Aurora

7 WHAT IS THIS

She feels the thump of the splash, the slosh and dip of the ferry in the water, she unlatches her restraints and gets onto her feet, falls over immediately. Ah yes, feet still numb. Damn. Like walking with both feet asleep at once, very difficult, very annoying. Balancing on an ocean swell, oh my she falls.

Up again, she staggers to Badim. He’s awake, he grips her arm and smiles, says, “Help the others.”

The floor sways and bounces under her as she crawls to the operations console and joins the people already crowding around it. Aram is there tapping away. He eyes Freya with a wild glance, like no look she has ever seen on his face.

“We’re down,” he says. “We’re alive.”

“All of us?” she asks.

He grins broadly at her, as if she is predictable to him, says, “Not sure yet. Probably not. That was one hell of a squeeze for a while there.”

“Let’s check and see,” Freya says. “Help the injured. Have we got contact with anyone yet?”

“Yes, they’re on their way. A ship, or maybe a little flotilla. They’ll be here soon.”

“Good. Let’s be ready for them. Don’t let’s sink to the bottom of the ocean after all this. I think that has a tendency to happen in landings like this.”

“Yes, good point. It feels lighter than one g, don’t you think?” Aram is still grinning in a manner completely unlike him. She would have said he was the predictable one.

“I have no idea,” she says irritably. “I can’t feel my feet. I can’t even stand. Are we in big waves or something?”

“Who knows?” He spreads his hands wide. “We’ll have to ask!”

People in what look like spacesuits come into the room and help them to their feet and out of the ferry, into a tube with a moving floor that carries them up into some kind of large room, very stable underfoot compared to the lander, but she keeps falling anyway. Obscurely she is afraid of the people in spacesuits, quarantine suits no doubt, people who are all shorter than her. Keep hold of Badim no matter what. Behind her more people pour into the room, all her fellow voyagers; she tries to count, fails, tries to recall any faces she doesn’t see, says to the suited people around her, “Is everyone all right? Have we all lived?”

But then out of the end of the tube come spacesuited figures pulling gurneys, and she cries out and tries to run to them, falls, crawls, is pulled by her arms to her feet, is helped along. There’s Chulen, there’s Toba, unconscious at least, possibly dead, she cries out again. “Chulen! Toba!” No sign they have heard her.

Badim is beside her again, saying “Freya, please, let them get them to their infirmary.”

“Yes, yes.” She stands, hand on his shoulder, swaying. “You’re all right?” she asks him, staring at him closely.

“Yes, dear. Fine. We’re almost all fine, it looks like. We’ll get a count soon. For now, let them work. Come with me. Look, they have a window.”

Killed at the last minute, in the final approach. So bad, so—something she can’t name. Cruel fate. Stupid irony. That’s it: so stupid. Reality is stupid.

Slowly they move. She keeps stumbling. It’s like walking on stilts tied to her knees. Very frustrating.

“Look, here’s a window. Let’s see what we can see.”

They move through the crowd by the window. The starship people are crammed against it, looking out, squinting, hands held over eyes. Very bright out there. Very blue. A dark blue plane under them, a light blue dome over them. The sea. Earth’s ocean. They’ve seen it so often on screens, and this window could be a big screen too, but somehow it’s immediately clear that it’s not. Why it is so obvious to the eye that it is a window and not a screen is a puzzling question but she puts that aside, stares with the rest. Sunlight breaking on water spangles the sea surface everywhere, it’s really very hard to look at and stay balanced, tears are pouring down her cheeks, but not from any emotion she can feel, it’s just the brilliant light in her eyes, causing her to blink over and over. Lots of voices, all known to her, crying out, exclaiming, commenting, laughing. She can’t look out the window, a dread at the sheer size of the visible world seizes her in the guts and twists until she has to hunch over, duck her head under the window. Nausea, seasickness. Earth sickness.

“It’s lighter here,” Badim says, not for the first time; she hears that in his voice, that he is repeating himself, and recalls him saying it earlier, when she was not hearing things. “More light than what we called sunlight. And I don’t think the one g here is the same as our one g, do you? It’s lighter!”

“I can’t tell,” she says. She can’t feel the ship swaying on the waves either. “Is this a ship?”

“I think so.”

“Why can’t we feel the waves?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s so big the waves don’t rock it.”

“Wow. Can that be?”

One of their hosts speaks, they can’t be sure which one, the voice is amplified, and all the helmeted figures stare at them curiously.

“Welcome aboard Macao’s Big Sister.” Strange accent; from her memories of the feeds from Earth she guesses it is some kind of South Asian English, but different too. She’s never heard this accent before, and it’s hard to follow. “We are happy you are all with us and safe. We are sad to report that seven of your colleagues died in the descent, and several more are injured or distressed, none critically, we are happy to venture. We hope you will understand that we are wearing protective suits for our mutual safety. Until we are sure that we are not a problem for you, nor you a problem for us, we are instructed to ask you to stay in these rooms we will keep on Macao’s Big Sister for you, and to please not touch us. The period of quarantine will not last long, but we need to do a complete analysis of you, and your overall health, for our mutual safety. We know that because of your experiences around Tau Ceti you will understand our concern.”

The starship people are nodding, looking at each other uneasily, looking, some of them, at her.

She says, “Please tell us who died, and who’s in the hospital. We can help with identification if you have any trouble reading their chips. Also, can you please tell us what has happened to the ship and Jochi? Have they rounded the sun yet?”

She’s lost all sense of time, but it seems at least possible that in the same time it has taken them to descend through the atmosphere, splash down, and get picked up and led here, the ship may have already reached the sun and circled it, or not. But it isn’t so; the ship is going much slower now, and is still on its way to the orbit of Venus.

They learn that the ship they are on is two kilometers long and its upper deck is two hundred meters off the water, it’s a kind of floating island, moving slowly around the ocean, pulled on its way by masts that shape-shift into various sail shapes, also by kites lofting so high overhead that they are mere dots, or even invisible. The kite sails are up there catching the jet stream, apparently. The ship plows through the waves slowly, like an island cut free of its moorings. There are many of these floating islands, apparently, none in a hurry to get anywhere, obviously. Townships, their hosts call them. Like all of them, Macao’s Big Sister follows the winds, thus on some voyages it circumnavigates the Earth west to east, other times uses the trade winds in the mid-latitudes to circle back to the west, in the Pacific and Atlantic. They can tack into the wind, to an extent, and have electric motors for auxiliary power, or when they need fine movement. They moor off the harbors of coastal cities that are not very different from the townships, they are told. The feeds sent to the starship never mentioned these things at all. All the coastal cities are in large part new, they are told, as sea level is higher than when they left the solar system, twenty-four meters higher. Much has therefore had to change. They never mentioned these things in the feed.

From the upper rooms where they are confined, overlooking the topmost deck of the township, which is like a flying park under the sky, they can see for what they guess is about a hundred kilometers across the immense flat plate of ocean. The horizon is often clouded, and the clouds are colorful at sunrise and sunset, orange or pink or both at once, then mauve and purple in the last light. Sometimes there is a haze between the two blues of sea and sky, whitish and indistinct; other times the horizon is a sharp line, out there at the edge of the visible world, so very far away. Ah Earth, so big! Freya still can’t look at it; even sitting in a chair by the window she still loses her balance, is overcome by the clench of her stomach, the nausea in every cell of her. It’s scaring her how poorly she can face it. Aurora didn’t have this effect on her; of course she only saw that through screens, rendered and so somehow miniaturized. This window should be just another screen, a big screen, giving her yet another feed from Earth, as during every night of her childhood. But somehow it isn’t, it’s different, as in certain dreams where an ordinary space warps and goes luminescent with dread. It’s a fear she can’t dodge, a kind of terror; even when she leaves the window, pushes a walker down halls to other rooms, to the room she has been given to sleep in, it pursues her, a fear that is itself terrifying. She’s afraid of the fear.

They are in 1 g, by definition, but the voyagers decide, and the records in the computers they brought down with them confirm, that they were living in something close to 1.1 g for most of their voyage home. Why the ship did this, they cannot determine from the records they have.

Freya says to Badim, “It must have done it to make sure we felt light when we got here.”

“Yes, I guess that’s possible. I suppose. But I wonder too if there was some programming done by the people in Year 68, some kind of alteration that left the ship with no frame of reference. We can ask it when it comes around the sun.”

Ah—that’s the source of her fear. One of them, anyway. There may be more, there may be many. But that one stabs her in the heart. “Has it reached the sun yet?”

“Almost.”

A lighter 1 g or not, Badim is showing the effects of—something. Of being on Earth, he says. He jokes that their bodies are oxidizing faster in this world, the real world. He is stiffer, slower. “The truth is,” he says to Freya when she expresses concern, “depending on how you count it, I am now some two hundred and thirty-five years old.”

“Please, Beebee, don’t put it that way! Or else we’re all too old to live. You were asleep a hundred and fifty of those years, remember that.”

“Asleep, yes. But how should we prorate those years? We count the time we sleep, usually, when we give our age. We don’t say, I’ve been alive sixty years and asleep twenty years. We say, I’m eighty years old.”

“And so you are. And a very healthy eighty at that. You look like you could be fifty.”

He laughs at this, pleased with her lie, or pleased with her lying.

Then their ship has reached the sun, and Freya, heart filled with fear, asks their minders to show them what they can. The minders put images on a big screen in a large room where all of them who want to can gather. Not everyone wants to face it together, but most do, and indeed as the minutes pass, almost all the ones who said they wanted to be alone, or with family, come creeping out to join the big group. The screen is showing images of the sun. They sit there in a darkened room looking at it. It’s hard to breathe.

The image of the sun is filtered down to a simple orange ball, marred by a scattering of black sunspots. The image on the screen shifts, the sunspots jump to a new position, possibly this present moment. The predicted time of their ship’s transit behind the sun is just over three days, and now that time is almost over. They sit there in that no-time in which one can’t say whether time is passing or not. Maybe it was like that when they were hibernating; maybe now they have the ability to get back into that mind, when pushed that way. It’s too long, no one can say how long it is, or remember how long it’s supposed to take, or sense how long it feels. Freya is feeling sick now, obscurely aware that there is perhaps a rocking of this immense ship that is impacting her even though she can’t quite feel it. Many look like they’re feeling the same. Ungodly edge of nausea, the feeling she hates most of all, worse than the sharpest pain. Queasy dread. Like others, she staggers off to go to the bathroom, walks around the halls to make the time pass, feeling the dread squeeze her insides harder and harder.

Then a line of minute white particulates emerges from the right edge of the solar mass on the screen, like a meteor that has broken up, like a brief shimmer of the aurora borealis, and she sits down on the floor. Badim is beside her, holding her. Around her is everyone she’s ever known, all stunned and holding each other. They are stunned. Freya looks at Badim, he shakes his head. “They’re gone.”

She leaves that moment, that place.

Badim and Aram share a sad glance. Another conflagration of mice, going up in flames by the tens of thousands, as they have a wont to do. All the animals likewise. And Jochi. And the ship. It spawned them in its last days, like a salmon, Aram says. Have to hold to that thought. Poor Jochi, my boy. Aram wipes his eyes over and over.

Their minders are solicitous. They tell them that their ferry included a computer with ten zettabytes of memory, which may include good backups, may constitute a viable copy of their ship’s AI.

Badim shakes his head at them as they say this. “It was a quantum computer,” Badim explains gently, as if breaking the news of a death to a child. “It was not reducible to its records.”

A coldness comes over Freya, a kind of calm. So much has died. They made it back, they are home for the first time: but this place is not their home, she sees that now. They will always be exiles here, on a world too big to believe. Indeed it seems best to stick to disbelief for a while, stay in that disconnect. The intermittences of the heart being what they are, the feel of things will come back, eventually. And that will be soon enough.

They are taken to Hong Kong, and a couple of weeks later their township anchors offshore from it—a harbor city as big as a dozen or twenty of their biomes stitched together, and filled with many skyscrapers quite a bit taller than any biome, taller than a spoke, possibly taller than the spine. It’s hard to keep any sense of perspective against the sky. The day before it was cloudy, and the flat gray cloud looked like an immense roof over the visible world. Aram says those clouds were three kilometers high, and now he and Badim are arguing about how high the clear blue sky appears to be.

“You mean if it was a dome,” Badim points out.

“Of course, but it looks like one,” Aram says. “At least to me. I know it’s a scattering of sunlight, but doesn’t it look like a solid dome? I think it does. Just look at it. It’s much like a biome ceiling.”

He and Badim have taken to consulting a book they’ve found on their wristpads, an ancient text called The Nature of Light and Color in the Open Air, and now they pore over a section called “Apparent Flattening of the Vault of Heaven,” which confirms Aram’s contention that the sky can be perceived as a dome. “See,” Aram says, pointing at his wristpad, “the top of the sky looks lower to the viewer than the horizon is distant to him, by a factor ranging from two to four, it says, depending on the observer and the viewing conditions. Does that seem right to you?”

Badim peers up and out the open doorway to the upper deck. He and Aram walk out on this upper deck all the time, unconcerned by the exposure. “It does.”

“And this explains why these skyscrapers look so tall, perhaps, as the writer goes on to say that we tend to think the midway point of the arc between horizon and zenith is at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground, as it would be if the dome were a hemisphere. But with the dome being lower than the horizon is far away, the midway point of the arc is angled much lower, say around twelve to twenty-five degrees. So we consistently think things are higher than they are.”

“Well, but I think also that these skyscrapers are just stupendously tall.”

“No doubt, but we’re seeing them even taller than they are.”

“Show me what you mean.”

They put on sunscreen, hats, and sunglasses, and go out on the open upper deck of the great township and turn in circles, putting their hands out at the sky and chattering as they peer at their wristpads. They seem to be adjusting very well to the new world, and to the death of their lifelong home, of Jochi their lost guest. Freya still feels stunned, and she cannot yet even stand before the windows, nor do more than glance out the big open doorway between her and them; and the idea of going outside onto the deck with them is enough to knock her into a chair. A black emptiness fills her right to the skin.

Many of Hong Kong’s buildings emerge from the water of the city’s bay, a result no doubt of the big sea level rise, which some of her shipmates now claim to have read about or seen in the feed, but now it’s here below them, in the canals that thread between all the buildings closest to water, and the long, narrow boats grumbling airily past them, leaving in their wakes a slosh of waves and smell of salt and burnt cooking oil. Cry of wheeling gulls. Hot, humid, reeking. If any of their tropical biomes had felt as hot and humid as this, had smelled like this, they would have been sure something had gone wrong.

Behind all the skyscrapers are green hills, dotted everywhere with buildings. They’re still looking around at all this tremendous landscape when they are taken off their township, led into a long low ferry. It’s kind of like moving in a tram from one biome to another. No need to go outside the long cabin of the ferry, but Freya’s in a panic at the thought that she may have to. She’s been provided with boots that come up to just above her knees, and these seem to give her more support and balance than she’s been used to. She still can’t feel her feet, but as she walks the boots seem to know what she is trying for, and with some care she can walk pretty well.

Then up a tubular walkway, somewhat like one of their spoke interiors; then into an elevator car; then out into a room that opens out all along one wall to another open deck, located apparently some hundreds of meters above the bay. Up there in the sky, just under an inrush of low clouds, the marine layer, as Badim calls it. Whose idea was this?

Now the people of the ship are going out onto the open deck and very often falling down, many weeping or crying out, many going back inside the room to seek shelter. Freya huddles by the elevator. The starship’s people see her there and come over and hug her, and some of their hosts are laughing, others crying, all presumably moved to see people who have never been outdoors try to come to terms with it.

They’re like the winter lambs, some translation box says, let out of the barn in the spring.

A lot of their legs are messed up. Come on, get them back inside, the same box and voice says. You’re going to kill them with this stuff.

The box’s voice has a Terran accent, speaks English harshly and with a lot of tonal bounce. As if, Badim says, English were Chinese. Hard to understand.

Crying with embarrassment and frustration, feeling her face burn red, Freya breaks from her crowd and staggers on her new boots right out the open doorway wall, out onto the open deck, keeping her eyes squeezed nearly shut. Feeling faint, she walks to a chest-high wall with a railing on its top, something she can grasp like a lifeline.

She stands there in the wind and opens her eyes and looks around, her stomach like a black hole inside her, pulling her in. Sun incandescing through the clouds low overhead.

That’s a mackerel sky, says the translation box. Nice pattern. Warp and weft. Might rain tomorrow.

Oh my God, someone is saying over and over, and then she feels in her mouth that it’s her saying it. She stops herself with a fist in her mouth. Hangs on to the railing with her other hand. She can see so far she can’t focus on it. She closes her eyes, clenches the railing hard with both hands. Keeps her eyes closed so she won’t throw up. She needs to get back into the room, but is afraid to walk. She will fall, crawl back desperately afraid, everyone will see it. She’s stuck there, and so puts her forehead down on the railing. Tries to relax her stomach.

She feels Badim’s hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”

“Not really.”

After a while she says, “I wish Devi could have seen this. She would have liked it more than me.”

“Yes.”

Badim sits on the deck beside her, his back against the retaining wall. His face is tilted to the sky. “Yes, she would have liked this.”

“It’s so big!”

“I know.”

“I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”

“Do you want to move back from the edge?”

“I don’t think I can move yet. What we can see from here”—waving briefly at the bay and ocean, the hills, the skyscraper city springing up around them, the glare of the sun slanting through the clouds—“just what we can see from here, right now, is bigger than our whole ship!”

“That’s right.”

“I can’t believe it!”

“Believe.”

“But we were in a toy!”

“Yes. Well. It had to be as small as they thought would work, so they could push it to a good interstellar speed. It was a case of conflicting priorities. So they did what they could.”

“I can’t believe they thought it would be okay.”

“Well. Do you remember that time you told Devi that you wanted to live in your dollhouse, and she said you already did?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, she did. She got really mad.”

“Oh that brings it back! That time she got mad!”

Badim laughs. Freya slides down beside him and laughs too.

Badim puts his hands under his sunglasses, wipes tears from his eyes. “Yes,” he says. “She got mad a lot.”

“She did. But I guess I never really knew why, until now.”

Badim nods. He keeps his hands under his glasses, over his eyes. “She didn’t either, not really. She never saw this, so she didn’t really know. But now we know. I’m glad. She would be glad too.”

Freya tries to see her mother’s face, hear her voice. She can still do it; Devi is still there, especially her voice. Her voice, the ship’s voice. Euan’s voice, Jochi’s voice. All the voices of her dead. Euan on Aurora, loving the wind as it knocked him around. She reaches up and grabs the railing, pulls herself up and stares down at the great city. She holds on for dear life. She’s never felt sicker.

They’re put on a train to Beijing. They ride in broad plush seats, on the upper story of two long cars, linked like two biomes by a passageway. They constitute a moving party, with windows and skylight domes and the land flowing past them, flat and green, hilly and brown, on and on and on and on.

“Never have we moved so fast!” someone exclaims. It is indeed astounding how quickly the train moves over the landscape. It’s going 500 kilometers per hour, one of their hosts tells them. Aram and Badim confer, Aram smiles briefly and shakes his head, Badim laughs and says to the others, “For most of our lives we were moving one million times faster than this.”

They cheer themselves. They laugh at the craziness of it.

As the train glides with its startling rapidity over this impossibly big world, day turns to night, by way of the most lurid sunset they have yet seen, fuschia clouds blazing in a pale sky that is lemon over the black horizon, bending into green above that, then higher still a blue some say is called cyan blue, and over that an indigo that spreads all the way over their skylight to the east. All these intense transparent colors are there at once, and yet none of their Terran hosts are taking the slightest notice; they are all watching the screens on their wrists, screens that sometimes exhibit tiny images of the voyagers.

They can scroll for themselves on their wristpads and see what people are saying about them. But it’s disturbing to do so, because then they see and hear how much resentment, contempt, anger, and violent hatred is directed at them. Apparently to many people they are cowards and traitors. They have betrayed history, betrayed the human race, betrayed evolution, betrayed the universe itself. How will the universe know itself? How will consciousness expand? They have let down not just humanity, but the universe!

Freya turns off her wristpad. “Why?” she asks Badim. “Why do they hate us so?”

He shrugs. He too is troubled. “People have ideas. They live in their ideas, do you understand? And those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference.”

“But there’s more than ideas,” she protests. “This world.” She gestures at the fading sunset. “It’s not just our ideas.”

“For some people it is. They don’t have anything else, maybe, so they give everything they have to ideas.”

She shakes her head, still upset. “I would hate that. I would hate to be that way.” She gestures at the tiny angry faces on the other screens, faces still there on the wrists around them, imp faces, literally spitting in the intensity of their bitterness. “I hope they’ll leave us alone.”

“They’ll forget us soon enough. For now we’re the new thing, but another new thing will come. And people like that need fresh fuel for their fire.”

Aram frowns as he overhears this. It isn’t clear he agrees.

In Beijing they are guided to a rectangular building the size of a couple of biomes, a compound they call it, surrounding a central courtyard that is mostly paved but holds also a few short trees. The whole ship’s population can be fitted into rooms clustered at one corner of this compound, which must therefore house four or five thousand people; and it is only one building, in a city that goes to the horizon in all directions, a city in which the train, slowing down as it approached, took four hours to get to this central area.

Next day many of them are taken to Tiananmen Square. Freya does not go. The day after, they are taken on a tour of the Forbidden City, home of the ancient Chinese emperors. Again, Freya cannot face going out. Many are like her. When the others come back, they say the buildings appeared both ancient and shining as if new, so that it was hard to understand them as objects. Freya wishes she had seen that.

Their Chinese hosts speak to them in English, and seem happy to be hosting them, which is reassuring after all the venomous little faces on the screens. The Chinese want the starfarers to like their city, they are proud of their city. Meanwhile clouds and a yellow haze thicken the air, and keep the sky from being too overwhelming to Freya. She stays in rooms and pretends the world outside is a larger room, or that she is in some kind of projection. Possibly she can hold to this feeling all the time. She feels she has faced the worst, perhaps, although she still stays indoors, and away from windows too.

Several of the starfarers (this is what the Chinese call them) nevertheless collapse in the next few days, overwhelmed either physically or mentally, if there is any difference. Their tours are abruptly canceled, and they are all moved to some kind of medical facility, one as big as their compound, either emptied for their arrival or unused, hard to say, not much is ever explained to them, and some of them suspect they are now pawns in a game they don’t understand, but others are not worried about anything but themselves and their shipmates; because people are falling apart. The Chinese want to run tests on all of them, as they are worried for their guests. Four have died since they landed; many are disabled either from their hibernation or the descent from space; many more are not coping with Earth very well, one way or another. Miserable faces, scared faces, all these faces she has known all her life, the only faces she has ever known; her people. It isn’t how Freya imagined it. She herself is miserable.

“What is this?” she says to Badim. “What’s happening to us? We made it.”

He shrugs. “We’re exiles. The ship is gone, and this is not our world. So all we have is each other, and that, we know already, never made us particularly happy or secure. And being outdoors is scary.”

“I know it. I’m the worst of all.” She has to admit it. “But I don’t want to be! I’m going to get used to it!”

“You will,” Badim says. “You will if you want to. I know you will.”

But when she approaches a window, when she nears a door, her heart slams in her chest like a child trying to escape. That vault of sky, those distant clouds! The unbearable sun! She grinds her teeth; she gnashes her teeth! And strides to the windows, and smashes her nose into the glass and looks out, hands on her chest, sweating and gnashing her teeth, to look out at the visible world until her pulse slows. And her pulse never slows.

Days pass, they huddle miserably together.

Aram and Badim, worried though they are about things outside Freya’s ken, continue to sit next to each other and watch the screens, and chat about what they see, and observe their comrades curiously. If it were up to them alone, all would be well; they are having an adventure, their old faces say. They are having the time of their lives. Above all, they remain deeply surprised. Freya takes heart from seeing their faces; she sits at Badim’s feet pressed against his bony shins, looking up at him, trying to relax.

The two old friends often read to each other, as of old during the evenings in the Fetch, that lovely little town. And one day Aram, reading his wrist silently, chuckles and says to Badim, “Here, listen to this; a poem by a Greek who lived in Alexandria, one Cavafy:

“and so on like that, it’s the same old song we know so well—if only I were somewhere else, I would be happy. Until the poet replies to his poor friend,

Badim smiles, nods. “I remember this poem! I read it to Devi one time, to remind her not to pin all her hopes on Aurora, not to wait for our arrival before she started to live. We were young at the time, and she was most seriously annoyed with me, I can tell you. But that translation doesn’t sound right to me. I think there is a better one.” And he taps on one of the tablets left for them to use.

“Here it is,” he says. “I remembered right. I ran across the poem in the Quartet. Listen, this is Durrell’s translation:

“See, he rhymes it.”

“I’m not sure I like that,” Aram says.

“No, but the meaning is the same, and the payoff is here at the end:

Aram nods. “Ah yes, that’s good.”

They tap around for a while longer, reading silently. Then Aram says, “Look, I’ve found another version, a Martian one it seems, listen to this end:

“Very nice,” Badim says. “That’s us, all right. We are trapped in a prison of our own devise.”

“Horrible!” Freya protests. “What do you mean nice? It’s horrible! And we didn’t trap ourselves! We were born in prison.”

“But we’re not there now,” Badim says, eyeing her closely. She is sitting at his feet, as she has so often before. “And we are always ourselves, no matter where we go. That’s what the poem is saying, I think. We have to recognize it, and make what we can here. This world, great as it is, is only just another biome we have to live in.”

“I know that,” Freya says. “I’m fine with that. No problem at all. Just don’t be blaming us. Devi was right. We lived our lives in a fucking closet. It’s like we were kidnapped as children and locked away by some madman. Now that we’re out, I plan to enjoy it!”

Badim nods, eyes shining as he regards her. “Good girl! You do that. You’ll teach us again.”

“I will.”

Although her stomach knots as she says it. The unbearable sun, the vertigo sky, reeling around sick with fear, how to face it? How to walk at all in such a sky, with such bad legs, such a fearful heart? Badim puts an arm around her shoulders as he sees her face, she presses her face against his knees and weeps, he is so old, he is aging fast, oxidizing before her eyes, she can’t bear to lose him, she fears she will lose him, she has lost so much; she fears her huge uncontrollable fear.

The Chinese get her fitted with new knee-high boots that act according to her wishes, taking signals from her nervous system and translating them into walking that is not unlike what she would have done if she could feel her feet. It’s almost as if her own sensations have been transferred out into her shoes, while her actual feet remain as numb as shoes used to be. It’s a switch that takes some getting used to, but is much preferable to staggering around and falling, or pushing a walker, or swinging over crutches. She strides around in these new boots, trying to get used to them. Already she’s become accustomed to the strangely lighter 1 g of Terran gravity, almost.

They get invited to send a delegation to some kind of conference about starships, and Aram and Badim ask Freya if she would like to join them; they look concerned, they don’t seem to be sure she can handle it, but here, as so often in the ship, she sees that they want to use her as some kind of Devi surrogate or ceremonial figurehead, some kind of public face for their group. And she also understands suddenly that Badim feels he has to ask her, whether or not he thinks it’s a good idea for her to join them. “Yes,” she says, annoyed, and soon they are flying to North America, a group of twenty-two of them, chosen awkwardly, in a subdued, distracted manner, not their usual town hall style, they’re confused, it isn’t obvious how to decide things anymore, they’re not in their world, they don’t know what to do. Possibly the ship used to run their meetings more than they realized, who knows, but now they are in disarray.

Looking down occasionally from the rocket plane’s little window, she sees the great blue world rolling below them, in this case the Arctic Ocean, they are told. Earth is a water world, no doubt about it; not unlike Aurora in that respect. Perhaps it’s that which adds to the feeling of dread welling up in her; perhaps it’s dread of the topic of the meeting they are headed toward, given what the faces on the screens keep saying about them, given everything that has happened. Their Chinese hosts have promised to fly them back to their fellow starfarers anytime they want to go, promised that no one will ever keep them apart, assuming they want to stay together. They are world citizens now, the Chinese say, thus Chinese citizens, among all their other citizenships, and they have carte blanche to go where they want, do what they want. The Chinese offer a permanent home, and whatever work the starfarers care to do. The Chinese are hard to understand, it isn’t clear why they are doing what they are for the starfarers, but given the vituperation on the screens, the people of the ship can’t help but feel relieved. Even if they are somehow pawns in a game they don’t understand, or even see, it’s better than the dripping scorn, the spray of contempt.

Badim looks tired, Freya wishes he had stayed in Beijing, but he refused, he wants to be there for this, to help her. The cobalt sheen of the Arctic winkles with a curving pattern of white lines, waves extending horizon to horizon under them. They seem to be flying very slowly, though they are informed the plane is moving at least six times faster than the train from Hong Kong to Beijing; of course now they’re twenty kilometers above the Earth instead of twenty meters. They can see so far that the horizon is faintly curved, they can see again that this world is a sphere. Coming south they can see the real Greenland on their left, not at all green, just as they had heard, but rather a waste of black mountains, with a central sea of white ice largely covered by melt pools of sky blue, a mélange hard to grasp as a landscape. South again over the drowned coastline of eastern North America, deeply embayed by long blue arms of ocean, looking empty until just before they land, when buildings reappear under them in a profusion, in a doll city bright and geometrical, and they land on a point next to another forest of silver skyscrapers.

Rooms and vehicles, vehicles and rooms. Crowded narrow streets and canals, buildings tall on both sides. Faces in the street staring at their cars, some of them shouting things. Nothing like Beijing, more like the screens. Here people speak English, and despite the accents it’s easy to understand what is being said. It’s the starfarers’ own language, seems like it should be their world too, but obviously not. Here the sky seems taller than ever. Badim and Aram discuss this phenomenon, consulting their old book and its equations as they stare up between the buildings, ignoring the clear fact that the sky is shocking not for its height as a dome but precisely because it is not a dome, this is what is so frightening about it, but they persist in their conversation, perhaps to hold off that fact. Now as they tram through the city the sky overhead is a ceiling of patterned clouds that Aram says is to be called a herringbone sky, beautiful in the slant of afternoon light, low over them, although not as low as the rain clouds that amazed them in Hong Kong.

“Is a herringbone sky the same as a mackerel sky?”

“I don’t know.”

They punch around on their wristpads trying to find out.

Into a building as big as a biome. The Terrans themselves don’t actually spend much time outside, Freya thinks. Maybe they too are terrified. Maybe the proper response to standing on the side of a planet, in the open air of its atmosphere, very near to the local star, is always terror. Maybe everything humans ever did or planned to do was designed to dodge that terror. Maybe their plan to go to the stars was just one more expression of that terror. As she is still clutched over that terror, which continues to collapse her stomach whenever she is so close to being outdoors, this idea makes a lot of sense to her.

Then she is back in a building, moving through room after hallway after room, talking to stranger after stranger, there are so many of them. Some have devices they aim at her as they shout questions, she ignores these and tries to focus on faces that look nice, that will make eye contact with her rather than look at their devices.

They sit in a room that is some kind of waiting room, with tables covered with food and drink. They are soon to make a public appearance of some kind.

Word comes through their wristpads, from their Chinese hosts, that four more of their group back in Beijing have died, causes of death unknown. Among the four is Delwin.

Before she fully understands what Aram and Badim and the others are saying about this, and about the meeting’s purpose, all mixing up in her now, she is led up onstage before a crowd and a bank of cameras. There are a dozen people on stage, a moderator is asking questions, Badim and Aram flank her, along with Hester and Tao, and they sit and listen to what she slowly gathers is a discussion of the latest starship proposals.

She leans against Badim to whisper in his ear. “More starships?”

He nods, keeping his eyes on the speakers.

The current plan, with prototypes being built in the asteroid belt, is to send out many small starships carrying hibernating passengers, who will sleep while the ships make their way out to all the hundred closest stars that have been identified to have Earthlike planets in their habitable zone, not just Earth twins but Earth analogs. These stars range from 27 to 300 light-years away. Probes have already passed through several of these systems, or will in the near future, and are sending back their data, and everything looks very promising.

The people describing this plan get up one at a time from a bank of chairs on the other side of the speaker’s podium, go to the podium, and tell their part of the story, with big images on a screen behind them always changing, after which they then sit back down. They are all men, all Caucasian, most bearded, all wearing jackets. One speaker among them introduces the others, and he then stands to the side and listens to their presentations, quizzically, his head tilted to one side, tugging at his beard, a small smile playing under his mustache. He nods at everything the others say, as if he has already thought their thought and now approves its articulation. He is very satisfied with the way this event is going. He stands after another speaker has finished, says to the crowd, “You see, we’ll keep trying until it works. It’s a kind of evolutionary pressure. We’ve known for a long time that Earth is humanity’s cradle, but you’re not supposed to stay in your cradle forever.” He is obviously very pleased with the cleverness of this aphorism.

He invites Aram to speak, the curious smirk twisting his face as he makes a magnanimous gesture: he is allowing Aram to speak.

Aram stands at the podium, looks around at the audience.

“No starship voyage will work,” he says abruptly. “This is an idea some of you have, which ignores the biological realities of the situation. We from Tau Ceti know this better than anyone. There are ecological, biological, sociological, and psychological problems that can never be solved to make this idea work. The physical problems of propulsion have captured your fancy, and perhaps these problems can be solved, but they are the easy ones. The biological problems cannot be solved. And no matter how much you want to ignore them, they will exist for the people you send out inside these vehicles.

“The bottom line is the biomes you can propel at the speeds needed to cross such great distances are too small to hold viable ecologies. The distances between here and any truly habitable planets are too great. And the differences between other planets and Earth are too great. Other planets are either alive or dead. Living planets are alive with their own indigenous life, and dead planets can’t be terraformed quickly enough for the colonizing population to survive the time in enclosure. Only a true Earth twin not yet occupied by life would allow this plan to work, and these may exist somewhere, the galaxy after all is big, but they are too far away from us. Viable planets, if they exist, are simply too—far—away.”

Aram pauses for a moment to collect himself. Then he waves a hand and says more calmly, “That’s why you aren’t hearing from anyone out there. That’s why the great silence persists. There are many other living intelligences out there, no doubt, but they can’t leave their home planets any more than we can, because life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its home planet.”

“But why do you say that?” the moderator interrupts to ask, head cocked to the side. “You’re arguing a general law from your own particular case. That’s a logical error. There are really no physical impediments to moving out into the cosmos. So eventually it will happen, because we are going to keep trying. It’s an evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself. Possibly it may resemble something like a dandelion or a thistle releasing its seeds to the winds, so that most of the seeds will float away and die. But a certain percentage will take hold and grow. Even if it’s only one percent, that’s success! And that’s how it will be with us—”

Freya finds herself standing up, and briefly she has to attend to her balance, to keep from falling on her face in front of them all. Then she is striding across the stage, then she strikes the moderator in the face and down he goes, she falls on him and smashes through his raised arms with both fists, trying to get another good blow in, pummeling furiously, shouting something in a painful roar, she doesn’t even know what she’s trying to say, doesn’t know she’s roaring. She catches him hard right on the nose, yes! And then Badim has her by one arm and Aram by the other, and others are there too, holding her, shouting, and she can’t struggle too much without hurting Badim, who is shouting, “Freya, quit it! Freya, stop! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”

Uproar, bedlam, Badim wrapping her, not letting go, they are escorting her off the stage, she staggering, Aram ahead of them, one person standing in a doorway as if to block them, and Aram removing him by rushing at the man and shouting ferociously in the man’s face, which causes the man to leap to the side; the sight of this shocks Freya, lagging so far behind the moment she is still wishing she could get one more good blow in, hit the smirk itself, kill that idiot smirk, but it’s bizarre to see Aram shout like that. She twists in Badim’s grasp and shouts something back at the meeting room, but again she doesn’t know what she’s saying, it’s just something bursting out of her, like a scream.

After that they’re in trouble, she’s in trouble. Their group locks her in with them and claims diplomatic immunity, whatever that is in this case, no one can be sure, but it appears that it buys them some time, the authorities are a little unsure how to proceed, unsure enough for arguments to be made. Apparently the man she assaulted does not wish to press charges, is assuring everyone he understands post-traumatic stress disorder, and besides only slipped and fell. But in cases of assault and battery the wishes of the victim are not the main consideration, they are told, so diplomatic immunity may be their best defense, that or just the sheer uncertainty of their legal status at any time. They are aliens or something, Freya is too upset to follow the arguing. Anyway, for now no one is allowed into their rooms. Discussions go on out in the hallways outside.

Freya manages to sleep through a lot of it, but her right hand hurts, and in a dull way she feels a little ashamed, a little crazy. Though she also still wants one more poke.

They are now persona non grata, Aram says to Badim after one of the hallway sessions, almost everywhere.

Badim, looking older than ever, holds his head in his hands, when he is not holding her hand. She sits there staring at a window she dare not approach.

“Why did you do it?” he asks her. “Oh never mind, I know why you did it. He was a fool. Annoying, as fools are. But there are always fools, Freya. People like him will always exist, and they don’t matter. Don’t you see? They just don’t matter. Fools will always be with us. You have to leave them to it, and find your own way.”

“But they hurt people,” Freya protests. She hasn’t stopped feeling sick from the moment they pulled her off the poor man. She still wants that last punch, at the same time that she is doubled over with remorse. “It isn’t just foolish, it’s sick. Did you hear what he said? Dandelion seeds? Ninety-nine percent sent out to die, as part of the plan? Die a miserable death they can’t prevent, children and animals and ship and all, and all for a stupid idea someone has, a dream? Why? Why have that dream? Why are they that way?”

“People live in ideas,” Badim says again. “You can’t stop it. We all live in ideas. You have to let these people have their ideas.”

“But they kill people with them.”

“I know. I know. It’s always been that way. But look, people volunteer to get on these ships. There are waiting lists.”

“Their kids don’t volunteer!”

“No. But it’s still not our job to stop them.”

“Isn’t it? Are you sure?”

At this he looks uncertain. He takes her point, unhappily; that they might be obliged to witness. That they are the survivors of one of these mad plans.

She shakes her head, snares him with her look, as she so often has before. “Were the people who believed in eugenics just fools? I think we have to try to stop them!”

Badim looks at her for a long time. He is really looking ancient now. She can’t remember how he looked when she was a child.

He pats her shoulder, and several times he almost speaks, then stops himself.

“Well,” he says finally, “your mother would be proud of you.”

After that he can’t speak for a while.

Then: “You—you are reminding me of her. It’s almost nice to see. But not. Because I don’t want you to die too, from trying to do the impossible. Because look—you can’t stop other people from pursuing their projects, their dreams. Even if they are crazy dreams, even if they won’t work. If people want to do it, they will. Then later their children will suffer, sure. We can point that out, and we will. But it’s everyone who has to stop these people, all of us together. It has to be an idea that fails, that no one will act on because no one believes it anymore. That may take a while. And meanwhile, listen to me: kick the world, break your foot. And your feet, my girl, are already broken.”

They have to get out of town. Aram arranges that somehow, a flight back to Beijing, where the Chinese are apparently not interested in extraditing Freya and Badim for a crime of this sort. Some are calling it free speech, decrying the sort of state that would prosecute free speech. Let people defend themselves from unarmed assaults, please. Why is it anyone else’s business?

Badim shakes his head at this line of reasoning, but says nothing.

Then there begins to appear on the screens, and in the messages coming to them, support for Freya’s rash act. Not just one or two messages, but many. A little flood of them in fact. There are a lot of people on Earth who call themselves Earthfirsters, apparently. The emigration of people, often rich people, off Earth and out into the solar system, and then even out of the solar system, has left behind a great deal of resentment, it seems. Only now are these people paying any attention to a crew of lost starfarers.

“So now I’m popular?” Freya says. “They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?”

“Not the same people,” Badim points out, frowning. “Or maybe so. I can’t tell. But yes. That’s Earth for you. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. That’s how it works here.”

“I don’t like this place.”

Badim shakes his head. “You don’t like these people. It’s not the same thing. And it’s not everybody, either.”

Aram, listening to them, says to Freya, “‘Ah don’t you see, since your mind is the prison, you’ll live behind bars everywhere now?’”

“So fuck it, let’s move to Mars then,” Freya grumbles, remembering the poem, which had pierced her like a sliver.

“Definitely not,” Badim says, waving a finger. “They’re stuck in their rooms up there almost as much as we were on the ship. That place is not much different from Aurora. The problem is chemical rather than biological, and they may amend the soil there over time, but not soon. Centuries at the least! No. We’re just going to have to get used to it here.”

But during the brief disaster of their trip away, six more of them have died. One, a youth, Raul, was killed in a fight with some person who did not like the idea of them coming back to Earth. After the memorial services for these six truly sad affairs, Aram tells Badim a story about Shackleton, who got his entire crew safely home from one of his Antarctic misadventures, only to see several get sent to the trenches of the First World War, where they were promptly killed.

Freya is already feeling like she wants to hit someone again, and something in this dismal story makes her furious. “What are we going to do?” she shouts at them. “I can’t stand this! Just hanging around, getting picked off one by one—no! No! No! No! We have to do something. I don’t know what, but something. Something to change this place—something! So—what are we going to do?”

Badim nods uneasily. His ancient face is creased with an ancient look, a look Freya recognizes from her childhood: the pursed-lipped frown that always came over his face when he was trying to figure out what to do about Devi. This look had always held tucked within it several things: amusement, love, worry, annoyance, pride that he had such a problem to solve. His wife the warrior, on a rampage. Now maybe it’s a bit the same, maybe not. And anyway Freya is too angry to feel reassured by this. Now it’s her he is looking at, and to her there’s nothing amusing about the idea of having in your life a crazy idealistic person you love and must help. Not when she’s the person. Anyway it’s everybody, lots of the starfarers are like her, it’s nothing special. No, fuck it: they need a way to live, something to do, or else they’ll never be anything but freaks from space, dying one by one from earthshock. The people from the stations out around Jupiter and Saturn have made up that name for it: they come back from space to Earth to get a dose of bacteria or whatnot, their sabbatical they call it, come back to get sick in order to stay well, but it’s a tough thing for them, and they often come down with what they call earthshock, and sometimes die of it. Actually some Saturnine people are offering to help them adjust to their new situation. Along with the Earthfirsters. There’s a combination for you, Aram remarks. No, they’re freaks! And so only freaks want to help them!

Aram begins to study this sabbatical that the space people take. Everyone living out there in the solar system comes back to Earth for a bit of time every several years, if they are concerned to live a full life span, which of course almost everyone is. This association between returning to Earth and living longer in space is an unexplained correlation, a statistical phenomenon that no one can test out in their own body, as no one can live both ways, and it isn’t necessarily true for every individual that staying in space all the time makes them sick. It’s just that on average, space people who don’t return to Earth every five to ten years, for several months to a couple of years, tend to die quite a bit younger than those who do return. The numbers are contested, but the studies, which Aram thinks are mostly pretty well designed, generally agree that the added life span for off-planet residents taking Earth sabbaticals is something like twenty years, or thirty years. Even now that they are sometimes living up to two centuries, that is a long time. It’s such a huge discrepancy that most people adhere to what the data suggest, and go home to Earth on a personal schedule of some kind. Best to pay attention to the data, and not take chances.

Studying all this, Aram points out that the true artificial intelligence is the actuarial long-term study; no human could ever see these things. This particular AI has made a compelling case. Suggestive, plausible, persuasive, probable, compelling: scientists’ linguistic scale for evaluating evidence is still the same, Aram says, and it tops out with quite a strong word, really: to compel. People do it because they are compelled to. Reality makes them do it. The urge to live makes them do it.

But there is another effect, almost the opposite of the sabbatical, and just as strong, if not stronger: earthshock. People come back to Earth, perfectly healthy on arrival, and die of something without warning. Sometimes it can be very difficult to figure out what exactly did it, which adds to the fear of the syndrome, of course. Quick decline, earthshock, terrallergenic; these names contain within themselves the terrible news that the phenomenon they refer to is not well understood, an effect with unknown causes. Names like this reveal the ignorance in the name itself: the Big Bang. Cancer. Quick decline. Any disease ending with the suffix -itis or -penia. Et cetera. So many ignorant names.

So, the returned starfarers, having missed their own sabbaticals by some two hundred and fifty years, are now dying of earthshock, it seems. Even when causes can be found for any individual case, it’s suspicious that the causes have cropped up so soon after their return. Hard to believe they would have happened in the ship, in hibernation or not. No, something is going on. Something they will either survive or they won’t.

Meanwhile, living on this big crazy planet that still scares Freya out of her wits, what to do? What to do? At this point she could not be more miserable.

A week or more of this misery drags on before Badim comes to her and answers her question So what are we going to do? as if only a second has passed since it burst out of her.

“We go to the beach!” he announces cheerily.

“What do you mean?” Freya demands.

For of course there are no beaches. Sea level rose twenty-four meters in the twenty-second and twenty-third centuries of the common era, because of processes they began in the twenty-first century that they couldn’t later reverse; and in that rise, all of Earth’s beaches drowned. Nothing they have done since to chill Earth’s climate has done much to bring sea level back down; that will take a few thousand more years. Yes, they are terraforming Earth now. There’s no avoiding it, given the damage that’s been done. In this the common era year 2910, they are calling it a five-thousand-year project. Some say longer. It’ll be a bit of a race with the Martians, they joke.

But for now it’s good-bye to the beaches, and indeed many a celebrated island of yore now lies deep under the waves. An entire world and way of life has disappeared with these fabled places, a lifeway that went right back to the beginning of the species in south and east Africa, where the earliest humans were often intimately involved with the sea. That wet, sandy, tidal, salty, sun-flecked, beautiful beach life: all gone, along with so much else, of course; animals, plants, fish. It’s part of the mass extinction event they are still struggling to end, to escape. So much has been lost that will never come back again, that the loss of the joy of the relatively few humans who were lucky enough to live on the strand, who combed the beaches, and fished, and rode the waves, and lay in the sun—that’s nothing much to grieve for, given everything else that has been lost, all the suffering, all the hunger, all the death, all the extinctions. Most of the mammal species are gone.

Still, it was a way of life much beloved, and still remembered in art and song, image and story—still legendary, still a lost golden age, vibrating at some level below thought, there in their salty blood and tears, in the long, curled waves of DNA that still break inside them all.

So there are people bringing that back. They are bringing the beaches back.

These people are one wing or element of the Earthfirsters. Tree huggers, space haters, they’re a mixed bag. Many of them renounce not just space, but also the many virtual, simulated, and indoor spaces that so many Terrans seem happy to inhabit. To the Earthfirsters these people are in effect occupying spaceships on the land, or have moved inside their screens or their heads. So many people stay indoors all the time, it seems crazy to Freya, even though she herself still cowers in the shelter of built spaces every waking moment. But she has an excuse, she thinks, having been locked in all her life, while the Terrans have no excuse: this place is their home. Their disregard for their natural inheritance, their waste of the gift given them, is part of what causes her to gnash her teeth, and drive herself to windows, even into open doorways, there to stand trembling on the threshold, terrified, willing her body to stop clenching, to step out. Willing herself to change. Finding in that moment of liminal panic that sometimes you can’t make yourself do even the things you most want to do, when fear seizes you by the throat.

So, but these beach lovers are apparently like her in this opinion or belief about how to regard Earth. They are kindred souls, perhaps. And they are expressing their love of that lost world of the seashore, by rebuilding it.

Freya listens amazed as Badim and Aram bring into their compound a short old woman, brown-skinned, silver-haired, who describes her people and their project.

“We do a form of landscape restoration called beach return. It’s a kind of landscape art, a game, a religion—” She grins and shrugs. “It’s whatever. To do it, we’ve adapted or developed several technologies and practices, starting with mines, rock grinders, barges, pumps, tubing, scoops, bulldozers, earthmovers, all that kind of thing. It’s heavy industry at first. A lot of landscape restoration is. We’ve used this technology all over the world. It involves making arrangements with governments or other landholders, to get the rights to do it. It works best in certain stretches of the new coastlines. They’re mostly wastelands now, intertidal zones without being suited for that. Being amphibious”—she grins—“is weird.”

They nod. Freya says, “So what do you do, exactly?”

In these new tidal zones, the woman explains, they proceed to make beaches that are as similar to those that went away as can be arranged. “We bring them back, that’s all. And we love it. We devote our lives to it. It takes a couple of decades to get a new beach started, so any given beach person usually works on only three or four in a lifetime, depending on how things go. But it’s work you can believe in.”

“Ah,” Freya says.

It’s labor intensive, the woman continues. There is more work to do than there are workers. And now, even though the starfarers are controversial and in trouble—or rather, precisely because they are controversial and in trouble—the beach makers are offering to take them on. Meaning the entire complement of them.

“We can all go?” Freya says. “We can stay together?”

“Of course,” the woman says. “There are about a hundred thousand of us, and we send out working teams to various stretches of coastline. Each project needs about three or four thousand people during the most intensive phases. Some people move on when their part of a project is done, so the life can be a bit nomadic. Although some of them stick to the beaches they’ve made.”

“So you would take us in,” Badim says.

“Yes. I’m here to make that offer. We keep our whole thing a bit under the radar, you have to understand. It’s best to avoid political complications as much as possible. So we don’t go out of our way to publicize our projects. Our deals are discreet. We try to stay out of the news. I bet you can see why!”

She laughs as Aram and Badim and Freya all nod.

“Look,” she says, “there’s a political element to all this, which you need to understand. We don’t like the space cadets. In fact a lot of us hate them. This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place. Now there are many people on Earth who feel like it’s our job to make that right. It’ll be our job for generations to come. And now we’ve seen that you’re part of the damage they’ve done. It took us a while to get that, but when you punched that guy it became very obvious.” She laughs at the look on Freya’s face. “But look, it’s all right! We’ve taken in quite a few people who got in trouble by resisting that kind of shit one way or another. So, adding five hundred lost souls to one of our teams won’t be any big deal. You’ll blend in, and you can keep your heads down, do your work, and make your contribution. We can use the help, and you’ll have a way to go forward.”

Freya tries to take all this in and comprehend it. Beach building? Landscape restoration? Can it be? Would they like it?

Freya says, “Badim, will I like this?”

Badim smiles his little smile. “Yes, I think you will.”

The others are not so sure. After the woman leaves, there is a long discussion, and at a certain point Freya is asked to go out with an exploratory group and take a look at one of these projects and see what she thinks.

This will of course mean going outdoors.

Freya gulps.

“Yes,” she says. “Of course.”

Again they fly. This time it seems their Chinese hosts might be happy to see them go. More rooms and tunnels, planes and trams, trains and cars. Travel on Earth is not dissimilar to moving around in the spokes, although the g stays constant. They keep a low profile. Herded from one room to the next. Somewhere on Earth you go indoors, and move around in differently shaped rooms, which either move or don’t, and the next time you go outdoors (if you do!) you are on the other side of the planet. This is so strange. Looking out of a plane window at the ocean planet below, under its layer of clouds, Freya resolves to master her fear, to make her body obey her will. She is tired of being afraid. Sometimes, you get sick of yourself, you change.

A west-facing coast somewhere. They tell her where and she promptly forgets. She hasn’t heard of it before. Temperate latitude, Mediterranean climate. Yellow sandstone bluffs jump right out of the white-edged sea. Used to be beaches at the foot of these bluffs, they are told, beaches so wide they held car races on the flat wet sand, back when cars were first invented. It was a morning’s walk from bluff to water, their guide says, and all flat sand. Laying it on a bit thick. Point of stories however being that there is a lot of sand still out there in the shallows. Some of it has been swept south by currents into a giant underwater canyon that runs from just offshore to the edge of the continental shelf, but even that canyon bottom is a now a kind of underwater river of sand flowing down toward the abyssal plain, a river of sand that can be vacuumed up in tubes onto barges, barged over to the land, brought into the estuaries of the little rivers that break the long curving line of bluffs, and put there. Old sand for new beaches, located right at the new tideline, up in the estuaries. They’re also trucking in giant granite boulders from inland, some to drop offshore and make reefs, others to drop at the foot of the bluffs to establish a new strand on, others to grind down into new sand, gravel, shingle, cobble—whatever type of rock that used to be there on the shore. It takes certain mixes of minerals to make a beach that will last, to make it nice. Also certain kinds of reefs offshore. Millions of tons of sand and rock have to be moved and installed. There is so much their guides want to tell them, these guides all sun-browned, hair crisped by sun and salt, eyes aglow.

The starfarers are tired by their journey—jet-lagged, they have been taught to call it—out of synch with the planet’s rotation, diurnal rhythm, circadian rhythm—an odd malady that they are learning to recognize. After a first tour of this coastline, driven around in a car on roads along the top of the bluff, then around the shores of the estuary, with many stops to get out and look (but Freya does not get out), they are taken to an inn on the bluff’s edge. The inn seems to be a modest little conference center, with bungalows around a main building. Freya gets out when the car is parked inside a garage, and makes her way up to the lobby, then, in a controlled dash under a walkway, hustles to her assigned bungalow, next to the one occupied by Badim and Aram. Once she is settled, she looks out her open doorway to see the two old men stretched out on reclining chairs, in the shade of an overhang extending from their bungalow, looking out at the ocean. The overhang is called a ramada, they have been told.

Badim notices her and says, “Freya my dear, come on out and join us! Give it a try!”

“I will in a bit,” she replies irritably. “I’m unpacking.”

From the bluff they can see out over the ocean for a long way. A flat blue plate of stunning size, wrinkled with white light. Badim and Aram talk again about optical phenomena. They are aficionados at this point, and are hoping to see the green flash at sunset. Apparently Earth’s gravity, or atmosphere, they argue about which, bends the light from the sun in such a way that just before it dips under the horizon and disappears, the Earth is actually physically between the observer and the sun, but the sunlight is curving around the globe because of the atmosphere, or gravity, and as blue light curves more than red light, this curve around the Earth splits the light as if passing it through a prism, and this means that the last visible point of sunlight turns, not blue, which would be too much of a bend and too much like the sky’s color, but green, said to be a pure brilliant emerald green. “This we have to see!” Aram declares.

Badim agrees. “Strange to be as old as we are, and see it for the first time.” He turns and calls to Freya. “Girl, come see this green flash that may occur!”

“You’re not that old,” she says to him. “You’re like the hundredth-oldest person in the ship.”

“Well, even that would be old, but in fact I think I’m down to about fifteenth now. But let’s stay focused on the sunset. I’m told when the sun is three-quarters gone, you can look at it without damaging your eyes. Not for long, mind you, but long enough to see the green flash when it comes.”

She stands just inside her big ocean-facing double doorway and looks out, clenching her fists at her sides. The estuary is just visible beyond the point of the bluff to the left, a wave-creased bay. Where there used to be a beach at the river mouth, stretching between two points of bluff, there is now a white line of broken surf. They are building their beach out from the bluffs on each side, on top of the drowned one.

Waves slide in inexorably from the west, out of the slant sun mirrorflaking the ocean’s steely surface. Low but distinct lines of waves, visible as changes in the blue of the water, always approaching land. A strange thing to see. Out on the horizon is the faint gray bump of an island, poking over the clean line where sky meets ocean: light blue over dark blue, everything steely and dark in the late afternoon. Mild salty onshore breeze pouring in her doorway, seagulls planing by at eye level, their heads tilted down and off to the side. A line of pelicans below them passes north to south, a sudden vision out of the Jurassic, black silhouettes against the sun’s glare, slow flap of wings, though mostly they glide. The panic rises in Freya again, like a tide following its own mysterious pulls. She wants so badly to walk out into the open air, under the sky, but a clutch squeezes her heart, there’s nothing she can do about it, she can’t move. Even joining Badim and Aram under their ramada is too much for her. Nothing for it but go inside and try again later.

Even though it’s late, her hosts call her room, they want to show her more of how their project works, and as they will stay in the cab of a big earthmover of some kind, she figures she can just handle it. Jet lag has her quivering.

Out they go, room to room to cab. The earthmover moves sand from the giant piles of it in their receiving area, out onto the strand itself. In the horizontal light of late day they rumble and bounce down a long ramp to the new beach, now covered with vehicle tracks. Past smaller vehicles of various kinds, some plowing smaller and smaller piles of sand into flat surfaces, or pushing up dunes at the back of the beach. The important thing is to accept the new sea level and work with it, the people operating the earthmover tell her; it won’t go back down for centuries at best, and may never recede at all. But they are confident it won’t go any higher either; all the ice in the world that is likely to melt has already melted. There’s still a considerable ice cap in eastern Antarctica, but with temperatures stabilized at last, that one is likely to stay there. If not, well, too bad! More beaches to build!

For now, this is sea level. Tides here slosh up and down a vertical distance that averages three meters, more in the neap tides when the moon is closest to Earth. Tides really are a matter of tidal attraction between Earth and Luna. Tug of gravity, spooky action at a distance. Source of a great deal of life on this planet, possibly even the appearance of life, some say.

They are making sure the high-tide mark is well below most of their new strand, which will be one hundred meters wide at least. Behind the strand they are building dunes, and planting and introducing all the dune life. And during low tides, the wet strand that is temporarily exposed is made mostly of sand, with only some rocky areas under points in the bluff, for tide pools and the like. All these parameters and elements are designed, engineered, built, monitored. Freya sees it: this beach is their artwork. These people are artists. They have an art they love. They might kill her with talking about it, they love it so much.

Often in the river mouths that break the line of bluffs along this coastline, they tell her, the risen ocean has crashed right into houses, streets, lawns, parks, and all the rest of the previous civilization, tearing them away, carrying them off. So one of the first beach-building tasks has been to demolish and remove what was drowned, and this has had to be done offshore to quite a depth, or else the whole coastline would remain too dangerous. Here they finished that work some years before, and now, as Freya can see, they have deposited much of the sand for the new beach. About half the sand has been salvaged out of the shallows offshore and out of the underwater canyon, sucked up to barges, deposited where they want it. The rest has been manufactured on the bluffs. It gets distributed according to protocols that are always evolving as they study the waves in this region of the coast, and the river patterns of this estuary. And as they learn more about beaches generally, all over the world.

Ah, she says.

This beach is stabilized under the north bluff, and the south one is almost finished too. The starfarers can settle in and help, learn more about the process, get to know the people who do the work. They can see if they like it. As there are scores of such teams around the world, it seems very possible they could simply melt into the beach people, and become after that one little forgotten clump among Earth’s billions.

Freya nods. “It sounds good.”

She can go swimming off this beach if she wants, they say, it’s safe now, lots of the young beach people are doing it already. Does she know how to swim?

“Yes, I do,” she says. “I swam in Long Pond quite a lot.”

Very good, very good. She’ll have to try it. Water temperature here is good, just a little cool, warms up as you swim in it. She’ll find that the ocean’s salt water gives one quite a lift. It’s fun to be more buoyant. Waves tomorrow will be small, but some people will be bodysurfing anyway. Some people you just can’t keep out of the water, waves or no waves.

“Lovely,” she says, feeling the thrill of fear shoot down her spine and out her arms and legs. Even her numb feet can feel a little tingle of dread.

Back at her bungalow, feeling exhausted, she finds Badim and Aram still out under their ramada, arguing about the sunset, which happened just a few minutes before. They either saw the green flash or not. Their bickering is very relaxed, and she can tell that they like having a problem that they can’t resolve right away. Something to chew over. Two old men bickering by the seaside.

They welcome her back. The western sky is a deep, dark, transparent blue, over a sea that now seems lighter than the sky, a kind of blackish silver, more than ever lined by the ever-oncoming waves. There is a vastness to the scene that can’t be taken in. Freya stands in her doorway watching, feeling the wind push onshore. The old men leave her alone.

“I’ve done a new translation of that Cavafy poem,” Aram says to Badim. “The end, anyway. Listen to this:

“Ahh,” Badim exclaims, as if hearing a pun. “Very nice. I like how that takes it away from being something you’ve done to yourself. It’s more just the way things are.”

“Yes,” Aram says pensively.

Then after a while Badim chuckles and lightly slaps his friend on the thigh, points out at the twilight sky, a pure indigo unlike anything they have ever seen. “But hey—pretty damn big starship!”

“It is,” Aram admits. “But, does size matter? Is that it?”

“I think maybe so!” Badim says. “That makes it robust, eh? Big enough to be robust. And I’m beginning to think it’s robustness that is the thing we want.”

“Maybe so. You are getting more robust every day, I notice.”

“Well, the food here is awfully good, you have to admit.”

Freya leaves the two old friends to their banter, goes into her bedroom, lies down on her bed.

That night the sea breeze pours through her room and over her, she can smell the salt and feel it, until just before dawn, when the air goes still. All night she fails to sleep; she is quivering slightly, or the room is quivering under her. Her numb feet tingle a little, her stomach clenches. She feels her fear like a weight on her chest. It’s hard to breathe, and she tries to breathe deeper, slower. From time to time she stirs from a salty trance that was not quite sleep.

When the sky lightens outside her west window, illuminating the square of curtains, she gets up and goes to the bathroom, comes back out, paces around, sits on her bed, holds her head in her hands. She stands and goes to the window and looks out.

Sunrise blasts the ocean with its light. Dawn on Earth. Aurora was the goddess of dawn; this is the thing itself.

She opens the door to her bungalow, feels the air, now pushing offshore. The breeze is just slightly offshore now. It’s like the earth is breathing: in by night, out by day. It was like that in the Fetch. It’s already warm; it’s going to be a hot day. The offshore push of air is dry.

She washes her face at the bathroom sink, stares at her drawn face in the mirror. She’s a middle-aged woman now, the years have flown by; she hardly remembers what she used to look like. She pulls on shorts and a shirt, pulls on her helper boots, grabs up one of the bungalow’s big bathroom towels, puts on a hat.

“Fuck this,” she declares, and walks outside.

Big blue sky. Warm dry air, gusting gently offshore. In the shade of the bluff, down to the beach. Staggering down blindly, gaze fixed on her dead feet, moaning as she stumps down, tears and snot running down her face. She can barely see. She feels crazy, stupid, but most of all, scared. Just scared.

Down on the beach it seems a bit smaller, more like a biome. A very big biome, but not so much bigger as to cause her to faint outright. She is hyperventilating, sweating, gasping a little, sick to her stomach, staggering still on her weird boots. She has a big hat on, sunglasses on, she keeps her head down.

Onto the sand of the dunes at the bottom of the bluff. The sand sinks under her boots a centimeter or three with each step. This is enough to make walking tricky, given her feet. The sand trends slightly up as she walks toward the water, until she gets to a kind of low ridge, beyond which the sand falls away in a clean sweep, down into the foaming edge of the ocean. Broken waves are rolling up at her across this bubbling tilted expanse, the water clear over the wet gray-brown sand under it. This tilted wet verge is fringed with lengths of white foam. It’s loud here with the sound of breaking waves, most of which break about a hundred meters offshore, she guesses, then rumble in, white and foaming at the rounded edge of an incoming layer that is distinctly higher than what it rolls over, the white edge bouncing, hissing, a mass of bubbles in a line, moving in across the shallows, hitting other lines moving outward.

At the high-tide line stretch masses of blackened seaweed, also long lines of dull brown-green seaweed, with dimpled long wide leaves, and bulbs marking the lines. Kelp, she thinks. She goes to a line and sits down hard in the sand next to it. Keeps her head down, keeps breathing in a steady deep rhythm, tries to quell the nausea, halt the spinning of the world around her. Just a big biome! Hold it together! The kelp in her fingers feels like a hardened gel, just a little slimy. There is sand stuck to it. The individual grains of sand look not quite round: little beveled boulders, about fifteen or twenty stuck to the pad of her forefinger. She can see them best when she holds them about six centimeters in front of her nose. There are black flecks of something like mica stuck there too, much smaller than the blond sand grains. These black flecks mix with the sand grains, and where the broken waves are running whitely up and down the strand, some twenty meters from where she sits, there are delta patterns sluicing back down to the broken water, delta patterns of black in blond, crosshatched chevrons all pointed out to sea. It’s loud with the sound of breaking waves.

The sun comes up over the bluff behind her, and she feels the radiation on the back of her neck like the blast from a fire. It is indeed the blast from a fire. Her stomach clenches again. She digs in her bag past the bath towel, and pulls out a canister of sunscreen, shoots the spray on the back of her neck. It smells funny. Her hands are shaking, she feels sick. The smell of sunscreen makes it worse, she feels on the edge of vomiting. It’s good she doesn’t have to stand now, doesn’t have to go anywhere. Keep her head down, watch the sand grains glowing transparently on her translucent fingertip. Try not to throw up. God, what a lot of light. She has to clamp her teeth together to keep them from chattering, to keep the bile down.

“Fuck this!” she says again through clenched teeth. “Get a grip!”

A young man sings this ditty, walking by with rolling strides in the soft sand. Maybe sixteen or seventeen years old, unclothed, narrow face, blue eyes, his skin an odd brown color she thinks must be suntanned. His brown curly hair is so sun-bleached that the tips of its curls are a yellow almost white. Holding a pair of blue fins in one hand, looking like a Minoan wall painting she recalls seeing in a book. The water boy, holding water bags.

“Are you going out swimming?” Freya asks him.

He stops. “Yes, gonna ride some waves. There’s a great point break right out from here, called Reefers.”

“Point break?”

“Big reef out there about two hundred meters, easy to see at low tide. Most of the breaks will be rights, but it’s a south swell today, so there’ll be some lefts too. Are you going to go out?”

“I can’t really feel my feet,” Freya says, desperate for an excuse. “I have these shoes that kind of walk for me. I don’t know what it would be like to swim.”

“Hmm.” He frowns at this, stares at her as if he’s never heard of such a thing, and maybe he hasn’t. “How did that happen?”

“Long story,” she says.

He nods. “Well, if you had fins on, those you kind of swing from the knees anyway. Might help. And actually, if you just stand in the shallows, the water will mostly float you. You can use your arms, and shove off the bottom and catch the little waves.”

“I’d like to try that,” she lies, or maybe it’s the truth. She swallows deeply. Her face is on fire, her fingers and lips are tingling, buzzing. Her big toes are hot.

“Here come my friends; there might be another pair of fins in Pam’s bag, usually is.”

Young man and woman, again naked, brown-skinned, tightly muscled, sun-bleached hair. Young gods and goddesses, naiads or whatever, she can’t remember the name for sea fauns, but these are them. Beach kids. They greet the youth talking to Freya, calling him Kaya. “Kaya, hey Kaya!”

“Pam, have you got that extra pair of fins?” Kaya asks.

“Yeah sure.”

“Can you lend them to this lady? She wants to go out and ride.”

“Yeah sure.”

Kaya turns to her. “So, try it and see.”

The three young people stare at her.

“You do know how to swim?” Kaya asks.

“Yes,” Freya says. “I swam in Long Pond all the time when I was a kid.”

“Just stay in the shallows then, and you’ll be all right. Small swell today.”

“Thanks.”

Freya takes blue fins offered to her by the young woman. The three young ones run off into the surf, kicking arcs of white spray ahead of them, and when they get out thigh deep, falling over into a broken wave. After that they seem to be floating around to put on their fins, then they shove off into the approaching white walls of broken waves, which are breaking about thirty more meters out from them. Only then are they really swimming. They make it look easy.

Freya pulls off her boots, stands, strips off her clothes, sprays herself all over with the sunscreen, picks up the blue fins they have left her, walks very carefully down into the broken waves sloshing up the strand. Her feet are still numb, it’s like walking on short stilts, but there seems to be some new traction there in her big toes. The water is cool at first, she can feel that in the bones of her feet, but she quickly gets used to it. Not that cold. A surge runs up the beach over her ankles, then slides back down. The water under her is white with bubbles, more bubbles than water, and the bubbles hiss out their lives as they burst, throwing a fine spray calf high into the air. The water of an incoming wave suddenly loses momentum going up the tilt of the sand, then runs back down swiftly to a triple ripple, which is exposed only when the waves are farthest out. Maybe that’s true sea level. Here where she stands, water sloshes back and forth, therefore up and down, but mostly just back and forth. Waves breaking on a beach, this is how it looks, this is how it feels! Something loosens a little inside her, and she shivers now, feeling less sick than hot. Hot and yet shivering.

She keeps her gaze down, but even so she can see or feel that overhead the sky is blue, mixed with a lot of white around the horizon. It’s really loud down here, all water sounds, mainly the crashing of waves; sometimes it’s a clean crack when a blue wave folds over and falls, then explodes into white spray and bounces in toward her. Mostly the sound is an ever-shifting, grumbling wet roar, water falling and breaking on itself, a zillion bubbles bursting. The whole ocean’s edge is a kind of low waterfall, falling on itself over and over. Glare of sunlight breaking in a million places on the water, bouncing in her eyes. With her sunglasses off it’s too bright to do anything but squint till her eyes are almost closed. It’s so bright that things are somehow dark.

Kaya is coming in on a wave at her, only his head sticking out of the white water. He stands up near her and points out at his friends. “That’s Pam there, nice left, see that?”

Freya shivers.

“Can we really be out here?” she asks him helplessly. “We won’t get cooked by radiation?”

She’s breathing deeply, she can’t look anywhere near the sun, it’s far too bright for that, she’s squinting, crying a little at the explosion of light coming off the breaking waves.

“Well, that’s a good thought; look at you. Did you put on sunscreen?”

“I did.”

“Your skin is really white.”

“I’ve never done this before,” she says. “My skin has never been in sunlight before.”

He stares at her. “That’s crazy, although I have to say, you have beautiful skin. You can see all your freckles and moles and all. But yeah, if you got the sunscreen on you everywhere, it works really well. Where you missed, your skin will burn.”

“I believe it!”

“Well, yeah. Put it on every couple of hours, you’ll be fine. I’ll help you next time we’re in.”

“Don’t you use it?”

“Oh sometimes, but you know, I’ve got a tan, so I don’t burn anymore. I’ll put some on my nose and lips in the afternoon, especially if I stay out all day.”

“All day?”

“Sure, yeah, that’s the best kind of day.”

“Will you spray me now? I’m scared I’ve missed places or something.”

“Yeah, sure.”

He reaches down and pulls off his fins, walks with her up to her towel, steadying her by the elbow in the soft wet sand. He sprays her everywhere with the sunscreen.

“You have a nice body, so white, you’re like that goddess standing in the shorebreak. Here, let me get your legs and ass too. Can’t miss anywhere, or you’ll burn for sure.”

Burned by the sun! Burned by radiation from a star! She starts to shiver again, tries not to look up. Her shadow stretches toward the water, dark on the light sand. She’s still crying, fist to her mouth. The sand is too bright to look at. There’s just too much light.

He helps her back down into the water. He’s brown and lithe, like some animal not quite human, an aquaman, merman, kelpie, come out of the water to lead her into his element. A water sprite. She’s shivering, but not with cold. Possibly the shock of immersion will keep her from throwing up.

Back ankle deep in the white hissing surge. Here she is, on Earth, walking out into the ocean, in a blast of sunlight. She can hardly believe it. It’s as if she’s living someone else’s life, inside a body she can’t manipulate very well. Kaya helps her keep her feet. He kicks into an onrush of water, which casts an arc of spray back out toward the sea. Bubbles bursting all around, such a liquid sound. She has to shout a little for Kaya to hear her. “It’s not as cold this time!”

“That always happens,” he says with a white grin. “Water’s about twenty-four degrees today, just right. It’ll cool you down after an hour or so, but that’s okay. Here, look, when we get to about thigh deep, the bottom will start going up and down, and when a big enough wave comes in, just let yourself down under it. That’s the best way to get wet. Don’t drag it out too long.”

He holds her hand and they walk over the ripples he mentioned. The waves roll in all broken, hissing, hitting her waist high, then dropping back to thigh high. As a bigger broken wave approaches, Kaya lets go of her hand and with a shout dives under it. She crashes down right after him, the wave pushes her back toward shore, she jumps up shocked by the wetness, crying out at the cold. The water tastes salty but clean, cool in her mouth. It stings her eyes, but not much, and not for long. Kaya is leaning over to drink some of it, then spouts what he’s mouthed into the sky, like a fountain. “Drink a little,” he urges her. “It’s good for you. It’s the same saltiness as in us. We’re getting back in the great mama!” And with another hoot he dives under the next approaching wave and shoots up out of the smoother water behind it. Again she dives too late and is shoved back hard.

He swims in to collect her, swimming around when he could stand. “Pull your fins on your feet. Then dive under the waves. Look, when a wave breaks, some water goes straight to the bottom and then rolls back under, like this,” illustrating with his curling hand. “So if you dive and get in that water, it will pull you under the wave and pop you back up, outside the break. You’ll feel it pull you when you get in that flow.”

She tugs the fins onto her feet as another wave approaches; the waves keep coming one after the next, it’s a perpetual thing, every seven or ten seconds it seems, wave after wave and wave. She dives under the next one, goes down too far and feels the sand of the bottom with her hands, swirling into her face, then she feels the tug of the water back and up, and kicking she feels the fins despite her insensible feet, and shoots back up into the sun. Incredible burst of light in her eyes, salt water in her eyes and nose and mouth, she chokes a little but her eyes barely sting.

“Do you keep your eyes open when you’re under?” she shouts at Kaya.

“Hell yeah,” he says, grinning, all submerged except for his face and shoulders and hair and hands, sliding around her like an otter, taking in a mouthful of foam and shooting it at her playfully.

Then he stands and bobs beside her. “Okay, first game is just to crest the waves as they come in. Stand about chest high; that’s where most of these are breaking. The bigger ones will break farther out, and you have to swim out to the break. The smaller ones won’t break till they’re inside of us here. So, just watch, and as they come to you, jump up into the wave as it rises around you, and let it carry you right up to the break at the top. Let the very top of it break right in your face, crash through that upward, and fall down the back side. That’s already almost as fun as it gets. You’ll feel them lift you. Then, when you’re used to that, and you’ve seen how they tend to break, when a big one has reached you and it’s just about to break, turn when it lifts you and jump in toward the shore. Then it will carry you along, you’ll slide down the front of it on your chest. When you get to the bottom you can stick your head forward and the wave will carry you in a long way, or you can duck and tuck to the side, and fold under the wave and be standing right on your feet again, waist high. Try that for a while.”

She tries it. Waves rise up before her; when they are small and not yet broken she bobs over them, and at the top of her bobbing she can see out to sea, see the incoming waves in lines that keep on coming in one after the next, low and unformed. Sometimes she can see that one will be bigger when it arrives in the shallows, and by the time she sees that, all the other swimmers out there—there are about a dozen now—are swimming hard outward to catch it before it breaks, and if they do, they ride the wave sideways across its face, ahead of the broken part as it moves left or right, their wet faces tilted so their eyes are fixed on the wave rising ahead of their motion. Their bodies are the surfboards, she sees. A few of the wave riders have small foam boards they hold under their chest. They hoot at each other as they ride, and as the break closes over them they disappear into the wave, and the next time she sees them they are already swimming back out to catch another wave.

Up into a wave, lifted by it; crash through the thin translucent sunlit wall of water at the top, crash back down onto her chest on the blue backside. Kaya was right; this is already a great feeling. She is losing her fear, she is casting it away with every jump and fall. Lofted by a wave, fall; then again, over and over. Salt water in her mouth. Hissing and smooshing and crashing all around her, of water onto water. No need to talk to people, no need to think. Sun igniting a whole quadrant of the sky, can’t look up that way. Very obvious that looking at sunlight could blind you. Never look that way! The ocean tastes so good, it’s not like blood, it’s clear and cool and clean, salty, but somehow nicer than salty. As if it is the true water.

She begins to feel herself, her body. She is definitely more buoyant here than she has ever been in water before, and for a second she is reminded of the weightlessness of the ship’s spine. She casts that aside, but then she reaches out and holds on to it; with a squeeze of her heart she floats over the waves for the ship, for Jochi, for Devi and Euan and everyone else no longer there. Even the memory that comes to her suddenly, of Euan in Aurora’s ocean, is not bad but good. He picked a good end. Ride these waves for him and with him. It’s a kind of communion. She will outswim her fear. She is still shivering.

Finally a wave comes cresting up that seems to want to break and yet hasn’t managed it, a banked slope of water rising up before her in an awesome onrush, and she sees her chance and turns and jumps toward the shore, and the wave picks her up and as she floats up the face she is also sliding down the face, at about the same rate of speed, so that she is both hanging there and flying along: that moment is astonishing, she is still laughing at it when the wave tips more vertically and she slides abruptly down to its bottom and plows into the flat water that is not the wave, the wave catches her as it breaks, flips her in a somersault that shoots water up her nose and into her throat and lungs, she gags but is still in the tumble of the broken wave, she can’t get to the surface, doesn’t even know which way is up, bumps the bottom and finds out, shoves upward, bursts through the surface of hissing bubbles and gasps in, chokes, coughs, snorts, breathes cleanly in, gasps in and out a few breaths, starts to laugh. The whole event has lasted about five seconds, maybe. One has to hold one’s mouth shut when underwater. Obviously.

She tries to convey this to Kaya when he shoots by her, disappears, and then stands next to her chest deep. “You okay?” he asks.

“Yes! I got all tumbled!”

“You wiped out. You got caught in the washing machine.” He laughs.

“I have to hold my breath underwater!”

“Well yeah! And breathe out through your nose when you’re tumbling,” he says. “Then you’ll be fine. It won’t be able to inject its way into you.”

She goes back to cresting the waves. She turns and rides a few more, does better when they crash her down into the still water under the onrushing wave. When her rise and fall equalize and she flies, that puts a no-g spot in her gut, as if she is floating down the spine. She thinks of the ship again and cries out, a laugh of grief for her whole life, ah God that it had to happen this way, so crazy their whole existence, so absurd and stupid. So much death. But here she is, and the ship would be pleased to see her out in these waves, she knows this as surely as she knows anything.

The sun actually feels like it is hurting the skin of her face a little, and also she finds she is shivering between the arrival of one wave and the next; it’s a different kind of shivering than before, she is simply getting cold. The bigger waves come in sets of three, Kaya calls in passing, and she can see how this is roughly true. She can certainly see how they might come to believe it. They see a set coming, and try to get out over the first one before it breaks, then swim to a point where they can get a good takeoff on one of the following two. She wants to ride one across the face ahead of the break, like they do. Hard to arrange. Seems like she would need to be going a little faster for it to work, and Kaya agrees when she says that. “Kick hard with your fins at the moment you need the speed!”

“I’m shivering!”

“Yeah, I’m almost there myself. Go on in and lie in the sun for a while; you’ll warm right back up. I’ll come in in a while.”

She tries to ride a wave all the way in, botches her exit, gets caught up in the tumble of the washing machine, chokes on seawater again, can’t breathe for too long, can’t get to the surface. Suddenly she is grabbed and yanked up, chokes and gasps, coughs up seawater she has swallowed, almost vomiting.

It’s Kaya who has pulled her up, standing chest deep now, staring at her intently. His eyes are a pale blue.

“Hey!” he says. “Be careful out here. This is the ocean, you know. You can blow it pretty fast. You get yourself drowned out here and the ocean won’t care. It’s way stronger than us.”

“Sorry. I didn’t see that coming.”

“Tell you what, maybe just stay in the shallows here for a while. Do what we call grunioning. You just lie here where the shorebreak runs up the beach, you’re floating, but bumping on the ripples of the bottom too, and the waves run you up the beach, then the backwash runs you back down the beach. Just let the water push you around like you’re a piece of driftwood, or a grunion. It’s almost as fun as anything out here.”

She does it and it’s true. No effort involved. Keep her face out of the water, let everything else go. Float like a log. Bump here and there over the wet sand. She sees that the beach is more occupied now, kids up at the high-water mark are building sand castles and screaming. The hissing of the waves is loud, the air is filled with a mist of popped bubbles. Bubbles everywhere, more bubbles than water. Long strands of kelp grunion with her. Their bulbs look like plastic, they pop with a smell. It’s trapped whale breath! a little girl sitting there says to her, seeing her pop and sniff. Freya chews at a leaf of it; it tastes like the kelp they grew in their little salt pond, what a little thing that was, a birdbath. In and out, in and out she floats.

Eventually even here, where the water is warmer, and the sun is on her back and on the backs of her legs, even here she’s cooled down enough to shiver. She takes off her fins, levers herself to her feet, and very carefully walks up to her towel, falling down once. In the wet sand it doesn’t matter.

She lies on the hot dry sand next to her towel, in the sun. Quickly she warms and dries. There is a rime of salt left on her skin that she can taste when she licks it. The sand is warm, it sticks to her wherever she touched it when she was wet; now that it’s dry, she can brush it off with her hand. She can shove her feet and hands under the sand, and feel its sandy heft and give; the warmth extends down a ways, then the sand is cooler. She digs a pit in it, gets the pit down to a level where its bottom suffuses with water. The walls of this pit then fall in from the sides, which collapse into the little pool she has down there. When she scoops up the wet sand and lets it drip between her fingers, the sand hits the rim of her pool and the water in it seeps away and the sand remains in blobs that stack on each other, until they fall over. Once or twice she scoops up little sand crabs that makes her cry “Eek!” as the crabs crawl desperately over her palms, and she drops them back into the pool and they dig their way into the sand at the bottom of the pool and disappear. After a few times she realizes they don’t have any capacity to bite her, their jaws or palps or whatever are too small and soft. Apparently the sand under her is full of these creatures. Possibly they live on bits of seaweed. The beach makers must have put them here, got them started. Down the brilliant wet expanse of strand she sees a flock of shorebirds running up and down over their wet reflections, their knees bending backward. They have long beaks they use to stick in the sand, no doubt going after these same sand crabs. They stop and poke at little bubbles in wet sand, possibly the sand crabs’ exhalations. It makes sense. This beach is alive.

When Kaya comes in he is visibly shivering, skin goose-pimpled, blue under his suntan, lips white, nose purple. He throws himself on his towel, shivers there so violently that for a while he almost bounces off the sand. Slowly the shivers subside, and he lies there on his stomach like a sleeping infant, mouth open, eyes closed. Quickly his skin dries in the sun and she can see the white dusting of salt left on him. His hair is a tangle of curls, he is all muscle and bone, relaxed like a cat. A cat in the sun. A young water god, some child of Poseidon.

She looks around at the beach, squinting hard. It’s way too bright. Always the low grumble of waves breaking, the hiss of bubbles bursting. Haze in the distance, everything seen in a talcum of light.

“Can we really stay out here exposed like this?” she says suddenly, feeling a shaft of alarm spear her again. “The starlight won’t kill us, the radiation?”

He opens his eyes, looks up at her without moving. “Starlight?”

“From the sun, I mean. It’s got to be a massive dose of radiation, I can feel it.”

He sits up. “Well, sure. Might be time for more sunscreen, you’re so white.” He presses his forefinger into the skin of her upper arm. “Ah yes, see how it’s a little pink now, and goes white when I push there, and takes a little while to turn back to pink? You’re getting a sunburn. Let’s put another coat of sunscreen on you.”

“Will that be enough?”

“It will get you through another hour or so, I think. Especially if you go back in the water. We don’t usually just lie out here in the sun. Just long enough to warm up again and go back out.”

“How many times do you go out?”

“I don’t know. Lots.”

“You must be hungry at the end of the day!”

“Oh yeah.” He laughs. “Surfers are like seagulls, they say. Eat everything in sight.”

He sprays the sunscreen lotion onto her skin. She feels a little salty, a little raw, and the lotion is soothing. His hands when he touches her to spread the lotion behind her ears and up into her hairline are cool and smooth. She can tell by the way he touches her that he has touched before, that young as he is, he would be a good lover. When he lies back down she looks at him candidly. Feeling a little incandescent, stomach unknotted at last, cool but warm, she says, “What about sex on this beach, eh? Right out in the sun? You people must do that!”

“Yes,” he says with a little smile, and rolls over onto his stomach, perhaps modestly. “You have to be sure not to get sand in certain places. But, you know, it’s mostly something we do out here at night.”

“How come? It’s a public beach, isn’t it?”

“Well, yes. But it doesn’t sound like you mean what I mean when you say public.”

“I thought public meant it was yours, that you could do what you want.”

“I guess, yeah. But being public also means you don’t do private things here.”

“I think you should just do what you want! And I’d like to jump you right here and now.”

“I don’t know. You could get in trouble.” He peers up at her. “Besides, how old are you?”

“I don’t know.”

He laughs. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I don’t know. Do you mean how long I’ve lived, or how long since I was born?”

“Well, how long you’ve lived, I guess.”

“One day,” she says promptly. “Actually about two hours. Since I got out in that water.”

He laughs again. “You’re funny. You do seem kind of new to this. But hey, I’m warmed back up, I’m going to go back out for another session.” With a quick darting kiss to her cheek he jumps up. “See you out there. I’ll check you out, I’ll stay right outside from here and keep an eye on you.”

He runs down to the waves, splashes through the shallows stepping absurdly high, jumping as he runs, then leaps into the waves and turns to get his fins on, then swims farther out at speed, stroking smoothly, ducking under broken waves right before they reach him. It looks effortless.

She follows him in. It’s a bit colder than last time; her skin feels taut and warm, more sensitive to the water. But soon she’s back in it and comfortable, and the lift of a wave pulls her back into the sun, and she’s off to the races.

The waves are a little bigger, a little steeper in their faces; Kaya says it’s because the tide is now going out. The sun is higher now, and the ocean is simply ablaze with long banks of liquid light, heaving slightly up and down, up and down, lined by the incoming waves, which as they rise before her turn a deep translucent green. Now as she floats she can look down and see through clear water to the sandy bottom, yellow and smooth. Strands and even big clumps of seaweed float below the surface in masses. Once she sees a big fish swim between the strands, a fish with a spotted tawny back, the sight of which gives her a jolt of fear; it disappears, she calls out about it to Kaya when he swims by, he laughs and says it was a leopard shark, harmless, mouth too small, not interested in people.

She’s getting used to her fins, and finds she can kick from her hips, and swim along at what feels like a great speed. She’s a mermaid. Duck under the broken waves, feel the tug of the wave’s underturn, shoot up out the back through green water. Or over waves just about to break, swim fast at them, breast up them rising fast, crash through their crests and fall down their backsides, laughing. Crack of a wave’s first fall right ahead of her. Swim in with a swell trying to break, she can keep up with it, it picks her up and she’s sliding down the face again, this time at an angle ahead of the break, sliding sideways ahead of the break and across the surface of the wave, which keeps rising up before her, steepening at just the right speed to keep her falling down across it. Holding herself stiff and doing nothing else, and yet flying, flying so fast she emerges from the water from her waist up, she can even put her hands down on the water like the other bodysurfers and plane on her hands, and fly more!

Delicious.

Now there’s an old man out here, with what looks to be a granddaughter or great-granddaughter on a short rounded board, and as the waves rise he launches her on the waves like throwing a paper airplane, both of them grinning like maniacs. The mermen and mermaids spin down the faces sometimes, rise back up on them, dance with the wave’s particular shape and tempo.

The waves get bigger, steeper. Then there’s a shout and everyone is swimming hard out to sea, trying to catch a big set. As she crests one wave she sees what they have seen, and her breath catches: a really big swell, and it hasn’t even hit the shallows and begun to rise. Looks like it will break far outside her. She swims as fast as she can, just like everyone else.

The rest of them crest the big wave before it breaks, but she’s inside still, and has to dive under it. Go right to the bottom, clutch the sand down there, feel the breaking wave push her, lift her and push her down again, flapping her like a flag, and in the midst of that one of her fins comes off. She keeps on the bottom, comes up with a hard kick off the sand, reaches the surface just in time for the next wave to break right on her, it throws her down and then back up again, and without having to do a thing she is tossed back up to the surface, onto a hissing field of bubbles infused with sand that has been ripped off the bottom, she’s in a slurry of sand and seawater now. Immense roar. And here comes the third wave, outside and building, she tries to get out to it before it breaks, swims as hard as she can but she’s still out of breath, still gasping hard, and the wave’s top pitches toward her and suddenly she has the sickening realization that she is going to be at just the wrong spot, that it’s going to fall right on her, she takes in a deep breath and ducks her head into her chest—

Wham. It hits her so hard the air is driven out of her lungs, and then she is being flailed about, her whole body tumbling, no way to tell up from down, a wild tumble, the washing machine for sure, but so much bigger than those little ones that she’s utterly helpless, a rag doll, when will it let her up? Will it let her up? She’s running out of air, feeling an emptiness in her head she has never felt before, a desperate need for breath, she’s never felt that before and she panics, she simply has to breathe right now! And yet she’s down there swirling with the sand torn off the bottom, eyes clamped shut, whirling about, she’s going to have to give up and breathe water, damn, she thinks, after all that, to get home and drown a month later. Star girl killed by Earth how stupid—

And then she’s cast back up into the air, gulps it in, alas some water in the gulp, chokes, coughs, gasps in more air, in and out.

And then she sees there’s a fourth wave breaking. Not fair! she thinks, and crash, she is slammed right to the bottom again, hard tumbling impact. Unbelievable force. No air in her, just have to hold on. Now she really will drown. Life flashing before eyes, the classic sign. Stupid star girl, done in at last.

She opens her eyes, fights toward the light. Light-headed, empty inside, blood burning, desire to breathe so great she can’t stop herself, must breathe even if she breathes water, simply must! Must! Doesn’t. Holds on somehow as she tumbles, light above, dark below, try to get up toward the light, but helpless in the tumble, just a rag doll tumbling.

She comes up again, gasps out and in again, careful this time not to breathe in water. Quick lessons here, she looks around to see if another wave coming—there is. What is this? It’s trying to kill her!

But it seems smaller. Still, she is too far inside now to get over it before it breaks, too weak to swim out to it, can only breathe in and out in quick gasps, breathe hugely, desperately, the wave rises up, breaks outside of her, comes at her as a gigantic tumbling white wall, chaos, no way to get under it, just take one more breath and wham it hits her and again she’s tumbling, pinwheeling, no control, just holding on, just holding her breath. Only this time there just isn’t enough to last, impossible to hold your breath when you can’t, when you’re suffocating, she’s going to have to breathe water. Damn. What a way to go. Then she’s back on the surface and gasping again. Gasps in and out, turns to look, yes, another fucking great wall coming, streaked with foam and bubbles, but it takes its first fall and leap back to the sky, its first rush at her, and by the time it reaches her the white chaos is just a little calmed down. She lets it take her and roll her in toward shore. She’s holding her breath. She’ll either black out and die, or get rolled in to shore.

She hits the bottom, struggles around to relocate it. Can’t feel her feet, no fins at all anymore, pushes up wildly, shoots up into the air, comes down again, another wave knocks her under, but the bottom is there, she pushes off again, she’s tumbling, but some part of every somersault thrusts her head up into the air briefly and she breathes. Tumbling, hitting the sand on the bottom. If it were a rocky bottom she’d be killed, but it’s sand and she shoves up from it. Appears she’s only about chest deep here, but another broken wave smashes her down again. Damn! Hold breath, tumble without resistance, find the bottom, stand, breathe, knocked over, hold breath, tumble. This time when she stands she falls over because there’s no water to hold her up, she’s thigh deep, knee deep, she falls at another massive shove from behind, but fuck it, just roll with it, hold breath, come up, breathe.

Comes a moment when she finds herself on hands and knees in water sluicing backward under her toward the waves. Then another shove from behind, but she’s in the shallows, it’s where she was grunioning, there are the kids up there shrieking as the big waves have overrun their sand castles, instantly melting them to smooth nubbins in the sand, holes streaming water back down. No one paying the slightest attention to her. Good. She crawls up the beach. The next wave to strike her can’t even knock her over, just runs under her whitely hissing, bubbles everywhere, air full of salt mist, the backwash trying hard to sweep her back into the sea, she digs her hands into the wet flowing sand, water leaps up around her forearms and knees, she’s settling into sand that flows down under her, until another swell smacks her from behind. But she can’t be moved. A few more waves flow up past her and back, she sinks farther into the wet sand. She pulls her hands out, lifts her knees and feet out, crawls on hands and knees up the strand a little. One wave washes a blue fin right by her, she reaches for it and misses. The sand castles are too far. She stops there on hands and knees, resting. Everything brilliantly lit but also stuffed with blackness. Catching her breath, gasping in and out, retching a little, spitting out salt water.

Kaya runs up to her, puts his hand on her back. “Hey, are you all right?”

She nods. “Gah,” she says. “Gakk.”

“Good! That was a big set!” He runs back out.

Sun beats on her back, the wet strand gleams. Everything is sparking and glary, too bright to look at. A broken wave rushes up the strand, stops, leaves a line of foam. Big slab of water sheets back down the slope at her, crashes into her wrists and knees, sinks her farther into wet sand. Bubbling water swirls the sand under her to the sea, black flecks forming V patterns in tumbling blond grains, sluicing new deltas right before her eyes. Delta v’s, she thinks, now those are delta v’s. What a world. She lets her head down and kisses the sand.