2312

There were some people, standing by the buildings next to the trees. They were small somehow. Weighted down. Could this be so close to the great city? Was it indeed part of the city, part of what made it work, not just the wetlands but the legions of poor marginal people, living in the half-drowned ruins? The weight of the planet began to drag her down. Those people over there were like figures out of Brueghel, people from the sixteenth century, bowed down with time. Maybe these were the people living a real life, and what she did in space nothing more than the dilettantism of a gaga aristos. Maybe what she really needed to do was to live here and build things, maybe houses, little but functional, a different kind of goldsworthy. Under the sky, in the full light of the sun-the utter luxury of the real. The only real world. Earth, heaven and hell both-natural heaven, human hell. How could they have done such a thing, how could they have not tried harder?

Maybe they had. Maybe the trying included the flight to space, as some kind of desperate hope. Cast from Earth as if in a seed pod, out to where one was sure to freeze and rot and turn back into soil. This dirt by the side of the road. She lay on it, avoiding the thorny vine; squirmed around as if to burrow into it. A spacer fucking the dirt-they must see that all the time, not be impressed anymore. Those poor lost people, they must think. Because there was nothing like this in space, not really-not the wind and the big sky over her, almost night now, with moisture that was not yet cloud-Oh how could they have left! Space was a vacuum, a nothingness. They had inhabited it only by deploying little rooms, little bubbles; the city and the stars, sure, but it wasn’t enough! There needed to be a world in between! This was what city people forgot. And indeed off in space they had better forget, or they would go mad. Here one could remember and yet not go mad-not exactly.

But how sad it was. Grubby, tawdry, beaten down. Pitiful. Sad to distraction, to a stabbing despair. That they had let it come to this. That she had done what she had done to herself. Even Zasha thought she had gone too far, and Z was a very tolerant person. Would have stayed with her, maybe, if she hadn’t gone off. And now she was no longer the person Zasha had parented a child with, she could feel that, even though she didn’t know exactly what had changed. Unless it was the Enceladan bugs in her… In any case a strange person. A person for whom the only place that made her truly happy also made her deeply sad. How was she to reconcile this, what did it mean?

S he sat up. Sat there on the dirt, feeling it lumpy under her.

She saw a motion from the corner of her eye and tried to leap to her feet, misjudged the g and crashed back down. She peered into the gloom:

A face. Two faces: mother and daughter. Here it was such a clear thing; it looked like parthenogenesis. Moonlight just now breaking over the skyglow of the city.

The younger stepped toward Swan. Said something in a language Swan didn’t recognize.

“What is it?” Swan said. “Don’t you speak English?”

The woman shook her head, said something more. She looked around her, called quietly behind her.

Two more figures appeared next to her, taller than her and broader. Two young men. They leaned over and muttered to the daughter.

“You have antibiotics?” one of them said. “My coz is sick.”

“No,” Swan said, “I don’t carry those on me.” Although possibly her belt had something, she wasn’t even sure.

They took a step closer. “Who are you?” one said. “What are you?”

“I’m visiting friends,” Swan said. “I can call them.”

The young men approached her, shaking their heads. “You’re a spacer,” the first speaker said, and the other added, “What you doing here?”

“I have to go,” Swan said, and started for the road-but the two of them grabbed her by the arms. Their grips were so strong that she didn’t even try to jerk free. “Hey!” she said sharply.

The first speaker called out toward the dark behind the two women: “Kiran! Kiran!”

Soon another figure appeared out of the dark-another young man, the tallest yet, but willowy. The two holding Swan had grips that felt to her like something they had done before.

The new young man was startled at the sight of Swan and said something sharp to the two holding her, in a language she didn’t recognize. A quick urgent conversation passed between them; this Kiran was not pleased.

Finally he looked at Swan. “They want to keep you for money. Give me a second here.”

More urgent talk in their tongue. Kiran appeared to be making them nervous or defensive; then he approached and took Swan by the upper arm, squeezing once as if to send a message, and gestured the others away with a flick of his head. He was telling them what to do. The other two finally nodded, and the one who had spoken first said to her, “Back soon.” Then the first two slipped away into the night.