“It was lovely, thank you,” Olive said. She didn’t add It made me wish I could live on Earth, because the last time she’d confided in a handler, it was repeated at dinner—“Do you know what Olive told me on the ride over?” a librarian in Montreal had reported breathlessly to a restaurant table full of waiting librarians, “She told me she was a little nervous before her talk!”— so now as a matter of policy Olive didn’t reveal anything even remotely personal to anyone ever.
“Well,” Aretta said, “we should probably be getting to the venue. It’s about six or seven blocks, should we maybe just…？”
“I’d love to walk,” Olive said, “if you don’t mind.” They walked out together into the silver city.
* * *
—
Did Olive actually wish she could live on Earth? She vacillated on the question. She’d lived all her life in the hundred and fifty square kilometers of the second moon colony, the imaginatively named Colony Two. She found it beautiful—Colony Two was a city of white stone, spired towers, tree-lined streets and small parks, alternating neighborhoods of tall buildings and little houses with miniature lawns, a river running under pedestrian archways—but there’s something to be said for unplanned cities. Colony Two was soothing in its symmetry and its order. Sometimes order can be relentless.
* * *
—
In the signing line after the lecture in Manhattan that night, a young man knelt on his side of the table so that he was more or less at eye level with Olive, and said, “I have a book to sign”—his voice trembled a little—“but what I really wanted to tell you is that your work helped me through a bad patch last year. I’m grateful.”
“Oh,” Olive said. “Thank you. I’m honored.” But in these moments honored always felt inadequate, which made it feel like the wrong word, which made Olive feel somehow fraudulent, like an actor playing the role of Olive Llewellyn.
* * *
—
“Everyone feels like a fraud sometimes,” Dad said the following day, on the drive from the Denver airship terminal to the tiny town where he lived with Olive’s mother.
“Oh, I know,” Olive said. “I’m not suggesting it’s an actual problem.” Olive’s understanding of her own life was that she didn’t have any actual problems.
“Right.” Dad smiled. “I’d imagine your life’s a little disorienting these days.”
“Perhaps just a little.” Olive had forty-eight hours to see her parents before the tour resumed. They were passing through an agricultural zone, enormous robots moving slowly over the fields. The sunlight here was sharper than at home. “I’m grateful for all of it,” she said. “Disorienting or not.”
“Sure. Must be hard to be away from Sylvie and Dion, though.”
Now they were in the outskirts of the little town where her parents lived, passing through a district of robot repair foundries.
“I just try not to think about it,” Olive said. The gray of the foundries was subsiding into brightly painted little shops and houses. The clock in the town square glinted in the sunlight.
“The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.” Her father’s gaze was fixed on the road. “Here we are,” he said. They were turning onto her parents’ street, and there, so close, her mother stood in the doorway. Olive leaped down from the hovercraft the moment it stopped, and ran into her mother’s arms. If the distance is unbearable, she didn’t ask, then or in the two days she stayed with her parents, then why do you live so far from me?
* * *
—
Olive’s parents’ house couldn’t be called her childhood home—her childhood home had been sold a few weeks after she left for college, when her parents decided to retire on Earth—but there was peace here. “It was so good to see you,” her mother whispered when she left. She held Olive for just a moment, and stroked her hair. “Come back soon?”
A hovercraft was waiting outside the house, the driver hired by one of Olive’s North American publishers. She had an event at a bookstore in Colorado Springs that night, followed by an early-morning flight to a festival in Deseret.
“I’ll bring Sylvie and Dion next time,” Olive said, and stepped back into the tour.
* * *
—
A book tour paradox: Olive missed her husband and daughter with a desperate passion, but also she liked very much being alone in the empty streets of Salt Lake City at eight-thirty in the morning on a Saturday in the bright autumn air, birds wheeling in white light. There’s something to be said for looking up at a clear blue sky and knowing that it isn’t a dome.