It was a short trip. As short as the shuttle flight to Zealand—Rhamnetin explained that they could only use the tunnel drive a certain distance from nearby gravity wells, so most of the trip was spent getting to that distance. The movement between star systems took almost no time at all.
It was the longest I’d been on the Solar Flare without either a specific goal or being too exhausted to think. I watched the foliage shift around our explorations, blooming interfaces and screens for Rhamnetin, and I started to get a sense of how it was its own sort of network. We used root systems and mycelial networks as models; the Ringers seemed to use them directly for sharing information and input. Was that one reason they valued simplified ecologies? Maybe we could learn from their work and grow our own networks amid complexity.
Brend and Tiffany came in to the window-screen room a few minutes before the shift. Tiffany gripped thos lover’s hand; Brend looked scared but excited. Tiffany spoke as if daring us to object: “We heard there was a view in here.”
“Everyone else hobnobbing?” I asked sharply.
Dinar put a hand on my arm. “It’s a little overwhelming out there, I bet.”
Brend shrugged. “I let Adrien take care of the social dance. I’m just here to figure out how the Ringers signal their steps.”
“I thought your expertise was clothing design,” I said.
“My expertise is social signaling. Though textiles are pretty amazing too, in terms of texture and material qualities. The Ringers have their own signs: pockets and sashes and that bioluminescent moss. They don’t worry about temperature control, did you notice: everything they wear is either for carrying stuff or pure symbolism. Which I guess is what happens when you’ve had climate control for that many generations, plus they’ve amped up their internal temperature control the same way they adapt their day/night cycles. If we could get that tech, imagine how much more flexible our fashion design could be.”
“Not to mention our ability to cope with summer temperatures,” said Tiffany, “though you’d still need cooling for computers.”
Brend went on before I could consider how fascinating that idea was: “The Elliptical Orbit crew uses a different symbol set—I think they’re from a different culture. Maybe a different habitat? Astatine said some of those get pretty strange. Though who knows what Ringers think is strange.”
I interrupted. “Jace di Sanya. Why is she here? You said you didn’t want her faction along for the ride.”
“We lost, what do you think?” asked Tiffany. “Adrien doesn’t care much as long as e gets ahead, and Jace is the only Sanya here, and she outranks our whole delegation. She sure outranks the techies.”
“She wants to burn the planet,” I said. “She’s going to find allies on the Rings.”
“I heard a lot of people in Zealand complain about the fenceline restrictions,” said Dinar. “But people like her are why those rules are necessary. Are those vicious games really the best input the corporations have to offer?”
Cytosine skittered in with Glycine and Luciferin behind, forestalling what might have been a productive conversation. I hoped they’d heard us. “It’s time,” she said. “I thought you’d want to see.”
“And you wanted to get away from Sodium’s wrestling?” asked Rhamnetin.
“That too.”
Thanks to Dinar’s anime I anticipated a spectral hole in space, a circle of rainbows, stars going to streaks—a drama of transition to make clear how thoroughly we’d broken Newtonian measurement. But we barely needed to steady ourselves: one moment Earth was a distant marble shining in the distant flare of the sun; the next moment a new sun bloomed before us, and we spun to watch it gleam off a patchwork of jewels and wirework scattering into starlight.
“This is the natural view,” said Cytosine. “We can enhance it, if you like.”
“Not yet.” I moved closer to the screen. It felt unreal, like I might click away a layer and see how the special effects were done. I wasn’t ready for extra data. “Let me just look.”
The sun lay behind us now, its aura creeping around the edges of the screen. Before us the jewels grew slowly into a sky full of moons. White moons and green, etched blue with rivers and lakes. Moons round and oblong, and spiderweb moons bright with metal. At the equator, a dense ring of habitats captured the power of their star. But above and below they sketched the outlines of the full sphere, promising room for trillions more Ringers, whoever built in that name in generations to come.
Dori twisted against my chest, staring, solemn as if she understood the magnitude of what she was looking at.
“How far out are we?” asked St. Julien.
“About a hundred million miles from the sun,” said Glycine. “Almost halfway between the Rings and the First Ring’s original planetary orbit. We’ll dock in about six hours.”
I thought about those distances, and tried to process what I was seeing. The closest “moons” looked about the same size as our own did from Earth, but we were half an orbit away. Those were oceans out there, not lakes, each ready to swallow Earth whole. I filed estimates along with my recordings: emotions held together by math, and math that might preserve some hint of the place’s Olympian immensity. Or maybe a different myth would suit: a world tree, pendulous planets swinging from every twig. Filing data made the hope of reporting back—the promise of return to the Chesapeake, sudden light years away—feel real.
We had to decide how to pursue that hope. We could stamp our feet and yell about kidnapping, and demand immediate passage back to Earth. Safe, with our children safe alongside. But St. Julien, Jace, Adrien—none of them were likely to head home on the first available transport. They’d been ready for this trip, prepped for whatever negotiations awaited. Our own status was ambiguous and our preparation nonexistent, but we were all the watersheds had in the ground. We couldn’t afford to waste the opportunity.
I looked at Carol, then at Dinar and Athëo. Carol was easiest to read. A shift in body language, a nod—and we were agreed. Not as happy as we’d been to stick around the Solar Flare with Dori for first contact, but some things were worth the risk, and this was still one of them.
Dinar’s eyes shifted between the view and the corporate tech experts, then to Raven. She took a deep breath, touched Athëo’s wrist. They looked at us, and something shifted as quick and subtle and huge as the trip between stars. We were one unit, maybe for the first time, a single network passing data eye to eye and finger to finger, deciding together. My heart sped, and I felt the shiver of tension across my arms, and I couldn’t say whether it was excitement or fear.
Rhamnetin stroked my back. I was falling in love with him, but we didn’t have that connection—not yet, maybe not ever. Could I ever learn him that well, without common physiology or instincts to back my desire? We could be lovers and friends, but what would it mean to become more? And what about the rest of his household? I liked Glycine, and thought we might have something to build on there. Some of the others I barely knew, and Cytosine … sometimes she seemed too much like me, sometimes too strange and discomfiting to understand. She reminded me of my parents, all grand gestures and idealistic drama. Building family was terrifying enough with humans.
Cytosine reared up to the screen, let her kids waggle their limbs against it. They chattered in the Ringer language.
“Bug house,” said Raven happily, and then shocked me by making a noise that … didn’t sound exactly like their Ringer friends’ language, but sure sounded closer than anything I’d heard outside Athëo’s half-coded translation algorithm. Maybe I was underestimating the power of sheer monkey curiosity to overcome barriers. Space has a way of making things feel distant.
Cytosine’s eyes swiveled, and she said something else, and Raven said something else. “Your child has a talent for languages.”
Athëo smiled wonderingly at Raven. “They come by it honestly.”
We watched the view for a while, but even awe-inspiring vistas can only hold monkey attention for so long, and as my initial fury and fear ebbed I found more mundane things to worry about.
“Oh crap,” I said. “How many diapers do we have?” This set off a few minutes of scrambling as we inventoried accoutrements for dealing with various inconvenient bodily fluids, discovered that the Ringers hadn’t really processed either our regular changes of clothing or strong social expectation of wearing same, freaked out about being several light-years from the nearest hormonal implant refills, and decided that Kyo had enough on-call caregivers that we didn’t need to worry about whether he’d get fed. Eventually Dori set to wailing; I checked the monitor and began unwrapping her. “I’m gonna need some of that laundry now. And something to pack out into. Look, more historic diaper changes—first one in this solar system. Oh no.”
“What’s wrong?” asked Carol.
“Chargers. Things to plug chargers into.” My mesh would last a week if I didn’t overuse it, but after that I wouldn’t be able to record, or text anyone, or use any senses beyond the biological. “Oh god, Dinar.”
“Yeah.” Dinar sounded grim. Maybe she’d just thought of it too. “I don’t have my arm charger with me—I was expecting to be back home this evening, you know—and it’s a lot finickier than mesh.”
“I can probably explain the current requirements for our mesh, at least,” said Carol. “Electricity’s electricity, there are only so many variations on how you can use it. Your arm, though…”
“Unless you can explain my whole nervous system to one of their tech experts, I doubt it. The charger is set to keep the same level of stimulation going through the nerves that it gets from my shoulder. Without matching that pattern, it turns into a cute lump of protoflesh that twitches all over the place. No thank you.” Her expression tightened, tiny wrinkles shading her eyes. “What if one of us gets sick? What if one of the kids breaks a bone or gets an infected scratch? I’m sure Phenylalanine knows Ringer physiology backward and forward, but there’s no one in this solar system who can do anything for humans beyond first aid.”
“Look,” said Cytosine. “If it were up to me, we’d have spent longer planning this. But Sodium has the propulsion. And the momentum, literal and otherwise.”
“You said she does disaster response.” I glared. “Does she know that people need to pack things?”
“She knows that in a real emergency, they do without. Which this isn’t, but I suspect—I know—it feels like one to most of the Rings. This is the first time we’ve found a new species before it was too late, and it’s easy to treat ‘not too late’ like a deadline.” She picked up a squirming Diamond, put them back down when Raven tugged at their limbs. “You were right. Not trusting you to understand the importance of this trip—that was counterproductive. It was wrong.”
“Thank you.” I successfully resisted telling her all the reasons she’d been wrong, again, now that she’d admitted it. This wasn’t the time for a rant. “So what can we do differently from here?”
She rocked back, tail curling into her belly. “Once the Solar Flare’s fixed, I’ll bring you back. If you want. I think you should stay, but it’s up to you.”
“Could we just go back for a day or two?” asked Carol. “Pack a few things, consult with the network, and return better prepared?”
“Maybe? The triangulator blew because something about the jump to your system pushed the ship’s limits, and we still don’t know exactly what it was. If it happens again, we’d have to call for another rescue—I’d probably lose our ship over doing the same stupid thing twice, and whoever came to get us might have their own ideas about who from Earth to bring into the talks. I’ll take you home, if you ask—but I can’t guarantee the ride back again.”
“You’d risk your ship?” I asked.
She didn’t speak, and it was Rhamnetin who said, “It’s the right thing to do.”
“We’ll stay,” I said, “for now. But thank you for giving us the option.”
So we’d finally gained Cytosine’s respect for our choices—just as we were about to meet billions who might feel no such thing.
The other human guests wandered into the viewing room, trailing members of both crews. Things got crowded, though we were able to keep space open for the kids to play. Brend stayed near them, unsurprisingly; e liked crowds about as well as Aunt Priya. E pulled out an intricate little cross-stitch, threaded gold and copper and carbon, and began working on it as babies frolicked around em. I watched Jace cozying up to Sodium, Adrien and Kelsey and Mallory working the room, St. Julien and her spouse playing Terran ambassadors for all they were worth. I watched the screen.
This time, trying not to think too hard about my battery life, I felt ready to add extra scans to my sensory input. I studied the spectrum of the light (sun a little younger than ours, same basic type, I’m not an astrophysics expert), read the greenery (probably chlorophyll-based photosynthesis, same as ours, supported by the kid’s name), took standoff readings on the habitat atmospheres (oxygen a touch higher than Earth’s, inert gas balance a little different but basically harmless, greenhouse gases concentrated in hotspots that Rhamnetin told me were reclamation plants). The mix varied, he explained, based on aesthetics and which original planet they drew their numbers from. The habitats varied in temperature, most of them livable, a couple teasing the high end of what humans could tolerate, at least one shockingly cold. Seasonal variation, maybe, or someone trying to preserve an old polar ecology. Everything here was centuries-old compromise, a mix of what people had thought worth salvaging from two lost worlds.
They say German has a long word for everything, but among the dandelion networks, plains-ache is the yearning for an evolutionary ecology you’ve never lived in yourself, the body’s bone-deep knowledge of things that would make it not healthiest but happiest, that would feel right and quiet the anxiety-monkey behind your civilized forebrain. Walking for hours till you can feel it from spine to sole, a picnic with people you’ve known your whole life, a fresh-picked berry, a midday nap—a tiny taste of what your brain thinks it’s good for. Sometimes those things are actively bad for us, like waiting for the big ape to yell about the latest emergency, but even that can feel like a surge of home as overwhelming as the smell of baking bread. What did Ringers ache for? How much of it was left, here among these compromise-design worldlets? How well did their reshaped metabolisms ease those instinctive desires?
Or had they learned to feed the ache with their forested ships? Maybe their artificial worlds fit them as well as a dandelion network, designed for long-term comfort rather than immediate reward. You could go pretty far from your home ecology and still be okay, if you understood what lay at your core.