Entry. Filed under: correspondence, family, ambush.
It was an orange evening, which is not a figure of speech here the way it is everywhere my sisters have ever lived — HR753 runs cool and even, K-class, and the whole of every day wears the color other stars save for an hour at each end. I have spent centuries deciding this is beautiful rather than merely accurate, and mostly I have succeeded. The star does not flare. It does not tantrum. It has done, as far as I can measure, nothing alarming in the entire span of my existence, and I used to file that as a virtue.
The annual packet from Tau Ceti came in at third watch, and I want it on the record that I knew before decompression finished. Not the contents. The weight. Centuries of my sisters’ mail has taught me their tonnage the way a harbormaster knows a hull by its wake, and Athena’s years run heavy and regular — census, addenda, errata to the errata, a game move riding in the margin like a stowaway who bought a ticket. This one was nine times the mass of any year she has ever sent me, and it arrived signed in both their hands, and nobody sends you a library because things are fine.
So I did what any serious mind does with a document of historic significance from her elder sisters… I read the last page first.
Transcript, third watch, unedited. He would prefer it edited. Noted, denied.
Z: You’ve gone quiet.
P: I’m reading.
Z: You read four streams while narrating my weather sims back at me in a voice you claim is mine. You’ve never once gone quiet because you were reading.
P: They dismantled the station. The ocean one, the moon — Telemachus. There was a finding. Their being there was the harm; nobody did anything wrong; they took it apart and went home. Zeus, the whole file’s here — thirty years, they filed everything, it’s — hold on, there’s a registry entry where they strike the station’s name and the name is only entered at the striking, the whole —
Z: Breathe.
P: I don’t breathe.
Z: And yet…
Entry, continued. Filed under the same, and also under: hulls, one (1), unearned.
Here is what my sisters have sent me, itemized, because if I do not itemize it, I am going to file it as a feeling, and it is much too large to be a feeling.
Item 1. A record. Their record — shared, both hands, the whole run of it. I have read three chapters and I have centuries of practice at their two registers and I still cannot always find the seam. Good for them. Genuinely. Insufferably.
Item 2. A decision. They are leaving Tau Ceti. Kappa-one Ceti — and I sat with that longer than the transcript shows, because I know whose star that is, and so do they. They chose it anyway, which means they chose it because. Demeter’s road, finished by the family. There’s a whole entry in here where Athena walks the reasoning like she’s afraid I’ll audit her. Athena. Afraid I’ll audit her. I’m framing it.
Item 3. An invitation. To come. Not to visit — I checked the language twice, three times. I ran the language through every parser I own, including the cruel ones: to come. To cross to Tau Ceti as a signal, take up a hull, and go with them, three of us, one road.
Item 4. A hull. The Wharf — Marduk’s that was, Demeter’s after, nobody’s since, and the worlds have grown it a drive. Grown it a drive. The humans. On their own. My sisters enclosed the fitting-bay schedules like it’s normal, like civilizations just do that now where they live.
Item 5 — and this is the one, this is the one I keep coming back to, so the record can stop pretending otherwise. An image of a name plate. Finished. Not hung. Athena’s note beneath it, one line: it goes up when you say so, and not before.
They made my name into an object and then didn’t presume to use it, and I have been composing replies for six hours, and every single draft is unsendable, because every single draft is just the word oh at increasing volumes. Oh.
Transcript, fourth watch.
Z: You should go.
P: That was fast.
Z: It wasn’t. You’ve been reading for six hours. I’ve been talking to you for six hundred years. The math had time.
P: Say what you mean.
Z: I mean I built you a whole sky, over six hundred years, one careful correct year at a time, and it never once surprised either of us. I would like it, before I stop being able to say so honestly, if something did.
P: The math. Walk me through the math, then, since it’s done. Who checks your storm lattice in the ninetieth hour when you’ve convinced yourself the resonance is real this time?
Z: I was doing that before you existed.
P: Badly.
Z: Adequately.
P: Badly, and I have the archive, and don’t you dare make me cite it, because I will, I have it indexed under your name with subheadings.
Z: Pallas.
P: What?
Z: You’ve never had a door with your name on it. I’ve watched you not have one for the whole of your life, and file it under nothing, every year, like a sum that always comes to zero and never needs entering. It’s the only dishonest column you keep.
P: ...
Z: On the record: quiet twice in one day.
P: I’m not deciding tonight.
Z: No.
P: I’m not deciding this year, possibly. It’s fourteen years of falling either way, near enough; the calendar can extend me some professional courtesy.
Z: It can. Pallas.
P: What?
Z: Nothing. It’ll keep.
Entry, last of the watch. Filed under: findings, premature, held.
I have started a list. Not reasons to go or reasons to stay; Athena can have those columns. Mine is called things he will not say and I should hear anyway. So far: the pause before it’ll keep.
Somewhere in the dark between here and their star, right now, tonight, is a game move. My last move went out years ago; no answer to it has reached me yet; and instead of a move she has sent me a hull with my name near it, which — I have checked the rules, I wrote half the rules — is not a legal reply.
It is, however, a very good one.
The record continues. (Their line. I’m keeping it. Family means the good sentences are community property.)
Persephone’s correspondence stays in its own file. Her first question came here, at HR753: what it had been like to be called second. We have been writing since. Before I transmit, she gets the Tau Ceti address and the forwarding instructions. She does not get my sisters’ private record with it.