“I don’t want to go backpacking, for Chrissake,” I’d said. “I’d rather stay on the L.A. and plug into a stimsim.”
“Shut up and follow me,” said Mike and, like a lesser member of the pantheon following an older and wiser deity, I had shut up and followed. Two hours of heavy tramping up the slopes through sharp-branched scrubtrees brought us to a lip of lava several hundred meters above the crashing surf. We were near the equator on a mostly tropical world but on this exposed ledge the wind was howling and my teeth were chattering. The sunset was a red smear between dark cumulus to the west and I had no wish to be out in the open when full night descended.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of the wind and build a fire. I don’t know how the hell we’re going to set up a tent on all of this rock.”
Mike sat down and lit a cannabis stick. “Take a look in your pack, kid.”
I hesitated. His voice had been neutral but it was the flat neutrality of the practical joker’s voice just before the bucket of water descends. I crouched down and began pawing through the nylon sack. The pack was empty except for old flowfoam packing cubes to fill it out. Those and a Harlequin’s costume complete with mask and bells on the toes.
“Are you … is this … are you goddamn crazy?” I spluttered. It was getting dark quickly now. The storm might or might not pass to the south of us. The surf was rasping below like a hungry beast. If I had known how to find my own way back to the trade compound in the dark, I might have considered leaving Mike Osho’s remains to feed the fishes far below.
“Now look at what’s in my pack,” he said. Mike dumped out some flowfoam cubes and then removed some jewelry of the type I’d seen handcrafted on Renaissance Vector, an inertial compass, a laser pen which might or might not be labeled a concealed weapon by ShipSecurity, another Harlequin costume—this one tailored to his more rotund form—and a hawking mat.
“Jesus, Mike,” I said while running my hand over the exquisite design of the old carpet, “this can’t be legal.”
“I didn’t notice any customs agents back there,” grinned Mike. “And I seriously doubt that the locals have any traffic control ordnances.”
“Yes, but …” I trailed off and unrolled the rest of the mat. It was a little more than a meter wide and about two meters long. The rich fabric had faded with age but the flight threads were still as bright as new copper. “Where did you get it?” I asked. “Does it still work?”
“On Garden,” said Mike and stuffed my costume and his other gear into his backpack. “Yes, it does.”
It had been more than a century since old Vladimir Sholokov, Old Earth emigrant, master lepidopterist, and EM systems engineer, had handcrafted the first hawking mat for his beautiful young niece on New Earth. Legend had it that the niece had scorned the gift but over the decades the toys had become almost absurdly popular—more with rich adults than with children—until they were outlawed on most Hegemony worlds. Dangerous to handle, a waste of shielded monofilaments, almost impossible to deal with in controlled airspace, hawking mats had become curiosities reserved for bedtime stories, museums, and a few colony worlds.
“It must have cost you a fortune,” I said.
“Thirty marks,” said Mike and settled himself on the center of the carpet. “The old dealer in Carvnel Marketplace thought it was worthless. It was … for him. I brought it back to the ship, charged it up, reprogrammed the inertia chips, and voilà!” Mike palmed the intricate design and the mat stiffened and rose fifteen centimeters above the rock ledge.
I stared doubtfully. “All right,” I said, “but what if it …”
“It won’t,” said Mike and impatiently patted the carpet behind him. “It’s fully charged. I know how to handle it. Come on, climb on or stand back. I want to get going before that storm gets any closer.”
“But I don’t think …”
“Come on, Merin. Make up your mind. I’m in a hurry.”
I hesitated for another second or two. If we were caught leaving the island, we would both be kicked off the ship. Shipwork was my life now. I had made that decision when I accepted the eight-mission Maui-Covenant contract. More than that, I was two hundred light-years and five and a half leap years from civilization. Even if they brought us back to Hegemony-space, the round trip would have cost us eleven years’ worth of friends and family. The time-debt was irrevocable.
I crawled on the hovering hawking mat behind Mike. He stuffed the backpack between us, told me to hang on, and tapped at the flight designs. The mat rose five meters above the ledge, banked quickly to the left, and shot out over the alien ocean. Three hundred meters below us, the surf crashed whitely in the deepening gloom. We rose higher above the rough water and headed north into the night.
In such seconds of decision entire futures are made.
* * *
I remember talking to Siri during our Second Reunion, shortly after we first visited the villa along the coast near Fevarone. We were walking along the beach. Alón had been allowed to stay in the city under Magritte’s supervision. It was just as well. I was not truly comfortable with the boy. Only the undeniable green solemnity of his eyes and the disturbing mirror-familiarity of his short, dark curls and snub of a nose served to tie him to me … to us … in my mind. That and the quick, almost sardonic smile I would catch him hiding from Siri when she reprimanded him. It was a smile too cynically amused and self-observant to be so practiced in a ten-year-old. I knew it well. I would have thought such things were learned, not inherited.
“You know very little,” Siri said to me. She was wading, shoeless, in a shallow tidepool. From time to time she would lift the delicate shell of a frenchhorn conch, inspect it for flaws, and drop it back into the silty water.
“I’ve been well trained,” I replied.
“Yes, I’m sure you’ve been well trained,” agreed Siri. “I know you are quite skillful, Merin. But you know very little.”
Irritated, unsure of how to respond, I walked along with my head lowered. I dug a white lavastone out of the sand and tossed it far out into the bay. Rain clouds were piling along the eastern horizon. I found myself wishing that I was back aboard the ship. I had been reluctant to return this time and now I knew that it had been a mistake. It was my third visit to Maui-Covenant, our Second Reunion as the poets and her people were calling it. I was five months away from being twenty-one standard years old. Siri had just celebrated her thirty-seventh birthday three weeks earlier.
“I’ve been to a lot of places you’ve never seen,” I said at last. It sounded petulant and childish even to me.
“Oh, yes,” said Siri and clapped her hands together. For a second, in her enthusiasm, I glimpsed my other Siri—the young girl I had dreamed about during the long nine months of turnaround. Then the image slid back to harsh reality and I was all too aware of her short hair, the loosening neck muscles, and the cords appearing on the backs of those once beloved hands. “You’ve been to places I’ll never see,” said Siri in a rush. Her voice was the same. Almost the same. “Merin, my love, you’ve already seen things I cannot even imagine. You probably know more facts about the universe than I would guess exist. But you know very little, my darling.”