by Alex Oliver
Her own room was as she had left it, save for the addition of a cat family sleeping on the bed. She sat on the comforter beside them and looked out through the window to the familiar bunched up, hunkered down landscape of her childhood. Even the planet under its foreign coating of green had a compact, muscular look to it as if it was crouched to pounce.
Aurora took a long bath, intending to consider her options, but allowed herself instead to be soothed and distracted by the luxury of it. She painted her offensive nails and plucked her eyebrows and shaved her legs. It wasn't the relief she had expected it to be. Like the veil, it felt like the return to a box she'd outgrown.
The clothes were good though. A whole wardrobe of her own clothes and a chance to shed a uniform that didn't represent who she was anymore. She dressed in a outfit of dark trousers and boots and a silk blouse over a camisole with lace over the top. The mirror caught her for a moment - she looked and smiled, because Bryant had never seen her looking like this, and it was a comfort to imagine his face when he did. If suggestions of sex did not follow in short order at the sight of her like this, she would knock his head against a wall.
The thought prompted her to fill a small bag with a couple of changes of clothes and even a dress. She was stuffing the tablet with her library into it when it occurred to her that she was packing in case she needed to flee. That was ridiculous. Her family might not approve of her, but she was safe here. No need to be paranoid.
To the indignant stares of a couple of rudely awakened kittens, she set the bag on the bed and finished filling it up. She'd thought Keene loved her once, and he didn't. She'd thought Bryant loved her and he... well, he was always doing things she didn't expect. One could not always count even on the people one loved most. She buckled on her belt with her service side-arm and arranged her blouse and jacket over the top to conceal it. Best to be prepared.
Another five minutes were spent in marveling at the bright eyed soft innocence of the kittens. Oh, they thought they were fierce with their batting little velvet claws, but their attacks on her fingers under the watchful eye of their tabby mother just left her smiling.
Could she really face the kitchen? Walking over the razor wire of her mother’s reproof over and over, hoping for a forgiveness that would have come already if it was going to? No, she couldn’t. She padded down the back stairs and went out to find her sister.
As mãe had said, Selena was in the cow shed. What she hadn't said was that Selena was covered top to toe in waterproof overalls and had her gloved arm up the birth canal of one of the heifers. Aurora immediately regretted wearing the silk blouse.
Selena seemed to be struggling with fastening calving chains around the calf's correctly positioned front feet. The cow stood in a head gate, but every time she bore down Aurora could hear her horns thud against the doors and the ominous sound of wood beginning to split.
"You need some help there?"
Selena's head snapped around, and she gaped at Aurora as if she was the one who had been slapped. Then the cow sidled and stepped on Selena's booted foot. Selena turned back to her work, taking hold of the chains and sitting down to pull. "I don't know what you want me to say to you."
The tears had not retreated far. Aurora felt them shake her voice as she replied. "How about 'Hi sis, it's good to see you. Things must have been hard for you recently. I'm glad you're OK."
"I ca... I can't--"
"I know."
Aurora shut up and let Selena help the cow push. The heifer strained three more times, Selena gritting her teeth and panting as she pulled at the same time, and then the head was out and the rest of the calf slid in a rush of fluid out to land on Selena's waterproof knees. She cleaned its nostrils out, flicked an ear until it snorted in its first breath and said "Can you release the head gate for me?"
Aurora did, guiding the tired heifer into a pen with a manger of clean straw and a trough of water. Selena set the bull calf in front of his mother and guided the heifer’s nose down so she could sniff him. When she began to lick, cleaning him up, claiming him as her own, Selena smiled. "Let's give them some room."
They moved away to the other end of the shed, where the horses drowsed after a long day of managing the herd. Aurora reintroduced herself to her own riding horse, Tigre, hooking an arm over his neck for moral support. Tigre bent his head back and lipped at her veil as though he still remembered who she was.
Selena stripped off her overalls and placed them with the chains in the sterilizing unit. Underneath, she wore a smart business suit appropriate for a successful vet, but daring for a woman of Novocasa. Like Aurora, she had insisted on a career rather than a marriage, but unlike Aurora she had not wasted that too.
She was older than Aurora remembered, now mature and settled in her strength. Something hard glinted in her hazel eyes as she caught Aurora's gaze. But after holding it for a short time she looked away with a rueful smile. "No hug?"
"Oh God!" Aurora lunged for her, gathering her up tight in her arms, and then they were pressed together and she was crying again, miserable and rejected and grateful into Selena's raw silk jacket. "Oh God, tell me I haven't lost you too."
"No. No you couldn't. Nothing you could do. Whatever it was." Selena wasn't making a lot of sense, her own voice choked and her embrace clinging uncomfortably hard. "When I thought you were dead I-- You could have called!"
This reaction was much closer to what Aurora had hoped for from her mother. It made her chin tremble and her stinging eyes burn again, but she stepped back and straightened up with a sigh. "I'd got a colony to manage, everyone starving. I didn't want to invite reprisals either on them or on you."
Selena reached out to stroke Tigre's nose, looking at Aurora sidelong as if the world was such that she really couldn't face it head on. "The vids say you deposed the legitimate government and killed the governor out of hubris, and you threatened Admiral Keene that you'd go to war with him over your daughter. Is that true?"
"I didn't kill the governor," Aurora murmured, because this drowsy old barn didn't seem like it could exist in the same universe as her history of blood. "He should be arriving in Snow City round about now, with money to book a passage home. Other than that, yeah. Pretty much. Not hubris though. The government abandoned us there to die. If I hadn't done anything the colony would have failed and everyone on it would have starved."
She thought about the ancient city in which they had set up base, abandoned and empty, the native plants going into winter, the fish stocks dwindling. Lunches of boiled boot-leather, followed by dinners of hot water. "They still might. I couldn't let that happen. Over a thousand souls. I couldn't just get back in my ship and leave them to starve."
The calf was on its feet now, russet and fluffy, a chunky-legged little thing nudging at its mother's udder with a fresh pink nose. Selena moved over to her bag and drew out a collar with a tiny brass bell, the name Fausto already painted on it in neat white paint. She clasped it around the calf's neck while it drank.
"I can see that," she patted the tuft of Fausto's forelock and seemed to come to a decision, smiling at Aurora almost cheerfully. "The murder, that was what I couldn't believe about you. The boys trying to kick you down, and you telling them where they could get off - that I could see."
Aurora laughed, and rubbed her thumb over the slight roughness on the surface on her dog tags to remind herself of old friends. "Only all my life."
"So I suppose if everyone’s starving that includes you? You’re hungry?"
"I'm ravenous. But I'm hiding from mãe."
Selena huffed as if to say 'for someone so brave you're such a coward' and took her elbow. "I'll go with you. Come on. I'll field the questions while you eat dinner."
"It's a deal."
They walked in through the boot room and the pantry, where the barrels of maize flour, the jars of oil and wine struck her for the first time as strange. To have so much food you could store it up! What a miracle. After scrubbing her hands at the sink, she walked
about just touching things - the rind of a hard cheese impervious as a little planet, one link out of a string of sausages, a bulb of garlic.
Selena smiled, but the expression had a worried edge. "You look like you've never seen food before."
"I've learned not to take it for granted," Aurora corrected, just as Tiago put his head into the room and froze, watching her as though she was a rattlesnake on his floor.
Tiago was the baby of the family, barely twenty, lighter skinned than most of them and with a honey blond shade to the ends of his curly hair. Questions might have been asked, if he had not so clearly resembled his father's mother. His round face broke into a smile just an instant too late to look natural. "Aurora. I. Ah. I didn't believe you were really here. Are you in trouble? I mean, are they hunting you down, because Ayiqueo wanted to come, and she's expecting our first and I don't want her to be in any danger."
"Tiago!" Selena snapped, putting an abashed look on his face. Aurora had already left for boot camp when Tiago was born, so this wasn't the misery of her mother's reaction, but it was another strike on a place already bruised.
I shouldn't have come.
"I don't think I was followed," she said, "And I'm not staying long."
"Good."
"Tiago! Selena said again, gratifyingly outraged. "Don't talk to your sister like that."
"It's all right," Aurora interrupted, though it wasn't, not really. Not much she could do about it though, other than accept it and get out of here soon. "It was selfish of me to visit."
Tiago nodded in solemn agreement to that, but looked mollified. He sighed. "Mãe says to lay the table. I'll do plates."
"It wasn't at all," Selena hissed to her, as they straightened the tablecloth over the dining room table and put down mats to protect the polish. "How could it be selfish to come home? I don't understand how he could--"
"This isn't my home anymore," Aurora hadn't known the sentiment was in her until she heard herself articulating it, but it felt true. Truth was she'd outgrown this place years ago, but kept it out of sentiment as a memory of an idyll that never was.
"How can that be true?"
"I, uh," the thought of Bryant hit her with sudden stab of longing. Bryant and his slippery charm, and his obvious joy in the mysteries of 'his' new planet. Bryant holding out a glowing alien flower to her, by the light of a galaxy of blooms. "I," she shrugged. "I met someone."
"No!" Selena clasped her hands over her mouth in a gesture that reminded Aurora unhappily of her mother, but she was smiling. "You? He's not scared of you?"
Oh, it felt good to gossip like a normal person, to let herself grin back, a little smug. "He is, but he kind of likes that."
"No!" Selena exclaimed again, shocked and amused.
"There's a lot of that going about."
Aurora's levity burst like a balloon. She turned at the sound of Pai's voice, to see her father enter the dining room. Gray haired, distinguished, he had the build of a silverback gorilla and the amiable stroll to go with it.
"A lot of what, sir?"
"A lot of saying 'no' to whatever it is that you've done now."
Pressure tightened around her chest once more, but she wasn't going to start crying this time. Mother got the love, father the obedience, that was how they had always seemed to prefer it.
"I'm just doing what I think is right, sir, like you taught me."
"Well... let's eat before we discuss that. Your mother put a lot of effort into making a meal for you. We should appreciate it."
He sat at the head of the table like a commanding officer, like Keene on his flagship, and a wave of discomforted hatred went over her at the thought. Men in authority. God, they were everywhere.
Miguel and his wife Folade came in and sat in their places without looking at Aurora. They nodded to Selena, and spoke to Tiago, and murmured polite noises in response to Pai pouring them wine. But Aurora might have been transparent. Even when their eyes rested on her, their gazes passed straight through.
With a prickle of unease, she noted that they were alone. "What did you do with your children?" she asked. "Where's my niece Francisca? And the other one you were expecting when I was here last? Zantina, wasn't it?"
Miguel's eyes slid towards her and then away without actually making eye contact. "Ill at home."
Joachim sat down opposite her and began passing dishes up the table as mãe brought them in. He kept his balding head down but it hardly concealed the fact that he was also alone. "And Joachim, where are Tisa and Tristao?"
He looked up as though he was being subjected to torture. "I don't have to tell you that."
He was the one closest to her in age. The one with whom she'd learned to ride, who taught her how to blow a tune from a piece of grass held between the thumbs. "No," she agreed, thoughtfully, because she'd just noticed that the screens were rolled back so the lighted room was visible from the darkened garden. The doors into the house were shut, and everyone had left their children at home.
"No, you don't have to tell me anything." With an internal tearing her certainty of being safe here ripped apart. She leaned back gently to feel the reassuring weight of her pistol press against her spine and tried to tell if there was movement out there, beyond the dance of the night-flying pollinators around the balcony lights.
None that she could see. Mãe was still bringing dishes in, everyone filling their plates in awkward silence around her. With a look of horrified sympathy, Selena went out to the kitchen to help her mother bring the meat, and Aurora fidgeted on her seat, trying to deny what her instincts were trying to tell her.
She had a gun. There was probably a route out through the garden. She had time to - she grabbed the bowl of feijoada and spooned some out, tore into the pão de queijo and began to eat, ignoring the looks of shock at her manners. From the stir all around the table, eating before mãe sat down ranked as a far higher offense than merely rumored murder.
Mother of God, it was so good to have real food again. She took another two rounds of cheese-bread and put them in her pockets, noticing with a kind of disbelieving hilarity that the stiff faces around the table had begun to show realization, awakening.
When Selena ran in with her veil askew, smashing the kitchen door handle deep into the old plaster of the dining room wall, Aurora was already on her feet.
"She says they're! She says she--!"
"Which door?"
A stirring of shapes out beyond the balcony lights translated into the purposeful movement of men with soot-blackened faces. Bright blue and spitting like a cobra, a line of plasma arced into the room from some trigger happy goon out there and burned a hole in the table, filling the room with smoke.
Tiago leapt to his feet, hands raised. "No shooting! You said no shooting, we have pregnant women here!"
Aurora ran for the kitchen door. Her mother planted herself in her path, a look of heartbreak and determination on her face. She thinks she's doing the right thing. She thinks she's a martyr. Aurora's grief turned usefully inside her into a lashing rage, and she shouldered the woman aside, knocking her into the laden table that was a trap, a distraction and a betrayal all disguised as homecoming.
She wasn't thinking about that right now. Diving low through the door, she avoided the shot that had aimed for her head, rolled into the gunman's legs and knocked him down. It was harder fighting people from her own world, just as fast and strong as herself, but she was itching to hurt someone right now and it might have been to his advantage when the earthenware plate of acarajé came down on the back of his head and knocked him out.
Selena stood behind it, looking startled at herself. "I.. I, yeah, I came to tell you--"
Aurora scooped up the fallen snacks and headed for her room, her sister trailing behind, still struggling to find words.
Without switching the light on, Aurora put the bread and the deep-fried bean patties into her bag, the bag on her shoulder, and turned to open the window.
"Thanks," she said, looking at Sele
na with a whole family's worth of gratitude. "For not being in on it. You want me to knock you out too? You can claim I downed him, overpowered you. It won't look like it's your fault."
"You're just?" Selena stammered, the remnants of her severe blue veil sliding from her disheveled hair. "Mãe told them you were here! How can you be so calm?"
Aurora put her back to the wall by the window, looked out. The roof of the cow shed sloped to her right, but on the left bushes swayed not quite in time with the wind. "I'm not calm. I'm storing it up for later."
"But this-- But it-- How could they do this?!"
Aurora belatedly realized that Selena was not shocked at all. The trembling, the stutter, that was a fury as transcendent as her own. "It's OK," she said. "But I gotta go. There's probably going to be some shooting, so keep Ayiqueo indoors until it's all over. I will com you, if I can."
Shouting echoed up from downstairs. That meant more soldiers inside. Aurora closed the curtains, snapped the light on and sprinted for Miguel's room, from which she'd be able to get down onto the cowshed roof. After that... well, something would suggest itself, probably.
"Take care," she tried again to say good bye, climbing out of the unlit window while - hopefully - the troops were concentrating on the room they knew was hers. But Selena just said "No. No, they've got a cordon, mãe said. I’m not going to let you run out into a fire-fight. I've got an idea. I’m coming too."
Slithering down the wall and onto the tiles of the cow shed, Selena gamely followed after. A moment later they were both slipping beneath the eves of the barn and watching Fausto doze by his mother. Selena pulled out a winter horse blanket and its straps from the tack box and buckled the straps around Tigre, one over his shoulders, one over his withers. "Remember Odysseus?"
Aurora did - a Terran hero, older than old, whose story was still used to teach Latin. She crawled under the horse, got her shoulders through one strap and her feet through the other, so she was hanging flush along Tigre's belly. Selena flung the long blanket over the top, concealing Aurora from casual view. She slipped Tigre's bridle on, opened her own horse's stable gate – he would follow her as a colt followed its mother. Then she let the cows out and mounted Tigre without a saddle.