them as if he’d been thrust into the searing blaze of noon. When the first passerby looked their way he stopped moving and clutched the ropes tightly with four hands, his posture growing cowed and defensive. Yalda watched the woman’s expression change from confusion to recognition, then from shock to comprehension. As she passed them on the opposite ladder she glanced at Yalda with what might have been an acknowledgment of her audacity, but exactly what fate she wished for the happy couple was impossible to discern.
Fatima took Nino with her everywhere, introducing him to friends, fellow students and acquaintances without a trace of self-consciousness, as if he were a long-lost uncle who’d just arrived in their company by some mysterious alternative route. At first Yalda took this as some kind of unspoken reproach for her own reticence at the task, but then she realized that it was nothing of the kind. People put up with a very different attitude from Fatima, as Nino’s advocate, than they would have from the woman they blamed for the fact that he was still alive at all. Fatima was utterly partisan on her friend’s behalf, but there was no reason for anyone to think of her as self- serving.
Every day, Yalda tagged along as Fatima showed Nino the food halls, the workshops, the classrooms. He was getting reacquainted with places he hadn’t seen since before the launch, and roaming far enough from the axis to grow familiar with the changing centrifugal force. Some of the people they encountered were brusque, but no one started screaming threats or accusations. And even those who had no particular respect for Yalda, or Fatima, or for Frido’s oath of protection, might have been given pause by the realization that Yalda’s choice of co-stead was the bluntest possible assertion of a woman’s right to decide when, and with whom, she had children. With holin scarce, with pharmacology failing them, any purely cultural force in favor of autonomy was all the more precious.
Isidora and Sabino took turns teaching Yalda’s old class. Yalda sat in and listened, watching Nino struggling to extract some sense from all the arcane technicalities as Fatima whispered explanations to him. This was his world now, not the wheat fields, and whatever role he played in it he’d have to learn some of its language and customs.
Yalda made a bed for him in her apartment, and he accepted that intimacy without complaint or presumption. The first night he was with her she could barely sleep; she did not expect him to wake her and demand what she had offered him, but his presence made it impossible for her to forget the ending she had chosen for herself. Better that than to be taken by surprise, like Tullia. Her only other choice would have been to launch herself into the void again and wait for her cooling bag to run out of air, leaving her to cook in her own body heat. Because whatever she might have wished for in a moment of weakness, however strong the urge to renege might have become, the holin that could have bought her a year or two more was now irrevocably out of her hands.
Nino clutched the rope at the edge of the observation chamber and peered down at the countless tiny color trails fixed above the rocky slope.
“Those are the orthogonal stars?”
Yalda said, “Yes.”
He grimaced. “They look just like the stars back home. But now you’re saying that their worlds could kill us with a touch, if we so much as set foot on them?”
“That’s how it seems,” Yalda replied. “But then, who knows what will happen down the generations? We might even find a way to mine their rock, to render it harmless.”
Nino looked skeptical. He still found it difficult to accept that the
“Look at what we’ve survived already,” Yalda said. “Harder tests than any you gave us at the launch.”
“If those stars lie in the future,” he said, “why can’t you just search among them with your telescopes and see if they strike the world, or not?”
“Light from that part of their history can’t reach us here,” Yalda explained. “When we looked out at the ordinary stars, back home, we saw them as they were many years ago. The same is true of these stars—but ‘many years ago’ by our measure, now, means far from the world, far from any collision that might happen.”
“But if they continue as we see them—?”
“Then the world will end up in the thick of them,” Yalda said. “That much is clear.”
Nino was silent. Yalda said, “What we’re doing has the chance to help your children, far more than Acilio’s money ever could. Don’t you want to be a part of that?”
“It’s worth trying,” he conceded. “Better than rotting in that cell. And if you really can trust me with your own flesh—”
“Why wouldn’t I?” Yalda did her best to silence her doubts. “You’ve been a good father before. Just promise you won’t force the sagas down their throats.”
“I might tell them a couple of the old stories,” Nino said. “But the rest would be about the flying mountain whose people learned to stop time.”
He reached over and put his hand on Yalda’s shoulder. Nature dulled her fears, lulling her into a sense of rightness at the thought of what lay ahead. If she waited, if she asked for time to say her farewells, that would only make it harder. This was her last chance at the closest thing to freedom: her will, her actions, and the outcome in the world could all be in harmony.
Yalda said, “I want you to name our children Tullia and Tullio, Vita and Vito.” For all that she’d cared for Eusebio, if he was going to outlive her his name could look after itself. “If there’s a solo, call her Clara.”
Nino dipped his head in assent.
“Love them all, educate them all.”
“Of course,” Nino promised. “And you’ll be no stranger to them, Yalda. What I don’t know about you, your friends will tell them. Fatima will tell them a dozen stories of you a day.”
He’d meant to reassure her, but Yalda shivered with grief. A mountain could fly through the void, but she could not see her own children.
She fought against her sadness; if she succumbed to it now and stopped what they’d begun it would only be twice as painful the next time.
Yalda took hold of the ropes with three of her hands; with the fourth she drew Nino’s body closer. The color trails of the old stars were splayed out above them. His chest pressed against hers, innocently at first, but then their skin began to adhere. Yalda twitched, panic-stricken, picturing herself tearing free, but then she stifled her fear and let the process continue. When she looked down, a soft yellow glow could be seen passing through their conjoined flesh, its message older than writing.
Her eyelids grew heavy, and a sense of peace and reassurance suffused her thoughts. There was no need for words now. They were sharing light, and the light carried Nino’s promise to protect what she would become.
APPENDIX 1
UNITS AND MEASUREMENTS
