitted my Renkinn, which was still in prime condition -- except for the antique hull, obsolete navigational gear, and woefully inadequate power supply, all of which they assured me, could be easily upgraded.

I winked as soon as the last module was loaded and, a subjective moment later, opened my eyes to the strange new skies of an older universe.

I was debating the wisdom of returning to Earth when they asked me to transport a few members to another outpost. It didn't take much convincing. After an eighteen-hundred year absence, I knew I'd find Earth's civilization even more incomprehensible than before.

I winked where they wanted, six hundred light-years back toward Earth, and hoped that the society there was something I could still relate to.

After that I winked wherever I could, jumping across the light-years and spending as little time as possible in places where the society wasn't particularly understandable or friendly, while relaxing a bit where they were more compatible with my needs. Somewhere along the line I lost track of the real years, wondering if anyone besides Renkinn pilots even worried about that kind of thing.

The station's interior indicated a high level of technology. After a short trip down a tastefully decorated corridor, I found a warm cubby suffused by dim, yellow-orange light. The color and intensity had to be deliberate, the sort of light that humans loved, and it reminded me of summer evenings when I was romancing Janet and thinking I was in love.

The drink that floated up from the surface of the table was fizzy, dark, and tasted faintly of cinnamon. It had a kick like caffeinated ethanol, but without the burn.