by Neil Clarke
Petra bit down on any response she could make. Because oh, she’d tried to fix things—this entire mess was her trying and failing to fix things. Mostly just managing to keep herself in a holding pattern and scrambling away from any bombs that came up. Things were bad enough without her trying to fix them further.
Eventually, she said “I have work to do. In Third Cluster.”
Ilen’s expression didn’t change. Apparently she still felt that there was a high degree of shit in what Petra was saying.
But she didn’t call her on it. “Well,” Ilen said. “Later, then. And you can feel free to stop by.”
Petra grunted. She’d always been free to stop by; the invitation was more irony than anything.
“If you need anything …” Petra said.
“The things I could say to that,” Ilen said. “I’m fine, Petra. And you’re humming like a lightning rod. Go Make.”
The route to Kaah this time took Petra through the ebb and flow of the crowds. Third Cluster was one of those clusters that synchronized sleep-wake cycles, to some extent—there would always be early risers and late sleepers and those who eschewed the cycle altogether, but it was consensus early morning, and human colonists filled the halls. Here and there on whatever business they had; Petra had to admit, she didn’t know what they got up to.
Sulai, her mind whispered. In one of their spats, Amad had said You’re half-Su yourself. Do you even know how to speak to real people? Nash had apologized for him, and Amad had apologized in his own way—no words, no overt gestures of contrition, but he’d brought some physical media display in from the ship and showed her an old performance of something. He’d found it hysterical. She’d found it incomprehensible, and he’d sulked off and avoided contact with her halfway to the next season.
Kaah was already Making at the outgrowth when Petra entered it, and she was beaming, inasmuch as the Su had interpretable expressions that could be read as beaming. Petra sat on the ground, crossing her legs like a Su would, and waited, with her eyes closed, watching the colony take shape in ordered lines beneath the sporadic wrath of the sky.
Finally, Kaah finished her hallway, and the bright electricity quieted down to a more latent level. She turned to Petra and gestured greeting.
“My petition for offspring has been granted,” she said.
Petra blinked back into a social mindset, then processed what Kaah had said.
“That’s wonderful!” Petra said, then had to search a moment for the traditional Su response. “The news is my joy; the benefit of the colony is my joy. Have you found a willing Father?”
Kaah gestured assent. “Suva Umet, who approved my petition. She is skilled in constructing zygotes with Father and Maker potential. As we increase our capacity for gathering energy, there will be further roles in the colony for Makers. I expect a clutch of five, potentially more.”
“It will be good,” Petra said. Then, a human phrase: “I’m happy for you.”
Kaah gestured pleasure, then said, “Your arrival is convenient. I defer to your expertise in the dimensions of family units.”
Some expertise, Petra thought. Third Cluster tended to have family homes that kept a core of children and grandchildren and grandparents all together, a few peeling off in each generation, plenty staying behind. Petra had grown in a more Su-flavored cluster; individual rooms for the most part, pairs and two-generation groupings here and there. But she had a sense for what the division of rooms should be, at least; what private areas a human expected that a Su would find extraneous, what layouts between the units would help people mix in the halls as they did in the halls below. And in any case, it was a change of subject.
Thankfully, with the Su, a conversation about pregnancy would rarely turn toward whether or not the other participants hoped for a child. It wasn’t a traditional milestone in a Su life. It was a bestowed honor.
“I’ll set the foundation lines,” Petra said, and pressed her hands into the smartmat.
A bestowed honor. Like the fact that one of the Su Fathers had pressed her hands into Petra’s mother’s belly, felt out the growing cells, and whispered to them that this human child, this one, should have the gift and the curse of hearing the lightning, of feeding it to the substance of the colony walls, feeling that substance change and grow and stretch into new walls and new forms. It had taken three generations on this planet for human Fathers and Makers to be born. Was that only because the Su Fathers had taken so long to understand their different biology? Maybe it was some quirk in how the Su found individuals worthy—maybe it had taken that long to overcome their revulsion at human reproduction.
To the Su, human females were defective—they possessed the necessary organs to carry life, but not the banks of gametes that could be prompted to combine at a Father’s influence. They’d found human males even more bewildering: jettisoned gamete banks walking around in sentient containers that seemed, to the Su, unnecessary.
The Su had caches of each gamete in themselves. The Su Fathers impelled combination and controlled mutation. Autosexual reproduction requiring two participants, unless the Father self-fertilized, but the relationship was hierarchical, not intimate.
She traced out the energy-bearing conduits, laying the foundation for walls here, partitions here, thick sheets of smartmat to occupy the interstitial places. Big round rooms for families to gather in; little compartments for sleep, a storage room here, a solitude room here. Life dictated the layout of the rooms and was circumscribed by it in turn; Petra only aped it, feeling out the spatial rhythm of the units below.
The lines of energy through the colony made sense. She felt alive here, right here, laying her will into the colony walls. All the chaos in the sky came down through the towers and the smartmat and her hands and became something solid and good. And if she could dissolve herself in the doing, so much the better.
Petra came home to the smell of something frying.
Apparently one of the workers had moved in a collection of Nash’s old culinary equipment, or he’d had them delivered somehow from the colony outskirts; he was one of the only people Petra had ever known who’d had cooking supplies manufactured for him. Most everyone was content with the variety of engineered foods the Su provided. But Nash had a few old-world aesthetic sensibilities.
And Petra had to admit, he could do damn impressive things with the raw materials that came from the Su.
He’d connected up a heating apparatus to the module’s power, and when she walked in he flashed her a quick smile—uneasy, and probably forced— and transferred a series of somethings into a shallow, lens-shaped bowl. Every motion was deft, as though he’d rehearsed his actions in the event of her arrival.
He filled another bowl for himself, picking them off the stack of four sitting by the cooktop. There’d been a time when all four would have been filled. Four bowls, four bulbs of drinks, four little trays of whatever Nash had been experimenting with that evening. Four cushions around a low table, with Ilen’s laughter and Nash’s anecdotes and Petra and Amad sparring good-naturedly over this or that bit of policy or pragmatism.
Nash had only replicated the barest bones, here. He sat cross-legged on the floor, the lens bowl in his lap.
“Let’s try this again,” he said.
Petra rolled her palm around the curve of the bowl, feeling the heat, and took it to her desk. “A lot’s missing.”
From Nash’s expression, he didn’t see her meaning for a moment. Then he shook his head. “No, I just meant—you know. Talking.”
Ah. Petra placed the bowl on her desk, which changed itself, just a little, to hold it. Buttering me up.
Still, food was food, and she turned her attention to it. Thin strips of grown protein matrix—a food form modeled to mimic the striations of muscle, glistening with a sauce that smelled sharp and sweet. Edible flowers, breaded in something that had heated up golden, so that the red of the petals peeked through like sunrise on a thin-atmosphere day. A long white grain, flecked wi
th green. All of it so much more reminiscent of the raw material than anything Su-processed, Su-consumed.
She hadn’t thought she was hungry, but the smell suffused her and woke her stomach. Storm, but it did smell good. She’d forgotten that food was an art, in some of the human subcultures. For a long time now, she’d just approached it as one of the mechanisms necessary to not die.
“I kinda used your authority to get some of this,” he said, with a note of apology in his voice. “I told the Sudaeg that it would ease the mental strain of the storms.”
That’d explain it, then; she hadn’t thought they’d stock fresh flowers in the commissary. Low demand. Tension wound through Petra’s jaw. “Always the people person, Nash.”
“I’m not going to abuse your authority,” Nash said. “I’m pretty sure I couldn’t if I tried.”
There were too many things Petra could say to that, and they all twisted in her throat. She took a bite, instead.
Flavors she’d known the names for, once, flooded her mouth; textures she hadn’t eaten in ages rolled against her tongue. She let a long breath out and cursed. “I forgot all about this,” she said.
“Old Earth specialty,” Nash said, which was a lie. It was some new rein-terpretation of the old cooking tradition, twisted around to match whatever food plants they’d brought and established in the colony. So much of Earth had remained on Earth, lost to their colony either forever or for the time it took for another generation ship to decide to come and bring their own array of important things.
“Lucky Hurem,” Petra said, and took another bite. Nash chuckled and laid into his own food.
“You ever go down to the Folly Garden Cluster?” he asked.
Despite herself, Petra smiled. “Haven’t. They did finish it, though.”
“I heard,” Nash said, and grinned. This smile looked less forced. Not quite right yet, but on its way. “Original size, too?”
Petra let out a laugh. “You know the Su,” she said. “They commit.”
“They committed to a spitball,” Nash said. “Lin and I had no idea how to design a garden. They wanted a size, we said ‘large’ thinking we wanted something bigger than the garden modules we had, and when we woke up there was this cavern that a Maker had just gone ahead and put together and we were supposed to find a way to fill it. No one even thought that, hey, this is a ridiculous size.”
“You said ‘large,’ they thought ‘large in terms of absolute Making size,’” Petra said. “The Su tend to assume that humans know what humans want and will say what they mean when they ask for things.” Whether or not they’d approve of those things as benefiting the colony was another question, but Nash and his colleague had asked for space at the height of storm season. They’d asked for a resource nearly as abundant as air. Any other time, and they’d have had to pin down dimensions and limit their expectations and find a Maker who felt like indulging human needs was a priority just then.
“That was the first resource allocation project I had, remember that?” Nash said. “Talk about distorting your expectations early.”
“You didn’t understand the Su,” Petra said. “I would have expected that.”
“So you told me,” Nash said, and tilted his head at her. “That was back when you liked me.”
Petra’s humor cooled. She set down her utensil, fingers braced on the curve of the composite. She could etch it with lightning, but not much else; it wouldn’t hold a charge or define a path through which intelligent circuitry could flow. “Remember when Hurem Keyne paid me a visit?” she asked.
All humor vanished from Nash’s expression. “Don’t,” he whispered.
“Remember,” Petra said, voice low to keep from breaking, “when I came home to a habitat rupture? Remember how I could smell the sulfur coming in from outside? They set off a blast inside our home, Nash. The lights were out. I could hear the air ingress. I couldn’t find Ilen. I didn’t know if she was lying dead in a corner. You wouldn’t remember that, would you, because you had run.”
Nash was staring down at the floor, jaw stiff, expression hard. “I didn’t ever think anyone would come after you,” he said.
“You didn’t ever think,” Petra corrected. “You want to reminisce about the times when I liked you? You know exactly what happened. You made your choices, you sold us out, and when it all went up in sparks you vanished back to the ship. All that’s on you, Nash—it’s still on you. You think you can cook me dinner and all’s forgiven?”
“I made mistakes,” Nash said. “And people got hurt because of them. I know I’m not going to make that right, but I figured I could at least start making it up to you. Start,” he added, quickly, as Petra found a retort at the tip of her tongue, “doing something good in your life, at least.”
Petra stared at him.
“You look like you haven’t eaten since I left,” he said.
Petra blinked. She hadn’t considered how she’d look to someone who hadn’t seen her in so long—why would it matter, anyway? She knew she’d taken to running off the tension. Knew she felt harder and leaner than she had back in the good times. But seeing a fleck of maternalism in Nash stunned her for a moment.
Then, like everything about Nash, it fed a bit more fuel into the slow-burning anger in her gut.
“The food was very good,” she said, stiffly. She couldn’t find a way to say I don’t need your good works; I’ve survived this long without you caring; There’s nothing you can do to change what happened, so why bother trying now?
“Yeah,” Nash said. “You know, I didn’t do much cooking out in the ship. Harder to get food variety, there. It’s more of a holiday thing.”
Plenty of things Petra could ask, at that. What kind of holidays do you celebrate, out there? or Wasn’t there a big push to get the ship’s hydroponics up and running again? Time was, she’d been curious about life on the ship the way she’d been curious about life back on Earth: it was a foreign land, and one she’d never be visiting. Tales of strange customs were always passing amusements.
Now, the comment felt barbed.
“I’m glad,” she said, “you’ve found something to enjoy here.”
Nash bit back words—probably a curse, probably some invective. “Please,” he said. “Can we just start over? Start from here?”
You haven’t been living here, went Petra’s anger. I’m here. I’m always here. Where the hell else would I be starting from?
Probably wasn’t what he meant. Probably what he meant was, can’t we pretend like we don’t have a past? Or more likely, can’t we just pretend like our only past’s the good one?
And maybe he could pretend that they could have a fresh start. But Petra couldn’t imagine what the hell it would take to feel good about this. About Amad showing up and throwing Nash’s life into her arms, like it was her responsibility. About Nash forcing a smile and bringing his guilt to lay at her feet like it was her job to forgive him.
About him bringing up those times before all this, the food and the company and the easy companionship. Petra didn’t get along with most people— Ilen and Nash had been notable exceptions. She’d pushed Ilen away herself, and Nash—
Was Nash.
“We are,” she said, “exactly where we are.”
The question was, as it always was, where the hell to go from here.
Sooner or later something would break, one way or another. Petra knew this. She’d either wall off Nash completely, let him live his ghost of a life out beyond the periphery of her awareness, or she’d crack, let him in again, maybe find herself dragged along to forgiving him. This shambling mockery of their former friendship was too unstable not to decay. But just the thought of forgiving him made her feel duped and stupid, like she was falling again for the easy smile and the amiable interest.
She knew that where they were now, what she was feeling, was miserable. Thing was, there was quite some distance between knowing that and knowing how to fix it.
And she didn’t have a way to s
ay it. Never had been the best with words, except those words she had a chance to rehearse, over and over, locked in her head for hours.
Still, she might have found something to say if the colony hadn’t shuddered, as something in the sky exploded.
Petra’s head snapped up, even though she couldn’t see a damn thing through the colony composite. But there was no time to feel shock or fear: an instant later two more explosions shook the ground, presaged by a matter of moments by a wave of energy that rammed straight through her mind and tossed her in all directions at once.
Petra’s mouth was open but sound wasn’t coming out; her body curled and spasmed outward, skin and muscle and bone striking smartmat composite desk and floor and walls, mind tossed between them as though it didn’t have a home in either one. Attack, part of her thought, but the rest of her was alight. Drowning in lightning. Her mind was scrabbling through the whole of the colony, lit up like a nightmare, smartmat there growing into tumorous outcrops, food receptacles there searing their contents or expelling them, the insulation at the oxygen recyclers glowing their resistance.
Nash here, reaching out to grab her, his voice insistent and concerned, and Petra threw out a hand and found his body and sent great gluts of energy cascading out of her—through her body straight from the screaming sky and the overloaded colony walls—and the body that was Nash flew away and out of her awareness again.
And then awareness flew out of her awareness, caught and twisted on the overload, and she was nowhere.
There was nothing, and then there was noise and senseless sense data and pain and noise, and then there was a tumult of energy she couldn’t find her way out of.
And then there was a tiny sliver of calm, pressing its way into her awareness, with the barrage of energy hammering around it. Petra reached for it, tried to focus in the wreckage of all her thoughts, and the calm pressed deeper into her until she came to the surface of cool air and nausea and a hand on her forehead.