It had started on the Preiss. It had started the moment they’d died. Kit didn’t say it, but he was sure that was what had happened. The dark things, more real than anything real, had blown him and his baby away like handfuls of dust in a high wind. That was death. And then their clock had been inverted. They hadn’t been reborn, but un-killed. The man who wasn’t in the room with them had managed it with a vast effort. An effort that had exhausted him. Kit had been disoriented, grateful, confused, frightened. He’d been lost for a flashbulb moment in a cacophony of memory and identity and sensation.
And there had been voices. Not real ones, not words. He wasn’t developing aural hallucinations. But he’d remembered things, known things from lives he hadn’t led. While they were questioned by the Laconians from the Derecho, when they’d been released to finish the journey to Nieuwestad, even for a time after they’d arrived and been escorted to the orientation campus.
The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent habit like taking drugs or gambling. The kind of thing you could take or leave. Coffee with breakfast instead of tea. Buying the same kinds of socks. Existing as an individual. All things he could do or not do without much changing. Another wave of nausea rolled through him with the thought, but it faded.
He slipped into the bed, trying not to wake them. Bakari was a warm, soft stone. Nothing short of Armageddon was going to wake him now. Rohi didn’t open her eyes, didn’t shift on the mattress. He was almost able to convince himself she was asleep when she spoke.
“Are you all right?”
“You were at a dance recital,” he said, softly. “But you’d forgotten all the choreography. You had to improvise it all on the fly, and it wasn’t going right.”
She was silent for a while. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it? It’s happening more often.”
Kit sighed. On the ceiling above them, the first faint shadows were starting to form. “Yeah.”
“For me too,” she said.
The first two weeks of orientation had been held in a wide auditorium large enough to seat three thousand, though there were fewer than six hundred new immigrants in their cohort. The stage was set a little off-center to give over one wall to vast windows that looked out over the escarpment. The local tree analogs were complexes of mosslike growths that built up like vast coral reefs, and they shimmered silver to green to ruddy orange depending on the temperature and the direction of the wind.
With Bakari in the company daycare facility, Kit’s mornings had been presentations by the Jacobin-Black Combined Capital welcome team and representatives of the unions talking about Nieuwestad as a planet and Fortuna Sittard as a city. They would have sixteen-month years and thirty-two-hour days. The local biosphere relied on compounds that weren’t toxic but could be irritating, so keeping inside the sealed areas of the city was recommended. They got maps of the city—commissary, medical complex, entertainment district, public swimming pool, religious facilities. The procedures for reporting legal infractions to security, and security infractions to the union reps, were detailed, and Kit and Rohi had to mark that they’d been briefed and understood. The JBCC welcome team led them in songs about teamwork and fellowship, and even the union reps joined in.
With Rohi at his side, Kit felt a little bit grounded in the sea of new voices and faces, the disorienting prospect of the life his new contract had created for him. There might be hundreds of new faces and all the displacing details of coming to live in a new city on a new planet, but Rohi was there, and she was his anchor.
The third week, with his feet a little more nearly under him, he started his workgroup orientation, and Rohi started hers. Halfway through the first day, he realized it was the longest he’d spent away from her since they’d boarded the Preiss back in Sol system.
There were only six people joining the civil engineering team. They met in a classroom that looked like a hundred classrooms he’d been in before—thin industrial carpet with a pattern to hide stains, sound-absorbing hardfoam walls, recessed lighting that was cheap because everyone everywhere used printed parts from the same design. His new superior was an attractive woman named Himemiya Gosset. She had a tight smile and a habit of stroking her chin when she was thinking, and Kit realized halfway through the second day that he’d read an article she’d written about the use of local materials in large-scale water recycling plants. Slowly, the unease and wariness and bone-deep sense of displacement started to give way to enthusiasm and even excitement about the work he’d be doing.