Planet
42 Beta
By
Lisa Shapter
The return trip did not go so well. I made a
mistake plotting my course. The Shoebill’s
apparent gravity was disabled by an impact, and my
last conscious sight was the floor coming at me, as I
wondered if the team on the planet on the inner orbit
had sabotaged my ship.
I woke up, and someone was trying to put
something over my head. I tried to fight him off, and,
unlike most Corpsmen, he did not try to pin my arms: I
would have gone for my sidearm if he had. Instead, he
let me take in that the inside of the helmet had air,
and I instinctively reached to pull it on. While my
hands were busy with automatic adjustments and checks,
he made the tears at the appropriate catchpoints in my
thermals for vitals monitoring. He was only doing his
job: he pulled me onto a splayed-out suit, and quickly
fastened and sealed all the components, starting with
my core. The suit automatically set up its connections
and monitoring leads and lit up with healing fields. I
was briefly blind while it shut off my optic nerves,
so I would not see the visual disturbances caused by
running the fields over my eyes. My sight was back
before I had time to gasp. With the oxygen and fixes
to my injuries the pain in my head cleared, but I lay
still and let him finish fastening the suit’s legs and
arms as the suit replaced hypothermic cold with
warmth, and
let those fields finish their work. The process went
faster if I did not try to help.
The Corpsman’s gloved thumb did the final
external checks, touching a pressure switch on my
chest and on the side of my helmet. Everything seemed
to have a green light, and the suit apparently
reported all of my injuries had been treated.
I was looking through permiglass at what
might as well have been the face of a popular young
American football captain who has no idea why people
admired him: my rescuer was blond, handsome,
fair-skinned, and a picture of wholesome, tanned good
health. A colony life of regular outdoor exercise in a
moderate climate with a mostly vegetarian diet
obviously agreed with him. There were care lines on
his face, emphasized when he was worried, but they
vanished when I smiled at him. He grinned back through
his faceplate.
“Is that better, Magistrate Gestae?” his
voice said over the helmet’s output.
He might as well have said ‘coach’.
“Much. Nightskyman?”
“First Lieutenant Vester Coy. I’ll get you
into the Spes, and check the tow line,” she,
for Coy was her world’s mother, grabbed me in a rescue
carry, secure and strong, but not the crushing squeeze
most grunts would use. She hauled me into the back of
the small craft parked in my ship’s central corridor,
sealed the craft’s doors, and, with a disorienting
flip and yaw, flew out my ship’s atmospheric door with
exactly the neat maneuver for getting through a door
designed for people, not scout craft.
###
I found myself on her main ship’s hospital
bed, still in my spacesuit, as she cheerfully went out
to do the dangerous check on the towline between her
working ship and my disabled one. Another set of
healing fields and I was well enough to take the suit
off myself and push it into the hopper for processing.
The medical computer told me to lie back down, and I
agreed: the brief effort had made the edges of my
vision turn dark grey. A mechanical arm came down from
the ceiling and whirred while the ship’s medical
computer looked for the right placement for hydration
and monitoring leads. The whole room became glorious
in all its utilitarian, rounded-corner white and lilac
glory: the ship had boosted the med lab’s oxygen
content.
My rescuer was taking off her suit at the
other end of the corridor and singing some ancient
song in a weird modality. She sounded happy. I heard
her boots thudding up the corridor.
“How’re we doing, Magistrate Gestae?”
Again it sounded like ‘coach’.
“‘Resada’ will do.”
“OK, Resada.”
It still sounded like ‘coach’.
She came over to look into my face. I looked
back at her.
“Your record says you’ve got a husband. It’s
just the oxygen and the endorphins,” she cautioned.
“It’ll wear off.”
“I don’t like women,” I assured her.
“That’s a shame, women are great,” she said,
the unthinking opinion of any young man on earth, as
though Coy did not remember she was in farspace or the
changes done to her.
I could not get a crush on this woman: I
really didn’t like women, and her sunny temperament
already grated on me.
She thumped forward, and I lay in the medlab
until I felt the bump of the ship entering atmosphere.
I felt for the datatablet she had put on the bedside
tray.
‘Coy, I thought we were going back to base,’
I typed.
“I can’t leave my kids right now,” the
doorside intercom replied. “I’ve sent a message to
your husband.”
“I’m not authorized to land....”
“Your record says you are,” Coy said. “I know
why you were on that world. Stay with us awhile, rest
up, your spouse will come and get you, and you can go
to the next world together.”
I thought about that lovely idea for a long
moment. Orders kept us apart. The Exploratory Corp
ignores marriages when it gives orders; farspace is
too large to see that every pair and group stay
together, no matter what their rank or training.
“I have our ship, Coy.”
It would be months for Coy’s message to reach
my assigned world; it would take months for my
husband’s reply to reach here. My ship would need to
be repaired. Even if my husband somehow got passage on
a second ship, and left the moment Coy’s message
arrived, he would take even further months to get
here. I did not want to stay here for most of a year.
I did not want to become part of this family. I did
not want what could never be mine hung in front of my
face.
Her ship lurched and rocked. Emergency fields
held me to the bed, and inertial dampeners made it
feel like a brief carnival ride rather than a
life-threatening danger.
“This is the Pisces #2456, the Spes,
at 27 km. Watch your descent, you’re within the 150
meter minimum,” Lt Coy said, far calmer than I would
have been.
“Climbing to 30 km. Sorry, Spes,
sudden decal. We were in the area,” the door-side
intercom relayed: Coy had not shut off the piloting
room pickup. It was not the voice of my husband, but
of one of the guards assigned to be sure I went to the
meetings with my perpetrators and that I followed all
Corps orders.
I would have to put up with him needling me
about this mission and my past mistakes all the way to
the next world, starting with letting my ship connect
with an asteroid.
Of course my guard had not been in the area:
this ship had come from a base relaying the message
out to my husband. I do not know how my custodian had
gotten permission to do it, but he had put the ship in
classified emergency mode, and the craft had punched a
hole in the universe to get here. In minutes my minder
would be standing over my bed, asking why I had
smashed up my ship, left the inner world with my
assignment unfinished, and how I had been dumb enough
to be away from the piloting console while flying
through hazards. Nothing was a good reason to him. I
curled up in the bed and put my arm over my head. The
medical computer noticed my agitation and gave me a
sedative.
###
I woke up to the smell of pancakes, the faint
smells of sawdust and clay, and a smell like roses. I
was not dreaming. I was lying in a strange, deep soft
bed with warm covers drawn up to my shoulders,
pleasant flannel bedding, and a perfectly comfortable
pillow. Gravity was so close to earth’s that I would
have to get out of bed and jump up and down to tell
the difference. I could hear the soft draft and
crackle of a fireplace; just enough muted wind and
rain to make the house cozy; and the sound of someone
making tea or tisane with a metal kettle, metal spoons
and thick, clay mugs. The table or counter top had
some kind of quilted mats or protective covering,
nothing had been put down on bare wood or stone.
“You can’t fool me, you’re awake.”
I twisted and sat up: my husband was sitting
at my bedside, smiling. After years of not seeing him
I poked him in the chest: I had dreamed or
hallucinated his presence before. The combination of
med lab drugs and danger, or an unnoticed microinjury
to the brain, made the possibility of hallucination
likely. He was here. I threw my arms around him and
pulled him onto the bed.
“I am so glad to see you.”
Rain kissed me and put his arms around me. He
said nothing, he didn’t need to say anything.
“How did you...?”
“It’s a long and not a completely happy
story,” my husband said, holding me tightly. “Your
ship’s emergency beacon reached us before Lt Coy’s
message did, and as much as I wanted to blaze here it
wasn’t my idea.”
“Are our guards in the room?”
Rain nodded.
“How many of them?”
“Two,” a gruff voice answered from the
direction of the table.
“And we’re not supposed to leave the two of
you alone,” a second voice said. Heavy, booted feet
came up to the foot of the bed across a wooden floor.
“Sorry,” he added. “You two have a history of....”
“Conspiracy, collusion, confiscation, and
desertion,” Rain said, getting up with another kiss.
“I remember. You arrested us,” he patted my hand and
said softly, “everything else will have to wait.”
“Back away, and speak at a normal volume.”
Rain looked irritated: it was not his way to
be sentimental, but he looked ready to half-shout
pillow talk in order to embarrass our guards into
leaving. I knew what they would do: they would set
their faces and stay no matter what we did, not
wanting to give us a cover for planning further
criminal activities.
“I hate them,” I said, not caring if my tone
was not quiet enough to be inaudible two meters away.
Rain shrugged, “we earned the Corp’s
mistrust. I tried to get you back to base the moment I
found you and you sabotaged my ship.”
“Now what?”
“We take you back to base,” the guard at the
foot of my bed replied.
“Couldn’t you leave them alone?” a voice said
from the table, this world’s commander, Edward
Philips. He spoke with the shadow of an order in his
voice, although no commander could tell any Magistrate
what to do, and our two guards were Magistrates. The
guard in the kitchen was saying something. “Out,”
Edward said. “Both of you out. I will see to this
woman’s welfare while she is on our world,” he saw
them both out and followed.
“I can’t imagine they’ve gone far,” Rain
murmured.
“I’m tired and upset....”
“I know,” he said softly. “I am, too -- I’ll
explain another time.” He bent to take off his boots
and pulling back the covers then got into bed with all
his clothes on. He put his arms around me. “You have
no idea how difficult my life is without you. Every
day I wish you were with me, wish I could know what
you think, want to talk with you, plan with you. Every
day I wish I didn’t have to go to bed alone, eat
without you, no matter how many colonists and staff
are there ….” Rain let out a deep sigh. “I love you so
much I can’t stand being married and barely seeing
you.”
“You took the words out of my mouth,” I said.
“I just want to sleep.”
“Do you want some hot tea? Tisane really,
this is the wrong latitude for tea.”
That sounded lovely, but it would get cold by
the time I woke up again. I listened to the drowsy
sounds of the fireplace and the weather outside.
“Sure.”
He got out of bed. I heard the sound of hot
water pouring from a kettle, and he brought two mugs
over from the kitchen table.
“I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything like
it, but you get used to it.”
I took a drink, it was pleasantly hot, and...
something naturally sweet like brown baking spices, or
maybe sassafras, hearty like a roasted, brown rice
tea, a tang that was not sourness or astringency. It
all went by too quickly and was too strange to put
into words, not while I was this tired. I was glad to
have something hot to drink that was not ship’s
coffee.
“So?” I said.
“We’re together now,” Rain said with a shrug.
It was exactly like him to accept the moment for what
it was. “Sleep sounds good. I sleep better when I’m
with you.”
I had a miserable image in my mind’s eye of
him restless with insomnia, alone in our bed on our
world.
I looked around for somewhere to put the
mostly-full cup, and found a windowsill just deep
enough for a lantern, a mug, and a book. I already
liked these people. I listened to the tinkling coals
forming under the firewood and the mild fall drizzle.
“Is there any way we could stay?”
“Hmm, that first moment of coming to -- to
find someone sitting by your bedside -- can be a
surprising one: it sometimes changes lives.”
Rain jostled the bed, moving to see how close
to the window our guards were, then looked at me as if
everyone in the universe would love me at first sight,
as he had. He went on before I could ask him any
question about some bedside memory he did not mention.
He had never been ill.
He settled in by me and took a drink,
considering how to say something charged.
“You made Vester nervous.” My husband
observed; his indirectness made me anxious. “She’s a
simple soul, she fell in love with her husband when
she was sent on a rescue mission after his scout
craft. They were marooned on the world, alone together
for months.”
“Then they must understand our story.”
“Well nobody shot the engine in their story,”
my husband replied.
I shrugged, “just glad to see a friendly
face. I was blacking out from ox
dep and hyp.”
I was astonished Rain was not jealous: I
worried I sounded insincere. I felt for his hand and
felt the same grasp as the hand that took mine the day
we married -- on the first day we met. I tried to add
up how much time we’d spent together: the stay here to
recover and repair my ship might be more than that.
“You’ll want to make that clear to her before
we leave.”
Rain was bemused, shutting the door on
nothing, waiting for my answer.
It was hard to get used to thinking of that
footballer’s frame as female.
“Her record doesn’t say she’s been to base
for the changes I went through,” I said, wondering if
I had missed something.
“Experimental procedure, all of it onworld,
pills and medlab visits. It worked: they have two
children, one grandchild, two more on the way.
Successful colony, even with just the two of them.
They could use more people even with their assigned
staff.”
I thought of Coy’s caution and felt a very
disturbing reality that I might be able to love more
than one person at once. It was just there, clear,
with no one in mind. I had dated three people once on
earth before I enlisted. It hadn’t lasted long, and
they moved on without me. If I did ever want to expand
our marriage, Rain would have to want that too, with
just the same people. I did not want to marry Coy;
instead, I felt sad that I had married too quickly
with too little discussion and had too little time
being married.
“Would you... would you ever want to widen
our marriage, Rain?”
“I’d be willing to try,” Rain said,
astonishing me. “Do you want to stay here?” he said,
with his utter acceptance of what is. “I don’t know
these two guys, but....”
He used a genderless word, but Rain had to
mean not our two hosts but the two guards I’d been
stuck on a ship with longer than any time I’d spent
with him.
“No, not them. Anyone.”
“Anyone,” Rain said, leaning back and rolling
the word, and all its implications, around in his
mind. “Hmm, I’m happy with you, but I trust your
judgement in people. Did you have someone, or
someones, in mind?”
He was teasing -- he was not, he was waiting
for my answer: who are we?
“No, I... Oh God, you, must think I’m unhappy
with you, or that I’ve met someone else.”
Rain took a drink of this world’s tisane and
set his mug back on the floor. It was a comfortable
gesture from when we were first married, when we
shared his ship’s one bed. He smiled.
“No, I don’t think that. And I have no idea
if I can love more than one person. I’d be willing to
try, if it means staying married to you. It might do a
lot of damage to us, but it all depends on who, and
how we go about it,” he looked at me, kind, and
trusting. My heart ached with how much I loved him.
“You’re the best husband in the galaxy.”
“Have you thought about how this might work
because we see so little of each other?”
“Yes,” I said, shifting and resting my head
on his shoulder, “but we were together all the time
until we got hauled in to base, so I’m not very
worried.”
Rain reached over and rubbed my side, glad I
was close enough to touch. He rested his head against
mine.
“If this all goes well,” I said, “I’ll be
home in another seven-and-a-half years, minus transit
time home from the second-to-last world my abductor
had clients on. I’ll make it back for our 18th
wedding anniversary.”
“All of your children will be grown by then,”
Rain said. He sounded sad that the two of us would not
raise a one of them together. I knew he was glad that
we would have all the years after alone together.
“How do you stay married to me? I’m never
home, I keep sending strangers’ children, and colonial
refugees....”
Rain moved his cheek against me and moved to
settle on top of me and give me a long kiss.
“How do you stay married without me?” he
asked, “I so want to be with you, and comfort you, and
show them you’re worth infinitely more than how they
treated you. I’m proud you’re mine, I’m glad you’re
mine, no one in the whole universe has any idea how
brave you are, how strong you are, how loving, and how
good.”
“Our guards do,” I answered. “They do a lot
of smiling, they keep trying to tell me they’re not
warders but friends, and they’ve stayed away after
Coy’s husband shooed them out.”
“Marry one of them,” Rain murmured, thinking
to himself. They were the only two other adults
permanently assigned to our world; I had not known
anyone else on our world who was staying longer than
six months, so I had to mean them, or nobody.
“I think they’re a set, the two of them.”
“It’d be a marriage on different terms than
our marriage,” Rain said, thinking out loud, “unless
things change in ways I can’t see with all four of us.
It’d be a frontier marriage, now: dedication to the
children and construction projects. I’m not sure why
people dignify colleagues, or what people on earth
would call ‘friendship’, with mutual lifelong vows. I
suppose there’s still that tradition from the Starving
Times on earth when people would marry
acquaintances, fellow refugees, in order to adopt
their children, get an extra allotment from the dole,
get them an emigration permit, make them eligible for
refugee clinics, have someone to watch the children
while they gathered water or firewood.... I’ve always
thought that was noble and selfless, but I’ve never
wanted to do it myself. Have you gotten very fond of
our guards?”
I barely liked them.
The possibility of a wider marriage rested
within me, clear and cool. I was not going to grab
anyone’s hand and run for the chaplain’s office once
we docked at base; it would be years before we stood
at another Magistrate’s desk. The realization came
years too early, long before I or Rain felt anything,
but it was true.
“No, Rain. I don’t even know where that came
from.”
“Well,” he said, settling to sleep, “then
let’s not worry about it right now. Let’s turn in for
as long as they’ll let us. As soon as you’re well and
the ship’s vacworthy we’ll have to be on our way in
separate rooms for the trip back to base.”
I tried to stay awake, but the wood in the
stone fireplace became coals, the guest room became
dark and warm, the wind dropped off, and a gentle
patter of rain began to fall on the roof. The softness
of the bed invited sleep, as did the familiar shape of
my husband’s body against me. His relaxed breathing,
his presence, which had always meant I was comfortable
and safe, made me drop off into unconsciousness. As my
Tito Potosí always used to say, “tomorrow’s worries
will have to take care of themselves”.
END
Planet
42 (Editor’s Cut)
By
Lisa Shapter
“Colony world 12867," I said again, tapping
my fingers on the Shoebill’s piloting console.
“Colony world 12867, this is Magistrate Gestae of the
Pisces 2174, nicknamed the Shoebill, doing a
nav courtesy check." I held my breath, a silence could
mean as little as someone nailing a loose shingle on a
roof or fixing the alignment of a ten meter
communications tower; it could mean everyone was dead
from some local illness.
Someone activated a ship’s intercom pressure
switch, the first noise I heard was his palm hitting
the wall beside the pickup. I tensed with worry, but
the voice was flustered and happy.
“Shoebill, this is Colony world 12867,
Coy’s World. Everyone here is fine.... Our daughter,
uh, our cloned daughter is just in the ship’s medlab
for a routine checkup. Everything’s well and on
schedule here, everyone’s healthy. Do you need any
aid, Shoebill?”
The man’s voice slid from all but shouting
his parthenogenic daughter was self-pregnant with her
second child, which must have been the reason for the
trip to the medlab, to crisp, standard nav courtesies.
I was briefly angry. I could be an Exploratory Corps
secrecy enforcement officer, and that stumble over
“our cloned daughter” when it should be “our clone”
could be enough to make a grunt or a civilian
contractor wonder about the Corps’ secrets. At the
moment those secrets made me angry, but I was not in
this solar system to visit Coy’s World; this was
simply a check to be certain all was well. I was due
an update from base, but according to Corps records I
was the second ship to pass by this world in the eight
years since the planet’s founding.
“Captain Philips?" I asked coolly.
“He’s ...." The speaker turned his head away
from the wall pickup, then I heard the indistinct
voice of another man. “I’ll take this up front." A
transfer tone and several moments of silence as the
pickup in the ship’s forward piloting console came on.
I listened to the man’s boots pounding up the ship’s
central corridor. He ran like a grunt. Then the
clatter of someone hitting the seat and checking the
pickup.
“This is First Lieutenant Vester Coy, team
Geologist of colonial planet #12867. Do you need any
aid, Shoebill –- Magistrate Gestae?" The man’s
voice was as sharp as a newly unpacked uniform, and he
probably had my personnel record and the ship’s record
on screen before his sentence was finished.
I wanted to ask about the daughter’s
pregnancy. I could not by farspace law. Lt. Coy’s
‘we’re all well’ would have to cover himself, his
commander, their two parthenogenic children, and their
two parthenogenic grandchildren, who were not yet
school aged.
“I’m fine,” I replied. “The Shoebill
is just passing through 12867's orbit on the way to an
assigned stop at 12862, five orbits in.”
“Your party’s there to meet you,” Lt. Coy
said in almost a neutral voice:
he must have read enough of my record to know
this would be an awful meeting.
“Two is a Venus-like, Magistrate, and 3
through 6 would be moons if they didn’t have their own
orbits. They
probably started out as moons.
Fly carefully.”
“The Shoebill has a route mapped,
anything I should be careful of?”
Other
than the people I was going to meet:
I could almost hear Lt. Coy thinking that. I agreed
with him. I
looked back over the planet’s record.
*************************************************************
Planet 42 –- Planet
Catalogue # 12862
2
Men
2
Go Through with it
0
Fertilization
Mother had no idea.
* = father(s)
All names from The
Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church
Team: (current ranks)
Commander: Captain Marbeck
Quétif (Mother)
(Forestry science)
Second Lieutenant Gérin
Nunquam (Climatologist)
Second Lieutenant Troxell
Siddals (Astronomer)
(Biologist took sick)
3 Children:
Sirmond boy, 5 biological
age, not yet pregnant
Herculano boy, 4 1/2
biological age
Carnap boy, 31/2
biological age
***************************************************************
Unlike
me neither of them had spent a year on base being
changed to carry a child.
Who was the mother of their two children? I saved
myself by remembering that colony worlds were usually
named after their male mothers.
“This is Captain Philips.”
The second voice broke in from the ship’s
medical lab.
“All’s well, Captain Philips?”
“All’s well,” the man said, the tone of a
calm smile in his voice.
“Thank you for your good wishes, Magistrate
Gestae.” His
tone somehow managed to convey that he read my record
and he knew any congratulations of another man’s
motherhood would be bittersweet.
“Clear space,” he added, signing off with
brief nav formalities.
They sounded happy, I wanted to go anywhere
that sounded happy.
I did not want to go to an inhospitably hot
world with an unbreathable atmosphere to see two
criminals, but I spent a moment at the Shoebill’s
piloting console thinking about orders; the Corps had
put me in jail for disobeying orders once before, I
could not give them any excuse to do so again.
###
The ship found her way steadily through weak
but complex gravities, avoiding several small bodies
whose trajectories might or might not have earned them
classification as natural impact debris, meteoroids,
or asteroids. All I cared about was damage to the Shoebill’s
hull, and she got through clean.
I set down on planet #12862, a Venus-like,
confirmed that I would suffocate before I roasted in
the outer atmosphere, double-checked my ‘suit, and
stepped through the fields, which separated ship’s air
from atmosphere. I spent a moment adjusting the
‘suit’s controls so a scroll of chemistry data stopped
passing over the lower-left faceplate of my helmet. I
told the ‘suit to tell me if it began to corrode or
otherwise became compromised. I looked up to see one
‘suited figure at the base of my ship’s landing ramp.
It should be four by personnel records.
“This is a colony world?” I asked. Visibility
was a variable 1-2 meters; through the fog the
landscape was made up of the sort of blobby formations
one sees in a wet cave.
“This is a colony world,” a man’s voice
replied over my ‘suit’s intercom. The Exploratory
Corps gave up on terraforming years ago: the success
rate was low. The cost of shipping barges of equipment
and large teams of specialists was, well,
astronomical, even for earth’s last military and only
space agency.
“And you’re trying to... what?” I asked,
perhaps there were edible life forms to domesticate,
but no earth crops would grow here outside of
artificial, greenhouse conditions.
“Found a colony,” the man said with a sigh.
“The expense isn’t much greater on a marginal world
than on a habitable one. The resource profile makes it
worth it. Or it will to our great-great
grandchildren.” I guessed something from the way he
said ‘our’ but waited. He put out his hand. “Captain
Marbeck Quétif, I owe all the children I bore on this
world to you, Magistrate Gestae.”
I stepped on to ground; a soft ground, which
made the ‘suit flash a warning across my faceplate
about watching my footing. I was close enough to see
the other man -- or woman’s -- face; hormonal changes
don’t alter bone structure, not in a grown person’s.
No way of telling if this was the world’s mother or
one of my perpetrators.
She smiled at my suspicious look.
“I should have put red stripes on this ‘suit.
We use them so often, interchangeably that it makes no
sense to mark one ‘Mission Commander’. I passed all my
tests after the year of changes on base, Magistrate
Gestae; but once I got out here, I couldn’t conceive
from any man’s sample in our ship’s library. As the
donor mother of our three children I owe you thanks.”
A tone, dryly bitter, in her tenor voice. I knew she
would not say more over a pickup, which both of our
ships were recording.
I had spoken to many women who could not
conceive planetside for a hundred local reasons: the
procedure is experimental, and every 28 days there is
a chance for something new to go wrong. No way to tell
what some new world will do to a mother’s (or a
father’s) health. A clean ship’s medical lab isn’t the
same as a sterile hospital room with techs and
specialists. According to her ship’s records this
woman had reported to the ship’s lab once a month
throughout the required window, taken every precaution
with herself and the library of samples, and had never
gotten pregnant. Talking to her now, I was certain she
had forged something: a dab of sealant on the end of
the medical probe, soaking one’s hands in hot water
after backing the external-constructed womb away and
holding the fertilizing probe between two palms so the
DNA and temperature readings check out. I have heard
of all kinds of ways to fool a ship’s rudimentary
medical computer into recording an attempt at
conception when none is possible. Her teammates’
desperation to sustain this mission and their colony
had made them commit crimes against me. They had kept
her in a place she did not like raising the children
of men she had not wanted to be fathers.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I’m supposed to say that to you, Magistrate
Gestae.” Her voice took on the tone of shrugged
shoulders. “It’s not so bad.”
I made the normal, polite enquiries after her
team and their children’s health.
###
I
walked through their greenhouses, their algae
outcrops, and ‘aquaculture’ facilities (empty except
for a native edible fish-analogue).
Then the first of my perpetrators, Second
Lieutenant Gérin Nunquam sat across from me in the
mess hall, took off his ‘suit helmet, and stared at
me. He had seen my face before. (He snapped his
fingers in front of my drugged face, but I never saw
him.) He seemed shocked that I existed, or that I was
not mute and paralyzed, or that I had returned. He
stared at me. He put his face in his hands. I was not
sure I could count that as an apology. He left the
room.
Second Lieutenant Troxell Siddals took his
place. He was one of those who cannot bear what he has
done, so he blamed me: shackled flat on my back and
helpless I had somehow made him do this. Commander
Quétif sent him out before he got through the first
sentence. She followed him and spoke to him, but he
did not return.
I met our children, they were certainly mine.
Commander Quétif and I talked about the shared custody
the law requires. Putting it into practice without
Siddals’ and Nunquam’s consents made the legal
requirement theoretical. Her men had lied to her about
where they went and what they had done on my pimp’s
ship. Yet the Commander knew perfectly well her
pseudoeggs had not produced these three embryos in
their three medical storage cubes. She had always told
her children she had carried and nursed them; but when
another Magistrate had arrived to investigate the
charges, they did understand that the eggs that grew
inside Mommy had been stolen. (They were too young to
know exactly how.)
I learned of a third perpetrator, the team’s
Biologist. Their ship’s medical records gave me no
reason to label his death ‘suspicious’. His final
months of illness and the scar his loss left on this
team and their small children would be too difficult
to fake. I scanned so little terran organic matter
here that he had been, well what they did with the
dead in that novel about Mars (and on some actual
terraformed worlds). He was mulched. He had been
broken down into organic compounds first so nothing to
run a forensic scan on.
I took off my ‘suit, stowed it in the mess
hall’s doorside locker, and sat down in thermals and
booties across from Commander Quétif. She picked up
her helmet and said something into it; some
preprogrammed command to shut off recording. I
preferred to put my helmet out of pickup range. It is
too easy for base to program a ship’s computer to
ignore certain orders in the field, even from a
mission commander.
“Do you think we murdered our Biologist?” she
said with a quirky smile. “He was happy here.
Climatologist Nunquam is thrilled to be posted to a
non-earthlike. Astronomer Siddals can study the
formation of this solar system and the history of this
nav region until the sun goes nova. As a Forestry
Scientist I have to magnify algae and pretend they’re
very simple trees with no leaves or bark.” She turned
her head, and the shoulders of her suit moved a
little, a gesture, which even years ‘suited had not
broken.
“I can get you out of here,” I said.
She looked at me, studying my face.
“Why?” She began to smile a little, “am I
that handsome? What on earth could you want me for?”
“I need staff to help raise my children. You
could bring ....”
“I’d rather not bring anything,” she said
softly. She stood, went and picked up her helmet, then
stood at attention before me. “Magistrate, I have no
kit, but I will serve the Pisces #2174, the Shoebill,
faithfully.”
“As a Magistrate I can’t be your CO. We’re
outside the normal Command structure,” I said, “but I
can send some paperwork to base ahead of us, request
transfer to my world, put some urgent legal reasons
behind it.”
She followed me without hesitation, making no
sign of pausing for any possessions, taking any of the
children, or saying goodbye to anyone on this world.
She helped me into my ‘suit. I checked it as she put
on and tested her helmet, and I followed my ‘suit’s
directions on how to get back to the Shoebill
without tripping or getting mired in soft ground.
“How long have you been here?”
“Seven years,” she said. It had the tone of a
gently ironic ‘seven happy years’.
“Thank you for walking me to my ship. Usually
it’s only a courtesy, but in this environment you
could almost lose a 20-man ship.”
“I have on bad days. As I said, Climatologist
Nunquam is very happy with his assignment here.”
“What are you currently working on?”
“Oh, just maintenance really. We’ve got five
types of algae growing in what I suppose you could
call ‘agricultural conditions’. It’s more finding wild
colonies and tending and expanding them. As with any
alien species there’s a lot of trial and error and few
of the kinds of problems -- and little of the kind of
work -- I hoped to be doing here. We scanned some
tree-analogues in the other hemisphere. I go to study
them when I can, but they’re on a long cycle that
wasn’t dormant when the first scouts were here. Now I
just go check on equipment, watch readings from my
desk, and hope someone in 200 years will find all of
this interesting or helpful when they do come into
flower. They aren’t flowers, actually....” She
stopped, “it doesn’t matter, now.”
“No, it doesn’t,” I said quietly.
We got to the ship, I went onboard to run the
internal checklist while the Commander went to do the
external inspection; making sure none of the landing
legs were mired and that nothing had damaged the ship
in my absence.
“No sign of tampering,” she said, her helmet
pickup routed to the ship’s internal intercom. Her
voice sounded lackadaisical but tense.
“Commander
Quétif?”
I could not tell if I was listening to an
open pickup of anxious breathing or local interference
this close to the planet’s sun. I waited a moment and
had the ship check: the Shoebill reported no
one within the liftoff blast radius. I put my ‘suit
back on and went outside with a pistol. I made a long,
careful scan of the fog by instruments and my own
senses, but I saw no one. Returning to the ship’s
temperate environment, the back of my thermal shirt
clung damp and cold against my back. At my demands
that I would not leave without an assurance of the
Commander’s welfare, a ‘suited figure came out of a
distant workbuilding and waved, saying nothing. I
began to pick my way across the terrain, but I got
knocked on my back by pistol fire: a hand weapon could
not defeat the ‘suit’s fields with one shot. A lucky
shot or repeated hits might. I rolled and crawled,
hoping the muck and fog would camouflage the suit’s
reflective outer skin. I stayed low to present less of
a target. Basic training took over fear. I kept moving
and looking, keeping to fog and cover as best I could.
I got to the base of the landing ramp. I made the best
check I could of whether I was being followed or
targeted. Visibility had dropped to .5-1 meter. I ran
up the landing ramp, got into the safety of the ship’s
fields, and felt its automated systems doing the best
they could with the chemical mud on my ‘suit. I
stuffed the thing into processing as soon as I had
clearance two steps into the corridor.
I made preparations for a quick spacerise,
made sure no one was near the ship, did not go through
nav courtesies. I checked one last time that no one
had come out to fly away with me; then I left the
piloting console once autopilot pulled out of orbit to
sit down in my office and charge Commander Quétif’s
teammates with attempted murder, unlawful detention,
and every applicable crime I could think of.
As I drew up probable causes, I knew I could
not be sure she was dead; but she had not simply
fainted during the outside check. The Shoebill
could not pick up her ‘suit beacon. If she had changed
her mind about leaving, she would have said something.
I hoped her teammates had only knocked her out; but
the silence and utter lack of signs of a soldier in
distress made me believe she was dead.
Five
hundred
clicks past the planet’s gravity
well
something
thudded into my ship, knocking the stylus out of my
hand: one isn’t supposed to feel anything in open
space. I began to go aft, it seemed to be where the
impact was. Perhaps Quétif had lived and had somehow
gotten into a scout craft and followed me up. If she
had to keep transmission silence, then a tap on my
hull would be the only way to tell me I ought to let
her dock in the craft bay. It was an awfully hard tap.
I felt the ship yaw before the inertial dampeners
caught up with the motion.
Another blow: the ship was doing her
automated best in the system’s asteroid belt. I had
not taken the time to ask her to route a safe path
back out, and everything had, of course, moved since
the path that took us in was wide open. I should have
been up front at the piloting console; although it was
not impossible that one of Commander Quétif’s
teammates had sabotaged this ship during the tour or
after our talk.
The floor flew away from my feet. I hit the
corridor’s ceiling dazingly hard. I was not really
worried as the ship’s floor came back at me at some
uncontrolled speed. Automated metal arms would pull me
into the medical lab and mend any injuries I received.
As soon as I got into communications range Coy and
Philips on the farther inhabited world in this system
would do a nav check.
If the Shoebill
reported damage and I did not reply, they would be out
here as fast as they could light their own craft. If
they somehow neglected this duty, the Shoebill
would pilot herself to base while the ship’s medical
computer kept me unconscious and stable. If I did not
die on impact and if the ship kept hull integrity, I’d
be fine; but the floor sure would hurt.
My last conscious sight
was the floor coming at me.
###
I woke up, and someone was trying to put
something over my head. I tried to fight him off, and,
unlike most Corpsmen, he did not try to pin my arms: I
would have gone for my sidearm if he had. Instead, he
let me take in that the inside of the helmet had air,
and I instinctively reached to pull it on. While my
hands were busy with automatic adjustments and checks,
he made the tears at the appropriate catchpoints in my
thermals for vitals monitoring. He was only doing his
job: he pulled me onto a splayed-out suit, and quickly
fastened and sealed all the components, starting with
my core. The suit automatically set up its connections
and monitoring leads and lit up with healing fields. I
was briefly blind while it shut off my optic nerves,
so I would not see the visual disturbances caused by
running the fields over my eyes. My sight was back
before I had time to gasp. With the oxygen and fixes
to my injuries the pain in my head cleared, but I lay
still and let him finish fastening the suit’s legs and
arms as the suit replaced hypothermic cold with
warmth, and
let those fields finish their work. The process went
faster if I did not try to help.
The Corpsman’s gloved thumb did the final
external checks, touching a pressure switch on my
chest and on the side of my helmet. Everything seemed
to have a green light, and the suit apparently
reported all of my injuries had been treated.
I was looking through permiglass at what
might as well have been the face of a popular young
American football captain who has no idea why people
admired him: my rescuer was blond, handsome,
fair-skinned, and a picture of wholesome, tanned good
health. A colony life of regular outdoor exercise in a
moderate climate with a mostly-vegetarian diet
obviously agreed with him. There were care lines on
his face, emphasized when he was worried, but they
vanished when I smiled at him. He grinned back through
his faceplate.
“Is that better, Magistrate Gestae?” his
voice said over the helmet’s output.
He might as well have said ‘coach’.
“Much. Nightskyman?”
“First Lieutenant Vester Coy. I’ll get you
into the Spes, and check the tow line.” She, for Coy was her world’s
mother, grabbed me in a rescue carry, secure and
strong, but not the crushing squeeze most grunts would
use. She hauled me into the back of the small craft
parked in my ship’s central corridor, sealed the
craft’s doors, and, with a disorienting flip and yaw,
flew out my ship’s atmospheric door with exactly the
neat maneuver for getting through a door designed for
people, not scout craft.
###
I found myself on her main ship’s hospital
bed, still in my spacesuit, as she cheerfully went out
to do the dangerous check on the towline between her
working ship and my disabled one. Another set of
healing fields and I was well enough to take the suit
off myself and push it into the hopper for processing.
The medical computer told me to lie back down, and I
agreed: the brief effort had made the edges of my
vision turn dark grey. A mechanical arm came down from
the ceiling and whirred while the ship’s medical
computer looked for the right placement for hydration
and monitoring leads. The whole room became glorious
in all its utilitarian, rounded-corner white and lilac
glory: the ship had boosted the medlab’s oxygen
content.
My rescuer was taking off her suit at the
other end of the corridor and singing some ancient
song in a weird modality. She sounded happy. I heard
her boots thudding up the corridor.
“How’re we doing, Magistrate Gestae?”
Again it sounded like ‘coach’.
“‘Resada’ will do.”
“OK, Resada.”
It still sounded like ‘coach’.
She came over to look into my face. I looked
back at her.
“Your record says you’ve got a husband. It’s
just the oxygen and the endorphins,” she cautioned.
“It’ll wear off.”
“I don’t like women,” I assured her.
“That’s a shame, women are great,” she said,
the unthinking opinion of any young man on earth, as
though Coy did not remember she was in farspace or the
changes done to her.
I could not get a crush on this woman: I
really didn’t like women, and her sunny temperament
already grated on me.
She thumped forward, and I lay in the medlab
until I felt the bump of the ship entering atmosphere.
I felt for the datatablet she had put on the bedside
tray.
‘Coy, I thought we were going back to base,’
I typed.
“I can’t leave my kids right now,” the
doorside intercom replied. “I’ve sent a message to
your husband.”
“I’m not authorized to land....”
“Your record says you are,” Coy said. “I know
why you were on that world. Stay with us awhile, rest
up, your spouse will come and get you, and you can go
to the next world together.”
I thought about that lovely idea for a long
moment. Orders kept us apart. The Exploratory Corp
ignores marriages when it gives orders; farspace is
too large to see that every pair and group stay
together, no matter what their rank or training.
“I have our ship, Coy.”
It would be months for Coy’s message to reach
my assigned world; it would take months for my
husband’s reply to reach here. My ship would need to
be repaired. Even if my husband somehow got passage on
a second ship and left the moment Coy’s message
arrived, he would take even further months to get
here. I did not want to stay here for most of a year.
I did not want to become part of this family. I did
not want what could never be mine hung in front of my
face.
Her ship lurched and rocked. Emergency fields
held me to the bed, and inertial dampeners made it
feel like a brief carnival ride rather than a
life-threatening danger.
“This is the Pisces #2456, the Spes,
at 27 km. Watch your descent, you’re within the 150
meter minimum,” Lt Coy said, far calmer than I would
have been.
“Climbing to 30 km. Sorry, Spes,
sudden decal. We were in the area,” the door-side
intercom relayed: Coy had not shut off the piloting
room pickup. It was not the voice of my husband, but
of one of the guards assigned to be sure I went to the
meetings with my perpetrators and that I followed all
Corps orders.
I would have to put up with him needling me
about this mission and my past mistakes all the way to
the next world, starting with letting my ship connect
with an asteroid.
Of course my guard had not been in the area:
this ship had come from a base relaying the message
out to my husband. I do not know how my custodian had
gotten permission to do it, but he had put the ship in
classified emergency mode, and the craft had punched a
hole in the universe to get here. In minutes my minder
would be standing over my bed, asking why I had
smashed up my ship, left the inner world with my
assignment unfinished, and how I had been dumb enough
to be away from the piloting console while flying
through hazards. Nothing was a good reason to him. I
curled up in the bed and put my arm over my head. The
medical computer noticed my agitation and gave me a
sedative.
###
I woke up to the smell of pancakes, the faint
smells of sawdust and clay, and a smell like roses. I
was not dreaming. I was lying in a strange, deep, soft
bed with warm covers drawn up to my shoulders,
pleasant flannel bedding, and a perfectly comfortable
pillow. Gravity was so close to earth’s that I would
have to get out of bed and jump up and down to tell
the difference. I could hear the soft draft and
crackle of a fireplace; just enough muted wind and
rain to make the house cozy; and the sound of someone
making tea or tisane with a metal kettle, metal
spoons, and thick, clay mugs. The table or counter top
had some kind of quilted mats or protective covering,
nothing had been put down on bare wood or stone.
“You can’t fool me, you’re awake.”
I twisted and sat up: my husband was sitting
at my bedside, smiling. After years of not seeing him
I poked him in the chest: I had dreamed or
hallucinated his presence before. The combination of
medlab drugs and danger, or an unnoticed microinjury
to the brain, made the possibility of hallucination
likely. He was here. I threw my arms around him and
pulled him onto the bed.
“I am so glad to see you.”
Rain kissed me and put his arms around me. He
said nothing, he didn’t need to say anything.
“How did you...?”
“It’s a long and not a completely happy
story,” my husband said, holding me tightly. “Your
ship’s emergency beacon reached us before Lt Coy’s
message did, and as much as I wanted to blaze here it
wasn’t my idea.”
“Are our guards in the room?”
Rain nodded.
“How many of them?”
“Two,” a gruff voice answered from the
direction of the table.
“And we’re not supposed to leave the two of
you alone,” a second voice said. Heavy, booted feet
came up to the foot of the bed across a wooden floor.
“Sorry,” he added. “You two have a history of....”
“Conspiracy, collusion, confiscation, and
desertion,” Rain said, getting up with another kiss.
“I remember. You arrested us,” he said softly and
patted my hand, “everything else will have to wait.”
“Back away, and speak at a normal volume.”
Rain looked irritated: it was not his way to
be sentimental, but he looked ready to half-shout
pillow talk in order to embarrass our guards into
leaving. I knew what they would do: they would set
their faces and stay no matter what we did, not
wanting to give us a cover for planning further
criminal activities.
“I hate them,” I said, not caring if my tone
was not quiet enough to be inaudible two meters away.
Rain shrugged, “we earned the Corp’s
mistrust. I tried to get you back to base the moment I
found you and you sabotaged my ship.”
“Now what?”
“We take you back to base,” the guard at the
foot of my bed replied.
“Couldn’t you leave them alone?” a voice said
from the table, this world’s commander, Edward
Philips. He spoke with the shadow of an order in his
voice, although no commander could tell any Magistrate
what to do, and our two guards were Magistrates. The
guard in the kitchen was saying something. “Out,”
Edward said. “Both of you out. I will see to this
woman’s welfare while she is on our world.” He saw
them both out and followed.
“I can’t imagine they’ve gone far,” Rain
murmured.
“I’m tired and upset....”
“I know,” he said softly. “I am, too -- I’ll
explain another time.” He bent to take off his boots
and, pulling back the covers, then got into bed with
all his clothes on. He put his arms around me. “You
have no idea how difficult my life is without you.
Every day I wish you were with me, wish I could know
what you think, want to talk with you, plan with you.
Every day I wish I didn’t have to go to bed alone, eat
without you, no matter how many colonists and staff
are there ….” Rain let out a deep sigh. “I love you so
much I can’t stand being married and barely seeing
you.”
“You took the words out of my mouth,” I said.
“I just want to sleep.”
“Do you want some hot tea? Tisane really,
this is the wrong latitude for tea.”
That sounded lovely, but it would get cold by
the time I woke up again. I listened to the drowsy
sounds of the fireplace and the weather outside.
“Sure.”
He got out of bed. I heard the sound of hot
water pouring from a kettle, and he brought two mugs
over from the kitchen table.
“I don’t think I’ve ever tasted anything like
it, but you get used to it.”
I took a drink, it was pleasantly hot, and...
something naturally sweet like brown baking spices, or
maybe sassafras, hearty like a roasted, brown rice
tea, a tang that was not sourness or astringency. It
all went by too quickly and was too strange to put
into words, not while I was this tired. I was glad to
have something hot to drink that was not ship’s
coffee.
“So?” I said.
“We’re together now,” Rain said with a shrug.
It was exactly like him to accept the moment for what
it was. “Sleep sounds good. I sleep better when I’m
with you.”
I had a miserable image in my mind’s eye of
him restless with insomnia, alone in our bed on our
world.
I looked around for somewhere to put the
mostly full cup, and found a windowsill just deep
enough for a lantern, a mug, and a book. I already
liked these people. I listened to the tinkling coals
forming under the firewood and the mild fall drizzle.
“Is there any way we could stay?”
“Hmm, that first moment of coming to -- to
find someone sitting by your bedside -- can be a
surprising one: it sometimes changes lives.”
Rain jostled the bed, moving to see how close
to the window our guards were, then looked at me as if
everyone in the universe would love me at first sight,
as he had. He went on before I could ask him any
question about some bedside memory he did not mention.
He had never been ill.
He settled in by me and took a drink,
considering how to say something charged.
“You made Vester nervous,” my husband
observed; his indirectness made me anxious. “She’s a
simple soul, she fell in love with her husband when
she was sent on a rescue mission after his scout
craft. They were marooned on the world, alone together
for months.”
“Then they must understand our story.”
“Well nobody shot the engine in their story,”
my husband replied.
I shrugged, “just glad to see a friendly
face. I was blacking out from ox
dep and hyp.”
I was astonished Rain was not jealous: I
worried I sounded insincere. I felt for his hand and
felt the same grasp as the hand that took mine the day
we married -- on the first day we met. I tried to add
up how much time we’d spent together: the stay here to
recover and repair my ship might be more than that.
“You’ll want to make that clear to her before
we leave.”
Rain was bemused, shutting the door on
nothing, waiting for my answer.
It was hard to get used to thinking of that
footballer’s frame as female.
“Her record doesn’t say she’s been to base
for the changes I went through,” I said, wondering if
I had missed something.
“Experimental procedure, all of it onworld,
pills and medlab visits. It worked: they have two
children, one grandchild, two more on the way.
Successful colony, even with just the two of them.
They could use more people even with their assigned
staff.”
I thought of Coy’s caution and felt a very
disturbing reality that I might be able to love more
than one person at once. It was just there, clear,
with no one in mind. I had dated three people once on
earth before I enlisted. It hadn’t lasted long, and
they moved on without me. If I did ever want to expand
our marriage, Rain would have to want that too, with
just the same people. I did not want to marry Coy;
instead, I felt sad that I had married too quickly
with too little discussion and had too little time
being married.
“Would you... would you ever want to widen
our marriage, Rain?”
“I’d be willing to try,” Rain said,
astonishing me. “Do you want to stay here?” he said,
with his utter acceptance of what is. “I don’t know
these two guys, but....”
He used a genderless word, but Rain had to
mean not our two hosts but the two guards I’d been
stuck on a ship with longer than any time I’d spent
with him.
“No, not them. Anyone.”
“Anyone,” Rain said, leaning back and rolling
the word, and all its implications, around in his
mind. “Hmm, I’m happy with you, but I trust your
judgement in people. Did you have someone, or
someones, in mind?”
He was teasing -- he was not, he was waiting
for my answer: who are we?
“No, I... Oh God, you, must think I’m unhappy
with you, or that I’ve met someone else.”
Rain took a drink of this world’s tisane and
set his mug back on the floor. It was a comfortable
gesture from when we were first married, when we
shared his ship’s one bed. He smiled.
“No, I don’t think that. And I have no idea
if I can love more than one person. I’d be willing to
try, if it means staying married to you. It might do a
lot of damage to us, but it all depends on who, and
how we go about it.” He looked at me, kind, and
trusting. My heart ached with how much I loved him.
“You’re the best husband in the galaxy.”
“Have you thought about how this might work
because we see so little of each other?”
“Yes,” I said, shifting and resting my head
on his shoulder, “but we were together all the time
until we got hauled in to base, so I’m not very
worried.”
Rain reached over and rubbed my side, glad I
was close enough to touch. He rested his head against
mine.
“If this all goes well,” I said, “I’ll be
home in another seven-and-a-half years, minus transit
time home from the second-to-last world my abductor
had clients on. I’ll make it back for our 18th
wedding anniversary.”
“All of your children will be grown by then,”
Rain said. He sounded sad that the two of us would not
raise a one of them together. I knew he was glad that
we would have all the years after alone together.
“How do you stay married to me? I’m never
home, I keep sending strangers’ children and colonial
refugees....”
Rain moved his cheek against me and moved to
settle on top of me and give me a long kiss.
“How do you stay married without me?” he
asked. “I so want to be with you, and comfort you, and
show them you’re worth infinitely more than how they
treated you. I’m proud you’re mine, I’m glad you’re
mine, no one in the whole universe has any idea how
brave you are, how strong you are, how loving, and how
good.”
“Our guards do,” I answered. “They do a lot
of smiling, they keep trying to tell me they’re not
warders but friends, and they’ve stayed away after
Coy’s husband shooed them out.”
“Marry one of them,” Rain murmured, thinking
to himself. They were the only two other adults
permanently assigned to our world; I had not known
anyone else on our world who was staying longer than
six months, so I had to mean them, or nobody.
“I think they’re a set, the two of them.”
“It’d be a marriage on different terms than
our marriage,” Rain said, thinking out loud, “unless
things change in ways I can’t see with all four of us.
It’d be a frontier marriage, now: dedication to the
children and construction projects. I’m not sure why
people dignify colleagues, or what people on earth
would call ‘friendship’, with mutual, lifelong vows. I
suppose there’s still that tradition from the Starving
Times on earth when people would marry
acquaintances, fellow refugees, in order to adopt
their children, get an extra allotment from the dole,
get them an emigration permit, make them eligible for
refugee clinics, have someone to watch the children
while they gathered water or firewood.... I’ve always
thought that was noble and selfless, but I’ve never
wanted to do it myself. Have you gotten very fond of
our guards?”
I barely liked them.
The possibility of a wider marriage rested
within me, clear and cool. I was not going to grab
anyone’s hand and run for the chaplain’s office once
we docked at base; it would be years before we stood
at another Magistrate’s desk. The realization came
years too early, long before I or Rain felt anything,
but it was true.
“No, Rain. I don’t even know where that came
from.”
“Well,” he said, settling to sleep, “then
let’s not worry about it right now. Let’s turn in for
as long as they’ll let us. As soon as you’re well and
the ship’s vacworthy we’ll have to be on our way in
separate rooms for the trip back to base.”
I tried to stay awake, but the wood in the
stone fireplace became coals, the guest room became
dark and warm, the wind dropped off, and a gentle
patter of rain began to fall on the roof. The softness
of the bed invited sleep, as did the familiar shape of
my husband’s body against me. His relaxed breathing,
his presence, which had always meant I was comfortable
and safe, made me drop off into unconsciousness. As my
Tito Potosí always used to say, “Tomorrow’s worries
will have to take care of themselves”.
END