I have learned to wait serenely until she’s ready to return to me, just as she has learned to wait, less serenely, until she is ready to return to those parts of the world where she makes her living. My daughter is too old for what she does, but she cannot, somehow, leave it alone. Injured, diseased, half bald, she always goes back.
But Lucy is partly right. It isn’t just America’s present riches that have led to her present civility. This decade’s culture-optimistic, tolerant, fairly formal-is also a simple backlash to what went before. Pendulums swing. They cannot not swing.
While I waited for Lucy, I returned to my needlepoint. Now that nano has begun to easily make us anything, things that are hard to make are back in fashion. My eyes are too old for embroidery or even petit point, but gros point I can do. Under my fingers, roses bloomed on a pair of slippers. A bird flew to the tree beside me, lit on a branch, and watched me solemnly.
I’m still not used to birds in the house. But, then, I’m not used to this house of my son’s, either. All the rooms open into an open central courtyard two stories high. Atop the courtyard is some sort of invisible shield that I don’t understand. It keeps out cold and insects, and it can be adjusted to let rain in or keep it out. The shield keeps in the birds who live here. What Lem has is a miniature, climate-controlled, carefully landscaped, indoor Eden. The bird watching me was bright red with an extravagant gold tail, undoubtedly genetically engineered for health and long life. Other birds glow in the dark. One has what looks like blue fur.
“Go away,” I told it. I like the fresh air; the genemod birds give me the creeps.
When Lucy returned, someone was with her. I put down my needlework, pasted on a smile, and prepared to be civil. The visitor used a walker, moving very slowly. She had sparse gray hair. I let out a little cry.
I hadn’t even known Kyra was still alive.
“Mom, guess who’s here! Your cousin Kyra!”
“Hello, Amy,” Kyra said, and her voice hadn’t changed, still low and husky.
“Where… how did you…”
“Oh, you were always easy to find, remember? I was the difficult one to locate.”
Lucy said, “Are they looking for you now, Kyra?”
Kyra. Lucy was born too soon for the new civil formality. Lem’s and Robin’s children would have called her Ms. Lunden, or ma’am.
“Oh, probably,” Kyra said. “But if they show up, child, just tell them my hearing implant failed again.” She lowered herself into a chair, which obligingly curved itself around her. That still gives me the creeps, too, but Kyra didn’t seem to mind.
We stared at each other, two ancient ladies in comfortable baggy clothing, and I suddenly saw the twenty-six- year-old she had been, gaudily dressed mistress to an enemy general. Every detail was sharp as winter air: her blue jumpsuit with a double row of tiny mirrors sewn down the front, her asymmetrical hair the color of gold-leaf. That happens to me more and more. The past is so much clearer than the present.
Lucy said, “I’ll go make some tea, all right?”
“Yes, dear, please,” I said.
Kyra smiled. “She seems like a good person.”
“Too good,” I said, without explanation. “Kyra, why are you here? Do you need to hide again? This probably isn’t the best place.”
“No, I’m not hiding. They’re either looking for me or they’re not, but I think not. They’ve got their hands full, after all, up at Celadon.”
Celadon is the aggressively new international space station. When I first heard the name, I’d thought, why name a space station after a color? But it turns out that’s the name of some famous engineer who designed the nuclear devices that make it cheap to hoist things back and forth from Earth to orbit. They’ve hoisted a lot of things. The station is still growing, but it already houses one hundred seventy scientists, techies, and administrators. Plus, now, two aliens.
They appeared in the solar system three months ago. The usual alarms went off, but there was no rioting, at least not in the United States. People watched their children more closely. But we had the space station now, a place for the aliens to contact, without actually coming to Earth. And maybe the New Civility (that’s how journalists write about it, with capital letters) made a difference as well. I couldn’t say. But the aliens spent a month or so communicating with Celadon, and then they came aboard, and a few selected humans went aboard their mother ship, and the whole thing began to resemble a tea party fortified with the security of a transnational bank vault.
Kyra was watching me. “You aren’t paying any attention to the aliens’ return, are you, Amy?”
“Not really.” I picked up my needlepoint and started to work.
“That’s a switch, isn’t it? It used to be you who were interested in the political and me who wasn’t.”
It seemed an odd thing to say, given her career, but I didn’t argue. “How are you, Kyra?”
“Old.”
“Ah, yes. I know that feeling.”
“And your children?”
I made myself go on stitching. “Robin is dead. Cross-fire victim. His ashes are buried there, under that lilac tree. Lucy you saw. Lem and his wife are fine, and their two kids, and my three great-grandchildren.”
Kyra nodded, unsurprised. “I have three step-children, two step-grandchildren. Wonderful kids.”
“You married again?”
“Late. I was sixty-five, Bill sixty-seven. A pair of sagging gray arthritic honeymooners. But we had ten good years, and I’m grateful for them.”
I knew what she meant. At the end, one was grateful for all the good years, no matter what their aftermath. I said, “Kyra, I still don’t know why you’re here. Not that you’re not welcome, of course, but why now?”
“I told you. I wanted to hear what you thought of the aliens’ coming to Celadon.”
“You could have comlinked.”
She didn’t say anything to that. I stitched on. Lucy brought tea, poured it, and left again.
“Amy, I really want to know what you think.”
She was serious. It mattered to her. I put down my teacup. “All right. On Mondays I think they’re not on Celadon at all and the government made the whole thing up. On Tuesdays I think that they’re here to do just what it looks like: make contact with humans, and this is the first time it looks safe to them. The other three times we met them with soldiers and bombs and anger because they landed on our planet. Now there’s a place to interact without coming too close, and we aren’t screeching at them in panic, and they were waiting for that in order to establish trade and/or diplomatic relations. On Wednesdays I think they’re worming their way into our confidence, gathering knowledge about our technology, in order to enslave us or destroy us. On Thursdays I think that they’re aliens, so how can we ever hope to understand their reasons? They’re not human. On Fridays I hope, and on Saturdays I despair, and on Sundays I take a day of rest.”
Kyra didn’t smile. I remembered that about her: she didn’t have much of a sense of humor. She said, “And why do you think they took me and that Kikuyu boy into their ships?”
“On Mondays-”
“I’m serious, Amy!”
“Always. All right, I guess they just wanted to learn about us in person, so they picked out two growing specimens and knocked them out so they could garner all the secrets of our physical bodies for future use. They might even have taken some of your DNA, you know. You’d never miss it. There could be small culture-grown Kyras running around some distant planet. Or not so small, by now.”
But Kyra wasn’t interested in the possibilities of genetic engineering. “I think I know why they came.”
“You do?” Once she had told me that the aliens came just to destroy her life. But that kind of hubris was for the young.
“Yes,” Kyra said. “I think they came without knowing the reason. They just came. After all, Amy, if I think about it, I can’t really say why I did half the things in my life. They just seemed the available course of action at the time, so I did them. Why should the aliens be any different? Can you say that you really know why you did all the things in your life?”
Could I? I thought about it. “Yes, Kyra. I think I can, pretty much. That’s not to say my reasons were good. But they were understandable.”
She shrugged. “Then you’re different from me. But I’ll tell you this: Any plan the government makes to deal
