“But you could come with us! Then we’d all be safe!”
“It isn’t that easy. You’re free out here, but I have connections to the land world, and they could make me come back. Then... I might not be able to help putting you all in more danger than I’ve already done.”
“But where will you go?”
“To the starship. If they’ll still have me.”
“What if they will not?”
“Then... I’ll have to wing it.”
He looked at her. “I did not know you could fly, too.”
J.D. laughed.
“I will miss you.”
“I’ll miss you, too, Zev.”
“Come wade in the water.”
“Why?”
“So that I can hug you when I say goodbye.”
It was too complicated to try to explain why she had told him not to touch her yesterday, but why it would have been all right for him to hug her now. She walked with him into the water until they were knee-deep, and then she hugged him and stroked his curly hair. He spread his fingers against her back, and she felt the silky swimming-webs against her skin.
“Goodbye.” His breath whispered warm on her breast.
Zev took the lung and slid beneath the surface. J.D. did not see him again.
o0o
Floris Brown rested in the soft grip of a zero-g lounge, held gently against it with elastic straps. At first, weightlessness had disoriented her, but by the time the space-plane docked with the transport she had begun to find it welcome and comforting. It eased the pains of eighty years of fighting gravity, and even the bruises of seven minutes of crushing acceleration.
The braided strands of her hair floated in weightlessness. She let three patches grow long, but shaved the rest of her hair to a soft short fuzz. The shells and beads strung into the braids clinked and rattled softly. The end of the longest braid drifted in the corner of her vision. It was completely white. The central patch was streaked with bright pink, the right-hand strands were green. But she always kept the leftmost long patch the natural color of her hair. She also left her eyes their natural blue, but wore heavy black eye make-up on her upper and lower eyelids and her eyelashes.
She gazed out the wide bubble-window. It provided an unending source of interest.
As the transport had powered gently out of low Earth orbit, it had passed within sight of the deserted Soviet space station. To the unaided eye it looked like any other satellite, moving from sunlight to shadow. With binoculars it looked old. Though the vacuum of space protected it from rust or other deterioration, cables dangled and twisted eerily; and the antennae all hung motionless, aimed at nothing.
Floris remembered the vigor and assurance of the Soviet space program, as it outdistanced that of her own country when she was very young. All its promise had been lost, its lunar base abandoned and its Mars expedition never begun, when the Mideast Sweep gained power and eliminated the space program as useless, extravagant, an insult to the face of god, a tool of Satan. It made Floris sad to look at the old space station, drifting dead in its orbit, kept as a monument to the past.
Once they left low Earth orbit, her nostalgia dissipated. The transport pilot, showing off the sights, oriented the observation window first toward Earth, then toward the moon, then toward the stars. Undimmed by Earth’s atmosphere, the constellations stunned her. She could imagine the sky a hundred or a thousand or a million years ago, the air free of the pollution of human activities, the galaxy sweeping in a brilliant path from one horizon to the other. Back on Earth she had seen the Milky Way as a fuzzy patch of light across the middle sixty degrees of the sky. Out here she knew that if she could see all the way around her, she would see the entire disk of the Milky Way. For the first time she understood why prehistoric people — and even some modern people who ought to know better — could believe that the stars contained esoteric meaning.
Occasionally one or another of the passengers came by and greeted her. She was a curiosity: not the oldest person ever to travel into space, but the oldest to make a first trip, the first member of the Grandparents in Space program.
One of the benefits of her years was that her lifelong difficulty remembering names and faces could now be ascribed to age. She smiled and nodded and said hello and thanked people for their welcome; but after five or ten she gave up trying to remember any individual.
“Ms. Brown?”
She looked around, seeking the voice.
Someone drifted into her vision from above the level of her head, upside-down from her orientation.
“Please call me Floris,” she said.
“Thank you. I’m Victoria Fraser MacKenzie. I’m on the faculty of Starfarer. I just wanted to welcome you into space, and see if you needed anything. I could show you around, or help you to your sleeping net.”
“I’m not ready to sleep,” Floris replied. She found herself tilting her head to try to get the faculty member’s face rightside-up. “I seldom sleep more than a few hours at night.” This was not strictly true, but Floris had occasionally found the claim useful. No one had ever disputed her when she repeated the cliché about old people and sleep. “I’m just going to stay here and watch the stars.”
The faculty member smiled. That’s interesting, Floris thought, that a smile upside-down still looks like a smile, and not like a frown. She had never had occasion to observe this before.
“They’re beautiful, aren’t they? The whole galaxy as if you could touch it. And in a little while I think Esther is going to orient the transport so we can see Starfarer.”
“Esther?”
“She pilots this transport.”
“Thank you for your welcome.” Floris tried to keep her attention on the young woman speaking to her, but it was hard to talk to someone upside-down. Besides, her gaze kept returning to the stars.
“If you need anything, just let me know.”
“All right.”
o0o
Victoria hovered solicitously, protectively, near Floris Brown. She wished she had come right out and said that she had been one of the major proponents of the Grandparents in Space program, arguing that the expedition needed a wider age-mix. Perhaps she could work it subtly into a conversation.
Victoria felt comfortable around Floris Brown. She hoped they would be friends. No one could take the place of Victoria’s great-grandmother, but Grangrana refused to apply to the expedition. Victoria would not see her again for at least a year. Probably more than a year. Already Victoria missed her.
But she liked to think of Grangrana living comfortably in the house that Merry had arranged for the partnership to buy. On the rare occasion that property came up for sale, corporations bought it, not ordinary people. Victoria had never expected her family to own a house. But there it was. It even had some land of its own, away from the city, on the edge of the Vancouver Island wilderness.
Only yesterday she had run up the front stairs of the house for her last visit with Grangrana before the expedition departed.
The door recognized her. Expecting her, it opened. Inside, the air was hot and dry.
“Grangrana?”
She went upstairs. Soft bright light filled the hallway, spilling through the glass wall separating the corridor from the sun porch. Beyond the windows, Victoria’s great-grandmother sat sleeping in her favorite chair.
Victoria entered the room quietly, trying not to wake the eldest member of her extended family. She sat in the other chair and watched Grangrana doze. Heat radiated up at her from the black flagstone tiles. She slid out of her jacket and settled back, content to wait, comfortable despite the oppressive warmth. Grangrana had always welcomed her.
Victoria let her surroundings create another memory to take with her on the long trip. Grangrana wore her hair shorter these days than the way Victoria first remembered, still in an iron-gray Afro, but more subdued and easier to care for. Her black skin was smooth except for the ritual scar on her cheek, obtained on a research trip before Vic
toria was born. Grangrana could have had the scar removed, but she chose to keep it. She admired the people she had visited; they refused to condescend completely to the modern world. They paid tribute to ancient traditions with a single, elegant facial scar.
Whether they still carried on their new tradition or had been forced to change, Victoria did not know. Their territory had been swallowed up in the chaos of the Mideast Sweep two decades before, almost as an afterthought, a brief southern lunge of the greater wave that overtook the U.S.S.R.
Victoria hoped this house would be a haven for Grangrana, the way Grangrana’s small apartment in Vancouver had been a haven for Victoria, for Grangrana’s friends and colleagues and former students; even, once in a while, for a member of the group she had lived with in Africa. A few of them had been trapped in the west. They could not legally return to their homes. Victoria’s most powerful recollection of them was the dignity with which they bore their grief and displacement.
Gradually they had stopped visiting; gradually even Grangrana lost contact with them all. She believed they had returned home, no matter what they had to do to get there. No matter what happened to them when they arrived.
“Victoria?”
Victoria started awake. Grangrana stood before her, a little stooped, frailer than six months ago.
“I fell asleep,” Victoria said, abashed. The heat and the few minutes’ sleep made her groggy.
Grangrana smiled. “So did I.”
She touched Victoria’s hair, brushing her fingertips across the soft, springy surface. Victoria wore her hair shorter than Grangrana used to, longer than her great-grandmother kept hers now.
“I’m so glad to see you,” Grangrana said. “I thought I might not again.”
“I know,” Victoria said. “I was afraid of that, too.”
She stood and hugged her great-grandmother and kissed her cheek.
“I’m still afraid of that, Grangrana. We’re going to be gone so long...”
The house AS rolled into the sun room.
“Come have tea,” Grangrana said.
They sat at the white wrought-iron table in the corner, on spindly white wrought-iron chairs.
“The time will seem longer to you than to me,” Grangrana said. “The older I get, the faster time passes. I think we perceive time as a proportion of our lives. A year isn’t a large proportion of my life anymore. I think I’ll still be here when you get back.”
“I hope so. But won’t you reconsider coming? Won’t you at least apply?”
Grangrana shook her head. “No, I’ve finished my adventuring. I’ll wait here for you to come back to me and tell me all about it. Tell me things now. Are you happy?”
“Worried. Distler has only been in office a couple of months, but he’s already started trying to carry out his campaign promises...”
“Don’t tell me about the United States, don’t tell me about sword-rattling. I can hear all that on the news, I can remember it from twenty years ago, forty years ago. It’s all cycles. I want to hear about you. Has it been a year, since...?”
“A little more,” Victoria said. All the memories surrounding the accident came back to her. Time had begun to dim the pain, but she had to work to keep her voice steady. “Stephen Thomas got through it better than Satoshi and I.”
“You’re still with them both,” Grangrana said hesitantly.
Victoria turned away from the window and toward Grangrana, the relative she loved most in the world. Her vision blurred and she blinked furiously. She had thought and believed she would never hear that particular querulous tone again, and never have to live through this conversation.
“Yes, Grangrana,” she said. “I’m still with them. They’re still with me. We’re a partnership, personal and professional. The accident — Merry’s death — changed things. But it didn’t end the partnership.”
“I thought it would,” Grangrana said, softly, as if she were speaking to herself. “When it happened, I was sorry for your grief, but I thought it would release you.”
“It isn’t like that!” She sat on the floor at Grangrana’s feet and clasped one frail hand in both of hers. “I’m not entrapped, I’m not blinded — I never was. It’s true that Merry was the catalyst for the family. Merry loved falling in love and being in love and staying in love with a lot of people and managing the partnership. But... Why can’t I explain it right to you? I love you and I want you to think well of me, I don’t want you to be ashamed of me — “
“Ashamed! Victoria, nothing you could ever do could shame me. No, I’m so proud of you, but when you told me about this arrangement, I remembered some of the foolish things I did when I was your age — younger than you.”
“But it isn’t like that. It isn’t a cult, Merry didn’t use charisma to keep us as pets, or worshipers, or slaves.”
“Cherie, you never know it until it’s over. It’s so easy to persuade yourself to give up yourself for someone. Especially someone you love.”
Anger mixed with despair. “I’ve made myself believe it happened to you, because you say it’s so. Why can’t I make you believe it isn’t happening to me?”
“Because I’m old and stubborn and I love you.” She drew Victoria up and embraced her. “I want you to be happy.”
“I am, Grangrana.” Victoria let her cheek rest against her great-grandmother’s shoulder. She breathed the cool cedar scent of Grangrana’s perfume, the fragrance of clothing kept in cedar trunks and a huge free-standing cedar-lined cabinet, Victoria’s favorite hiding place during childhood games.
“They seem like good men, Satoshi and Stephen Thomas,” Grangrana said. “But don’t stand for it if they pretend to be better than you. Men like to do that, even when they don’t realize it.”
Victoria knew the struggle her great-grandmother had had to endure to succeed, in a different time. It seemed, to her, nearly as bizarre and incredible as the lives of Grangrana’s great-grandparents, who had escaped to Canada from the United States during the years of slavery. Grangrana’s stories of times past had taught Victoria the fragility of freedom.
“They wouldn’t, Grangrana,” she said. She sat down again in the wrought-iron chair, in the warm sun-room. The rays slanted through the windows, nearly horizontal, casting blacker shadows against the black flagstones. Victoria suddenly chuckled.
“What is it, chérie?”
“It’s that you think my household is outrageous,” Victoria said, “and all my other friends think it’s terribly old-fashioned.”
Chapter 4
Next morning, orbital time, Victoria floated into the transport cafeteria. She wanted a cup of strong tea. Stephen Thomas used to tease her about the British influence on her eating habits, but once she persuaded him that a single taste of English breakfast tea with milk and sugar would not kill him, he decided he liked it. He still drank coffee the rest of the day and night, immune to the effects of caffeine, but sometimes he drank tea in the morning. Victoria thought she had done him no favor, for tea was scarcer than coffee outside Earth’s gravity well, and milk was expensive.
She passed Floris Brown, so far the only member of Grandparents in Space, accompanied by a member of the transport crew.
“Good morning, Ms. Brown.” Victoria smiled. “I mean, Floris. How are you enjoying the trip?”
“Oh... hello. It’s fine, thank you.” Nothing in the tone of her frail voice indicated she remembered Victoria from yesterday.
She must be tired from the stress of liftoff, Victoria thought, trying not to be disappointed.
“Victoria!”
J.D. and Feral called to her from across the room. She was impressed that they had both already learned not to make unnecessary gestures in zero-g.
Feral, who looked like he had been up for hours and had already hit his stride, pushed toward her and handed off a hot-pack to her. He kicked against the wall and passed her again going the opposite direction, still facing her.
“Good morning. Docking in an hour.”
They both reached J.D. at the same time. Feral grabbed a handhold; Victoria brushed her hand along the bulkhead, using the friction to dissipate her momentum.
Victoria extended the hot-pack’s straw and sipped it. Tea, with milk and sugar.
“Thanks,” she said to Feral. Most Americans, even if they had noticed how she liked her tea, would have put cream in it. “Have you guys had breakfast already?”
“Just finished,” J.D. said. “I wanted to be sure to get a good spot to watch the docking.”
“I don’t think you’ll have any trouble,” Victoria said. “Most of the folks on board are old hands. You and our new grandmother are the only new permanent residents, and Feral and that other guy are the only temps.”
“What other guy?” Feral asked.
“He was in the observation bubble yesterday morning, but he disappeared and I haven’t seen him since.”
“I don’t remember him.”
“He has kind of brown hair, or was it blond — you know, that color that you think is blond but when you really look at it, it’s brown. And...” She tried to remember what color his eyes were. Her image of him shifted and faded. “Medium height, maybe a little taller.” Height was difficult to judge in weightlessness. “Medium build.” She searched for a distinguishing characteristic.
“I saw him a couple times in the corridor,” J.D. said. “But he didn’t say anything.”
“I guess I didn’t notice him,” Feral said, frowning.
“Not much to notice. Anyway, even if he and all of us here and half the crew go to watch the docking, it won’t be crowded.” She sighed. “This is the first time I’ve ever taken a transport to Starfarer that hasn’t been full.”
“So Chandra’s not on board?” Feral asked.
“Who?”
“The sensory artist. I heard she was leaving Earth soon. I thought I might get a chance to interview her.”
“Oh, dear,” J.D. said. A blush crept up her cheeks.
“What’s the matter?”
“I was supposed to take her diving. I completely forgot about it. I just... left.”
The Starfarers Quartet Omnibus Page 7
