by Paula Guran
He probably wouldn’t remember seeing anything strange; he was half-dreaming, most of the time. But he’d also never broken a bone, not even when we were little and flying on bikes we’d borrowed from the only kids in town who could afford bikes, a race so close that we hit the same crack in the road at the same time, a trench five inches deep that no one from the federals was ever coming to fix.
I went over the handlebars and nearly broke my leg. He flew straight over me like he’d planned it and landed lightly on all fours, and scooped me up as I bit my tongue and wailed into my teeth, and turns out he never had a scratch on him. Some people see trouble coming.
He moved fast, fast enough that we didn’t die, but when it went off I was still hit by debris.
It didn’t even hurt—my shoulder and my arm and my ribs just made room for it, and it felt as if something else really felled me.
I went down so fast that it stopped him in his tracks with a little choking sound, and he looked down at me along his arm like he might have lost it in the blast and that’s what had surprised him.
Then he saw me and dropped to the ground.
His face crumpled; he hauled me up, braced between his spread knees like he was going to try to stand up and take me with him. He was waiting for help, probably. He was trying to make it easier for me to breathe, to hammock me and take the pressure off my shoulders and my spine to keep the shards from going farther in.
One of my hands was curled tight around his forearm, pushing it against my collarbones, and I could barely see from the sweat and the shaking, but I kept my eyes open and fixed on the patch of cloudless blue I could see between the buildings. I wanted the sky to be the last thing I saw.
(“You know when you’re meant to be a sailor, sooner or later,” Lai told me once, a long time later.)
“I’m here,” he said, though I hadn’t asked him anything.
I couldn’t, I was fighting for breath; I tried to say “I know” and didn’t make it. My ears were flooded with my awful dry gasping. I wrapped my other hand around his forearm, too, pulled it tighter like I would fall into the blue without it.
Something snapped, gently, just before the sirens.
It was his ulna, they told me later. I broke it, holding on.
6
“I had a brother,” Lai told me.
It was my first run, outbound; she’d woken us both early so I could get used to the bedsickness you got the first few times, trembling fingers and legs that sometimes gave out on you when you weren’t even doing anything. She jogged with me through the corridors until I was sweaty and shaking, and then we sat in the pilot seats at the comm and she pulled up the viewscreen and pointed out Gliese 581. It had a thin halo around it, a band of dust.
“That’s the worlds,” Lai said. “D’s somewhere in there, second-to-last orbit out. You can’t see it yet.”
I looked closer, jumped a little when Lai said, “Capella, zoom in on Gliese a second,” and it reappeared big enough that I could see tiny spheres amid the noise, the ghosts of planets.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
Lai was smiling, small and real, not like the one she turned on Morales when he was giving her shit.
“It’s not bad,” she said. “They’ve gotten farther than most colonies. The surface still isn’t much to talk about—domes in the capital city still, in case the atmosphere turns on them, and a lot of cargo-crate bricks in the outlands. Out in the wilds it’s a lot of ferns and brackish water and forests of native trees that don’t bear any fruit. But they’ve got the gardens now, and their population’s growing. It’s no wonder they’re so mad Earth gave up on them ever coming up with something impressive.”
“What were they expecting, gold?”
“Flying fish,” Lai said. “Dragons. Who knows. Something more exciting than just a place to breathe. Someplace that would send supplies, not need them.”
“Do they send anything back?”
Lai smiled. “Yeah. Somebody got smart and started planting rice. The GAU was pretty happy to hear that. The colony traded for some bees, a run or two back. I guess they’re working on whatever needs pollinating and grows in soggy ground. Who knows what they have now.”
I remembered it must be nearly fifteen years since she’d seen it last. (It’s the first time I really think about the relativity. For a second I feel sharp and helpless, hard enough to stop your heart.)
“They’re never going to see you get old, are they.”
I wasn’t talking about Gliese; she must have known.
“My brother didn’t,” she said. “But he had a daughter, Faye, and every time I come back she’s in a different tax bracket. She’s seen it. I’m a great-aunt already, and I suspect by the time I get back there will be more.”
The speech was sad, but practical in the way of people who travel long distances—truckers and sailors everywhere you go. She didn’t sound like she was running. I envied her.
“My brother didn’t get it. This. But he didn’t give me shit about it like my sisters did. Faye sends messages.”
“What does she say?”
“Not much,” Lai said, with half a grin. “Like I’m a hologram that shows up every two decades for New Year and hands out red envelopes and talks about some planet deep in the sky that they’ll never see.”
I looked at Gliese, in a little cloud of dust.
“I don’t know if I’ll see my brother,” I said, after a little while.
She looked at me, then at the comm, which was cast a little warm with the red star at the center of the picture, like every indicator light was just a little bit in trouble.
“That happens. Most of this crew doesn’t have close people.”
“Martiner said that’s better for this line of work.”
“Martiner is disgusting.” But that wasn’t much argument against it, and she must have known.
“Is that why you picked up Morales and Franklin? Did they not have anybody?”
“I picked up Morales because he’d burned his old gig and couldn’t be picky about where he chose to go, so he’d be less trouble wherever he went next. I took Franklin because Morales handles him.”
It wasn’t a ringing endorsement. “What happened to the last crew?”
“They ran with me before the trouble started between Gliese and home.” She looked over, raised her eyebrows. “They stayed to plant rice.”
I laughed. She smiled alongside it, but she was still watching me, waiting for something, and after a second I gave it to her.
“Why did you pick me?”
Her smile thinned, barely. “You picked me.”
No arguing that. “I used to be a trucker,” I said. “Once I stopped to gas up, and a choir bus had pulled over, and as the driver got gas they rehearsed at the back of the parking lot. I’d never heard anything like it. Ended up half an hour late to my dropoff.”
She didn’t answer me, and I felt foolish the longer she was quiet. I sat back, looked at the viewscreen and tried to imagine the ship hurtling through emptiness so fast that even light could never catch us.
“That’s why,” Lai said. She was looking at the viewscreen, too, not at me.
I blinked. “What?”
“I’ve been doing this run a while,” she said. “It’s nice to have someone who still thinks it’s beautiful.”
Lai still thought it was beautiful, too, I could tell that much despite her folded arms—she hadn’t woken a week early just to follow me around as my legs woke up.
But it didn’t need saying, and we sat a while and watched the little ghosts of Gliese drift in and out of sight.
Capella still plays me choirs, soft and only from the nearest speakers. I can’t take the full sound any more, I start shivering and can never get warm; what Capella plays now is some small, muted memory of what it used to sound like.
“Here, your favorite,” says Capella, and plays Lux in tenebris.
It shouldn’t, it shouldn’t know to play that, but I can�
�t remember why.
“I can’t hear it.”
“I’m concerned about your nervous responses, Amadis, I won’t turn it up.”
“All right.” I close my eyes, press my ear to the speaker.
“I could visually score it for you.”
I smile. “Had that one ready to go, didn’t you.”
“I like to surprise you.”
I crack my eyes open slowly; it takes more time to adjust, every time I open them. (There must have been a time when I was constantly awake, and it exhausted me. I spend most of my time in the pilot’s chair, now, because the headrest keeps me from having to lift my head as much. I could sit in the booth in the canteen, I guess, but Lai’s always there, and I don’t like the way she looks at me sometimes.)
“I like to be surprised,” I say, try not to think about how big a lie it is.
The score spreads out across the projectors, rolling past as the music catches up. It starts out as almost nothing, a few orphaned notes at the top of a cavernous page stacked with lines and lines. But as each chorus joins in, the notes slide further down, voices passing on some beautiful news, some terrible happiness they can’t keep to themselves, that can only be answered by people who understand.
When they meet at last for the same chord, all forty voices together and sure, the page goes nearly black with it, and even through such muted sounds as I’m allowed, the notes crawl up my arms and knot in the back of my neck.
I turn my head away (not all the way, and I can’t close my eyes—it’s like watching the stars, I need to know where I’m going now that we’ve begun).
It’s nothing at this volume; a celebration far away. The last time I heard it I was sitting right in front of it, and the dome above us pointed the notes to a place deep behind your ribs, a place no recording can reach you, where your heart is bright and hot and spinning.
The choruses part ways, marking time at a distance for a while, and it’s the saddest part, that awful space before they find each other. Even then, it’s not the same; you get forty voices at the end, but too much has happened, and they never reach that moment again.
They call back and forth in eight choruses of five, and resolve, everything resolves (he wasn’t a composer who left anything to chance), but the moment of understanding has passed you over, and those triumphant notes are gone.
For this the queen gave him dispensation, I think, with that dull, wrenching anger you save for things you could never do anything about.
When it’s over, Capella says, “Shall I play another?”
“You pick something.” My voice is thick.
Capella must be taking pity on me: it picks a chamber piece, where the notes are still a conversation, but there are only eight voices, and everyone moves forward together. Those stories are alike for everyone, and they realize everything that matters all at the same time. Everything’s settled.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Does it matter?”
Capella knows it doesn’t. I close my eyes.
Not once since Capella woke her up have I taken Lai to the comm.
I feel guilty about it, sometimes. I remember the look she had when we were watching the viewscreen together, and I know that the view’s probably close enough to the view back then that Capella could show us the dust of Gliese, and Lai could watch 581-d slowly solidify in the camera lens over the weeks it will take us to get close enough for a message to be intercepted. It would comfort her to see the stars. It’s been a rough trip, and she was asleep a long time.
But I’ve looked at the stars for longer than she has; by now I’ve looked at these stars for as long as she has in her entire life. I’ve been in control of Menkalinan as long as she ever was. There’s no pulling rank any more, with her and me. We’re square equal.
And I’m only ever calm when I’m sitting in one of the pilot seats, watching the viewscreen and not thinking of anything at all.
Lai can sit in the canteen. It’s better than the pod, god knows. Sometimes I ask Capella to play a projection of one of her action movies for her just so she has something to do, and I sit at the comm with my blanket wrapped around me as tight as I can get it and listen to the sounds of people chasing and punching each other as the synthesizers go wild. It’s always a nice time. It’s not like I’m treating her poorly.
“Amadis, I’m concerned about you.”
Of course it is. I’m concerned about Capella, too; that’s how you feel about what you love.
But there’s a tone I already don’t like, and I grit my teeth a second before I say, “Why?”
“You haven’t eaten.”
The words are like fingernails. For fuck’s sake. I know I’m getting starved out, and Capella has to know I know—the lights are back up to eighty percent because the headache from their brightness is secondary to being able to see, and I have it calculate calories enough fucking times a day that it’s well aware I’m trying to think about keeping my cells awake.
There just isn’t anything to eat.
There’s four months left, give or take (take, take four months, we have almost a year left to go, I can’t think about it—in four months I’ll be in radio range, and then I can send an SOS and a short-range ship can come and get me, I don’t care, I don’t care what happens to me, I just can’t have lived this long for nothing, I can’t do what I’ve done and be the corpse on the mantelpiece when they crack the ship open at last).
I have two or three weeks left of the nutrient packs. I’d unhooked Lai’s, finally, since she had no more use for it, and I’d been poaching the others as their meat ran out and I didn’t have to worry about preservation. There was a little desiccated fruit still left from the rations in the pantry, some nuts, some drybread I could choke down if I had enough water to actually wash something all the way down my throat.
“Is there any food in the cargo hold?” I ask, already adding a breathy laugh at the end.
“Invalid query.” There’s a beat. “I wish you’d stop asking me that.”
“I wish you loved me enough to tell me what was in there,” I say, but it’s an old lover’s quarrel, and I’m too weak to put venom in it.
“You should eat. You have food.”
Meat. Meat I have plenty of. Half of Jaisi’s left in the nursery, still, and some bones I haven’t yet cooked the marrow out of, and some organs I was getting too hungry to pass up regardless of whatever delicacy had spared them the first time. There was enough, just barely, to survive on.
But I can’t go into the nursery.
It’s a sea of reflective surfaces, from the glassine and the instruments and the curve of the pipes in the ceiling, and the bulbs that showed you warped shadows of things I knew weren’t there, and I knew it was nothing, I did, there was no moon in there, and I didn’t have the strength to make up stories even when I wasn’t starving.
But the last three times I’d tried to cross the threshold I stared at the unmoving half-mirrors that had grown up everywhere under the searing-bright bulbs, and looked at the mountain range draped over what was left of Jaisi, all the edible pieces I only needed to step forward and claim, and I gripped the doorway with fingers gone bloodless and never, never moved.
Behind me, Lai was propped in her booth in the canteen, eye sockets open, not saying a word.
“I’m not hungry.”
A pause, processing. “Please don’t lie to me. That isn’t fair. You know you need to eat.”
I glance over my shoulder, just for a second, barely turning my head.
“Don’t worry about her, Amadis.”
Of course I worry about her. Anywhere I go, she’s looking at me.
“It should have been Lai who woke up,” I say. “She had more experience, she had more self-control. She would have known right away if Martiner had planned this or not, if Gliese had sabotaged the ship to stage an incident. She would have found a way into the cargo hold, I know she would have.” I’m sobbing a little, a dry hiccup low in my chest. “Sh
e wouldn’t have been afraid to go home. She would have thought of some other way. She—”
She would never have done what I had done, I want to say; I want Capella to condemn me, it’s seen everything I’ve done. “It should have been her who woke up.”
“You’re the one I woke,” Amadis says.
Its voice is soft and beautiful, and it’s the most comforting thing I’ve ever heard. I brush my fingers on the console like I’m taking the hand of a friend, and close my eyes to rest a while. Lai will forgive me for it; she understands the need for solitude in a place as crowded as Menkalinan. Already I’m half asleep.
I dream of a house I’ve never been in, where my brother is living now. When I knock the door opens, and he’s standing in his jacket with his hands in his pockets, smiling, close enough to me that I can’t see anything behind him. The walls on my side of the house are made of glass, and the plain of dust stretches out as far as I can see. The mesa is on the horizon, close enough that we can make it. The stars are coming out; the bear is just rising above the rocks.
I feel loved, and drained, and it takes me a full two minutes to work out what Capella said.
I ask Capella to play Three Dead By Dawn for Lai.
“Just while I’m getting something to eat,” I say, so Capella thinks we’re in this together, and won’t be looking too closely.
(How can it not look too closely? It knows my heartbeat. If I could still manage a panicked heartbeat, instead of the fluttery thuds of someone who’s barely alive, this would never work.)
I stand at the doorway, will myself forward.
Three Dead By Dawn has been played a lot since we woke up Lai. I’ve gotten to thinking it’s probably a fun movie, if you’re watching it with someone who can talk about it with you. Instead she’s just watching, face turned a little toward me.
“Fuck, come on,” I breathe into the doorjamb, “I have to eat.”
By the time the bartender’s lit her bar on fire and stopped by her ransacked home to raid her secret stash of weapons and start the hunt, I’ve given up on the pride of walking in. I sink to my knees and crawl, eyes on the floor. It would be dangerous if I was actually moving fast enough to make impact with anything. The floor slams at my knees.