“This is Elfhome,” the male said.
She slapped her hand over her mouth. He spoke English? She had just ranted on and on. God, what had she said? First contact and she had thrown a hissy fit. Wait—how did he speak English if this was first contact? Maybe she just misheard him.
“Have you really been to the moon?” he asked.
She nodded, hand still over her mouth. He was definitely speaking English with a lilting British accent. He wasn’t simply parroting her faint New York accent back at her. Oh God, he had understood everything she had said! What exactly had she said? She had ranted on without thinking. Had she mentioned being on the moon? Yes, she had. She nodded, and then, realizing that he might not know the gesture, added. “Yes, I have. I was—I am an astronaut. That’s a scientist that travels to other worlds to study them.”
“What’s it like? The moon?”
“Very beautiful, in a lifeless kind of way. Rock and dust and cold and nothing more.”
He tilted his head to scan the trees above them, as if looking for the moon. “Do you suppose our moon is like yours? Lifeless?”
She floundered in the flood of implications. This twin of Earth had a brother of their moon. A nearly infinite set of identical events that would have needed to happen to form both. And most stunning of all, that he would know that the two planets were so similar. “Statistically speaking, yes.”
“Do you find our world more to your liking?”
There was a loaded question. It meant he had a full grasp of the concept of world and that she wasn’t a native of his. “Yes.”
“My father says it’s not much different than Earth.”
She considered the implication of the statement. The male not only knew of the existence of another planet, he knew its name and spoke one of its languages. There was only one way she could imagine he knew so much. “Your father has been to Earth.”
“Not for several hundred years. I have to say—judging by the city that you sent to visit us—your world has changed greatly since he was there last.”
For a moment she forgot how to breathe, and only remembered as she realized she was going lightheaded. Deep breaths. Radically shifting worldview required deep breaths.
“How…how…how old is your father?” It was the first of the “how” questions she could force out.
The male considered the question for a minute. “The exact count of his age? I do not know it. He has needed four digits to count his age for hundreds of years. I believe, though, that he is still under two thousand years old. Maybe.”
“And a year has three hundred and sixty-five days.”
He thought for a while longer. “That seems to be a correct number. I confess, one such as I has little need to count the days. I do not watch for winter’s thaw to sow crops or such things as that.”
Been to Earth. Lived for hundreds of years. Pointed ears. Lived on Elfhome. “You’re elves.”
“That is what our people are called. You are a human?” It was more question than statement.
“Yes. I am a human. I’m Lain Shenske.”
“What does your name mean?”
“It—it doesn’t mean anything. Shenske is my family name, given by father’s bloodline.” She didn’t want to explain being Jewish. “Lain is my given name, but neither one actually means anything.”
“I am Kaanini-kauta-taeli. It means Lightning Strikes Wind; a brilliance that is there and then gone. My mother was angry when the priestess gave it to me: I will most likely die young.”
“That’s terrible. Why would anyone even give a child a name like that?”
“Because she saw my future.”
She stared at him in horror.
“I do not mind. It has freed me to seize life, live it as I wish now, with no thought of the long future. If you constantly compare this moment with some perfection that you imagined, you are fated to be forever disappointed. Adventure is the unforeseen, not the expected.”
Blithe words for someone of sound body who had not had their dreams crushed. But was she not here, on an alien world, far greater than any she expected to explore? Europa would have been a long struggle to drill down through ice to open water and then pray for life. Exploring Elfhome might not be possible without her failure, because with the United States shelving its plans for Jupiter, the world had funneled its energy into the Chinese colony program.
She hated to admit her mother’s platitudes of “sometimes bad things have to happen for the good things to follow” had any bearing on her present situation. Lain had snarled in her mother’s face for that and every suggestion to use the wheelchair or to push herself in physical therapy. Lain hadn’t seen the point; her life seemed over. She couldn’t have predicted this impossible event all riding on the flip of a switch.
She cursed. A flip of a switch! Sooner or later the Chinese were going to flip the power switch again. If it wasn’t for her odd conversation with Yves, she wouldn’t have guessed that Pittsburgh’s disappearance was linked to the hyperphase gate in orbit. The Chinese would continue testing the gate until it was time for the colony ship to jump to Alpha Centauri. At that point, there would be no reason to keep the gate on. Pittsburgh would return to Earth and the connection to Elfhome would be lost.
If she wanted to stay on Elfhome, she needed to get to a piece of land that wasn’t shuffling between the worlds.