Unpopular Science

The woman was a seer, and when she started laying out her cards, it looked like a bad late-night television commercial for phone-in psychics, but this woman was one of the few who could truly see.

This was when the dream became, once again, a nightmare.

“I see you,” said the seeress. “I see your fathers and your daughters and your sons, battling one another…”

“I have one son. I have one daughter. That’s all.” Remo was trying to convince himself more than the seeress.

“I did not say soon,” the seeress reminded him. “I did not say when….”

“When,” breathed the Sonoran Desert as he awoke. It was after two in the morning and the village of Sun On Jo was silent. Remo counted the steady heartbeats in the house and felt reassured. He stood at the window and watched the desert, feeling sorry for himself.

He came to Sun On Jo more often now and found it a place where he felt peace and a sense of belonging, but this time there was foreboding. He felt like a fisherman standing on the rail on a perfectly calm sea, with no sign of heavy weather in any direction, but knowing a killer storm was moving in. The weather reports wouldn’t tell him how soon or from which direction the storm would come.

He didn’t know how to steer around it.

He heard a slight snuff from the pit where Freya’s wolf was having its own nightmares, or maybe it was hunting in its sleep. Better not be hunting, Remo thought with a wry smile. Freya didn’t approve of hunting animals for food, even by natural carnivores. She didn’t eat meat and she had poor Sunny Joe packing in more vegetables than he ever ate in all his life. Remo had heard some Sun On Jos complaining that Freya was again stealing ammunition so they couldn’t go out after game.

Freya, Remo decided happily, simply did not have a killer instinct.

As if that revelation wasn’t enough, Remo had another. Without even being aware of it, he’d been evaluating Freya as a potential heir.

Freya, his heir? His trainee? Freya, an assassin?

“What was I thinking?”

Freya embracing the dangerous, bloody existence that was the life of a Sinanju Master? Freya, placed in harm’s way, by her own father? Remo could never do such a thing.

“Well?”

Remo wasn’t alone. It was the man himself, Sunny Joe, who was Remo’s own biological father, who had placed Remo on the doorstep of an orphanage in New Jersey so many years ago. This was also the man who had become the father to Remo’s children, taking them in when they were in distress and in need of the comfort and care of a true home.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Remo said, turning away from the desert.

“Why were you breathing so loud, then?” Sunny Joe gave Remo a tight smile that said it was a joke— they both knew Remo was probably the most skilled inhaler/exhaler on the planet. “Let’s go,” Joe said, “before you huff and puff and wake the whole town.”

Sunny Joe Roam had once been a famous movie star, more or less. Using the professional name William S. Roam he appeared in cinematic gems like Muck Man. He even starred in the Muck Man sequels, but those were uninspired efforts that lacked the passion of the original. Roam’s most important role was as the symbolic leader of the village, the Sunny Joe.

They were out in the desert, walking on the rocky earth under the brilliance of the stars, and in the sandy places they left no footprints.

“You were thinking about Freya, but I guess I’m still not so sure what you meant when you said, ‘What was I thinking?’”

Remo felt the night around him, and he felt comfortable in it. Sun On Jo wasn’t a rich place, but it was beautiful. What some saw as a stark wasteland, Remo saw as a magnificent landscape of nature, active and vibrant. He felt at home here. He felt unpressured being here, and unpressured by Sunny Joe. The question was a probing, sensitive one, but Joe wouldn’t be offended if Remo never answered it. Joe—unlike some fathers Remo could mention—wasn’t the harping, nagging, complaining type.

“I’m supposed to take an heir,” Remo said, without really meaning to.

“This I know.”

Remo wondered how much Sunny Joe did know about him, about Sinanju traditions. The Native American tribe was descended from Sinanju, from one of the twin brothers who were Sinanju Masters centuries ago. Two Masters was a violation of tradition, so one twin, Kojong, left behind his village on the rocky coast of Korea and vanished. His fate was unknown in Sinanju until discovered by Remo and Remo’s adopted father, Chiun, Master of Sinanju Emeritus. They learned that Kojong had journeyed to the North American continent and become the spiritual leader of a small tribe, who called him Ko Jong Oh.