“Like some of our politicians,” he muttered.
“Politicians?” Aditi asked. Then, before Jordan could reply, she said, “Oh, you mean your leaders of government.”
“Yes,” Jordan said. Changing the subject, he asked, “The weather. Do you ever have serious storms? Storms strong enough to damage the crops?”
Aditi looked at him quizzically for a few heartbeats, as if she were searching her memory for the right answer. At last she replied, “Severe storms are very rare at this latitude. If one develops, we extend the energy shield to protect the fields.”
“I see.”
Aditi led him out into the farm. Jordan felt a tingle flicker through him as they stepped from the paved walkway onto the bare ground.
“We’re outside the energy dome now, aren’t we?” he said.
Aditi nodded. “Yes. Out in the open.”
Squinting up at the sun, Jordan saw Sirius glowing a hot bluish white. And a smaller blaze of light not far from it. The Pup, he realized. Sirius’s white dwarf companion.
“It must seem strange to you,” Aditi said, “to see two suns in the sky.”
“Everything here is strange,” said Jordan. “Yet somehow … familiar.”
They walked down the row of what looked to Jordan like newly sprouted cabbage. The sky was dotted with puffy white clouds. The earth at his feet looked soft, warm. He saw a beetle scurrying between sprouts.
“How old are you?” Aditi asked.
Surprised, he replied, “Fifty-two, if you must know.”
“Oh! Was I impolite?”
“Only a little.”
“I became one year old sixty-seven days ago,” she said.
“One?”
Aditi laughed at his consternation. “Our orbit around Sirius takes thirty of your years.”
“Oh. Of course.”
Jordan looked in the direction they were walking. The cultivated fields seemed to end well short of the wooded hills that rose before them. Beyond the hills, craggy mountains rose, green with trees almost to their rocky crests. Darker clouds were building up above them.
“Our calendar is different from yours,” Aditi said. “We have no moon, so we don’t count months the way you do.”
Jordan replied, “That’s a shame. No beautiful moonlit nights.”
“When the Pup swings in its orbit farther away from Sirius we have practically no nights at all. Just a sort of dim twilight.”
“Moonlight can be very romantic,” said Jordan.
“‘The orbéd maiden, with white fire laden, whom mortals call the Moon,’” Aditi quoted.
“You know Shelley?”
“I love his poetry.”
“You know so much about us,” Jordan said, “and I know so little about you.”
“We’ve been studying your world for a long time. More than nine years.” Then she added, “Our years.”
“Nearly three hundred Earth years. That goes back to before we invented radio.”
Aditi nodded.
“Did you know that we existed … the human race, I mean?”
“We saw that your world seemed to be a duplicate of ours,” she said.
“So naturally you studied it.”
“Naturally.”
“Yet you never developed space flight? No satellites, no astronauts?”
Aditi seemed to think about his question for a few heartbeats. Then, “There are no other planets in our system. And the other stars are so far away.”
“So you were born here, on this planet?”
“I’ve lived here all my life,” she replied, looking directly into his eyes. “I’ve never been anywhere else.”
Jordan realized her eyes were very beautiful, a soft delightful brown.
“And Adri and all the others,” Jordan heard himself asking, almost like a prosecutor questioning a witness, “they were born here too? They didn’t come from another planet, another star system?”
She shook her head. “No. How could they?”
“I … I was just curious,” he stammered.
She glanced up at the sky and Jordan looked up too. The clouds over the mountains were thickening.
“We’d better go back,” Aditi said. “It looks like it’s going to rain.”
Jordan took her arm and pulled her to him and kissed her. Aditi looked surprised, startled even, her eyes wide and searching.
Then fat drops of rain began to spatter around them and, laughing like children, hand in hand, they ran back toward the shelter of the city’s energy dome.
Guilt and Fear
Jordan spent the next two days almost constantly with Aditi. For the first time that he could remember, he put aside his duties and left it to Brandon to deal with the people on the ship while he spent every waking moment with the woman he found to be so delightful, so fascinating.
Fully human, he found himself thinking. I wonder how fully human she really is.
And Aditi seemed to enjoy his company. She showed him every corner of the city, and they took long walks out into the countryside.
He found himself unburdening his soul about Miriam.
“It was all my fault,” he confessed one afternoon, as they sat on the grass beneath a spreading shade tree. “I was burning to stop the fighting in Kashmir.”
“You wanted to prevent more people being killed in the war,” Aditi said, very seriously. “Your motives were noble.”
“My motives were very noble,” Jordan answered bitterly. “I saw visions of the Nobel Peace Prize before my eyes.”
“That wasn’t your real motivation,” she said.
“Wasn’t it?” Jordan shook his head at the memories. “Whatever, I dragged Miriam into that hellhole with me, and it killed her.”
“The monsters who used biological weapons killed her. Not you.”
Leaning his head against the rough bark of the tree, Jordan said, “Yes, perhaps so. But I brought her there. I knew it would be dangerous, but I brought her there anyway. I should have protected her, cared for her. Instead…”
He saw that she was waiting for more, her gentle brown eyes focused on him, patiently waiting for him to finish the story.
“I loved her so much,” Jordan choked out. “And she loved me. That was the wonder of it. She loved me. Loved me so much she let me lead her to her death.”
Aditi leaned toward him and patted his tear-streaked cheek.
“The pain,” he moaned. “Those last days … so terrible. I was so helpless … there was nothing I could do.”
“Jordan,” she whispered, her lips close enough to brush his cheek, “you are a good man. A very lovable man. Please don’t be sad. Don’t dwell on the past. Think of the future. Think of what you can accomplish.”
He took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded once again. “We can’t undo the past. But does it ever let go of you?”
“In time it will. In time.”
Jordan’s pocketphone chirped. He flinched at the interruption, thinking that he’d ignore it. Whatever it is, it can wait, he told himself.
Yet he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled the damned phone out and flipped it open.
Brandon’s face appeared on the little screen.
“Time to get back to work, Jordy,” his brother said, a crooked grin on his handsome face. “Hazzard’s bringing the first group down in an hour.”
Time to get back to work, Jordan repeated silently. He looked up at Aditi, who held her hand out to him. Together, they got to their feet and headed back to the city.
Jordan, Brandon, and Adri walked through the cool forest to the glade where Thornberry would set up the expedition’s prime base. To his surprise, Jordan saw that both rocketplanes that had landed there days earlier were gone.