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The news was everywhere. It was in our dreams, it was on TV. Tonight, the travelers on the first starship from Earth would awaken. That morning, Danous yawned with the expectant creak of shutters, the first stretch of shadow across narrow streets. The air shimmered with the scent of warming pine, it brushed through the shutters and touched our thoughts even as our dreams had faded. For this was Starship Day, and, from tonight, nothing would ever be the same.
Donna had picked up Jared’s favorite—Romano’s to go, he liked the rosemary bread and the penne rustica—and was just putting it in the oven to keep warm when they brought him in. They being EMTs, after pounding urgently on the door, and brought him in meaning he was on a stretcher. He had an IV in his arm and his eyes were bandaged with thick layers of gauze.
The City Man was calling him. Tracker lifted his head from his garden, distracted from the small fears and satisfactions of the black beetles sucking juice from the ruffled cabbages beneath his fingers. The scent of that calling came to him on the soft westerly winds that also carried molecules of ocean, fish, and seagull shit, dying shelled-things and hungry water-living mammals.
They hate me. They have told me this, again and again, starting from almost the first day of the mission, and continuing every day since then, carrying their hostility well outside the confines of the solar system and into the realm of bentspace. Their hatred does not quite extend to the realm of murder, at least not yet; but it does include telling me every day, in every possible way, that they find my presence intolerable.
Diana hasn’t seen her son naked before. He floats now in the clear gel bath of the medical bay, the black ceramic casing that holds his brain, the long articulated tail of his spinal column. Like a tadpole, she thinks. Like something young. In all, he hardly masses more than he did as a baby. She has a brief, horrifying image of holding him on her lap, cradling the braincase to her breast.
Every night I come home and I drink. I trade away the hope, the guilt, the fear, even the love—I think it’s love, crazy as it seems. I trade them for oblivion, because otherwise I won’t sleep at all. I drink until there’s no life left in me, until I’m able to forget for just a little while the chrome vessel in the corner and what’s at stake. Sometimes I hope that I’ll dream of her.
This is 2015. A party on a westside roof, just before midnight. Some Mia or Mina or throwing it, the white girl with the jean jacket and the headband and the two-bumps-of-molly grin, flitting from friend circle to friend circle, laughing loudly and refilling any empty cup in her eyeline from a bottomless jug of sangria, Maenad Sicagi. There are three kegs, a table of wines and liquor, cake and nachos inside.
I had bought half an hour with Malka and I was making the most of it. Lots of Off girls, there’s not much goes on, but these Polar City ones, especially if they’re fresh off the migration station, they seem to, almost, enjoy it? I don’t know if they really do. They don’t pitch and moan and fake it up or anything, but they seem to be there under you. They’re with you, you know?
His keys dropped, rattling on the parquet floor. Julius stared at them, unwilling to look at the bandaged stump where his left hand had been two weeks ago. He should be used to it by now. He should not still be trying to pass things from his right hand to his left. But it still felt like his hand was there. The shaking began again, a tremelo building in his hand and knees.
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