CONTROLLING INTEREST

As Travelers, returning home stirs trepidation and uncertainty, as sharp as the moment we first embarked on our Exodus. We carry the quiet ache of knowing that while we were lost in time, the world moved on without us. Weeks and years may have passed for us, yet decades slipped by for those we left behind. Lives changed, memories dimmed, and bonds unraveled – leaving us adrift, disconnected from the people and places we once called home.

But home is different. We wonder: will anyone grasp the cost of what we’ve endured? In the eyes of those we love, we see doubt, fear and distrust after our long absence. But even as we hold them close, offering thanks and breaking bread, our thoughts drift back to the stars, to the battles fought and those still to come, to the fragile promise of a tomorrow they may never see.

Though our missions take us far from home – the homecoming is always a time…well spent.

“The statue,” Jonah said, “is a little much.”

“Well, yes,” Iris admitted. “I can see that coming back to find a statue of yourself beside the docking field might raise eyebrows.”

“I mean literally. It’s ten meters tall.”

“We needed a statement, a hero figure.” Iris ducked into the relative cool of the port buildings. People were staring, pointing. His face, recognizable from that great livestone sculpture outside; stern, determined and noble. Jonah didn’t feel that he was any of those things, just as he wasn’t ten meters tall. People were gasping and staring, though. An old man dropped to his knees. A woman reached to touch the hem of his threadbare coat.

Iris got him to a booth in the port lounge, and a couple of uniformed men made sure they had their privacy. The interiors Jonah saw looked smarter than they had been when he left, just like the clothes of the people here. A definite hike in manufacturing and overall wealth. And evenly spread, too. The staff at the port seemed well-fed and in good spirits, people invested in their work and not just clinging on because starvation was snapping at their heels. It had been rough when he left, and he’d worried that the family was going to just hoard its wealth and turn its back on the world. Whatever stewards had been in charge had obviously been working on infrastructure and general quality of life.

“I can’t help noticing our little lizard badges all the staff around here have, and all the posters too.”

“We took over the port.” Iris flashed a smile at a dog that ambled up with a tray of drinks on its back. “Thank you, Masri. It was… well, basically there was a crooked cartel running the joint back about… twenty years ago. And there were pirates in the outer system, too. They were killing off the shipping trade because they couldn’t keep their greed in check. So, we had to step in.”

“Why us?” Jonah asked. “What about, what were they called, Cicatrice Corporation, old Vancell’s lot. This was their stomping ground back when I left.”

Iris rolled her eyes. “Them? Well, you remember the pirates and crooks I just mentioned?”

“Seriously?”

She shrugged. “Change of management, short term profiteering. You know, the usual.”

Jonah spared a thought for Pa Vancell, not exactly a good man but someone who knew the value of order. Not so his heirs, apparently.

“It got messy,” Iris went on. “There was a war, basically. Us and those we could motivate, against Cicatrice and their brigands. I understand it was bad. Which is why Uncle Mateus reckoned we needed a figurehead. Hence that great big you out there. The promise of the future, the man who was coming home with the goods. And you have. I’ve seen your cargo manifest. If even half of that stuff checks out, it’s a whole leap forward for our manufacturing and the weather control satellites. What’s that face for?”

“I just realized ‘Uncle Mateus’ is Little Matti. He was half your age when I left, running around wearing his dad’s old space helmet. He still around?”

She shrugged. “He took off, after he’d got things stable. Handed things over to Cousin Elisha.”

“He always did say he wanted to go Traveling,” Jonah recalled, bittersweet. In his head was the child of then. In Iris’s head was a man past middle years clutching for the last coattails of his dreams. And where was Matti now? Would he and Jonah ever coincide, or would they keep missing each other until one of them never came home or used up their personal stock of years?

“What are today’s bugbears?” he asked her, then had to clarify what he meant because the phrase had fallen out of use.

“New Celestial presence in-system. All very polite so far but they reactivated one of the ruins on the big moon of Fourth Sister. And they’ll work out we took some of their stuff, and maybe that’ll be a problem, but we’ve got quite a punchy planetary defense force these days. We’ll have to see. There’s a secessionist movement amongst the colonies on the nightside continent that’s gaining momentum. Aunt Vishni is negotiating right now, but we reckon we’ll have to let them go their own way. It’s talk and ideology now, but in a generation’s time it’ll be fighting if we try to hold onto them. Let them go and hopefully they’ll be happy trading partners, maybe even asking to rejoin us in a century’s time. We can, as we always say, afford to be patient. And there’s a nasty little movement just kicking off that wants to strip rights from the Awakened, but we reckon there are basically three industrialists who are pushing that, and if the worst comes to the worst, we have some good triggermen on-world right now.”

Jonah considered that. “That’s how we do things, is it?”

“Not if we have any option, but every time they open their mouths to their followers a score of dogs and pigs and dolphins get hunted down and beaten. It’s a weapon in our arsenal, Uncle Jonah. You want the full particulars and a seat on the board to make your voice heard, you know it’s yours for the asking. If you’re staying.”

“Am I?” he asked himself. He’d been sure he would, but so many things had changed. Perhaps the best service he could do, for his extended family here, was drop off his cargo and work out what distant star was calling to him. There’d always be somewhere. And then, of course, the world would have moved on even further when he returned. Young Iris here would be an old woman, would be dead, would have set off on her own voyages of discovery, and then where would he be? Forever the man they’d made the statue of, even after people had forgotten what any of it was for.

Except that curse, at least, would never be his. The whole point of the family business was to ensure that the Travelers were never forgotten. Someone would be waiting to talk the returnees through what had changed, ease them back into the world.

He heard a murmur and then someone was walking past the staff to their booth, an uneven tread and a faint whir of servos that spoke of an artificial leg. He looked up and his eyes widened.

“Eloisa?”

She was older – older than him now, where she’d been a few years his junior growing up. But she was only a little older, not a whole generation. She grinned, teeth flashing silver in her dark face.

“Jonah Redclaw, as I live and breathe! Look at you! Six years, and barely a day on you.”

For him it had been two. For the world around them, three decades since the pair of them had last stood under this gravity, in this atmosphere. He embraced her fiercely, feeling the weight of the muscle her adventures had put in her.

“The leg’s new,” he noted.

“Got cut by a Ghost over on Hambara,” she said. “My engineer rigged my mech suit so that the socket plugs right in, though. Runs better that way. You sticking around, old man?” Her nickname for him now bizarrely detached from all objective time, just as they both were.

“I…” Suddenly it felt very good to have solid ground beneath his feet, a world where he was known at least second-hand. “For a while. If you are. About time I pulled my weight, put in a day at the family firm.” And it wouldn’t be forever, he knew. The stars would call him out there again. But sometimes it was good to slow down, let relativity catch up with you.

“Good.” That radiant grin again. “Let me show you round.”