Chapter One
Joseph
Space is full of stark beauty and darkness, and largely empty. But there are still surprises. The day our plans changed started with the simple chaos of two children and a dog.
We were halfway home, eleven months awake in the small intimacy of the ship, working hard not to crawl up each other’s nerves.
I leaned against the warm wall of the simulated sun in the nursery, smiling as Chelo, my beloved sister, my best support in the whole world, laughed with her son. Two modified maintenance bots trailed after one-and-a-half-year-old Jherrel as he toddled from Chelo’s arms toward me. The bots looked like a cross between dogs and spiders, scuttling on four feet and holding two up, ready to save Jherrel from any emergency, including himself. It amazed me that he hadn’t figured out how to wreck the whole ship yet. If he were older, he might have.
The nursery floors and walls showed why we kept the two children mostly contained: the walls were scratched and even, occasionally, slightly dented. The room smelled like bot-grease and the sweet sweat of children. “Un-cle Jo-seph!” Jherrel exclaimed, his mouth twisted in a huge grin. He always came to me when I entered the room, as if I were his favorite toy or perhaps his pet dog.
Speaking of dogs, the black-and-white stray I’d taken from Fremont, stood by my feet. Sasha. Her ribs no longer showed and her coat had grown glossy. She bent over her forelegs in a play bow and wagged her tail at Jherrel.
Across the long silver floor, Jherrel’s slightly bigger half-sister, Caro, actually rode one of her keeper bots, while her mother, Kayleen, held her hands for balance. Kayleen’s smile was as wide as Jherrel’s, the one blue eye not covered by a stray fall of her dark hair twinkling a welcome. She’d known I was coming. I’d spoken to her via the data nets as I neared the nursery, a warm sharing of our silent language.
Caro noticed me and squealed. Verbal, like her mom. Kayleen stood up and Caro got a little ahead of her. She lifted a foot up onto the robot’s rounded back, maybe trying to stand. Her foot slipped and she fell backward onto the floor with a screech.
Sasha raced for the robot, snapping at its front legs as it tried to turn around and help Caro. Kayleen came between the dog and the robot, holding Sasha off so the mechanical minder could help Caro up.
I burst out laughing, and Kayleen and Chelo both glared at me with their most severe mom faces.
I put my hands behind my back and squatted down so I’d be closer to the children’s height, marveling yet again that Chelo and Kayleen and Liam could possibly be parents. Yes, they were older than me by the three years or so of cold sleep I’d spent on this same journey when I went to Silver’s Home, but still. Parents.
Jherrel waited patiently for Caro to make her way over to us and then looked at me with expectation.
I pulled my hands in front of me and opened them, palms flat, so the two tiny aircars I’d carved of cured lace-leaf wood lay on them. The cars were baby-fist-sized, and styled after the cars they’d see when we got to Silver’s Home. The children snatched them up, toddling around and pretending to fly the toys through the nursery. The robots clattered and whirred after the children. Caro came back to me, burbling engine noises while she flew hers beside my knee.
I laughed and caught Caro’s eye. “Really, they’re quieter than that.”
She ignored me, following Jherrel toward the far corner. Kayleen grinned as she watched her daughter go, completely intent on the noise of flying. “Thanks. It always fascinates them to have new toys.”
“I like making them things. It’s not like there’s much to piloting way out here.”
Chelo grimaced. “I know.”
Sasha uncurled and stood, sniffing my hand for a pet. I gave in. I’d bathed her yesterday, so she smelled of soap. She was the closest thing I had to a child of my own.
“You’re a good uncle.” Chelo leaned in, resting her head momentarily on my shoulder. “If only they could have open space to run in.”
A space ship has no fields and no roads. Even though it is surrounded by stars, it has no sky. The wall I stood against gave us a dawn, midday, dusk, and night.
The children were too young for cold sleep, so Chelo, Liam, and Kayleen had chosen to stay awake. Thankfully, Creator was outfitted for a waking crew.
My father had been with us on the way out, but now I was the only pilot. This made me aware of everyone on the ship. Seven other people lay in cold sleep. The five of us in the room were awake, as well as Liam, who had fathered both the babies. Alicia as well. My sweetheart. I couldn’t see her, so she was probably in trouble.
She’d teased me into letting her stay out of cold sleep, whispering that she was afraid Kayleen and I wouldn’t be able to resist each other if we were awake together. I’d whispered back that it was her fear, and not her common sense, that kept her awake. She had kissed me and pulled me into our room in answer.
I loved Alicia with all my heart, needed her, spent my daydreams on her.
Besides, Kayleen loved Chelo and Liam, and they loved her. How could they not? They had been the only ones like themselves on a whole planet. Their bonds were as strong as mine with Alicia, maybe stronger. They had been three against a world.
It was time for me to teach Kayleen more of what I’d learned. I crooked a finger at her. “Ready?”
You are a mean man, she told me across the data streams.
I know, I answered the same way.
She glanced at Chelo. “Can you handle them both?”
“Liam will be along any minute.”
Kayleen followed me to the command room. At any other time in her life, Kayleen chattered. But on her way to our lessons, she was almost always silent. I took a seat at the table, letting her choose where to be. There were only four chairs, and she selected the one closest to me, on my right.
“You can do it,” I whispered, and took her hand, letting it lie calmly on mine, a resting of the two together rather than a grip. To fly the ship, she needed to learn to track multisourced data.
She dropped her head, not even bothering with preambles anymore.
I was already there, waiting for her, linked deep enough to the streams of ship’s data that I breathed information. Kayleen caught up to me, suffering as I drilled her on ship speed and gravity, on water supplies and nearby stars. Creator was fast—just under lightspeed—so our place in the starscape changed regularly. Marcus had taught me that even though Creator did the daily course charts, a real pilot would know these things. He was my teacher, so I did what he asked.
Pilots went crazy even more often than other Wind Readers. Kayleen knew.
“Are you ready?” I asked her.
Agreement. Something I felt as much as saw.
We matched our breath. I led, slowing her, slowing us both. She did this part easily now. Marcus taught me to match breath with him, and now I was teaching Kayleen.
She and I folded our virtual selves nearly inside of each other and plunged into the ship’s library. I began to bombard her with questions.
“What’s an affinity group?”
She barely hesitated. “A family of economic and other interests.”
“What is the Port Authority?”
“A power that hates you.” That came from her conscious self, not the data. I waited for her to get it right. “Regulator of space travel and thus commerce for Silver’s Home.”
“What are the Makers?”
Her answers came fast. She hated this. I knew because the way we saw each other, raw and unfiltered, inside the data meant we were, in some ways, naked to each other. At least her fists weren’t clenched today. “A term loosely applied to Wind Readers who create new living things. Also means the affinity group that created the Silver Eyes, the island chain that you left from.”
And where we were returning to. “What is Lopali?”
“Home of the fliers.”
“What are the fliers?”
“Humans who can fly.”
“What are the swimmers?”
“Humans who live under the sea. There are not many of them.”
“How many?”
A long silence fell. Some of the other questions she’d answered before, but every day I asked some new ones, probed deeper. She’d have to figure out how to find this number. So much time passed that I worried she’d become lost. Eventually, she said, “When Creator left, there were fifty-two, but three were starting the de-sculpting and won’t count.”
Very good. The small muscles in her jaw and neck tightened, relaxed, tightened, even as her answers remained perfect. But I couldn’t make this easy for her. I owed her better than that. “Where is Caro right now?”
I wanted to scream triumph when she didn’t skip a beat. “In the nursery with Liam.” That meant she went up to ship’s data from the library seamlessly. Harder than it sounded. And her hand hadn’t even twitched.
“Are the carrots in the garden ripe?”
Hesitation. “We can harvest a few more this evening.”
Good. “What is the best school for Wind Readers on Silver’s Home?”
She’d need to go back into the library. I waited.
No answer.
Her hand pulled away from mine. I caught her as she jerked up and back, so her head nestled against my arm, the long fall of her hair nearly brushing the ground. A light breeze from the air recirculation systems blew the loosest strands lightly, as if a true wind touched her, and her jaw quivered and tightened before she snapped her eyes open and sat up. “It’s always so hard to be back.” She lifted her hands and clenched and unclenched her fists, then stood and shook her oversized feet. “I forget I have a body at all.”
At least she wasn’t mad at me. Three days ago, she’d emerged screaming that I was too hard on her. I wasn’t. I knew how much it cost us to be so powerful and to lose control. I shivered and pushed the memories away, worked to keep my teacher’s face on.
I was protecting her.
I was far stronger than Kayleen, and I had hidden for months on Silver’s Home. It took time to build skills to keep the flood of data from leaving me a trembling idiot. Fremont’s simple data nearly drove Kayleen crazy. I needed to drive her hard. The impartial data streams of a full economy would not care about her.
I did.
An alarm went off and warning thrummed through my blood. My fingers jerked involuntarily and my spine stiffened.
Something man-made approached us.