Jeff Kozzi

Chapter 2:  Bolas Scharo

upper atmosphere, Shelswun, Intergal 1:1:62179

In a matter of seconds, a low-pitch hum sounded from the back of the racer and rose to a pitch so high it hurt the human pilot’s ears.

The racer wasn’t supposed to make a noise like that.

Bolas Scharo veered the plane over Shelswun’s skyline, looking for a rooftop that would make an appropriate landing pad. He was kruup away from Kapital, and nowhere near Ellis Port. He calmed his fears and turned the racer around, rationalizing simply: the unfamiliarity of the sound frightened him, and the stresses of being Shelswun’s popular but ineffectual governor impeded his ability as an ace pleasure pilot.

The explosion changed his mind. Pieces of the racer burst away from the flier’s hull and began falling to Shelswun’s grey surface. Smoke lined the arc of his flight, mixing with Shelswun’s grey atmosphere.

Bolas’ hands danced over the controls. He depressed the activator for the ejection seat with his pinky. When nothing happened, he pounded the button with his first two fingers.

Still nothing happened. He remained in the failing aircraft.

A chain reaction spread through the plane’s systems. Bolas Scharo’s legs began to burn. He screamed.

Pain ushered a quickly-spreading feebleness. His right hand on the throttle, Bolas reached down with his left to tap at the communications board. It sparked in response. A screech sounded. His left arm burned.

"Hold...together..." he urged himself in a hoarse gasp of a whisper.

The racer lost altitude.

He scanned the landscape below him, looking for some place to bring the racer down. Shelswun was a crowded sitiworld. No oceans or parks or grasslands graced its surface. The moon was completely developed, pole to pole. He searched for a less populated region, a perfect place to bring the racer down.

But was there any perfect place to crash and die?

He decided on a smelter siti. Few workers, most without any sense of smell, shifted there. Bolas may have already halfway counted himself dead, but he still fulfilled his role as the worldly governor, looking to do the best thing—or the least harmful—for his people.

More pieces of the racer broke away.

Scenes of his childhood replayed before him. Isolation dominated. He saw Bodine, older and taller. Bodine, the first son of Shelswun’s governor, the man who would become governor on his fortieth birthday. Bolas, the second and last son, grew beneath his brother’s shadow. Bodine would be governor, and all attention and indulgence went to him. Bolas was left much to himself, except when his duty called. As the eldest son of the monarchial governor, Bodine was assured the throne of Shelswun, and his childhood had reflected that with an education according to his promised duties. As the younger son of the monarchial governor, Bolas was taught less, of a curriculum that did not include Bodine’s lessons of politics and policy, government and grace, business and bureaucracy . The differences were sharp; Bodine would fulfill his duties as an adult. Bolas’ duties were served in childhood, literally the whipping boy for Bodine’s misdeeds and failures.

Bolas’ life unfolded in segments as the racer twisted in its plunge.

Bolas was sixteen. Tutorship over, he pursued education in fields of his own choosing, living his preferences for fast ships and good times at the Shalhoon Akademi, forming his circles of acquaintances outside the snobbery of the Shelswun elite. Free of petty dictates of how royalty should behave, Bolas acted on his impulses. He met Cosha, and the two fought, gaining probation from the Akademi. Disciplined together for their fight, he and Cosha forged a friendship that never diminished and, all too frequently, led to further trouble, but as partners rather than as adversaries.

Worlds they visited replayed before Bolas’ eyes. Faces and places mixed and mingled, flashing by more quickly than Shelswun’s smog passed by the racer’s cockpit windows. Meanderings and philanderings passed as fragments of memories, too elusive to hold his fleeting attention. A Moonite, Cosha Kabenta was, at least theoretically, the opposite of princely Bolas Scharo. Their friendship became an exchange, and Bolas learned more—street learnings, as opposed to book learnings—about life and love and liberty than he had learned all his life on Shelswun. The drudgery of stance and poise fell to the freedom of fun and virtual hedonism.

Bolas returned home to Shelswun for Bodine’s wedding. Bolas inspected the bride, polite and beautiful. Quiet and sullen, he watched the precision of ceremony and coupling and dowries paid. He got drunk at the wedding, as if living his life elsewhere. He couldn’t remember if the tabletop outburst "Get the dowry back—the bride ain’t pure!" had actually come from his mouth or if it had sourced from a fabled legend of exaggeration. The disapproval of his parents and their circle of influence came down. Bolas left happy, not because he had been home, but because he was once again leaving what had once been home.

The plane approached Shelswun in a twisting angle.

Bolas was twenty. He graduated the Shalhoon Akademi, no longer the same person he’d been at sixteen, no longer the proper prince to be hushed when Bodine entered the room with his regalness and weight-gaining wife and bratty children. He remembered the arguments and lectures, the accusations and contempt, yet Bolas failed to hold the "proper" life of Shelswun aristocracy, not in contempt of his parents, but because he’d learned to accept and savor simple— and more sincere—lifestyles.

The night of drunkenness that followed replayed before him. He saw himself as he stumbled through the alleys.

He woke in bed, with a simple but beautiful woman of his own age tending him. He remembered her father, and how Blane Webster forced Bolas from his cube as soon as Bolas could stand. Bolas had never forgotten Webster’s anger and fear. The image replayed again as his racer spiraled worldward, just as it had haunted his dreams ever since.

"Veronika Masi Webster! You’ve tended him, now ge’rido’ him!! The richmen’ll be lookin’ an’ they’ll be blamin’ us all for his condition!"

Big and boisterous, an aged textileman with dire need of a bath and new clothes, Blane Webster watched from the window, afraid of what might be assumed of his possession of the governor’s son. Without time for expression of gratitude, Veronika sent Bolas from the tiny cube and into the streets of the slums. Webster’s fear ran with him, as did his daughter’s innocent beauty.

Bolas returned that night, flowers in hand for the young woman who had found him in the alley and had risked her own safety to tend to his needs. A courtship, approved of by neither her surroundings nor his, began. The objections of Bolas’ "peers" and his father’s advisors abounded.

Every facet of Veronika Webster that Bolas had fallen in love with replayed as the racer pierced the polluted clouds. The opposition his family voiced turned what might have been a philandering effort (Veronika had shunned his every advance with insistence to save herself) into something deeper. Rebellion sprouted dedicated love, and Bolas spent less time with his Shelswunion acquaintances and more with Cosha and Veronika and offworld friends.

The images continued to pass through his mind. He could no longer feel his legs or his left arm. The racer continued to fall.

With the penitance of a prodigal son returned home too late, Bolas attended the initially solemn affair of his parents’ and grandparents’ funeral. The untimeliness of their deaths sprouted anger and spurred suspicion. Bodine exploded upon sight of Veronika on Bolas’ arm.

"Her kind killed Mummi and Daddi!"

Bodine’s proclamation sparked the official report that proletarians had planted the bomb that had killed the governor, his wife, his mother, and his father, his retired predecessor. Six innocent people were executed as the engineers of the plot.

Bolas and Veronika married at a wedding blacklisted by most of Shelswun’s elite. Bodine attended as a formality, without his wife or their children. Living off an inheritance barely a fraction of Bodine’s, the newlyweds spent much of their time offworld, until Bolas was called home following the death of Bodine and his family.

At twenty-three years old, the whipping boy became governor. Few political allies stepped forward, barely in time to block private legislation that would have barred Bolas’ taking the throne unless his marriage to the "classless richless tramp" was annulled.

Bolas no longer felt the pain associated with his damaged limbs. He no longer felt the damaged limbs. The racer responded in spurts. He seemed to forestall the inevitable.

Bolas was twenty-four years old, and the most popular governor Shelswun had seen in millennia. The billions of people, from all races living and working on overcrowded Shelswun, loved him and Veronika, "queen of their kind." The elite hated them both. Bolas’ attempts at improving life for people like his divorced in-laws—the common Shelswunions—encountered obstacle after obstacle, particularly his intentions of reforming the Shelswunion political scene from monarchy to popular democracy. Bolas was, after all, the first governor in centuries who could implement such a transformation with almost no risk of losing his position in an uncorrupt election.

Veronika’s announcement of her pregnancy met with mixed opinion and opposition. The rumors that the deaths of Bolas’ family had been engineered to bring Bolas to power continued unabated.

The endless line of buildings and structures loomed closer as the racer failed. Bolas’ grip on the throttle weakened.

Bolas Scharo was twenty-five years old. His heavily pregnant wife kissed him goodbye with a loving squeeze to his buttocks, and he climbed into his racer for his daily joyride, not without concerns about the delivery that could happen in minutes or weeks. Until the racer’s alarm had sounded, the impending birth of their first child had dominated Bolas’ mind. Now he faced the very real, very sad fear that he would never know his son.

Bolas’ last daily joyride was ending. His love for his wife and unborn child were not.

The images of his life ended.

An image of Veronika, not quite seeming real, replaced all else.

The racer crashed.