16

And now you’re dead.”

Agata could no longer see Tarquinia in the whirl of stars and shadow around her, but this flat pronouncement came through the helmet’s link as if the woman were right beside her.

“I’m sorry.”

“How did it happen?” Tarquinia demanded. For a bell and a half she’d been oppressively close, observing every tiny mistake Agata made and dispensing acerbic reprimands, but even the distance this mishap had put between them wasn’t going to silence her.

“I don’t know! The tank just slipped out of my hands.”

“Just slipped? Why do you think you’re spinning like that?”

“I must have opened the valve too soon,” Agata confessed.

“Well … don’t,” Tarquinia replied irritably.

“I’m sorry,” Agata repeated.

The point of the exercise had been to try to use her cooling bag’s air tank as an improvised jet. She’d understood perfectly what the prerequisites for a successful burst would be: a tight grip on the tank and a thrust aimed straight at her center of mass. But she’d held the tank wrongly, or slipped, or panicked.

She wasn’t actually going to die of hyperthermia; she had two small emergency canisters strapped to her belt. She managed to detach one and connect it to the bag’s inlet without mishap. The cool rush of air felt unearned, but then, if the Surveyor broke apart halfway through the mission, casting them all out into the void, she doubted that a few dextrous maneuvers with her air tank would be enough to save her.

Agata saw a figure approaching out of the mountain’s shadow, a little closer each time it spun into view. It was easy for Tarquinia: she had one of the new jetpacks strapped to her body. The six nozzles were all controlled by photonics, their thrust automatically balanced so they imposed no torque at all. Bulky as the things were, Agata decided that she was going to wear her own pack for the entire twelve years of the mission, rendering these dispiriting training exercises redundant.

Tarquinia collided with her roughly, grabbing hold of Agata’s arm. Agata’s gut twitched; she was tumbling in a completely different plane now, and the sudden shift in the flow of stars across her vision was more wrenching than the impact. Tarquinia seized Agata’s other shoulder and embraced her, pulling the two of them into equal intimacy with the slab of equipment that covered Tarquinia’s chest. Then she must have told the jetpack to kill their rotation: the torque itself was imperceptible, but it looked as if someone had slammed a giant brake against the spinning black bowl that held the stars.

When the sky had ceased turning, Tarquinia released her grip and hooked Agata’s belt to the front part of the jetpack.

“Are you all right?” she asked, less brusque than usual.

“Yes.” Agata realized that she’d been shivering.

“I know it isn’t easy, but you have to reach the point where things like this are just instinctive.”

“I understand.” Agata gazed past her into the dark hemisphere that had once held the orthogonal stars. They were still out there, in the blackness, but her own eyes were now emitting the light she no longer received from them. “I don’t think I can do this,” she said. “I think I made a mistake.”

Tarquinia interposed her helmet into the view. “You want those light deflection measurements, don’t you? I thought the fate of the cosmos hung on those fractions of an arc-flicker.”

“You’re the astronomer. You could do a better job at that than I could.”

Tarquinia said, “I’m not taking any measurements that aren’t essential for navigational purposes.”

Agata doubted she was serious about that. “If my real job is to stop Ramiro going crazy and ramming the Peerless, why don’t they choose a pro-messager pilot to keep him in check?”

“I don’t think they’ve been overwhelmed with applications,” Tarquinia replied. “Anyway, that’s just politics; for practical deterrence, you can bet there’ll be some tamper-proof way to incinerate the Surveyor with the flick of a switch from the Council chambers.” She squinted at Agata through their faceplates. “I’m not going to force you to do anything. If you want to go back to the airlock right now, that’s fine with me.”

Agata was tempted, but she stopped herself. If she pulled out of the training now there’d be no chance to reconsider. “Why did you volunteer?” she asked Tarquinia. “Do you think there’d be a war, without the Surveyor?”

Tarquinia didn’t reply immediately. “I’m still hoping that we’re not that suicidal, but if we are I wouldn’t pin my hopes on Esilio.”

“Then why?”

“Why fly to another world?” Tarquinia frowned, as if the question were absurd: the mere grandeur of the idea was reason enough.

Agata wasn’t buying it. “If it could be easy and safe, then you’re right: who wouldn’t want to be on that mission? But it won’t be.”

Tarquinia said, “You want to know what swings it for me? I always thought I was doing something worthwhile just by helping to keep the mountain running smoothly. Given what was at stake for the home world, that was enough. But if the messaging system starts spitting out reports of the reunion, the entire reason for the journey will start to feel like something long past: still worthy, but faded, there to be taken for granted. If I can have a little excitement with a detour of my own—doing no one any harm, and maybe even helping slightly—I’d have to be insane to pass up the chance.”

“A little excitement?” Agata would have thought Tarquinia’s encounter with the rogue gnat had given her enough for a lifetime. “We’ll be unreachable. If anything goes wrong, there’ll be no one to help us.”

“Hence …” Tarquinia spread her arms.

“You think these exercises are going to protect us?”

“They’ll nudge the odds in our favor,” Tarquinia insisted. “If you ever start taking them seriously. But if you want certainty, feel free to tell Greta that you refuse to fly until they’ve built the messaging system and confirmed the Surveyor’s return.”

“Would that be so terrible?” Agata retorted. “Or would the whole thing become worthless to you, if you knew you’d be safe?”

“Not at all,” Tarquinia said mildly. “But I don’t think the politics would work out. If we postponed the launch until your side achieved everything it wanted, then whatever chance the Surveyor had of defusing tensions would vanish.”

“That’s true.” Agata glanced back toward the mountain. “We’re getting awfully far from the Peerless.”

Tarquinia declined the opportunity to remind her exactly how many orders of magnitude larger her comfort zone needed to be. “So do you want to correct our drift and take us back to the slopes?”

“How?”

Tarquinia detached the tank from her own cooling bag. “Incrementally. Small bursts, then wait and observe the effects.”

Agata accepted the tank with her left hand, then brought her arms together behind her back so she could grip it with her right hand as well.

“You’ll need to hang on to me,” she told Tarquinia.

“Right.” Tarquinia complied. “The belt hook alone leaves too much freedom, it’d be asking for trouble.”

Agata said, “If we were doing this for real, I’d leave the whole thing up to you.”

“Pretend I’ve lost consciousness.”

“In that case I’d cut you loose.”

“And fly the Surveyor back on your own? Good luck with that.”

Agata closed her front eyes so she could concentrate on the task. She took her time estimating the position of their combined center of mass, then she aligned the axis of the tank to pass through it while pointing more or less in opposition to the direction in which she believed they were drifting.

She opened the valve, counted one pause, then shut off the air.

The thrust was slightly off-center, imparting a small amount of spin, but at least she hadn’t lost her grip on the tank. Agata waited until she’d come full circle, then she released a second burst along a shifted axis that largely compensated for the first unwanted torque.

Tarquinia said, “See, you’re a natural.”

Agata took a moment to process the remark for traces of sarcasm. She said, “There’s only one downside if I get us back safely.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t want anyone believing that they could put their life in my hands.”

“Because…?”

“I think we’ll all be much safer,” Agata explained, “if everyone around me is so terrified of the prospect of relying on me in an emergency that they work twice as hard to ensure that it never comes to that.”

Tarquinia said, “Don’t worry: there’s nothing you can do to rob me of my healthy respect for the possibility that your incompetence will kill me.”

The guards all knew Agata by sight, but she still had to sign a patch to enter the workshop. When she reached the Surveyor Verano and half a dozen of his team were conducting inspections—shining serious-looking instruments on the polished gray stone around the edges of the rebounder panels—but he motioned to her to go inside anyway.

The airlock’s safety mechanisms had been disengaged to allow people to crawl through the entry hatch unimpeded. Agata emerged in the front of the upturned cabin and slid down the tarpaulin that had been spread protectively across the long, curved clearstone window that presently faced the workshop’s floor.

As she rose to her feet she heard a rustle of paper from one of the rooms above her. “Hello?” she called up.

“It’s only us!” Azelio replied. The first two faces that appeared staring down at her belonged to Azelio’s niece and nephew, Luisa and Lorenzo. “Come and join us,” Azelio suggested, squatting down to shoo the children away from the opening.

Agata climbed the rope ladder up to the doorway and clambered into the cabin. After going through the turnaround it was easy to adjust her perceptions to make everything look normal; all the vertical shelves running along the wall in front of her served as a perfect cue to define the ultimate, functional orientation of the room.

The children had a thick sheaf of pictures with them that they were in the process of pinning to the soft wooden board on which they knelt. “This is just the start,” Luisa explained. “There’s a new one for every stint.”

“Every stint of your uncle’s journey?”

“Yes.”

Agata was impressed. “That’s a lot of pictures.” All the ones she could see looked like impressions from the children’s own skin—there were no photographs or artificial images. Some were obviously meant as portraits of family members, but there were more fanciful works as well: scenes with strange animals surrounded by giant flowers; Esilio suspended in the void, sprouting improbably huge mountains, the black disk of its sun covering the star trails. “You’re good at keeping the colors aligned,” she said. “I could never do that.” It was quite a skill to raise exactly the right shapes for each dye, with enough precision that the combined result of three or four separate impressions was as sharp as this.

“I can teach you,” Luisa offered.

“I won’t have time.”

“I’ll teach you when you get back.” Luisa smoothed the paper beneath her hands but turned her rear gaze to Agata. “It’s not so long that I’ll have forgotten how. I’ll only be seven.”

“Is this the Surveyor?” Agata asked, pointing to a gray lenticular shape with a beam of yellow light emerging from the middle.

Lorenzo said, “Yes. I did that one.”

“Is it going to Esilio, or coming back?”

“Coming back is at the end.” Lorenzo gestured toward the stack of images yet to reach the board. Luisa hushed him, as if he might be spoiling a secret.

“I hope we didn’t keep you from something,” Azelio said.

“I was just going to look around again. Fix things in my mind.” Agata knew that sounded strange, but the more familiar she became with the craft’s interior, the less anxious she felt about the prospect of seeing nothing else on their journey to Esilio for the next six years. “I want to get accustomed to the place in small doses, and then I’ll be ready for it non-stop.”

“Fair enough.”

“I never thought about bringing my own changes of scenery.” She moved aside to let Lorenzo continue with the strip of images he was attaching.

“You can share the pictures if you like,” Azelio replied. “Believe me, I’ll be asking to borrow your books.”

“Can I share them?” Agata asked Luisa.

“Of course,” Luisa replied affably.

Lorenzo said, “Just be careful you don’t smudge them.”

Agata took her leave. To reach her own cabin she had to descend and then climb a different ladder. The layout was a mirror image of Azelio’s; she’d already stacked the shelves with books, the vertical piles made less precarious by restraining strings.

She knelt on the blank wooden picture board, wondering if it would seem strange to the rest of the crew if she pinned a photograph of Medoro there. Or maybe she could have a stylized print made that looked like a skin impression, and then among the borrowed pictures from the children it wouldn’t stand out too much.

Agata walked over to the shallow indentation that would hold her sand bed. She leaned against it and imagined waking in this spot, gazing up at the cabin’s moss-free ceiling, everything around her muted gray in the safety light.

But she’d woken in the same apartment for more than six years, and that had never felt oppressive. Here, there would be a reward for her patience drawing inexorably closer—the kind of guarantee that her work had never been able to provide. To walk on a planet, to tread on open ground beneath the stars would be extraordinary. Between that, the test of Lila’s theory, and the chance to rid the mountain of Medoro’s killers, she ought to have more than enough to sustain her.

Agata climbed down the ladder and crawled out through the airlock. It was time to start saying her farewells.