Qory and I had been together pretty much my whole life. We’d been traded to Grace when I was seven. My life before that was a dream filled with bright colors and the tinkle of music and smiling grown-ups and the sharp knees and grabby hands of toddlers. That would’ve been the crèche. The first specific person I can remember was my big brother Qory. Then we were on the Resolute, an androgyne supply ship whom I never liked. It seemed we were only with them a week or so, although Qory says it was eight months. Then came the trade to Grace to join Mom and Dad and Uncle Feero on their decades-long survey mission.
The two things I remembered most about Uncle Feero were his beard and that he died when I was nine, which was sad, although Mom said he was 186 years old. His beard was white and it tickled when he hugged me. So, twelve years on Grace. After Uncle Feero, nothing much had changed with our family except that Qory had stopped being my bossy big brother and had become my bratty little sister.
I still loved her though, especially now that she was all I had.
McDog hopped from his shelf to the desktop, then launched himself onto my chest. Qory giggled when he breathed his flowery breath into my nose. She seemed to enjoy playing with the toys she’d given me more than the ones I’d given her.
“Like me and you, dear brother.” She repeated herself, as if I were as cloudy as Dad. “A pair.”
I swatted McDog away. “I’m going for a roll.” He skittered across the deck on his belly, then picked himself up and climbed onto Qory’s lap. “Don’t crash the ship while I’m out.”
I designed the roller myself back when we were in the mangle, but I’d only been able to use it since we’d emerged into real space. I had to keep it in one of the empty cargo holds. A transparent sphere three meters in diameter, it was too big to fit though the crew airlock in our habitat. Grace had warned me about this before she fabbed it. At the time, I told her I didn’t care. I did mind now, since I had to roll in it about three hundred meters up the cargo passageway and then wait twenty-three minutes for her to evacuate air from the loading bay. The bay was a huge space and the delay was annoying.
But it’s not like there was anywhere I needed to be.
I opened the roller’s hatch, climbed through, and started the systems check. Eight electromagnetic bands wrapped around the skin of the roller, up and down, left and right, each twenty centimeters wide. When charged they held the roller to the hull and provided resistance for the workout. I switched each one on and off, feeling the pull of the magnets on the EM filaments woven into my clingy. I activated the life-support module that floated above the running pad; it snuffled and breathed warm re-oxygenated air down at me. A few seconds later, I heard the hum of the CO2 scrubbers. When I closed the hatch, all the lights on the control screen went green.
“Good to go,” I said to Grace. “Any news from Mercy?”
“Have a good roll,” she said.
I dialed the magnets up so I’d burn twelve hundred kilojoules per hour, an easy pace. The running pad shushed around the interior as I jogged and the roller bowled up the loading bay’s ramp onto the hull and into space. Normally I played my music during workouts—wormhowl or book or maybe something classical. I’d been binging on Li’s post-human operas. But I decided to go mindful this time and just focus on the stars and my breathing.
Even here at the far edge of Kenstraw system, the star swarm stretched in every direction, blue pinpricks and yellow specks and orange sprinkles and red dots, enough to cloud the imagination with their brilliant profusion. I asked Grace where the Kenstraw binaries were, but she said Mercy blocked my view.
Grace’s sister was a lumpy, dark chain that curved across my sky. I thought I could pick out the module with the swimming pool and wondered if Dad had gone swimming yet. Did he even realize that he had changed ships? If Mercy put him in the right kinds of stories, he might never know. I didn’t worry so much about Mom; she’d be all right no matter what happened. Bots weren’t as fragile as humans.
Did they miss me as much as I missed them? How could I not have known how much Dad and Mom meant to me? I got so lost thinking of them as I rolled along that I strayed too close to a sensor mast, and one of the latitudinal magnetic bands made the roller lurch toward it. I stumbled, flailed, and had to push against the side of the roller to right myself.
That made Grace check in but I reported that I was fine.
I decided to concentrate on the view. I tried that technique that Qory taught me to improve my attention. You stare at a specific star to memorize its position, then turn away for a three-count and then look back and try to find it. I was getting better at this, but it was still hard. There were so many stars, more than even Grace could count.
She’d joked once that since one of the goals of the infosphere was to count all the stars, she might have to live forever to get it done. Not that funny, but what do you expect from a starship’s intelligence? When Qory had said that nothing lives forever, Grace had told her to grow up.
Grace was more than a thousand years old, according to Qory. Which was hard to imagine, but then Qory was two hundred and something. I forgot how old Mom was. Old.
Everyone was older than I was. I mean, Dad and I were almost contemporaries and he was what? A hundred and twenty? A hundred forty? But he was wearing out, which was probably why the starships had agreed to trade him.
What would I be like a hundred-some years from now?
Humans. It wasn’t fair, being us.
“Grace,” I said, “what’s my heart rate?”
“One hundred and forty-one beats per minute. That’s your aerobic zone, seventy-eight percent of your max rate. To reach your anaerobic level, you need to be at about one hundred sixty bpm.”
“That’s okay. I can’t think and roll that fast.” I listened to my breath chuff. “How old is Mercy?” I said.
“Mercy and I were activated one thousand one hundred and eight years ago.”
And there had been stars for twelve billion years. Was I seeing any of those?
I thought Grace would ask why I wanted to know about her sister. That’s what she would have done before Mercy showed up. Grace was usually nosy about why I was thinking what I was thinking. But recently she’d just responded to my questions with basic answers. No follow-up. Like some kind of retro computer in one of those dull historicals. My guess was that she was too busy arguing with her sister about our new crew.
Maybe that wasn’t so bad, getting her off my shoulder.
Gave me a little privacy.
Time to think.
I turned away, one, two three, then looked back. The star I’d been fixed on was in a group that looked like a tilted face. I’d made up my very own constellation: two eyes, one orangey and one big and white, like the face was winking. Four stars curving in a crooked smile. The nose star was almost green. Dad always claimed he could see green stars, although Qory said there was no such thing. I squinted.
Maybe the nose star was blue.
Was I having such strange thoughts because I didn’t have my music on? “Grace, are any of the stars out here green?”
“Yes, but they don’t look green.”
“Why?”
“All stars emit radiation across a broad range of wavelengths,” she said, “which peak at one color on a bell curve, depending on surface temperature. Some peak at a wavelength that we define as green. Earth’s star, for example, peaks at yellow-green. But because green is right in the middle of the visible spectrum, all the other colors being emitted blend together as white to the human eye.”