“What’re ye doin’, ye daft bugger?” he calls from the shoreline. “Ye forgot yer pole!”
His father waves and smiles, sets the oars in the boat, and pinches his nose tight as he tips over the back.
* * *
—
Someone grasps at his hand, sweaty and hard and shaking. “Help,” a voice says, but he doesn’t know how to use the word, how to make sense of it, and after a few moments the hand lets go.
* * *
—
Holding his mother’s hand, dry and bony and cold. He is small. “See it, Ferg?” she says, pointing.
He sees it, half-buried in the mud and weeds, water lapping around it. Something white. He lets go of her and runs. Crouching down in his bare feet beside it, he pulls gently with his fingers. Tools break things, his mother has told him hundreds of times. He remembers and will not use them.
It’s a small plate, only a tiny chip out of one edge, a wreath of leaves running along the rim and an elegant flower sketched in the center. He rinses it gently in the water, then stands and holds it up. This is treasure: a lost thing found.
“It’s nearly whole,” he asks. “Can we keep it for once?”
The crickets are loud.
His mother doesn’t answer, but she takes the plate and tucks it gently into her basket, safe again. She will spend days cleaning it of dirt only she can see, over and over again, until at last she will set it out on the hillside with all the other things pulled from the water, her very own monument to a vanished place and time. She has tried to explain how she carefully places each item, but Fergus does not understand the logic of it, does not understand why. Instead he looks toward the sea, hoping to spot something else on his own, something that if he hides he can keep.
* * *
—
Mars. Ares Three. He’s been here just shy of four months, crashing into walls, careening off ceilings, buoyed as much by the weaker gravity as he is by the sheer joy of being here, somewhere new, somewhere free. He even has friends, sort of, or at least a good start on them.
Dru is leaning half on his chair, half on his shoulder, her thick red mud-coated boots up on the café table. She’s been filling him in on the latest MCA crackdown and atrocities, on sandstorm protocol, on Martian baseball—she’s so eager to disabuse him of wrongheaded Earther ideas about the game that he doesn’t have the heart to tell her he has no idea anyway. Her fandom is compelling, and in hindsight he will see all the other signs to which he is right now utterly oblivious.
“There’s a game three nights frae noo,” he ventures. He is almost completely broke, has been scrounging left-behinds in the café to feed himself while he tries to find something useful to do with himself to earn some cred. But almost broke is not completely broke. “I could gie us tix.”
She gets quiet, sits up straight in her own chair. She’s been getting better at understanding his accent, and he’s gotten better at sounding Marsie, but for a moment he wonders if she missed what he said. “I can’t,” she says at last. “I have to go do a thing. I’ll be out of dome for a few weeks.”
“Is it mair fun than baseball?” he asks.
“It’s dangerous,” she says.
“Sae that’s an aye?” he jokes.
She grins, though not for long. “What do you think of Mars?” she asks. The question sounds casual, feels anything but.
“It feels like home. Like I belong on Mars, like I was meant tae be here aw this time. Like I’m finally alive,” he says. He laughs. “That sounds more mushy and sentimental than I mean it, but it’s true.”
She punches him gently on the shoulder. “Want to come meet some of my other friends?” she asks.
“Any friend ay yours is a friend ay mine,” he says, and finishes his drink in one last big gulp as she grabs her bag off the back of the chair.
* * *
—
He is stretched, pulled from side to side, opened and closed. It is awkward and uncomfortable, but he does not mind. He remembers Graf’s knife, and this is not so bad. It feels like his life is unspooling, golden threads extruding from his eyes and ears and wiggling away into the distance, but he does not mind that either. When he wakes, it will all come back inside.
* * *
—
He is sprawled in a chair across from Harcourt, watching the blue-tinged flames of the gas fire, half-full bulb of scotch in hand. “You would have loved my mother,” Harcourt says. “She was the epitome of the Red Sand grifter. The things she got away with . . . You’d hardly believe me if I told you.”
Never mind that Harcourt has just told several of those stories, all riotously improbable, while they waited for Berol to bring dinner. “The woman could cheat space out of vacuum,” he concludes. “She’d love your plan.”
Fergus smiles. “At least that’d be one person,” he says.
“And you?”
“What?”
“Your mother. Is she where you got your inventive streak?”
Fergus takes another sip of scotch, remembers that Marsie culture is matrilineal, remembers that everyone there eventually talks about their mothers. “I didn’t really know her,” he says, and that is, in a way, no lie at all.
* * *
—
He has the key in his hand, is not sure what possessed him to take it, knows he has been thinking about this for years. I should return it before anyone sees, he thinks, and has half convinced himself to back out when his eyes catch the light glinting off his mother’s collection. All the ragtag scraps and shards of a past that was never his own are lined up, enshrined on the bluffs above the shore. The collection appears haphazard, but the pattern is precise by whatever design lies in his mother’s mind; once when he moved a piece ten centimeters to the left to see if she’d notice, she beat him with a broom handle so badly he’d had to sleep on his stomach for weeks until the cuts and welts healed. He’d been nine, he thinks. Maybe ten.
His gaze is drawn to the white circle of the plate he found when he was just a boy, helping his mother pull relics of the past from waters that had long since drowned them. He only has to raise his eyes a bit to see the blank patch of blue-green water, lifted in little lines of white by the wind, where not long ago his father had waved, and smiled, and disappeared.
The key is hot in his hand. He should put it back. He turns his back on the bluffs, on the carefully kept monument to lost people’s broken things and broken hearts, and wonders if the bike will start.
* * *
—
He and Mari are floating in his room in Leakytown, surrounded by a swarm of foil-wrapped balls. Mari is cutting the next one open as he pulls a bright red alien from its box. Mari has been asking him about Mars, about what life is like there, how dirt feels, how the sky feels, if he’ll ever go back there. Her wistful tone has made his answers more thoughtful.
She is quiet for a while. “Fergus,” she says at last. “You ever miss someone so much it’s like you’re lost without them?”
“All the time,” he says, breaking the plastic alien in half. “I just don’t know who.”
* * *
—
There are crickets, and a scream that doesn’t last long. Neither belongs to him, so he drifts back to sleep again, into dreams of thunderstorms and the cold, steady Scotland rain.
* * *
—
Someone is shaking him, but he is not ready yet.
* * *
—
Mother Vahn is standing in front of him, smaller than he remembers in her bulky suit. He thinks this has not happened, that this is a dream, but he’s not sure. When Mother speaks, she has Mari’s voice. “What the hell is your problem?” she asks.
“People are my problem,” he tells her. “I don’t want to be a hero.”
“Why not?”
“Becau
se when I’m gone, I don’t want to leave any trace I was ever here!” he shouts. “I don’t want to leave behind people who will miss me, or need me, or who will pick up broken bits of my life to mourn over. I just want to be gone, like—” Like water, closing over my head. “Just gone.”
“Gone is the coward’s way out,” she says, and she fades back into the darkness. Even the crickets seem muted, distant now.
* * *
—
She’s got her bare feet up on the seat of her chair and her skinny arms wrapped around her knees, and she’s looking at him as if he’s some unexpected curiosity that has washed up on her shoreline. Hani, who’d promised to show him around, has already taken off, abandoning them both.
“Explain it again?” Fergus asks.
She sighs, puts her feet down, and leans forward. “Okay, maybe think of it like a maze. You know what a maze is, right? Good. So, you want to get from point A, the beginning of the maze, to point B at the opposite corner. Normally you have to walk the whole maze, back and forth, twisty-turny, except to you it all feels indistinguishable from walking in a straight line, and you can’t see the maze or the walls or the turns at all. With me so far?”
“Aye,” he says, though he’s not sure he is.
“So, passive jump is like being in the same maze, except wherever you are, you can jump to any other spot in your line of sight. Can’t go around bends, can’t see the bends, and you still gotta go all the way through the maze, and it still feels like a straight line, but you’re sorta hopping faster through it. Right?”
“Okay,” he says, and he’s definitely feeling lost now. “So then, active jump?”
“With active jump, even though you still can’t see the walls, there are certain places where instead of following the maze, you can walk right through the wall and end up on the other side. Not instantly—walls can be pretty thick—but now you’re not walking the maze or hopping through it but cutting across it. So you’re breaking the maze rules. But it only works when you’re at one of those magic crossing points. Space is like a big maze drawn on paper that’s been crumpled up, and what makes those places where you can cross between points in space are big, complicated gravity wells that are adjacent to each other across folds. Well, they think. I dunno that they know. The Bomo’ri probably do, but they’re so pissed at us stealing their tech in the first place, no way they’re gonna tell us.”
She met his eyes and laughed. “You don’t get it.”
“No, I do a bit. I just need tae think about it fer longer.”
“The point is, if you wanna go five kilometers but you have to walk it, it’s effectively farther away than if you want to go fifty but can take a fast train, or five hundred if you can take a rocket. So if you wanna fly at sublight speeds from Jupiter to Pluto, it’s gonna take you years and years, but you can jump from Jupiter to Haudernelle—”
“Haudernelle?”
“One of the big human colony worlds way out there somewhere,” she says, waving her hands up at the ceiling. “Hundreds of light-years away. Way the hell on the other side of the maze if you’re walking, but only a few walls away if you’re not. So you can be there in a day or two.”
“Have ye been there?”
She rolls her eyes. “No. Mars is the best place in the universe. Why would anyone want to leave once they’ve been here?”
“I cannae imagine,” he says, and in that moment he can’t. Maybe, finally, his luck is turning.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Fergus.”
She puts her feet up again and rests her cheek on her knees. “How did I forget that? I’m Dru. How long you known Hani?”
He laughs. “Four days. Ye come here aft?”
“Best coffee in the best city on the best planet in the Universe,” she says. “And since I explained space to you, you’re buying. Then you can tell me where the hell you come from that they talk like you do.”
* * *
—
He finds Theo in the control booth of one of the robotic fab bays, holographic schematics in front of him that he’s idly moving his forefinger through as if he could touch the lines of purplish light. “You were looking for me?” Fergus asks.
Theo grunts. He is a large man in height and girth, much but not all of which is muscle, and he has a beard to rival any to ever grace the face of an Earthman. The beard is also, much to Fergus’s surprise, the most brilliant color of neon blue.
Theo raises an eyebrow. “Kelsie keeps calling me Bluebeard,” he says. “I did it to humor her, and I’ve decided I like it.”
“It suits you,” Fergus says, and he is surprised to find he means it sincerely.
“Noura said you were back for another visit, and I wanted to get your opinion on something before you vanish again.”
“Oh?” Fergus asks. He can’t imagine what for. The Shipmakers of Pluto are, hands down, the most weirdly brilliant people he knows, and he has always felt insignificant and dull by comparison.
Theo steps aside and holds out one broad hand to gesture at the windows beyond them. A ship is taking shape out in the bay, still just a half-formed skeletal frame surrounded by a swarm of robots. It is the perfect full-scale version of the holo-design in the room. “It needs something,” Theo says. “Maybe not much, but something, and I can’t figure out what. Here.”
Theo taps the projector, and the schematics switch from purple line drawings to a fully realized model. The ship has a sleek, pointed shape and a large fin on the underside with the active jump engines. It’s not like anything Fergus has seen the Shipmakers make before. “New style?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“You ask LaChelle? She’s the professional designer.”
“She’s off on Titan,” Theo says. “Maison suggested—and I hesitate to repeat it—‘giant googly eyes.’ Noura said it was perfectly fine as is.”
“Ignatio?”
Theo chortles. “I’m not sure I even know what planet Ignatio is from, but I do know that what passes for aesthetics there is vastly different than in humanspace. You wanna have the weirdest three hours of your life? Ask them their opinion of Picasso. Have a drink in hand first, though.”
“I’m not any kind of artist, but . . .”
“. . . but?”
“It’s not the shape. I like the shape,” Fergus says. “It looks like a ship that’ll always keep you one step ahead of trouble. What about adding a bright blue stripe down the side, to break up the lines just a little bit? Blue for Theodoric Bluebeard.”
“Maybe?” Theo’s thick eyebrows go up as he considers. “Maybe! Thanks, Fergus.”
“No problem. You decided what you’re going to name this one yet?”
“Yeah. Venetia’s Sword, I think. Noura’s still working on the mindsystem, so we’ll have to see how its personality fills out for a few days after initialization before we finalize anything.”
“It’s a good name,” Fergus says. He’s never sure how long he’ll stay before the itch to move on becomes unbearable or when he’ll be back here again, but he hopes he gets a chance to see it fly just once when it’s finished.
* * *
—
Da is slumped in his armchair, staring at nothing, lost in memories, remembering lost dreams. Ma is somewhere out by the shore, hunting for relics alone now. She’d found the salvaged teacup he’d hidden from her and smashed it on the floor in a fit. They’d both cried, in separate rooms, for separate reasons, for days. Now she does not trust him, has abandoned him to his father.
“You.” Da speaks, startling him. “Your one job was to make her love the both of us. What good are you?”
Even if he’d had an answer, it doesn’t matter; the distant stare is back, and Da will not acknowledge him again until Ma returns, and then only with the back of his hand to show who’s side he is on, who he is loyal to
.
It is a warm enough evening that he can escape and sleep in the shed, where he won’t be able to hear their silence.
* * *
—
Someone or something is shaking him. He wakes.
Chapter 16
Fergus reached out and found fingers, then a hand on his shoulder. Opening his eyes, he stared uncomprehendingly at her face for a long time before he remembered about words. “Mari!” he said. It was quiet, wrongly quiet. “Where are the crickets?”
“The what?”
He blinked at her. “I don’t know,” he admitted. He tried to sit up, discovered he was in zero gravity, and went slow-tumbling ass-over-head around the small, unfamiliar space.
“How do you feel?” Mari asked.
“Fine,” he said, catching the wallbar with two crooked fingers as he spun past and pulling himself over to it. He lifted up his shirt; the angry red marks from the shrapnel cannon and the flailing cable were gone, as were scars from a dozen different skirmishes over the years. Should he have expected something else?
“Where’s my ship?” he asked at last.
“What?”
“Venetia’s Sword. I had it. I was on board—”
Her eyebrows went up. “That’s what you remember?”
His hand strayed back to his abdomen, fingers spread out across his skin, seeking. His shirt, he noticed, had holes in it. “There was something,” he said. He frowned, trying to find the missing pieces half-buried in the mud of his memory. “Something happened.”
An image of a knife flashed through his mind, there and gone again, but he remembered. “Graf stabbed me,” he said, not entirely believing his own words. “He hid on the ship, disabled the environmental controls to keep from being detected. I flushed us both out into space.”
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