by Neil Clarke
No response.
“I’m in perfect health,” she declared. “I cleared quarantine in three days.”
“Thank you.” The robot withdrew the device. “Please, continue.”
Adrenaline and the weak gravity made the next stride into a leap. The walktube took a soft turn, then climbed toward the main terminal. Another barrier had been passed. Sitta coached herself: A simple ride to Farside, another cursory scan at the border, then freedom for the rest of her days. The impulse was to run to the public railbugs, but the spectacle of that was sure to draw all sorts of unwanted attention. Forcing her legs to walk, she kept thinking, “I just want it done. Now. Now!”
Two signs greeted her entry to the terminal. “WELCOME TO THE NEW NEARSIDE INTERPLANETARY TRANSIT FACILITY AND PEACE PARK.” And beyond those tall, viscous letters was a second, far less formal sign. Sitta’s name was written in flowing liquid-light script, accompanied by shouts and applause, a tiny but enthusiastic crowd of well wishers charging her, making her want to flee.
“Surprise,” they called out.
“Are you surprised?” they asked.
Nervous faces crowded close, examining her scars and general weathering, everyone fighting the urge to blatantly stare. Then she set down her bag, taking a breath and turning, showing her profile, making everyone gawk and giggle aloud.
Hands reached for her belly.
Pony, flippant as always, exclaimed, “Oh, and we thought you weren’t having any fun down there!”
Insensitive and graceless, and every other face tightened, ready for her anger. But Sitta politely smiled, whispering, “Who could have guessed?” Not once, even in her worst daydream, had she imagined that anyone would come to meet her. How could they even know she was here? With a voice that sounded just a little forced, Sitta said, “Hello. How are all of you?” She grasped the nearest hand and pressed it against herself. It was Varner’s hand, large and masculine, and soft. When had she last felt a hand both free of callus and intact?
“No wonder you’re home early,” Varner observed, his tone effortlessly sarcastic. “What are you? Eight months along?”
“More than six,” Sitta replied, by reflex.
Icenice, once her very best friend, came forward and demanded a hug. Still tall, still lovely, and still overdressed for the occasion, she put her thin long arms around Sitta and burst into tears. Wiping her face with the sleeve of her black-and-gold gown, she stepped back and sputtered, “We’re sorry, darling. For everything. Please—”
Varner said, “Icenice,” in warning.
“Accept our apologies. Please?”
“I came home, didn’t I?” asked Sitta.
The question was interpreted as forgiveness. Every face grinned, yet this was far from the same old gang. Where were Lean and Catchen? And Unnel? The Twins had made it, still indistinguishable from each other, and Vechel, silent as always. But there people hanging in the background, wearing the suffering patience of strangers. Spouses, or spies? Sitta had to imagine this was some elaborate scheme meant to keep tabs on her. Or perhaps some species of slow, subtle torture was being unleashed, as a prelude to things even worse.
Everybody was talking; nobody could listen.
Suddenly Varner—always their reasonable, self-appointed boss—shook people and declared, “We can chat on the rail.” Turning to Sitta, he winked while asking, “May I carry this lady’s satchel?”
For an instant, in vivid detail, she remembered the last time she had seen him.
Varner took her hesitation as a refusal. “Well, you’re twice my strength anyway.” Probably true. “Out of our way, people! A mother needs room. Make way for us!”
They used slidewalks, giant potted jungles passing on both sides. Staring at the luxurious foliage, unfruited and spendthrift, Sitta wondered how many people could be fed with crops grown inside those pots, and how these treasures might be transported to the earth.
More thoughts needed to be choked to death.
Turning to Icenice, she examined the rich fabrics of her gown and the painted, always perfect breasts. With a voice intense and casual in equal measures, she asked, “How did you know I’d be here?”
Icenice grinned and bent closer. “We had a tip.”
Sitta was traveling under her own name, but she’d left the Plowsharers in mid-assignment. Besides, Plowsharers were supposed to enjoy a certain anonymity, what with the negative feelings toward them. “What kind of tip, darling?”
“I told one of your administrators about us. About the prank, about how sorry we felt.” Her long hands meshed, making a single fist. “She knew your name. ‘The famous Sitta,’ she called you. ‘One of our best.’”
Nodding, Sitta made no comment.
“Then just yesterday, without warning, we learned that you’d been given a medical discharge, that you were coming home.” Tears filled red-rimmed eyes. “I was scared for you, Sitta. We all were.”
“I wasn’t,” said Varner. “A little cancer, a little virus. You’re too smart to get yourself into real trouble.”
Sitta made no comment.
“We took the risk, made a day of it,” Icenice continued. She waited for Sitta’s eyes to find hers, then asked, “Would you like to come to my house? We’ve planned a little celebration, if you’re up to it.”
She had no choice but to say, “All right.”
The others closed in on her again, touching the belly, begging for attention Sitta found herself looking upward, hungry for privacy. Through the glass ceiling, the gibbous gray face of the earth showed featureless and chill; and after a long moment’s anguish, she heard herself saying, “The last time I spoke to you—”
“Forget it,” Varner advised, as if it was his place to forgive.
Icenice assured her, “That was eons ago.”
It felt like it was minutes ago. If that.
Then Pony poked her in the side, saying, “We know you. You’ve never held a grudge for long.”
“Pony.” Varner had a gift for delivering warnings with a person’s own name. Sitta made no sound, again glancing at the earth.
Again, Varner touched her with his soft heavy hand, meaning to tease sure her in some fashion. Suddenly his hand jumped back. “Quite a little kicker, isn’t he?”
“She,” Sitta corrected, eyes dropping.
“Six months along?”
“Almost seven.” She held her leather bag in both hands. Why couldn’t she just scream at them and run away? Because it would draw attention, and worse, because someone might ask why she would come here. Sitta had no family left on the moon, no property, nothing but some electronic money in a very portable bank account. “I guess I don’t understand . . . why would anyone even bother—”
“Because,” Icenice proclaimed, taking her best friend by the shoulders. “We knew you deserved a hero’s welcome.”
“Our hero,” people muttered, those words practiced, but poised. “Our own little hero.”
And now she was a hero. The ironies made her want to laugh, just for an instant. She had come to murder them, and she was heroic?
“Welcome home,” they shouted, in unison.
Sitta allowed herself another tired smile, letting them misunderstand the thought behind it. Then she glanced at the earth, longing in her gaze, that world’s infinite miseries preferable to this world’s petty, thoughtless abuses.
2
The war ended when Sitta was four years-old, but for her and her friends it hadn’t existed except as a theory, as a topic that fascinated adults, and as a pair of low-grade warnings when the earth fired its final shots. But they were never endangered. For all intents and purposes, the war was won decades before, the earth in no position to succeed, its enemies able to weather every blow, then take warm pleasure in their final campaigns.
Victory was a good thing. The four year-old girl understood good and evil, winning and losing, and why winners deserved their laurels and losers earned their punishments. She also understood, in some wordl
ess way, that Farside was a special place meant for the best people. Its border was protected by fortifications and energy barriers. Several thousand kilometers of dead rock lay between its blessed people and the enemy. Bombs and lasers could obliterate Nearside, melting it and throwing up new mountains; but on Farside, for more than a century, the citizens suffered nothing worse than quakes and some accidental deaths, friendly bombs and crashing warships doing more harm than the entire earth could manage.
Other worlds told different stories. They were always fighting for survival, every life endangered. No place was safe but the back of the moon, and that’s why Farsiders were the great winners. Sitta’s family made its fortune in genetic weapons—adaptive plagues and communicable cancers, plus a range of parasites. Following a Farside custom, her parents waited until retirement to have their child. It was the same for Icenice, for Varner, for everyone, it seemed. Sitta was shocked to learn as a youngster that near-youngsters could make babies. She had assumed that humans were like the salmon swimming up from the Central Sea, a lifetime of preparation followed by a minute of desperate spawning, then death. That’s how it was for Sitta’s parents; both of them expired even before she reached puberty. An aunt inherited her—an ancient, stern and incompetent creature—and when their relationship collapsed, Sitta lived with her friends’ families, all pleasant and all indifferent toward her.
Growing up, she learned about the great war. Tutors spoke about its beginnings, and they lectured for hours about military tactics and the many famous battles. Yet the war was relentlessly unreal. A giant and elaborate theory presented for her entertainment. She liked the battles for the visual records they left behind, colorful and modestly exciting, and she observed the dead with clinical detachment. Sitta was undeniably bright—her genes had been tweaked to ensure quick, effortless intelligence—yet in some fundamental way, she had gaps. Flaws. Watching the destruction of Nearside and Hellas and dozens of other tragedies, she couldn’t truly envision the suffering involved. The dead were so many abstractions. And what’s more, they were dead because they deserved their fates, unworthy of living here, unworthy of lovely Farside.
In the beginning, the earth had ten billion citizens. It was a wonderland with skyhooks and enormous solar farms, every sort of industry and the finest scientists. The earth should have won. Sitta wrote the same paper for several tutors, pointing out those moments when any decisive, coordinated assault would have crushed the colonies. Yet when chances came, the earth lost its nerve. Too squeamish to obliterate the rebels—too willing to show a partial mercy—it let the colonies breathe and grow strong again, ensuring its own demise.
For that failure, Sitta had shown nothing but scorn. And her tutors, to the machine, agreed with her, awarding good grades to each effort, the last of them adding, “You have a gift with political science. Perhaps you’ll enter government service, then work your way into a high office.”
Such a ridiculous suggestion. Sitta didn’t need careers, what with her inherited wealth and all these natural talents. But if she wanted to work, regardless of reasons, the girl was certain to begin near the top of any organizational heap, inhabiting some position of deserved authority.
She was an important child of important Farsiders.
How could she deserve anything less?
3
The railbug was ornate and familiar—an old-fashioned contraption with a passing resemblance to a fat, glass-skinned caterpillar—but Sitta needed a moment to recall where she had seen it. Free of the port, streaking across the smooth glass plain, she was sitting on one of the stiff seats, stroking the dark wood trim. There was a time when wood was a precious substance on Farside, organics scarce, even for the wealthiest few. Remembering smaller hands on the trim, she looked at Varner and asked, “Did we play here?”
“A few times,” he replied, grinning.
The bug had belonged to his family, too old to use and not fancy enough to refurbish. She remembered darkness and the scent of old flowers. “You brought me here—”
“—for sex, as I remember it.” Varner laughed and glanced at the others, seemingly asking them to laugh with him. “How old were we?”
Too young, she recalled. The experience had been clumsy, and except for the fear of being caught, she’d had little fun. Why did anyone bother with sex? She would ask herself that for weeks. Even when she was old enough, screwing Varner and most of her other male friends, part of Sitta remained that doubtful child, the fun of it merely fun, just another little pleasure to be squeezed into long days and nights of busy idleness.
The railbug was for old-times sake. That’s what she assumed, but before she could ask, Icenice began serving refreshments. “Who wants, who needs?” There was alcohol and more exotic fare. Sitta chose wine, sipping as she halfway listened to jumbled conversations. People told childhood stories, pleasant memories dislodging more of the same. Nobody mentioned the earth or the war. If Sitta didn’t know better, she would assume that nothing had changed in these last years, that these careless lives had been held in stasis. Which might be true, in a sense. But then, as Icenice strode past and the hem of her gown lifted, she noticed the gold bracelet worn on the woman’s left ankle. Sitta remembered that bracelet; it had belonged to the girl’s mother, and to her grandmother before. In a soft half-laugh, she asked, “Are you married, girl?”
Their hostess paused for an instant, then straightened and smiled, her expression almost embarrassed. “I should have told you, Sorry, darling.” A pause. “Almost three years married, yes.”
The buzz of other conversations diminished. Sitta looked at the strangers, wondering which one of them was the husband.
“He’s a Mercurian,” said her one-time friend. “Named Bosson.”
The original Icenice adored men in the plural. The Icenice she remembered gave herself sophisticated personality tests, then boasted of her inability enjoy monogamy. Married? To a hundred men, perhaps. Sitta cleared her throat, then asked, “What sort of wonder is he?”
“Wait and see,” Icenice advised. She adjusted the straps of her gown pulling them one way, then back where they began. “Wait and see.”
The strangers were staring at Sitta, at her face.
“Who are they?” she whispered.
And finally they were introduced, more apologies made for tardiness, Pony claimed the job, prefacing herself by saying, “We’re all Farsiders here.” Was that important? “They’ve heard about you, darling. They’ve wanted to meet you, and for a long, long while . . .”
Shaking damp hands, Sitta consciously forgot every name. Were they friends to the old gang? Yet they didn’t seem to fit that role. She had to resurrect that ridiculous theory about spies and a plot. There was an agenda here, something she could feel in the air. But why bring half a dozen government agents? Unless the plan was to be obvious, in which case they were succeeding.
A social pause. Turning her head, Sitta noticed a long ceramic rib or fin standing on the irradiated plain. For an instant, when the earthshine had the proper angle, she could make out the bulk of something buried within the glass, locked securely in place. A magma whale. At the height of the war, when this basin was a red-hot sea stirred by thousand megaton warheads, Farsiders built a flotilla of robotic whales. Swimming in the molten rock, covering as much as a kilometer every day, they strained out metals and precious rare elements. The munition factories on Farside paid dearly for every gram of ore, and the earth, in ignorance or blind anger, kept up its useless bombardment, dredging the ocean, bringing up more treasures from below.
The rib vanished over the horizon, then with a quiet, respectful voice, Icenice asked, “Are you tired?”
She was sitting beside Sitta. Her gown’s perfumes made the air close, uncomfortable.
“We haven’t worn you out, have we?”
Sitta shook her head, honest when she admitted, “I feel fine.” It had been an easy pregnancy. Then placing a hand on her belly, she lied. “I’m glad you came to meet me.”
>
The tall woman hesitated, her expression impossible to read. There was sternness in the voice when she said, “It was Varner’s idea.”
“Was it?”
A sigh, a change of topics. “I like this place. I don’t know why.”
She meant the plain. Bleak and pure, the smoothest portions of the glass shone like black mirrors.
“There is a beauty,” Sitta allowed.
Icenice said, “Which makes it all so sad.”
“Why? What’s sad?”
“They’re going to tunnel and dome all of this.”
“Next year,” said an eavesdropping Twin.
“Tunnels here?” Sitta was dubious. “You can shield a spaceport and a rail line, but people can’t live out here, can they?”
“Martians know how.” Icenice glanced at the others, inviting them . . . to do what? “They’ve got a special way to clean the glass.”
“Leaching,” said Varner. “Chemical magic combined with microchines. They developed the process when they rebuilt their own cities.”
“People will live here?” Sitta wrestled with the concept. “I hadn’t heard. I didn’t know.”
“That’s why they built the port in the first place,” Varner continued. “All of this will be settled. Cities. Farms. Parks. And industries.”
“Huge cities,” muttered Icenice.
“This ground was worthless,” growled one of the strangers, “Five years ago, it was less than worthless.”
Varner laughed without humor. “The Martians thought otherwise.”
Everyone looked dour, self-involved. They shook their heads and whispered about the price of land and what they would do if they could try again. Sitta thought it unseemly and greedy. And pointless.
Pony said, “You know, it’s the Martians who own and run the spaceport.”
Sitta did her best to ignore them, gazing back along the rail, the earth dropping for the horizon and no mountains to be seen. They were at the center of the young sea, her home world smooth and simple. Far out on the glass, in a school of a dozen or more, were magma whales. As their sea cooled, they must have congregated there, their own heat helping to keep the rock liquid for a little while longer.