Ostriches with large heads, gelatinous blobs with chunks of crystalline seawater adhering to their bristled skin. And worse. Ship fragments that were alive. Everything had been mixed into a cosmic grab bag, and samples had been plucked out.
The Aighors didn’t deny that they were responsible, in the beginning. The theory of the moment was that they had developed probability disrupters, weapons that could exchange mass-for-mass with world-lines slightly askew from status geometry.
Then the supernova spread its shell of light out through the fields, through the anomalies, following with a tag-along shell of particles. The flower bloomed in deep space, deadly and timeless.
The pyrotechnics had ended long ago. An expanding nebula of gas and hard radiation surrounded the remnant of the Alpha star.
Leaving higher spaces within the small solar system of the Delta star, the Peloros immediately began absorbing data. Beneath a faintly silvered energy shield, robots normally deployed for cleaning the warp nodes were installing new equipment in the sensor clusters of the outer hull.
Anna supervised everything with obvious enjoyment. The first few hours out of warp, she was in constant motion, giving orders and making decisions. Jason DiNova followed a few steps behind, grinning. This was the Nestor he was used to working for. Domesticity seemed as ill suited to her as a wool comforter on a star.
Then, as if on cue, Nestor withdrew from the activity and sat down in an unused corner of the cargo bay, chin in hand, brows together, deep in concentration. Two yeoman spheres hovered nearby. DiNova stood to one side, leaning against a bulkhead.
“All right,” she said. “Bring the chapel furniture down from inner C, manufacture a few runners of white linen, clone some flowers in Special Projects. I’ve recorded plans and designs in my notes. Look them up. I want it all down here in six hours. Send invitations to all ship’s personnel, and special dispensations to watchholders. The Peloros can run without supervision for a few hours, right?” She looked at DiNova. He nodded.
“Fine. Pardon me for a moment,” she said. “I have some apologies to make.”
Kawashita was in her cabin, exercising with four light metal poles he’d borrowed from Materials Dispensary. She watched him set to a pattern of moving abstract hologram images, wiping them away with intricate swings. When the exercise was over, she interrupted.
“I’m sorry,” she said. Kawashita looked up. “For running off like that. But I can’t promise I’ll mend my ways.”
“So? We both took chances, no?”
“But I know you’ve still got quite a bit of masculine pride. I shouldn’t go out of my way to tread on it.”
“You have work to do, obligations. Any discomfort they cause me is minimal.”
“What are we going to do when you find a place you want to settle?”
“I know what I will do but not what you’ll do.”
“Most of this is in my blood. So I tell myself, anyway. Without it I might be a different person. But—”
“You shouldn’t give it up, then.”
“I was going to say, I need some time to decide what I’m going to do, how I’m going to be. I don’t want to traipse across the Galaxy after every will-o’-the-wisp of potential profit—not for the rest of my life. I saw what that did to my family. After this I want to put it away for a while, try something else.” She sat in a desk field. “Do you believe me?”
“Not completely,” he said.
“Willing to take a risk?”
“Yes.”
“We’re both idiots, you know,” she said.
“You, who take risks every day of your life—risks that can decide the future of everything you’ve done—you worry about one small chance?”
“I’m a coward. I have soft underbellies that can be ripped open. I’ve never let anyone get at them before. When I commit myself to you, you’ll have all the road maps to them, and a set of claws.”
He put the poles down and held out his arms. She stood and came to him. She was sweating and her back was stiff. “If I knew I had any soft parts left, I’d tell you where they are,” he said. “Fair exchange. But I don’t know where they are myself. I have only one goal, and there’s no reason anyone would try to set me on a different course—not even you. We’ll give each other more freedom, not less, if only because we provide points of rest for each other—sea anchors in a storm.”
She pulled back from him and smiled. “Talk about May-December marriages,” she said.
“Is everything ready?”
“Will be shortly. Kondrashef has agreed to be your best man. And DiNova will give me away, which is symbolic, I suppose. I can hear him worrying about all the projects we’ll pass up after I’m married. I have friends in the entourage who’ll act as maids of honor, flower girls, and the like.”
“I’m not familiar with this kind of wedding.”
“Nor am I, believe me. But you told me to design it as I saw fit.”
“I’ve never been much at remembering lines.”
“It’ll be simple. A short walk, a ceremony, witnessings.”
“And a working honeymoon. It does seem crowded.”
Anna sighed. “I couldn’t pass this one by. Too much at stake.”
“To the Japanese, a wedding means a great deal.”
“It means a lot to me, too. Still, I see…it would have been nice to have time to ourselves right away.” She put her hands on her hips and shook her head. “Are we getting off to a bad start?”
“You were worried about knowing what you want. Do you really want this?” His face betrayed nothing. His tone was reasonable, and Nestor couldn’t tell if he was expressing dissatisfaction, or if she was merely fighting her own guilt. “Yes. I do.”
He smiled. “The only thing I ask is that you know what you want. I’m flexible. I can do what I wish almost anywhere.”
“I wish I knew what you really thought” she said. “You seem too damned reasonable.”
“Your risk,” he said, smiling.
“One part of me says you should stand up and make me back the hell out of the Ring Stars. The other says you’re letting me follow my wyrd, like I was some kind of summer thunderstorm, useless to interfere with. I don’t know which I prefer.”
“What you’ll find here interests me,” he said. “If the kami who call themselves Aighors didn’t have anything to do with these stars, then who did?”
“You think the Perfidisians had something to do with it?” She paused, her lips held tightly together. “Damn you. You’re taunting me. What the hell do you want? Tell me straight, or I’ll cancel the whole thing!”
“Are you angry?”
“Goddamn right I’m angry! You’re playing me like a fish on a line! Tell me straight!”
Kawashita folded his hands behind his back and took a relaxed, at-ease position. “I’ve seen you before when you’re angry. You lose all reason. So—don’t interrupt—listen carefully. You don’t control me. Your circumstances don’t control me. I decide for myself and base those decisions on things you cannot understand—experiences I haven’t told you or anyone else about. I can return to my own world and live well enough. I don’t depend on you for anything but the dubious luxury of traveling all over the Galaxy. It’s a matter of interest, not necessity. It isn’t for myself that I criticize condensing the ceremony, or holding it out here, where its ghost is rooted to nothing, where no one can ever pinpoint its place with any certainty. It’s what you will think later, how you’ll feel about our bonds. I marry you to stay married. I don’t consider it a pact of convenience. I learned that a variety of bed partners doesn’t satisfy me. I don’t want to be alone any more than I have to be. If you wish to wander far from me, at any time, then don’t marry me.”
“That isn’t what you said a few minutes ago.”
“So love makes me inconsistent.”
; “I don’t know what I want to do.”
“Then don’t marry me. I know what I want to do—have to do. If I am the anchor, and you’re a far-straying ship on a thin chain, we might as well not marry.”
“No,” Anna said. “It would be a travesty.”
“I might have done that once, if I’d married during the war. I might have left a wife at home and fought far at sea, perhaps died. But I didn’t. That philosophy has stayed with me.”
“We shouldn’t get married?”
It was Kawashita’s turn to be irritated. He turned away from her and squared his shoulders. “I want to.”
“So do I. But I’m not sure I can live up to everything. Shall we compromise?”
“Do we even know the limits within which we can compromise?”
“I think I can set them out. Fidelity.”
“If that is what you want,” Kawashita said.
“I want it. I’ll consult you on all business journeys—all journeys, of any kind. But we can’t make a fixed rule about them. It just wouldn’t work.”
“No.”
“I don’t know how much I have to wander, just to stay sane. But I will let you help me decide.” She held him around his shoulders, laying her head onto the back of his neck. “We’ve both contradicted ourselves. I guess neither of us knows how to work this kind of thing out. Being reasonable isn’t enough.”
“We won’t make lasting decisions now. We’ll work things out as we go along.”
“Wherever I go, I want you with me.”
Kawashita laughed. “We’re both crazy. You more than I. You have everything you want, and you want more—you want to be satisfied with less. I’m willing to put up with anything but not willing to be separated from you.” He turned around in her arms, rolling her chin on his shoulder until she was looking up at him. “The thought of doing without you scares me. I don’t know who else I’d turn to.”
“That’s not fair to you,” Anna murmured.
“So is there anything different about us? We make a contract, just as billions of humans have done for thousands of years—we feel afraid for each other, afraid of living without each other, which is the height of immaturity. Like two adolescents.”
“I’m not that far from adolescence,” Nestor said. “Not compared to you.”
“So? Look at me. My body hasn’t changed since I was twenty-five years old. My needs haven’t changed. I’ve never felt like an old man, even when all those around me thought I was a patriarch.”
“You don’t conjoin like an old man.”
“Until now, I’ve been mating with ghosts. Shadow-fucking. I’ve been asleep four centuries—and now that I’m about to marry you, my life starts up again.”
“I want to please you.”
“Now that we’ve said these things, the wedding is just a formality, a party for the rest of the ship, no?”
“I’ve never been much for formalities, myself.”
“It’s simple. A short walk, the ceremony, witnessings,” Kawashita said.
Nestor tapped her chin on his chest and grinned. “Wish us luck?”
“No wine, for a toast?”
“At the flick of a wrist,” Nestor said. She ordered wine and it rose up from the food table in two long-stemmed glasses. “Vintage,” she said. “Not manufactured. Tapped from kegs in the cargo bays. I bought some on Earth before we left, for the wedding. Let’s sample it before we force it on the guests.”
They drank to each other. “Christ,” Anna said, laughing as she wiped her lips. “It’s green. I’ll have to run it through the processor anyway.”
Twenty-Six
Direct excerpt from the tapas records of Yoshio Kawashita. Translated from the Japanese by Language Program (Trevor)—1360-C Twentieth.
Married. Almost trivial, four hundred and some years old, recording a marriage. Married before, seven times, but to people who didn’t exist. I know the institution, but through the distortions imposed by divine spirits.
Married to Anna Sigrid Nestor, strong, loving, fragile. Like jumping off a cliff. Beneath the dome, I was never nervous about being married, any more than an actor on stage. What was I committing myself to? But now I can choose to let my time run short—to die. A marriage can take up a substantial portion of the rest of my life—perhaps all of it. For Anna it was a nervous time, too. Between us we sweated lakes. Slurred our speech. Laughed at our mistakes. Some cried with Anna. Some laughed with me when I delivered my lines in suddenly broken English, as though I’d forgotten
Married in the cargo bay, by an interdenominational minister. License witnessed by the Peloros Testament as legal counsel for the ship, under supervision of three human lawyers; these signed our license. Belong to no country; our legal obligations are minimal. Things are much simpler this way. Any children—natural or, more common, exutero—are automatically entitled to a percentage of our holdings equal to the number of children, divided into half of the estate, subject to legal alterations by our personal Testament programs. Are other ramifications from common law, but have no place here.
After the ceremony and hours of celebration, Anna took me aside and suggested it was time to begin the honeymoon.
And so we did.
Twenty-Seven
The next wake-period, the Peloros announced its presence in the Delta system of the Ring Stars. Anna assigned Kawashita as a second officer aboard a lander, and Kondrashef acquainted him with exploration procedures.
Call signals from four hundred other ships were logged in the first week. Among them was her father’s flagship. Arrangements for a meeting were made, and the two warper ships docked in stellar orbit. Visitors, luxury supplies, and news not available through general transmissions were exchanged. Then, without announcement or ceremony, Donatien Nestor came aboard the Peloros. Anna met him at the makeshift visitor’s station in the lander bay.
He was a tall, lean man, with powerful features that reminded Kawashita of some of the armor masks he had worn—a sharp, hooked nose, eyes inclined upwards at the sides, thin lips which, in a smile, always seemed to have the advantage of you. He gave Anna a peremptory hug, congratulated her on being among the first to arrive, then turned to Kawashita.
“Is this our long-lived new family member?” His voice was mellow, mid-ranged, pleasant. He held his hand out, and Kawashita clasped it firmly. Donatien’s grip was light and unassuming. The Japanese bowed, and he returned the bow, but with a diffident look to one side. “You have quite a history. Unfortunate it was interrupted.”
“I’ve lived a great deal longer because of that,” Kawashita said.
“Anna.” Donatien hugged his daughter again, still with some reserve, as if unsure exactly what to do.
“I’ve missed you, Father,” she said.
“We’ve missed you, too. Much work was done, however. I hear you’re doing well.”
“Very well. Yoshio and I think we can afford to take a few years off after we’re done here. We plan to travel around for a while—as tourists.”
“Never done that, myself,” Donatien said. “Probably never wanted to. Kawashita-san, how do you get along with my strong-willed offspring?”
“Very well,” he said.
“Remarkable. Not a bit of accent. You seem to be adjusting.”
“I’ve had a long time to prepare.”
“So you did. Are there refreshments, a place to relax for my party? Anna, this is my domestic partner, Julia Horsten”—a tall, thin woman, almost skeletal around the wrists and ankles but smoothly filling out around hips and breasts—“and your half brother, Marcus.” The boy was about ten years old, sandy-haired, and husky. He smiled politely.
“You flew airplanes?” Marcus asked.
Kawashita nodded. “A long time ago.”
“Sunk aircraft carriers?” the boy pursued.
“More sinned
against than sinning,” he answered, shaking his head.
“The social side is what I’m here for,” Julia said, peering around the lander bay like an exceptionally dignified deer. “But I’m sure Donatien wants to discuss partnerships and pacts.”
“Partly. Anna, is your sensory equipment as good as I think it is?”
“Father, we’re on different pledge-sheets now.”
“So we are. Is she breaking you in, Yoshio, or are you on a different pledge-sheet, too?”
“We are communal, I believe.”
“Totally,” Anna said. “But Yoshio has his own fortune. He doesn’t rely on me…” She interrupted herself, unsure the implication had even been made. Then she called DiNova from the shrouded sensor equipment waiting to be loaded onto the lander and introduced him to the family. “Jason knows more about the ship than I do, and he’s probably dying to talk business, but he’s even more interested in escorting a beautiful lady and fine young brother around the Peloros. Correct?”
DiNova nodded with studied enthusiasm. Julia looked at him with a faint air of disdain but took his proffered hand and told Marcus to come with them.
“Very good,” Donatien said. “I assume you have the special sensors ready—you’d be foolish not to use them, and you’re no fool. Daughter, this isn’t going to be as important a find as some people think. Do you have that feeling?”
Anna cocked her head in query.
“I’ll give you some free information. None of the matter in the three systems we’ve scanned has been altered in the least. The supernova cloud appears to have an unusual hyperfine structure, but there doesn’t seem to be any correlation between that and the probability distortion.”
“If we’re exchanging data, Father, I don’t have anything to offer in return.”
“Not at all. What I’m saying is, the evidence will have to be purely artifactual. Nothing subtle seems to have changed.”
“Except the Alpha star itself.”