Reading the Wind (Silver Ship) (12 page)

Above the hold, the garden level also had room for labs and experiments and a ship’s hospital half as big as ours back in Artistos—three rooms and a storeroom. Just above, in the level of the frozen, Jenna and Alicia and Bryan waited.

The first level of crew’s quarters sat above the frozen. After that, the common level, which included the Command Room, then another set of crew’s quarters, and everything above served as labs and storage, except the very nose of the ship, which was weightless and could become an escape pod.

I commanded Leo to take me to the higher of the two crew quarter levels. It led me up to the doorway to the living quarters, then slid through, stopping just beyond so that I could still see one long arm trailing in the open door, as if it were saying, “I’m waiting for you.”

Red and green and yellow pipes and dark blue handholds covered
the walls, a chaos of physical plant designed to support the fifty people who could live here.
New Making
could support up to two hundred people, fifty on each living level, as long as half were always frozen.

I pushed past Leo and went through a door on the right, following directions gleaned from Starteller’s records. Each set of rooms could serve twelve or thirteen people. Shared bathrooms and galley space clustered near the ship’s center. The outer walls were lined with rooms big enough for one or two, for sleeping and storing personal effects.

The common seating between the galleys and the sleeping spaces stood empty. Chairs clustered as if waiting for conversations. I passed through them to the sleeping rooms. My parents had shared the one at the end.

Their bed filled the wall opposite me. A gold coverlet embellished with a planet and seven moons had been laid neatly across it. A picture of Fremont. Had my mother made it to display her dreams of her new home?

Closed cupboards lined one wall, tempting me. But first, I lay across the bed. Inhaling deeply, I struggled to find some human smell, something left of their energies. But the room did not smell of people, just of the sterile ship’s air touched with garden smells, metals, and oils.

I swung my feet from the bed and reached for the cupboard and pulled open the doors. There were four squared shelves. The bottom two held clothes. I left them for now, looking in the others. The top two were smaller. The left one must have belonged to my mother. A metal necklace of bright silver set with shimmering beads lay next to matching earrings, delicate and simple, pinned to a soft deep blue cloth. Beside them lay a tray with a mirror, a hairbrush, and a blue painted box strapped to it.

I carefully loosed and lifted out the box and opened its lid to find it stuffed full of papers and pens. I took out the papers. Drawings. Drawings of people, and of plants. Some people in her drawings had obvious genemods—a woman with wings, an over-muscled strongman, a man with four arms. I found one drawing from Fremont, a picture of a hebra, quite well done, with the long neck and beard, the head swiveled as it looked behind itself.

Half the drawings were delicately rendered pictures of a handsome man with long dark hair, blue eyes, and a broad smile. He looked as normal as I did, with no obvious mods. The hand that rendered the portraits had been tender, showing intimate moments such as the man looking up at the stars or sitting on a couch, relaxed, watching the artist.

Surely this was my father. Who else would she have drawn so often? I spread the drawings out on the bed, looking from one to the other. His eyes were set wider than mine, but I had his chin, his easy smile. An ache spread in my throat. “Leo? What do you think? Am I like him?” I thought for a moment that my words had fallen on deaf ears, but Leo did leave its post at the door and come sit by the foot of the bed.

The right-hand cubby wasn’t as neat. It held a brush, a headband full of data threads like the one of his Jenna had given me on Fremont. I took it out and ran it through my fingers. The threads woven into the band were bright purple and blue and gold, and the leather had become stiff from disuse. I worked it between my hands until it became slightly more pliable, then pocketed it.

Near the back, I saw a little carved wooden box. I lifted the lid and found a data button nestled in soft velvety-red material. I took it out, palming it, and sat back down on the bed.

The first data thread I followed proved to be sets of still pictures, clearly labeled with names and places and times. The years were high: 568, 571. We were on Fremont year 224 when we left. We counted ours from the settling of Fremont—perhaps they counted from the settling of Silver’s Home?

I recognized some of the same people my mother had drawn. The seventh picture showed my mother and father when they were about twenty-five, around ten years older than I was now, or at least had been when we left Fremont. They stood against a railing, both smiling, my father’s arm around my mother’s shoulder. In the picture, he seemed sparer than in the drawings, maybe younger?

My father stood tall and slight, with legs that looked built for running. His physical genemods might have simply been to build a perfect athlete’s body. My mother appeared to be a taller and just slightly older version of Chelo. Thin and strong, with a squared jaw, an intense
look, and small breasts and hips. She, too, could be a runner, or maybe a climber. Her biceps and the muscles of her forearms made ridges under her dark brown skin. Her hair was long and straight, braided to fall on one side. Chelo sometimes braided her hair like that, and I wondered if it was from a memory of our mother. The photo was labeled David and Marissa Lee.

Marissa.

I hadn’t known her name. I said it three times to myself. “Marissa, Marissa, Marissa.” My voice was swallowed in the emptiness of the tiny room, the larger crew quarters, the great ship, itself tiny amongst the stars.

A tear splashed onto my hand, startling me. I had cried before, at the foot of the
New Making
on the Grass Plains, and in the dark of the night, bawling because they abandoned us. Maybe it was being in their space, actually knowing what they looked like, that they’d had lives of their own, but these tears felt different, tears for them instead of tears for me. What had they experienced on Fremont, what had it cost them to leave us?

In the picture, my mother looked up at my father’s face, as if admiring his nose or the turn of his jaw.

There was more, but for now, this bittersweet picture left me full.

I nestled the data button in my captain’s coat pocket next to the headband, took my mother’s hairbrush, and closed the cubbies. I gave a silent call to Leo, and it clambered up to me, settling on four arms, leaving the other two in front of it. I patted it for being obedient, as if it would notice, and told it, “Good night.” These words, like the others, reverberated in the emptiness. I curled up and fell deeply asleep on my parents’ bed.

W
hen I woke, I took Leo, ate, and went to the ship’s nose. I’d only been here once, with Jenna, in freefall. It felt entirely different from anything on Fremont and it took a good head for math to move with economy.

Even here,
New Making
’s skin was windowless and smooth. I could call up data via Starteller, but there was no projection wall so any video was inside my head, fighting my normal vision, making me feel off balance. I anchored myself by hooking my feet in some of the
webbing festooning the walls, and took the data button back out. It helped to feel its shiny silvered surface hard as a pebble in my palm, to caress it with one finger of my other hand. Some level of physicality helped me stay grounded, present in both the webs of data and in my body. I no longer had Chelo by my side to be my link to the physical.

I followed different threads, ignoring the pictures for now. Stored data about the ship. Links to financial records. Probably useful, but I had no context to understand any of it.

Then, finally, something truly personal. I found my father’s journal.

They realized the planet was inhabited a few days before they landed. He described how they’d spotted Traveler, the colonists’ stranded ship, in silent orbit around Fremont. And then, on landing day:

I pictured them landing, Jenna still whole. She might have been pretty, and perhaps stood taller, before her arm was ripped from her socket and one eye torn from her face in the last battle of the war. She might have laughed often.

I read forward. He didn’t keep detailed notes for the next few weeks, just short entries about when visits happened. Apparently he and Mom stayed on the ship at first. Then the lack of progress frustrated him, as did the leader’s choice to humor the illegal settlers, to try and convince them with words. I slid hastily forward, looking for the entries nearer the war, looking for information about us.

In one entry, he proclaimed:

That was close to the last entry. Ship’s records suggested he and Mom left the
New Making
shortly after that. Apparently, he didn’t take the journal with him. Three weeks later, the war started. I knew they had come back, but clearly he had not chosen to add to his journal on their return trips. There was not even an entry for Chelo’s birth, or mine.

But he had given me a clue, and an odd hope. If it took the Journey as long as it took her sister-ship, the
New Making
, to go home, then the Journey may not have left in defeat. She may have left to secure our claim.

I unhooked from the netting, and let myself float free, connecting more fully to the
New Making
’s data trove. It felt as if I myself flew between the stars, ship and self indistinguishable one from the other.

S
tarteller informed me Jenna’s waking sequence had begun. There was no way to hide from her that I had been awake, so I didn’t bother. I toyed with meeting her in her waking room.

Jenna was a fighter, a predator with quick reflexes. Surprising her didn’t seem like a good idea. So I took the path of least resistance and left her a note that I waited for her in the Command Room. I set out a glass of water for her, sat in one of the side chairs, and watched a picture of Silver’s Home on the wall screen.

She came in, opening the door with her one arm. Her short hair hung in gray wisps around her ravaged face, highlighting her missing eye and the devastation of folds and wrinkles surrounding it. She had grown even thinner on the ship than when she ran wild on the outskirts of Artistos, hunting and living from the land. As if being someplace with no immediate danger had drained her of vitality. Her one steely-gray eye fixed on me, and I waited to see what she would do.

Her voice was as cool as her eye. “I presume this is no accident?”

I shook my head, offering no defense.

She took the glass of water I’d set out for her and drank it. Her voice was sharp as she asked, “What did you do with the time?”

Her question and the look in her eyes made me feel as if I’d betrayed her. I swallowed hard and sat up straight. I told her what I had done, trying to make the story sound noble but hiding nothing, including my visit to my parents’ room and what I had read in my father’s journal.

When I finished, she said, “Yes, they may have made it back in time.” She sighed, and held her silence for a long moment. “But it would have been close.” She waited again, watching me. “I suppose you had to begin to drive your own destiny eventually, and I knew you were curious about your parents.” She stared at me, evenly, so still I felt her anger in her silence. “I don’t expect any further choices that you don’t consult me about.”

“Why not? I’m an adult now, and I know how to handle the ship.”

She laughed, her laughter stinging and a little scary. “Flying a simple ship with a preprogrammed course is nothing like maneuvering on a planet full of sophisticated people and complex politics. You
must not
act on your own when we arrive. The first few days on Silver’s Home may be dangerous.”

“Why?”

She turned her back to me and went to the galley and poured herself another glass of water, drinking it quickly and pouring yet another, which she held in her one hand while she looked me up and down as if trying to read my soul. All she said was, “Silver’s Home will appear safer than Fremont. But it is far more dangerous, especially to you.”

“Why me?”

“Because no one with your strength can afford to be so headstrong.”

She walked out of the room, as if she couldn’t bear to talk to me right then.

I
mages of the
New Making
crashing into the ground raked my nerves.

The special pillowed chair in the command room held me securely, my head fixed in place by a rigid but padded rest. I stared up at the piteously glowing blue ceiling. Jenna stood behind me, silent and still, her brow furrowed as she looked down at me. The light from the control displays gleamed across the ridges of scar tissue on her face: red, orange, white, and blue; like sunrise over a distant mountain ridge.

The soft hums, clicks, and beeps of the controls blended into a continuous background noise that by now was familiar, almost soothing. I stroked my captain’s coat, running my fingers along the bumps of the data buttons, the plush, velvety fabric interwoven with tiny, slick data threads. Even though I no longer needed it for daily status checks, I wanted to be sure I had the best possible communications with
New Making
when I started braking. I took a deep breath of the cool, recirculated air I’d probably breathed a thousand times before, and let it out slowly, willing myself to relax, to open to the data flow. Braking.