As they started the burn for Sol ring at half a g instead of the usual third, Naomi sighed. At first, he thought her mind was on the same things as his.
“Too many fucking ships going through the rings,” she said. “And here we are, not exactly leading by example.”
He looked at the tactical. She was right, of course. Just in the time they’d been at a relative stop so that she could read through the data, ten more ships had passed through gates, burning on one errand or another that someone decided was worth the risk. Or didn’t understand that there was a risk. Or didn’t care.
“You saw there was another event?” Naomi asked. “There was a message from Okoye. It happened in Gedara system.”
“How many does that make?”
“Twenty? Something like that.”
Alex, above them, burst into a little run of melody. Something bright and jazzy, and as full as springtime. It was like listening to a message from a different universe.
“She’ll figure it out,” Naomi said, answering Jim’s silence. “If anyone can, she will.”
As they dove down toward the fluttering interference surface that was the gateway to Sol, a fast transit ship burst through the Laconia gate behind them, flipped, and started a punishing maneuvering burn. Jim watched them, waiting for the tightbeam demanding their surrender. It didn’t come.
“Looks like we skipped out at just the right time,” Naomi said.
“Another near miss,” Jim said. “Don’t know how many more of those we’re going to get.”
They passed through the Sol gate before they could see where the fast transport was headed.
Interlude: The Dreamer
The dreamer dreams, and her dream carries her and hers flowing backward into a time before minds. Like grandmothers telling the stories their grandmothers told about their grandmothers before them, she falls gently and forever into black oceans the size of everything. The other two are and aren’t and are again, with her and within her like humming to the memory of songs she never quite forgot. She broadens like a sunbird spreading its wings to catch the warming light, but there is no sun and no light—not yet—and the cold darkness is wide and comforting as a bed.
And she knows things.
Once and gone so far away no one was there to think it, the it was like this: Down was the hardness of heat, and up was the hardness of cold, and between those two implacabilities was the universe. The dreamer dreams the currents of flow and force, and her blood is the ocean’s blood. Her salt is the ocean’s salt. With a hand as wide as continents and softer than her skin, she caresses the burning heat below her and the soothing cool above. Long eons, and nothing is alive until something is. Maybe many things are, but the dream is a middle dream, and she dreams the middle because the path that crooks her swimmingly on begins there, but slowly slowly slow.
The dreamer drifts and the others drift with her, and more now: little bulbs of pastness around her and within, drifting on the same flow that she is and that she is. Two touch and become one; one thins itself into two and two and two and two. She watches the languid, lightless stuttering in the blessed cold as the grandmothers whisper that here is the birth of lust. Here, the puppy-wise gambol of making for the joy of making, with nothing to make of but from self more self.
The dreamer forgets, and is the slowness. She reaches over timelessness and invisibilities, thirsty for something richer than water. Thimble feasts rise from below and sate her for decades, and she dreams that she is dreaming, safe inside the eternal flow. Her hand reaches up to her heel, fingertips stretching ahead to brush her toes. She is a child made of saltwater bubbles, and one of the others says so, like cells? but the words are another place and she is voluptuous now, outside all language.
There is no light—not yet—but there is heat far far below, stuttering and buzzing and raging. It boils up the strange taste of stones that draws her and drives her away and becomes her. Above, the cold where nothing flows, the endless curving wall around the universe. And the ripple, now the always-ripple of a flow inside the flow that only some things feel. A handhold in the waters, a something made from nothing that she shimmies wrigglingly along. She presses herself against it, and lusty, she improvises. The little bulbs of pastness complicate and reach, one for another. And for the first time in all of time, she is tired.
Watch watch watch, the grandmothers whisper. Feel that one that falls, slippingly down too far into the heat and riot; that mindless genius. This is important, they say, and the dreamer draws herself down too and others how many with her sink. The bubble rises, full of thrum and fever and ill, and when it cools, it is butterscotch on the tongue and a billion insects choiring joyful in the summer night. It is a thousand new toys wrapped in gauze and ribbon. It is coffee and candy and the first awkward kiss, the almost-almost-almost shuddering against the skin. And she knows she will go again, that she who is a child of bubbles will send herself away again to be burned and then cherish her blisters. She longs to be made strange by the hotness and the hurt.
This is how it was when we were girls, the grandmothers say, and the dreamer dreams that she understands.
That’s enough, someone says. All right, people. By the numbers and by the book.
Chapter Eight: Elvi
Fayez, floating at her private desk, scrolled through the notes. Whenever he was confused or skeptical, a little line appeared between his eyebrows. “So does this make any fucking sense to you? Because I’m baffled.”
The notes had the scans of Cara’s brain and body and the ones of the BFE, but the important part for Elvi was the interview and subject report with Cara. It had taken them hours to complete, Elvi asking questions and Cara answering verbally or writing out her reply, and while it was the least objective thing in the report, it was also the thing that excited her most.
“It does. I mean, I think it does,” Elvi said, and paused. “I have some ideas.”
He shut down the window and turned his attention to her. “Maybe you better tell me, then. Because I don’t know what I’m looking at here.”
She gathered her thoughts. Exobiology hadn’t been Elvi’s first field of concentration. Back in the dim and ancient times that were really just a few wild and change-filled decades before, she’d gone to Sejong World College because it had the best medical genetics program that she could afford. When she was being honest with herself, it wasn’t even that she loved medical genetics all that much. When she was fifteen, she’d seen Amalie ud-Daula play a medical geneticist in Handful of Rain, and she spent the next year trying to get her hair to look the same. She never really managed. The weird alchemy of adolescent imprinting transformed her unconsidered identification with an entertainment feed actor into an interest in how strands of DNA turned into pathologies.
The idea of a flaw as tiny as a missed base pair translating itself into a slightly different curve on a protein and then into a leaking heart valve or a nonfunctional eye was compelling and creepy in more or less equal degrees. She thought that it was her passion, and she’d followed it with the dedication of a woman who believed she was on the path the universe wanted for her.