Work Text:
Jack saw T’Mir put the money in the jar.
Of course he did. Watching T’Mir work was even better than the library. Geometry in the way she angled the broom just so. Physics and acoustics in the shh-shh motions of her sweeping. And, yeah, chemistry, too. The unrequited kind, but that was all right. In theory, necking would be great, sure, but there was something … elegant … about T’Mir. Regal, even. Untouchable.
Almost otherworldly.
Maybe T’Mir was secret royalty living the life of a commoner before ascending to her throne, her interest in meditation a way to set down her burdens of responsibility. Those guys she lived with could be her bodyguards. That made more sense than some of the skeevy ideas Billy would toss out when he was drunk at the bar.
Because how the heck else did T’Mir get a roll of fifty-dollar bills as big as Mom’s fist?
“Jack! Jack!” Mom screamed, she was so excited to see the money. Enough to pay for all four years of college if Jack kept his scholarship.
When T’Mir next came in to work, Jack would do something to thank her without asking questions. Regal royalty would like that. Manners, not prying. Appreciation without demanding an explanation.
But T’Mir didn’t come back to work.
Mom cried a little with Mestral gone, her face all blotchy-red the way it was when Dad first left.
It seemed the right thing to do, somehow, a few minutes after dusk, to watch for Sputnik in the sky, chill in the air and faraway glint on the metal sphere, and to speak quietly and with deference to royalty, “Thank you, T’Mir, for everything.”
Then there was college and studying and getting a job as a librarian in a town out west. Big, clear skies. During the day, Jack’s eyes focused on library patrons or the card catalog or shelves of books. But at night, Jack could look up, up, up at the stars … to look for T’Mir, somehow.
He told his wife about T’Mir the day of the moon landing. She’d nodded, sure, but she knew how much Jack liked to read and to think about places like India and Tibet, and it was probably easy enough to believe Jack had created a fantastical story around an ordinary woman who somehow decided to give away an eye-popping amount of money. He probably wouldn’t visit places around the world, anyway. Heck, Jack probably wouldn’t ever leave the country. He wouldn’t see or do anything special except in the pages of a book or the flickering TV images of the moon landing, so he may as well stop believing his own tall tales.
Go to work.
Help raise the kids.
The phone cord wrapped tight around Jack’s fingers, though, when Mom called to say she’d seen a guy that looked like Mestral at a diner in Philadelphia, un-aged in all these decades.
Weird, right?
Impossible, right?
If T’Mir hadn’t put the money in the jar, Jack probably would have died in the mines. There had been another accident a few weeks after college started. Not something to let his mind linger on, but the dust clogging his lungs from the Eugenics Wars was brutal, maybe like the old mines used to be, and Jack should have died ten times over by now, an elderly marvel of medical innovations: prosthetic hips, a prosthetic kidney, even a prosthetic heart with beats that felt real.
He promised Lily Sloane that he’d help her find titanium. Lily made sure Jack’s grandkids survived the bombings, so Jack could use the remnants of his library research skills—heck, the remnants of libraries—to figure out where there could be titanium, to play along as if Lily was right and Zefram Cochrane could stay sober long enough to build an actual spaceship. Besides, Zefram’s slurred words and drunken dances were reminders of what it had been like to grow up in a bar—God rest Mom’s soul—and the grandkids needed something to keep the hope alive.
Except Zefram’s spaceship went up and came back down, another craft landing afterward, not round or shiny like Sputnik, no glint from the sun in the darkness of night, humanity’s night, there was something poetic about that, and a man stepped out.
Elegant.
Regal.
Almost otherworldly.
Definitely otherworldly.
Not untouchable, though, Zefram shaking the alien man’s hand, and the economy collapsed a while ago but a roll of fifty-dollar bills as big as Mom’s fist floated, ghost-like, in that handshake.
Jack saw T’Mir put the money in the jar.
So, it seemed right, somehow, standing with his grandchildren before the dawn of a new age for humanity, to look away from the unfamiliar-yet-familiar alien, and to gaze toward where Sputnik once was and where Zefram had just been, and to speak quietly but with deference to faraway royalty in the stars, “Thank you, T’Mir, for everything.”