Of course I didn’t.
I wanted to see him. I recognized his walk before anything else. In all the years, that detail hadn’t changed. He was taller, and he tried to hide beneath a hoodie and civilian clothes, passing through the concourse toward the carrier docks. But I knew those shoulders and the gait of someone who knew where he was going. He didn’t cover up out of fear, but from stealth.
I moved with him, slipping along the edges of the crowd between his path and mine. It took me a minute to notice the child.
A little boy. Maybe four or five, but who could tell? They held hands. The boy carried a stuffed bear wearing soft armour, its furry ears dragging on the deck.
I was that age once. Cairo held my hand like that.
It’s me, I wanted to shout. As if those two words could make up for a decade or more as some humans reckoned time.
Come back.
It happened all at once; the little boy said something and Cairo leaned down to pick him up in his arms, barely breaking stride. Smaller arms went around broad shoulders. The bear dropped to the deck in their wake and Cairo kept walking, oblivious.
I saw the boy open his mouth to protest and then I was there. The crowd was no longer a wall. I hadn’t made the conscious decision, but I found myself holding the stuffed toy, reaching to touch Cairo’s arm.
He turned before I could tap him, sensing proximity maybe. Or his son’s distress. The little boy twisted in his arms to keep his own eyes on the toy, reaching toward it. Toward me.
“He dropped this,” I heard myself say.
My brother wasn’t the only one covered up. My hood was pulled low, long sleeves covered all of my ink. Maybe he saw my mouth move but that was it. I stared somewhere at his chest and below. At the blue boots his son wore, dangling at his side.
The bear left my outstretched hands, plucked to safety.
“What do you say, Ryan?” A deep voice. But I knew that accent.
Meridian. Like mine. What it had been three worlds ago.
“Thank you,” a small voice said.
“Welcome.”
“Thank you,” my brother said.
I just nodded.
They turned to go. He wasn’t going to waste time on a stranger.
I looked up as they moved further into the concourse crowd, still headed toward the carriers. Cairo didn’t turn around, but his son was looking over his shoulder, holding the armoured bear in his arms.
The boy had blue eyes. Not like mine. Not like his father’s. Big, searching blue eyes that stared at me as if he knew. Ryan, Cairo had said. My nephew.
I didn’t follow them. They walked away and I stayed where I was, the ghost they left behind.
Now all I do is remember.
My fourth world is the clearest. Sun bright and comet swift, all I can do is chase it. Maybe one day I’ll be able to enter in again. Like it’s a room left open for me. Like a voice offering a greeting, something as simple as hello. Maybe next time I’ll look up and stare him straight in the eyes, dark eyes like mine, with just enough tilt at the corners to speak of our common ancestry. His son’s gaze was a start, but it was only the edge of the solar system. There’s more.
Soochan found me sitting on the deck outside of the carrier docks. He twitched, all nervous.
“Them Marines gonna sweep you away from their stoop, you can’t stay here. Come back to the Empress.”
He didn’t ask why I was sitting there. Maybe he thought I was high.
I’m waiting for them to come back, I wanted to say. But of course I didn’t. It wasn’t the truth anyway. What would I say in that moment if they had?
I’m your brother, take me with you? Take my DNA and test it against yours. Check how far back we’re connected. Tell me where you’ve been all this time, when time slipped so easily between the stars. What war are you fighting? Will you fight mine for a while?
Save me just this once.
Come back, my brother. Come back, Cairo. You’re tattooed on my skin, beneath my heart, inside my blood. I tried to forget you, but nothing worked.
I want you to hear me say our family name. I’ll only say it to you. No one else would understand what it means.
You were my first world.
Kathleen Ann Goonan is a writer, speaker, and recovering academic. She has published seven widely translated novels, including the first novel of her Nanotech Quartet, Queen City Jazz (a NYT Notable Book) in 1994 and In War Times (Tor, 2007), winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the American Library Association’s Best Novel of the Year. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Clarke, BSFA, and Nebula Awards. She has published over fifty short works in markets such as Discover Magazine, Asimov’s, Omni, Appalachian Heritage, F&SF, and many anthologies. Her latest academic publication was in Sisters of Tomorrow (edited by Lisa Yaszek and Patrick B. Sharpe, Wesleyan, 2016). She is working on two novels and a screenplay. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech and is a member of X Prize’s Lifeboat Foundation.
THE TALE OF THE ALCUBIERRE HORSE
Kathleen Ann Goonan
Here stands a house all built of thought,
And full to overflowing
Of treasures and of precious things,
Of secrets for my knowing.
—Olive Beaupré Miller, The Latch Key
T here is a theory that consciousness arises through self-organizing mass. This takes ages. Think of the thousands of years the oldest bristlecone pine grew, nearly five thousand, and it could grow older, if it had a chance, though it no longer has that chance. Except here. And maybe somewhere, but that is a mighty thin maybe.
Nevertheless, think of all the systems that went
