He laughed and finally returned her glance. “Sweetheart, you'd never believe how familiar you sound. Come with me.”
“Where are we going, Les?”
“To the observation lounge,” he said, and started walking that way. There was one advantage to wandering ways and a trained spatial memory; he'd been aboard the Montreal less than forty-eight hours, and he already knew his way around.
The lounge was crowded, for once. There was a poker game in progress by the beverage dispensers and one or two people sitting in chairs near the porthole and monitors. Leslie paused beside those, off to one side so he wouldn't block anyone's view, and gestured Casey in beside him. She came without a word and stood there silently, looking where Leslie was looking. He heard the shallow catch in her breathing and smiled, knowing the deep, spinning view still tightened her chest as well as his own.
The long fall gave him vertigo, but he waited until the silence got heavy before he said anything more. He waited until she cleared her throat, in fact, and cut her off as smoothly as if he'd been about to start speaking anyway. “You know, in my own country, you could point to any rock, and hill, and gully, and I could tell you who it was.”
“Who?”
“They're all ancestors, in the Dreaming. Everything is, in my own—”
“Do you have a country, Les?”
Oh, she was good at those sidelong glances, and sharp as a tack. He gave it the silence its weight deserved, and nodded. “Sometimes. I think everybody has a nation… sometimes.” And now it was his turn for the sly look across his nose, and she was already looking away when he did it. “Do you?”
She rubbed her arrogant nose with a gleaming steel forefinger. “Have a nation?”
He nodded.
“Sometimes,” she answered, and he laughed. And then she turned to face him full-on, and lowered her voice until they were the only ones in the room. “So tell me about this Dreaming.”
He gestured out the window, at the stars and the sun-catcher shape of the birdcage, small enough with distance that he could have covered it with his palm. He sorted out a child's explanation, and floated it in simple words. Beginner stories. Truth, but not very much of it, suitable for paddling your toes in. “The Dreaming is what came before, even though it persists to today. And everything that is or will be was already sung, predestined. It's all waiting under the ground to happen.”
“Everything?”
“You, me. Piper and Forward. The Montreal. Everything. We just haven't found it all yet. And the roads between the stars. Those were sung. That's what the songlines are, roads in music and verse. When you get to the end of your songline, when you don't know the verses anymore, you enter someone else's territory, but the melody continues. And if you know the melody, even if you don't know the language, you can find the way, because the landmarks are in the melody. It's just the stories that are in the words.”
“By that logic, the Benefactors were already sung, too.”
“How do you know they weren't?”
She stared at him. He turned and gave her a grin and she shook her head slowly, ruefully, as if in complex understanding. “Do your songlines go to the stars?”
He grinned, and nudged her shoulder with his own. “Now you're catching on. The road is the song. The song is the road.”
Her expression hardened, a fish that spots the hook. “What do you want, Leslie?”
“I get to suit up and come EVA with you tomorrow, right?”
She sighed and turned back to the window, staring out it, past it. Down the long parallel lines of the starlight, the expression in her eyes distant enough to have a chance of looking farther even than that. She shook her head, but she muttered, “You know how to operate a space suit, son?”
“I've checked out ground side. Never in zero G. Or vacuum.”
“Well,” she said, scrubbing her flesh hand and her steel hand against the thighs of her fatigues, “I guess we'd better get down to a cargo bay and get you some practice, then.”
Fairy tales don't teach children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children that monsters can be killed.
— G. K. Chesterton
11:00 PM
Saturday September 29, 2063
HMCSS Montreal
Earth orbit
Sometimes Geniveve Castaign liked to pretend she was invisible. She'd slip out of bed barefoot, midwatch and in the middle of the night. She'd tug her coveralls on over her pajamas, undog the hatchway, and ease her way into the corridor when she was supposed to be in bed asleep.
No one ever said anything, or did more than nod to her in passing. She shared her quarters only with Boris, Jenny's cat who had gotten to be the whole ship's cat by now, and she got special quarters in the civilian corridor because nobody on the ship's crew wanted a twelve-year-old roommate — even Patty, who was seventeen and who had a private room because she was a pilot.
She could wander all night, and as long as she dodged Elspeth and Jenny, nobody ever said anything. Nobody ever said anything, that is, as long as she stayed in the unrestricted-access parts of the ship, because they all felt bad about Leah. And because it wasn't as if Genie had to be up for school. And because the Montreal wasn't set up for kids, not yet, and wouldn't be until the first batch of colonists came on board.
And because they knew Richard and Alan were in her head, and Richard and Alan wouldn't let her get into any trouble.
In any case, it was 11 PM, and Genie had been trying to sleep since nine. She gave up, climbed out of her bunk, and went looking for Patty. Patty was up, of course. Patty was nearly a grown-up, and she was a pilot. And either she or Jenny always had to be awake and able to get to the bridge. Just in case. Although Patty's on-duty time was supposed to be spent studying.
Which meant she'd probably be in the ready room by the bridge, because Captain Wainwright had made sure there was a state-of-the-art interface in there, and that was also where Genie did her schoolwork, usually while her dad was on duty.
Genie wasn't supposed to be on the bridge unless she was invited. But the ready room also had a door to the corridor, and there was nothing to keep her from climbing in wheel, and nothing to keep her out of the ready room once she got there. Except—
“Where are you off to, young lady?”
Richard's voice always had a certain humorous tint to it when he called her that. She kept climbing up the access ladder, eschewing the lifts. I couldn't sleep, she answered. I'm going to go do some homework.
Which wasn't exactly a lie, and Richard would probably know if she lied, but he didn't always catch on to truths that weren't… complete. He was too polite to just read her mind, or at least he pretended to be.
Richard coughed inside her head, a polite cough into the palm of his knobby, elegant hand, the white of his cuff extending past the sleeve of his jacket, a steel-banded watch glittering against his skin. How come you wear a watch, Richard?
“It gives me something to fiddle with,” he answered, and demonstrated.
But you have a clock in your head.
“I find it helps me relate to meat-type people better if I keep myself reminded of what it's like to be meat. And you don't have a clock in your head, kiddo.” Affectionately, and said with the tone that would have gone with a hair-ruffle that Genie was much too old for, if Richard had been able to manage it.