It was a small, dark oval. An overlay gave a sense of scale. Not large at all. Smaller than her quarters on Gewitter. The adrenaline hit her system even before the comparison image came up. The egg-shaped ships from the grotto on Laconia. And the match certainty: 98.7 percent.
“You son of a bitch,” she whispered. “There you are.”
Chapter Thirty-Two: Kit
Many, many things were known, but some were bright and immediate. Fortuna Sittard was both capital city and company town. The hexagon/pentagon tessellation of the Nieuwestad logo really was inspired by the surface of a football. The city was less than ten years old, but already half a million people lived there at the edge of a massive tectonic escarpment where the highland rivers were cutting valleys as they flowed down toward the southern sea. The morning sun would come through the windows and spill across the ceiling over the bed, every imperfection in the surface throwing a tiny shadow in the rose-colored light.
There were other things, less bright but just as much known. A coffeehouse in Toronto where a man and woman had said goodbye for the last time, and the way the scent of baked apple would still make her cry sometimes. A recurring pain in a chest that the doctors called idiopathic angina but that carried all the fear and threat of heart attacks. The pattern of an old melody on piano keys adapted because the left hand was missing a pinkie. The spilling grammars of Italian and Czech. A great wash of memory and significance and knowledge, there but grayer somehow. Lapping like the little waves at the edge of a lake.
Eyes opened and saw where the shadows would be. Legs shifted out from under a blanket, but they weren’t anyone’s legs. They just were. A woman muttered in her sleep, dreaming that she was in a dance recital and had forgotten all the moves. The toilet was a few steps away, and for a moment there were other toilets to reach from other rooms. Some on the left, some on the right, some down the hallway or the stairs. More than a few built into the wall of the ship’s cabin, complete with vacuum flow for when the drive was off and everything was on the float.
Nearby, a finger touched the light switch, and a glow filled the air. A hand fumbled with a warm, soft penis, and urine spilled down to the white ceramic bowl. There was relief, and then soap and warm water and the light put out.
A child slept in the nursery. He was already large for his crib. That was a known thing. And farther, but not too far, there was a daughter already getting up for work, her attempts to be quiet more alerting than outright noise would be. And there was no one in the house but silence and the thumb-sized grubs they call “cricket slugs” on Pathé. And ships’ drives hummed and thrummed—all the ships’ drives in chorus like cicadas.
The hand that had touched the light switch pulled aside the curtains. The window had spots on it where old raindrops dried, and beyond that, the stars. A woman’s voice said Kit? and more eyes opened. A naked man stood at the window, looking out at the night, but something was very wrong with him—right, but not right. Familiar, but unfamiliar. Reversed, because he wasn’t in the mirror and then he wasn’t the person who saw himself in the mirror and then he was.
“Kit?” Rohi said again, and Kit fell back into himself like he’d jumped off a building. His head spun as he staggered to the toilet, dropped to his knees, and vomited into the bowl. When he was empty, he retched for a while, each spasm more painful than the one before, but slowly gaining more time between them. Bakari was crying and Rohi was singing to their boy, soothing him, cooing to him that everything was all right.
Eventually the vertigo passed, and Kit was himself again. In the planetary gravity of Nieuwestad his body felt heavy in a way that somehow felt different than acceleration on a ship, even though Einstein had proven it wasn’t. He washed out his mouth at the little metal sink and walked back to the bedroom. Rohi was curled on the pillows, Bakari asleep in the crook of her arm with his closed eyes shifting in a dream. Kit’s skin stippled itself with gooseflesh from the cold, and he pulled on a set of thermal underwear. He didn’t have pajamas.
It had started on the Preiss. It had started the moment they’d died. Kit didn’t say it, but he was sure that was what had happened. The dark things, more real than anything real, had blown him and his baby away like handfuls of dust in a high wind. That was death. And then their clock had been inverted. They hadn’t been reborn, but un-killed. The man who wasn’t in the room with them had managed it with a vast effort. An effort that had exhausted him. Kit had been disoriented, grateful, confused, frightened. He’d been lost for a flashbulb moment in a cacophony of memory and identity and sensation.
And there had been voices. Not real ones, not words. He wasn’t developing aural hallucinations. But he’d remembered things, known things from lives he hadn’t led. While they were questioned by the Laconians from the Derecho, when they’d been released to finish the journey to Nieuwestad, even for a time after they’d arrived and been escorted to the orientation campus.
The thing where he lost the idea of Kit in a stream of consciousness that wasn’t his? This was new. It had only come a few times, but afterward he felt thinner and less connected to reality. Like the essential self he’d always known—the thing he meant when he said “I”—turned out to be less an object and more a kind of habit. Not even a persistent habit like taking drugs or gambling. The kind of thing you could take or leave. Coffee with breakfast instead of tea. Buying the same kinds of socks. Existing as an individual. All things he could do or not do without much changing. Another wave of nausea rolled through him with the thought, but it faded.
He slipped into the bed, trying not to wake them. Bakari was a warm, soft stone. Nothing short of Armageddon was going to wake him now. Rohi didn’t open her eyes, didn’t shift on the mattress. He was almost able to convince himself she was asleep when she spoke.
“Are you all right?”
“You were at a dance recital,” he said, softly. “But you’d forgotten all the choreography. You had to improvise it all on the fly, and it wasn’t going right.”
She was silent for a while. “It’s getting worse, isn’t it? It’s happening more often.”
Kit sighed. On the ceiling above them, the first faint shadows were starting to form. “Yeah.”
“For me too,” she said.
The first two weeks of orientation had been held in a wide auditorium large enough to seat three thousand, though there were fewer than six hundred new immigrants in their cohort. The stage was set a little off-center to give over one wall to vast windows that looked out over the escarpment. The local tree analogs were complexes of mosslike growths that built up like vast coral reefs, and they shimmered silver to green to ruddy orange depending on the temperature and the direction of the wind.
With Bakari in the company daycare facility, Kit’s mornings had been presentations by the Jacobin-Black Combined Capital welcome team and representatives of the unions talking about Nieuwestad as a planet and Fortuna Sittard as a city. They would have sixteen-month years and thirty-two-hour days. The local biosphere relied on compounds that weren’t toxic but could be irritating, so keeping inside the sealed areas of the city was recommended. They got maps of the city—commissary, medical complex, entertainment district, public swimming pool, religious facilities. The procedures for reporting legal infractions to security, and security infractions to the union reps, were detailed, and Kit and Rohi had to mark that they’d been briefed and understood. The JBCC welcome team led them in songs about teamwork and fellowship, and even the union reps joined in.