Sky-Man's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Sky-Man bought the tabloid from a kiosk in the spaceport concourse and read his own face on the front page. The photo showed him mid-flight, mask askew, the yellow eagle bright on his chest. The headline named him. The article named the street where he grew up, the house with the eagle carved above the door, and the fact that he was, at thirty-four, unmarried and looking. He folded the paper under his arm and walked to a bench before his knees decided for him. He had come to the spaceport that morning for one reason. A woman he liked worked the freighter desk, and he had spent a week planning how to ask her to dinner without the suit between them. That plan was finished now. Every person at every counter had a copy of the same paper. He could see it stacked by the coffee cart and tucked under a pilot's elbow. He tried anyway. He walked to the freighter desk in plain clothes and said her name. She looked up, and her eyes moved from his face to the paper on her console and back. She smiled the careful smile people use for money. She asked if he wanted the window seat to the forest moon. She asked if he preferred cedar lodgings at the waystation, the one with the picture of the old ship on its gable. She did not ask him anything else. He left the counter. He tried a woman at the bookshop. He tried a mechanic eating noodles by the fuel bay. Each one recognized him before he finished the first sentence. Each one softened in the same wrong way. One asked, laughing, whether the ring on the front page really let him fly. He had not been wearing a ring. The tabloid had drawn one in. He sat back down on the bench. A small bird landed near his boot, blue-winged, red-headed, white at the breast, tame from crumbs. He watched it hop. He thought about his father, and the eagle cut above the door, and the years he had spent believing it was only wood. He had put on the suit to find out what his father knew. He had not put it on to be sold at a kiosk. A shadow crossed him. A woman in a red-shouldered uniform stopped at the bench and looked down at the paper on his lap. Seven of Nine. He knew the face from newsfeeds. She commanded a ship out past the Vega belt. She did not smile. She said, "They printed your street. Move." He asked why she cared. She said, "I do not read tabloids for suitors. I read them for threats to my crew's shore leave." He stood. The bird flew. He left the tabloid on the bench and followed her toward the freighter gates, unmasked, unmarried, and, for the first time that morning, not being looked at like a prize.