CHAPTER
ONE
“This is just as nice as the margrave train in New York.” Ellie smushed her face against the window, made a kissing shape with her lips, and blew an enormous raspberry. When she pulled her face away again, a sheet of condensation on the glass surrounded an archipelago of negative space remembering the presence of her nose, cheekbones, and chin.
John stopped his pacing to admire his daughter.
Beyond the glass, deep blue sky and bright green foliage stretched in all directions. The train was fast; only three hours earlier, the family had come down the ramp from the shuttle bay onto the concourse at Central Transit Station.
Ruth handed each girl an animal cracker. She offered John one, and he waved it away. She did all this without releasing her grip on one of her bags—it was the bag into which she’d packed her mother’s jewelry, once the steward of the starship Oberon had retrieved it from the ship’s safe.
“Maglev,” Sunitha said, correcting her sister. “It means magnetic levitation.”
“Fine,” Ellie shot back, “but margrave means you float.”
Animoosh barked. Her ears were rotated intotheir forward position, which meant that she was alert, curious, and a little on edge. She pressed against John’s knee.
Ellie was five years old and Sunitha eight. They shared a cinnamon complexion midway between the peaches and cream colors of their mother’s face and the dark walnut of their father’s. Ellie also had her mother’s features, with a long nose, narrow, full-lipped mouth, and strong jaw, framed by a shock of unruly dark red hair. Sunitha’s face looked like her father’s, angular, with fine features and high-arching eyebrows. Except, of course, that she didn’t have his protruding eyes or the ears that poked out perpendicular to the side of his skull. Her hair was a deep golden color, and tightly curled.
“We call this kind of train a maglev train,” John said to Ellie. “You’re right, it does float. It levitates on giant magnets, which keeps the drag down and lets the train go really, really fast. This train is much newer than the ones in New York, so it’s cleaner and shinier.” Also, the Sarovar Company employees seemed less prone to writing vulgarities on the train walls than New Yorkers were, but he wasn’t going to point that out to his young daughters. “It doesn’t go to as many places, though.”
“Because Sarovar Alpha is unexplored!” Sunitha said.
Ruth smiled. She still had that part-fretful, part-hectoring expression on her face that she had put on when John had told her they’d be traveling to Henry Hudson Post by train. She fretted and hectored from a good place, from the best of all possible places: she didn’t want John to die of heart failure, if the train accelerated too fast.
He knew why she worried, but it was still too much. He wasn’t that fragile.
“Sit down, John,” she said. “Stop bending your wrists and fingers back.”
“Yeah, Dad,” Ellie said. “You’re going to break off your hands!”
John clasped his hands together to stop himself from bending his wrists and fingers backward. It was a lifelong habit, like cracking one’s knuckles.
Ruth fretted in part because they had sold everything and borrowed all the money they could to get here. They had a suitcase each full of clothing and small domestic items plus John’s computer, but no other possessions.
John had a life insurance policy, but it wasn’t very big, because they couldn’t afford much in the way of monthly premiums right now. The Company salary had started getting deposited in their Sarovar Depository account when they boarded the Oberon in orbit above New York and had therefore become visible immediately upon their emergence from the Saravor end of the wormhole, but life insurance premiums were high for John. If he died, Ruth would be economically stranded, with two children.
“Is that what Doctor Doctor tells you?” John asked. Doctor Doctor was the AI tutor he had installed on both girls’ multitools in New York. “Sarovar Alpha is unexplored?”
“The planet has been surgeried!” Ellie cried, before pressing her face against the window again.
“Surveyed. Yes, but not explored,” Sunitha said, slipping into her faux aristocratic-English accent. “Surveyed just means that they flew around it a few times and took measurements from space. All of the planets of Sarovar System have been surveyed but not fully explored. There are satellites orbiting Sarovar Alpha right now, but they’re mostly for communication. That’s how our multis work here. There are just a few large posts on the planet, and although there are many minor posts, they are really small. The train lines mostly connect the major posts with Central Transit Station—that’s the spaceport we just left. Cataloguing of indigenous species is only at an estimated forty percent completion. Of course, any planet has an awful lot of species, given all the bugs and microbes and stuff.”
Ellie detached from the window. “Some planets are just rocks.”
“Yes, but I mean habitable planets,” Sunitha said.
“There are still many unknown species,” Ruth said. “What are the most famous ones we do know about?”
“Weavers!” Ellie shouted.
“Shhh,” Ruth urged her.
John bent his left hand back until his knuckles nearly touched his forearm and shrugged. “We’re the only ones in the car.”
It was true. The car in front of them was empty and the car behind them held several men who had embarked with them at Central Transit Station. They wore heavy boots and jumpsuits, and accompanied several large crates marked TOOLS and PROPERTY OF THE SAROVAR COMPANY on a long, narrow sledge.
“Good,” Ruth said. “They can practice acceptable manners while there’s no one around to hear them fail.”
John laughed.
“Weavers,” Ellie whispered. “But what about the other ones? Zoofoos and ills?”
“You mean Zaphons,” John said, “and Illig. There’s only one known wormhole connecting to Sarovar System, and its other end is near Jupiter. That means that to get here, you have to go through Earth. It’s like we’re on a dead-end street, in terms of space travel. You might see nonhuman sentients here, but I think they would have to come as Company employees, so there can’t be very many of them.”
He’d had a Zaphon lecturer at NYU, Professor Tzaark. Not for an accounting class; the sedate extraterrestrial, who looked half wolf and half lizard, had lectured on the experience of encountering alien life-forms—while at the same time providing in his own person an object lesson. Zaphons were nocturnal, so the class had been held in the evening, and Tzaark had always arrived yawning and blinking, newly roused from sleep.
“But Sarovar Alpha has lots of its own species,” Ruth said. “Doesn’t it, girls?”
“The Sarovari Weavers,” Sunitha explained, “have a three-sided geometry rather than being bilaterally symmetric, as so many of Earth’s life-forms are. They produce the Sarovari Weave, which is one of the exports of the Sarovar Company from the Sarovar System.”
“Those are some awfully big words to come from such a delightfully small girl,” John said.
Sunitha smiled.
“Did you just memorize the words, or do you know what they mean?” John asked. Sunitha was capable of parroting back enormous amounts of data, but he worried she didn’t always process what she learned by rote. “What is ‘bilaterally symmetric’?”
“Bilateral symmetry means that a creature’s left and right sides mirror each other,” Sunitha said. “Like you, mostly, when you don’t slouch or bend your hands back.”
“Thanks.” John grinned. “I didn’t really have a good posture coach until I got married.”
“Daddy slouches.” Ellie laughed.
“The Weavers are radially symmetric, and three-sided. On Earth, bilateral symmetry is associated with cephalization, which means having a head.” Sunitha frowned. “Doctor Doctor doesn’t know whether the Weavers have heads or not.”
“They’re sentient,” Ruth said.
Sunitha grimaced. “That doesn’t mean they have heads. Maybe they have brains, and whatever else they need to be sentient, in some part of their body other than a head.”
“Souls,” Ruth suggested. “They need souls.”
“Doctor Doctor doesn’t mention whether the Weavers have souls.”
“I’m glad to hear that Doctor Doctor doesn’t know everything,” John said. “That means there are a few things left for us to explore.”
“Like sixty percent of the species,” Sunitha said. “Estimated. Maybe we’ll see the Weavers close up ourselves.”
“I don’t want to explore bugs,” Ellie said.
“The Weavers have diseases,” Ruth said. “Diseases that can be especially lethal for human beings, even though they don’t seem to bother the Weavers themselves.”
“That’s what we’ve heard, anyway,” John murmured. “So we’ll be careful.”
“I know.” Sunitha stamped a foot. “I mean, maybe the post we end up at will have a zoo. Or a stuffed specimen, or something.”
“I just want it to have a decent church,” Ruth said. “I don’t even care much what kind, at this point. I grew so tired of hearing the triple-chewed mush of the Oberon’s chaplain.”
“Ew, he was boring,” Sunitha agreed.
“I’m not sure you can really put sentients in a zoo,” John murmured. “Maybe a museum. For artifacts.”
“Do we know yet what post we’ll end up at?” Ruth asked. They had had this conversation many times before. She was really asking whether he had received any messages on landing.
“I have to imagine Henry Hudson,” John said. “Surely, the bookkeeping data is all transmitted there from the smaller posts for the financial planning and analysis work. And my boss works there. Stands to reason we’d be there, too, doesn’t it? Of course, they could send us anywhere. Maybe we’ll be sent to the southern continent and we won’t be dealing with Weavers at all. We’ll be mining and watching out for Riders.”
“Henry Hudson is as big as a city.” Ruth’s eyes were hopeful. Her family tree was heavy with pioneers, missionaries, and explorers, but she was herself a city girl. She liked plays and art galleries, and had thrived in New York City, even having to drag two little girls along with her everywhere she went. “A small city, anyway.”
“I bet Henry Hudson Post will have a zoo. And a museum.” John nodded. “And there’ll be school, so you can ask your teachers about how to get a good look at a Weaver. And maybe a Rider. Does Doctor Doctor say whether there are Riders on the northern continent at all? At least, there must be better pictures of Weavers here than are available on Earth.”
“How do we trade with the Weavers?” Sunitha asked. “Doctor Doctor says they don’t speak any human languages.”
“I have no idea,” John admitted. “Maybe we learned their language. Maybe we have some way of trading without language.” Professor Tzaark had told stories of the first encounter between Zaphons and humans, out beyond the orbital ring of Pluto, at which he had been a young participant. They had initially communicated by laborious pantomime and pictures sketched in a smear of strawberry jam, which had more than once nearly caused the parties to attack each other.
“Do we give them money?” Ellie asked. “What do they spend money on?” She took another animal cracker from her mother. “Do they like cookies?”
“I have no idea.” John shrugged. “I’ve read . . . well, in the orientation materials the Company sent me, that there are some funny new words we’re going to have to learn while we’re here. Like setty.”
“Isn’t that a sofa?” Ruth laughed out loud.
“You’re thinking of set-TEE,” John said. “SET-ty is a Sarovari word, and it means something like ‘guy’ or ‘person.’ The example sentence that the orientation material gives is, ‘My toilet is backed up. Do you know the number for the water-setty?’”
Ellie laughed. “I’m going to call you my Dad-setty and my Mom-setty.”
“Just Mom will do fine,” Ruth said. “What does the word ‘setty’ have to do with how we trade with the Weavers?”
“It suggests there’s a pidgin,” John said. “Probably the traders here didn’t make the word ‘setty’ up, so maybe they borrowed it . . . for instance, from the Weaver language. But that’s just a guess, because how exactly we trade with the Weavers isn’t something I’ve been able to figure out yet. It’s a . . . trade secret, you could say.” He grinned.
“Is that a dad-setty joke?” Ellie smiled.
John chuckled. “Guilty. You can ask your teachers all about the Weavers.”
“I have a teacher now.” Sunitha sounded cross. Had he talked too much about what he knew, and let her talk too little? “Doctor Doctor.”
“Father meant a flesh-and-blood teacher,” Ruth explained.
John frowned. Father made him feel old. He preferred Dad-setty, given a choice.
“I want a real live teacher,” Ellie said. “What’s a margrave, then?”
Ani pressed against John’s leg, so John sat and stroked the dog behind her ears. Her color-changing coat had become somewhat confused during the five months aboard ship, shifting from chocolate brown to autumn red, and then stopping. Ani was an abstemious dog, if there was such a thing—some dogs would gorge themselves whenever there was food available, but Ani only ate when she was hungry. As a result, she still had her boxy, muscular frame, whereas John and his family had all gotten a little soft on the voyage. As he stroked his dog, he could feel her relax. Her ears slid back to their rear position, and she yawned.
“A margrave is a title of nobility,” John said. “We’ve never had those in the United States, but they used to use them in many parts of Earth. They still have them in a few countries. Like a queen or a king, only a margrave is a much lower title.”
“Like Uncle Christopher?” Ellie asked.
John raised his eyebrows at Ruth, inviting her to explain.
“Uncle Christopher is a cardinal,” she said. “That’s sort of like a margrave, but instead of being a title the government gives, it’s a title the church gives.”
“He’s a priest,” Sunitha said, in a very margrave-like accent.
“A senior sort of priest,” Ruth said. “He leads other priests.”
“Can Uncle Christopher float?” Ellie’s eyes were pinned to the forest canopy beneath the train’s elevated track. John followed her gaze and saw rich green vegetation, growing over gray rock and sliced into sections by green and brown streams.
“Neither margraves nor cardinals can float,” John said. “Maglev trains float.”
“Oh yes.” Ellie’s voice was distant, her imagination captured by the forest below.
“Is Sarovar part of the United States?” Sunitha asked.
“I’m sure you’ve already tried to figure out the answer for yourself,” John said. “What do you think?”
Sunitha frowned. “It seems like a Territory. Like Puerto Rico used to be, or Oregon. The Weavers don’t vote.”
“They’re hostile to humans,” Ruth said. “And savage and unpredictable. Whether we can communicate with them or not.”
Little confirmed information about Sarovar Alpha, or its Rider and Weaver populations, was available in New York. But years of informal meetings with Company recruiters had left a stew of rumors, suggestions, and innuendo in NYU’s student population. At parties and in study groups and in private conversations, Ruth and John had both absorbed that stew.
“And I don’t think the U.S. government really does much here.” Sunitha puckered her lips in thought. The accent had disappeared. “It doesn’t even collect taxes.”
“It collects taxes upon remission to Earth,” John said.
“And the judges are all Company employees,” Sunitha continued. “Is there even law here?”
“Some U.S. federal law is applicable in Sarovar System,” John said. “Taxes, murder, a handful of big crimes. Most day-to-day kinds of law are covered by the Company’s bylaws and code of conduct.”
Sunitha nodded. “So I think that makes Sarovar something like a condominium.”
It was John’s turn to frown. “You mean, like in an apartment complex?”
“Ha ha,” Ellie said. “Sunitha got a word wrong.”
Sunitha shook her head, her good mood abruptly restored. “A condominium is where two powers jointly control a territory.” Her aristocratic tones had returned. “Like Oregon once was.”
“Well, Doctor Doctor has already taught you more than I know.” John shook his head. “But the Sarovar Company is a federally chartered United States corporation whose principal operations are in Sarovar System. It operates under a charter that gives it the right to basically run the system, so long as it pays taxes to the U.S. and guarantees all indigenous sentient species certain rights.”
“I don’t think a whole system should be turned over to a private company,” Sunitha said.
“Well, someone has to run the place,” John said. “It’s slow and dangerous and expensive to get ships through the wormhole, both directions. And private companies are much better than the government at controlling costs and running efficient operations. If not the Company, then who do you think should be in charge?”
Sunitha shrugged. “Maybe the church.”
John nodded. “Mom would like that.”
Ruth smiled.
“Uncle Christopher!” Ellie cheered. “Uncle Christopher can run the system!”
“He might be too busy trying to keep the Anglicans and the Mormons from jumping out of the United Congregations,” Ruth said. “Being a cardinal is already a lot of work.”
“Just before we left New York,” John said, “they accidentally printed a missal with the Angel Moroni on the cover. Again. It nearly caused a shooting war in West Africa.”
“Nobody shot anybody,” Ruth demurred.
“Thanks to Uncle Christopher,” John said. “So we should leave him right where he is.”
“I know one more thing about Sarovar and the Sarovar Company.” Sunitha’s voice had a sly tone, as if she were prepared to spring a punchline.
Ani rolled over onto her side and John scratched the dog’s belly. “What’s that?”
“That the Company is about to get one new trader!” Sunitha beamed.
John’s heart melted. “Accountant, at least,” he said. “We’ll see about trader.”
Ruth’s brows furrowed.
“Certainly, trader,” he said. “If not immediately, then very soon.”
“That’s how Company employees make their fortune,” Sunitha informed them all, as Ruth needled John with her eyes. “They can trade for their own account, buying Sarovari Weave and other exports and selling them back home.”
John nodded, his throat dry. “Of course, they have to pay their share of the Wormhole Transit Fee. And unless they want to take the risk of loss on the shipment, they may want to sell to a broker here on Sarovar. Only then they make less money.”
“But the risk isn’t high,” Ruth said, “is it?”
“It’s not zero,” John said. “But that’s what an entrepreneur is—it’s someone who puts his own money in and his own hard work and is willing to take the risk.”
“We’re willing to take risks.” Ruth smiled at John, but there was steel in her smile. She didn’t look at her daughters, who were forty light-years from home and riding a train into a new life with unknown perils. “And we’ll do our best to manage the risks.”
John reached across the gap between the train seats and took her hand. “Of course.”
“We might end up rich,” Sunitha said.
John laughed. “Let’s start by trying to end up debt-free.”
The maglev began its deceleration, approaching Henry Hudson Post.