Chapter 15 #2
“Fine.” I crouched down and they crowded around me, oblivious to the notion of personal space.
I pulled up a star map first. It was small, but I set the device to projection mode, and a glowing network of planets and stars lit up in the air above my wrist. It wasn’t a large projection.
The device wasn’t made for that, but the children gasped in awe and leaned in closer.
“Here’s a section of the quadrant we’re in.
” I used my other hand to rotate the hologram.
“And here…” I moved my fingers to zoom in on a small blue light. “Is our planet, Podnos-9.”
No one moved or spoke for one glorious moment.
Then: What is that planet? Is that a star or planet? Are there people on that dot? What do they eat in space? Why is that dot red? How come we only have two moons?
The questions came fast and hard and I only heard a few of them clearly as they pressed even closer and their small fingers reached out to try and touch the hologram.
The projection could only be manipulated by me, so their hands moved in and out of the suspended light beam.
That seemed to fascinate them as much as the answers I tried to provide.
Aila leaned in so close her nose nearly entered the projection. “And all of that is what’s out there?”
“This is just a tiny bit of the galaxy,” I explained. “This map doesn’t cover everything.”
The serious-eyed girl pointed at the dense cluster near the center. “What’s that part?”
“A crowded star system. Complicated politics.”
“Have you been there?”
“Parts of it.” I didn’t feel the need to explain the absurd level of corruption going on in that system, so I switched the display to Silli’s species file.
There were lots of happy sounds at that.
The full Vradic-89D biological profile replaced the star chart, including habitat notes, behavioral data, a moving model of the animal.
If Silli had been sitting on my shoulder, I’d be curious to see what he thought of his own image.
The six children bombarded me with a new round of questions, most of which were impossible to answer.
I didn’t know if Silli had dreams. He sometimes twitched in his sleep, so maybe.
I didn’t know if he had brothers and sisters, or if he missed them.
And I didn’t care to know if he washed after he relieved himself. Those were activities I left to him.
Eventually, I herded them back to the village where the children were returned to their families.
The afternoon had cooled. Aila gave me a hug, which surprised me, before skipping away with her friends.
She had organized a successful expedition and had clearly cemented herself as the center of all things adventurous.
I watched them move off with a tired smile, but stayed in the village a while longer.
I wasn’t sure why until I admitted I was waiting to see Maive.
I found her in the square, in conversation with two of the elders. Everything in her posture said present, calm, capable. It had said this all day.
But I’d been paying attention for weeks now.
I saw fatigue in the set of her shoulders, which rested a degree or two beyond their usual straight line.
I heard it in the slight pause before she responded to the elders’ questions.
There was a specific weight of a long day that was visible to no one other than one who had spent an embarrassing amount of time watching her.
I came and stood near her, close enough that my arm was alongside hers, and I put my hand briefly at her lower back. A light touch that no one could see.
She didn’t turn. But something in her shoulders eased, barely. The conversation with the elders wrapped up and we walked toward the stone building together when the elders moved on. She didn’t comment on the touch and I didn’t explain it. We walked.
So this is what it is. Knowing someone well enough to notice when they’re tired, and acknowledging it without making a big thing of it.
I had been alone for all of my adult life and thought myself content with it.
Apparently, I wasn’t anymore. The newness of that hung between my two hearts with more weight than I wanted to examine right now.
I said goodbye to her a short while later and took the path south.
Somewhere past the scraggly trees, in the last stretch before the rise, I took in the view toward my house. The ocean. The quiet. The evening ahead.
Today had been good. I’d eaten a meal surrounded by people who were willing to have me there.
I’d spent the afternoon in a forest with children who’d started the afternoon wary of me and ended it showing me their world’s best-kept secrets.
I had touched Maive’s back and watched her carry her day more easily for thirty seconds.
Hmm, I thought. So that was what a happy day felt like. I filed it away and kept walking.
B2 met me at the crest of the rise.
“Welcome home, Gilrox. There was an anomalous reading from the northern perimeter. Approximately two hours ago.” It rotated toward me. “You were beyond comm range to notify you, at the time.”
“What reading?”
“A thermal signature, brief. It resolved before I could complete a full scan.”
“Wildlife?”
“Not consistent with any known native animal.”
I walked the perimeter, taking my time. The soft soil at the forest edge held nothing. No broken branches, no tracks, no trace of anything that had passed through.
I reset B2 and went inside.
A thermal signature that resolved before full scan could be a dozen things. A sensor glitch. Heat rising off sun-warmed rock. All more likely than the alternative.
But I sat on my deck with a beverage and looked north at the village lights and thought about Wint-ti birds and Junu trees and mushrooms that took years to become what they were, and a syrup that the quadrant apparently found very valuable, and I knew that my threshold for what counted as nothing had shifted.
I wasn’t sure when it had happened.
I was paying attention to it now.