I don’t understand,” Sagara said later, as they made their slow and ponderous descent back to the planet’s surface. He had rolled up Boone’s corpse in a sheet of canvas. “Why are we going back?”
“The androids—no, the synthetics can’t come home with us,” Park heard herself saying. The golden glow had faded in her head, but only a little. “They want to stay here.”
Fulbreech made an incredulous noise, then winced and rubbed his throat. His voice was hoarse and gravelly, destroyed by Boone’s assault, but otherwise he and Sagara were both still intact. “Why?”
She looked at Jimex, who was helping to readjust the arm of one of the injured synthetics. He smiled at her, and Park said, “They’ll be happier here.”
Sagara made a face, but Fulbreech looked between her and Jimex with almost wonder. “You’re one of them now,” he said. It wasn’t an accusation, only an epiphany—as if he had finally uncovered a secret of Park’s that she had always hinted at, but he had always missed.
The ship purred and whirred around them. Park felt the awareness of METIS and ARGUS pressing against her like watching spirits. “Maybe I always have been,” she said.
Outside, the sky was a riot of color and light: a dance so fierce and searing that it seemed almost harmful to look at. Above, the escape pod had disappeared into a dark, ragged fissure in the sky.
Park told Sagara that Natalya had simply gotten away—that Park had not been able to catch up to her in time. He grunted and said, “She’ll die in space anyway, or go to prison. That escape pod only has a month of rations, and who is she going to call for help? The ISF? Even if she manages to land at Corvus without starving, the Security team will be waiting there to arrest her. And being charged with murder, mutiny, and conspiracy by the very entity she was trying to escape from—the one whose mission she torpedoed? They will not be kind. I’d rather eject myself into space.”
Then at least she’ll have done it herself, Park thought, and made that choice on her own. She was glad that she had not taken that away from Natalya, whatever happened. It was more complicated than not wanting blood on her hands; there was something more there, but what it was, Park could not exactly say. The METIS part of her muttered in a tiny stream of rebellion, though—and so at least Park knew that the choice had been hers alone. That the part that had spared Natalya was still her, and only her. That seemed important, somehow. She wanted to tell the synthetics about it, but didn’t know how to articulate it. Maybe they already knew.
They landed, and Park felt the settling of the ship like it was the concluding piece of a vast and complex puzzle. Fulbreech helped her to the airlock while Sagara stayed on the ship to send his own message to ISF and rest his leg. Taban watched them don their exo-armor suits with some hidden amusement. The synthetics had all reconvened again, claiming that Keller and Reimi needed three hours to complete their reawakening. They all crowded eagerly at the door, like schoolchildren waiting to go to recess. They did not line up in formation, as they used to.
Park opened the airlock. The synthetics all spilled out, and Fulbreech helped Park through the door. It was easy enough to climb down the little ladder that led down under the hatch, but once she hit the ground, Park nearly collapsed. There was an unutterable pressure in her head, the howling and rushing of a sound so vast that for a moment her vision went dark. Briefly she thought that they were being attacked, that some enormous and hideous monster was about to consume them—or that the unity rain was coming again—but then Fulbreech clapped a hand to her shoulder and held her as she swayed. “It’s the wind!” he shouted through his helmet. Out here, his voice sounded utterly transformed, unrecognizable—like it belonged to a different man, a stranger and not a stranger. “It’s just the wind!”
Of course, Park thought in a daze. Nearly a year in space, aboard a sealed, pressurized ship—she had forgotten the sound of wind.
After a moment the two of them managed to stagger upright. Despite herself, Park had to cling to Fulbreech, trembling, before she managed to stand on her own and open her eyes. Through her sparking vision Eos seemed to swim and shimmer like a mirage. She felt as if all the air had been sucked out of her lungs. There was nothing out there but ice: a frozen tundra that stretched out in a flat, razor-sharp horizon, so white that it nearly cut the eye. And there were the two suns, weak and watery with pale light. And the sky—the sky was a deep green, a kind of color that made Park feel rich and full. It was the first time she had seen natural light since she’d left Earth. It was almost unbearable to look at.
“Are you all right?” Fulbreech shouted through his helmet.
After a moment, Park straightened and nodded. The synthetics were looking around, some with hesitation, others with wonder. A kind of chanting rose from them after a while, or singing, though Park couldn’t make out the words. They’re taking it in, Park thought. They were reveling in it, all of this, Eos, their new home. What that meant.
She was almost afraid to study it too closely. What would it all look like, ten years from now? One hundred years from now? Was she looking at the birthplace of synthetic civilization? Would they live forever, procreate, and share their enlightenment with their machine offspring, cannibalized from parts of the ship, until they one day reached the solution mankind had never been able to uncover? Could they really make this place a home for themselves?
We could do it, she thought then. We did it with Mars and Phobos and Titan. They can do things we never dreamed of.
Fulbreech had put his arm around her shoulders. He felt solid and warm and heavy with life. Off in the distance, a line of rose was beginning to rim the horizon. Daybreak, Park thought, turning the word over in her head. The marker of passing time. But did it mean anything on a planet where time was not a steady march, more a scattered melody that no one knew or could hear, and the planet’s surface was populated by androids who did not age?
Someone was tramping up to her, through the ice; for a moment Park couldn’t make out his figure, shadowed as it was by the brilliant dawn. Then the figure resolved: it was Jimex. His eyes were spangled with gold in the light.
“You don’t need your helmet,” he told her. “This place is yours, too.”
Fulbreech made a noise of disbelief, but Park shrugged off his arm and began to take off her helmet.
“No—” Fulbreech began, startled.
The helmet disengaged from the suit with a rush of frigid air; Park took a deep breath. Then another.
She smiled.
“Where will you make your home?” she asked Jimex. She looked to the mountains in the distance: silvery-gray structures that seemed to crease the horizon. No, she thought, catching herself. Not mountains. Folds. “Are you happy to finally be here?”
“Yes and no,” Jimex answered, as serious as ever. “In a way, we have always been here.”
Park smiled at him, and her heart gave a hard clutch of love. “I understand.”