“Apologize,” Anna said.
Nono nodded, then turned back to the pot of rice. “I turned on your desk terminal today to check my mail. You were still logged in. There was a message from the United Nations about the secretary-general’s humanitarian committee project. All those people who they’re sending out to the Ring.”
Anna felt the sharp twist of guilt. Of having been caught out at something.
“Shit,” she said. She didn’t like profanity, but some occasions demanded it. “I haven’t responded yet.” It felt like another lie.
“Were we going to talk about it before you decided?”
“Of course, I—”
“Nami is almost two,” Nono said. “We’ve been here two years. At some point, deciding to stay is deciding who Nami is going to be for the rest of her life. She has family in Russia and Uganda who’ve never seen her. If she stays here much longer, they never will.”
Nami was being fed the same drug cocktail all newborns in the outer planets received. It encouraged bone growth and fought off the worst of the effects low-gravity environments had on childhood development. But Nono was right. If they stayed much longer, Nami would begin to develop the long, thin frame that came with life out there. To life in low gravity. Anna would be sentencing her to a life outside her home world forever.
“Europa was always supposed to be temporary,” Anna said. “It was a good posting. I speak Russian, the congregation here is small and fragile…”
Nono turned off the stove and came to sit by her, holding her hand on the table. For the first time, the faux wood tabletop looked cheap to Anna. Tacky. She saw with startling clarity a future in which Nami never lived anywhere with real wood. It felt like a punch to the stomach.
“I’m not mad at you for coming here,” Nono said. “This was our dream. Coming to places like this. But when you asked for the transfer out here, you were three months pregnant.”
“I was so unlikely to be chosen,” Anna said, and she could hear the defensiveness in her own voice.
Nono nodded. “But you were chosen. And this thing for the UN. Flying out to the Ring as part of the secretary-general’s advisory group. And our baby not even two.”
“I think two hundred people signed up for the same slot,” Anna said.
“They chose you. They want you to go.”
“It was so unlikely—” Anna started.
“They always choose you,” Nono interrupted. “Because you are very special. Everyone can see it. I can see it. I saw it the first time I met you, giving your speech at the faith conference in Uganda. So nervous you dropped your notes, but I could’ve heard a pin drop in that auditorium. You couldn’t help but shine.”
“I stole you from your country,” Anna said. It was what she always said when Nono brought up how they met. “The Ugandan church could have used a young minister like you.”
“I stole you,” Nono said, like she always said, only this time it had a disconcertingly pro forma feel. As though it were an annoying ritual to be rushed through. “But you always say this. ‘There were so many others. I was so unlikely to be picked.’”
“It’s true.”
“It’s the excuse you use. You’ve always been one to ask for forgiveness rather than permission.”
“I won’t go,” Anna said, pushing her hand against her eyes and the tears that threatened there. Her elbow banged into the salad bowl, nearly knocking it off the table. “I haven’t said yes to them. I’ll tell them it was a mistake.”
“Annushka,” Nono said, squeezing her hand. “You will go. But I am taking Nami back to Moscow with me. She can meet her grandparents. Grow up in real gravity.”
Anna felt a white-hot spike of fear shoot through her stomach. “You’re leaving me?”
Nono’s smile was a mix of exasperation and love.
“No. You’re leaving us. For a little while. And when you come back, we will be waiting for you in Moscow. Your family. I will find us a nice place to live there, and Nami and I will make it a home. A place where we can be happy. But we will not go with you.”
“Why?” was all Anna could think to say.
Nono got up and took two plates out of the cupboard, then dished up dinner and put it on the table. As she spooned Waldorf salad onto her plate she said, “I’m very afraid of that thing. The thing from Venus. I’m afraid of what it will mean for everything we care about. Humanity, God, our place in His universe. I’m afraid of what it will do, of course, but much more afraid of what it means.”
“I am too,” Anna said. It was the truth. In fact, it was part of the reason she’d asked to join the expedition when she heard it was being assembled. That same fear Nono was talking about. Anna wanted to look it in the eye. Give God a chance to help her understand it. Only then could she help anyone else with it.
“So go find the answers,” Nono said. “Your family will be waiting for you when you get back.”
“Thank you,” Anna said, a little awed by what Nono was offering her.
“I think,” Nono said around a mouthful of mushrooms and rice, “that maybe they will need people like you out there.”
“Like me?”
“People who don’t ask permission.”
Chapter Five: Bull
“
I
t’s not in the budget,” Michio Pa, executive officer of the Behemoth, said. If she’d been an Earther, she would have been a small woman, but a lifetime in microgravity had changed her the way it did all of them. Her arms, legs, and spine were all slightly elongated—not thin exactly. Just put together differently. Her head was larger than it would have been, and walking in the mild one-third-g thrust gravity, she stood as tall as Bull but still seemed perversely childlike. It made him feel shorter than he was.
“We might need to adjust that,” he said. “When they put in the rail gun, they were treating it like we had standard bulkheads and supports. Thing is, the Mormons were really trying to cut back on mass. They used a lot of ceramics and silicates where the metals usually go. Directional stuff. We fire a round right now, we could shear the skin off.”
Pa walked down the long, curving corridor. The ceiling arched above her, white and easily twice as high as required, an aesthetic gesture by designers who hadn’t known they were building a warship. Her stride a little wider than his, moving a little more comfortably in the low g and making him trot slightly to keep up. It was one of a thousand small ways Belters reminded earthborn men and women that they didn’t belong here. The XO shook her head.