wind. “Yes, Administrator?”
“Please tell the First Mate or the Captain I would like to speak with them.”
There was no perceptible delay, but Danilaw knew she must have checked with both before she answered. “Of course. The First Mate will see you on the Bridge.”
When Danilaw reached the Bridge, not just Tristen but also Perceval was waiting for him. And Amanda, seated on the grass beside the Captain’s chair, a cup of some hot beverage in her hand. She smiled at him; he winked back. There, at least, was one unexpected and happy outcome of the entire situation.
The Bridge was bright with increased sunlight. Even filtered—as it must be now—it filled the space with warmth and a honeyed glow. The handle of his new guitar case rough against his palm, Danilaw breathed deep— violets, lily of the valley. Alien Earth flowers he had only learned the scents of recently.
In the forward screen, a three-dimensional image of Fortune and its secondary, Favor, fell endlessly one around the other. They were magnified, but even in their magnification Danilaw could feel how close they were. A day or two out now. So close.
So close to home.
So close to irrevocable decisions.
The worst of it was, he had come to like the Jacobeans, in all their sophipathic insanity. They might be grotesques, caricatures, larger than life and full of violence—but they were also shockingly generous and, sometimes, shockingly funny.
Whatever happened next, he thought, he was not going to enjoy it.
“Tea?” Amanda said. She held up her cup and gestured to a pot half hidden in the grass beside the Captain’s chair.
“Please,” Danilaw said. He sat beside her and opened the guitar case; he saw her considering look, and her decision to accept the obvious without asking questions.
The guitar was cool and smooth in his arms. It fit perfectly in the cradle of his torso and thigh. It was, in fact, in tune.
He found a G chord and strummed it. It didn’t have the mellow resonances and tonal quirks of an age- seasoned, handmade instrument, but the intonation was clear and bright. “I see I didn’t need to call a council —”
“The news just came from Aerospace,” Amanda said. “There’s a lighter coming up to meet us. It should be here in twelve hours.”
Danilaw felt his muscles flex involuntarily, digging his thighs and buttocks into the soil where he sat. He breathed out, pushing the tension away, and tried not to let relief dizzy him.
A day away.
Tristen, on the far side of Perceval’s chair, folded his hands. “You wanted to speak with me.”
“I may have a partial solution to your situation,” Danilaw said. He did not look at Amanda, not wanting to reopen their old argument about rightminding. “You understand that a majority of the citizens of Fortune are taking an isolationist line—”
Perceval lifted her chin and looked at him. Just looked, but Danilaw felt the heat of embarrassment in every limb.
He swallowed and forced himself on. “We have a world. We can spare a little of it. Just this once. It’s not like generation ships are going to be a common occurrence.”
Tristen huffed. “You’re offering us resources to move on.”
“It’s a shameful bribe,” Danilaw said. “The alternative requires you to submit to rightminding, and integrate into the Fortune colony.”
He did not expect them to like the options. Judging by their thinned lips and sidelong glances, he had been right. But Tristen said, “What about your secondary, Favor? The binary world. You haven’t settled it—”
“It’s still got an ecosystem,” Danilaw said. “A toxic ecosystem, but the potential for introducing an imbalance—”
“Toxic for you,” Tristen said. “We would adapt. We will be forced to adapt to gravity, in any case. We’re not”—he hesitated, as if searching for a sufficiently emphatic word—“
“I’m sorry,” Danilaw said. “There’s too many of you. And you’re not rightminded. It’s the rightminding, frankly, that will be the biggest sticking point for my people. Without it, they will always see your people as aliens. As the sword of Damocles.”
“I see,” Perceval said.
Amanda pressed a belated cup of tea into Danilaw’s hand, which had dropped away from the neck of the guitar. He sighed and sipped it.
She said, “Why don’t you come down to Fortune with us? When we descend?”
“Excuse me?” Perceval said.
“There’s room in the lighter,” Amanda said. “Come down. Meet a rightminded planet. Then make up your mind.”
Perceval opened her mouth. Tristen placed a hand on her shoulder. “I’m not sure—”
“Oh, never fear,” Amanda said. “I am going to inspect every inch of that lighter before I put anyone on it. A person really only needs to be sabotaged once.”
21
for the descent
O true as steel come now and talk with me,
I love to see your step upon the ground.
Nothing could have prepared Perceval for the descent.
The shuttle-pod—a lighter, Captain Amanda said—that would bring them into Grail’s gravity well and (at last) its atmosphere was a dart-shaped creature like a bird, and she stared at it for long moments before she realized that, of course, it was streamlined—aerodynamic. Because they were going into an atmosphere, and that was this vessel’s primary purpose.
An
The world was too brittle and unwieldy to bring in close to anything that generated the tidal stresses that wracked the Fortune-Favor system. Two planets of comparable size in an endless falling ballet around each other and their sun made for challenging close orbits, and Perceval was all too aware of the fragility of her old and battered world.
So now she was seeing Grail with her own eyes, for the first time, from the habitation deck of a ship named
It was not so easy to reconcile the maps and images of Grail—of
It could not show what she witnessed now—the dark worlds, side by side, the smaller sidelit in the narrowest possible band of crescent, the larger just a silhouette rimmed with liquid, evanescent electrum until the
