“Siri,” I say and this time her name is not unbidden. Below me, below the crest of the hill and the shadow of the white tomb, the crowd stands and shuffles. They are impatient with me. They want me to unseal the tomb, to enter, and to have my private moment in the cool silent emptiness that has replaced the warm presence that was Siri. They want me to say my farewells so they can get on with their rites and rituals, open the farcaster doors, and join the waiting Worldweb of the Hegemony.
To hell with that. And to hell with them.
I pull up a tendril of the thickly woven willowgrass, chew on the sweet stem, and watch the horizon for the first sign of the migrating islands. The shadows are still long in the morning light. The day is young. I will sit here for a while and remember.
I will remember Siri.
Siri was a … what?… a bird, I think, the first time I saw her. She was wearing some sort of mask with bright feathers. When she removed it to join in the raceme quadrille, the torchlight caught the deep auburn tints of her hair. She was flushed, cheeks aflame, and even from across the crowded common I could see the startling green of her eyes contrasting with the summer heat of her face and hair. It was Festival Night, of course. The torches danced and sparked to the stiff breeze coming in off the harbor and the sound of the flutists on the breakwall playing for the passing isles was almost drowned out by surf sounds and the crack of pennants snapping in the wind. Siri was almost sixteen and her beauty burned more brightly than any of the torches set round the throng-filled square. I pushed through the dancing crowd and went to her.
It was five years ago for me. It was more than sixty-five years ago for us. It seems only yesterday.
This is not going well.
Where to start?
“What say we go find a little nooky, kid?” Mike Osho was speaking. Short, squat, his pudgy face a clever caricature of a Buddha, Mike was a god to me then. We were all gods; long-lived if not immortal, well paid if not quite divine. The Hegemony had chosen us to help crew one of its precious quantum-leap spinships, so how could we be less than gods? It was just that Mike, brilliant, mercurial, irreverent Mike, was a little older and a little higher in the Shipboard pantheon than young Merin Aspic.
“Hah. Zero probability of that,” I said. We were scrubbing up after a twelve-hour shift with the farcaster construction crew. Shuttling the workers around their chosen singularity point some one hundred and sixty-three thousand kilometers out from Maui-Covenant was a lot less glamorous for us than the four-month leap from Hegemony-space. During the C-plus portion of the trip we had been master specialists; forty-nine starship experts shepherding some two hundred nervous passengers. Now the passengers had their hardsuits on and we Shipmen had been reduced to serving as glorified truck drivers as the construction crew wrestled the bulky singularity containment sphere into place.
“Zero probability,” I repeated. “Unless the groundlings have added a whorehouse to that quarantine island they leased us.”
“Nope. They haven’t,” grinned Mike. He and I had our three days of planetary R and R coming up but we knew from Shipmaster Singh’s briefings and the moans of our Shipmates that the only ground time we had to look forward to would be spent on a seven-by-4-kilometer island administered by the Hegemony. It wasn’t even one of the motile isles we had heard about, just another volcanic peak near the equator. Once there, we could count on real gravity underfoot, unfiltered air to breathe, and the chance to taste unsynthesized food. But we could also count on the fact that the only intercourse we would have with the Maui-Covenant colonists would be through buying local artifacts at the duty free store. Even those were sold by Hegemony trade specialists. Many of our Shipmates had chosen to spend their R and R on the Los Angeles.
“So how do we find a little nooky, Mike? The colonies are off limits until the farcaster’s working. That’s about sixty years away, local time. Or are you talking about Meg in spincomp?”
“Stick with me, kid,” said Mike. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way.”
I stuck with Mike. There were only five of us in the dropship. It was always a thrill to me to fall out of high orbit into the atmosphere of a real world. Especially a world that looked as much like Old Earth as Maui-Covenant did. I stared at the blue and white limb of the planet until the seas were down and we were in atmosphere, approaching the twilight terminator in a gentle glide at three times the speed of our own sound.
We were gods then. But even gods must descend from their high thrones upon occasion.
* * *
Siri’s body never ceased to amaze me. That time on the Archipelago. Three weeks in that huge, swaying treehouse under the billowing treesails with the dolphin herders keeping pace like outriders, tropical sunsets filling the evening with wonder, the canopy of stars at night, and our own wake marked by a thousand phosphorescent swirls that mirrored the constellations above. And still it is Siri’s body I remember. For some reason—shyness, the years of separation—she wore two strips of swimsuit for the first few days of our Archipelago stay and the soft white of her breasts and lower belly had not darkened to match the rest of her tan before I had to leave again.
I remember her that first time. Triangles in the moonlight as we lay in the soft grass above Firstsite Harbor. Her silk pants catching on a weave of willowgrass. There was a child’s modesty then; the slight hesitation of something given prematurely. But also pride. The same pride that later allowed her to face down the angry mob of Separatists on the steps of the Hegemony consulate in South Tern and send them to their homes in shame.
I remember my fifth planetfall, our Fourth Reunion. It was one of the few times I ever saw her cry. She was almost regal in her fame and wisdom by then. She had been elected four times to the All Thing and the Hegemony Council turned to her for advice and guidance. She wore her independence like a royal cloak and her fierce pride had never burned more brightly. But when we were alone in the stone villa south of Fevarone, it was she who turned away. I was nervous, frightened by this powerful stranger, but it was Siri—Siri of the straight back and proud eyes, who turned her face to the wall and said through tears, “Go away. Go away, Merin. I don’t want you to see me. I’m a crone, all slack and sagging. Go away.”
I confess that I was rough with her then. I pinned her wrists with my left hand—using a strength which surprised even me—and tore her silken robe down the front in one move. I kissed her shoulders, her neck, the faded shadows of stretch marks on her taut belly, and the scar on her upper leg from the skimmer crash some forty of her years earlier. I kissed her graying hair and the lines etched in the once smooth cheeks. I kissed her tears.
“Jesus, Mike, this can’t be legal,” I’d said when my friend unrolled the hawking mat from his backpack. We were on island 241, as the Hegemony traders had so romantically named the desolate volcanic blemish which they had chosen for our R and R site. Island 241 was less than fifty kilometers from the oldest of the colonial settlements but it might as well have been fifty light-years away. No native ships were to put in at the island while Los Angeles crewmen or farcaster workmen were present. The Maui-Covenant colonists had a few ancient skimmers still in working order, but by mutual agreement there would be no overflights. Except for the dormitories, swimming beach, and the duty free store, there was little on the island to interest us Shipmen. Someday, when the last components had been brought in-system by the Los Angeles and the farcaster finished, Hegemony officials would make island 241 into a center for trade and tourism. Until then it was a primitive place with a dropship grid, newly finished buildings of the local white stone, and a few bored maintenance people. Mike checked the two of us out for three days of backpacking on the steepest and most inaccessible end of the little island.