Sometimes the right decision leads to the chance of a lifetime.
I married much later in life than my business partner, Marcus Aurelius Kirk Jr., so although we retained our friendship from childhood days, I had eliminated most of those friends who were stuck on boyhood immaturity long before my marriage to Commander Khadijah Biles. She also discovered who her true friends were, so at 43 and 35, we were able to make our decisions together with very little but wise counsel around us.
When Capt. Benjamin Banneker, Khadijah's uncle, got sick during our honeymoon, changing our plans to be near him often was an easy decision for us to make. The bachelor scientist and commander had plenty of support without us, but he deeply appreciated us being around as often as we were even after he was clearly in no immediate danger.
One day we arrived for a visit, and Uncle Ben was looking as weak and sick as we had seen him – but he was on the phone, and just in shock.
“I mean, I predicted it, and I said there was a 15 percent probability that it would recur in this century, but I never thought … .
The Lokustrum, like humans and humanoids in general, are carbon-based beings, but there are planetary carbon states and then there are stellar carbon states, and the Lokustrum were of the second order. Put another way: they were plasma-based lifeforms made mostly of carbon in plasma state. They lived much as stars do, as it happens: consuming hydrogen and helium and by nuclear fusion (in digestion, as the Lokustrum case is) turning them into carbon.
The star Loku is a stormy yellow supergiant, but from the Lokustrum perspective, it is an overflowing blessing because there is always a nice big solar flare for them to eat, and as the star cycles, their populations increase and decrease accordingly.
Once per century, on average, Loku cycles up toward a spectacular stellar storm, a fact recorded in the ice cores of its one habitable world, Lokuss. But the fact that Lokuss has ice, and is pleasantly habitable at its relatively short distance from Loku, was a great mystery when young Lt. Cmdr. Benjamin Banneker, ship's science officer, was on the first fleet ship to ever set eyes on the Loku system.
The young science officer discovered from the evidence of the ice cores and also tree rings what was going on: the Lokustrum took cues from Loku's cycle to come out of their normal patterns milling in close orbit with the star to take up positions around the planet Lokuss and literally eat up the stellar storm as it was pulled in by the planet's gravity.
He also predicted the shape the Lokustrum would take around the planet based on the somewhat erratic magnetic field it has, and that although the Lokustrum's numbers would be so great that they would partially block Loku's heat and light from the planet's surface, they themselves generated enough light and heat to partially compensate for that – so, the trees experienced a long, deep winter and the ice cores were big, but also full of carbon ash from the abundance of the planet's protectors. That was the only explanation for the very small tree rings and the huge ice cores instead of non-existent ice and massive tree die-back that should have been recorded because of Loku cycling into its storm state.
From examining the melt and freeze patterns of the system's asteroids and comets, the young science officer determined that Loku normally stormed about every 120 years, but comets that took hundreds of years orbiting in and out of nearness to Loku showed melt patterns that were more frequent – more like 70-80 years. However, the asteroid record, re-examined, showed that this was a rare occurrence – perhaps once in every millennium, Loku stormed twice in a century.
So, in the 23rd century, Loku had stormed in 2202. That had been observed, although the Lokustrum had not from the distance and direction of the observation. With all the available evidence, then-Lt. Cmdr. Benjamin Banneker had predicted its next storm run-up and the next theoretical Lokustrum response as likely around 2420, but that there was a 15 percent chance that Loku was at its millennium mark based on the deepest ice cores available, and so might storm twice in the 23rd century and so reveal the Lokustrum Metamorphosis.
And this is how Khadijah and I got to see the usually once-in-a century Lokustrum Metamorphosis on the rare short version of its re-occurrence within a century, predicted by none other than Capt. Benjamin Banneker. People would be paying once-in-a-lifetime ticket costs to get a view of the Lokustrum system from a safe distance, and the fleet the retired captain had faithfully served would be controlling access … but that same fleet would provide him, and thus us, the view of a lifetime.
Mrs. V.T. Kirk, the wife of my business partner, had been married to my best friend and had thus been a friend for so long by then that I had to get married to a fleet commander of my own to be reminded every day that Mrs. V.T. Kirk was the awesome individual known at work as Full Fleet Admiral Vlarian Triefield, the highest-ranking woman and science officer in the fleet. She did Mark a favor by doing his Cousin J.T. the favor he wanted most of all – “Get the flagship out for this, Admiral,” she told him, and then remembered the man once her captain and mentor, along with his niece and new nephew by marriage.
“Get the fleet flagship out, Admiral Kirk, and pick up Capt. Banneker and the Dixons to bring them out here in style.”
So, Mark's cousin got to be back in command of the ship that made him famous, and he was so happy he did not even think that he was not the star of the show any more – all the dignitaries and scientists and thinkers he also picked up only had eyes for the captain that celebrity to that point had passed by. It was, at last, Uncle Ben's show!
The Lokustrum performed magnificently in Uncle Ben's show, having already come together in the beginning of their great organization by the time we arrived – billions of them, rolling into the same orbital plane as Lokuss itself. Once they achieved that, they tightened up, their angular momentum and thus their speed increasing as they began to overtake the planet itself.
And still tighter, to gain the speed necessary to “swallow” Lokuss, while the slower-moving Lokustrum trailed out in a fabulous pattern showing the overlapping in this still of the arcs of gravity produced by the mass of Lokustrum and the gravity of Lokuss itself:
All of this took a week, during which time Uncle Ben humbly and calmly spoke with everyone who wanted to speak with him, within the limits of “light activity” his physician called every day to remind him of.
“After all, ladies and gentlemen,” he would say, “if I follow my doctor's orders, we will have the next twenty years to talk about the Lokustrum – if not, this will be the last you will see of both of us!”
Mark and I picked up so much business for Kirk and Dixon Shipping and Kirk, Dixon, and Oahuapedal Solutions it was ridiculous.
“Well, a once-in-a-lifetime chance for us as well!” Mark said about it. “Your uncle, like my cousin, is such a gracious, generous champion of a man!”
“Don't put me in there with Benjamin Banneker,” Mark's cousin J.T. said. “I'm not there yet. A man has to still have things to aspire to when stuck on a desk job he hates!”
Given who Mark's cousin is and was and yet would be, the size of the compliment he had given Uncle Ben was immense … and fitting.
After a week, the Lokustrum overtook Lokuss, and collected themselves tightly around it, but then broke form.
“If I'm right,” Uncle Ben said, “the rest will be quick.”
He was right. Admiral Triefield ordered every single ship put on night mode, life support only and sensors only, so that every single person present could watch in the next hour as Benjamin Banneker's prediction panned out in detail.
Lokuss's magnetic field was complex and erratic, so in order to fully provide exterior protection (or at least from the Lokustrum perspective, get set up for the buffet from Loku, the star getting ready to take over the show with a huge stellar storm), the Lokustrum had to make a particular formation...
… and, sure enough, they came out in the exact position young Benjamin Banneker said they would, forming an “exoskeleton” to the planet Lokuss.
“Now THAT is a bug I would hate to get that on my windshield, even on my favorite starship here,” Cousin J.T. said about it some time later, but there were no jokes made in the awe of the moment, because just after we had stared long enough at that, those of us in the admiral's lounge were next riveted by the silent tears rolling down the face of Benjamin Banneker the aged, seeing with his own eyes what his mind had seen 55 years earlier: a set of aliens who formed a collective in the shape of what they individually were: a plasma-based creature that resembled a very large insect.
Admiral Triefield came to attention, and all the officers followed suit – she saluted her former commander, and all the officers followed suit. They left. The other dignitaries took the clue, and also quietly departed, leaving Khadijah and I to wrap Uncle Ben up with a big hug as he wept for joy.
There was another reason Admiral Triefield and the officers had left quickly – it was time for all of us to go. The great flagship of the fleet came alive almost suddenly, yellow alert, shields at the ready, and so did the rest of the flotilla assembled, technically under command of Mark's cousin J.T. Everybody who was going to get to the surface of Lokuss for close observation had to get there; everybody getting off Lokuss had to get off and out of the system because Loku was about to put on the fireworks, and everything not on Lokuss in the system was about to get scorched. Everyone responsible for the observation of how the Lokustrum were going to interact with the stellar storm had to get in position with their ships.
Time was that Benjamin Banneker would have been running on his young and then his first and second pair of bionic legs, right in the middle of all the activity … but he was now in the time of his life when he could sit and wonder again at the sheer magnificence of the galaxy, and respond as his heart desired.
“Lord, that You have allowed me to live to see it … how great Thou art!”
We sat with him for another six hours and watched from a safe distance as Loku fulfilled the second part of his prediction and stormed mightily, and just enjoyed this deeply personal time of awe and thanksgiving with him.
“Is this the greatest honeymoon ever or what?” Khadijah said to me later on when Admiral Triefield had pulled rank on all of us and told us to go to bed.
“Wouldn't have missed any of it for any world whatsoever,” I said.
“Rufus,” she said. “I just realized – you were offered the riches of many worlds. You chose to get a plant and head home, and so saved Uncle Ben's life!”
“Khadijah, you know I'm a straightforward man. When I say I wouldn't make that trade, I mean it.”
Khadijah said nothing for a moment, and then shed tears.
“In Uncle Ben I had the best uncle and the best father after my parents passed away … and he set me up to have the best husband in the galaxy, and that's you.”
“A man has to have something to aspire to on these desk jobs,” I said as I wrapped her up in my arms and kissed away those tears. “Being the best husband to the best wife with the best uncle in the galaxy is definitely a goal I look forward to getting up for, every day of the rest of my life.”
