Bill Jordan's Barn

It was night-time at the crofter’s cottage where Iskira had grown up, and in this place, remote from the university by more than a hundred miles of crag and tarn and moor, nights were dark. That same dark night reigned all over the globe. Pre-Nottingham Earth was not destined to end for over a decade yet.

The young student Iskira was sitting by oil-lamp in the solitary barn opposite the cottage. High over her head in the blackness of the rafters loomed the great ached back of an interplanetary escape-craft, one of its engines missing. Iskira had removed her wig and contact-lenses so that her eyes and hair were back to their natural purple, but the pinkish body-paint of her human guise was still on. She looked exactly what she was – someone torn between two worlds.

Into the barn strolled Bill Jordan, Iskira’s adoptive father. He joined her on the hay-bale where she was sitting. She greeted him with the smile of one who has nothing to smile about, and the smile he returned told her he knew. Bill lit up a woodbine.

“We never see the real you anymore,” was how he opened the conversation, after his first exhalation of sweet-scented smoke. “When you were a kid getting back from school it was the first thing you’d do, take a long bath and wash off that stuff so you could get some sun to your skin again. Beverley was saying just the other day how much she misses that little silver smiling face…”

The last sentence was delivered with a chuckle, in which Iskira did not participate. “I must practice the make-up every day, Father,” she told him. “Until I find how to get it absolutely right. It’s more important than it used to be, now that…”

Her voice petered out, but Bill understood. Children didn’t put their faces as close to one another’s as people did when they reached the age Iskira had become. Nor did children touch each other in the same way, or devote so long to merely looking. Bill took another draw on his cigarette, this time giving a deep sigh as he did so.

“Iskira, you don’t know how tough a decision it was for me and your mother to send you away to school,” he began. “At first we never imagined anything but keeping you here, where no-one ever comes, and educating you ourselves so you wouldn’t have to hide who you really are. But even by the time you were ten, we could see you were turning into some kind of scientific genius. You deserved to be everything you had the potential to be. And a pair of simple folks like us…”

Iskira gripped his hand and squeezed it fiercely. “Don’t ever say that again, Father,” she commanded, tears in her eyes. “You and Mother rescued me from that spaceship, raised me as your own…I owe you both a debt I can never repay.”

Bill patted her hand. “But we knew we’d be putting you through this,” he finished gently. “We knew these times would come.”

He did not need Iskira to remind him they would have come regardless, or that they would still have brought something of the pain she was living through had she been human-born. Father and daughter alike were already aware of that much. They sat for a while in a silence somewhat more comfortable than that which had preceded it, until Iskira commenced again quietly:

“The Martian woman in the ship – I suppose she must have been my birth-mother?”

“That’s what we’ve always assumed,” Bill replied. “Beverley and I noticed you were a long time at their graves today, up on the hill. One of the others I’d guess was your father. Not sure who the third man was…”

Iskira snorted a sudden and humourless laugh.

“There’s the pattern,” she remarked, in an absent voice addressed far more to herself than to Bill.

The latter, though he heard, neither answered nor queried the incongruous statement. After a moment or two he directed his head at the Martian ship, whose embarkation-ramp he had noticed was standing open to disclose a lit interior, and continued: “Is that why you’ve been onboard today too?”

His daughter shook her head. “I was watching the data-log,” she responded darkly. “Father, are we facing the same? Every time now that I view those well-worn images of human science annihilating the last traces of civilization on my homeworld, I wonder how far we can be from turning the same manmade blight on ourselves. Each nation arms itself more frantically by the day. Threats, blockades, final warnings…is this planet fated to doom itself, as it has already doomed mine?”

“You landed on a world sorely in need of heroes, Iskira,” Bill agreed gravely. “We’ve just got to keep our hopes alive that the better side of man can somehow win out in the end.”

“That is not what my mentor tells me, Father,” she responded, in a voice so shrunken and wan it could barely be heard. “Lately he speaks of nothing but readiness. His intellect awes me as much as it ever did…but now it frightens me too. I never dreamed even he could conceive of such terrible weapons, such nightmarish destructive power. But he insists he is changing only as he must, only as deteriorating conditions demand, only as war becomes inevitable…”

“Now, there’s a chap we don’t hear a lot of these days,” Bill slipped in. “When you’d just started your studies, all you ever talked about was this supervisor of yours. Not so much of late though.”

Immediately he resumed smoking, as one who had voiced words of no especial consequence, and his tone was as mild and conversational as it infallibly was. Iskira however started, and gazed speechless at him.

Those kindly wise features, that pink age-lined face as familiar to Iskira as her own, had a way of being the most knowing and the most reserved all at once. As casually as his last utterance had been made, Iskira was in a single moment certain that somehow Bill Jordan had gathered everything. Was it possible he had found out about the engagement? Let alone the doubts and second-thoughts now plaguing her on that subject? And could he even know, this extraordinary old man who always appeared so humble, what truly lay at the core of Iskira’s turmoil?

Could Bill Jordan know about roguish smiles and a whisky-roughened voice, about twinkling brown eyes and a chiselled unshaven chin and a lean muscular build, all of them belonging to a swaggering young laird who drank and brawled and threw his family fortune around, and yet who was not the wastrel he pretended to be, no, anything but, for in the research labs Iskira had seen that much already. What ideas he had! Certainly, his was an untutored mind and not the equal of Irwin’s, not yet, but there was no question that this classmate and contemporary was speaking to her own scientific sensibility in ways she had only ever imagined a far senior scholar would be able to, and this in turn had already opened up for Iskira wondrous sparkling vistas of possibilities they might perhaps be able to realize together…

Bill’s strong old arm was around her shoulders.

“But you know why the tough decisions are so tough?” he said to her. “Because they’re the ones when you know, right from the very start, what you’re going to do.”

His voice was soft and trusting. It came as no surprise to Iskira when, with a last fond embrace, Bill Jordan rose and departed.

As soon as he was gone, Iskira fished Dr. Mendelssohn’s engagement ring out of her breast pocket.

Cause and effect. It was the first law of science, but as she looked down at the ring in the dim lamplight Iskira saw only the latter, that small fragile diamond shattered, the thin gold band slagged into a mangled straight. There were too many variables for an hypothesis as to the why. If she had lived in a world of peace and accord, would Irwin’s fixation with its worse-case scenario have become this mania whose steady growth she had witnessed and learned to fear? Already she was determined she could neither marry nor love him if he continued thus. But if James had not walked onto campus and into her life when he did, would she not have tried harder to be that madness’s cure? And if Irwin were truly losing his senses, was it destined to happen no matter what…or would it be Iskira herself who condemned him to inescapable decline, the moment she handed him back his ring?

On that long-ago night when Iskira sat alone in Bill Jordan’s barn, the answer to that question was beyond her reach.

Now however, it would have been clear enough even to a less perspicacious scientist than she.