My presence made the slumber party more awkward, but there was little choice; there was no other place on the ship even remotely suitable for humans to rest. Rhamnetin and his conspecifics slept in the trees, and I still wasn’t sure what was comfortable for the plains-folk. I should’ve invited some of them to stay over. Rhamnetin had been so friendly, so willing to put himself forward, that it had been easy to get to know him to the exclusion of the others. But I could depend only so much on his mediation, and I should’ve tried to get to know his family as he’d gotten to know mine—to figure out how we fit together. Now Cytosine had separated us, either because she wanted us apart or simply because she wanted to yell at him more.
St. Julien gave me blankets and a nightgown and a couple of NASA “ration bars.” I wolfed one down before I even tried talking to her; Dinar’s scones seemed days ago. The ration bar was better than you’d expect from the name: granola and honey and dried fruit, backed by the earthy undertones of some sort of mushroom flour. St. Julien watched, and offered an inadequately apologetic shrug, and I realized there was no useful conversation to have with her. It wasn’t as if she was going to say, on the ship where Ringers might hear, “I like you, but I’ll do anything to restore power to my nation and get us into space.”
Tempting, to tell the Ringers to take the remnant governments, the corporate boards and their eager employees, and bring them to the Rings to do what they would. Leave Earth to those who believed as I did. The watersheds could join in our own time, once we truly understood ecosystem management—not what made a world minimally functional, but what made it beautiful and wild, a worthy dance partner to a species grown worthy in return.
Then we’d get to the Rings, and find the old fight waiting for us: their habitats full of our most toxic hierarchies, welded in place by Jace’s darkest marketing arts. Getting there first had power of its own. We might have to run ahead, just to keep up. And then we’d lose everything Earth still had to teach us.
I wondered if St. Julien read as much in my unfocused gaze as I did in her shrug.
I settled into the blankets, let the others get back to friendly conversation. I listened for some hint of the outside world, but the ship cushioned itself against the storm. Other sounds filled the air, disconnected: the whisper of ventilation, the hum of engines, the chitters of insectlikes and birdlikes, the music of Ringer conversation in other rooms. Unable to think of a reason I shouldn’t sleep, I slept—and only realized when I woke about two hours later exactly how tired I must have been. Now in the dark, lights reduced to some level that didn’t match Earth’s familiar moonlight and starlight, my brain had recovered enough to churn over everything I should be worrying about. My breasts ached, swollen with milk.
A pillbug curled beside me in the dark.
“Cytosine?” I asked. But no babies curled against their belly, and I thought they were smaller, limbs subtly different in shape.
“Glycine. You really can’t tell us apart, can you?”
“Not in the dark. What’s going on?”
“Cytosine says you violated our welcome and tried to break the antenna, and Carnitine and Luciferin say the same. Rhamnetin insists it was Asterion, but Cytosine is convinced you and he are playing out some sort of Pre-Reach hormonal drama. What happened?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Exactly what I told Cytosine, damn it. I thought she liked us being romantic with Rhamnetin. What’s a hormonal drama?”
“You know. Artificial pheromones to warp his reactions.”
“What? No!” I lowered my voice. “If anyone knows how to do that, it’s the corporations, and I’m pretty sure that’s only in stories.”
Glycine rocked slowly, limbs weaving like fronds. “We’re all frightened. The idea of being stranded on a dying planet is bad enough, without being reminded how dangerous a living planet can be.”
“Earth’s not dying. But I don’t want you stranded, either. The watersheds don’t. It might be convenient politically, and I know that’s all Cytosine perceives right now.” And again my hypocrisy cut into my thoughts: I’d let myself forget everything but practicality, and it had worked out very badly. Maybe I’d poisoned the Ringers’ trust somehow, even without letting them find out about the puzzlebot. Or maybe they just understood how fear pared people down to gut responses and ruthless decisions.
But with Glycine, I thought, we might have a chance. They’d been willing to learn from us, to admit we had something to offer. If they could accept our tools of self-definition, maybe they could accept our openness on a larger scale. “We know what it’s like to almost lose your home. Because Earth was dying, because of how much work we’ve put into preserving a living world for our great-great-grandchildren. We want you to be where you want to be, because you deserve the thing we want for ourselves. We want to share what we’ve learned, without assuming we know what’s best for each other. But the watersheds need you—” I tried to put it in their terms. “We need you to imagine new kinds of symbiosis, beyond the ones you already know. Maybe even new possibilities for your own people.”
Glycine unrolled, and I thought they were going to say something else. Then, abruptly, they scurried off. I waited, holding still in the dim light, trying to spot whatever had startled them, hoping they’d come back. But nothing showed. Eventually I lay back down.
Long hours later, the ship’s forest brightened. Diurnal things woke, skittering and flying among the leaves. Magenta blossoms unfurled and dropped bright pendulums that twirled in the artificial breeze. The other humans woke and stretched, eyeing me as they discussed logistics.
My mesh, when I pulled it into place, churned with messages. The storm was over, and there was no sign of the blackouts that had plagued us yesterday.
Mendez alone headed directly for me. “Everything’s working now. I’d swear all the weirdness last night was the weather, if it weren’t so obviously targeted.”
“And if the whole thing weren’t such a wild anomaly,” I agreed. “Asterion will say we’re making patterns out of noise.”
“So what happened last night?”
I blanched at the thought of explaining it again. “Maybe I can upload my records now.” I could; I did. The critiques would be worse than anything I’d gotten at the beginning of this mess, and more deserved.
I texted my household and received assurances of survival and further demands for explanation. I could check in alive, at least, and tell them that we were comfortable if bruised. Then, testing my fears as if dropping a sensor into a pond: Athëo, if you’re up for triaging my inbox, I could honestly use the break. I let the message sit in my vision, unsent, while I wavered. He’d asked to share my troubles, and sworn he wouldn’t compound them. Maybe I could try it. I bit my lip, let the text flow out before I could change my mind.
Mendez interrupted my private anxieties, frowning. “Check the common feed. We’re not the only network that’s a mess.”
The wider news was starting to trickle into the Chesapeake. I tried not to look at Adrien, but it was hard. There were minor disasters all over, new and ongoing and imminent. Nothing that should be overwhelming—these were the sorts of storms, droughts, fires, and outbreaks that the dandelion networks rode out every day. But the Lower Mississippi, prepping for Hurricane Braulio, had stumbled over their usual flood projections. For decades now they’d been moving populations slowly, not just retreating from the rising sea but getting ready for the inevitable moment when the Mississippi would tire of its old route and shift permanently to the Atchafalaya. It grew likelier every storm, and the projected impacts only a little less dire: there were people and places that couldn’t or wouldn’t be moved in advance, that would suffer when forced. They’d run the simulations for moving the river deliberately a thousand times, and never quite hit the balance that would make that seem like a good idea.
Sometime yesterday, about the point when we’d been dueling the tech team’s bots on the antenna, a rogue group had placed explosives at key points in the aging Army Corps of Engineers levies, and let the river go where it had long wanted to go. The common feed was mercifully free of images, but a few had been virus-scanned and shared with other networks: bodies and broken homes where no one had been expecting a flood. In New Orleans, people stared blankly at the slowing trickle where the great waters had been. In the common feed and across networks, the Lower Mississippi unleashed a flood of threads: some begging for help replacing now-irrelevant storm preparations and resources overwhelmed by the flood, others demanding justice under the shared guidelines of the watersheds.
“This has to count as unapproved geoengineering, right?” asked Mendez. Her usual confidence faltered; this was even further beyond her expertises than mine.
“I think so. But it’s not like atmospheric seeding; you’d have a hard time making the case that it was meant to impact anyone outside the one network.” And even if it was, they had no idea who did it.
Except, whoever set the bombs, we knew who was behind them. Redbug and Elegy had been convinced that a stupid sabotage was necessary, then cut off from the crowd that might have suggested better options. It was the same in the Lower Mississippi: an even more horrific sabotage unsupported by the numbers—unless some people had seen different numbers, different threads, different arguments. Networks made untrustworthy, turned against themselves, right as we most needed to work in concert. If I met Jace di Sanya face-to-face again today, I was sure I’d find him smirking.
And what would happen if I tried to post this problem to the network?
“We need to get home,” I told Mendez. “We need in-person meetings, as many as we can manage. People need to know.”
The Ringers were only too eager to let us go. I wanted to bring Rhamnetin home with us, but couldn’t find him, and everyone I asked explained with bland equanimity that he wasn’t available. “Asleep.” “Healing.” Or no explanation at all. And no response to my texts. It would’ve been easy enough for Cytosine to confiscate his makeshift mesh, and no one here would even be shocked.
“Tell your network,” said Cytosine, “that we’re turning on the antenna. The signal’s weak, but it’s out.”
I felt a lurch in my stomach, equal parts relief and fear. My breasts pulsed painfully in sympathetic echo. “I thought you had days of construction to go.”
She stroked Diamond and Chlorophyll methodically, as if reassuring herself. “Taller and stronger would’ve been better. But now is best. The signal is out, and none of your people can stop it. Maybe our backup will have better luck than we have.”
Mendez and I left the island alone and watched the antenna pulse light into the mist, silent against the roar of the swollen Potomac, as we flagged down a ride to the train.