Babylon's Ashes

by James S. A. Corey

  “Do you think Pa will take the job?” he asked. He sounded almost wistful.

  “Yes, eventually,” Naomi said. And then, a moment later, “How long have you been planning that?”

  “The idea of the union, or Pa in particular?”

  “Pa.”

  Jim shrugged. “It was pretty clear early on that having an Earther be the head of it wasn’t going to work. I thought Fred would be able to find someone. So I guess I started looking at her for it right around then. Consciously, anyway. She was kind of perfect, though. She broke with the Free Navy in order to help the Belt. No one else did that, or at least not as openly. And she won every fight she led her people into. I think the ones who need to take her seriously, will.”

  Naomi sat on the edge of the crash couch. It shifted with the change in the center of their combined weight, moving Jim a few centimeters closer to her. He stretched out an arm as invitation, and she settled back into it. “Do you think she’ll enjoy it?”

  “I don’t know. I’d hate it, but maybe she’s different enough from me she’ll find something to redeem the process. The important thing is I think she’ll be good at it. Plays to her strengths. At least I don’t know anyone who’s likely to do better.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said. “You really think you couldn’t have done it?”

  “I was never an option. There’s too much history. Maybe an Earther can do it in a generation or three when things have been different for a while.”

  Naomi laughed, moved her head to rest beside his. “By then something else will have happened.”

  “Yeah,” Holden said. “That’s true. But in the short term, I really do think she’s the best one for the job. I’m just glad she was here. My second choice for the job would have been you.”

  She sat up, looking into his eyes to see whether he was joking. A long way away, Amos laughed just loud enough for the echoes to reach her. Jim’s expression was somewhere between chagrin and amusement.

  God, he’d been serious.

  “You could have done it,” Holden said. “You’re smart. You’re a Belter. Your opposition to the Free Navy’s as good or better than Pa’s. You have a track record that Earth and Mars would have been comfortable with, and enough connection to the Belt to make you plausible to them.”

  “You know I wouldn’t have done it, right?”

  “No,” Jim said, and there was something almost like sorrow in his voice. “I know you wouldn’t have wanted to. I know you would have hated it. But you would have, if you had to. If there wasn’t someone else. Too many people would have needed you for you to turn them all away.”

  She lay back down, considered the idea, and shuddered.

  “I know, right?” Jim said. “And how are you doing?”

  She took the hand of the arm she was lying across in hers, drew it gently around her like he was a blanket. He had asked her that every few days since the war ended. How was she doing? It sounded like an innocuous question, but it carried more than its own weight. She’d killed her old lover, her old friends. She wished with a longing as powerful as thirst that there had been a way to save her son. Jim wasn’t asking if she was all right so much as how bad was it. There was no good answer for that. I will carry this guilt and sadness for the rest of my life was just as true as I lost my son years ago. Her comfort was that she was still alive. That Jim was. And Amos and Alex. Bobbie and Clarissa.

  She was as much a monster as Clarissa or Amos had ever been. She was someone who’d found a way to save her little chosen family when everything seemed lost. The two didn’t balance, but they existed together. Pain and relief. Sorrow and contentment. The evil and the redeeming could sit together in her heart, live together, and neither one take the edge off the other.

  And Jim knew that. He didn't ask because he needed an answer. He asked because he needed her to know the answer mattered to him. That was all.

  “I’m all right,” she said. The way she always did. Jim reached out his other hand and dimmed the lights. Naomi closed her eyes. They felt very comfortable that way. She could hear from Jim’s breath that he wasn’t asleep. That he was thinking about something.

  She kept herself awake, just a little. Waited for him. Little flickers of dream danced in at the edge of her mind, and she lost track of her body every now and again.

  “Do you think we should go out to the colonies?” he said. “It seems like maybe we ought to. I mean, we’ve been to Ilus. And if we can sort of blaze the trail? Make it normal? Maybe it’ll be easier for Pa to get more Belt ships to take the risk.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “Because the other thing we could do is stay here. There’s just a lot of work that’s going to need to happen here. Rebuilding. Beefing up Medina for when Duarte comes back. Because you know whatever he’s doing is going to be a problem eventually. I don’t know where we should go next.”

  Naomi nodded. Jim rolled in closer to her. The warmth of his body and the smell of his skin were consoling.

  “Let’s just stay here for a minute,” she said.

  Epilogue: Anna

  As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”

  In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

  Anna savored the moment, then closed the text window and made the same, small sound that she always did when she finished the book. Anna loved the Bible and felt comforted and lifted up by what she found in it, but Tolstoy was uncontested for second place.

  The accepted etymology of the word religion was that it came from religere, meaning “to bind together,” but Cicero had said its true root was relegere, “to reread.” The truth was, she liked both answers. What brought people together in a sense of love and community and the impulse to go back to beloved books weren’t that different for her. Both of them left her feeling calmer and renewed. Nono said it meant she was an introvert and an extrovert at the same time. Anna couldn’t really argue against that.

  Officially the ship was the Abdel Rahman Badawi operated by Trachtman Corporation out of Luna, but everyone on board called her the Abbey. The complex history of the ship was written in her bones. The hallways were different shapes, depending on the style when they’d been added in or what salvaged ship they’d been taken from. The air always smelled like new plastic from the recyclers. The thrust gravity was kept at a thin tenth of a g to conserve reaction mass. The cargo decks far below Anna now were cathedral-high and piled with all the things that the new colony on Eudoxia—shelters, food recyclers, two small fusion reactors, and a wealth of biological and agricultural materials—would need. There were already two other settlements on Eudoxia. It was one of the most populous of the colony worlds with almost a thousand people on it.

  When the Abbey arrived, that population would triple, and Anna and Nono and Nami would be part of it. Would live out the rest of their lives, chances were, finding ways to raise food they could eat, learning about their new, broad, and problematic Eden. And hopefully, building the spaces and institutions that would shape humanity’s presence on that world forever.
The first university, the first hospital, the first cathedral. All the things perched just outside reality, waiting for Anna and her fellow colonists to bring them into being.

  It wasn’t the retirement Anna had expected or hoped for. Some nights she dreaded it. Not for herself so much as for her daughter. She’d always thought of Nami growing up in Abuja with her cousins, going off to university in Saint Petersburg or Moscow. She felt wistful now, knowing that Nami would likely never have the experience of living in a huge, sprawling urban environment. That she and Nono wouldn’t grow old together in the little house near Zuma Rock. That her own ashes, when she passed, would be scattered on unfamiliar water. But Abuja also had a few thousand less mouths to feed. Out of the remaining billions on Earth, it was nothing, except that enough nothings together might add up to something after all.

  Her cabin was smaller than the house with two tiny bedrooms, a little sitting area with a scruffy wall screen, and just enough storage for their personal items. There were twenty like it in their hall, with a shared lavatory at one end and a cafeteria at the other. Four halls like hers on the deck. Ten decks on the ship. Right now, Nono was at the galley on deck three singing with a bluegrass quartet. The youngest of the musicians—a rail-thin, red-haired man named Jacques Harbinger—had used almost his whole personal space allotment on a real hammer dulcimer. Nami would be coming back from school on deck eight, where Kerr Ackerman was using the ship tutorials to teach the two hundred or so children about biology and survival techniques tailored for Eudoxia. After they both came home and they’d all had dinner in their own galley, Anna was going to the Humanist Society meeting on deck two, where she’d already won the role of the loyal opposition to George and Tanja Li, the young atheist couple who ran it. She didn’t fool herself into believing anyone would change anyone else’s mind. But the trip was long, and a good philosophical discussion passed the hours pleasantly. Then home to work on her sermon for next week.

  She remembered something she’d read, she didn’t know where, about the life of ancient Greece. The private space had been thin there too, most of people’s hours spent in the streets and courtyards of Athens and Corinth and Thebes. A world where everyone’s home was not their castle but their dorm room. It was exhausting, but exhilarating too. She could already see the early shapes of the community they would eventually become. And the efforts she made now would have an effect on what happened when they reached their new home planet. The decisions they made in building their township would be the seed crystal for the city that might one day rise up from it. A few hundred years, and the work Anna did now to make this group a kind, thoughtful, centered one might be able to shape a whole world.

  And wasn’t that worth a little extra effort?

  She heard Nami’s voice before the door opened, serious and percussive the way she got when she was focused on something. She didn’t talk to herself often, so Anna assumed she had someone from school with her. When the door opened, she was proven right.

  Nami walked into the little common room, practically dragging a sullen Arab boy behind her. He started a little when he saw Anna. She smiled without showing her teeth, didn’t quite make eye contact, didn’t move. She’d learned more about how to be with traumatized people in the last year than she’d ever hoped to know, and much of what she came to understand was that humans were domestic animals like dogs and cats. They responded poorly to threats and well to a gentle building of trust. Not rocket science, but easy to forget.

  “This is Saladin,” Nami said. “We have a group project.”

  “Good to meet you, Saladin,” Anna said. “I’m glad you could be here.”

  The boy nodded once, looked away. Anna had to resist the urge to try to draw him out, ask him where he lived, who his parents were, how he liked his classes. She was always impatient to help people, even when they weren’t ready to be helped. Maybe especially then.

  Nami, nattering about the great-man theory and technological ratchets and railroading time as if to fill the conversation for both of them, went to her bedroom and came out with her school tablet. Anna hoisted an eyebrow. “That’s been here all day?”

  “I forgot it,” Nami said lightly. Then, “Bye, Mom,” as she marched out the door.

  Saladin hesitated like he was surprised to have been left alone with a grown-up. Anna looked close to him, but not straight on. He nodded and ducked out the door after her daughter. She waited for one breath, and then another, and then—knowing it was a bad idea—crept to the closed door and peeked out. Nami and Saladin were walking down the narrow ship corridor, squeezing close to be side by side. His right hand was in her left, and as far as Anna could see, Nami was still talking animatedly about whatever she was talking about while Saladin, rapt, listened.

  “So what’s your group project?” Anna asked.

  Dinner that night was spiced beans and rice that very nearly mimicked the real thing. Nono was tired after her rehearsal, and Anna was expecting the Humanist meeting to be intense and a little taxing, so they’d taken the food back to their rooms instead of staying in the galley. Nami sat cross-legged with her back against the door while Anna and Nono took two of the chairs that folded down out of the wall. The walls were close enough that even though they were on opposite sides of the room, their knees almost touched. It would be almost a year living in the Abbey. By the time they reached Eudoxia, they might not remember what open space felt like anymore.

  “History,” Nami said.

  “Big subject,” Anna said. “Any particular part of history?”

  Nono looked up at her from under her eyebrows, so maybe Anna wasn’t being quite as casual and nonchalant as she thought. Nami didn’t seem to notice anything, though.

  “No. All of it. We’re not talking about what happened in history, we’re talking about what history is. So, you know”—she gestured in a circle with her spoon—“is the important thing about history the people who actually did things, or if they hadn’t been alive, would the same basic things have happened, just with other people doing them? Like with math.”

  “Math?” Anna said.

  “Sure,” Nami said. “Two different people came up with calculus right at the same time. So maybe everything’s like that. Maybe it doesn’t matter who leads a war because the things that made the war happen weren’t leaders. They were how much money people had or how good their land was for making food or something. That’s the section I’m writing. Saladin’s writing about the great-man theory, but it’s old because they only talk about men.”

  “Ah,” Anna said, cringing at how obvious she felt. “Saladin’s doing that?”

  “It’s about the idea that without Caesar, there wouldn’t have been a Roman Empire. Or without a Jesus, there wouldn’t have been Christianity.”

  “Hard to argue against that,” Nono said.

  “It’s a history class. We’re not talking about the religious part. And then Liliana’s doing the section on the technological ratchet, where the thing that changes is how well we understand how to make things like medicines and nuclear bombs and Epstein drives, and that everything else about history is cyclic. The same things happen over and over again, but it just seems different because we have different tools.” Nami frowned. “I don’t understand that one yet. But it’s not my section.”

  “And what do you think?” Anna asked.

  Nami shook her head and scooped up a last spoonful of almost-beans. “It’s dumb to break it up like that,” she said around her food. “Like it’s one thing or it’s something else. That’s not how it ever is. It’s always that there’s somebody who does whatever it is. You know, conquers Europe or decides that it’s a great idea to line aqueducts with lead or figures out how to coordinate radio frequencies. You never have one without the other. It’s like nature versus nurture. When do you ever see one without the other?”

  “That’s a good point,” Anna said. “So how does the project work?”

  Nami rolled her eyes. Oh God, they were in eye-rolli
ng ages now. It seemed so recent that her little girl had been free of contempt. “It isn’t like that.”

  “What isn’t like what?”

  “Mother. Saladin isn’t my boyfriend. His parents died in Cairo, and he’s here with his aunt and uncle. He really needs friends, and anyway Liliana likes him, so even if I did, I wouldn’t. We have to be careful. We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle. If we mess it up, it’s not like we can just change schools.”

  “Oh,” Anna said. “Is that something you talk about at school?”

  The eye-roll again. Two eye-rolls in one night. “That was you, Mom. You’re always saying that.”

  “I guess I am,” Anna agreed.

  After they were done, Nami took their bowls and spoons and drinking bulbs back to the galley for them, an echo of the way she used to clean up after dinner back at home. When that had been home. Then she was off to study with Liliana and, for all Anna knew, Saladin as well. Nono took her turn being alone in the room. Anna made her way toward the lift and deck two for the Humanist Society, her hands touching the walls at either side of the corridor as if to steady her. It is necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, she thought, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious. And it was true, as far as it went.

  But it was also a mistake to lose sight of all the individual lives and choices and flashes of pure dumb luck that brought humanity as far as they’d come. History, she thought, was perhaps better considered as a great improvisation. A thinking-through of some immense, generations-long thought. Or daydream.

  The problem, of course, with the idea of nature versus nurture was that it posed a choice between determinisms. That was something Nami seemed to grasp almost instinctively, but Anna had to remind herself of it. Maybe history was the same way. Theories of how things had to have happened the way they did only because, looking back, they’d happened that way.