by Linda Nagata
“Ready?” Shoran asked him.
Mikael nodded.
She tossed the fox into the air. Its multiple pairs of mechanical bee wings instantly vibrated into flight mode, producing the humming minor note Urban had heard earlier.
“Check the personnel map,” Shoran said. “Almost everyone is at Alkimbra’s lecture. We’ll need to stay away from the pavilion, but we’ve got the rest of the deck to play.”
“You’re not interested in the history of Tanjiri?” Urban asked, eyeing the fox hovering a meter overhead.
“I’ll read the transcript later—and I’m sure you will too.”
Mikael said, “The game is simple. We chase the fox, corner it, trap it if we can.”
“But use no devices,” Shoran warned. “And no implements. The aim is to train your strength and reflexes. We are a team. Let’s go!”
The fox shot off down the path. Then it dove beneath the trees dividing Clemantine’s cottage from the next one over, where Vytet lived. Mikael bounded after it in a great leap made possible by the gee deck’s low gravity.
Urban turned, listened a moment to the fox’s retreating hum and decided to take a shortcut. Two swift bounds let him achieve a running start. He jumped to the meadow on the cottage roof, then jumped again, to land, rolling in the small lawn of the back garden where he’d been inventorying his subminds just a couple of minutes before.
To his frustration, Mikael was still a step ahead of him while Shoran was only a step behind, appearing around the corner of the house, laughing as the fox doubled back to shoot just past the grasping fingertips of both Urban and Mikael. It shot under trees and over hedgerows. They followed in frenetic pursuit, shouting tactics at each other:
Go around!
Stop it at the picnic ground!
No, no! The other way!
Hearts pumping, chests heaving, skin glistening with sweat. Kona, who’d skipped the lecture too, came out to join them as they took a short break. He greeted Shoran with such an affectionate hug, Urban interpreted it as evidence of a renewed relationship.
So far, sexual associations among the ship’s company tended toward casual and ephemeral, his relationship with Clemantine the exception.
“Release the fox,” Mikael complained.
Shoran laughed and did so, releasing Kona too. They started the game again. The lecture must have ended because a few minutes later several more players joined in, Clemantine among them. She came dressed like Shoran. Bumping up against Urban, she gave him a wink. “Glad to see you making friends.”
“It’s coming at you!” Mikael shouted.
She jumped for it. Urban only watched, entranced by the beauty of her muscular bronze body, simulated sunlight glinting off the gold iris tattoos that edged her ears. She shouted as the fox slipped past, escaping by a millimeter. When it angled away, they bounded in pursuit. Shoran shouted at them to “Go around!” Go around what, Urban wasn’t sure, but after a minute Clemantine was laughing for the sheer joy of wild motion and what else really mattered?
Inexplicably, amid the chaos, he flashed on that separated version of her, the stranger, the one he wasn’t sure he could trust. He heard her words again: I live her life and mine.
This time, he understood. This is what mattered to her. This existence, the loving, tumbling, laughing, fearful, hungry, melancholy, restless human existence lived on this timeline allowed her to exist on the other, just as his dream of finding Clemantine again had let him fare alone over centuries. His doubt eased as he remembered her promise: I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect all of you.
A shout, all too close—“Move!”—startled him back into the present. A glimpse of the fox speeding toward him. He sprang at it, using his head to knock it in Kona’s direction. Kona was taken by surprise. All he could do was bat it toward the ground to slow it down.
Clemantine dove, seizing it as she rolled across a tiny lawn, but she didn’t have a good grip on it. It was wriggling free until Shoran met her. She clapped her hands around Clemantine’s—and abruptly, the hum of the fox ceased.
“We won!” Shoran crowed to a chorus of whoops and laughs as nine players collapsed to the ground in a satisfied state of exhaustion.
<><><>
Clemantine lingered, luxuriating under the soothing, slow-falling water of her shower, quietly astonished at her own growing optimism. It had been a good day. She’d spent time in the library and on the high bridge, and the lecture had been interesting, but mostly she was still aglow from her introduction to flying fox.
The game had given her a workout, but better than that, it had been fun. Simple fun. She could not remember the last time she’d just played like that. Maybe not since that long-ago age before the Chenzeme ravaged Heyertori.
She squeezed her eyes shut, recoiling from the memory.
Don’t go there.
“Live in the moment,” she whispered. “Live for now.”
She touched the water off. Toweled herself dry in a gentle, warm wind. Then stepped out of the shower. The ultra-thin polymer of its walls unlocked, melting into a translucent ring that sank out of sight beneath the blond-wood floor as the ceiling regrew, smooth white.
After a moment of thought she requested a short, shimmering, mahogany-colored shift from the house DI. The dress budded from the generative surface of an active wall. She pulled it on, smoothed it straight, and walked barefoot into her living room.
Urban looked up with a smile from where he crouched by a low table with curved legs, arranging the various dishes he’d synthesized for their dinner.
“Just in time,” he said. He was dressed in loose trousers, his skin smooth and clean from the ministrations of his Makers; he did not enjoy showers as she did.
“It looks wonderful,” she said, and meant it.
He had picked up a lot of useful skills over his long lifetime, though he’d never learned to invest much value in the idea of home. He lived with her in this cottage, but it was hers. It reflected her personality and the simple serenity she preferred. Urban lived there without imparting any sense of himself to the place.
“It’s your home,” he always insisted. “Even when you’re not here, it’s as if you are and I like it that way. Don’t change anything.”
So the soft colors and the simple graceful lines of the furnishings that came and went in the changeable front room were all to her taste.
There was often a sofa positioned to catch the sunlight or moonlight coming through a side window. The table would be extruded from the floor on demand whenever they wanted to share a meal or a pot of tea. Colorful pillows served as their seats. The paintings on the walls changed every few days, or more often if the current selection did not suit her mood. The largest painting could be made to disappear, replaced by a screen where they watched recorded dramas.
The only unchanging piece in the room was a slim side table of honey-colored wood with a shallow dish on its polished surface in which a colony of irises grew.
Clemantine had an affinity for the flowers. Since her youth she’d been entranced with their beauty. She wore them as ornamentation, tattooed in gold along the edges of her ears. Only later in life did she come to appreciate them as symbols of renewal, life from lifelessness at the turn of seasons.
She sat down, cross-legged, facing Urban, and raised her jade-green chopsticks as part of a smiling salute. “Itadakimasu,” she said in appreciation of the meal.
“The least I could do.”
“You should host a community dinner and cook for everyone.”
He laughed. “No, they expect actual cooking, not just food ordered from a synthesizer.”
“You could help plan the menus.”
The focus of the community was squarely on the study of the Hallowed Vasties, but that destination remained far off, so people divided their time among a range of interests and enthusiasms.
Cooking was one of the most popular pastimes, whether for festivals, community meals, or competitions. Musicians and
singers were abundant, performing in a range of styles. Visual arts and live dramas were pursued with passion, and the library was continuously mined in a search for recordings of ancient dramas, both performed and interactive. There were dramatic readings, intellectual and virtual games, and after today, athletic games.
Clemantine continued to practice her own hobby of genetically sculpting plants. The irises she kept on the side table were her creation. She had redesigned their genome so that with a proper feeding of nutrients they would grow from rhizomes to bold and bright blue flowers within three days, stay thus a while—a randomized span of time, unpredictable, anything from a day to ten days—and then the color of the flowers would shift to white, a sign that the cycle was nearly done.
If she was there to see the white color then she would sit cross-legged, waiting, watching, meditating, until, without further warning, the plant darkened and within a few seconds crumbled in on itself, collapsing in a layer of granular humus that fell like a shroud over the half-exposed rhizomes. Those seemingly lifeless roots would not quicken again until they received a new feast of nutrients.
The first time Urban had seen the collapse he’d been angry over it. “That’s horrible. Why do you want it to do that? Why don’t you make the flowers perpetual instead?”
“A false promise?” she’d asked him.
He hadn’t bothered to answer that. Just shook his head and moved on. Never questioned her on it again—though she’d seen him watching the transformation since then.
She meant for the rise and fall of the flowers to symbolize renewal, not death. More than once in her life she had lost all and grown again from nothing. Even in this peaceful succession of days, as she strove to live in the present, she thought it wise to be reminded of that.
She composed a message and sent it off to her separated self: *I think I understand why you want it this way.
Later, when dinner was finished, she would send a submind to that other version of her, and share her experience of this day.
Chapter
23
The fleet’s array of telescopes engaged in a continuous slow survey of the Near Vicinity, seeking for anomalies near enough to constitute a threat. Only once a year did the Astronomer focus the array on the individual star systems of the Hallowed Vasties, to capture updated images.
Pasha had sought out Vytet as soon as she learned of this schedule, wanting his explanation for it before confronting Urban directly. “It makes no sense,” she’d insisted to him. “We should be monitoring the Vasties more often. Twice a year, at minimum. It’s why we’re here.”
Vytet had given up his archaic beard, revealing a refined face, one that now wore an ambivalent expression. “I don’t disagree, but Urban’s priority is protecting the fleet from near-term threats, so that’s where the telescope time goes. The Astronomer has advised him an annual survey of the Vasties is sufficient to capture evidence of change.”
“Maybe in the past,” Pasha had conceded. “Maybe even now, for the more distant systems. But we’re closing on Tanjiri and Ryo. Both should be monitored on a much more frequent schedule.”
Vytet had advised patience. “The annual survey is coming up,” he’d reminded her. “Let’s wait. See what it reveals. And then make the argument.”
A shiver of excitement touched her as she left her cottage. The annual survey was finally underway. In minutes, the first new images of Tanjiri in a year would begin to come in.
For once, as she hurried along the path, she did not hear the annoying hum of a flying fox. It was late afternoon, the favorite time to play the game, but today there was only birdsong, the buzz of bees, and quiet chatter as people made their way to the amphitheater, where they would watch together as the new images arrived.
She thought she’d left early, but most of the front-row seats were taken by the time she arrived. Fortunately, Tarnya was there at the center of the row, along with Shoran and Mikael. They waved at her, calling out, “Pasha! We’ve saved you a seat.”
She hurried to join them, as walls descended from the perimeter of the sheltering pergola and the canopy shifted to impenetrable black, blocking out the afternoon sunlight. As the walls bonded to one another and to the floor, the temperature dropped—appropriately, Pasha thought, given the sudden fall of night. On the curved projection screen, a starfield blazed in sudden glory.
A rustling and murmuring as those still standing hurried to find seats, guided by tiny points of blue light on the floor.
“What do you think we’ll see?” Shoran asked, starlight reflecting in her eyes, along with an excitement that echoed Pasha’s own.
“I hope we’ll see what’s casting shadows on the star,” she said. “If it’s a planet, or a disc of debris, or a surviving structure.”
“You want it to be a structure,” Tarnya teased.
“Yes! That would be amazing. Our first hint of the kind of habitats that combined to create the cordon.”
The gathering settled, murmurs faded. A shiver ran up Pasha’s spine—from the cold or from anticipation? She couldn’t say.
She looked for Vytet and saw him standing beside the dais, a tall silhouette limned in starlight, his long hair loosely tied. Vytet had organized this gathering. Now he acknowledged the restless silence by gesturing at the projected starfield. “We have the grandest of views,” he said in his gentle, contemplative voice. “But it’s a view that changes only slowly. It’s not as if we can turn a corner and encounter a new vista. All that is, is out there in front of us but at such a distance details are elusive. Only slowly, gradually, as we draw closer to a target star do we have a real chance of discerning what might still exist in orbit around it.”
A doorway peeled open. Light washed in, inciting annoyed murmurs. A man’s handsome silhouette, against the afternoon glare. Pasha recognized Riffan.
“Pardon me,” he said contritely as the doorway sealed shut behind him. “I’m a minute late.”
Good-humored teasing erupted. People liked Riffan. They clapped and whistled and called out, “Find the man a seat!”
Not Pasha. She stayed silent, and under cover of darkness, allowed herself an irritated snarl. Are we friends, Pasha? he’d asked, but she’d skirted the question. Now she bit her lip and conceded, if only to herself, Jealousy is the worst emotion.
It was not his fault he’d been privileged to go on the expedition to the beacon. Urban had picked him out of the archive, ostensibly because Riffan was an anthropologist. Yet an exobiologist would have made sense too. More sense. But Urban had met the two of them aboard Long Watch, and he had chosen Riffan.
She chided herself, You are so petty!
And still, it rankled. She’d worked so hard in her career. She’d had to push at every stage to advance in the sclerotic hierarchy of Deception Well. The quality of her work had always earned praise and yet it did not bring her the reward of new projects. Always, she had to take the initiative, put herself forward, or be forgotten. Over the years she’d often felt invisible.
None of it was Riffan’s fault, but she could not help a stab of jealousy every time she saw him, so she did her best not to see him. It was that simple.
Shuffling sounds from the back indicated Riffan was still making his way to an open seat, but Pasha raised her chin and fixed her attention forward as Vytet resumed his introductory remarks.
“The ingredients of life are all still present at Tanjiri,” he said. “Past surveys have detected water, oxygen, and abundant organic molecules. Whether those are associated with biological life we can’t know, but the situation is intriguing.
“Throughout our journey, we’ve tracked irregular but easily measurable variations in Tanjiri’s luminosity. And yet historically, the star is known to be stable. We have data from centuries of observations, predating the expansion, that prove this.”
Shoran interrupted with a half-raised hand. “You’re assuming the people of the Hallowed Vasties did not manipulate and destabilize the star itself,” she s
aid.
“We can’t be sure,” Vytet admitted. “We know they possessed engineering skills far beyond anything we’re capable of—but did they build their cordons from matter harvested from cometary clouds? Or did they break up planets to do it? To overcome the attractive force of gravity . . . that is a physics we know almost nothing about, even now, when we’ve had the use of the propulsion reef for centuries.
“We don’t know how the cordons were made, but in just a few minutes we may gain some insight on where the matter was obtained.
“We have records of Tanjiri’s major planets. We know where they should be now, in their orbits, and we know the percentage each would contribute to the variation in luminosity as they cross the face of the star—”
“If they still transit the face of the star,” someone in the second row interjected. Pasha recognized the precise diction of the physicist, Naresh. “If they are no longer intact, we have no basis for our calculations.”
“Yes, Naresh. Exactly.” Vytet again spoke to the full gathering. “What we do know is that the variation we’re seeing is much greater than could be caused by the known planets if they do all still exist. Our hypothesis—mine, along with those Apparatchiks we call the Scholar and the Astronomer—is that some megastructures from the original cordon, or perhaps just fragments of them, still exist.”
Pasha’s mind was running ahead. “But this is not a new theory, correct?” she asked. “It’s been less than two thousand years since the Hallowed Vasties broke up. Not much time on an astronomical scale. And if the structures had been broken down to dust, we would have seen a nebula.”
Naresh answered this, saying, “I’ve looked over the historical data.” Pasha turned to see him in the row behind her, a shadowy figure in the faint light, his posture as precise as his words. He continued, “There may be a nebula, but it’s too thin to account for a majority of the matter that went into the construction of the cordon.”
