“Before that,” Naomi said. “I didn’t know my father, and my mother had a long-term contract on a freighter that didn’t accept children. I was mostly with my tías. Some of them I was related to, but most I wasn’t.”
“I didn’t really know my mother,” Teresa said. “She died when I was young.”
“That’s hard,” Naomi said as if she was agreeing with something. Teresa waited for the next question. How did she die? She was sorry now that she’d brought it up. But no one pushed.
“I don’t know about any of that,” Alex said. “In Mariner Valley, it was Sweet Sixteen. Unless it was thirteen. There was some of that too.”
“That why you were so pissed that we missed Kit’s?” Amos asked.
Alex looked down, a flash of pain covered over almost instantly by a good-humored ruefulness. “Me and Giselle were pretty much at our worst about then. Staying scarce was the right thing to do, but yeah. I was awfully sorry to miss it.”
Teresa took the last mouthful of her cake, to Muskrat’s visible disappointment. She’d spent most of a year with these four people. And after the epic failure that leaving her with her cousin on New Egypt had turned out to be, probably the next year too. Others had come and gone, but this central crew had remained the constant. Listening to them talk now was listening in on the idle chatter of a family. But it was a family she didn’t belong to. Part of that was that none of them was anything close to her age. When they talked about the time before the ring gates, it was like watching an old entertainment feed. The idea of all humanity trapped in a single system made her feel almost claustrophobic. It meant something different to them, and she could make out aspects of what that was. Her understanding would never mesh with theirs.
She watched Amos. He didn’t talk about birthdays or parents. Of the four, he was the one most like her—on the edge of the conversation. But he was comfortable there. He was comfortable anywhere.
She would never have what they did. Her experiences were only her own. No one else anywhere had lived the way she had, and people who had been closest to her were all back on Laconia or else dead. Other people could tie their stories together with analogies and patterns, how one person’s childhood birthday was like someone else’s, but her life had been too different. Nowhere in the universe would she find a table full of people whose fathers had groomed them to take control of humanity’s fate, who had been offered immortality and turned it down, whose private life had been synonymous with the function of a galaxy-spanning state.
The only hope she had was to find a place and start building, not a normal life but a comprehensible one. Then wait until it was all in the past and she could tell warm, shareable stories about it.
Even the idea was exhausting.
The alert was a polite chime. The ship letting them know that the moment had passed and the next thing was coming. They cleaned up the detritus of the cake breakfast, and Alex gave her a brief, awkward side hug before he led Jim and Naomi toward the lift. She and Muskrat followed Amos down toward engineering.
“They mean well,” Teresa said.
“Yup.”
In engineering, Amos gave Muskrat a treat and took her to the canine couch while Teresa strapped herself in. The air smelled of silicone lubricant and the thin, harsh ozone that the ceramic printers gave off. It reminded her of the smell of rain, but without the minty tones, and it comforted her. How strange to have been in a place long enough that the smell of it felt like home. Or maybe she wouldn’t have felt that way except that she’d nearly lost it to a bunch of Presbyterians.
The transit out of New Egypt and into Freehold would go quickly. In theory, any two gates could be connected by a straight line, so that the angle at which a ship entered one could be set such that it didn’t need a braking burn. In practice, most ships came in slow, and often made their course corrections when they were fully in the ring space and could see their targets. Something about shooting blind through a gateway they couldn’t see, when missing it meant instant and utter annihilation, made the limbic systems of most pilots light up in a very bad way. This particular transit was in the sweet spot—not too far, but also not too steep an angle. If something did go wrong, the Roci would have time to shift its trajectory and exit some other ring.
At their present speed, the gap between gates would be brief, and the transits themselves wouldn’t be noticeable—one moment they would be in the eerie non-space of the ring gates, the next falling toward a distant star with the familiar universe around them. Amos strapped himself in across from her, scratching idly at his chest where the gunshot had opened him.