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In the beginning, Stephen sold the tragedy of it: their parents die in an explosion on a shuttle transport, on a mining planet, on a ship that collided with a freak meteor shower, leaving the two orphaned boys alone in a derelict, drifting in space until they were picked up.
The truth? More sordid, and he leaves it out of the stories he tells to teary-eyed port officials, shop owners, transport cops. To be honest, Stephen doubts Bloom ever knew or cared about their own origin: a father that left, the slam of doors, the crash of bottles and the waft of ethanol evaporating.
When their mother left them in her turn on Altair IV, telling them she’d be back after shopping, to wait for her at the fountain, Stephen knew. She wouldn’t meet his eyes beneath his father’s hat, only patted his head lightly and turned away.
Bloom’s pudgy baby hand was in his; Bloom was playing with the broken dice Stephen had found beneath their bunk – they only rolled snake eyes, single dots staring eternally up, no matter how hard you shook them, but Bloom didn’t care. He crowed with delight each time they landed, rattled them in his palm, and threw again.
Bloom didn’t see her leave, disappearing into the crowds of people, her red coat blending in with the mass of colors and the water in Stephen’s eyes until she was gone. Later, when he learns about ancient art, archaeology, Monet, he thinks of that moment, but doesn’t say.
It was better that way; Stephen doesn’t tell that story. In his stories, no one leaves.
Knowing or not, Stephen waited for her not to return until the station’s market closed for the cleaning shift, the stalls closed up and ported out, the streets empty and echoing.
“Clear out, you lot,” the bot-man said upon finding the two brothers huddled there. “Ten helo-secs ‘til close. You know what happens to lost tots,” which Stephen did, he supposed. Altair IV was a trading post, one they’d visited in his youth, before Bloom. His father had told the sordid tale of boogey-men and child-snatchers, and beneath his put-upon act, Stephen had heard a ring of truth. Altair IV thrived on unpaid labor, and sales sometimes of a darker nature, done after market-close.
Bloom looked up at him, suddenly aware, chubby-cheeked and wet eyed.
“Don’t cry,” Stephen said, and mimicked a pose he’d seen often, hoisting the younger onto his hip, nearly falling beneath his load. “Don’t cry. We’re going,” he told the public servant, whose eyes were already elsewhere.
The bot-man turned back, and cocked his gleaming head. “Your parents will be waiting?” More a question than a statement, one the young Blooms would hear again, until they’d made it fully grown.
“Of course,” Stephen lied. “I see her there,” he pointed, and satisfied, the bot-man left, having done his duty, or as much as he saw fit. “Don’t cry, Bloom, don’t cry,” he begged, and the toddler buried his snotty face in his neck. “Look up, the stars are coming out.” An old trick, one that often worked; the little Bloom loved stars.
He lifted his head, tears tipping over the rims of his eyes, down his cheeks, but the sobs had stopped.
“See the dragon there, above the horizon? And the brightest, that’s our sun. Do you see them?” Bloom nodded. “I’ll show you every one,” Stephen vowed, and his brother babbled out the shapes he saw as young Stephen toiled on, listening with half an ear.
“Story!” Bloom begged, the stars losing their shine as the night wore on. “Steffin, story!” Keep him quiet, his mother had often said, and this the best trick of them all, to keep the younger Bloom silent and enthralled.
“Once,” Stephen said, ignoring the hot tightness behind his eyes as they passed a red-coated matron they didn’t know, packing up her wares, heading home for the night. “Once, there were two brothers, that caught a star and sold it.”
By the time Stephen had made his slow winding way to the nearest transport, to the next open market, a place with light and food and, Stephen hoped, a place where plans could be safely created, the cleaning crew was out in force.
Bloom drowsed against his shoulder, drooling, content, as his teary-eyed (crocodilian tears? Stephen leaves that detail out of his own personal narrative, even now) brother pled his case to the considering captain of the crew.
The half-metal man said, “There’s a hefty fine for trespassing after-hours,” eyeing the two with his one pupil, but seemed to soften at the tale – “It’s my fault,” Stephen sniffed for all his worth. “She’s waiting for us in Quadrant 12,” the wealthiest district on Altair IV. “There’ll be a reward, for sure, for our safe return.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” the captain said, nodding and patting Stephen’s shoulder with a heavy hand, then helping them aboard the vehicle. “We’ll watch you for the night, then take you there, straight away.”
“Thank you,” Stephen oozed, ignoring the trembling in his hands. Bloom watched with wide eyes and held his brother close.
“The two of you are healthy lads,” the captain said, more to his crew than to the two of them, spinning the wheel and motioning two workers aside. Bloom and Stephen tucked up in their space, warm against the engine well.
“Sound as sendicots,” Stephen agreed, holding his brother closer and watching the streets pass by. He counted the shop fronts he knew, waiting. “Are there any spare rations? It’s only that my brother’s hungry, and he’ll cry.”
This produced the winces expected, and the captain grudgingly thumped a compartment with his hand; it fell open, food packets within, doled out unwillingly to the Blooms. Stephen marked its location well.
His hope: that they would pass the street of vendors of antiques, who closed up for the night, but did not leave. He remembered open windows, shops of winding towers of books and cloaks and other defunct delights – a place to hide and wait out the night.
Stephen, at that age, hadn’t yet learned to write a complex tale. This is a story spun of desperation, and there are many holes. But Stephen has his share of luck, and the gift to use it well – the vehicle hit a snag in the streetway, the captain turned his head, and Bloom and Stephen exited, rations stuffed down the younger’s shirt in a crinkled mass, and an open window in their sights.
“Damnation,” he heard from behind, and the clunking sound of feet, but then the cursing stopped. “Leave it, lads, there’ll always be another night.”
And the next chapter of the Brothers Bloom begins, there, in the archivist’s shop, and none but Stephen knows the prologue now.
In Stephen’s story, they’re not orphans. They’re never alone. They’re brothers, the Brothers Bloom, sprang into existence wholesale, a germ of an idea that came to life, stepped onto the screen. Their origins shrouded in mist and mystery. It’s better that way, and they’re always together.
Stephen can rewrite the universe to suit his needs. Their lives aren’t going to be tragedies, now.
Bloom never asks, not on any planet, not on any ship, at any age. He just turns his face into Stephen’s shoulder and sighs tremulously. Stephen rubs his back and tells him the stories he learned from holovids – the archivist had kept them, taken their presence in with an impassive eye and moving on to its work again, while trembling Stephen spoke and begged and asked forgiveness. “Don’t make a mess,” was all it said, then it disappeared amidst the stacks.
The archivist, antique-dealer, transcriber of crumbling tomes - the longest-lived family they were to have, besides the original, which, as previously stipulated, no longer has a place in the Blooms’ own archives.
Deleted, written over, improved. Stephen’s a fast learner.
Their first home, Stephen spent hours upon hours in black and white, watching a world gone by, while Bloom slept in his lap, mouthed at his too-big lapels. A single world, one planet, awash in water and heroes and larger-than-life deeds of derring-do and chicanery: their thematic arcs and dramatic poses flickered over the Bloom faces, millennia passing in minutes. On the streets of the city he plied a new trade – tourists were the easiest marks, and the most likely to take pity on a wide-eyed lad, lost and alone, but there were vendors distracted by a crying Bloom that could be counted on not to notice a pilfered meal or four.
The archivist ignored them, mostly, only blinked when Stephen sat down plates of food at its elbowed side. So Stephen and Bloom played alone in the aisles of a people long dead and gone – there were movies to watch, dress-up games to be had, and card tables, and trick mirrors. The archivist despised computers; it was years before Stephen added them to his tale.
Old-fashioned, they lived in a world of paper and pen, and screens were seldom used. Stephen learned well - data not on computers was seldom stolen or seen, he noted, and he sketched the city streets in careful ink, plotted exits and entrances and hiding-holes.
"Always have an escape route," he lectured the younger Bloom, who nodded and bounced a rubber ball again, eyes elsewhere, out the window, on the stars.
After two years in the shop, Bloom losing baby fat and Stephen gaining inches and an appreciation for salesmanship – he brought in more customers and credits than the store’s clerks, until the clerks were all let go. The archivist regarded him benevolently beneath waving tendriled hair, and cuffed Stephen’s head, almost, Stephen thinks, like a father would, after each successful sale.
But after two years of this, they found it one morning, still and stiff in its favorite perch, curling celluloid strips surrounding withered tendrils.
Stephen doesn’t tell that story, either, when he tells the Blooms’ tale. The archivist is theirs alone, and he knows Bloom remembers this, at least.
When they’re packed off by officials after the next cycle’s rent, due, goes unpaid, they do not leave empty-handed. Stephen brought the relics of that life with him: the deck of cards, the suits, the suitcases, the loaded die, the lessons tucked away inside his mind despite the papers left behind.
Bloom brought only an old, exquisitely expensive teddy bear, stuffed out of the sight of the commandeering local officials in the hollow space beneath the suitcase’s latch; a hiding place.
“He left you nothing,” the officials said, and packed them off on the shuttle transport, and the customs dwight clicked its fingers greedily as it pawed through the shop that had been their home. “Take your clothes and go.”
“You lie,” said Stephen, and it was summarily made clear with a heavy fist that two young boys of humanoid origin on a dwight’s station had little sway in the grand scheme of things.
“Speak, or stay together, it makes little difference to us,” the dwight lied, again, but Stephen let it go, and held his brother’s hand. He had what he needed. And Altair IV had lost it’s charm.
“Fuck this town, we’ve seen it all,” he said, trying on a sneer, and rubbed his nose. Bloom looked up at him, waiting, and Stephen straightened. He had work to do.
“Pick a star,” he told his brother, and bit by bit, lightyear by lightyear, they crossed the universe and made themselves anew.