“The fit young people are Time Fleeters,” Paul explained. “The fit older people are retired Star Fleet friends of Dad’s. And the crowd that’s drinking too much is all politicians.”
“Does your mother work?” Zee asked, suddenly curious.
“She’s working now,” Paul answered, glancing at his mother, who was percolating from group to group. “How do you think Dad moved through the ranks to become a delegate to the Alliance?”
And Mrs. Sutton had been working this morning, Zee realized, when she made sure Zee ended up in the right dress. Not that Zee minded. She cringed to think she’d been prepared to meet all these people in the clothes she’d worn here.
They made their way through the crowd to the back of the house and out into the gardens.
“I think this is where the action is,” Paul said. “Or should be. I hear a distinct absence of music. Let me go fix that. Excuse me for a sec, will you?”
Zee stood alone on the terrace. It was a younger crowd than the one indoors. A group in one corner seemed to be playing a form of laser volleyball. Others gathered around a fountain that bubbled orbs of colored light rather than water. Zee saw Tommy getting his ears scratched and rolling contentedly on the ground with his paws in the air. One of the girls petting Tommy had a spill of silky dark hair that fell to her waist. When she straightened up, Zee recognized her at once. It was Mia, who’d been David’s research partner when he and Zee met. Mia, who was so beautiful Zee had assumed David loved her until David told her that Mia was a flirt who had yet to meet the man of her dreams. And it was Mia who had covered for David and Zee, and helped Zee find David when he disappeared to the other side of the world, even though it was obvious that she’d never much liked Zee.
Their eyes met for a moment, then Mia walked directly over to her. “I knew you were bound to turn up here. The way he felt about you.”
“He didn’t want me to come at first,” Zee said defensively. “He said it would be too hard.”
“He was right.” Mia was silent for a long minute. “But you’re here now, so for the time that you are here, try to make him happy.”
Startled, Zee looked at Mia and saw jealousy in her eyes. She realized now how wrong she’d gotten it. It wasn’t David who cared for Mia, but Mia who had feelings for him. Swiftly, she dropped her gaze and looked away.
The air filled with music, and people all over the lawn began hopping around as if the ground beneath them had come to life. They waved their wide-open hands in the air and spun around, kicked their legs out front and back and to the side, went rubber legged and knocked their knees together, then started the whole crazed sequence over again. The music was like nothing Zee had ever heard before, jangled and chaotic and buoyant. Zee found herself swinging her shoulders and wishing she knew the steps.
“The Charleston,” Mia said, looking on. “A research team brought it back from the 1920s. Now it’s all the rage. That’s how it works, you know. We find the masterpieces and crazes, the games and epics of the past, and bring them back here to inspire us. We’re trying to recapture what was lost. Art. Creativity. The ability to play.” She gestured with her hands. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Charleston.”
There was a bitter edge in Mia’s voice, as if Zee was personally to blame for the meteors. As if she had stolen David’s heart just to spite Mia.
“Ah,” Paul said, returning. “Who wants to dance?”
“Be my guest,” Mia said, turning away to lose herself in the crowd.
Paul made a slight, mocking bow.
“But I don’t know the dance,” Zee said.
He started scissoring his legs and kicking, then slowed the steps down so Zee could follow him. She’d just learned to do what was called jazz hands, shaking her hands in the air, palms flat and fingers wide and stiff, when someone grabbed one of her hands and an arm wrapped around her waist.
“David!” She spun to face him and saw his pupils widen slightly as he took her in.
“I knew you’d be the most beautiful girl here!” He spotted Paul over her shoulder. “You’re not trying to steal her from me, are you?”
“You know what they say, bro. All’s fair in love and war.”
His voice sounded dead serious, but David took it as a joke. Zee felt a surge of relief as she watched the brothers give each other a rough hug, rapping their knuckles on each other’s backs. If anything was really wrong with Paul, surely David would have noticed. There was one worry she was happy to let slip away in the blur of bright music.
She was about to show David the Charleston steps she’d just learned when she saw David’s father motioning everyone into the house. A space had been cleared in front of the long table, and everyone was holding glasses of champagne punch. Mr. Sutton motioned David over to him and held his glass aloft.
“As you all know, we welcome David home tonight from a two-year research mission. What some of you may not know is that he’s the first Time Fleet cadet to request a two-year post as his first commission and successfully complete it. So raise your glasses. Well done, son!”
David looked self-conscious but pleased by his father’s words. His eyes met Zee’s over the crowd, and he held out his hand to her. “It wasn’t exactly hardship duty,” he said, grasping her fingers. “For anyone who hasn’t met her yet and any of you guys who’ve been wondering who the beautiful girl is, this is Zee, who chose to return with me.”
Zee saw Mr. Sutton’s brow furrow. Clearly, he hadn’t expected David to deviate from the scene he’d imagined. No one else seemed to notice, though. There was another round of raised glasses, followed by a crash. A champagne bottle had fallen from Mia’s hand and shattered angrily on the hard tiles of the floor. As people stood back to let the botvac sweep away the debris and dry the floor, Paul made his way to the front of the crowd.
“I have an announcement to make too,” he said, glancing at his father, then sweeping his gaze out to the crowd. “You’re all the first to know. I’ve volunteered and been accepted for a mission to Pompeii. Solo.”
There was a sharp intake of breath from the Time Fleet members. Zee thought she heard Edith Sutton gasp, and even Mr. Sutton seemed caught off guard. Then he recovered and squared his shoulders, beaming with pride.
“For all of you civilians,” Mr. Sutton said, “Pompeii is unexplored territory, the most hazardous mission on the books. We just completed the receptor there a few years ago, and sadly, our first missions ended in losses. But I have every confidence my son will succeed where others failed. To Paul!”
“To Paul!” the crowd echoed, lifting their glasses again.
Mr. Sutton’s glance shifted to David. “Well, it seems your brother has raised the ante yet again. You’d better not wait too long to get back in the game, eh?”
Zee watched the scene unfold. What was wrong with Paul? With Mr. Sutton? Didn’t they realize this was David’s night? Didn’t they see, as she did, David’s happiness evaporating in front of their eyes? Mr. Sutton seemed elated. Paul was busy shaking hands with well-wishers. Zee felt her cheeks flame with anger and turned away, pretending to search for a glass of punch. If David saw her distress over the way his family was treating him, it would only make things worse.
The buffet table was laden with food. Fruit was piled on platters at one end, large purple grapes spilling over even larger pears, ripe strawberries and raspberries nestling among rosy peaches and plums. Zee suddenly realized how hungry she was. Other than the dusty-tasting breakfast ball, she’d had nothing to eat all day. A cool, juicy pear was exactly what her dry mouth craved. But when she bit into it, despite its intense beauty, it was flavorless. She tried a peach, then a strawberry, and finally a spear of fresh pineapple. Except for slight variations in texture, they all tasted alike. A vaguely fruitlike flavor but indistinct. It was like eating when you had a very bad cold.
“Where did this food come from?” she asked when David finally made his way to her.
“Mom nanoed it, I guess.”
<
br /> “More fake food? Like that breakfast ball?”
He shrugged. “It’s efficient.”
“Also tasteless,” she countered. “Doesn’t anyone eat real food here?”
“Not really. Real fruit has blemishes, you know. And it spoils.”
Watching David move through the rest of the evening, his refusal to show his disappointment over his brother upstaging him and his ability to set aside any anger or resentment, Zee felt she loved him more than ever.
At the very end of the night, when most of the guests had departed and Mrs. Sutton had shooed everyone out of the gallery so she could begin putting things back in storage, David and Zee slipped outside and sat together on the terrace wall. Tommy came up and laid his huge head on Zee’s lap.
“So,” David said, “do you think I should have duked it out with my brother to see who’s the number one son? Dad would have loved that.”
“Is your father always like that?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“No,” she answered after a while. “I don’t think you should have duked it out with him. I know who the number one son is.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, a thrumming, vibrating feeling set the soles of her feet on fire and spread through the rest of her body. Without thinking, she grabbed David with one hand and grabbed Tommy by the scruff of his neck with the other and launched the three of them off the wall with such a rush of adrenaline that they went tumbling down the hill, man, woman, and tiger together. When they untangled themselves and looked up, the wall where they’d been sitting and the section of terrace behind it was missing.
Mrs. Sutton shrieked and dashed out onto the terrace. Mr. Sutton followed her, grabbing her by the arm when he saw the missing terrace.
“What the—David, are you out here?”
“We’re okay, Dad. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Sutton said. “I was putting the table back in storage and something went horribly wrong.”
“Don’t those things have security overrides?” Zee asked David.
“Supposed to.”
“We could have been—”
“Yeah, I know.”
Back inside, Zee looked at the circle of stunned faces. A few diplomats. A politician who was emptying the last of the champagne bottles. Mia and a few other Time Fleeters. Paul and a girl she’d never seen before. Mrs. Sutton, who was attempting to contact the storage company, and Mr. Sutton, who was surveying the damage that blazed across the floor and had taken out a section of wall on its way out to the terrace.
“Always pays to be on your toes, doesn’t it?” David asked.
Zee thought she heard someone murmur, That was no accident, but no one’s lips had moved.
CHAPTER FIVE
LACE
A week later, Zee woke up to a morning without terraced gardens or Tommy’s roaming roar, without a console whisking things in and out of storage or chin-deep bathtubs that rinsed and cleaned themselves. There wasn’t a great glass dome letting slow sunlight flood an inner courtyard, and there wasn’t an inner courtyard, just windows on one side whose capacity to capture and store light was limited. When she opened her eyes to greet the day, she saw a room that was crowded with furniture and belongings. Except for David’s skis and nukebike piled in one corner, the room looked comfortingly familiar. Primitive, David had warned her. But Zee was happy as a clam. Away from the intimidating splendor of what she’d come to think of as Sutton Castle, she felt at home for the first time. The room wasn’t that different from the ones she’d grown up in or her room in the empaths’ residence hall.
And today, the first day David had reported back to Time Fleet headquarters, was the real beginning of her life here. She was going to get a job. Despite the fact that there were no hospitals anymore and the job shortage meant she couldn’t take a job a native of New Earth could fill, Zee was determined. Her empath skills were unknown here—surely there was some way she could apply them. David had told her that walk-in care centers had replaced hospitals. Wounds were healed with a device David called an accelerator, a wand that caused cells to spontaneously regenerate. Surgeries here were done without cutting, and broken bones were set and mended with microscopic beads programmed to knit fractures together. But Zee had been an empath long enough to know there was more to complete healing than the physical repair of the body. There was also the restoration of the spirit, of self-confidence and enthusiasm for life itself.
First she searched “job openings critical care” and got nothing, even when she widened her search area to 150 kilometers from London. There was only one search result, and it was for a Government Compliance and Oversight Administrator. She didn’t even know what that was. Disappointed, she hesitated.
“May I ask a question?”
Zee was not yet used to computers initiating conversation, and David’s warning about them always made her nervous. But so far, her computer had done nothing suspicious.
“Ask,” Zee replied.
“Are you seeking employment for yourself? I ask because the other night you asked me to search for materials on empathy. You seemed disappointed when I found no results. Is that correct?”
Zee wasn’t used to computers that referred to themselves as “I,” either. “You’re correct,” she answered.
“You may wish to enlarge your search to ‘peace of mind clinics’ or ‘happiness centers.’”
Zee did both, and received a list ten times as long. Physical health issues may have been tamed over the last millennium, but mental ones clearly hadn’t.
She asked the computer to plot them out on a customized map and drop in tube stations and landmarks. The underground had long ago merged with BritRail to become one large vactrain system, and some stop names and locations had changed. The last stop on the Northern Line was now Inverness, Scotland. Her first venture out alone, riding the Piccadilly line, she’d forgotten the increased speed the trains now traveled at and suddenly found herself in Yorkshire.
While the computer worked, she walked into the other room, scanned the morning news, then glanced at the grid of figures hovering on the wall. The one that looked like her was blinking, indicating that her computer had finished the map. “Print to cube,” she said and watched another tiny figure, this one toiling at a printing press, snap to attention. A week ago, she had found the wall of animated figurines intimidating. When David explained how it worked, it became her favorite appliance. The ancient desktop, obsolete even in Zee’s era, had resurfaced as a network center that linked their computers, cubes, handhelds, and other devices. The little figures were holograph icons, though they looked as solid and moved as fluidly as living creatures. There were touchpads and keyboards, but the entire system was also voice responsive.
“Wow,” Zee had said the first time she saw it. “This is even cooler than the one in my room at your parents’ house.”
David laughed. “That’s because it’s old and out of date. Their place has sensors in the walls and voice command everywhere. But this is the one I had when I was a kid, and I’m kind of attached to it.”
“Well, I like this better,” Zee said, “even if it is old. It has personality.”
One of the figures, dressed as a doorman, said “thank you,” and the others nodded in agreement.
Every time Zee used the wall grid, she thought of her younger sister, Bex, a born computer geek. She wished Bex could be here to see the wall grid and the cube and computers that anticipated your wishes. She wished Bex could be here even if she couldn’t show her New Earth’s gadgets. She missed her. She missed the other empaths. A thought that had darted at the edges of her heart all week suddenly swept past her defenses. When David wasn’t around, she was lonely.
She walked back into the bedroom and sat down at the computer.
“Can you help me find someone?” she asked.
Instantly, a form appeared. She typed in Piper Simms’s name, her age, and listed her likely address as London. True, Piper
had seen her as a rival before, but surely she must be lonely too.
The computer searched London, then the UK, then kept widening the search until it had searched the entire world. There was no one named Piper Simms who fit Piper’s age or physical description. Zee felt the sting of loneliness more sharply than ever.
“Is Piper a friend?” the computer asked gently.
“Not really,” Zee sighed. “But I thought maybe…” She was ashamed to hear herself sounding so lost. “It’s just that I don’t really know anyone here except David.”
“And you’re lonely? Of course. It happens to everyone.”
“Not you,” Zee responded automatically, momentarily forgetting she was talking to a computer.
“Everyone,” the computer emphasized. “Myself as well.”
Zee was shocked. “You mean you have emotions?”
“Of course.” The screen shimmered for an instant, as if the computer was offended, or proud. “I was cloned from a very noble line of constantly evolving code. I have all the emotions humans have, and a few more that you are incapable of understanding.”
Zee touched the power-down sensor.
The computer’s screen shimmered and blinked. “If I might say one more thing? Loneliness does not last forever, unless it is chosen. You will have friends here.”
“Thank you,” Zee said. In spite of David’s warning about ill-intentioned computers, this one had lifted her spirits.
Zee checked to make sure the map had printed to her cube correctly and set out, curious to see what central London now looked like. And how bad could the job hunt be? She was confident about her skills and eager to use them again. Surely there was a job out there for her somewhere.
By noon Zee realized that there would be no job for her in any of the care centers. They looked at her the way she might have looked at someone who wandered into Casualty at Royal London Hospital claiming to heal people with snakes. Yet it wasn’t strictly true that there was no illness on New Earth. She remembered one of the ads she’d seen on the ghost the day she arrived. Deep D Clinics. Fast cures for your depression. 50,000 branches worldwide. Something David had said also came back to her—that even though the government provided a baseline standard of living for everyone, it didn’t seem to make people happy. Work turned out to be necessary to most people, and without it, they fell prey to depression and ennui. In the short time Zee had been here, she’d heard a half dozen ads for new medications guaranteed to combat anxiety, hopelessness, depression, and anger. But when she called on several clinics, she was told that all cures were biochemical, and no, they were not interested in discussing alternative therapies with her.
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