Swan Song (Book Three of the Icarus Trilogy) (7 page)

“So what’s this perfect name of yours?  I’m not saying I’ll do it, but I’m curious.”  Douglas heard a grinding noise and from the creaking of the chair realized that Goldstein was leaning forward.

Maxwell Garrison used to be a proud man, but he didn’t have pride in anything worth noting.  He had climbed to a very powerful position in the Commission, Director of the Northwestern Quadrant, and he had personally signed off on plenty of papers which had bettered the company’s bottom line.  Garrison had introduced a number of different weapons and tactics because of a few strokes of his pen.  But Maxwell Garrison was no longer a proud man.

Not after his employer had killed his wife and son.

Garrison had been on Midgard setting up his daughter into her new apartment at Hawking University when he had heard about the drastic actions taken by the Trade Union.  Maxwell had never been briefed on that possible contingency; he had never known that the battlefields of Eris were built on tons and tons of chemical warfare.  He would never have left his family on the asteroid if he had known.  Maxwell didn’t even get to have a proper farewell.

The middle-aged, balding man would never have a chance.  He had lost his will to live and his appetite in the days since.  He knew he should feel quite fortunate that he and his daughter Christine had not been lost in the struggle, but Garrison felt lost without Constance and that he had failed little Nathan.  Maxwell was supposed to protect them; he was giving away his life to the system so that his son and daughter could raise little children of their own.

Garrison picked himself up from his seat at the kitchen table and flicked on the light.  Dawn was already starting to filter through the windows of the small apartment, but he felt like the room needed to be a little brighter.  The bureaucrat hadn’t slept again; the couch was far too uncomfortable for the pampered man to catch even a few hours of sleep.  Maxwell had originally been staying in one of the luxury hotels in the area, but he was starting to run out of funds since he had lost his job.  War World Entertainment didn’t think that the destruction of Eris was enough to justify severance pay.

So Maxwell Garrison had started living in the apartment of his daughter.  The kitchen was small and cozy; yellow wallpaper graced the walls that made the old man smile.  Garrison remembered when Christine was moving in a couple of months ago and how he had helped make the apartment more suited to her.  Maxwell was usually lazy, but he felt like he needed to help his daughter with this one small step to another planet.  It had made his heart warmer.

He stumbled away from the kitchen and looked at the couch; he knew back in college he would have been perfectly fine sleeping on it, but rest came uneasily to the older man.  The springs would poke into his back and the material was rough, and with the discomfort came all the memories.  Garrison wished they would have been happy ones, but for some reason Maxwell could only remember the day-to-day annoyances.  He remembered Constance’s face as she wiped away the dirt on her hands from her gardening and that stern expression she wore as she reminded him to pick up some university merchandise.  Maxwell remembered his son rolling his eyes when he told the teenager that he loved him.  Garrison had only waited a second before leaving the boy to his video games and internet-browsing; Nathaniel had started to become difficult.

Even at the annoyances Garrison had to smile, but with the memories came all the pain and grief.  He would never hear his grown-up son say that he loved his father and Constance would never again greet him with a kiss and a hug and a complaint.  He would never walk again on Eris, his home of thirty years.  It was gone, and with it most of his family.

In the artificial light from the kitchen, Garrison continued to stumble towards the other end of the apartment.  For some reason all he wanted was to see his daughter.  He just wanted to see Christine’s face before trying to sleep again.  He walked over to the off-white door and was about to knock before he thought better of it.  He wanted to see her sleeping; he wanted to see her at peace.

Garrison opened the door and found the room in the general disrepair of a college student.  Hawking University hadn’t bothered to close its doors with the revolution; they were literally a world away.  Now, a month into the fall term Christine had fallen into the habits of a freshman student.  Clothes were scattered around the floor and her desk was cluttered with all different kinds of text materials that Maxwell knew she wouldn’t read.  That was the way of things with students.

The father let his eyes pass from the desk to the small bed in the corner and found his daughter bundled up in the covers.  Her eyes were closed, her dark brown hair was covering most of her face and she seemed just like she had been all those years ago when he had come home late and Constance had already tucked them in.  Garrison’s heart melted at that.  Christine would always be his little girl; it didn’t matter if she had started to like boys or girls or whatever.  It didn’t matter if she could speak to him on equal footing about current events or history.  Christine would always be that little child bundled up in covers.

It wasn’t long after Maxwell’s intrusion that Christine stirred within the sheets.  Those brown eyes of hers opened and the image of the child fell away as she jerked awake.  The young woman sat up in her bed and gathered the covers around her as a defense before she realized it was just her father at the door.  Christine breathed heavily and brought her hand to her forehead before she turned to look at the older man.

“Daddy.... Sheesh, you know how to scare someone.  What do you want?” she asked in her annoyance.  Garrison was shamed by the reaction and looked at his feet before turning back to the young woman on the bed.

“I....uh.... I’m sorry, honey.  I just.... wanted to know what you wanted for breakfast,” Maxwell made up on the spot, not wanting his daughter to know what was going through his mind.  She didn’t deserve to be reminded of their losses this early in the morning.  The dark-haired girl laughed at the comment and then flopped back down onto her pillow.

“Daddy, since when could you cook?” she asked as she turned and gave a little smile to her father.  Maxwell became flustered and looked down at his feet at the comment.  He hadn’t really thought it through.  The formerly-rich man brought his gaze back up to his daughter, who was busy rummaging around in the cheap, Swedish bedside table.  The young woman brought up the phone from the drawer and looked at it before sighing.

“Actually, Daddy, I don’t even have time, I have to get ready,” she said as she jumped out of bed and to her closet, throwing clothes on the floor as she decided her outfit for the day.  Garrison stood awkwardly in the doorframe for a minute before realizing he didn’t want to see anything his daughter was about to do.

“Are.... are you sure you don’t even want cereal?” he asked desperately.  All he wanted to do was spend time with Christine, but she always had a thousand things to do.

“I told you, Daddy, I don’t have time,” she said while looking over a light brown sweater, not even bothering to make eye contact with Maxwell.

“Well, ok, I guess I’ll just have one myself,” Garrison said as he backed out of his daughter’s room and shut the door.  The older man walked over to the kitchen table and time slipped away from him.  He didn’t even have the chance to go to the cupboard before Christine burst out of her room with her schoolbag and disappeared out of the door.  Garrison’s mouth was halfway open in surprise, wondering how she had gotten ready so fast, but then the door opened suddenly and his daughter was looking through the opening.

“Sorry, Daddy, gotta run.  You should go look around town today.  Get some fresh air,” she said with a smile and then slammed the door again.  Maxwell didn’t even have enough time to react.

“Bye, honey,” he said to the empty apartment.

Garrison sat at the kitchen table for a few minutes before realizing he was supposed to be making a bowl of cereal.  He stared at the cupboard for a few seconds before realizing he didn’t have the energy to grab a bowl and lift the box and then fill the rest of the empty space with milk.  It was completely unappetizing to the man.

Maxwell fell back onto the uncomfortable couch and squirmed against the now-familiar springs in the cushions.  He closed his eyes and started to count, desperate for any method to bring sleep to his tired mind.

Garrison lost count around two hundred and opened his eyes in his frustration.  He slammed his hand against the back cushion of the cheap couch and then slid himself around so that he was sitting on it the right way.  The old man held a staring contest with the television across the room for about a minute before he started looking for the remote.  He found it along with the other five remotes his daughter had placed on the coffee table and cursed his options.  The first one turned on the stereo.  The second started up the digital recorder.  Garrison finally found the remote to the television with the fourth and didn’t bother trying to figure out what the fifth could possibly do.  He just turned on the contraption and tried to appreciate the news.

Maxwell watched as they introduced a hippopotamus into the ecology of Solaria.  Some rich yuppies had thought it completely against the theme of their vacation that they couldn’t see any hippopotamuses, never mind how dangerous they were, and so after twenty years of protest the yuppies got their way.  Garrison was absolutely apathetic to the entire ordeal and the news segment only brought back memories of his own vacations on the resort planet.  He remembered little Nate grinning as the colored birds flew through their little bungalow.

The next two segments on the program were also little fluff pieces designed to make humanity forget about the bloody revolution happening just outside their front doors.  It was starting to make Maxwell sick.  The only reaction that it prompted in the former director was disgust in the system.  He angrily hit the remote lying on the cushion next to him and accidentally hit the channel return button.

All of a sudden the television was showing an entire wall’s worth of War World footage.  The channel return had led Maxwell to the War World Network, which showed all the best highlights and reruns from the program over the last fifty years.  Garrison was appalled that the network was still going strong after these two months of revolution.  He had figured that Montgomery wouldn’t want to anger the populace more after Eris.

Garrison watched the footage and saw a number of different celebrities from the games that were long dead.  Tojo leapt over a mech suit and threw grenades into the cockpit as he did; it was one of the plays of the year and Garrison actually remembered watching it live.  The middle-aged man didn’t notice it, but while he watched the footage he was gritting his teeth.  As the Japanese slave soldier ran away from the blast, Garrison’s fists were clenched.  He couldn’t contain his anger any longer and slammed his curled fists into the coffee table in front of him.

Miraculously the table didn’t break from the effort, the Swedes had done well with this model, and Garrison rolled back onto his rear and started to nurse his hands.  He was still angry, but the pain had shocked him back into rational thought.  Garrison looked down at his hands and could feel the ache in his teeth from the grinding.  The middle-aged man was breathing heavily as he realized that raw emotion had taken hold.  He hadn’t felt that kind of passion in years; he hadn’t felt that kind of rage in decades.

The older man walked to the bathroom and removed his clothes before taking a cold shower, doing his best to recover his poise.  He didn’t know where all that emotion had come from; it made perfect sense to him now that Montgomery hadn’t turned off the channel.  Jasper wanted to show the world that the slave soldiers were really just show-off celebrities who had no real cause to rise up.  Seeing that program was enough to bring Maxwell’s blood to a boil and he didn’t know what to do with that emotion.

As he closed his eyes and let the cold water hit him in the face he could hear the background noise of
War
World
coming through the walls.  The acoustics bounced back every explosion and gunshot and every bit of raucous laughter from the commentators and it became enough for Maxwell to start breathing heavily again.  There was no peace to be had while the program ran, and Garrison was starting to get tired of it.  The older man heard Franklyn Stone laughing and couldn’t take it anymore.

He attacked the wall where the showerhead was attached and could feel the echoes of the strike coming through his arms.  He struck at the wall with his fists again and again and felt an endless rage starting to pour out of him.  The older man was heaving his arms forward and could feel his belly swaying from the effort, but that didn’t matter.  He had to get rid of this emotion somehow.

After a few moments of strenuous attack, Maxwell was winded and held himself up against the wall.  There was little damage on the thing, one of the tiles was slightly cracked, but as Garrison looked down he could see red swirling around the drain.  He stood up and brought his hands in front of him, seeing the broken skin around his knuckles.  They hurt, but Garrison didn’t seem to care.  He felt slightly better, in fact.