Even so, it was almost an hour before he thought to check Nadima’s public social profile and see that, after two centuries and with no other warning, he had been divorced.
The Carrath stones themselves vary in size, but maintain a common ratio of 1 to 1.7 to 4. The channels carved in them show markings consistent with a drill, and flakes of steel suggest that this carving was done with something not dissimilar from our own technology. Some people have posited that the stonemakers are a separate branch of humanity, somehow displaced from Earth before the diaspora, and following a parallel track of technological development. It is an intriguing thought, but unfalsifiable. Florid speculation follows the stones, and I have had some flights of fancy myself. It’s a hazard of the occupation.
Whether the stones were created in situ or brought to the sites in which we found them is another mystery. The first stone, discovered on Carrath-3, gave the stones their name, but analysis shows that it was not the oldest of the artifacts. It was only the first we happened upon. If the stonemakers were present in these disparate systems, why do we find no other artifacts or structures in common among these sites? If the patterns or their field effects have an origin outside the systems, how did they arrive there if not by slipdrive? And why does the stone appear to be local to the systems? What carved them, and where did the carvers go?
We have only the artifacts themselves to guide us. Which brings me to the central problem of my research, and with all research into them.
Context.
The Forger into Darkness was a rated ship with room on board for seventy people, a small warehouse for their supplies, the slipdrive chamber and housing, and an interior design of cream, pale blue, and an orange that should have been hideous, but somehow managed to seem cheerful. The ship sat in its gate high above the atmosphere, waiting for the last of its passengers to arrive.
Peros paced the pilot’s quarters. By regulation, he could have been downgraded to a single now that he was unaccompanied by a spouse or spouses, but Nadima had left with so little time before the departure that the change would have been more trouble than it was worth. Instead, the other sink in the bathroom went unused. The other half of the bed stood witness by its emptiness. The other closet held nothing but the place where her dresses and gowns, tunics and trousers and undergarments would have been.
Sitting on the desk was the homunculus of Mohommed, their first son. The boy himself—a man almost a hundred and seventy years old, but still in Peros’s mind a boy—was on a habitable moon of Ergregos-7. They were a hundred lightyears apart, but the slip made it as if his son were in the room.
“Did she speak to you?”
“Yes,” Mohommed said.
“Were you able to talk sense into her?”
The homunculus lifted its hands in a gesture Peros recognized. Nadima had made it when she was exasperated, and little Mohommed had learned it and kept it in the patterns of his brain for the fifteen decades since he had left their home to start his own life. The boy likely didn’t know the motion wasn’t his own or where he’d learned it.
“She seems happy,” Mohommed said.
Peros didn’t curse, but his growl made if feel as if he had. “Is she with another man?”
The homunculus leaned forward. “She is on a walking tour of Kellar Complex on Rasia-3 with Fatima Delgado and Abby Haal. I don’t think she has some secret lover, Papa.”
“Then why?” Peros snapped.
The homunculus shrugged. When Mohommed spoke, his voice was weary. “I haven’t lived with her in a century and a half. You woke up beside her every day. You know her better than I do.”
An alert chimed. Peros was expected at the captain’s table for dinner with the VIPs for the expedition. The image of Nadima’s empty chair beside him intruded into his mind, a wave of black dread flowing behind it.
“I have to go,” he said. “Keep at her. Find out what you can.”
“Papa, this isn’t going to help.”
“I just want to understand.”
“Well, you sound angry.”
“I am angry. I can be angry and understand. I can do both.”
“If you say so. Be well.”
The homunculus went still and lost Mohommed’s shape and features. Peros let himself curse, now that he was alone, and threw himself into his dress uniform with a banked violence. The man who looked back out at him from the mirror looked young and fierce. Not at all like a man with a wound in his heart. It didn’t look like him at all.
The table was round with room for a full dozen settings. The centerpiece was a kinetic sculpture of wirework and thin membrane that remade itself in iridescent dragonfly-wing patterns every few seconds. The captain, a hard-faced woman from Gellia-3, was one he had worked with before and liked well enough. She didn’t ask after Nadima, so he assumed she knew. The chair that would have been his wife’s if he still had one was occupied by a pleasant, slightly horse-faced woman.
“New regen?” she said as she passed the olive oil.
It took Peros a moment to understand what she’d said, as lost as he was in himself. His smile was, he hoped, polite.
“Yes. Just before I came here.”
“The first few weeks after a regen, I feel like I’m eighteen again. Terribly distracting. Mine’s three years in, and I still feel like I’m getting used to it some days.” She held out her hand. “Yva Brooks. I’m research lead.”
“Peros Williamson. Pilot,” he said. He meant to shake her hand, but she didn’t move when his fingers clasped hers, so they only sat there, hand in motionless hand, until she let him go.
“I understand I was a last-moment fill-in. I hope your wife isn’t ill?”
“I wouldn’t know. She’s divorced me,” he said, and realized it was the first time he’d said the word aloud. The first time he’d confessed his new status as if it were truly done, and not merely a moment’s aberration on Nadima’s part.
“Ah, I’m very sorry,” Yva said. “Was it a long marriage?”
“Almost two centuries,” Peros said, astonished by how conversationally it came out.
“That’s an impressive run,” Yva said, and took a sip from her water glass. “I’ve never been much for long-term relationships. The alternative can get lonely, that’s true, but I’ve always found ways to cope.”
She smiled at him in a way that didn’t mean anything, unless he wanted it to. But if he wanted it to, it did. Peros’ heart was suddenly racing, and he felt a blush rising under his newly darkened skin. And rage. He was single. Nadima had left him. She had no grounds to object to his behavior, whatever it was.
“I would be grateful,” he said carefully, “for any advice you can share.”
Imagine for a moment that you are in a pub with a group of people who know each other well. People who have been interacting with each other for a very long time. Imagine one of them makes a reference to some event that they shared, but that you did not. Will that be comprehensible to you? Will it not? The difference is the context. If they say “Remember the night when Toby got so drunk he tried to go home with Mira?” and you know both Toby and Mira and why they would be a poor sexual match—close consanguinity, for example—you will be in a position to understand the scenario despite not having shared the experience. If you do not, you still have enough shared context of what it is to be in a pub, what it is to be drunk, and what sorts of things inspire hilarity in one’s friends after the fact to understand that the pairing was somehow inappropriate.