Not for Use in Navigation

by Iona Datt Sharma

  "Cat," Talitha says, gently, "I can help" - and Cat wants to cry over the junior craftsmen who departed for telephone engineering, rather than do this work that matters.

  "Do the groundwork," she tells Talitha, screwing pieces of paper into tiny balls and throwing them north, northwest, north-northwest. Talitha follows them and lays down the right forms for rigidity and tension, not with textbook perfection, but with the fluid essentials.

  "You'll put yourself into a coma if you try this with no help," she says, without looking up. “There's not enough push in the forms for you to lift this alone."

  Cat gestures wildly and put in a cross-stroke. "No other option."

  Talitha holds up her pen and pulls up her sleeves, exposing the unmarked skin of her forearms.

  "You're mad," Cat breathes.

  “It’s energy," Talitha says, with head back down. “It will fuel" – she draws a form in the air, and Cat breathes in sharply – “under the wing, if you – look, Cat, we don’t have time to argue over this. Say yes or wait for the fire brigade."

  Cat stares at her for another moment, then pulls up her own sleeves. “I didn’t mean you," Talitha snaps, a little panicky, then begins to draw. Cat’s fingertips are on the edge of the sheet and as the forms take shape something crackles at the paper’s edge. Cat stares at it in bemusement, not thinking about the pain, as the fire catches and carries along the sheet and in its wake Talitha sketches out form after form, ones Cat only knows from textbooks, with no time to perfect her work before it’s sacrificed to the flames.

  "Done," Talitha says, and the two of them look at each other, then both reach downwards. Cat has time for fear, feeling her eyebrows singe and the roaring heat inches from her bare hands – and then they press the new sheet of paper down onto the aircraft wreckage, the flames leaping across. They only have a minute or two, Cat thinks, before the metal starts to heat up.

  “Now!" Talitha yells, and Cat adds one more form with a hand that barely grips, simple enough for an apprentice to have done it – avis-unmarked, a stylised bird, for flight – and the broken pieces explode upwards.

  Before Cat can move, Talitha dives in, grabs Toby, covered in dust, with blood showing at his mouth, then goes back to check there’s no one else there. "Go!"

  "Get back!" Cat presses both hands down, bloody and ruinous, destroying all the forms. The mess of the wing rattles down like unholy rain, Cat's knees hit the ground and the last thing she remembers is the sound of steam hissing, and Talitha's voice, soft and determined, as she calls to the others, as she pours water on the flames.

  ___

  "Mrs Knapp," Cat's saying, not for the first time, "I'm so, so sorry" - and Audrey stamps her foot.

  "Cat, with all due respect, shut up," she says. "It's a fat lip and a broken leg. Toby's had worse playing cricket. And even if he hadn’t, it wouldn't have been your fault."

  "He's my apprentice," Cat says, stubborn and frustrated, "he's my apprentice, and I should have protected him, and I should have..."

  "Cat," Audrey interrupts, "if you must make a martyr of yourself, go back to fixing my aeroplane. I will take Toby home for a while and run him back to you when he's ready. A very good day to you both."

  She bows, turns on her heel and stalks out of the hangar. In the ensuing dusty silence, Talitha sighs. "She's right," she says, tentatively; Cat has not been easy to talk to, these last few days. "It's not your fault."

  She waves vaguely as she says it: Margaretha Zelle is still spread in pieces across the hangar floor, though the remaining craftspeople have been working hard to remove the destroyed pieces, as not to warp the whole. Before Cat can say anything else, Talitha adds, "How's Lindy?"

  "She says she's feeling a little better," Cat says, sounding defeated. Other than Talitha herself, Lindy had the worst of the smoke inhalation and falling debris. "She's going to stay with her sister-in-law for a few days."

  "Glad to hear it," Talitha says, and then stops short. "The first part, I mean. And - Cat. What about you?"

  "What about me?"

  "How are you?" Talitha asks, insistent. "Cat, you lifted that wing more or less entirely by yourself. I know I helped make the thing susceptible, but you made it fly." She pauses. "I've seen what happens when people do mad things like that."

  "Mad things like that," Cat repeats, with something in her expression that Talitha can't read. After a moment Cat gets to her feet, slowly and stiffly – Talitha wasn't wrong that what she did has taken the energy out of her - and beckons imperiously. "Come with me, please."

  Curious, Talitha follows. Outside the hangar, on the grassy hillside, Cat sits down on a soft tussock and leans backwards, looking right up at the sky. She doesn't speak for a couple of minutes, and Talitha reaches over and touches her shoulder. "Cat?"

  Still silence. Cat takes a number of deep, steady breaths. Talitha is starting to wonder if she’s ever going to speak when Cat finally sighs and says, "So. These forms." She pulls back her sleeves as she says it, showing the damage: the lexical cuts are healing faster than the burns around them.

  Talitha looks across at her face. "Yes. What about them?"

  "I'm not sure," Cat says, mild. "I’ve been wondering, you see, if you might have used them in the war. If that's how you know what you know."

  "You've worked it out, then," Talitha says, dispassionately.

  "Have I?" Cat says, still looking straight up. "I don't know what I've worked out. I do know the old stories, about people who work with skin, and blood, and all those things that are neither ink nor paper."

  "Mostly," Talitha says, sighing, "I worked with ink and paper. Mostly, but not always."

  "Can you tell me?"

  "I probably shouldn't." Talitha shrugs. "It was a place up north, somewhere near Loch Laggan, if you know it. If an aircraft came down with something interesting in the visible lexicography, that's where the pieces were brought. And..." - she pauses, then goes on - "with them, they brought the pilots."

  "I was approached, myself," Cat says, matter-of-fact. "Just a few weeks after the declaration, actually. Someone came up to me in a café in Soho and said they'd known my father. They probably did, at that. Told me about the importance of the war effort. And how everything could be a weapon in the wrong hands. Asked me to consider a role in special operations, italicised, and awaited my answer."

  Talitha shakes her head in return, impatient. "You said no."

  "I want to say I thought about it," Cat says. "I want to say I had that kind of… courage? But I sent him away and he didn't come back. Tell me, what forms did you use on the pilots?"

  "Lapidary forms, with proprietary modification." Talitha shrugs again and gestures. "If you work them on rock, it crumbles."

  "Jesus Christ." Cat puts both her hands over her eyes, and Talitha flinches.

  "We didn't all have the luxury of the long way around," she says, more sharply than she'd meant; she does not care about Cat’s opinion of her, not about this. "We didn't all have the kind word, the fair start. We weren't all like Toby, or..."

  "Me." Cat hasn't moved. "All of us raised in the grand old tradition. Remember Icarus. Help all who ask for it. Thou shalt not kill. Did you—"

  “Yes. When it could not possibly be avoided."

  “For information?"

  “Among other reasons." She pauses. "You saw the value of generating energy in a hurry."

  Cat looks up at her, something awful in her eyes. "Christ."

  “Cat." Talitha stands up and takes a step downhill. “I did what I did. And I saved Toby’s life. Yours, too, in the war. A dozen times, perhaps, without your knowing it. If you call it dirty work, well, I'm not here to answer to you."

  She's trembling a little as she walks down the hill, but not too much. She's thinking about the pretty little room she's renting from an old lady who's kind to her, and how she came here where they still fly.

  “Talitha." Cat scrambles to her feet, swaying slightly. “Stop, please."

  Talitha says
, over her shoulder, “Perhaps you should have waited till the fire brigade came from Lynn. Perhaps you should have let the undercarriage tip and crush Toby’s bones."

  Cat makes a frustrated noise and holds up her palms, still partly bandaged, all the exposed flesh shiny and raw. “Talitha…"

  “Your own skin was in the form you made," Talitha says, and she'd meant to walk away, but she's turned on the spot, facing up. “Burnt away. Don’t talk to me about clean hands."

  "I'm not, for God's sake," Cat says, staggers and lands on the grass, makes a muted noise of pain, and moves no further. Talitha takes one more step, and has a sudden memory of meeting Cat in the village cafe, the rising arc of boiling coffee, the tins of tomato soup that are still sitting on her shelf at home, now sealed for all time, or at least until she stops having lunch with Cat every day. With a groan, she starts back upwards.

  "You did your own war work, Cat," she says, half with anger and half something else, as she gives Cat a hand to steady herself with, and sits back down beside her. "You told me yourself."

  Cat just looks at her. "I know."

  “And," Talitha says, cuttingly, "you implemented what I learned. What I got from them, and the improvements you made…"

  “I know."

  “You might not have done the work, but you—"

  "I know!" Cat puts her head in her hands, then looks up. “For goodness' sake, Talitha. I know what I did."

  "Well, then," Talitha says, hands shaking.

  For a moment, there's only silence. Then Cat leans back and breathes out, and her expression slowly loses some of that bleakness. "Believe it or not, Talitha, before the accident I was planning to offer you a job."

  Talitha stares. "What?"

  Cat nods. "Lindy and the juniors are good and sweet and Toby has promise, but I need a real second."

  Talitha's still staring. "You want me to be your assistant?" She pauses. "I mean – you still do?"

  "My right hand. " Cat gestures with her actual right hand, the bandages making the point. "Will you consider it?"

  "I don't have your qualifications."

  "We'll put you in for your exams when Toby does his. Will you do it?"

  Talitha says, "Even if I do, I won't apologise for who I am, Cat. Nor what I did. I don’t need your forgiveness."

  "I used to build efficient aircraft," Cat says, softly and sadly, “delivering efficient artillery, on top of people. I don't know what happens, about that." She spreads her palms. "I told you before, I don’t know much that isn’t flightcraft. I don't know about what's written, what's true. Thou shalt not kill and all that. But I've got to rebuild that damn aircraft, Audrey's bought her goggles. I've got to get the new syllabus for Toby, and I need to send a get-well card to Lindy and I need to put in an order for a few hundredweight of wing canvas and I need to not be sat on my arse on a damp hillside, and I need your help."

  Talitha grins, suddenly. "All right," she says. "On one condition." She holds out a hand to Cat, who takes it, and between them they get Cat to her feet. “When she’s built, you’ll fly in her."

  “Oh, no, no," Cat says. “Don’t even think about it."

  Talitha shakes her head. Despite the chaos in the hangar, out here in the wind and the sun, she can imagine Margaretha Zelle clearly, how strange and beautiful she’ll look, with forms hidden within her skin and so much more than she seems. “Don’t worry," she says, giving Cat a shoulder to lean on, “I’ll teach you how."

  "All right," Cat says, sounding entirely defeated, "if that's what it takes" – and Talitha laughs as they go on up the hillside, into the curve of the sky.

  Landfall (your shadow at evening, rising to meet you)

  At one point, it was a source of consternation to Earth's constitutional bodies that the original Mars mission made landfall on Christmas Eve. It was a diverse, multinational and strictly secular leap of faith into the unknown; with three hundred and sixty-four other days to choose from, the particular date was felt impolitic.

  Magnus never worried about it too much. "They'll speak of one longer than the other," she used to say, and all these years later Evan sees her point.

  She still wishes Magnus wouldn't roll into a room full of children and official visitors, on Landfall Night, and say: "And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed."

  "Magnus." Evan taps her foot and resists rolling her eyes upwards. Heavenwards, perhaps. The sky above the Tharsis Montes is blue with the translucency of eggshell, shifting through a blink-of-an-eye twilight to a depth of black never seen on Earth. The Milky Way dusts across it. Even through ugly fibre-optic tinsel and the silicate dome glass, it's beautiful to the point of pain. "That's not the line."

  The kids are getting restive. One of Evan's students pulls at her sleeve, which is undoubtedly a precursor to Evan I have to pee or similar. Evan taps her foot again. "Magnus, please."

  "Sorry." Magnus doesn't sound at all sorry. She leans back in her chair and rolls back a few centimetres. "O brave new world that has such people in't! I will show you fear in a handful of dust. That's not it either, is it?"

  "Magnus, will you just say the fucking line."

  The official visitors – from Terran Central Administration, by way of several months' journey time – look alarmed. The kids all perk up at once. Evan groans.

  "Once upon a time," Magnus says, leaning out of her wheelchair so she's almost at eye-level with the nearest child. Magnus despises children with less of the open hostility with which she despises the rest of the human race, which is one of Evan's favourite things about her. "This was called Dome 2B. There were five domes and fifty people and a lot of duct tape and a broad range of talents. Don't do that."

  A child pauses in the act of hitting his neighbour with a Happy Landfall Night card.

  "Good," Magnus says. "We contained multitudes. We were combination botanist-linguist-polka-dancers. The best and the brightest the planet had to offer, at a hundred thousand dollars – you don't know what those are, kids, thank the Lord for that – per kilogram. Very efficient. Very pioneering."

  None of this is the line either. The line is: "Teachers, technicians, surveyors, and more! Mars needs you!"

  There's going to be a voiceover after that, and maybe some inspiring music, but they want the strapline spoken by a voice that speaks from history: the first commander of the first Martian colonisation expedition. Though with a calculated background of domesticity, Evan thinks: by the twinkling fibre-optic lights of a Landfall Night celebration and the faces of humanity's only extra-Terran children.

  "Very pioneering," Magnus says again. "The Martian Colonisation and Exploratory Mission can go to hell."

  She sweeps out, wheels soft on the carpeted floor. Evan checks the ratio of adults to children in the room, and goes after her.

  ___

  Dome 2B was initially constructed of meteorite-resistant polymer and the will to survive. These days it's made of glass, with the peculiar orange-purple shimmer that comes from the local mineral impurities. It encloses pods and modules and the internal components of a rudimentary spaceport structure. But along with what came with them, they have enclosed what was already here: precious square metres of the Martian landscape, under glass so they can breathe, but real sand and grit and dust underfoot. Evan knows to find Magnus at the very edge of the dome, her fingers outstretched to the inner surface, not quite brushing it. The surface will be unbearably cold to the touch, with planetary night well-advanced on the other side.

  Evan waits a while before asking, "Well, what's wrong with you?"

  "Nothing," Magnus says shortly, and lays her hands on the glass. Evan hisses and grabs her wrists, pulling her away.

  "You're going to give yourself frostbite, you silly cow," she says. She would usually have much more to say on the subject of Magnus's self-destructive tendencies, but this time she trails off. Beyond the curve of the dome, the landscape stretches out before them, wind
swept and lonesome and every inch enticing. Evan stares at it, then down at her oldest friend's fingers bluish with cold, and feels frightened and miserable.

  "Before we came here," Magnus says, gently. "Before we came, and we saw, and we conquered our own little space, and went forth, and multiplied. Before all that. They said to me, it will take all the years of your life. It will take all you have. Best to make peace with whatever gods you believe in."

  "Magnus…"

  "Because it won't be by their holy rites that you are laid to rest. And I said, yes. Yes. Take me there, and you can take all I have."

  Evan looks up. At this time of year, it's easy to pick out the light that wanders among the fixed stars. Earth is bright tonight. Close-to it would be brighter still, the dark side strung across by the necklace of the equatorial stations, and the space elevator cables descending into the atmosphere. What was an extraordinary journey will remain extraordinary, but those technicians, surveyors, scientists, teachers, and – such luxury, and after thirty years, such necessity – artists, and primary school teachers, and lawyers, and town planners, will come at a payload cost of a hundred dollars per kilogram.

  Magnus follows her gaze. "But here we are. Here we are, still. Holding welcoming parties. Making recruitment posters."

  She's crying. Evan looks down again at Magnus's hands, half-frozen, reaching for further worlds to conquer. "We'll outgrow the domes," she says, carefully. "There will always be more to do."

  "Yeah," Magnus says, and finally pulls back from the edge, blowing on her fingers to warm them, and wiping her eyes. "Like, for example, trundling back in to make a bloody speech all about technicians for a brighter tomorrow."

  "We do need technicians for a brighter tomorrow," Evan says. She turns to look behind her, at their footsteps and wheel tracks in the reddish soil. On impulse, she kneels down to bury her hands in that crumbly dirt. Magnus watches her with something sad and sweet in her expression, and they go back inside together.