-S.G.
Agape: Introduction
The planet gazed back at the boy, gigantic. Wreathed in a red glow, it reminded him vaguely of Erik, the gas giant that floated, comely like a bauble, on the perimeter of his own system. With an even thicker haze in his mind the boy thought of Mars, that shadowy red orb, the first planet to be successfully colonized – but the zeniths of olden days and the triumphs of long-dead civilizations were dead to the boy, like the Book of Genesis to an atheist. The only purpose that the dormant memories, cocooned as they were in the trappings of the irrelevant, served the little eleven-year-old now were as a trapdoor in the mind. Crawling through his forgotten history lessons, pushing his conscious around inside them helped draw the boy’s focus from the occasional rasp of a sob and the muted scuffling coming from the corner of the room. The boy’s mother was making preparations.
An hour slid by, and the air grew thick as pea soup with anticipation. The boy grew light-headed, partly from the oxygen depletion. When the collision had happened, there hadn’t been time for questioning or deciding. The pilot had been killed by the stray chunk of space rock, knocked sprawling across the cold metal floor of the cockpit with his head split open like an overripe melon, when the asteroid struck. The only other passenger on the tiny, retired military cab – a thick, doughy woman with an inch of makeup on – had hyperventilated. Now she lay unconscious, half-choked by drool and breathing thickly on the thin carpet that covered the floor of the passenger area.
The boy turned, and his mother wiped her nose noiselessly before attempting a smile. The boy did not return it. He had been born on a “mining rock,” one of the many thousands of listless, soulless pieces of space-coal, hurtling in the orbit of planet too gaseous to inhabit. He’d been a quiet boy, bookish and preferring solitude, and this did not fly well the sons of miners. So he’d learned quickly how to use his fists, and any trace of boyish innocence had long since left him.
The boy’s father, a quiet old drunk whom he rarely saw, had been relocated to one of the most remote semi-terra’d rocks on the fringes of Civilization (semi-terra’d meant, “semi-terraformed,” a loose, political term grafted by the mining companies to excuse the poor, horrid and often dangerous living conditions imposed upon even the most domestic mining colonies). The boy’s mother, an equally quiet, birdish woman who still wore spectacles made out of glass (not because they were antiques – they’d been her grandmother’s and her mother’s before that, but instead because she could not afford better ones, such as the only somewhat-outdated, plastic models or the new “living” contact lenses that adjusted perfectly to both the light and the wearer’s eyes), had taken the opportunity to move onto a homeworld, and had gotten a part-time job as a clerk in a gun shop to pay the meager price of sending the boy to a lower-end public school. Miner’s sons usually didn’t get schooling, so the boy, although he should have been at a disadvantage, had skipped ahead to the seventh grade (that was how poor the school was – it still used the outdated “grade” system) and was excelling.
Ada held back her little cries almost completely as she began to put the boy’s ACES (Acclimate Completely!...To Environments that are Strange!, the advertisement had blared. Ada had been so worried about the trip to visit the boy’s father that she’d bought the suit new, outdated though it was. The boy would have been grateful for its handiness, were he not focused so much on the impending flight he was to take on the Escape Shuttle) suit over his slim, bony body (his build, not the typical meaty one of a miner’s son, had served him well in countless bouts of fisticuffs – agility, the boy had discovered, was often more valuable than brawn, especially when the heavy could pay a price trying to gain ground swiftly in the so-often mucked-up gravity of the colonies), cooing softly as she did so. Inside his mind, the boy was distasteful. Such an emotional display would serve no purpose now, when so much was on the line (the boy didn’t admit it to himself, but part of this feeling, at least twenty-five percent of it, he would have reasoned were he conscious of it, was embittered anger, that Ada should show more affection for him now than she had in eleven years). She tousled his short, black hair and kissed his thin, cold child’s cheeks. She looked into his round, dark eyes with her own timid, brown ones. “Agape,” she whispered.
The boy knew what Agape meant. It was one of the oldest words he knew, stemming from a language that evolved before space travel was yet undreamt of in the mind of man. It was a Latin word, and it meant divine love. This had always been Ada’s prayer for him, that God should watch out for him in his most vulnerable moments. Just a single word, the g and the p mashing together to make the e just a puff of air when she said it: Agape.
But now was not one of the boy’s most vulnerable moments. In fact, it was his least. For that was one of his strengths. To barricade it all inside like a fortress of pig iron. The boy’s fathers had worked in the mines for over twenty years, but for all the rock and metal he had been around the boy had more steel in him than his father could dream of.
Less than five minutes later, a tiny cylinder was hurtling through space toward an unnamed planet. The boy couldn’t see his rapid descent toward its surface (for if he could have he might have been able, as the cylinder got close, to pick out thousands of myriad city lights, unmanned and lifeless like alien fireflies dotting its surface), but curled in the required fetal position inside the ejected Escape Shuttle, a handful of the boy’s emotions, in a moment of rare tenderness, trickled through the wall he had built, and as the shuttle continued to drop toward the red planet, an electron evading its cloud, favoring the shelter of the giant nucleus, a solitary word quietly filled the dark, cushioned cylinder, and the boy only said it once:
“Agape…”
