The train entered a tunnel.
Whit found himself feeling frightened—he wasn’t sure why. He had never been afraid of the dark. And it wasn’t Dehm’s story, because he wasn’t sure he believed it, especially since it had all the signs of some weird THE loyalty test.
Maybe it was the sudden reality of separation from the life he knew . . . the sense that he was moving into a new world.
They emerged into harsh desert light. Blinking, Whit turned away from the window and focused on his fellow passengers.
He had seen earlier that they were mostly his age, about evenly split between guys and girls. Dehm, in fact, who was in his own world for the moment, fumbling with his cards, was the oldest person in the car.
One thing they all had in common . . . they all seemed to be alone. No pairs or groups.
And every one of them wore the same look that Whit did: wide-eyed, unreasoning fear.
The train plunged into another tunnel.
QUESTION: For Yahvi Stewart-Radhakrishnan, what’s it like growing up on a Near-Earth Object?
YAHVI: I don’t know how to answer that. I grew up, I guess.
QUESTION: How do you spend your time?
YAHVI: I go to school and work at my jobs, what else?
QUESTION: Would you like to go shopping?
YAHVI: Is that what teenagers do on Earth?
QUESTION: Some of them.
YAHVI: Then sure, I suppose.
QUESTION: Would you say that growing up on Keanu is different from growing up on Earth?
YAHVI: How would I know? I just got here.
YAHVI, FIRST INTERVIEW
YAHVI
“Why can’t I see Zeds?”
Yahvi caught up to her mother after the boring conversation in the meeting room.
“He’s in a pressure chamber.”
“I heard. So why can’t I see him?”
The family stretched across the half-lit hallway, Yahvi on the left, Rachel in the middle, Pav on the right. As she frequently did in conversations like this, Rachel turned to Pav, as if to say, Listen to your silly daughter.
Which always infuriated Yahvi. “Mom!”
Rachel opened her mouth to tell Yahvi why not, then closed it. “Actually, there is no good reason. Let’s see about Sanjay, then make sure Zeds is okay.”
Yahvi never wanted to come to Earth at all. Leave Keanu someday? Sure, if she lived until the NEO reached a destination. But she wasn’t holding her breath for that; even with all the enhancements her parents and Harley Drake and Sasha Blaine kept talking about—extending the human life span to hundreds of “years”—well, it still wouldn’t be good enough.
Yahvi was ready to admit that having Earth as a target was an improvement over the Architect home world. Earth was a few years distant, at Keanu’s rate of travel.
The Architect home world? Something like five thousand years.
“Humans just aren’t suited for travel between the stars,” Sasha would always say.
“What is it we are suited for?” That question came from Nick Barton-Menon, who was the most complete smart-ass in Yahvi’s year at school . . . and as cute as he was smart.
The trouble was, he knew it. The double trouble was, everyone tolerated it. Even Sasha Blaine, the giant red-haired goddess of a mathematician, would put up with snarky comments from Nick that would have gotten Yahvi or anyone else sent to the fields for “readjustment.”
“Humans are great at starting wars,” she would say. (This was not a onetime exchange.) “Lying, cheating, quarreling, poisoning our environments.”
“Go, humans!” one of the others said.
“So we’re essentially like the Reivers,” Nick would say. “Only larger and less able to disassemble ourselves and survive.”
“Those are just our bad traits, some of which turn out to be useful. As in dealing with the Reivers.” Yahvi had never seen a Reiver; none of the yavaki had. They had been exterminated on Keanu before she was born.
Or so everyone said. Obviously, given the terrifying things they heard about these creatures, their varying shapes and sizes, their insane ability to duplicate themselves, their ability to destroy—that is, reshape to their own needs—anything they touched, every human on Keanu hoped they were gone. Every now and then some yavak, or even one of the older HBs, would report a sighting in some tunnel or one of the other habitats (the Skyphoi habitat was notorious for these events), and there would be a lockdown and panic. Even Nick Barton-Menon would pay attention then.
The problem was . . . apparently a whole bunch of Reiver Aggregates had escaped from Keanu. They had made their way to Earth.
Which was surely bad for Earth, but Yahvi had a difficult time imagining the place, even having seen it looming in the Adventure view screen for four days . . . and after walking its surface for several hours.
Of course, she had been limited to the sights and sounds of an Indian Air Force base, and one particular building—hardly a representative sample, as Sasha Blaine would say. But even then, she was ready to conclude that while Earth might be a perfectly fine place for those born there and condemned to live their lives there, it seemed too limited, too confined.
For example, Keanu moved. It was going places.
Earth moved, too, of course. In a steady rigid orbit around one sun, the same thing it had been doing for four and a half billion years, and, with luck, for another two or three. That was just striking Yahvi as not much fun.
Of course, it probably reflected her anger at having come close to death . . . and her frustration at being cooped up in this awful hospital away from whatever fun Earth had to offer.
She was more frustrated that she and her parents, and for that matter, Xavier and Zeds, weren’t allowed to see Sanjay Bhat, or even to know for sure if he still lived.
Yahvi, Rachel, and Pav went upstairs to the entrance to the intensive care unit only to find Indian Air Force guards and this Wing Commander Kaushal blocking their way. “Your companion is in no condition for visitors,” the round little counselor told them. There were no nurses or doctors around, no one who might listen to an appeal.
“We’d like to know his condition,” Rachel said, in a voice that Yahvi knew well; it meant, I’m being patient for now, but the explosion will follow shortly.
Kaushal was deaf and blind to this, however. “You saw the extent of his head injuries,” he said. “He was taken directly to surgery after we arrived here, and no one has emerged to tell me what is going on.”
Rather than cloud up and rain all over Kaushal, Rachel turned to Pav. “Where did Taj go?”
“He and Xavier had to talk about securing our cargo—”
Rachel turned back to Kaushal and actually said, “Thank you. We’ll come back in an hour.”
“Maybe we could get something to eat,” Pav said. Yahvi felt that they had just eaten, and besides . . . she still felt sick from the crazy near-death experience of a landing, and the smells and sights of the intensive care unit.
Yahvi hadn’t gotten to know Sanjay Bhat prior to Adventure’s launch—for most of her life, he had just been one of those faceless, humorless, grown-up HBs who spent most of their time in the Temple and hurrying back and forth on Important Work.
Nor had they bonded during the four-day mission. Sanjay had spent most of his time in the lower deck with Xavier, again, likely busy with Important Work. Yahvi could not remember them having a single conversation that went beyond two sentences—and one of them went this: “Don’t be such a yavak!”