Barrens, page 7
“We have additions for the habitat too,” Jacques said. “Though you’ve done an impressive job.”
He nodded toward the habitat, looking very different from when he’d left, with the dome over the top of the landers and habitat tent between.
“Just wait,” Garrison said. “Lila’s been extraordinary.”
Jacques laughed. “I hadn’t expected anything less.”
“Thank you,” Lila said. “This way.” She led them across toward the structure.
“This has changed too,” Jacques said.
“Yes.”
The stems now had an airlock—courtesy of the construction robots, and help from the inhabitants.
Lila, Garrison, Jacques and Denella, who’d joined them, cycled through and took the whisk elevator down. It delivered them into a wide anteroom with a low ceiling and dim lighting. There was a lot of equipment in the room, a mix of things constructed from Garrison’s ideas and items the inhabitants had brought around. Some black and blocky, some with tubes wrapped all around, some you could pick up in your hands, others the size of a personal vehicle.
“This is where they brought you the first time?” Jacques said.
“No,” Lila said. “But that is nearby. This, it turns out, is more convenient and energy efficient. You can take your suit off now.”
“Really? You have atmosphere here.”
“Turns out this is a cooperative effort.” Lila clicked her helmet neck ring and the seal released. Cooler air wafted around her. She was used to the smell now, organic and oily.
“Of course,” Jacques said.
They stowed their suits in shelving units along the wall.
Jacques looked lean and fit, but tired. Clean-shaven and with his hair trimmed and slicked. It surprised her how much she’d missed him.
How could she have missed him at all? She barely knew him.
He smiled at her. “I thought about you a lot while I was on the way there and back. It’s good to see you.”
“Did you just look her up and down?” Denella said. “That is not good.”
“It’s okay,” Lila said. “I did the same to him.”
“Good grief,” Garrison said. “We’ve got work to do here.”
“Yes,” Jacques said. But he looked between Garrison and Denella, and pointed to them each in turn. Back and forth.
“What?” Denella said.
“Is this a thing, here?”
“I...”
“It’s a thing,” Lila said. “So I don’t think they get to judge people checking each other out.”
Garrison sighed.
“All right,” Lila said. “Let’s go and meet her.”
“Her?”
“Yarukie-Krelloe. You’ll like her.”
They strode through more rooms and corridors. Places that were familiar to Lila now, but of course Jacques looked around, wide-eyed.
“We’re prepared,” Lila said. “We have a meeting room here.”
The entry door was arched and double-width.
Yarukie-Krelloe was there already, with several of the others. Dressed in a variety of styles, with their hair short and their bodies lithe.
Lila was used to their angled eyes and small mouths, but for a moment she saw through Jacques’s eyes.
There was a long table, filled with delicacies, pastries and fruit. Mostly locally sourced. From their deep stores. They had planned on this moment. Planned for a long time.
“You came,” Yarukie-Krelloe said, stepping forward and holding out her three-fingered hand.
Lila remembered her own hesitation. That creepy spidery-ness of their hands.
But Jacques didn’t react except to hold out his own hand. They grasped and shook.
“I’m guessing they have taken this from us,” he said, smiling, “rather than it being their own thing too.”
“Quite a coincidence,” Garrison said. “But, yes, they have the same thing. We have a lot in common.”
“But not interstellar travel.”
“No,” Lila said. “We’ll give them that, and they’ll give us suspended animation.”
“Kind of moot, isn’t it?” Jacques said. “You don’t need both.”
“You do, if you want to go to Andromeda,” Garrison said.
“Andromeda.” Jacques looked around. “Why would we go there? We haven’t yet explored one percent of our own galaxy. I mean, I get the fascination, but that would take... centuries.”
“Yes.” Garrison smiled. “Lila?”
“What?” Jacques said. “What am I missing?”
“Remember how we thought they’d been in suspended animation for maybe hundreds of thousands of years? Well, we were out by a substantial factor.”
“You don’t mean...” Jacques looked around them all again. “Say it aloud. I don’t want to sound like a fool.”
“They’re from Andromeda,” Lila said. “Millions upon millions of years to get here. Hundreds of millions, even”
He nodded.
“We realized of course when we looked at the surface more,” Garrison said.
“And ran more reverse tracking extrapolations,” Denella said. “About half of them put the planet right back out there.”
“Not just interstellar space,” Lila said. “Intergalactic space.”
“Their suspended animation systems must be pretty extraordinary.”
“They are,” Garrison said.
“And they want to go back?”
“Wouldn’t you?” Lila said.
“I suppose you want to go with them.”
“Do you?”
“Are you asking me on a date?” he said.
Lila laughed. “That would be some date.”
“Yes it would.” He was nodding, considering.
“I can build the ships,” Garrison said. “Not personally, you understand, but with some of their technologies and some of ours.”
“Andromeda,” Jacques said.
“Captain,” Denella said. “I would ask permission to go. And Malé, and August and Fiona will ask for permission. They want to come too.”
“Well,” Jacques said, with a wry smile, and looking over Yarukie-Krelloe and the others. “Who am I to deny permission for a venture like that?”
“Well, I’m going,” Garrison said.
“Of course.” Jacques smiled at Lila. He reached his hand toward her.
“I sure would like to as well,” he said. “If you’ll have me.”
“You bet,” Lila said, a charge running through her again.
“How about that?” Garrison said. “The grandest venture ever, settled in moments.”
“Of course,” Lila said. “That’s how all the best things happen.”
About the Author
Award-winning author, Sean Monaghan has published more than one hundred stories in the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and in New Zealand, where he makes his home. A regular contributor to Asimov’s, his story “Crimson Birds of Small Miracles”, set in the art world of Shilinka Switalla, won both the Sir Julius Vogel Award, and the Asimov’s Readers Poll Award, for best short story.
He is a past winner of the Jim Baen Memorial Award, and the Amazing Stories Award.
Sean writes from a nook in a corner of his 110 year old home, usually listening to eighties music.
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