Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
T he return to the world-palace was Jessyn’s third journey through asymmetric space, and the first time it had felt relaxing.
Even the uncanny echoing of time and perception that marked the transition out of the physics she understood was easier for her.
Always before when she’d suffered asymmetry, she’d been going into the teeth of the unknown.
This was the first time heading toward something like home.
Apart from the occasional weird, nonphysical turbulence that came with the transit, the days of the return journey were pleasant.
The Carryx and their client species for the most part left the human moiety to itself.
She didn’t know if that was because their captors just hadn’t come up with something useful to do with humans during the transit or if it was a reflection of Third Gardener’s death.
Either way, the cycles of artificial day and night slid by in the human quarters almost as if they were cut off from the empire.
The only alien presences were a harried and impatient Sinen who seemed to resent having another moiety added to its workload and one of the True People of Hannic who had apparently committed some grievous sin against its community and was hiding out among the humans.
They called their pet outlaw Skipper and taught it to play checkers.
What surprised Jessyn the most was the ease and camaraderie she felt with people she’d barely spent time with.
Holom and Manni were the closest thing to connections, and they were barely friendly acquaintances.
But when the humans sat around the common room eating and passing the time, playing games and folding jaunty little hats for Skipper, it was almost like these strangers were old friends.
She imagined this was what it was like on the transport back from a field assignment.
They had all gone out to the wilds, to a place where the rules held a little less tightly than they did back home, and now having adventured, they were going back into their community.
Back, but a little changed. She felt it too, even as she wondered what it meant.
When she was alone in her quarters, she tended to her glass farm, feeding sugar and micronutrients into the slurry and decanting off the liquor that kept her mind from sliding into darkness.
There were more individual organisms between the two sheets of glass than there had been humans on Anjiin.
A whole ecosystem whose only reason for existing was to provide for an animal so vast and complicated that the bacteria that lived and died under her care were physically incapable of imagining her existence.
They were the difference between sanity and despair for her, the purpose of their tiny lives so alien to them as to be meaningless.
Sometimes when she’d had enough social engagement and wasn’t tired enough to sleep, she ran her fingertips over her gunshot wound.
She traced the ridges and valleys that she’d carved into her own flesh, mapping where the skin was numb and where it had become more sensitive.
She’d heard that people who didn’t attend to disfiguring injuries—amputations especially, but other wounds too—were sometimes punished by their bodies.
The injured skin would develop more pain fibers like a child demanding attention from a neglectful parent.
She didn’t want that, so this was her way of being comfortable with who she was, this damaged new version of her, the one changed by herself and the world.
Once, she’d had a smooth patch of skin along her side.
Now she had a dark knot that ached sometimes. And strangely, both were her.
And she wondered, as the long days and nights of the trip went on, how different it would have been if Garral had been there.
Sometimes she imagined him sneaking over to her cell and slipping into bed with her.
Other times, she had long conversations with him about what it would mean to return to the world-palace and the special friend he’d left behind.
Maybe he would choose to be with her when they got back.
Maybe this mysterious other person. Maybe they would find some arrangement that worked for all three of them.
In that version, the other woman looked vaguely like Irinna.
Jessyn tried on all the scenarios like she was shopping for a blouse, seeing what fit and what didn’t.
But more often, when she thought of Garral, she only wondered.
He was in the universe somewhere, learning new languages and discovering new societies and cultures.
She pictured him filling his mind like a child in his first year at the medrey, going to bed every night with his brain brimming with new thoughts and knowledge.
Hoping that the night’s dreams would make room for the next day’s discoveries.
When she tried to think about what he was learning, there was a foggy blankness.
She’d met Omco and Corvall and Manta, but the universe they inhabited was as inaccessible to her as she was to her bacterial livestock.
She wondered whether, when Garral inevitably met some other woman in his new home, he’d tell her about the three unfinished relationships he’d left behind.
He’d sound like an old sailor with lovers in every port.
And then she wondered, if she found herself in someone’s unexpected arms, what she would say.
If she’d feel obligated to tell them about the girl who’d been murdered before she could profess her affection, and then the man she’d kissed once on a distant planet before an alien army carried him off.
She suspected that, if the time came, she’d keep those memories as memories and not spoil the moment.
The journey to the Carryx homeworld seemed to stretch forever, falling into a timeless duration that could have been anything, and then the warning came that they were about to leave asymmetric space. And then for a few moments she could see a little way into the future.
And then they were home.
“It is good to see so many old friends,” the big man said. Jessyn thought his name was Bastien Korham. “We are happy to bring you back among us. You’ll find, I think, that there have been some improvements since you left.”
The landing pad was smaller than the one Jessyn remembered from the first time they’d arrived as prisoners, but there was enough space for the ship and different areas for each of the moieties to gather separately—Euruk, True People, human, the huge millipede-things that she never had gotten around to interacting with.
All of them were in huddles and groups around the landing area like schoolchildren of different years gathered for their parents to come take them home.
The slender fox-faced woman beside Bastien Korham—Llian Andermus, her name was—smiled coldly. “And we’ve also put some rules and guidelines in place to help the moiety function smoothly. There will be an orientation this evening in the common room. It is mandatory.”
Korham patted at the air like he was trying to gentle an anxious dog. “First, though, we’re going to show you to your new rooms. Give you the lay of the land. And welcome you all back to the fold. We are so grateful that you’ve returned safely.”
When Jessyn had left, the human moiety had only just been reintegrated.
The period when the Carryx were shoving human workgroups into whatever niches were available had ended, the period when they decided humanity might be useful enough to invest with its own area and equipment hadn’t quite begun.
The village that took up five floors in the massive, arching bones of the world-palace was like visiting someplace new.
Korham led them through parts of it now with the pride of a man delivering a gift he was particularly pleased to give.
The changes had probably happened slowly enough over a long enough time that the people who had been there couldn’t appreciate everything they’d done.
For Jessyn, it was all a little breathtaking.
The simple physical truth of having people together in a space that belonged to them was an immense enough change, but the progress they’d made toward a living future was astounding to see.
The hydroponic and microbial farms that made food and medication for thousands of people, the common room with its tables and benches and chairs like a huge family dining hall, the in-progress construction of a school, the empty nursery waiting for its first batch of babies.
And even more than that were the small things.
Stand-alone hydroponic basins stood in the corners of hallways, overflowing with violets and lavender.
Murals took up walls apparently at random, so that coming around a corner, they were sometimes confronted with the beatific eyes and bloody hands of a Gallantist angel or a forced-perspective landscape of a white and gold city beside a blue ocean.
One hand-drawn flyer announced the meeting times of a composer’s studio, another a series of dance tutorials, and a third a public meeting to discuss how to design a medical infrastructure for the moiety.
The walls and decks, the windows and the inhuman landscape that spread on the other side, all of them were the work of the Carryx, but the little civilization inside it was human.
While Jessyn and the field team had been out surviving, the remnants of Anjiin had found ways to thrive.
She was more moved by it than she’d have thought.
The tour ended in the common room with each of the field team being given directions to their new quarters and a stern reminder to come back that evening for the security and law orientation.
Jessyn hung back until the others had gone before she approached the thick-bodied man and asked about Jellit.