Aloud, she said, “Gies and Basrat sent word today. Everyone thought they were dead, but they were holed up under a mountain in the Julian Alps. Probably didn’t plan to pop their heads above ground until everything was settled, but you know how Amanda is. It’s never real with her unless someone knows she has it better. I don’t know why you liked them.”
She caught her mistake too late, and something vast and dangerous shifted in her heart. She took a deep breath, bit her lip, and went back to wrapping her sari in place.
“Once we have the Free Navy under control, we’ll have to do something about emigration. No one’s going to want to stay on Earth. At this rate, I may take off. Retire on some alien ocean where I don’t have to feel like I’m responsible for making the waves go up and down. Mars will never sort itself out. Smith? He puts a brave face on it, but he’s not a prime minister. He’s hospice nurse for a republic. Anytime I start feeling like my job’s bad, I just have a drink with him.”
They were all things she’d said before, in some variation. There were new things every day—reports from the planetary surface, from the surveillance drones around Venus, from her covert service agents on Iapetus and Ceres and Pallas. With the Free Navy busy making the OPA look measured and rational, Fred Johnson could still be of use making contact with the reservoirs of the Belt that understood how dangerous Marco Inaros was and how the damage already done could spiral into something even worse. God knew he never brought in good news. But for everything new, for every irrevocable tick of the clock, there were the things she cycled back to. The ones she revisited again and again like rereading a favorite book. Or poem. Things she said because she had said them before.
“There was a thing you read me one time. About jack pines,” she said, digging through her jewelry box for her necklace and the gold bracelets that would go with the embroidery. “Do you remember it? All I have is that it ended ‘da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, and paved the way to Paradise.’ It was about how the seeds needed a fire before they could spread. I told you it sounded like a sophomore girl trying to make the break up with her abusive boyfriend sound deep. That poem. I can’t get it out of my head now, and I can’t remember it either. It’s annoying.”
The bracelets slid into place. The necklace settled too lightly on her collarbone. She sat at her table, touching on eyeliner, tapping a nearly homeopathic bit of rouge onto her cheeks. Just enough to make her look more vital than she felt. Not enough to make it seem like she was wearing makeup. The smell of the rouge reminded her of the apartment in Denmark she’d kept during university. God, her mind was everywhere these days. When she finished, she turned to her hand terminal. The indicator showed she was still recording. She smiled into the camera.
“I have to put the mask on now. Go wade into it all again. They still haven’t found you, but I tell myself that they will. That I would know it if you were dead. I don’t know it, so it isn’t true. But it’s getting harder, love. And if you don’t come back soon, I’ll have saved so many of these messages, you’ll spend half a semester just catching up to me.”
Except, she thought, there wouldn’t be semesters. Or poetry courses. Or any of the things that had made her life hers before the rocks fell. And then, almost as if he was there, Arjun’s dissenting voice murmured in her mind, There will always be poetry.
“I love you,” she said to the hand terminal. “I will always love you. Even…” She hadn’t said it before. Hadn’t let herself think it. There was a first time for everything. A last time too. “Even if you’re not here.”
She stopped recording, repaired the damage her tears had done to the makeup, and lowered her head like an actor preparing to take the stage. When she lifted her eyes again, they were harder. She made the connection request to Said, and he answered immediately. He’d been waiting.
“Good morning, Madam Secretary,” he said.
“Cut the bullshit. What fresh hell are we facing today?”
“You have a meeting with Gorman Le from the scientific service in half an hour. Then breakfast with Prime Minister Smith. An interview with Karol Stepanov of the Eastern Economic Strategic Report, and then the meeting with the Strategy and Response Committee. That will last until lunch, ma’am.”
“Stepanov. He was the one who got the Cigdem Toker Award three years ago for the piece on Dashiell Moraga?”
“I… I can check, ma’am.”
“For fuck’s sake, Said. Try to keep up here. He is. I’m sure of it. I should talk to his wife before I meet with him,” she said. “Is there a place we can push him to in the afternoon?”
“I can make space, ma’am.”
“Do that. And make sure Smith is a private audience. I’m sick of every fucking thing I do being under a microscope. If I get an ass polyp, I’ll find out about it on Le Monde.”
“If you say so, ma’am.”
“I say so. Send the cart. Let’s get this over with.”
Gorman Le was a thin man with light brown hair salted with white and jade green eyes that Avasarala guessed were cosmetic. She hadn’t known him before she came to Luna. He’d been promoted above his level of preparation when the rocks fell, and it showed in his overly somber bearing and the way he cleared his throat before he spoke.
“The ships that… failed to complete the transition tended to be larger in mass,” he said. “The Oleander-Swift, the Barbatana de Tubarão, and the Harmony all follow that pattern. The Casa Azul doesn’t match that, though.”
The science service had always been a large presence on Luna. It was where the first broad-array telescope had been built, up free from the interference of atmosphere. The first permanent moon base had been equally divided between military posturing and research. But the generations that had risen and fallen since then had left the Luna science service behind, pressing out to the places where the action really was: Ganymede, Titan, Iapetus. God help them all, Phoebe. It left the Luna-based service office hardly more than admin offices and children’s science-fair projects. The meeting room they were in was gray-green with wall screens left cloudy by years of fine abrasion and fake leather chairs.
“I’m hearing you say there’s no consistent pattern,” Avasarala said.
Gorman Le pressed his jaw tight and flapped his hands in frustration. “There are patterns. There are any number of patterns. They all had drives built within a twenty-month window. They were all using reaction mass harvested from Saturn. They all went missing in high-traffic periods. They all had the sequence ‘four-five-two-one’ in their long-form registry codes. With this little to go on, I can find as many patterns as you want that match all the missing ships. But which one matters? No, I can’t tell you that.”
“Any ships with four-five-two-one in the registry code make it through?”
Gorman Le made a small huffing sound, like an angry hamster, then looked down and blushed. “The Jaquenetta, registered out of Ganymede. It went through between the Oleander-Swift and the Harmony. Reported back from Walton with no trouble.”