Urban turned, listened a moment to the fox’s retreating hum and decided to take a shortcut. Two swift bounds let him achieve a running start. He jumped to the meadow on the cottage roof, then jumped again, to land, rolling in the small lawn of the back garden where he’d been inventorying his subminds just a couple of minutes before.
To his frustration, Mikael was still a step ahead of him while Shoran was only a step behind, appearing around the corner of the house, laughing as the fox doubled back to shoot just past the grasping fingertips of both Urban and Mikael. It shot under trees and over hedgerows. They followed in frenetic pursuit, shouting tactics at each other:
Go around!
Stop it at the picnic ground!
No, no! The other way!
Hearts pumping, chests heaving, skin glistening with sweat. Kona, who’d skipped the lecture too, came out to join them as they took a short break. He greeted Shoran with such an affectionate hug, Urban interpreted it as evidence of a renewed relationship.
So far, sexual associations among the ship’s company tended toward casual and ephemeral, his relationship with Clemantine the exception.
“Release the fox,” Mikael complained.
Shoran laughed and did so, releasing Kona too. They started the game again. The lecture must have ended because a few minutes later several more players joined in, Clemantine among them. She came dressed like Shoran. Bumping up against Urban, she gave him a wink. “Glad to see you making friends.”
“It’s coming at you!” Mikael shouted.
She jumped for it. Urban only watched, entranced by the beauty of her muscular bronze body, simulated sunlight glinting off the gold iris tattoos that edged her ears. She shouted as the fox slipped past, escaping by a millimeter. When it angled away, they bounded in pursuit. Shoran shouted at them to “Go around!” Go around what, Urban wasn’t sure, but after a minute Clemantine was laughing for the sheer joy of wild motion and what else really mattered?
Inexplicably, amid the chaos, he flashed on that separated version of her, the stranger, the one he wasn’t sure he could trust. He heard her words again: I live her life and mine.
This time, he understood. This is what mattered to her. This existence, the loving, tumbling, laughing, fearful, hungry, melancholy, restless human existence lived on this timeline allowed her to exist on the other, just as his dream of finding Clemantine again had let him fare alone over centuries. His doubt eased as he remembered her promise: I’ll do whatever’s necessary to protect all of you.
A shout, all too close—“Move!”—startled him back into the present. A glimpse of the fox speeding toward him. He sprang at it, using his head to knock it in Kona’s direction. Kona was taken by surprise. All he could do was bat it toward the ground to slow it down.
Clemantine dove, seizing it as she rolled across a tiny lawn, but she didn’t have a good grip on it. It was wriggling free until Shoran met her. She clapped her hands around Clemantine’s—and abruptly, the hum of the fox ceased.
“We won!” Shoran crowed to a chorus of whoops and laughs as nine players collapsed to the ground in a satisfied state of exhaustion.
Clemantine lingered, luxuriating under the soothing, slow-falling water of her shower, quietly astonished at her own growing optimism. It had been a good day. She’d spent time in the library and on the high bridge, and the lecture had been interesting, but mostly she was still aglow from her introduction to flying fox.
The game had given her a workout, but better than that, it had been fun. Simple fun. She could not remember the last time she’d just played like that. Maybe not since that long-ago age before the Chenzeme ravaged Heyertori.
She squeezed her eyes shut, recoiling from the memory.
Don’t go there.
“Live in the moment,” she whispered. “Live for now.”
She touched the water off. Toweled herself dry in a gentle, warm wind. Then stepped out of the shower. The ultra-thin polymer of its walls unlocked, melting into a translucent ring that sank out of sight beneath the blond-wood floor as the ceiling regrew, smooth white.
After a moment of thought she requested a short, shimmering, mahogany-colored shift from the house DI. The dress budded from the generative surface of an active wall. She pulled it on, smoothed it straight, and walked barefoot into her living room.
Urban looked up with a smile from where he crouched by a low table with curved legs, arranging the various dishes he’d synthesized for their dinner.
“Just in time,” he said. He was dressed in loose trousers, his skin smooth and clean from the ministrations of his Makers; he did not enjoy showers as she did.
“It looks wonderful,” she said, and meant it.
He had picked up a lot of useful skills over his long lifetime, though he’d never learned to invest much value in the idea of home. He lived with her in this cottage, but it was hers. It reflected her personality and the simple serenity she preferred. Urban lived there without imparting any sense of himself to the place.
“It’s your home,” he always insisted. “Even when you’re not here, it’s as if you are and I like it that way. Don’t change anything.”
So the soft colors and the simple graceful lines of the furnishings that came and went in the changeable front room were all to her taste.
There was often a sofa positioned to catch the sunlight or moonlight coming through a side window. The table would be extruded from the floor on demand whenever they wanted to share a meal or a pot of tea. Colorful pillows served as their seats. The paintings on the walls changed every few days, or more often if the current selection did not suit her mood. The largest painting could be made to disappear, replaced by a screen where they watched recorded dramas.
The only unchanging piece in the room was a slim side table of honey-colored wood with a shallow dish on its polished surface in which a colony of irises grew.
Clemantine had an affinity for the flowers. Since her youth she’d been entranced with their beauty. She wore them as ornamentation, tattooed in gold along the edges of her ears. Only later in life did she come to appreciate them as symbols of renewal, life from lifelessness at the turn of seasons.
She sat down, cross-legged, facing Urban, and raised her jade-green chopsticks as part of a smiling salute. “Itadakimasu,” she said in appreciation of the meal.
“The least I could do.”
“You should host a community dinner and cook for everyone.”
He laughed. “No, they expect actual cooking, not just food ordered from a synthesizer.”
“You could help plan the menus.”
The focus of the community was squarely on the study of the Hallowed Vasties, but that destination remained far off, so people divided their time among a range of interests and enthusiasms.
Cooking was one of the most popular pastimes, whether for festivals, community meals, or competitions. Musicians and singers were abundant, performing in a range of styles. Visual arts and live dramas were pursued with passion, and the library was continuously mined in a search for recordings of ancient dramas, both performed and interactive. There were dramatic readings, intellectual and virtual games, and after today, athletic games.
Clemantine continued to practice her own hobby of genetically sculpting plants. The irises she kept on the side table were her creation. She had redesigned their genome so that with a proper feeding of nutrients they would grow from rhizomes to bold and bright blue flowers within three days, stay thus a while—a randomized span of time, unpredictable, anything from a day to ten days—and then the color of the flowers would shift to white, a sign that the cycle was nearly done.