Edge of Dark (14 page)

The smell of eggs and herbs mixed with the light scent of Jean Paul's tea. The silence in the room was so thick that the sizzle of hot oil, clanking pots, and even the pouring of water all seemed loud and intrusive.

Jean Paul stepped carefully into the awkward void, probably quite aware that his comment about sex had sparked Charlie's cooking frenzy. He spoke to Nona. “Let me show you where you're going.”

Well, now Charlie was taking Nona to Neville whether he wanted to or not.

Jean Paul dragged out a physical picture book. The form of the object fascinated Nona, and she held it in her hands, turning it this way and that and feeling the heft of it.

“You've never seen a book?” Jean Paul said.

“That's what this is? A book? Static information?”

“Historical information doesn't change much,” Charlie called from the kitchen.

“What you know about history might,” she said.

“Point.” Charlie blushed and turned back to cooking, barely listening as Jean Paul took her through the book, showing her pictures of Lym in its most recent technological heyday at the beginning of the age of explosive creation. Neville had been designed to scoop resources out of the sea and use them to help people flee the gravity well and establish new bases in space.

Charlie put Cricket's big metal bowl on the ground and watched her lick the edges clean before she started crunching the bones of the tharp in the center.

He piled plates high with eggs, toast, and grilled vegetables, and set them down in front of Jean Paul and Nona just as they were opening the page of the book that showed pictures of Neville.

It had been a beach town once. Since these pictures, ice had repopulated mountaintops and turned into solid sheets on both poles. Sea level had fallen enough that more than a few kilometers separated Neville from the beach now, all downhill.

In the long-ago Neville had been a testament to high technology and design. Nano-strength buildings flowed one into the other in graceful, glassy arcs. Imposing metal sea gates had protected the city from tidal waves and storms. Lacy and filigreed bridges married one building to the other in a series of arches. In one sunrise shot, gold light haloed a long string of fantastic bridges.

Nona picked up the book, ignoring her breakfast. “That's beautiful. It's even more beautiful than the Deep.”

Jean Paul looked pleased with her. “In Neville's time, it was the most beautiful city in the solar system, and by far the most exotic. The most advanced.”

She glanced at Charlie, who had just brought his own plate over to sit down. “We'll go there?”

Charlie's blood raced. If they did go, he'd have a whole day alone with her. He loved the idea, and it scared him. He glanced at Jean Paul. “Do you want to go?”

For a moment, Jean Paul's eyes lit up, but then he turned away and when he looked back his expression was flatter. “No. I'll stay here. Someone's got to be able to come save you if you need it.”

Nona must have caught some of the awkwardness in the exchange, as she looked from man to man and then dug into her eggs.

He left Cricket at home with Jean Paul. As he and Nona neared the beach, a school of longfish danced in the wave spray, their wet, blue-green bodies giving themselves away by movement alone. When they splashed into the water after they leapt a wave, they seemed to merge with the ocean, fish and water all the same shimmering blue-green. Each fish was almost the size of the skimmer, maybe twice as long as he was tall, and thin.

He slowed down so that Nona could lean out and point at fish after fish, until she fell back against her seat laughing in delight.

He took her to the beach and they stopped to walk on the sand. The fish were gone, but one edge of the rocky beach had a number of exposed tide pools. He walked barefoot, and she followed suit, following his steps carefully. He couldn't explain why he wanted to show her as much of what he loved about Lym as possible, or why it felt so urgent. Maybe the battle above them—beyond them—past them—maybe
that
battle made him feel like every good thing in his life had become fragile.

Nona seemed to feel the same way. She knelt on moss-covered rocks and took pictures of the clearest tide pools, the beach, even of him standing on rocks and pointing down at particularly bright spiny slugs or, once, at a black eel that slithered out from behind two rocks for just a moment and then went back in. She'd shown him the camera setup she had—a small physical lens that she held in one hand and controlled with clever finger gestures. Today, she used it almost nonstop as if creating memories for later.

As they were walking back, he asked her what she thought of the tide pools.

“There's more order than I expected.”

“What do you mean?”

“I always imagined Lym as all tooth and claw, that things would be eating each other every place I looked.”

He laughed. “Everything here does eat other things.”

“But not every minute. I expected a constant fight between wild things. I think I've been understanding biology all wrong.”

“The fight to eat or be eaten is constant if you know how to look. We're working hard to allow natural responses.”

She dug her bare toes into the sand. “Disorder is practically banned in space, but you're creating it.”

“We're creating room for disorder and measuring it. We're not creating the thing itself.” He walked. “That's not even right. We're creating balance.”

“Okay.” She brushed wind-blown hair from her eyes and took photos of the waves. “Coming here is like coming home must have been for my parents. They were on
The Creative Fire
. You know what that was?”

“The miracle ship that came back home.”

“People lived and died in it for generations. They flew through space but never actually saw stars. They had no idea what Adiamo was like. They had a game that depicted the world before the sundering or the remaking, before the Ring of Distance. It showed Lym and Mammot and a few stations and nothing else. The game play was here, on a fictional Lym. I know. Dad showed me a version of it once—he used to play it with Ruby.”

“
That
Ruby?”

“Ruby the Red.”

“You knew her?”

“No.” Nona pursed her lips. “Ruby died right after I was born.”

“So you weren't ever on the
Fire
?

“No. Well, I was conceived on it. It was destroyed before I was born. But I think Lym is to me as the Deep was to the
Fire
. Close, anyway. A place where the very genetics that shape my muscles and bones originated. A place that I wouldn't exist without.”

He loved her poetic way of looking at things. It altered how he saw Lym, if only by adding the tiniest bit of completely strange and new perspective. “Ready to see some more history?”

She grinned, tucking a stray strand of blue hair behind an ear. “Sure. Will there be less breeze?”

“Probably.” He flew her into Neville through the broken sea-gates, which hung askew on great hinges, opening outward. They dwarfed the skimmer.

She surely expected something like the pictures Jean Paul had shown her.

Jagged edges and ripped and broken bridges surrounded craters full of broken building material. Mangled and stripped vehicles littered cracked streets. The largest building still stood, but the center of it had a hole almost all of the way through, and the tail end of a star fighter stuck out of the middle of it. Near all of the edges, dirt had blown over the streets and a wild cacophony of spring flowers reached along every edge on their march to reclaim the city.

“Oh,” she exclaimed. She leaned forward like she had over the fish, but the sounds coming from her were small moans of disappointment mixed with awe. “Can we land?”

“It's not safe.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes there are looters. Parts of the city are still full of treasure and bones.”

One hand shaded her eyes as she squinted down at the city. “I don't see anyone.”

He scanned the area. Too many intact walls and other good places to hide. “There's no way to know if anyone's there.”

She turned her face toward him, her eyes as excited as they had been earlier, watching the fish. “I do want to land. To look around a little.”

Her enchantment reminded him of Neville's beauty. He forgot it these days, seeing the dangers instead. A hazard of his job. He flew them all around the perimeter so she could see the devastation from all sides.

“I don't see anyone else here,” she pointed out.

“That doesn't mean it's safe. Looters hide when they see me. But I know a place where we can probably stretch our legs safely and eat lunch.”

He took her to a low hill piled with big rocks and tucked the skimmer neatly beside one rock a little taller than the vehicle. They were close to the broken city, but with a long stretch of clear land between them and the nearest buildings. A pool of spring water fed three scraggly trees. Flat rocks made an artful half circle for comfortable seating. “My theory is this area used to be a park,” he told her.

“What happened?” she asked, as they climbed out of the skimmer. “To the city. Such . . . I never saw so much destruction.”

“War happened. The ship there—the one that you see holed in the central building—it belonged to the mechs, who became the ice pirates after they were banished from the system.”

“I've heard that term,” she mused. “Mechs. It meant human uploads to machine bodies, right?”

“And similar things. Copies of humans, so there could be a whole fleet of a hundred robotic ships managed by a single human mind that was also a hive mind.”

She looked over at the destroyed city. “I hadn't realized they hated us so much,” she said softly.

“I don't know who hated who the most. Or who was the most afraid of who.”

“So what is it now? Is it hatred or fear?”

“I don't know.” He started unpacking a picnic. Jean Paul had sent two vegetable sandwiches, two cookies, water, and a bottle of wine with two nice glasses. He frowned at the wine. Jean Paul knew better; Charlie didn't drink when he was working. “Maybe war is always both.”

“You brought me here to see this because of what happened to the High Sweet Home?”

“Partly. I might have brought you here anyway.”

She went silent for a minute before musing, “Whether we're afraid of the ice pirates or we hate them, it might be the same. Satyana thinks a war could ruin the Glittering. That they've been building up so much military strength that they could destroy every station. Every one. All of them. I never imagined the Diamond Deep being vulnerable before. We have defenses for asteroids and enough guns and fighters to fend off a small fleet of invaders, but that's all. Satyana thinks the ice pirates could take the Deep, or destroy her.” She looked up, as if she could see the pirates from here. “I talked to her this morning, and she's more worried than I've ever heard her.”

His gut tightened. Of course the stations were threatened, too. “Surely there'd be no reason.”

She looked directly at him, determined. “Just like we need to save Lym, the Deep matters to humanity. It is our greatest social and technical achievement.”

It sounded like propaganda, but she believed it. He'd never thought of the Glittering as anything other than a vague evil. But he saw she was right. “Okay.”

“Satyana said that the High Sweet Home has been partly disassembled.”

He handed her a sandwich. “I'm sorry about your friend.”

She turned away, but not before he noticed her blinking back a tear. He looked straight ahead, giving her space. Eventually, she ate.

They got through lunch with a quiet companionship that felt pregnant with some desire for more. It made Charlie profoundly uncomfortable. He knew how to refuse a client who flirted inappropriately with him, but Nona wasn't flirting at all.

He was attracted to her.

He hadn't felt like this about anyone for a decade. As she helped him pick up the remains of their picnic, her pinky brushed the back of his hand. Her touch felt like a trail of fire.

Feeling slightly reckless, he opened the wine and poured a full glass for each of them. Even though he contrived to spill half of his since he was on duty, he felt off-balance, threatened from above by war and from the side by a beautiful woman.

They sat and drank in silence together. No toasts, no small talk that didn't matter. Only a silence that felt like conversation.

When they finished the wine, she proclaimed, “I'm going for a walk.”

“It's really not safe,” he told her.

“Is anywhere safe?” She laughed at him, a good-natured laugh. “I want to get some close-ups.”

He swallowed a retort and grabbed up both his projectile gun and the stun gun he'd used on the tongats before he followed. “Okay. I'll go with you. But only to the edge.”