Shai-shanreached her stage one altitude. Wings reconfigured themselves. Hydraulics whined. And Shai-shankept going.
No word for friend among atevi, no word for love… no word for man’chi among humans, no word for aishi, either.
But maybe both species were wise enough now in dealing with one another.
Maybe this generation figured out how to treat the changes that ran amok through everything they touched.
Maybe kids like Cajeiri would figure out how to deal with situations that shoved biologically different instincts up against one another in what had been, once before this, a dangerous, dangerous intimacy.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Ginny said to him.
And what was he thinking? That atevi were clearly feeling stressed? That the aiji, who ordinarily backed every change proposed to him, held a ceremony in tribute to the old ways?
“The ceremony,” he said. “Just before I took off. Whole reason for the trip down, it seems. Pace of change. Atevi want to catch their balance. Remember the traditional things.”
“Maybe Mospheirashould have a ceremony like that.”
Ginny surprised him with that sentiment. She wasn’t the philosophical sort.
“Why so?”
“Kids,” Ginny said. “ Kids. This generation thinks it’s all a given.”
“My generation?”
Ginny gave one of those rare laughs. “There’s kids tall as I am who were bornduring your tenure, paidhi-aiji. You’ve been too busy way too long. There are kids just about to vote who think there’ve alwaysbeen jobs in space, who think the War of the Landing is a dull chapter in a big book.”
“That’s scary.”
“Oh, damn right it’s scary.”
Appalling thought. Six years since he’d been on Mospheira. The better part of a decade. And she was right. A ten-year-old kid who didn’t care that much about history so easily became a twenty-year-old who didn’t think it was important, either.
“That’s incredible,” he said.
“Kids think there’ll always be a new invention every week. That there’s a magic fix for every problem.”
“That’s good and bad,” he said. “Bad, if they think someone else is always going to solve it. I’m sorry—I plan to retire someday and leave the mess to them. I expect them to do their homework.”
“Oh, but you haven’t been there. We Mospheirans—we do love our holidays. We love our leisure time. We’re too damn convinced it’s all going to work, so if we choose as a nation not to have aeronautics, it doesn’t matter. We need a new swimming center in Jackson. If we choose not to develop our own security, it doesn’t matter. The threat from space, that’s always been there. Just ask any sixteen-year-old.”
“Damn scary.”
Shai-shanroared on, climbing, still climbing, headed for that queasy moment when, far above the earth, perilously riding her momentum and betting their lives in the process—she would shut down one set of engines, switch on another, and transit to space.
“And damn labor,” Ginny said. “And damn unions. Theydon’t think the crisis is that urgent either. The aliens out there aren’t coming tomorrow. They might never come. What does the average factory worker care, except they want their televisions, their beach-front homes, their boats and their retirement plans?”
Atevi and humans were reaching a kind of engine-switchover, too: that was what Tabini’s ceremony said. That was what Mospheirans weren’tcommemorating. Having gone as far as they could on the old arrangement of separatism, atevi were working directly with humans again, this time in orbit, where it made no sense to build two segregated space stations. On mutually uncommon ground, isolated from everything familiar and historically contested, they tried to adapt.
And that meant the carefully channeled interface was flung wide open, everyone exposed to the same stresses that had brought them to war before. Now with more lethal weapons, more power at their disposal—but with strangers supposedly looming on the horizon, strangers with a grudge, a grievance, or pure native aggression: no one was sure, least of all the human crew of Phoenix, who had seen their handiwork—they waited desperately to be invaded, and their children lost faith that the invaders would come.
The cultural differences, the biological differences that had led atevi to attack the early settlers were continually with them… now known and laughed at, on both sides, but those differences still tweaked live nerves in moments of frustration.
A worker, human or atevi, who couldn’t overcome his own biologically-generated anger and laugh at a situation, had to ship out—he got a quit-bonus for his honesty, but all the same, he had to ship out.
And thus far, years into the project, they’d only had to ship out—what, fourteen, fifteen, out of hundreds? Not too bad a record… thus far. The two species had changed their cultures to fit—somewhat.
They’d developed a stationside culture of interspecies jokes, that was one thing—some bawdy and some stupid. Mospheiran experts had wanted to silence them, but atevi had let them run, and the ship humans had contributed the framework and Mospheirans took to it. A human team and an atevi team had a contest, one such joke began…
There was a whole series of those, that usefully illustrated species differences, cultural differences, and made two species laugh. That was the good news. No one had gotten mad. That was the other good news.
We have to get alonghad become the common sentiment between humans and atevi aloft, at least.
Aloft, and being over sixteen, they still believed in the invaders.
They just tended to forget about them, for long, long stretches in which the company contests or the prospect of a machimi play took precedence.
The flight, bumpy for a while, smoothed out. The vodka and fruit juice arrived. Bren sipped it and drew a long, long breath. The screen showed nothing but darkening blue ahead of them.
Chapter 3
The vodka was down to icemelt, they were on their way in deep vacuum, and take-off nerves were quieter. Banichi and Jago, in the seats opposite, were reading manuals.
With Ginny, there was at least a wealth of small talk—island gossip, some of it hilarious, some of it union spats, political maneuvers that only elevated Bren’s blood pressure and tempted him to have a second vodka.
But he didn’t have to go to the island and deal with the problems, these days, and given the rare opportunity of a trip to earth, he didn’t go there, not even with family to consider. He left island politics to Ginny and Shawn and all the brave souls who had no cultural choice.
And it didn’t damned well matter to the space effort if the island politicked about the shuttle port, and took forever getting its own shuttle off the ground. Four atevi shuttles were flying—well, count Baushi, which was simply a lift engine for heavy modules: a freighter, a simple freighter, that carried passengers in a small afterthought of a module… a lot like the aircraft arrangement that had once, in simpler days, squeezed the paidhi into the regular island flight, ahead of dried fruit and pottery.
He supposed if he had missed the flight, he might possibly have caught a ride on Baushiin a few days. He tended to discount it as a passenger option, but it was. Using both spaceports, servicing two shuttles at once, one on the early and one on the late phase of mission prep while a third underwent systems-checks and cargo loading, they had a flight newly landed or about to go nearly once a week, with rare exceptions, and if Mospheira ever got it completed, Mospheira was building a runway out beyond Jackson limits to improve their narrow choice of weather.