"When I didn't hear back from you," Gabriel said, as softly, "I stopped writing. I thought maybe you didn't want to." He trailed off.It was fear that made him stop, the sudden realization that, whatever and whoever his father might have been when Gabriel had seen him last, he was not that person any more."I wrote to you, too," his father said. "They must have stopped the messages, intercepted them. Bastards!"The two of them sat quiet for a few breaths. "Tell me one thing," his father said. "Has it been worth it?" Gabriel blinked."Before you. I mean, before it went." his father struggled for the words. "Before you left, you were always sure that everything was going to go well for you. A great adventure."Gabriel sighed. The constant wonder of starrise and starfall, the sight of new planets, strange people, aliens, danger and sudden unexpected delight. He wished he could find words, or time, to tell his father all about them. But crowding them out came images of fire in space, the briefest millisecond of screams before death took his friends, the walls of that jail cell on Phorcys, the cruel set of Elinke Dareyev's face the last time he saw her. Rejection, pain, loss, betrayed expectations."Worth it?" he finally said and wasn't sure what else to say. How did you put worth on a life? Was it fair to judge it merely by whether things had gone well, gone according to plan or not? "I guess so. Things haven't been all bad."Gabriel thought of the luckstone. Whatever else might be happening to him, boredom wasn't part of it. Uncertainty, yes, but life was uncertainty to some extent. "They'll get better," he said. He put all the conviction he could find into the statement, hoping his father would believe him.He looked up again, met the elder Connor's eyes, and was not quite sure he'd carried it off.
