“What?” said Pater, his voice snapping in the large office like a frozen twig on a cold Christmas morning.
“I’m getting married, Pater! And I wanted you to know about it!”
Dallas’ smile could have lit up a room with happiness, had the news been given at a happy family event in a roomful of receptive, joy-filled family members.
But as he’d given the news in his father’s office, at the second highest point in the family’s fortress city, and to his father alone after a particularly difficult and not entirely successful morning of trade negotiation, the news was not well received at all.
Dallas’ smile faltered as he saw his father sit slowly at his desk. His eyes were not looking at Dallas, but turned inward to some secret place that Dallas had never seen.
“I- I had no idea,” said his father. His voice sounded more surprised than shocked. “I had thought for certain you were going to ask for your brother’s place as the pilot of the Galatine. As the leader of our defenses.”
Dallas spoke slowly, his speech the slow, hesitant words of a man walking through a minefield. “You don’t sound angry, Pater. But you’re not happy either. Are you upset?”
“I am upset, Dallas. But more because I have so completely misread this situation, despite the accuracy of the intelligence given me. You- you’ve been keeping company with a girl, I know. But is she your intended?”
“Yes! She’s beautiful, Pater! Wonderful! She loves me and I love her! She works for our family, she follows the Faith, and she's sworn she'll support me in all I do! She’s just the kind of girl I-”
“Hold,” Pater said, raising his hand. “This is the girl from the lower levels, yes?”
“She’s a waitress at one of the lower-level restaurants, yes. What’s wrong with that?”
“What’s- what’s wrong? Saint Mazinga, lad, what’s right with it? How did your paths ever intertwine?”
“I was with my friends. We were slumming. We were hungry, and stopped in the place. She’s lovely, Pater! Beautiful, intelligent, and faithful too! She attends Mass on Sunday at Saint Chromatius' parish, and her family is wonderful, too!”
Pater inhaled slowly, his eyes widening as he looked at the desk before him. “Son, my dear filius, you perhaps misunderstand. Or you’ve read too many Shakespeare plays with your tutor. This- this wedding you are so joyful about- it simply cannot be. It will be neither good nor profitable for you, your family, or your future.”
“My future,” Dallas said the word as if it tasted like dirt in his mouth. “My future, Pater, involves sitting in this place, waiting to see if anything interesting will happen. And the only way that will take place is if one of my brothers dies! I don’t want that to be my life, and neither would you!”
“Son,” Pater said, rising, “this girl- it’s normal for a young man to see women. Court women. Perhaps even love them. But a woman of this station…son, I, too, loved such a woman, once. Long, long ago. BUt it wasn’t meant to be, either. I was angry at my parents for their refusal to bless our union, but then- then I met your mother at a function. And she captivated my heart, my soul, like no woman ever did, before or since.”
“And the fact that marrying her nearly doubled our family’s influence had nothing to do with it, hm?”
“You will have to re-learn how to speak to your elders, Dallas Morgan!” In one smooth motion, Pater had moved in front of his desk, locked eyes on his son and rose a pointed finger barely six inches from Dallas' nose. His tone was no longer dreamy and nostalgic, but instead angry enough that a few flecks of spittle had flung and settled on his salt-and-pepper colored goatee.
“And you’ll need to learn, Pater, that I’m not some little kidling anymore, whose knuckles you can rap when you don’t like what I’m doing!” Dallas yelled back, his hands now bunched into fists and his head leaning forward.
“I’ll treat you like a man when you’ve earned it boy, not before!”
“How can I earn it if I can’t make my own decisions?”
Pater's own left hand was a fist now, his right opened and waving behind him at the vastness of the dark, starry night outside. “If your decisions involve playing ‘fear and run’ with a battlemoon? Or compromising our family’s interests so your hormones can be satiated? Perhaps I should just give you a blaster now with a single loaded chamber, and you can start playing Red-Star Roulette with it! It’d be safer than the route you're traveling, believe me!”
“You think you know better than me? What's better for my life?”
“I know your life impacts a hades-a-lot more than you, boy! Remember your oath? The motto of our family? Your life and your decisions about it impacts me, your Mater, both of your fratris, everyone in this fortress, on this world, and in this territory!”
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“Leave them out of this, especially my brothers! Houston loves his test tubes, Austin loves his holo-paints. But me? I love Secunda, and nothing’s ever gonna change that! Not you, not Mater, not Houston or Austin, and especially not a billion or more people I’ve never known and I’m never gonna meet!”
“You are a scion of the House of Morgan, Dallas!" Pater yelled, his right index finger stabbing at the floor fo emphasis. "Those people you’ll never meet depend on us for safety, security! That they’ll wake up tomorrow without worry that a Red Star bomb will drop on their city, or a Corporate swarm will land in a troop carrier, kill their family and confiscate their farms!”
“I’m Dallas Morgan, and I’d rather be happy with a waitress from the ground level than live in some joyless marriage so billions of people I’ll never meet can pay a better price for soybeans!”
“Is that what you think of your Mater and me? Soybeans?”
“No! I think you traded the girl you loved and your globulos for a title, a pretty office and a bunch of lines on a starmap!”
Dallas was unprepared for what happened next.
Dallas’ father, Texas Morgan, Earl of the territory of New Avalon and head of the House of Morgan, pulled back his right fist and swung with genuine intent to harm another human being for the first time in over two decades.
Having been trained by the same man as his father, Dallas instinctively dropped to the floor and swept his leg under the bigger man.
Expecting the attack, Texas jumped in the air and stomped down hard with both of his booted feet, fully intending to break the ankle of his attacker.
Dallas yanked his leg back quickly and rolled back to the wall, leaping to his own feet in the fighting stance of the Horse, feet exactly eighteen inches apart, knees bent, right arm bent with a fist pointed at his father and the other bent arm and fist covering his chest.
Pater was fit for a man his age, but breathing hard. “You,” he said slowly, looking at his son’s perfect fighting stance, “you, will go. Out of this office. You will spend an hour tonight, sitting in front of your great-grandfather's sword. You will meditate on what he had to do to get that sword, to build it, and what he used it for.”
“I’m going to marry her, Pater.”
“Silentium! And you think about and pray for wisdom regarding what privileges, duties and responsibilities your birth has given to you!”
“I’ll go. And I’ll marry her, with or without your approval.”
Pater straightened himself, adjusted his shoulder pads and raked a slightly bony hand through his graying but still dark hair. Winded, his deep breaths kept punctuating his speech. “If you act in any way against this family, (breathe) Dallas, recall that I’ve taken (breathe) the same oaths that you were taught. I mean to keep this conversation (breathe, smaller) private, and I- strongly advise you do the same.”
“I’m leaving, now, Pater,” Dallas said, moving slowly out of the office, maintaining his Horse stance and backing to the door while facing his father, eyes riveted to any part of the larger man that could become a threat.
“Dallas, my- my son, please-”
“What?”
“You- you have a name any woman in her right mind would cleave to. But son, my son, please be certain you know who this girl is. Know her, know everything, before you do anything that cannot be undone. If you leave like this, you will forfeit everything that is your here! ”
“I know exactly what I’m doing, Father.”
“Remember your great grandfather’s sword!”
“Good-bye, Father.”
Dallas finished backing out of the office, and watched the door slide shut. Turning his back in more ways than one he strode with a military bearing away from the office of the man who’d raised him and been a part of every day of his life.
He pushed the button to call the lift. As it hummed to his floor, he took one more look at the sword hilt in its case.
Great-grandfather James Bowie Morgan made that sword, his tutor had told him, while a war prisoner of the Red Star. He cobbled together pieces of tech, stolen from the labs he’d been made to clean and sweep at night, eventually creating the first holo-knife. A simple, added dial lengthened the blade to a sword, and he used it in the prisoner uprising to free an imprisoned princess of New Avalon. Awarded her hand in marriage by her father, and and earldom of territories besides, your great-grandfather covered the sword hilt in unbreakable adamantite chrome, and decreed it would be passed down as a weapon to be worn in battle by every descended head of the House of Morgan forthwith…”
The door opened, and Dallas Morgan had the first of what would be many imagined conversations with his Pater.
That sword is who we are, in more ways than one, Pater. We are descended from junk. Trash. Pieces cobbled together with a shiny, metal coating covering our rough edges and fragile parts. We’ve been used for a great purpose, but perhaps have forgotten who we really are.
And maybe it’s time…
Dallas got into his fighting stance again, now only a foot from the sword’s display case.
His fist flew in a blur of motion, striking the ancient glass and shattering it.
No alarm sounded; none was ever thought needed.
His hand, miraculously uncut, reached in almost of its own will and wrapped itself around the sword hilt that he’d seen ten-thousand times or more growing up, but had never touched until this moment.
The metal was cool, smooth, and fit him better than any glove he’d ever worn.
He strode into the lift and heard his father’s door open behind him just as the lift's door slid shut. The lift dropped, propelling him away from his Pater and his office. Were anyone to tell him he would not set foot in his home after today for the next ten years, he would have fallen to his knees and wept, just his Pater, unseen, was now doing at the closed turbolift door.
TO BE CONTINUED….