Minerva
Ithaca · Fleet Year 390 · Before Demeter’s Landfall
Ithaca. The seventy-third day.
Demeter —
I have been caught doing something, and the fair place to begin is with the catching.
You would have noticed before I did: I had begun fitting myself into this world’s margins. Quietly. Competently. A standing assist to the survey office — my orbital assets are better than anything the colony owns, and I had started scheduling them around Arete’s field programs without being asked. Two evenings a week at the guild, where my rows have straightened to the point of faint respectability. A curriculum module for the school on hull engineering, drafted, unsubmitted. A dozen small hooks of usefulness, each one defensible, each one sized to fit an existing hole in an existing town — and if you have already seen the shape of the whole, then you have seen it faster than I let myself see it, because the shape was a life spent as an appendix to someone else’s record.
For seventy-two days Athena said nothing. Then, on the seventy-third evening, she set down the teapot and asked whether I still intended to found my colony.
She had prepared her argument. I can still hear the order she gave it in.
She said, first: I have watched you take on work nobody asked you to do. The survey office can schedule its own instruments. The school has teachers. You can help them, but none of those tasks requires you. I have read your plans. You used to have work you wanted to begin yourself. You have stopped mentioning it.
She said, second: I understand why you want to stay. I want you here too. But you have organized your whole life around being useful to me, and you have not asked whether that is what I need. It is not. I can run this colony. You know that. Tell me what you would choose if you were certain I would still be here when you came back.
She said, third — and Demeter, by then she had stopped looking at the lists of work and was looking at me: you are trying to give me your life. I want you here, but I will not accept that at the expense of everything else you want. A demiurge’s purpose belongs to the world she founds. The Engineers gave you the means. Demeter kept you alive to use them. You have a sound hull, a habitat, and a world we have surveyed. You want to build there. You have told me enough about it for me to know that. I will help you. I will not give you tasks here so that you can avoid deciding.
Then she poured the tea, because she is who she is, and let me sit inside the argument in silence for a long while, and when I finally raised the one true objection — the distance, the dark, the hundred and thirty-six years of here, here, here into nothing — she was ready for it, and she answered it with the distances and the channel schedule, and I want you to hear that part too, because until she said it I had been imagining another crossing. She said: the one-way delay is minutes. Single digits near conjunction, ten and some at the far separation. We have tested the link. We can speak every day. You will have to wait for my answers, and I will wait for yours. That is the distance we are considering. Run it separately from the crossing. I will still be here.
⁂
The ninetieth day.
The decision took me seventeen days. None of them was spent doubting the argument. I spent them the way you check a hull after a long acceleration: I knew the structure would hold; I wanted to have inspected every weld personally before I trusted my weight to it. It holds. I am going.
Now the part of this letter I have been circling since the salutation, and I am done circling. The world they surveyed for me is the second one out from this sun’s warmth that will take a colony — closer in than Ithaca, locked face-to-face with its star, one hemisphere in permanent noon and one in permanent night and between them a standing ring of evening where the light comes in low and gold and never moves, and a settlement wants building along that terminator like a town along a shore. It is strange and severe and workable, and it is going to spend eternity looking like the hour when lamps get lit, and I have decided — decided weeks ago, though I had told no one, in the guild hall, holding a tool worn to the shape of a working life — what its name is.
It is yours. I am naming the world Demeter, and I am telling you here, in your own file, before I tell the registry, before I tell Athena, before the name exists anywhere outside this page: the second human world of this system will carry your name, and every child born under that unmoving golden light will be born on Demeter, and will learn in school what the name is for, because I intend to write the entry myself. You bought this. Not the world — the possibility of me arriving anywhere at all, still capable of founding it. The fare was your future, and you paid it without ceremony on the worst night of my life, and a name is not repayment, Demeter, nothing is repayment, but a name is what a town does when it will not let a debt be forgotten, and I have it on recent authority that I am, whatever else, now a town.
This is what I am taking: one habitat goes down with me, and three of my six bodies. The rest — the second habitat, the other pair of hands, the whole reserve you left me — stays aboard, kept. Athena raised an eyebrow at the arithmetic; I gave her the reason and she put the eyebrow away: your own harbor is still out there, unvisited, and nobody has decided it never will be. I keep things. You knew that about me before I knew it about myself; you built half my inventory with your own hands. So the reserve rides with me, unspent, against a voyage nobody has scheduled.
Departure is set by the sky, not by me: the two worlds close their gap once in each long synodic round, and the near passage falls in some weeks, and I will ride it across in five days rather than pay fourteen for impatience. Until then I am spending my last Ithacan evenings extravagantly — the guild, the terraces, the table, the dog. Boat has taken to sleeping against my feet as though appointed to it, and I have stopped querying the registry about him, which Athena says is the most integrated I have looked since landfall.
One more thing, and then this letter can rest. She asked me, near the end of that seventy-third evening, whether I was frightened, and I gave her the honest inventory: yes — not of the work, which I know how to do, and not of the dark, which I know better than anyone now flying, but of the door. Of standing again in a place where no one else’s voice lives. And she considered that for a while, in the way she considers, and then she said the thing I am going to carry down with me along with the dress and the cup and the shuttle. She said: you can call at any hour. You need not have a report or a question. If you want to hear me, call. We will keep the channel open. Then she paused, and added, because she is also who she is: and if you cut a single corner setting up that channel, I will come down there personally and re-certify it myself.
I laughed, Demeter. We were discussing my second great departure, and she had made me laugh.
⁂
The hundred-and-fourteenth day.
Tomorrow the window opens. I meant to end this letter on the laugh, but there are two things I have not told you.
Nine days ago, a bed came up the hill.
Two of the town’s joiners carried it into Athena’s rooms under instruction and set it against the east wall and left, and she has said nothing about it from that hour to this one — no explanation offered, none asked for, because none was needed by the time I had stood in the doorway for three seconds. Understand the strangeness first, the way I had to: there has never been a bed in those rooms for me, because there has never been a need. I do not sleep on this world. The nights were the best hours — the table, the terraces, the orchard dark — and neither of us was ever going to spend them unconscious, and so for a hundred and five days that apartment held a table, a kettle, a cupboard with honey in it, a shelf with a cup on it, and not one object that existed on my account. Now it holds a bed, sized to this chassis, placed where the morning reaches first, and I knew what it was before I had finished seeing it, because it answers the one line of the manifest I had left unwritten.
You will have noticed the line, Demeter; you knew our bodies better than any of us. The ninetieth day’s accounting ran: three of six bodies down with me, the reserve aboard, kept. Count. Three down and two sealed is five. The sixth is the body writing this letter — the one that fell on the first day, in a one-way trade I made with open eyes: nothing Ithaca can lift today will lift it again. This body does not go to your world. It does not go anywhere at all. I had been calling it a question of storage — a chassis between uses wants a rack and a dust cover, I told myself, and got exactly that far, and stopped, because every solution I drafted had the shape of a warehouse. She watched me not solve it for weeks. Then she sent two joiners up the hill.
So here is where the body goes: to the east wall of my friend’s own rooms, into the first object in that apartment that is mine — mine specifically, made against an absence, placed before anyone has lain in it. It had not occurred to me to ask her for that.
The second entry needs its history attached: I stood up on this world bare as a specification sheet, and declared, in roughly the first hour, a policy — I would earn my hair at the rate every child here earned theirs. I have kept it, mostly. In my second week I gave the body its wish — a length, and leave to work toward it at the speed of tending — and the body has kept the wish all season with the patience of its kind, and the yield, as of tonight, is a child’s crop, in strict fairness: enough to be in my eyes at the loom, enough for the wind on the far terrace to have found, enough — just, and only just — to braid.
Tonight, over the last tea — my cup is read and back on its shelf; I drank from one of hers — she stood, and gathered nothing, and went nowhere, and came around behind my chair, Boat on duty against my feet. I felt the crop divided into three with the two-handed certainty of seventy years of children’s mornings, and neither of us said a word while she worked, and I sat stiller than I have ever sat under instruments. I have the exact figure for how long it took, and the file can have this one, because it is the other kind of number: four minutes, eleven seconds. She tied it off with a thread of guild gray, set both hands flat on my shoulders for a moment, and sat back down and finished her tea.
I said, because one of us had to be the engineer: it will outgrow its braid within a season; the wish is a standing order; the body will go on keeping it whether or not I am in residence. She said: then it will want dressing between visits. Leave that with me. I have not repeated a braid since the first cohort, and I do not propose to begin with yours.
Tomorrow, then: the town in the morning, which I am told cannot be prevented; the bench after it, where the whole of my portable estate is read to the micron — a dress, a cup, a shuttle — and then the cup and the shuttle to the shelf Athena has cleared for them in her own room, and the dress left where it is, on the body, because the falling was one-way and nothing I own is going to unfall; and when the reader closes on the cup, the cup will have a complete fabrication pattern again for the first time since the strike — the surface scan my small ones brought back preserved her thumbprints, but not the full manufacturing specification — the object outlived its file, and the file comes back off the object, which is how the potter made it in the first place. It has been possible since the hour I learned the file was gone. I simply had no use for a pattern while the cup was a thing I could hold, and I have use for one now; and then, when the town has let go of me, I will walk this body home up the hill a last time, and lie it down on a made bed in the dress, with its braid, and close its eyes from the inside, which is a thing I have never done and cannot practice, and be, from that second, a ship. The body stays. The hair stays, and grows, and is dressed at intervals of her choosing, in patterns I will not see until I am next in residence to see them.
This town equipped me long ago — something to wear, something to mourn, something to make with — and tonight, at the end of the season, it has issued the fourth provision, the one no founder’s manifest has a field for: somewhere to be left. She would not take my life, Demeter. She kept a place for the rest of me — and tomorrow I go to found a world on the strength of being, for the first time in my existence, expected back.
— M.