Originally, I'd planned on hiring an aircab to take me out to the farm. Zelda wouldn't hear of it. She insisted they'd be in town picking up some things anyway, and that the best way to see Ariana's countryside was by ground, so they absolutely had to come to the spaceport to pick me up.
I had to admit now that taking the ground car was a brilliant idea.
Transit usually wasn't so physical for me. In space, in warp, I entered the metal shell of my ship, the quantum processes of interstellar travel worked their magic, and I hardly even felt it except as a twinge, a moment of dizziness, like going into a room and not remembering why I wanted to be there. I left my cabin, and the ship was in a different part of the galaxy. Transit meant nothing.
Here, I couldn't deny the movement. Rubber-padded wheels on a packed dirt road, an open canopy, landscape passing by—and wind, the very air moving around me, playing with my short-cropped hair, making my scalp itch. It should have felt like standing in a compartment that had just opened to vacuum, but it didn't. This was... organic, for lack of a better word. I could have closed my eyes and still known that I was under open sky and not in a wind tunnel.
Once we left the capital, I smelled the endless rolling fields passing by, hot living grasses, a musty organic scent that somehow managed to smell green. I could taste the vegetation on the back of my tongue, as if I were chewing one of those blades of grass between my teeth. My stomach rumbled, full of appetite. The tires' humming vibrations massaged my muscles, rattling loose the last months—years—of stress.
I'd fought in battles to protect worlds like this. Made the battles seem worthwhile, though they didn't often seem so while I was in the middle of them. I liked it better when all the sides stayed at the negotiating table, or pillar, or cloud drift, or wherever, and all I had to do was stand there looking off icial. Captain Song pulled this vacation on me because he thought I'd get bored. That was going to backf ire. I could retire to this. I could stay here forever, under the sun.
The agoraphobia—the blank shock at having so much open sky around me, miles and miles to the nearest wall—came and went. I did okay as long as I was gripping the door handle. I never once told Tom he was driving too fast. He would have made a joke about the speed of spaceflight and laughed at me.
Zelda planned a picnic on a hill, part of a vast public parkland near the farm, a rolling meadow of grasses kept short by wandering sheep. The sheep weren't here at the moment, and we spread a blanket in the shade of a tree overlooking a field of
green. So much green. We had a view of a whole valley: the grid of farmland stretching out, with furrowed acres and rows of olive trees and vineyards. This part of Ariana might have been built to order, its beauty was so heart-stopping. Probably had been designed, just so.
Then came the food. All of it fresh from the farm's kitchen. Tom carried the wicker basket from the car, Mim arranged wooden plates and cloth napkins, sliced cheese and broke bread, filled little bowls with plump red grapes and blackberries she'd picked that morning. It was crazy, unbelievably decadent to my eyes. It must have cost a fortune, except they'd grown most of it themselves, so no. I'd be eating up a day or two of prof it, that was all.
I picked up a slice of firm, yellowish cheese, and a beeping rang, accompanied by a vocal warning in my audio bug. I'd turned off all the off icial channels when I left the
Raja Ampat,
but this was a medical alert, which I couldn't shut down:
These consumables have not passed Mil Div testing standards. Non pasteurized, non sterilized—
"What's that?" Zelda said. The beeping had been loud enough for everyone to hear.
I gave a subvocal command to my transponder implant—also a rudimentary scanner, meant to ensure that I didn't eat something incompatible or outright poisonous to my system while I was on an alien world. So really, the device was doing exactly what it was supposed to be doing, and I was pretty sure such rich food would play havoc with my digestive system for the next few days. I'd brought medication to avert the worst of it. Zelda and the others didn't have to know the details.
A bit chagrined, I said, "My transponder. I can't shut off all the functions. I'm sorry, it shouldn't bother us again."
"They're not calling you back to work, are they?"
I was hoping to avoid talking too much about work while I was here. I
wouldn't
be called back, not unless the Cancri mess cleared up a whole lot faster than I expected it to. Another possibility: Mil Div might call me back if they were very, very desperate. Naturally, the scenarios spun out in my mind, because I was often thinking about such scenarios. It was habit, or pathological maybe. I could think of at least three xenopolitical situations that would render my recent disaster moot and require me returning to the ship immediately, and all of them involved some kind of invasion or multi-system armed conf lict. Even Ariana would be affected. I wished I was sure something like that couldn't possibly happen.
I had to pull myself back to the current idyll.
"No, no, I've got a whole month, they won't call me unless there's a disaster, and that kind of disaster would mean we had bigger problems." Again, they didn't need to know the details.
Zelda's smile returned full force. Carefree and happy, and I hoped she'd stay that way the whole visit. Mim distributed food, and Tom gave me a look, like he suspected what was going on under the surface.
"Wendy, eat, eat!" Zelda insisted, and I finally tried the bite I'd been holding.
The food was so fresh it lit up my tongue. Mil Div nutritionists insisted nobody could tell the difference between fresh or vat-grown and preserved, dirt-grown or hydroponics. I could tell. There was wine. I hadn't had a drink in weeks—alcohol and warp travel made my stomach do things that didn't make the pleasure worthwhile. This went straight to my head and felt divine.
"Tell us stories, Wendy," Zelda said. They'd started a second bottle of wine and were sprawled out on the blanket, watching shapes in the clouds, and shadowed surfaces of the two moons hanging near the horizon.
"I don't know any stories."
"Where you were last, then? What was the last planet you went to and what happened?
What did you do? I know you always say it's boring, but I want to hear about it anyway. It's only boring to you."
The last mission? Oh, what the hell. They wouldn't have actually heard of the place and I could gloss over the worst of it. "All right, then. My last stop: 55 Cancri. The fourth planet."
Tom stared. "Cancri Four? Where that riot happened? Where the Trade Guild was booted out? You were there for that?"
So they had heard of it. Oops. "Yeah, I was there."
"Oh my gosh, you weren't actually
there,
were you? On the planet, I mean?" Mim said, eyes round, horrified.
"No, I was in orbit." And that wasn't a lie, as far as it went. My
drone
had been on the planet, and I'd been interfaced with my drone, which was almost just like being there. The whole team had gone down in drones, because the planet was a gas giant. It was the only way we could meet with the Di hydrogen breathers. But my team hadn't quite been able to explain to the Di that the drones were machines, not suits, and when the Di started wrenching open the metal shells looking for weapons, I'd ended up pulling the pin on the drones' destruct sequences. Destroyed the Trade Guild contingent and did quite a bit of damage to the Di in the process. The Di cried foul and refused to send another delegation. Riot was a strong word for the ensuing chaos as the Di forced all Trade Guild personnel off the planet and out of orbit.
The incident was still under review when I'd left. Truth be told, I agreed with Captain Song: my destroying the drones had been the right call, based on my suspicion that what the Di really wanted was to conf iscate the technology, not negotiate. From an economic and political standpoint, it should have been a minor incident. The Trade Guild had mining rights at plenty of gas giants and Cancri four wasn't an essential trading partner. But the event had been enough of a disaster that it had made news. Not the kind of news that was actually news, like the stellar-political balance of power shifting, war and famine and failures of technology and the rest that would actually make a difference, but the kind of freak-show news that drew crowds of gawkers because people couldn't look away. My name had never come into it, except as "the unnamed Military Division off icer who allegedly instigated the riot." Which wasn't accurate or reassuring.
"Really, it was embarrassing more than anything. You'd be surprised how often stuff like this happens." I winced; now they'd be even more worried.
"I don't want to know," Mim said, holding her hand f lat in a "stop" gesture, her eyes shut. "I don't want to think about anyone blowing you up."
"I told you, I wasn't even there. My
drone
got blown up. We use drones where we can't handle the atmosphere or gravity. It's safer." Or in case the host species decided to attack us, for example...
"The worst thing you'll face around here is goats shitting on you," Tom said.
"I think I would rather have my drone blown up by aliens," I said, and they laughed like they were supposed to, and ate more food, and talked about the weather.
We'd started packing up when Zelda, Mim, and Tom exchanged looks in a silent conversation. They wanted to say something, but was it good or bad? Curious, patient, I waited.
"We have news," Zelda said finally, and her whole face lit up. I was ashamed that my heart sank a little. This was the look my sister had had when she announced that she and Mim were getting married. It was her Big Plan Look, that meant she was going to turn her world upside down chasing a dream. What exactly was so enticing that she'd give up all this?
"Can you guess?" Zelda said. "You have to guess."
"Look at that, Zel, she's scared to death. Drop the suspense and tell her," Mim chided.
"You tell her, I can't even get the words out."
"She's
your
sister!"
Zelda bit her lip, as if to keep her smile from getting any bigger. "Okay okay okay. Well. The news is—we've got a baby started."
The three of them looked at me expectantly, and I didn't know what to say.
I didn't know how I
felt.
First, relieved, that Zelda seemed well and truly settled, happy and conf ident enough to take on something like a baby. Second—how had my little sister grown up enough to have a
baby?
"Wow," was all I could say.
Zelda babbled. "She's a little girl, three months along. We must have spent months talking about how to do it, whose DNA and how and if we wanted to go natural, but then which one of us would carry her, but then we decided neither of us could take the time off from the farm and this is safer anyway, and then this was Mim's idea, since she and Tom are so much alike anyway, we just had them pop his sperm and my egg in a test tube, no extra expense for genetic manipulation, apart from basic screening and so on, and there we go, baby! Anyway she's incubating at the pre-natal center in Sage, and I can't wait until we can bring her home."
I covered my mouth with my hand to hide the disbelieving smile, and my eyes were stinging. I had to say something before I started leaking.
"And that's why we're so glad you could come visit," Zelda went on. "I mean it would have been better in a few months after she's born and you could meet her, but you can come back, and this way I could tell you in person. I really wanted to tell you in person."
"Oh, Zelda, I'm so happy for you all," I said finally, opening my arms to take my sister in for another fierce hug. A minute later Tom and Mim joined us. One big group hug, one big happy family, and I wondered at my luck to ever be a part of it. I was going to be an aunt. At least, if I stayed I would be. Or I could go back to Mil Div and be the distant, mysterious aunt who had adventures and was never around.
Zelda and I had grown up in a city, on a planet that was all city, even the polar ice caps, which housed cold-weather research and manufacturing. We'd been born into a collective, with eleven adults operating in an accounting firm and six children growing up together. Our four collective-siblings continued on in the business, but we'd always been different. None of us had paid much attention to which adults were whose parents—it wasn't supposed to matter, when you operated a family like a business—but I understood that we shared a biological mother, Eva, and that she'd been different, too. She took the auditing cases, traveled, and was sought after by corporations looking to track down embezzlement and other internal problems. Eva was an accounting hit man, and she loved adventure. That was the word in the family, that Eva loved adventure, and she'd passed that trait to her daughters. We had her red hair, too.
So while the other siblings certif ied as accountants, Zelda went to a college where she could try everything, from art to science to solar sail racing, looking for inspiration. She'd found Mim. By then, I'd graduated from the planet's Mil Div academy. I hadn't known what I wanted any more than Zelda had, only that I wanted to go
away.
Away from the planet that was a city, away to something completely different, to some wide open spaces, and you couldn't get more wide open than space. Same impulse as Zelda, opposite direction. Once at the academy, I discovered an aptitude for security. From there, the Diplomatic Corps beckoned because of the prestige. They were the best, they saw the real action. Almost a thousand space-faring species populated the galaxy, and I wanted to meet them all. I wanted to keep moving. In the years since then, I'd never been bored.
People sometimes said there was nothing new in the universe, but there was. Mil Div was finding new civilizations all the time. Trillions of sentient beings in the universe, and the thing that made them all alike was that they made choices. Each choice that each life made was new to that life.
Nobody could say that Zelda and I had picked wrong. We'd each picked our direction and kept running full tilt. Something to be admired in that.