“Some argue it might be better or worse depending on what we do, or only for some and not others. What if we live our lives again and again until we get them right? Or we start over, but something is different, perhaps only one small change.”
“No, none of that’s good,” Kali said.
Toran walked beside Kali, glancing over at her. Beyond her, a shallow stream of crystal clear water ran down the center course of the valley. It emerged from the gray fog ahead, splashed over the stones in its way, and disappeared into the fog behind.
“Others think that our lives are preserved in time—that they never end, and the good moments are always there, playing over and over again.”
He had a vision of his own past laid out in the fourth dimension—the long worm of his existence running down the valley, past the cairn to the shore, to the sentinels, to the landing site and into orbit, and back to Athena, to the moment of his birth.
He remembered swimming with Fadia in the Surma River—the sun shining through the ragged bushes on the bank, her laughter as she splashed awkwardly in the waves, trying to swim the way he’d shown her, and the bright fabrics of her shawl and skirt swirling around her.
“The bad moments,” Kali said, “they’d replay as often and crush the good ones between them.”
“It would depend on how your life was,” he replied, watching for her reaction. “Whether you long for some happy time again, or think it was all worthless and hope for something different. Or, you’re afraid of something—of living it over, or having it come back to you.”
Kali grunted. “Conscience.” she said.
“It’s adaptive.”
“For some.”
At least for the species, Toran thought. “You don't have a use for it?”
“It's a luxury now.”
Toran felt the chill of the rain on his shoulders again and pulled his hood up. He brushed his beard; the mist had coated the hair with fine beads of water that were cold on his fingertips. Kali walked on in silence, ignoring the rain, not meeting his eyes.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Not anything I need to tell you.”
“Was it on Haffay?”
“No.”
A lot of things had happened on Haffay. The islands had changed hands several times over the centuries. A few cycles ago, when the North had invaded to take it from the Provisional Army of Chon Dō, Kali had flown Vertels for the North Athenian Forces. It wasn’t a secret, it was in her official bio. “War Hero”—publicly, that’s what got her on the mission.
“But you were there?”
“Yes.”
He waited, but she didn’t go on. If she wouldn't give it up the easy way, he thought, there were other ways.
“Did it bother you—the Order of Protection?”
“No.”
“That the result of your war was to sterilize every person under the age?”
“Temporarily,” she snapped. “That was the point of the operation.”
The Order had imposed Northern law on the islands. Under the law, all minors were required to have reproductive system implants. The Northerners had had the implants from the time of the seeds, but they were hated and feared in Senta and by the Sentan population of Haffay. The devices could be turned off legally once the children reached adulthood, but many of the native population of Haffay would be too afraid of the medics and the clinic to go. The North Athenians knew that.
“You think that's humane? How many children aren’t alive today because of that order?”
“Tell it to the soil. It was almost stripped off. Half of them would have been dead in a generation.” She looked straight at him. “Do you like watching flies buzz around the wasted bodies of starving children? Is that humane?”
“No, I don’t,” he said.
She was right. That's how civilizations die—their soil eroding under them so slowly no one sees it. It had happened over and over again in Senta. The soils in the North developed slowly through careful practices; the soils in Senta only when they were left alone after a famine. Almost none of the worlds in the Network had Earth’s history of recent glaciers or the rich soils they’d left behind; Athena was no exception.
Toran had seen a collapse—not on the news on the wallpaper, but in person on a humanitarian mission to the southern tip of Senta. Good times pushed the limits of population out, and then drought and dust pulled them back in. It had been like that since the first exiles set foot on Senta, determined to live without the rules of the North.
“Hypothetical children—they don’t suffer,” Kali said.
“My mother and my wife—” Toran said softly, “they were both from Senta.”
“Then I’m sorry…” she said.
“Sorry for what?”
“Sorry for nothing.” The rain was becoming heavier. Kali pulled the hood out of her jacket collar and tugged it over her head.
He reached for her shoulder and turned her to face him.
“You were going to say something. Sorry for what?”
She looked at him, her head shrouded by her hood and her face lost in the darkness inside.
“Sorry that they were born in the wrong time and the wrong place. Sorry that they weren’t born in another place.”
She slipped from his hand and started walking up the valley into the mist. He stood for a moment. Something had happened to Kali on Haffay, and he sensed it was important. He wondered what it was, and what it would take to get it out of her.
Deep in his heart, he was afraid she knew something about Fadia.
Memories
In one smooth motion, Alon drew the knife, sliced the top off the meal packet—the atom-sharp blade passing millimeters over his left hand—and slotted it back into its sheath without looking down. Then he saw the expression on Ai’s face—a wordless “O” of shock followed by quick avoidance of his eyes.
Bad move, he thought.
Ai had hardly said a word to him since the pool. After sunset, he’d plugged a pair of lamps into the aux power jack on the helicopter and fired up the self-fueling methane stove. She’d sat with her back to a large rock, the yellow box of the field sequencer beside her, scrolling through its output on a piece of paper on her knees. The wan, blue light of the paper lit her face a pallid shade as she flicked her finger down the stream of results coming over the high-speed clip-on connection.
“You should eat something,” he said.
“I’m not hungry.”
He knelt directly on the rock, a few meters from his tent, feeling the striations on the surface pressing into his knees and ignoring the discomfort. He spilled the contents of the meal packet on the ground and spread them out. Each item had its own package, labelled in backward bureaucratese. After a while, you got to know all the choices and their pros and cons: the “cake, fruit and nut” was dense enough to choke on; the “stew, vegetable, spiced” wasn’t worth heating and tasted much better cold; the “coffee, Ancient-style, synthetic” was on the bitter side; the “patty, meat” didn’t list the species for a reason and was only worth the chewing if your ribs were showing; and the “cracker, whole grain, flat” was a good antidote to the damage the rest would do, although the “spread, cheese” it came with could double as glue. There was also a packet of “sundries, miscellaneous” containing a finger towel, toilet paper, salt, sugar, dental chewing gum, and a sleep or wake pill, none of them in the quantities necessary unless you saved them from several meals. Perhaps that was an incentive to keep eating.
He’d had similar meals off and on for years, on training exercises and in the field in Senta. The Astrocorps ordered the same machine the Northern Armed Forces used, dialing the fat down and the salt up for the rare case the meals would be eaten in zero-G. The machine extruded the meals already inside the wrappers, labels and all. After a while, you developed a ritual for eating them: Opening them in a particular order, in a certain way. Laying one half-eaten piece on the empty wrapper of another. Stuffing the leftover
pouches into each other and then back into the outer wrapper. Knowing what to keep and what to swap with someone else.
He picked up the fruit packet and held it close to read the label in the low light. Apples—dehydrated slices. That was the one he wanted, one of his favorites.
“Apples? Do you like apples?” he asked Ai.
“Hmm,” she replied, without looking up. He laid the packet aside, on top of a fist-shaped stone.
He ate the stew cold. There was a chill in the air. Ai pulled her flight jacket around her shoulders, and Alon turned up the heat on the stove until he could feel warmth from it. He pulled a rock sample from his backpack, checked the label on its bag against the map, and tossed it in a sample container with double knife-edge seals. When he was done, and the container was full, he would snap the clamps shut and wire them down. The knife-edge seals would keep the box airtight until it arrived at a laboratory on Athena, years from now. Until then, it would sit in a cargo module in a stack of containers, and perhaps it wouldn’t be unpacked on Athena for a while after The Child’s return. If he didn’t come back with it, it might be a very long time before anyone opened the box. Its contents wouldn’t have the same meaning to anyone else, the context of the moment they had been collected in forgotten, and there’d be no hurry.
Alon remembered how Ai had stood at the pool, her legs apart and her arms stretched out, to dry off in the sunlight. On the other side of the helicopter, he’d fastened his jacket, pulled its hood over his head, and let the soft-suit go invisible. He’d stood watching her from the edge of the plateau. As the sun arrived overhead, she’d leaned back, her hands open to catch the light, her face upturned and her eyes closed tightly. Her fingers curled into fists and her body shook for a moment, sunlight glinting off moisture on her face. Then her chest heaved as she breathed in deeply and let the air escape, uncurling her fists and relaxing her shoulders.
Alon had turned away for the tents, regretting his invasion of her privacy. He couldn’t justify it this time with orders or rules of engagement, and he didn’t want that image of her in his head. It had been a long time and the temptation was strong, but he still had a mission and he couldn't forget it. He couldn't afford a distraction or a liability.
Ai had signed up for all the scheduled landings. Alon would be on most of them; he had to know if he could trust her. Finding that out wouldn’t be easy. He knew his limits—someone more verbal might be able to talk it out of her, but he couldn’t rely on that. He needed some other leverage.
He dropped the last sample in the container, then slipped his jacket off, folded it, and put it aside. The black straps of the soft-suit harness crossed his chest over an olive-drab undershirt with short sleeves. He picked up the packet of dried apples, went to where she was sitting, and knelt beside her. The violet light of the methane stove cast a blue light on her face.
“Eat this,” he said, lifting her hand and putting the packet in it.
“I’m not hungry…” she started, and then stopped when she saw his bare arm. Her eyes widened and she tried to pull away, but he held onto her hand.
“It’s…burned?” she asked.
The skin of his right arm was a patchy quilt of scar tissue and regrown skin—red and torn, pale and even—stitched together in a field hospital. His arm had been punctured by a spray of shrapnel—jagged fragments of metal, diaglass, and steel shot. Under his shirt, down his side, his skin had been ripped apart, his ribs cracked, and his muscles shredded. One whole side of him had been torn down and rebuilt, almost as good as it was but not the same. The surgical machines had stitched him together on the outside and refilled him on the inside with something incrementally faster and stronger, but also more painful and less under control. It would always be the alien half of him—the one with the diamond bone and nanoscale tissues.
“Reconstructed,” he said. He held her hand and winced slightly at the effort. After the day’s work jumping and collecting samples, he felt an ache in his forearm. His radius and ulna had been entirely replaced with diacom, and the muscles of his arm with artificial contractile fiber. One point two times baseline strength—the legal limit. But sometimes his hand tightened up and wouldn’t let go, his fist closing shut and his nails digging into his palms.
“We have something in common,” he said. “I could have the skin fixed, but it’s a part of history.”
“The Islands?” she asked.
“Hmm.” Neither confirm nor deny. If anyone asked, he hadn’t said it.
“You didn’t do that to yourself.”
“Whatever I did, I had my reasons.”
“It’s not the same,” she said.
“What were yours?”
“You’re going to tell her, aren’t you?”
He had to think for a moment. “Who? Kali? Why would I do that?”
“Because she doesn’t know. Because you trust her.”
“I don’t have to tell her.”
“Please, don’t,” Ai pleaded. “Kali will never understand—she’ll make it very hard for me. She won’t let me fly with her again…”
Alon waited, but Ai didn’t continue. Was that what she was afraid of?
“Tell me why, then,” he insisted.
“And you won’t…?”
“I think I can keep a secret.” He smiled inwardly; he had a lot of them, and they weren’t going anywhere.
She hesitated, her mouth open, and then said, “I have a lot of scars…” Her voice choked in her throat. “I collect them. The most important things that happen to me—they always leave a mark.”
“Why these?” He touched her shoulder.
“After my mother died…I made them. It was a long time ago. I made them and now they’re the only thing I have left that reminds me of her.” Her eyes were wet and glistening as she looked up at him.
“No one knows?”
“Vessa knows. And Glade.”
Vessa was The Child’s doctor. If Vessa knew, so did Setona and chief scientist Zansai. Vessa was tight-lipped, but she would have passed on a report as part of the flight physical. Arden Glade was the psychologist who evaluated the crew. It was a puzzle: on the face of it, Ai should have been disqualified. But if all these people knew and she was approved for flight, they either agreed she wasn’t a problem, or Zansai wanted her badly enough to take a chance on her.
“I don’t want to hide them, but I don’t want to explain them over and over,” Ai said. “I can’t make them go away; I can’t change the past, but it’s too hard to talk about.”
“I know.”
“One day, I’ll stop covering them up, and everyone will see. People will think what they want, and I won’t care. But I can’t make them go away and forget what happened.”
“There won’t be anything to prove when we get home.”
“I hope so.”
He let her hands fall. She held the packet of apples tightly, as if it was something important. “Thank you,” she said.
He felt relieved. That was it, then? It was all in the past and it didn’t make a difference anymore. He hoped so.
She closed her eyes for a moment and leaned her head back against the rock. Then she looked up at him again. Her eyes met his; her expression was more determined than before. She’d been upset, but she hadn’t dissolved; that was also a good sign.
“I don’t hurt myself that way anymore,” she said. “Now I have more control.” Perhaps she was even smiling a little—he couldn’t tell in the light of the stove.
He went back to his position by the sample container. She sat staring into space for a few minutes, and then started scribbling quickly on her paper with a fingernail, as if writing down something important. He watched her for a while, finished packing his samples, and decided it was time to go to bed.
It wasn’t until much later, lying on his back in the darkness of his tent, that he began to parse more carefully what she’d said: I don’t hurt myself that way anymore.
∞
The light dimmed a
s Kali and Toran approached the top of the ridge south of Spirit Valley; soon they would have to camp for the night and sleep. Toran’s thoughts went round and round in his head and he wouldn’t get much rest without an answer to some of his questions. He knew he had to give up something to get anything from Kali.
“My wife died in Haffay,” he said.
Kali glanced back over her shoulder. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Fadia had been born in Senta and he’d married her there. He’d tried to get her residency in North Athena, but a new Communalist government in Einstein had made that impossible. Under Egalitarian governments, it’d been easy to move between Senta, Haffay, and Heisenberg, but he’d waited too long. The irony frustrated him—under the banner of unifying North and Senta, the Communalists had divided Athena more than ever.
The war had started a few months after the election.
“She died in Bruno,” he said.
Kali stopped and faced him for a moment; Toran couldn’t read her expression. She started walking again, making a straight line up the slope. He struggled to keep up without tripping.
“You couldn’t get her out of there?” she shouted back over her shoulder.
“Not once the forces landed.”
Very few Athenians had believed the new administration was serious about Unification until the ekranoplanes arrived on the shores of the North Island of Haffay. Even then, the forces had hesitated before striking South Island, digging in at standing off for weeks.
“I couldn’t send her back to Senta, either,” he continued.
“Really?” Kali said, in a dubious tone.
Toran had made it to Bruno a month after the assault to find Fadia’s parents waiting for him. The coroner’s report was cursory—one of hundreds quickly disposed of. Fadia’s mother had handed him a box of personal effects—the things he’d given Fadia—and told him to leave. He’d hurt them enough.
“Gunshot,” he said to Kali. “A single one to the heart; that’s all the coroner wrote.”
Kali stopped and turned to face him, her eyes narrowed. “Where was this?”
“I don’t know.”
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