“Commander,” he murmured. He made a formal salute, giving her the acknowledgment of her old Police rank even though, in her present position as head of the local constabulary, it was hardly what it had been.
Jerusha returned the salute solemnly, perfectly; irony widened her smile. “It’s been a long time since we stood like this, BZ,” she said. “The last time it was to say goodbye.”
“I still have the Commander’s badges you gave me off your old uniform.” He smiled too, remembering. “You said then I’d need them someday. I hardly believed you. But you were right.” He shook his head.
“And now you’ve outgrown them.” She nodded at his trefoil.
He glanced down; gestured her toward a seat. “Help yourself to some food. I haven’t had lunch yet.” He looked at his watch, and realized that it was nearly time for dinner. A platter with an untouched meal on it still lay on the low, rectangular greeting-table. He sat down across from her in one of the solid, wood-framed native chairs. They were all the furniture to be had, until the flow of imported goods had satisfied the new government’s vast and immediate technological needs, and ships had space in their holds for less vital commodities. “It’ll take me a minute to clear out my head, anyway. I’ve been reviewing data the hard way for most of the afternoon. Gods, I’d forgotten the kind of aggravation we had to put up with in the old days here—” The embargoes and restrictions that had existed when he served here before had meant that even the Police were forced to make do with outmoded, inadequate data systems.
“You didn’t know the half of it, then,” Jerusha said, taking a piece of cold fish.
“You were only an inspector. When I became Commander of Police, I found out what real red tape was. I expect you know what I mean now.”
“For several years now, unfortunately.” He nodded, matching her grimace. He chose what appeared to be a vegetable fritter, and began to eat it. It was cold and greasy, but he was hungry enough not to care.
“It’s a lot of water under the bridge since we said our goodbyes. What have you been doing all these years, BZ? I’ve heard—well, call them rumors.” She glanced significantly at the walls, the air. She looked back at him for a moment, before she casually touched her ear. He nodded. Their conversation was being recorded; everything that happened here was on the record.
“Developing the stardrive technology, on Number Four, and back on Kharemough.” He shrugged slightly. “Two excellent training grounds in bureaucracy.”
Her gaze met his, reading what lay behind the self-effacing words. “I thought you said you’d never go back to Kharemough again, after … what happened here.”
He glanced away, remembering the scars he had borne then—the marks of his suicide attempt, the crippled image of himself. “I said then that there were two worlds I never expected to see again—that one, and this one. Kharemough and Tiamat. And I believed it, then. But what happened on Four changed both those things for me.”
“You discovered the truth about Fire Lake.” She shook her head. “I know that part. And you became a sibyl.” She smiled again. “I suppose that’s all the explanation I really need.”
“What about you?” he asked. “The last time we spoke together I was getting on the last ship going up from here at the Final Departure—and you weren’t. I’m still not sure what gave you the courage to stay, when you believed it would be forever. I didn’t have that kind of courage… .”He shook his head.
“It was as much desperation—or pride—that made me stay, as it was courage,” she said. “And it was love… .” He realized that she did not mean a love of justice, or some noble ideal; she meant human love. He felt himself flush, as if she had somehow spoken his own deepest thoughts. He reminded himself fiercely that she was telling him about her life, not his, in the years since the Departure; and he felt incredulity fill him again.
“Really—?” he said softly. She had always seemed to him to wear self-reliance like body armor, when she had been his commanding officer and the only woman on the force. He found it almost impossible to believe someone had gotten through her defenses far enough to capture her heart … that it had somehow happened right in front of his eyes, and he had never even noticed. “Who?” he asked.
“Ngenet ran Ahase Miroe.”
He scratched his nose, searching his memory. “Gods—” he said suddenly. “Him? That one? The smuggler—?”
Her smile filled with unexpected sorrow as she nodded. “That’s the one.”
He shook his head. “Strange bedfellows,” he murmured.
“More alike than you know,” she said, again with the strange sorrow in it. “For better or worse.”
“So that was why you stayed, then.”
“Not entirely.” A flicker of the old defiance showed in her eyes. “I told you then, I wasn’t a quitter. What gave me the courage to … trust my heart, was knowing the truth. About what Moon Dawntreader was. About what she wanted to do, making the Change mean something. Miroe wanted that too. I knew it was work we could both give our lives to, willingly.”
He smiled, nodding; his smile faded as the animation went out of her face. “Are you still married?” he asked, carefully.
She shook her head. “Miroe died, a little over a year ago. An accident. A fall.”
His face pinched. “I’m sorry,” he said, understanding now what had changed her so painfully and profoundly. The measuring intelligence was still there in her eyes, but something was missing. Since he had last seen her, she had spent close to twenty years, hard years, on a hard world; but it was not so much that her body had aged. It seemed to him that what had been lost was the thing he had always admired most about her: her stubborn resistance to fate.
“So am I.” She looked up at him again. “Every day.”
“Do you have any children?” he asked, to fill the awkward silence.
She shook her head, and her expression then was too mixed to read. At last it became curiosity, as she looked back at him; but she did not ask the question he read in her eyes. She picked up a piece of pickled meat, elaborately noncommittal. “But the past is behind us, now, anyway,” she murmured. “History. The Change has come, and we’re supposed to cast off our old lives, try on new ones.”
“I thought that only applied after the proper rituals, when the Sea Mother gave her blessing,” he said, with a smile.
Jerusha raised her eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you believe in that, now—”
He shook his head. “Don’t tell me that you do.”
She shrugged. “But things have changed, whether we want them to or not—haven’t they?” She looked at him speculatively. “Everyone was afraid, on some level, that the Hegemony’s coming back would mean we’d be crushed under its boot again.”
We’d. His mouth quirked as he heard her include herself with the Tiamatans. Well, why shouldn’t she? She’d spent most of her life here. Newhaven, her homeworld, must be barely even a memory to her now. He studied his boot resting across his knee. “The Hegemony still has a heavy foot. I’m trying to keep them from setting it down in the wrong places too often. That’s why I asked you to come, actually. I wanted feedback from someone who knows Tiamat, but has a sense of the Hegemony’s perspective as well. Someone I know I can trust. I want to know what the mood in Carbuncle is; what sort of effect our presence is having, for better or worse. Anything I can do to make it better—”