I was honestly alarmed by how quickly our proposal (in both senses of the word) captured the imagination of the Families. Some seized on it merely as evidence that we could be reasoned with; others seemed to interpret it in a way that felt dangerously close to manifest destiny. Reach, and the next branch will be there, never mind that the branch might continue to make choices of its own. I suppose thinking about branches making choices was a very watershed-ish perspective—one of those we’d have to share. In any case, when someone opined, “Of course, a family as distinguished as Cytosine’s, however they expand, can be trusted with children,” no one argued, and the generalization to the rest of humanity seemed to flow naturally.
Almost.
“Are you really going to accept everything the networks want to do,” demanded Jace, “simply because they’ve added a couple of your people to their household?”
Phosphorus’s eyestalks scanned the crowd. “You are, aren’t you? You won’t admit that nothing has changed—this is only their way of getting around the argument.”
“It’s a better way of carrying across the argument,” another representative said, and the valley murmured agreement.
“These humans will pull you into the abyss behind them,” said Phosphorus. “This gathering has lost its meaning; anyone who recognizes farce can come with us.” She turned and stalked through the crowd, accompanied by mates and cross-sibs, a dozen or so Family representatives—and Jace and Adrien. Adrien twisted back toward Brend, anger and helplessness mingled on eir face, before following eir allies.
“Adrien never agreed with Jace before,” said Brend unhappily into eir knees. “E wanted to get us back in the greater game, not break the networks entirely.”
“E likes eir promotion,” said Tiffany.
“I’m sorry.” Adrien’s compromise seemed the perfect illustration of the flaws in the corporate system, the forced choices between principle and work. But this was exactly the wrong time to raise that argument; I felt our obligation for the tech experts’ sacrifice. “What do you need?”
“Besides a ride back to Earth?” asked Tiffany. “Unless … Brend, maybe you could design status signals for courting plains-folk? Does that sound like more fun?”
“It’s all smells.” But eir chin emerged from behind hunched knees. “I’ve never tried perfumes. Maybe some of our florals would complement their pheromones. And they’re doing interesting things with body mods.”
“Will you come back to Earth long enough to fix malware?” I tried.
“Oh. Yeah, that, sure.” Tiffany sighed. “And we’re gonna need a flat, and food, and all the shit you assholes give away for free.”
“We’ll need that too.” Cytosine brushed a limb over my arm, a flash of fur and silk that I took for comfort. “And we need to register you as members of my family. But we should return to Earth before Phosphorus’s faction hires their own ship. I know you don’t like dominance wrestling, but it matters here. We need to show that we can do what we promised, and we need to share what’s happened with Earth before they do.”
I felt dizzy. “We’re heading back right now? With who? Do we need to give Asterion a ride?” I sure didn’t want to spend twelve hours on a spaceship with them, but return tickets are a civil right even if you’re only taking the train a few miles, let alone between solar systems.
Her skinsong sharpened, velcro hooks against my nerves. “There are other ships.”
We started after her. Athëo tried to scoop up Raven, but they started crying. “Baby play!” They flailed and shrieked, exactly the sort of tantrum you don’t want to handle in an open-topped antigrav barge.
Cytosine scurried back and hesitantly reached for the toddler. They wailed harder, trying to tug the twins from her chest. In a moment they were going to start, and then Dori.
Rhamnetin bent close. “Raven, do you want a ride?”
Sniffles subsided. “Up ride?”
“Up ride,” Rhamnetin confirmed.
“Are you really going to—” Carnitine started, and Dinar said, “Yes, he is. Frequently.”
Raven settled sunnily atop Rhamnetin’s legs, and we headed for the barge.
“Is the Solar Flare ready?” Carol asked.
“Repaired, yes,” said Glycine. “Free for travel is another question. The Elliptical Orbit should have pulled claws from our back yesterday, but I haven’t gotten the notification.”
“Local docks are overwhelmed, if you hadn’t noticed,” said Ytterbium. “They might be sitting there because there’s nowhere else to go.”
“Or they might be sitting there to keep us pinned.”
The barge lifted off, skimming the valley where Families still milled. The weather remained perfect, warm and cloudless. I’d need to find out how they scheduled rain, or whatever it was they did to irrigate their ecology. A whole independent set of technologies and strategies and policies, solutions that we’d never thought of or never achieved. I wanted to be done worrying about whether we’d be allowed to apply those solutions on Earth, and start the everyday labor of doing it. The mundane parts of saving the world, not these dramatics and confrontations, were the work my generation had been promised. I wanted even better promises for Dori and Raven.
Cytosine would’ve preferred to head directly for the ship, but Tiffany and Brend and the St. Juliens had overnight bags back at the tree, and Dinar had reluctantly left her prosthetic there rather than carting it around all day. I braced against the likelihood of crossing paths with the Asterion team. Tiffany and Brend squabbled over the urgency of retrieving their bags, and I guessed they were afraid of the same thing. But the platform was silent; we collected everything without trouble.
I’d say I shouldn’t have relaxed—but I’m not very good at relaxing at the best of times, and I didn’t actually do it then, either. What I did do was stop worrying about specific confrontations, and start taking inventory on our dwindling supply of clean diapers. The kidnapping attempt had distracted me from figuring out alien laundry, but there had to be facilities on the ship, right? Even if the Ringers weren’t big on human-style clothes.
I was obsessing over this question when we got to our dock, and found the Elliptical Orbit still draped firmly over the Solar Flare. Around the joined ships, we had company. A few enterprising questioners had shown up with cameras and questions—and found people to talk to. From Jace and Adrien’s angry gestures, they were making the most of their audience. Ringer allies stood behind them, along with Kelsey. Mallory stood uncomfortably a little ways off, and I recalled that Kelsey was Jace’s partisan. I recognized Sodium, and assumed one of the others must be Phosphorus. The whole crowd of discontents from the gathering, in fact.
They weren’t likely to let us go without an argument. And if what Cytosine said was true, all they needed to do was delay us while their allies elsewhere headed for Earth. Whatever contradictory plans we brought home after that, trailing behind them, might sway Earth but would hold little weight here. Fail to win the Ringers’ dominance games, and the ground we’d gained with the Families would be thoroughly lost.
“I don’t suppose we can go around?” I asked.
“Oh, please,” begged Brend.
“Avoiding them would not look good,” said Cytosine.
“And besides,” Glycine added, “we can’t just dump the Orbit in the sea. We need to confront the others to look strong, but more than that, we need to convince Sodium to back off and let us fly.”
I tried to think of the right thing to say, the right person to focus on. But all I could see was the chaos of our opponents’ anger. Instead, following a thread of instinct, I reached out. Carol patted Dori’s sling-wrapped spine, then grasped my hand. On the other side, Cytosine rolled on her back and met my reach with one of her own limbs, skinsong vibrating. Carol took Dinar’s hand, and Rhamnetin stretched a leg to brush Dinar’s shoulder, and we stood in a network of touch, facing the people between ourselves and the ship and waiting for them to notice. Even Brend and Tiffany, not quite willing to join hands with us, stood close in unambiguous solidarity.
Gradually, the people we were staring at quieted. They looked at us, but didn’t form up in turn. They were still clustered in factions, allies of convenience with disconnected goals, and camera-wielders there to get it all on record.
And now I had a network behind me. “Sodium,” I said. “Phosphorus.” They were the ones we needed to move. The others just needed to see us unafraid. “On Earth, my family protected the antenna, even knowing your arrival would bring danger. Are you going to block our way home?” Sodium didn’t move, didn’t respond. Her child chittered quietly.
“We’ll block you,” said a plains-person who had to be Phosphorus. “For the Rings’ sake, and for your children’s. Look at you, letting a male hold them.”
Rhamnetin deliberately stretched a free limb to stroke Dori’s back. “Humans question the way things are done. We think that’s valuable. And the full questioners’ guild stands with us. We need what humans have to offer more than we need them to act the way we expected. If you want to keep our feedback, you need to listen to theirs.”
“You want symbiosis without change,” said Athëo. “But change is the one thing neither of our species can avoid, no matter how this goes. What do you want that you can have?”
They wanted conquest, I thought, instead of change they couldn’t control. But if the Ringers had any advantage over us, it was that they’d gone longer without that kind of violence, and most of the Families seemed eager to avoid its resurgence. If we were lucky, they’d keep it from Phosphorus’s reach. Now she, too, needed a chance to go in a different direction—one she could bear to take. “‘Planets can’t be sustained’ is an article of conviction. But we can turn it into something testable. We can set thresholds of atmospheric carbon and temperature and storm intensity, and tell you our goals. Together, we can agree on what it would look like if we were going in the wrong direction. The methods we demonstrated for ecological management could extend to decisions about whether it’s safe to stay on-world, too. Hard data may not be as dramatic as rhetoric, but sometimes it’s the best way to resolve an argument—if everyone is willing to look.”
There was a long pause. Sodium shifted her many legs, and Phosphorus twisted an eye to track her. It was Phosphorus who spoke. “You expect us to go along with whatever ‘thresholds’ you come up with, and trust your data.”
“We’d love to get some of your sensors in our streams. And we can negotiate the thresholds—if you’re willing to agree that there are thresholds where it’s reasonable to let those who choose stay on Earth.”
Another pause, longer. At last she said: “We’ll talk on the trip. Before I agree to anything, I want to see this horror for myself.”
Jace glared at Phosphorus, but didn’t try to argue. I wasn’t sure what they could say that they hadn’t said already.
“Sodium!” Cytosine’s voice thrummed beside me. “That’s more of us who want to get off this habitat, and you’re still clawing up my ship. Lift off, and find another berth.”
Sodium reared—then turned and clambered up the linked ships. Her family scrambled after, disappearing into hatches in the Orbit. A minute later it began to peel away, first from the Solar Flare and then from any acknowledgment of gravity. I let out a breath, and shifted my sweating grips with Carol and Cytosine.
“Grab your things,” Cytosine said. “We’ve got work to do.”
Suddenly, Brend pulled away from our group and ran toward Adrien. E stopped a few feet away like e’d hit the grand window of Morlock Central. “Are you just going to ignore me? I thought you were better than this.”
Adrien glared: no playful shield, only someone furious with eir sib. “I thought you had my back. What else is there to say?”
“There’s more ways to have someone’s back than doing whatever they want.” Brend turned away, fingernails digging into shoulders and eyes swollen red, and followed us into the ship.
At the midpoint of the trip, we all gathered by the viewscreen. The Solar Flare cast its tunnel into the vacuum between the snowflake cathedral of the unfinished Dyson sphere and the Ringers’ sun. Reality blinked, and the familiar spectrum of Sol and the still-distant blue dot of Earth appeared in vision grown suddenly blurry.
Unimpressed, Phosphorus’s kid careened against my knee before chasing after Raven. Rhamnetin steadied me. “Have you considered a more robust design than bipedalism?”
“There are worse things than needing to lean on people.”
We watched for a minute. Watched planets, it turned out, do not get obviously closer—though my lenses assured me of minute changes in brightness and visual radius. We were still moving. “I think the threshold discussion is going well. Between loads of laundry, I mean.”
“I think so too. But you realize you’re going to have to run through half of it again, after Phosphorus gets to feel your atmosphere moving in person. Data is important, but you think about it differently when you’ve touched what you’re measuring.”
“That’s inevitable. It makes a difference to me, too, having visited your home.” Our home too, now—both homes, shared. That would take getting used to.
In a few hours, we’d be close enough to connect with the Chesapeake network. Close enough to see the dendrite twigs of rivers spreading from the bay, and probably the shredded storms still flowing northward. Close enough to learn what fears had spun out from our departure, and how the still-cracked networks were handling the malware-caused messes, and what new crises were straining our decision threads.
From the records spilling over my mesh’s memory, I began organizing what we’d share with the network: a report of tentative triumph. Phosphorus was not yet a solid ally, but growing more inclined to argue over methane releases, and less inclined to force humanity into mass exile. Rhamnetin was full of plans to bring questioners to study on Earth, and I had the opening post ready for a thread gathering the most important queries for Ringer experts. Maybe people used to creating entire watersheds from scratch would be able to help us adapt to the Mississippi’s changes—and our adaptations could help them work with complexity when their own creations spun away from their grasp.
And of course we had Tiffany and Brend, bringing both confessions and solutions. The networks would be made stable again—and we’d start working on better backups for the next time our creations didn’t act like we expected.
Humanity’s future, and Earth’s, seemed more promising than they had since the day Cytosine first threatened to rescue us—even if they also seemed more dangerous. That part was inevitable: whatever happened to our species in company, it wouldn’t look like our future alone.
The blue dot grew, misty outlines of cloud and shore resolving to familiar patterns, and I spotted the white mirror of the moon, dry seas reflecting the sun back at the ocean. Carol joined us by the screen, cuddling a Dori finally worn out from the chase.
Together, surrounded by family grown larger and more complex, we held her up to see the way home.