THE BEQUEST

Travelers exist outside of time. Going on Exodus, living on the edge of lightspeed, is a form of immortality. When you return home years or decades – maybe even centuries – will have passed. Friends and family will age and die. New generations will take the gifts you bring and use them to advance and evolve society in your long absences. But you will remain the same – young and unchanged.

Or so it seems to those left behind. But even on Exodus, time still passes, albeit slowly. Eventually a Traveler’s hair goes gray, and wrinkles crease their skin. Until one day the cost of Exodus – the sacrifice and the struggle – is more than the aging body and spirit are willing to pay.

Retired Travelers are relics. Leftovers from a distant past. But they are honored and revered - the link to a glorious legacy, and the key to the next generation of heroes that will ensure humanity’s survival.

“To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.”
--In Flanders Fields, John McCrae

She called him Uncle Miru. He wasn’t her uncle. She’d looked back through the dynastic records once. Miru Hirabari, born two hundred and seventy-eight years ago. Family, but the sort that in other ages, or amongst other bloodlines, would have been known by portrait and tombstone rather than sitting in his customary chair. The ornate metal thing he’d found on a world seven stars away and taken for his ship, and that was as well-traveled as he was.

Old now, though. Old and shrunken, scarred and more suited to the telling of legends than the making of them. One of that handful of people of uncertain status around the family home. Those who had traveled and come back; enriched the family, protected its interests, furthered the cause of humanity amongst the hostile stars. But it was hard to fit them in when they were back with their feet on home ground. Yesterday’s people, with interstellar wanderlust in their eyes, even the old ones like Uncle Miru who’d surely never leave the gravity-well again.

“I hear my girl is fixing for a voyage,” he croaked, with that accent of his. The sound of a man from another country, except that country was “time”. That was how people spoke around here back when he was her age, before he left to stretch his days out in ventures elsewhere, pulling the elastic of his life as close to lightspeed as it would go, and coming back home young and brash even as the world aged. Yet, dance with relativity as you might, time still only moved in one direction. It had caught up with him at last.

She nodded. “Captain Chey said yes. I have a place, on the new expedition.”

“Crystal Chey will get you killed,” said Uncle Miru. “She forgets that everyone else isn’t the indestructible sort that she is. Don’t you be giving her the opportunity.”

“I know about her ways, Uncle.” She could readily imagine the same cautions given about him, back in the day. That ‘Lucky’ Hirabari – his luck doesn’t get any further than his own skin!

Uncle Miru made a dissatisfied noise and stared at his gaunt hands for a while. One of the younger cousins came in with tea, made the way Miru liked it, that nobody else bothered with anymore. The old man waited until it was all poured, until it had steeped. Whenever she shifted or opened her mouth, his stern look put her in her place. She’d swear the real reason she wanted to get off-planet was the way the older generations just unthinkingly looked down on someone with just two decades to them. She wanted to come back with stories of the antique ways of past generations, and the mystery of the long-range Traveler to her.

“I’ve seen your aptitudes, so,” he said at last. “You have the inductive genes to you stronger than we’ve seen for a generation. The old tech, the Celestial tech, it speaks to you, so?”

“I see images, in my head,” she clarified. “How things work, how I can get them to do things for me.”

He nodded, sipped tea, put off what he was going to say until the silence between them was taut to snapping. Then something went out of him, some last ebb of his defiant youth.

“There’s a thing I’m wanting you to have,” he said opening one of the metal chair’s countless concealed spaces, drawing something out. Its sleek lines were so beautiful, so alien, that it was a moment before she understood it was a weapon.

“Is that…?”

“The Icarus Slayer. The Mortal Gift. My old friend, so. Yes.”

“You… said it was lost.”

“I did. After I knew it wouldn’t be me heading out again. To stop the fighting over who would have it. Until I found someone, I’d be wanting to pass the burden onto.”

“The burden?” The Icarus Slayer, the weapon inextricably intertwined with Miru’s legends, the killer of monsters and gods.

“Take it up. Look, there’s a target I’ve set up, on the far wall there. Take up the damned thing and sight up, so, but tell me first what it says to you.”

The Slayer was delicate, a baroque flourish of grip and stock narrowing to a barrel more slender than her finger. It weighed next to nothing. She levelled it at Miru’s target and…

Felt it wake. Like some ancient, cunning crab-thing venturing from its shell long after it should have died. The scuttling claws of it in her mind. Its eagerness to find a use. A disdain for the target, instead her head filling with an awareness of every other option, ranked and assessed for threat. Her younger cousins playing in the garden past the balcony. Uncle Miru. The Icarus Slayer fixing on Uncle Miru, most powerful potential adversary, most glorious target, giving her a dozen different firing solutions that would kill or cripple him. Eager, panting, like a dog desperate to be let off the leash.

She gasped and put the weapon down hurriedly. “It-”

“Oh, you don’t need to tell me what the old rogue was after,” Miru chuckled. “And it will keep at it, so, no matter the asking. But you take no nonsense and make sure it knows who the master is, and it’ll serve you well. Icarus was proud, wouldn’t hear of it but that he flew right near the sun. The old Slayer here brings the proud and the mighty down to earth, don’t you.” He stroked the coiled lines of the weapon that, a moment before, had been mathematically plotting his demise.

“You take it, now,” Uncle Miru told her. “You be advised by me, there’s a galaxy of things out there that want to kill you. Beasts, humans, Celestials, Changelings, Ghosts. There’s nothing out there of worth but that someone else wants it, and most of the time your prize itself will fight to stop any hands laying hold of it. You’re going to those places, you’ll be needing a leveler, and I never found any leveler grander than this twisted little killing engine. Take it and keep it on a tight leash, so. Let it do its work in your cause, and then bring it back here and pass it on. Preferably with something of your own that you’ve found. You get to my age, you want to be casting more than just my shadow, you hear?”

And he pushed the weapon towards her, and she hesitated a little, then took it up. His hand lingered for a moment, as though he would snatch it back again. Then it was hers, and its deadly calculations were prowling about the edge of her mind’s firelight, growling for blood.

A strange, sad expression passed over Uncle Miru’s face, like autumn leaves, and she understood. Until this point, some holdout part of him had still thought he might go back, get on a ship, lead one more expedition into the unknown. In surrendering the Icarus Slayer to her, he was surrendering to time. A retirement, well earned, comfortable and hopefully prolonged, but accepting he would never again be the man from the stories. Lucky Hirabari, the voyager, the explorer, the hero.

Three days later she strode up the gangplank of Crystal Chey’s ship, with the Icarus Slayer slung over her shoulder. Hearing the whispers – scandal, shock, envy – from the family she was leaving behind. Seeing the appraising looks from Chey’s gemstone eyes, from the rest of the crew. She was the youngest of them, the least, but now she was bringing something more than her aptitudes. She was continuing a legacy stretching back centuries.

She glanced once towards the old house, towards the balcony. Uncle Miru had driven his chair out there. She saw the sunlight catch on it. She waved a final farewell. In her mind, the Slayer computed trajectories and firing arcs, and she felt it was the weapon’s own fond goodbye to its former bearer.