Ryan looked directly at Marianne.
She interpreted the look as a request to keep up the superficial tone. Ryan had always been as protective of Connie as of a pretty kitten. Had he deliberately chosen a woman so opposite to his mother because Marianne had always put her work front and center? Had Ryan resented her for that as much as Noah had?
Pushing aside these disturbing thoughts, she chatted about the aliens. Connie asked her to describe them, their clothes, her life there. Did she have her own room? Had she been able to decorate it? Where did the humans eat?
“We’re all humans, Terrans and Denebs,” Marianne said.
“Of course,” Connie said, smiling brilliantly. “Is the food good?”
Talking, talking, talking, but not one question about her work. Nor about the spore cloud, progress toward a vaccine, anything to indicate the size and terror of the coming catastrophe. Ryan did ask about the Embassy, but only polite questions about its least important aspects: how big it was, how it was laid out, what was the routine. Safe topics.
Just before a sense of unreality overwhelmed Marianne, Ryan’s cell rang, and the ringing woke the baby, who promptly threw up all over Marianne.
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Connie said. “Here, give him to me!”
Ryan, making gestures of apology, took his cell into the kitchen and closed the door. Connie reached for a box of Wet Ones and began to wipe Jason’s face. She said, “The bathroom is upstairs to the left, Marianne. If you need to, I can loan you something else to wear.”
“It would have to be one of your maternity dresses,” Marianne said. It came out more sour than she’d intended.
She went upstairs and cleaned baby vomit off her shirt and jeans with a wet towel. The bathroom was decorated in a seaside motif, with hand towels embroidered with sailboats, soap shaped like shells, blue walls painted with green waves and smiling dolphins. On top of the toilet tank, a crocheted cylinder decorated like a buoy held a spare roll of toilet paper.
Keeping chaos at bay with cute domesticity. Good plan. And then: Stop it, Marianne.
Using the toilet, she leafed idly through magazines stacked in a rustic basket. Good Housekeeping, Time, a Macy’s catalog. She pulled out a loose paper with full-color drawings:
Purple loosestrife leaves are downy with smooth edges. Although usually arranged opposite each other in pairs, which alternate down the stalk at ninety-degree angles, the leaves may sometimes appear in groups of three. The leaves lack teeth. The flowers, which appear in mid- to late summer, form a showy spike of rose-purple, each with five to seven petals. The stem is stiff, four-sided, and may appear woody at the base of larger plants, which can reach ten feet tall. Average height is four feet. Purple loosestrife can be distinguished from the native winged loosestrife (Lythrum alatum), which it most closely resembles, by its generally larger size, opposite leaves, and more closely placed flowers. It may also be confused with blue vervain (pictured below), which has…
At the bottom of the page, someone—presumably Ryan—had hand-drawn in purple ink three stylized versions of a loosestrife spike, then circled one. To Marianne it looked like a violet rocket ship unaccountably sprouting leaves.
Downstairs, Jason had been cleaned up and changed. Marianne played with him the limited games available for two-month-old babies: peekaboo, feetsies go up and down, where did the finger go? When he started to fuss and Connie excused herself to nurse him, Marianne said her good-byes and went out to the helicopter waiting in a nearby field. Neighbors had gathered around it, and Ryan was telling them… what? The neighbors looked harmless, but how could you tell? Always, Gina was on her mind. She hugged Ryan fiercely.
As the copter lifted and the house, the town, the countryside got smaller and smaller, Marianne tried not to think of what a failure the visit had been. Yes, she had seen her grandchild. But whatever comfort or connection that had been supposed to bring her, it hadn’t. It seemed to her, perhaps irrationally, that never had she felt so alone.
When Noah woke, he instantly remembered what day it was. For a long moment, he lay still, savoring the knowledge like rich chocolate on the tongue. Then he said good-bye to his room. He would never sleep here, out of his energy suit, again.
Over the months, he had made the room as World as he could. A sleeping mat, thin but with as much give as a mattress, rolled itself tightly as soon as he sprang up and into the tiny shower. On the support wall he had hung one of Oliver’s pictures—not a half-dressed barbarian princess this time, but a black-and-white drawing of plants in the World garden. The other walls, which seemed thin as rice paper but somehow kept out sound, had been programmed, at Noah’s request, with the subtly shifting colors that the Worlders favored for everything except family gatherings. Color was extremely important to Worlders, and so to Noah. He was learning to discern shades that had once seemed all the same. This blue for mourning; this blue for adventure; this blue for loyalty. He had discarded all his Terran clothes. How had he ever stood the yellow polo shirt, the red hoodie? Wrong, wrong.
Drying his body, he rehearsed his request to Mee^hao¡. He wanted to get the words exactly right.
Breakfast, like all World meals, was communal, a time to affirm ties. Noah had already eaten in his room; the energy suit did not permit the intake of food. Nonetheless, he took his place in the hierarchy at the long table, above Oliver and Jacqui and below everyone else. That was just. Family solidarity rested on three supports: inclusion, rank, and empathy. A triangle was the strongest of all geometrical figures.
“G’morning,” Oliver said, yawning. He was not a morning person, and resented getting up for a breakfast he would not eat until much later.
“I greet you,” Noah said in World. Oliver blinked.
Jacqui, quicker, said, “Oh, today is the day, is it? Can I be there?”
“At the ceremony? No, of course not!” Noah said. She should have known better than to even make the request.
“Just asking,” Jacqui said. “Doesn’t hurt to ask.”
Yes, it does. It showed a lack of respect for all three supports in the triangle. Although Noah had not expected any more of Jacqui.
He did expect more of the three Terrans who took their places below Oliver. Isabelle Rhinehart, her younger sister Kayla, and Kayla’s son had come into the World section of the Embassy only a week ago, but already the two women were trying to speak World. The child, Austin, was only three—young enough to grow up trilling and clicking World like a native. Noah gazed with envy at the little boy, who smiled shyly and then crawled onto his mother’s lap.
But they could not hold Noah’s interest long. This was the day!
His stomach growled. He’d been too excited to eat much of the food delivered earlier to his room. And truthfully, the vegetarian World diet was not exciting. But he would learn to like it. And what a small price to pay for… everything.
The ceremony took place in the same room, right after breakfast. The other Terrans had left. Mee^hao¡ changed the wall program. Now instead of subtly shifting greens, the thin room dividers pulsed with the blue of loyalty alternating with the color of the clan of Mee^hao¡.
Noah knelt in the middle of the circle of Worlders, facing Mee^hao¡, who held a long blue rod. Now I dub thee Sir Noah…. Noah hated, completely hated, that his mind threw up that stupid thought. This was nothing like a feudal knighting. It was more like a baptism, washing him clean of his old self.