No one answered. The Return had jumped—another strange expression, as if bypassing a hundred light-years of space was no more than a dance step—shortly after liftoff, three days ago. Since then the ship had been flying toward Terra and Branch had been trying to make contact.
“I don’t understand why no one is answering,” he said for perhaps the hundredth time. But, then, there was so much they didn’t understand about the ship, which operated on forces none of them, neither Worlders nor Terrans, understood. Jane less than the others. The Return was not Terran technology, nor World’s. Jane regarded this gift, made eons ago by an unknown race, as a sort of illathil, but there was no explaining that to any of the Terrans aboard. Jane didn’t try. It was going to be her job to learn their ways, not theirs to learn hers.
She left the bridge. Just outside the door, Private Kandiss was “on duty.” The soldier scared Jane a little—there had been no army on World until the Terrans came with their four soldiers. She had grown used to them, but they had always made her uneasy. Only Lieutenant Brodie had tried to learn World language or customs, and he had stayed behind. Kandiss-kal didn’t smile. His weapons were terrifying and distasteful, in equal measure. But there would be soldiers on Terra, many more soldiers than just this one returning home, and Jane must accept them. Acceptance of the new was the price of what World could learn from Terra.
And the Terrans knew so much more than World! Without their intervention, Jane’s society would have perished. A debt was owed, to the soldiers no less than to the scientists.
She said, “I will be called Jane now, please.” Kandiss nodded and turned away. Like Branch Carter, although for different reasons, Kandiss seldom looked directly at her, or at any of her people.
She found the fifth Terran, Kayla Rhinehart, on the observation deck, watching unmoving stars in the black sky. Jane didn’t like Kayla, who was one day too weepy and the next too excited, both without reason. However, Jane tried to be compassionate because Dr. Patel-kal—Claire!—said that Kayla had a “mental condition.” So did Belok^, but Belok^ was never mean.
“You’re going to love Earth,” Kayla said.
“Tell me about Earth,” Jane said, careful of her tenses. Although that was far easier than in World, since there were fewer tenses: just past, present, and future. Nothing to distinguish tentative, absolute, rotational, or in flux states of being. A simple language, English. Jane had learned it quickly.
Kayla said, “Earth is beautiful. Not dark and drab like World. Blue sky, green grass, cities with buildings that touch the sky!”
World was also beautiful. Jane did not say this. She was here to learn, not argue. “Did you have lived in a city?”
“Yes.” For a moment, Kayla’s face darkened; she was remembering something unpleasant, although Jane knew that Kayla would never say anything unpleasant about Earth. Her face brightened. “New York is the most exciting city in the world! It has Central Park, full of trees—green trees, Jane, not those ugly purple things on World—and flower beds and paths full of humans going exciting places: movies and VR palaces and boxing matches at the Garden. I know you don’t have those on World, being so backward and all.”
“Where did you go in New York City?”
“Oh, everywhere! But you’re missing the point. Earth is beautiful.” She stuck out her lip and glared.
“It sounds wonderful,” Jane said.
“It is! And people there don’t all look alike, because they come from all different countries. Not just one dinky continent, like on World, with everybody the same coppery color you are and with the same black hair. On Earth you can tell people apart.”
Jane said calmly, “Please tell me about the different countries.”
“No point. Everything you could want is in America.”
“Okay.” Jane had discovered that “okay” was a very useful word. It could mean almost anything, even polite disagreement. “Tell me about your favorite of things to do in New York City. You have said there was a place called McDooned?”
“McDonald’s,” Kayla laughed. “But you don’t eat meat, do you?”
“No.”
“Another reason to leave World! You don’t know what you’re missing!”
“We believe—”
“All those primitive beliefs will change once you’ve been here a while. You’ll be astonished at how much you’ll learn.”
“Okay,” Jane said.
Marianne needed a real lab.
The Return was huge. It had been a colony ship, had killed everyone on it, and had returned empty to World, contaminated and overgrown with flora. But, scoured and disinfected, it was the only ship available for the journey back to Earth, incomprehensible ships from long-departed aliens being in short supply. The star-farers had room for ten labs, and adequate equipment for none. Marianne’s “lab” consisted of a microscope, fifty years behind Earth tech, that Ka^graa had brought with him; fifteen smelly leelees in their cages; and a collection of cultures growing the virophage that had neutralized R. sporii on World. Which, on Terra, was now called Kindred. Or had been twenty-eight years ago.
“Hold that animal tighter,” Marianne said irritably to Branch, whom she’d all but dragged from the bridge to assist. “I can’t get the knife in the right spot when it wiggles so much.”
“I’m no longer a lab tech,” Branch said. “I’m the captain of the Return.”
“Only because you’re the only one who can make sense of the ship’s hardware.”
“I can’t make sense of it. I can only use it—a little bit, anyway. God, this thing reeks.” But he held the chittering creature closer while Marianne slid in the knife to sacrifice it.
“Marianne,” Branch said quietly as she laid the leelee out for dissection, “you should wait to do that. We don’t have an unlimited supply of leelees. And you’ll have better equipment on Terra.”
“I need to be doing something. And who knows what we’ll find on Terra?”
Branch said nothing. They had gone over and over this already, with Claire. The other two Terrans aboard, Mason Kandiss and Kayla Rhinehart, had refused to participate in the discussions. Marianne knew that Private Kandiss was too fearful of what might have changed, and Kayla refused to admit the possibility that anything had.
Twenty-eight years. No one had known that taking the alien ship to Kindred would involve time dilation. If she had known, Marianne would not have gone, not even to see Noah one last time.
For Claire, Branch, and Marianne, the discussions had evolved into a morbid game about how much things would have changed while they had been gone. “In the twenty-eight years from 1950 to 1978,” said Marianne, the geneticist, “we decoded the shape of DNA and sequenced an entire microorganism.”
“In the twenty-eight years between 1940 and 1968,” said Claire, the physician, “we got antibiotics, organ transplants, and vaccines for polio, influenza, mumps, and measles.”
“In the twenty-eight years between 1990 and 2018,” said Branch, the hardware wonk, “we got the Web, cell phones, and drones.”
“From 1770 to 1798, the United States was formed and royalist France fell, completely changing the political realities.”
“From 1955 to 2025, the CO2 in the atmosphere went from three hundred and ten parts per million to six hundred.”
“No fair, Branch,” Marianne said, “that’s seventy years, not twenty-eight.”