“A train car?”
“I make wooden toys. Mostly trains. Some trucks and things. I did it on Outpost from time to time—the children loved it, but my time was mostly taken—well, you know.”
“Your children?” I asked, though I knew it was the wrong question.
“No. I never…”
“Neither did I.”
“Ah, well,” he said gravely.
I fiddled with the train car, running it back and forth along my hand. “The wheels are really lovely.”
“Thank you. Do you want to see how I made them?”
I thought about it. “Why not?”
So he showed me the lathe on which he shaped the wheels, and their evenness seemed inevitable. Before I knew it, it was late afternoon, and I had carved out the rough shape of a caboose while watching Stephane do the detailing on an engine with far more in the way of scrolls and curlicues than the plain little train car he’d handed me.
“I would say let’s get takeout,” I said, “but they put lamb on their pizzas now, I expect.”
“Mutton pepperoni is surprisingly edible once you’re used to it,” he said. “The spices cover a multitude of sins. I know a place.”
We didn’t have pepperoni at all in New Landing. I don’t know how I could have forgotten it. It was worth the mutton, every bite.
“Do you sell the trains?” I asked when we’d finished the pizza.
“I haven’t tried, not here. I don’t know where I’d start. On Outpost there was always someone who wanted what I’d made and happened to have a bushel of gengineered—er, modified, sorry—plums or a new tea mug or something.”
“I still say gengineered, too,” I said. “We never stopped on New Landing. Well. Maybe they have now.”
“Maybe.”
I tried to make other friends, but the only person I could really talk to was Stephane. He didn’t seem to have other friends, either; at least there was no evidence of them. While I thought of him as the only person I could really talk to, quite often we didn’t talk about ourselves at all. He taught me to sand and carve and shape the wood, and we talked about projects, things we’d done, things we’d like to do. It was easier to come up with things I’d like to do while he was there, and I think the same was true for him.
Elsewhere it was hopeless. The clerks in shops spoke to me in English. They would break off their conversations with each other in French and ask in English if they could help me. When I answered in French they always switched back, but that had never happened to me before, not above once or twice, and now it was all the time. I think they could tell that there was something slightly different about me, and even after a hundred years, “foreign” still means “English” in Quebec.
I think that might have been comforting if they hadn’t meant me, and if their French hadn’t sounded so much more English than mine.
My only fear with Stephane was that he might think I wanted more of our relationship than I did. I have never been any good at romance—perhaps if I had, I’d have formed roots and stayed on New Landing—but we were young enough yet—well, some people were young enough yet until the day they died. But we were strong, healthy, middle-aged people. We could go back to the colonies if we liked; they’d still take us. And if that wasn’t out of the question, surely I couldn’t count on him thinking romance was.
I have always hated it when people fall in love with me. I hate having to give the speeches.
One day we were working together in the shed. It was a glorious day, the kind of bright green things turn after a hard rain. “Come on, we can’t stay in here all day,” Stephane said to me. “Come and get an ice cream.”
“Is it pear ice cream?”
“You like pear ice cream. And it doesn’t have any mutton in it. Come on.”
It was not the same ice cream shop that had been down by the river when I’d left, but it was just as good. I ordered chocolate, which came without pear, and Stephane ordered banana, which was exotic, newly revived just before our return. We sat on a bench and looked out at the St. Lawrence, and the ice cream was good, and the river was lovely. A man was making balloon animals for a passel of children, and the children looked just right, because children had always looked rumpled. One of them dropped a giraffe by the bench as she dashed past in hot pursuit of her brother.
I picked up the balloon giraffe the child had left behind. It felt like it had been dipped in syrup, but my fingers came away clean.
“It’s not nitrile,” said Stephane.
“What is it?”
“Some other flexible polymer. I don’t know. But people started getting nitrile allergies, so they replaced it the way they replaced latex before we were born. Colony kids have a lot more environmental stimulus. Not so many allergies.”
I put the balloon giraffe down again, carefully. It looked just like a balloon animal ought, lumpy and lopsided. But it was sticky.
“If everything was different, I don’t think I would have minded as much,” I said.
“You would have,” said Stephane.
“Do you think so?”
“You are perpetually minding just a little,” he said. “If it was more you’d be a malcontent.”
“Oh, thank you very much!”
“And if it was less you’d never have gone to New Landing in the first place.”
I thought about it. Perhaps he was right. I tried to remember how I’d felt when I lived in Montreal before, but I was so young then. It was mostly the feeling of being a teenager that stuck with me, and that was not the difference. So I thought about my time on New Landing. I hadn’t stayed. The others had. But Stephane hadn’t stayed on Outpost, either.
“The stars actually were closer then,” I said out loud. “It’s not that I’m saying I think they were or it felt like they were. We’re in an expansionary universe. The stars were actually closer then.”
“On the average,” said Stephane. “Galactic spirals are, by definition, not linear places. Some of the stars are closer now.”
“I suppose that’s something.”
“I think it is.”
We looked out at the canal together. It felt like a date, except that I had no desire to be on a date with Stephane. I was relieved when he grinned sidelong at me and said, “Well. Want to have another go with the lathe?”
I was getting better at it. My whorls and curlicues were not nearly as good as Stephane’s for decorating the fancy trains, but I could make every piece of the plain ones myself now, wheels and axles and the lot, and do it just as well as he did. I also roughed out the carving on the fancier work so that he had less to do, although he never minded.
It was lovely, but it wasn’t a life. Not a whole one. Not enough of one.
“Mireille, I have to talk to you,” said Stephane one day, and I set down the chisel and thought, oh, here it comes.
“All right,” I said.
“I can’t stay here.”
“What do… where are you going? Back to Outpost?”
“It’ll be just the same on Outpost. I’ll have been gone so long.”
I had thought of that, too. Whenever I tried to fantasize about going home to New Landing, I knew that relativity had beaten me, and it wouldn’t be home any more at all.
“Where, then?”
“One of the new ones. I had hoped you’d come with me.”
“Me?”
“You’re my friend.”
I let out a long breath. It was the right thing to say. “I want to be your friend.”
“I know it, Mireille.”
“I don’t know what else I want, though. I don’t think I want to terraform full-time any more.” I chewed on my lip and thought about it.
“No, we did that. We could have a little farm each,” he said.
“You could have a farm,” I said firmly. “I want an orchard.”