by Linda Nagata
Clemantine was nearby. She stood to one side of the dais in the company of a tall, gaunt man with black hair long enough to tie at the nape of his neck, and the unsettling, anachronistic embellishment of a short but heavy beard. Something about him—though certainly not the beard—made him seem familiar to Pasha, as if he was someone she ought to know. Another member of the founding generation, she suspected.
Behind her, the sound of shuffling feet and low, worried voices, as the seats filled in. People were still coming in. She was amazed at how many. She tried to count heads. At least forty-five. Or fifty? Maybe more.
Kona’s low commanding voice rose easily over the background noise. “Find a seat,” he warned. “You’ll want to be sitting down when you hear this.” He joined Clemantine beside the dais, studying the gathering. Pasha glanced back, to see that the seats behind her had all filled in. People hushed one another. When the last murmurings ceased, Kona turned to the dais. “Urban? We’re all here.”
Only then did Urban look up. Warily, he eyed the gathering. A glance at Clemantine, and then he straightened and uncrossed his arms. “It’s taken some time for us to reach this point,” he said, speaking loudly so that he could be easily heard throughout the gathering. He stepped to the side of the dais as the projection wall lit up behind him, white on black, displaying a simplified star chart with only a few features labeled.
Pasha studied the chart. She noted the position of Deception Well, skipped over the grouped stars labeled as the Committee, and jumped across the screen to Tanjiri and Ryo, two outlying stars of the Hallowed Vasties. Dragon was also marked on the chart, but the ship’s position made no sense. It was shown to be a full eighty percent of the way to those first stars of the Hallowed Vasties and that was absurd.
Pasha looked next at the top of the star chart where there was a label that read Today’s Date. Numerals followed, though it took a few seconds for her to make sense of them. She leaned forward, hugging herself, her queasiness rising again as she did the math.
If that date was real, then three hundred ninety-three years had elapsed since she’d sent her ghost to Dragon, and they were only a little more than a century away from the edge of the Hallowed Vasties.
A gasp from Tarnya beside her. More gasps and inarticulate cries of shock from across the gathering. Pasha rose to her feet. Fist clenched, she cried out, “You had no right!”
Tarnya was on her feet too, saying, “You must explain this!” Her voice discernible among a chorus of protests only because she was close by.
Looking deeply irritated, Urban stalked across the dais. Of all the raucous crowd, he focused his gaze on Pasha and in a voice strong enough to rise over the noise, he said, “It was necessary.”
Pasha took this as a challenge, took a step forward. The crowd quieted behind her. “Necessary to leave us archived and helpless for almost four hundred years?” she demanded.
“Yes.”
She shook her head. She could not accept this, did not want to. To keep them archived—and for so long!—was an outrageous violation of every person’s natural right of self-determination and it left her frightened for the future. Urban was the mind of the ship; he was its master. He held all actual power, leaving the rest of them to live at his discretion.
Pasha wasn’t naive. She knew this was how starships were traditionally organized, but a long-standing social covenant dictated that by accepting passengers, Urban had also accepted a responsibility to respect both the rights and the lives of those under his care.
Pasha needed him to remember that. “My understanding,” she said, speaking slowly as a hush fell across the gathering, “was that we would transfer to this ship and instantiate as ghosts. From that perspective, we would be able to oversee the growth of our own avatars and occupy them at our discretion.”
He met her glare with a resentful gaze. “There were complications,” he told her.
“Let’s all sit down,” Kona said from his post at the side of the dais. “We have a lot to go over.”
A rustling, as those who were standing took their seats again. Pasha felt a touch on her arm. Tarnya, standing a step behind her. Their gazes met. Worry lines etched Tarnya’s brow. “Let’s hear what he has to say,” she urged softly. “There has to be a reason.”
Behind her words, the unspoken entreaty: Be reasonable.
And of course Tarnya was right. Anger and outrage had their place, but neither could undo the past. Right now, Pasha needed to hear the facts. Everyone did.
A deep sigh as she worked to compose herself. Then a nod to Tarnya, and they both took their seats.
Urban stepped back to the center of the dais. His gaze moved across the gathering. “You,” he said to them, “all of you together, were the first complication we faced.” He swept his hand in a gesture that took in the gathering. “I invited two people. I accepted two others. Pasha recruited everyone else. There are now sixty-six people aboard Dragon. Far more than I was prepared for when we left the Well. But I rejected no one. I accepted every ghost that came through the gate.”
Pasha was caught off balance at finding herself singled out for criticism. Her cheeks burned. It was true she’d put out the word that the expedition was open for volunteers, but, “I didn’t exactly recruit,” she said defensively. “I just . . . let a few friends know about the opportunity.”
“And friends let friends know,” Tarnya whispered. “That’s how I found out.”
Riffan spoke from his position at one side of the gathering, sounding conciliatory when he said, “Urban, I think none of us suspected the enthusiasm this voyage would inspire.”
This drew from Urban a slight, cynical smile. “In my time, the people of Silk were quiet and cautious. I didn’t think I’d get ten volunteers.” He shrugged. “I should have remembered we’re all the restless descendants of frontier people.”
Pasha’s cheeks burned again, hearing these words as a grudging, condescending apology. Not all your fault, Pasha!
She gritted her teeth. She had acted precipitously, it was true. But she was here. So were the others. They were bound for the Hallowed Vasties and that was a victory. She could handle a little embarrassment.
Crossing her arms, she leaned in, listening to Urban’s explanation.
“Dragon is a hybrid ship,” he told them. “A careful balance has to be maintained between its human and Chenzeme elements. That balance would have been thrown into conflict if we’d tried to immediately establish a habitat and life support for sixty-six people. Even the virtual environment of the library couldn’t handle that number—and we were wary of that approach anyway, since we knew most of you have never lived an exclusively virtual existence.”
He looked to Kona, who nodded his agreement, adding, “Self-determination is an intrinsic right, but it must sometimes yield, on a temporary basis, when safety demands it.”
Pasha leaned back, appreciating the challenge posed by their unexpected numbers, and the neat logic of Urban’s long-term solution—but she resented it anyway. Hard to overlook four absent centuries.
A question from one of the back rows: “Kona, were you active during this period?”
“I was, along with Vytet.” He gestured toward the bearded Founder whose name Pasha had not been able to recall. “We were both consulted and agreed to the course that was taken. Rather than courting disaster, we chose patience.”
Pasha noticed Tarnya nodding a tentative acceptance of this explanation. She looked around, and was unsettled to see many others expressing agreement too. Of course, Kona was well known. Loved and respected. He’d led these people, or their ancestors, through the most harrowing times of their history. Most would be willing to trust his judgment. But not all.
“Four centuries of patience?” someone called out in an angry voice.
From Urban, that cynical smile. “Literally, we ran into problems.”
He told them of the lost outriders and the ensuing resource shortage. “We couldn’t rebuild the outriders and
complete the gee deck. Not until we made up our margins. The most efficient way to do that was to go hunting. To find another Chenzeme courser, lure it in, disable it, and take from it what we needed—and that’s what we did.”
A murmur of disbelief, of trepidation. Pasha’s heart raced, half in anger because he had to be lying—it would be madness to seek out a Chenzeme warship—and half in fear that he was mad enough to truly do such a thing.
“And here we are,” someone said in a bold voice balanced between amusement and anger.
Pasha leaned forward and looked down the row to see that it was Shoran, standing up from a seat near the end.
Shoran gestured at the sunlit garden beyond the pergola’s shade. “Here we are, surprisingly alive, on a beautiful deck that appears fully finished. I surmise we had the misfortune to sleep through a grand adventure?”
Urban looked puzzled, as if uncertain of Shoran’s deeper meaning. “Sooth,” he agreed. “It’s done.”
Pasha heard murmurs of relief:
Glad I wasn’t awake for that.
I would have died of fright.
“No, Shoran is right,” she muttered. “I would rather have been awake. It’s better to die aware.”
Tarnya turned a sympathetic gaze her way, but said nothing as questions erupted:
How was it done?
What damage was incurred?
Urban assured them, “The full history is in the library, and summaries have been prepared for you. You’ll be adopted by the network in the next several seconds and then you can review it all for yourselves.”
He looked to the side where Clemantine stood. She nodded as if to tell him to go ahead.
“Welcome to Dragon,” he said. “You each have your own reasons for being here, but one reason I hope we all share is an abiding curiosity about what happened to our ancestral worlds and what survives there now. We’re still a century of travel time from the closest star of the Hallowed Vasties, but we’ve already found our first artifact—and our first puzzle. I sent an outrider to investigate. It’s stealthed, so we can’t track its progress and we won’t get a report until it’s back in range—another ninety days or so—time enough for you to catch up on our history.”
He jumped down from the dais, putting an end to his speech just as Pasha’s atrium linked her into the ship’s network. Oh, she admired the strategy. She had gotten only halfway out of her seat when she sank back down, her resolve to confront him yielding to curiosity. What artifact had been found? And where exactly were they going, and why?
Without leaving her seat, she pulled up the summary reports Urban had mentioned and began to read.
Chapter
21
“You did good,” Kona said, his voice pitched just loud enough to draw Urban’s gaze as he left the dais. “Now you should stay. Make yourself accessible. Answer questions.”
Urban met this praise with a dismissive half-smile. “Let them catch up on history first. I’ll be around.”
He threaded between Vytet and Clemantine, nodded to Riffan who still stood near the entry, and walked off into sunlight.
Kona turned a disgruntled gaze on Clemantine, who rolled her eyes. “It’s better this way,” she consoled him. “He’s no good at comforting people and you know he doesn’t have the patience to listen to complaints.”
Kona grunted reluctant agreement as he eyed the ship’s company. Nearly everyone was still seated, eyes glazed, focus turned inward as they used their atriums to access the documents prepared for them.
“I thought his speech went well,” Vytet offered, his voice a gentle, low rumble.
“It did,” Kona agreed, also striving to keep his voice low so his words would not carry in the eerie quiet pervading the amphitheater. Somewhere, a trembling breath suggestive of quiet weeping. Rustling fabric, shuffling feet. A raspy indrawn breath. Sniffling.
The atmosphere would heat up once people got past the initial shock. Kona had agreed to be the buffer when that happened. It was the deal he’d cut with Urban, to get him to deliver the orientation speech. Urban had wanted Kona to speak, arguing, “You’re the politician. This is your role. You explain to them what happened.”
Kona had refused. “They need to hear it from you. This is your ship. You’re the master here. People need to know who you are. You need to engender trust, not suspicion. Let them know you’ve got their best interests in mind.”
The quiet continued for minutes before people began to look up, look around. Speak to their neighbors.
Motion drew his gaze: Shoran, rising from her seat near the end of the first row. She looked to Kona, and offered up a brilliant smile that warmed him deep in his belly. An old friend, an occasional lover. Her bright and cheerful personality a sharp contrast to his own somber pessimism, but they had gotten along, and he’d always admired her fearlessness.
He went to greet her properly. She came forward to meet him, but partway along the front row of seats she paused, using her toe to nudge Pasha Andern’s bare foot, startling her out of a reverie. With a smile, Shoran told her, “You started this. So come on now, and let’s figure out what’s next.”
Pasha’s lip curled. Her brow wrinkled in a scowl surprisingly fierce for such an elfin face. “All I did—” she started to exclaim.
“Was give the rest of us the opportunity of a lifetime,” Shoran interrupted. She turned her mischievous gaze on Kona and, raising a scolding finger, she said, “You I am not going to forgive for letting me sleep through the conquest of a Chenzeme courser and the expedition to the Rock. However, I’m still willing to negotiate on where we’re going from here.”
“There’s time for that,” he said gently, grateful to have her there. “Right now we need to get people settled.” The volume of noise was climbing as people left their seats. Several openly wept, others strove to comfort them, their encouraging words a sharp contrast to knots of angry conversation.
Shoran side-eyed the growing hubbub. Pasha turned in her seat to look. Beside her, Tarnya did the same, her expression concerned.
Kona knew Tarnya only from her bio, but he liked what he’d read. She’d served on the city council and had earned a reputation for straight talk and efficient action.
“All of you,” he said. “Work with me.” They turned to him with questioning gazes. In a low voice, he explained, “This could go either way unless we set a positive tone now.”
Tarnya was first to catch on. She nodded. Kona left it to her to lead the others. He stepped back onto the dais. “This is new for all of us,” he said, his voice calm, confident, and pitched to carry over the rising volume of conversation. It was also a voice everyone in the ship’s company knew, if not from personal experience, than from historical speeches replayed on annual holidays. The gathering quieted. People turned to listen.
“Some of you are thrilled to be here,” he went on, drawing enthusiastic whoops from the back. “Some are already regretting the decision to come.” A chorus of denials, and a muffled sob. “Regardless of what you’re feeling now, let’s help each other. Comfort each other. Move ahead, while we learn together how to make this work.” An extended pause. Everyone listening. “We’ve got time.”
This last won him some cynical chuckles—recognition that time was something they had in plenty.
“We do have time!” Tarnya called out in a positive voice, stepping up onto her chair, as she stepped into her assigned role. She surveyed the gathering, missing no one. “Time to mold a new community. A new way of life. Let’s get to know each other and our options, and together we can figure out what we want.”
“And where we’re going!” Shoran said, one hand on Tarnya’s arm to make sure she didn’t lose her balance. “And what we’re going to do when we get there, because if I have any choice in it, I am not going to miss out on the next adventure.”
“Adventure?” Pasha scoffed, on her feet now and facing the ship’s company. She looked small alongside Shoran, but not at all intimidated. “This is about disc
overy, history, what was and what can be. We are less than a century from the Hallowed Vasties! We can argue about how we got here, but we are here—and I want to know what we can see from here that we could not see from Deception Well, and I want to know where we are going.”
An eager murmur sounded through the gathering. A few voices offered competing assurances that they were even now consulting the ship’s astronomical records for the newest images of those star systems that had been cordoned—and Kona breathed a soft sigh of relief. Let them stay focused on what was ahead and they would be all right.
He said, loud enough for all to hear, “Our first destination has not been decided yet. The two closest systems are Tanjiri and Ryo. As we get closer, we’ll see in more detail what’s left at each, and we’ll know.”
<><><>
Riffan organized and oversaw a banquet to celebrate that first day, held at the dining terrace, halfway around the wheel from the amphitheater. Cushions served as seats around a long, sinuous table, segmented to make it easy to cross back and forth to either side. People moved about and mingled, introducing themselves as needed, sharing their wonder and their fear.
Riffan made sure to meet everyone, spending extra time with anyone who looked uncomfortable or alone, and making sure to find them friendly companions.
It was such a pleasure to have so many people to talk to! Though awkward to explain over and over why he’d been wakened almost three years ahead of all the others. When Shoran heard the story, she swore she would never forgive him for it. Riffan thought she was probably joking. Pasha, on the other hand, might plausibly be serious when she said the same thing.
He’d tried to explain his good fortune. “It was only because of my speciality in anthropology and Urban’s belief that the beacon was a human signal.”
Pasha was not happy with Urban either, of course, and she wasn’t alone in that. Maybe that was why Urban didn’t arrive with the others. Riffan had messaged him: *You’re coming, aren’t you?