(First published ‘Streets and Stars, October 1989)
The Viper glided to a halt in the landing bay. Apollo eased back in his seat for a micron, adjusting, stretching cramped limbs, letting the battle-alert tension drain from his body, then reached out to unseal the canopy. He climbed from the cockpit with the ease of long (overlong!) practice and slid to the deck, nodding a greeting to the ground crewman who stood by, waiting to take the ship over for its routine maintenance scan. The technician smiled in reply but didn't stop to speak, and Apollo turned away toward the turbolift. He was tired, his mind numbed with the endless centars of silence and solitude, his eyes filled with blackness and with the faraway shining of starlight. He needed a while alone, apart, to unwind, to adjust to reality; the fleet seemed somehow distant and dreamlike to him now.
As he slowly crossed the bay, a sound intruded into his dulled mind; a faltering thread of a melody that wound through his thoughts, slowly enwrapping and overwhelming the everyday, routine noises of voices and machinery that cluttered the air. Without conscious intent, Apollo found his feet turning toward the sound, tracing it to its source.
He knew the song; everybody knew the song. He'd sung it himself often enough.
Wings of silver, wings of fire …
The warriors' anthem. Untried cadets sang it sentimentally, picking out the chords on a half-learned liot, or hunting the melody one-fingered amid the keys of a celesta; seasoned warriors sang it through in their heads as they sped through the indifferent stars for what always might be the last time, whilst old, battle-torn veterans who would never fly again heard it played and had to turn away. It said it all: a few simple words, trite, even banal when written down and read coldly, a simpler melody; but together they melded into a vision, jewel-clear, jewel-bright, or what it meant to be a warrior, of what it was to fly: of honour and duty, and of the pure, cold beauty of the stars; of the dream that sent young men out into the unknown, to fight, even to die, all for …
… for what?
Blaze, my heart …
For survival; that could never be denied, never forgotten. But there was more to it than only survival, than this bare existence that could only by default be called life; so much more unspoken. Even after all these yahrens, Apollo could not have put into words what it all meant, what it was all for. Certainly not right at this micron, when nothing seemed very real in any case.
My soul's desire …
The singing had trailed away, the song incomplete. There was movement over to his right; Apollo glanced across. A Viper hung there in a cradle, its control panel open, the blackened scar across one silvery fin telling its own tale. A technician was working on it, gently probing with a laser torch into the network of slender silver filaments, fusing severed wires together. He must have heard Apollo's approach, for he glanced up, dull-eyed, and said, tiredly, "Y'need help, pilot?"
It wasn't the way most people would have spoken to a warrior, still less to a squadron leader, the Galactica's flight commander, but Apollo barely noted it. Staring, still caught up in the dream, he said unbelievingly, "Bard?!"
The band was Orpheus, and that was the name tagged onto their disks; Bard their leader, and he the one for whom the audiences chanted. But to the fans, the true believers, he was simply 'the man'.
There had always been music in the Colonies, and even before; the tradition stretched back to the dawn of human memory. But Orpheus was different, and the difference was Bard, whose music resonated in the human soul, whose words were torn directly from the human heart. Young, old, it didn't matter; his music was a universal language that all could understand and few, if any, could resist. He and his band had been a legend throughout the star systems before the destruction. The night of what should have been the peace treaty they'd been playing a huge, free, open-air concert in People's Park in Puerta Libra, Bard's home town. They had been halfway through the first set when the Cylon ships had come. Amidst the explosions and the screaming and the panic they had stood calmly, finishing the number even after the sound and video relays had been knocked out so that no-one could hear them. And then they had vanished, presumed killed, as so many others had vanished, died, in those days of living hell that had sprung from the Cylons' treason. No-one knew for sure, of course, but in the confusion … anything could have happened.
And now Apollo stood in the Galactica's landing bay, face to face with a legend, knowing the man from disk sleeves and vidscans and from a few distant glimpses from the thick of a crowded auditorium. The heavy, dark, waving hair was a little greyer, a little longer, the bones of the face worn a little finer, the eyes hollowed and shadowed with pain, but no believer, having once seen the man, could ever again mistake him. Off-balance, feeling as though he had taken one unexpected step too many across the borders of another world, Apollo said again, "Bard?"
The technician's face closed in on itself, and he started to turn away/ Apollo moved in on him, grabbing a slumping shoulder. "What're you doing here?" he demanded, still not certain that the face he recognised was real and before him, not a figment of an overactive imagination, a delusion brought on by too many long centars alone in empty space. "Why - ?"
Bard snatched free and swung around. "What's it look like I'm doin'?" he countered. "I'm fixin' circuits."
Reflexively, Apollo stepped back. For a micron, something very like pure hatred had sparked within the lustreless eyes. Uncertainly, he said, "You were singing …"
"There a law against it?" the man snapped. "You oughta know – warrior." Then the fire went out and he sighed, his body untensing. "Everyone sings. That song most of all. Seems like I hear it 'most every day."
"No-one sings it the way you do," Apollo said quietly.
A shrug, dismissive, disdainful. "I got better stuff to do now. Which'd you prefer, warrior – me to sing songs, or to fix your ship so you can still fly after you got it messed up?"
"Is that a serious question?"
"I'm serious. What's more important to you, warrior? Music? Or stayin' alive?"
"But no-one but you can write the songs," Apollo said. "Isn't that important?"
Bard's eyes met his, bleak and empty. "Not any more," was all he said, but Apollo sensed the dumb, aching agony behind it. Bard had been wedded to his music; his family, his band. He had lost it all; had come to this. Apollo had been there too, known that same pain; he'd lost lovers, friends, family. His wife.
But he could fight back. Maybe that was what made the difference.
"You're alive," he said. "Doesn't that count for something? You can't just opt out of life."
"I'm livin'." The singer's expression remained inflexible. "I'm payin' my dues – more'n if I was still singin'." Unexpectedly, his eyes softened. "You gotta be practical, warrior. Sentiment's fine, nostalgia's fine, when there's a time for them. Right now …" He shook his head sadly. "Right now, there's no time. No time for nothin'."
He spoke no less than the truth; but not the whole truth. Apollo tried one last time. "We could make time. People miss you, Bard."
The other man turned back to his work. "My disks are all in the libraries. I'm retired. Now, I got a job to do – okay, pilot?"
It was a dismissal, as positive as any the Commander might have given, and as final. Defeated, Apollo nodded, and left the man alone.
But he couldn't leave it there. Through all that day and through the night, lying wakeful in his bed, the songs ran through his mind and, with them, the memories each held: melding, merging into dream, but remaining perfect, crystallised.
The concert at the Academy: 'The Chosen Few', 'Promise of Tomorrow', 'Millennium Dreams', 'Hearts on Fire' … Marta, dancing until her feet bled, laughing, refusing to leave until it was over … he'd had to carry her out of the park in his arms, out away from the bright lights and the noise, away from the crowds …
I thought I'd never let her go …
Zac, ten yahrens old, stumbling across the notes of 'Shelter From the Storm': "I can't reach this chord, how does he reach this chord, what's he have, double-opposed thumbs or something?" Their mother, leaning over him, setting his fingers on the right strings, showing him the fingering; Adama, home on furlon, wincing at a flat note and insisting on retuning the liot to his own perfectly-pitched ear …
Quarrelling with Marta, standing back in explosive silence as she packed her bags and left; playing 'Winds of Change' over and over for centars, listening, remembering, wishing things could have been different … finally swallowing bruised pride and deciding to call; going past the open window, looking out into the street and seeing her walking slowly back …
Athena at sixteen, 'borrowing' her older brother's disks for a party of her own, one of her friends breaking the crystalplayer, the two of them giving up outings for a sectar to pay for the repair before Apollo got home from patrol; she'd come to meet him at the spacedrome and poured out a white-faced confession there, brought him the man's newest disk as a coming-home present: 'Run to the Sea'; he still had the disk, all the man's disk's, somewhere among his few treasured personal possessions …
Marta again, in their shared apartment, insisting on sticking up a holo of the man in the kitchenette: "But he's so gorgeous, Apollo!" And himself, dryly: "Thanks, sweetheart, and I love you too." But the picture had stayed; blackened and curled at the edges, it had still clung to what remained of the wall, that night when he had gone back to find her …
… and had found her …
That memory woke him as it always did, always would.
I can't just let it be.
The man was a part of his past, a part of all their pasts, an important one. And, so long as they had a future, a part of that future, too. There was little enough to celebrate in the fleet, little enough of beauty or joy; the people's souls, their hearts, were hungry for music and the dreams encapsulated in that music, the dreams and the magic that Bard and Bard alone could weave from empty air.
How could he deny them the gift he had to give?
Off-duty again a few days later, Apollo returned to the bay and sought out the technician. Bard might have been expecting him; when he saw him he only gave a resigned shrug and set his laserwelder carefully down by his side.
"I knew you weren't the kind to let it alone," he greeted the warrior, and his mouth stretched into a tight line that might once have been a smile. "You were a believer?"
Apollo nodded. "As far as I could be, yes."
"The Academy." Bard's voice held bitterness. Or was it only regret? "Yeah. I guess that always had to come first."
"You played there," Apollo reminded him. "In the grounds – the yahren I graduated." Memory tugged at him again: Marta – oh, Marta! "You played Hearts on Fire like we'd never heard it before …"
Bard smiled faintly, distantly. "'We'?"
"My girl …"
"Gone," the man said softly; not a guess. "Gone, like all the others."
"Yeah." Apollo looked into the man's eyes. "I found her – afterward. But that's not the way I remember her. I remember her the way she was the night you played; I'll always remember her that way. That's what you gave to us, Bard: a kind of magic. And we need that magic now more than ever. We need you, your music. Some of us have our memories, and maybe that should be enough for us, but others don't. And the kids who've never seen you play, never heard you – don't you think they deserve to know how it was, how it can be?"
Slowly, Bard shook his head. "I've told myself – I should try. But I've lost heart, warrior. All those songs about life and hope and fighting back, about building a new world out of nothin' … I just don't believe in it any more, any of it. And if I don't believe it, then how can I sing it?"
"You've stopped writing?"
Bard looked at the warrior and grinned lopsidedly, without humour. Standing, he crossed to a nearby locker, pulling it open. Scraps of paper flew out, rustling to the floor; the space inside was crammed with them. Apollo looked a question; the other man held out a page to him. "See for yourself," he said.
Apollo took the page. It held perhaps a dozen lines, and half of those scratched out, a stillborn embryo of a song. He looked again into the haunted eyes.
"I've tried," Bard said. "I have tried, warrior. I'm not the coward you maybe think I am. My music was everything to me. I thought – I thought, even if I couldn't sing it no more, at least I could write the songs so's others could sing. But I can't. The words won't come, the music won't. There's nothin' there. That part of me's dead, warrior, dead and gone, and I just don't think I can get it back. Maybe," he added softly, "maybe I don't even want to."
Apollo kept his voice quiet, gentle, understanding. "Why? Why, Bard?"
The man only looked at him, his face unreadable, then bent to regather the papers and stuff them back into the locker. He came back to sit by Apollo, fingers flexing and unflexing nervously around drawn-up knees. "Look," he finally said. "What do they sing? All of them? What is it you hear all the time, what do they even teach them in instructional period these days?"
Apollo opened his mouth to answer, but the man carried straight on.
"Wings. They all sing Wings. The warrior anthem. I wrote that. They sing it as they go out to die; they used to carve the words on warriors' deathstones. How it is to be a warrior, what it means, how it feels. And when the Cylons came, where was I? On stage, singing. Not fighting – singing. Singing while the audience ran and died, while the band stood behind me and fell and died too …" He stopped; his eyes were tightly closed, as though in pain. At last he opened them again; whispered, "I'm not a warrior. What right do I have? How can I write songs to send them out there, our kids, send them out to fight, die? Who am I to preach to them like some kind of frakking god … oh, god." His voice was dull, drained of life and hope. "I don't want to sing any more. God, I don't want it. I got nothin' more to give, warrior. So I do what I can instead."
"We all do," Apollo said mechanically, "what we can." He looked down at hands clenched in impotent fury; frustration at things lost that could not be regained, a grief that could not be consoled. "Whatever we can."
Bard turned dull eyes to him. Then, reluctantly, he smiled a little. "I got no cause to mourn," he said. "I had enough in those last ten yahren to last me the rest of my days. And there's my disks, like I said. Warrior, I wish I had something more for you, more'n you can know – but that's all there is. It's all I've got."
"Then that'll have to be enough," Apollo said. "For now. You do what you think you have to, Bard – but I am a warrior. I can fight, and I will. I'll be back." He climbed to his feet, looking down into the other man's upturned face, the eyes that were shadowed by the guilt of a million innocent deaths, and said again, like a vow, "I'll come back."
He had seen that look before, had known that same emptiness. There was nothing to be said when a man lost hope, nothing to be done; the only way to fight it was to fight it yourself. And how can you fight if you don't care whether you win or you lose?
It was the beginning of a strange, nebulous friendship, its limits and terms never firmly defined, yet fully understood on both sides. Apollo would come to the bay always; Bard never stepped away from his own environment, as though afraid that the world beyond would claim him for its own and never allow him to return to the shelter of his obscurity. The warrior's visits were of necessity irregular, but Bard was invariably unsurprised to see him, accepting his presence as natural. They would talk, though of neither the past nor the future, only of such small matters as could do no harm; yet there was a harmony, an understanding between them, so that their silences, though often long, were never uncomfortable. Apollo did not mention Bard's music again; but nor did he forget it, ever.
It became a source of considerable amusement to the squadron, their Captain and his occasional unexplained absences. Speculation was rife, and rumour wild and improbable. Apollo let them talk, and listened to the stories, faithfully reported to him in detail by Starbuck, with interest and a certain sense of incredulity.
"I should only be so lucky," he said once. "Where do they think I'd get that sort of energy? Let alone the cubits?!"
Starbuck only grinned. "Well," he said, inarguably, "you are the Captain!" Starbuck, of course and as usual, knew everything without being told, but enjoyed listening to the speculation too well to spoil it with the far less exotic reality. Apollo, for his own part, respected Bard's need for anonymity. Besides, he enjoyed the stories too.
And so it was for the best part of a yahren. Life in the fleet pursued its predictable round, with now and then some more or less dramatic turn of event to break the monotony. Battles were fought and won, new worlds charted and explored; supplies ran low and had to be renewed, tempers ran high and had to be placated. There were deaths, peaceable and otherwise, and births, although these were few. The Cylons seemed lost; other dangers took their place, and were overcome or brought to terms, as best the Colonials could defend themselves. Then the Cylons reappeared, and one more battle was fought, and after that it seemed that they were truly gone, this time forever – although, remembering the last time, no-one ever quite dared believe. The warriors patrolled; the civilians prayed. Life went one.
It was in Life Centre that the change began.
Apollo's hands were burned, raw and weeping. His control panel had blown a circuit as he brought his Viper in to land, and the resultant powershock had flung him violently back in his seat. The ship had slewed dangerously across the bay as its pilot lost consciousness, and only the rapid efficiency of the ground crew and the fact that they systems had been close to full shutdown had averted disaster.
"We've been getting a lot of cases like this," Cassiopeia was saying worriedly as she sprayed the blistered skin with a painkiller. "What's causing it, Apollo?"
He shrugged noncommittally. "Nothing, really," he said. "Coincidence." Which was a lie. The fact was that the Vipers in service in the fleet had been in use far too much for far too long and were beginning to show the strain – which, Apollo reflected, was true of more than just the Vipers. But there was no point in saying so; Cassi would only worry still more and, since there was nothing that could be done that was not already being done and proving ineffectual, worry was pointless.
Cassiopeia looked at him closely, hearing the lie in his voice, but she was intelligent enough and worked so closely parallel to the military as to be able to guess not only the truth but also Apollo's reasons for not confiding in her and, further, to know to say nothing. By such small deceptions are our lives made tolerable.
"I might have known it would happen to you," was all she said. "I'm so used to seeing you in here, I start to worry when you stay away for more than a couple of days."
"I do it on purpose," Apollo said calmly, back on familiar ground. "It's the only way I can get close to you without getting Starbuck jealous."
"I wish," she said, but didn't specify what she wished. She smoothed out the edges of the skingraft to bond them, and watched as Apollo flexed first one hand and then the other to test the meld. "Okay?"
"Good as new," he told her. "Thank you, Cassi." He looked up at her; his gaze flickered across the room, held, and his eyes widened. "Lords of Kobol …"
"What - ?" Cassiopeia looked over her shoulder to see what had caught his attention. Doctor Paye stood there, talking to one of the lab technicians: a tall man, big, with skin so dark that he must have been of pure Virgon blood; dressed in fleet uniform, he was nonetheless individual, unforgettable and unmistakeable.
"Is that - ?" Apollo sounded dazed. "Is that who I think it is?" he finally managed.
"If you think it's Negus, then yes, it is," Cassiopeia said. "He works in the haemogrouping lab – has done for a long time now, he came and volunteered not long after …" Like most of the Colonial refugees, Cassiopeia never mentioned the destruction by name. "It was what he trained for before he met Bard and joined Orpheus. Did you not know?"
"I didn't even know that he'd survived," Apollo said, still not certain; a sense of déjà vu caught dizzyingly at him. "No, I didn't know. I wonder …"
There was a long silence.
"This seems to be your day for half-formed thoughts," Cassiopeia dryly observed. "What do you wonder?"
I wonder if Bard knows? Apollo thought, but did not say. He looked up at the medtech and smiled disarmingly. "Nothing," he said. "It's not important. Thank you, Cassi."
The woman watched, resigned, as he crossed the room and the doors drew to behind him. "Any time, Captain," she murmured to the air. "You're welcome." She sighed to herself; she was accustomed to only ever learning part of a story. "I guess I'll never know."
Negus was used to being recognised. He had been a major celebrity back on the Colonies, but, once seem, he would still have been difficult to forget even without that advantage. He met Apollo's rather diffident approach placidly, neither taking offence nor showing the least surprise, and he said exactly what Bard had said.
"You were a believer?"
Apollo said again what he had said to the man. "As far as I could be, for the Academy. But that's not why – I mean, I'm not – " He felt awkward, intrusive. The big man sensed it.
"Is something wrong, Captain? I assure you, I don't object to your speaking to me – but you do seem to be a little unclear of your motives."
Apollo nodded. "I am. It's because they're not my own motives, and I'm not sure if I have the right to say to you what I'm going to." He hesitated, then said abruptly, before he could regret his decision, "Did you know that Bard is still alive? That he's here, aboard the Galactica?"
The other man hadn't known; that was clear before he spoke, in the wave of emotions that crossed his face. "On this ship?" he echoed, finally, and, when Apollo nodded, "Doing what?"
"Viper maintenance."
"Ah." Negus considered, his self-possession regained. "Yes, that makes sense. He always did have a flair for mechanics – he was one of those who can read a microcircuit panel as easily as you or I could read a page of print. Some people can, you know." He looked keenly at the warrior. "So he's keeping busy and making himself useful. That's good. But he's isolating himself – and that's bad; very bad. Not just because it's a waste of his talent, although it is that, but because of the harm he must be doing to himself. Will you take me down there?"
"If you'll come with me," Apollo said, and together they walked along the corridor toward the turbolifts. "Do you mind me asking – the rest of the band - ?"
"By some kind of miracle," Negus said, "most of us still live. I can only assume and give thanks for the fact that the lords of creation are music lovers, but not sufficiently so as to wish to call us to perform for them before our time. Saskia and Devlin have not been seen since that last concert. The rest of us not only live on, but Rossignol and Daleth and I were all evacuated aboard the same shuttle."
Apollo was silent for a micron, remembering with regret the flamboyant, brilliantly gifted celestinist and the reputedly insane rhythmer. "And the music?" he finally asked.
"Also lives on. Things have not been easy. Intership travel being so limited, there have been problems in all of us getting together for rehearsals, besides which, surprisingly enough, there is a notable lack of musical instruments in this fleet, for hire, loan, or love; even the legendary, or so I would like to think, name of Orpheus cannot unlock every door. Still, we persevere. The gods do seem to be with us; at any rate, they sent us a new celestist even better than Saskia, as well as Pulsar, whose name you'll know – ?"
"He was supposed to be the strongest rhythmer in the business a few yahrens back," Apollo confirmed, impressed. "The gods have got to be on your side."
"M'm," Negus agreed. "But, as I said, we still have our problems. Another one," he continued, "has been our lack of new material … and of a strong lead singer."
"Do you think Bard will join you – come out of hiding?" Apollo asked, daring to hope for a micron that the problem he had set himself would be so easily resolved. Hope faded as Negus shook his head.
"I think not. You see, Captain, I understand his motives." They had reached the turbolifts; Apollo pressed the request button to take them to the maintenance section of the landing bays. "I'm only a musician; I'm not greatly troubled by the strength of my finer feelings. But Bard is also a poet, and that gift has a price. No-one can claim that their own pain is any greater or any lesser than another's, for no two individuals will react in the same way to any one event. What happened on our worlds affected everyone. You, Captain: you suffer your own grief, your own losses; to a lesser extent you suffer those of your friends and, to a still lesser extent, the losses of your colleagues, acquaintances; and so it continues, becoming more and more distilled, to the griefs and losses of the nameless, faceless millions – but the pain fades, becomes unimaginable with distance." His voice grew stronger, underscoring what it was he had to say. "So it is with you, or with me, or with almost any of us. But for Bard, Bard with his empathic understanding of the human experience, Bard the eyewitness to the secret heart of us all – to Bard, each individual sorrow is as real, as sharp, as unbearable as his own, and the weight of that burden is unimaginable, must be intolerable. No man could have borne it; and the very sensitivity that births that awareness renders him ever more vulnerable."
Apollo said nothing for a few moments, taking in what the other had said, turning it over in his mind. "I can't put myself in his place," he finally said. "I don't have that depth of feeling. But it seems to me that to be able to write about the experience might act as a kind of therapy, a kind of catharsis. Locking it all away and hiding from it can only make it worse." He grimaced deprecatingly. "Forgive the amateur psychology, but I had to listen to a lot of this stuff myself when I went through a bad patch a while back."
Negus looked sidelong at him. "And did it help?" he enquired gently.
"Surprisingly, yes. It took a time, but in the end …" Apollo looked up into the big man's face. "Time may have been all I needed. It may be all that Bard needs, but somehow I don't think so." The lift stopped. Apollo opened the doors, and the two men stepped out. "I think that seeing you will help."
"I think so too," Negus said seriously, "or else I would not have asked you to bring me." He looked around the bay curiously, its vast, empty spaces that the constant traffic of ships scarcely began to fill, the vaster space distantly visible beyond the force field barriers; so familiar to Apollo that he barely observed it any more, to a civilian it was off-limits, a fascinating glimpse of a different life. "Where - ?"
Apollo steered him in the direction of the maintenance hangars. "I'll see you in and then wait outside," he said. "You'll have a lot to say, I imagine, and I don't want to intrude."
Negus smiled, warmly and for the first time. "You're very considerate, Captain. I appreciate it. Thank you."
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