“Then all we’ve done is plant our boots and wave our flag.”
“Too bad, isn’t it?” she replied. “But there’re other worlds if you can get off this one.” She glared at him, waiting for an answer.
He turned to look at the ridge to the south. The wall of the valley was only a hundred meters high, but on the south side, near the sea, it was almost vertical. The clouds were skimming over the edge of the cliff, hiding the top in gray. The old lava would be hard to climb using conventional equipment, but the thread-gun could fire multiple lines all the way to the top and anchor them into the rock. Then it would function as a winch, re-absorbing the lines as it lifted the person attached to it. He realized the sheer face would actually make it easier to get to the top; Kali wasn’t entirely crazy.
But he felt like a spare part for a fundamentally useless piece of equipment. If God had led him to these ruins, He had now taken them away, much as He had led him to Fadia, and then taken her away.
Desires
Ai lay on her side in the darkness, beside the empty space in the tent Kali had left behind, her hands between her legs to warm them. If he came to her now, she thought, she couldn’t say yes, but she wouldn’t say no either. He was strong. That both frightened and comforted her. If she fought him, she would lose; but if he held her, she would be safe.
The thoughts kept coming as she waited to fall asleep: Alon understood her in a way—they had something in common. North Athena could be hard on anyone less than physically perfect, but they didn’t have to hide anything from each other now. She could show him the rest of her scars and explain their meaning. He could tell her what happened on the Islands—the story he hadn’t told that evening. They would be damaged together and help each other heal; they’d each have someone to rely on in future missions.
But would it work? They’d have to keep it under wraps on The Child, out of sight of Setona. Could she make Alon happy—make it worth his while? Or would it fail and make it difficult for years to come? And what about Kali—did she have a past relationship with Alon? Would she be jealous? Alon liked to joke around with Kali and, in a way, they seemed close, but Ai doubted they’d ever been partners, and wasn’t sure they even really liked each other. But she didn’t want to deal with an angry Kali…
Ai rolled over on her back and closed her eyes. Trying to block out the thoughts, she started counting forward and backward in Shinju dialect. They’d all been learning it since leaving Athena, a few months in advance of the planned landing. She got through the numbers, recited the colors, and started on the times of the day.
At some point, she realized she’d lost track, and opened her eyes. The sky was green with aurora and full of stars; the tent and the clouds were gone, and she could see it clearly. The bright point in the center was Athena—the disk was almost visible. If she put on her glasses and zoomed in, she was sure she could see the twin continents. Ai felt as if Keto had rolled over and pinned her to its surface with its gravity, and she was looking down on the sky. She’d tried to leave Athena behind, but it had followed her here.
Now, instead of waiting for sleep, she was fighting it.
Ai dreamed the tent was in a forest of pine trees, drenched with rain. Something was outside the tent, padding around and snuffling at the door flap. She slipped out of her sleeping bag and edged quietly away. The muzzle of a bear lunged through the flap and its teeth clamped down on her ankle. The bear dragged her toward the door by the leg. That made her angry as much as afraid, and she stomped at its nose with her free foot. It let her go, but then it was standing over her as she lay spread-eagled on the ground, snarling in her face with its hot, smelly breath. She felt its teeth around her throat and reached her thumbs for its eyes as it choked off her breathing. The bear let go, and Ai rolled to Kali’s side of the tent, frantically patting it down for her rifle.
Of course, it wasn’t there. She swept the floor-pad all the way to the edge of the tent looking for the gun. Then she remembered: Kali hadn’t brought it to Keto—it was still in a locked box in The Child. Even if Kali had brought it, she wouldn’t have left it behind with Ai or Alon; she didn’t trust either of them that much.
Somehow the bear hadn’t attacked again. Ai looked over her shoulder for it, but it was gone. She shook her head; it was only a dream bear, so of course it was gone. Her heart was slowing down, and she sat with her head in her hands. She liked bears in real life—or at least the idea of them, from a safe distance—but she would have filled that dream bear full of depleted-uranium buckshot, or whatever Kali put in her gun. As her mind cleared, she laughed a little at that thought. It would take a dream gun to shoot a dream bear, not a real one, and her attempts at lucid dreaming with Arden Glade hadn’t gone well; her dream weapons always disappeared at the wrong moment. Maybe if she had a real gun, it would anchor the dream weapon in her mind; the mind is a strange machine—it was possible. But by that logic, the real gun would have to be loaded, and that would be bad for the next person who tried to wake her up.
Did Kali have bad dreams? Was that why she kept the rifle around?
Ai’s hands shook and she felt sweaty. She climbed back into her sleeping bag. It helped to have a sense of humor when your subconscious was trying to kill you. On the ship, when she couldn’t sleep, she would take a shower or walk around the hab-ring once or twice (“haunting” it, Toran had said). Walking at night on Keto didn’t seem like a good idea—too many hazards, and the night vision in her glasses would be weak under the overcast. Glade had told her to fall asleep thinking of something pleasant—a good time or a beautiful object, a place she’d been or something she’d seen that made her happy.
At the start of the mission, the crew had boosted off Athena in the landers to rendezvous with The Child in orbit. Ai had floated in zero-G—without, thankfully, feeling woozy—and hook-taped herself by a window. As the lander orbited south of the equator, she could see the polar limb of Athena, the continent of North Athena moving west and Senta rising in the east. The Child hung above the horizon, a gleaming arrow, her translucent spine reflecting the sunlight like a diamond necklace on velvet. The broad arrow-tip of her drive-head was to the left, the fletching and nock of her fuel tanks and fusion bell to the right. The sight of the ship had transfixed Ai, pinning her to the window as the lander approached. The diagrams in the textbooks, and the little models the trainers liked to point to, were to The Child the way a firefly is to the sun. It was the most beautiful thing she’d seen. And, for a while, it would be hers, as much as it was any Athenian’s.
She slept. She struggled up, and the walls of the tent were gray. She struggled up again, and they were yellow.
A voice from outside the tent said, “It’s late.”
She forced her eyes open. There was a shadow on the wall of the tent.
“We need to go soon…” the voice said. It was Alon.
“I missed the comm pass?” She’d slept in, but that was going to happen with the shorter day.
“I got it. Tell you later.”
Ai got out of her sleeping bag, and gathered her boots and flight jacket; otherwise, she was already dressed. She’d “borrowed” the flight jacket from Kali (like a lot of things, it would end up in the incinerator after the mission) because it was warm and she liked the color. Ai would have worn an Astrocorps flight suit as well—they were handmade of soft, natural cotton, and well fitted—but chief scientist Zansai had vetoed putting his science team in them. He said they were paid by the Science Institute, not the Ministry of Unification, which was code for some sort of territorial marking Ai didn’t want to get involved with. There were all these adjoining spheres of control in the mission—Captain Setona, science chief Zansai, the machine Eresh. Ai didn’t want to get caught between them.
She smoothed the embroidery of her shirt and put the jacket on over it. The paper with her diary on it was in her pocket—she kept it on her in case she needed to write something; it would be too easy to forget and lose something important. Sh
e’d updated it last night, even though it had been a hard day to write about. The data would replicate automatically to other pieces of paper nearby—perhaps even the helicopter and the field sequencer—but this was the piece she kept handy to remind herself.
Alon was standing near the tent as she stepped out, already wearing his backpack. He looked older this morning, his beard a little longer, and he didn’t smile. She caught his eyes and looked away quickly in a quick burst of shyness mixed with a little shame. It was cooler than the day before, and she hugged her arms around herself.
There was always such a gap between fantasy and reality. What would Stiletto have done? Climbed into the other tent and dared Alon to throw her out; apologized and moved on if he did? No doubt, Stil had plenty of regrets, but that was how she lived: You’re not trying if you’re not failing. Ai hadn’t pushed the edge that way. Maybe caution got her where she was, but now what? She needed more regrets—she wouldn’t have lived life fully without them.
Alon handed her a packet of vegetarian casserole. “You can eat on the way,” he said. “Pull the tab; it’s better hot.”
He picked up her sampling kit and started walking in the direction of the sea slowly enough she could keep up and eat. The valley was dappled by sunlight, puffy cumulus clouds scattered over it casting slow-moving shadows. The air had held onto the pre-dawn chill longer than yesterday, and there was a light breeze. To the south, Ai could see a darker bank of cloud; perhaps it would rain later. Kali and Toran would be somewhere in that direction. Had they reached the lander?
Alon breathed deeply. “Air’s very fresh, no?” he said. This time he smiled at her.
“Right—the calcium thing,” she replied. It was a secondary science objective on Keto to understand the low levels of carbon dioxide in the air given the limited carbonate cycle. The absence of continental land mass meant too little calcium weathering off into the ocean.
“Must be something else going on. You’re ready to find out?” He shook the sampling kit in front of her; he seemed to be enjoying himself now.
∞
Ai followed Alon from the plateau to the river bed, skidding down the gravel slope sideways. The river was dry, and the sun hid behind the clouds now and again for a few minutes at a time. Ai walked at Alon’s side. She looked at the valley walls north and south; she could see uneven layers of dark ash and darker lava in them. Alon was studying them as well. Occasionally, he stopped to examine one wall or the other through his glasses, zooming and panning. He seemed especially interested in the north wall.
“Are the Haffay islands like this?” she asked.
“No, the chain’s a continental fragment, dragged from the west of Senta by plate motion when it separated from the North.” The breeze ruffled his beard, and the light brightened again as the sun came out from behind a cloud. “Granites, uplifted marine sediments—limestones and sandstones. Schists. Not much basalt—some intrusions.”
“But is it a good place to go?”
He chuckled. “Depends on when you’re there. It used to be a resort. Not so much now, but maybe it’s getting better. We’ll find out, won’t we, in a few years?”
“So we did the right thing?”
He looked off into the distance. “Don’t we always?”
They walked on in silence for a few minutes. She remembered the packet of freeze-dried apples in her pocket, pulled it out, and offered it to him. She put on her best smile, the one that looked cute and happy in the mirror.
“Do you want to share this?”
“Sure,” he said, smiling back. He seemed genuinely pleased, and she was glad. She put some water in the packet from the tube of her backpack and shook it. She took the sampling kit from him, and they handed the packet back and forth until the fruit and the sweetened water in the bottom were gone. It was a good start, she thought.
They approached the point where the north and south valley walls came closest to touching. The river was trapped by two cliffs, but it had worn a channel between them fifty meters wide. Alon saw something on the south wall and turned in that direction. Ai could see hard sheets of lava projecting from the rock face, the ash between them washed out.
At the base of the wall, easily reached from the ground, was the open mouth of a cave. It was large enough to walk into, but dark inside—Ai couldn’t see anything in it. Alon walked up to the opening.
“Lava tunnel. They’re all through these cliffs.” He took out his hammer and struck a piece of lava off the wall near the opening. “There’s no magnetic field here. Not sure if it’s in reversal or there never was one. Might be able to get a residual off this.” He held the rock where it came from to record it with his glasses, then bagged it. Taking out his flashlight, he stepped into the open tunnel.
Ai followed him, letting her eyes adjust. The tunnel was cool and felt damp. Thin streamers of something hung from the ceiling. She used a sample bag to tug a handful free; definitely it was a living thing, but she wasn’t sure what. It would have to be primitive; she could sequence it later. Another time, she would have been more interested in the streamers, but today she had other things on her mind.
The floor of the cave was fine silt and the walls featureless and smooth, worn by the flowing lava. In the beam of Alon’s flashlight, the tunnel wound back into the cliff a few meters and then was cut off by a rockfall. There didn’t appear to be anything interesting at the end, and Alon turned to leave.
Ai moved in front of him, stopping him before he made it back into the sun. She could see his face clearly in the light reflected from outside; his cold blue eyes gazing steadily at her.
She talked softly enough that someone standing outside wouldn’t have heard. Her heart was already beating faster. “Last night, I give you something, but you didn’t give me anything. I gave you a ‘why’, but I didn’t get one from you.”
“What is it you want to know?”
“Why did you go to Haffay?”
There was a pause before he answered. “Why does any soldier go to war?”
“You knew it was coming; I wasn’t watching the news, and I did.”
“I had orders.”
“To do what?”
“You don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Why were you there?”
He didn’t answer. He started to push by her, and she felt a shot of anger. She wasn’t going to let him stonewall her that easily. She put her hand out to the wall, blocking his way with her arm across his chest. She looked up into his face; it was very close now. “I gave you something, now you have to give me something.”
“I didn’t agree to that.”
“Why did you go there?”
“To kill someone.”
She caught her breath. Her heart was racing, but she was in too deep now to stop. “Who?”
He grunted and straightened up to go past her. She stepped in, pressing against him, blocking him with her body and both hands. “I saw you on top of the north ridge yesterday. I didn’t see you climb up, and I didn’t see you climb down. I didn’t see you come up the valley, either. Maybe you don’t want me to talk about yesterday any more than I want you to.”
He laughed sharply. “You won’t get anything that way.”
“Who was it?”
He was silent for a moment, then he said, “Tell me how your mother died.”
Ai stood silent, with her mouth open. She’d aimed to bargain with him, bartering secret for secret; now he was bargaining with her. That was a step forward, but the price he asked—in secrets, it didn’t go much higher. It was hard for her to answer, but she couldn’t stop now.
“She cut her wrists. She cut the wrong way, and it took her a long time to bleed out. She had time to think about it. Someone could have saved her.”
He breathed out a gentle sigh. Her hands were on his chest and she could feel it move.
“You didn’t answer me,” she said.
“I went to kill an old friend.” He thought about it, then continued, “N
o, not a friend. Someone I knew—a colleague.”
“Someone bad?”
“An exile.”
“Like us?”
He spoke more quietly. “No, not like us.”
“You met Kali there?”
“I’m told.”
Ai let her hands fall and stepped aside.
Alon walked toward the mouth of the tunnel, but stopped before reaching the light. “Was that what you wanted?”
“Was it worth it—going to Haffay?” she asked.
“Did you find her?” he countered. He was still bargaining with her.
“For years, I dreamed I did.” It wasn’t the right answer, but it was the best she could do. “My father says I didn’t. I was very young.”
“About Haffay: we’ll know after we get back. Maybe in fifty or a hundred years.”
He walked out into the light.
She called out after him, “Alon! If I was going to do that to myself, wouldn’t I have done it already?” But he didn’t turn to answer.
Ai realized she’d gotten something important from him, but he’d gotten more from her. Would it always be like that—Alon knowing something more about her than she did about him?
She stood in the shade letting her heart slow down, then hurried out to catch up with him. The sunlight was harsh, and it took some time for her eyes to adapt.
Alon followed the channel toward the sea; Ai struggled to catch up with him. It took twenty minutes to reach the back-pool, and she smelled the dead fish and rotten egg smell before she saw it. She glanced at Alon and put on her filter mask to take samples while he stood silently with his arms folded. Suddenly, she remembered being a child and finding herself caught in her father’s disapproving stare, wondering what she’d done wrong.
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