Things Fall Apart: Chapter 55

Newer York, 8 Tammuz 2541 AS

Singer had briefly considered staying to see all the crew processed, but several factors made her reconsider. For one, she did not want to give any impression of distrust between herself and the local authorities. For another, the point of having Alexander come over now had been to let zir and zir parent sort out whatever they might need to sort out before the upcoming meetings, and Singer wanted to be sure they had the time they needed for that.

And then, there was the fact that she was simply running out of steam. And hungry. They had snacked at the museum, but a meal would definitely not come amiss.

So when Ellison had subtly indicated with a head gesture that maybe they should all head back to the train and leave MacDonough and his people to their jobs, Singer took the hint and said as much aloud. They almost made it out the door without fuss, except someone—Singer didn't see whom and didn't recognize the voice—shouted, "Three cheers for the Captain!"

Singer turned to accept the three huzzahs, aware that she was probably turning a very indecorous shade of pink and totally mystified as to what she might have done recently to merit such a display.

The ride back and supper in the embassy dining room were relatively uneventful. As much as Singer would have loved to be a fly on the wall to hear child and parent hash things out, Robin and Robina were clearly saving any serious conversation for afterward. Table conversation was mostly light, with Ellison and O'Halloran demonstrating their training as diplomats by keeping things social.

Afterward, O'Halloran excused herself—and by extension, Alexander and Robina—by offering to show Alexander to zir room. Seth took this as his cue to head back to their delegation's lodgings near Admin and saw himself out. Ellison looked at the diminished group and said, "Goodness me, I may be out of excuses to evade paperwork. After all, you'll be leaving in a few days. I have reports that are badly overdue to send with you. Are you three all right entertaining yourselves?"

It was subterfuge, of course. Ellison knew they'd be sowing relays on their way to Tau Ceti. She could transmit her report—if there was anyone to receive it—after Zephyr signaled that relay was up. It would require Ellison to postpone her much discussed retirement all of a week, or else to just leave it for O'Halloran to deliver.

But Singer wasn't going to argue, and said instead, "Honestly, I think I could use some time to myself."

Singer could sense Ellison wanted to give her a stern "mom" look, but instead said breezily, "Then by all means, take some, my dear. The meeting tomorrow is going to be a lot, I suspect."

Thus excused, Singer rose as Ellison did, and they each left the dining room. Ellison proceeded up the stairs to her room. Cadotte and Espinoza had stayed behind in the dining room. Singer considered going to her room, but wound up out on the veranda, picking a patch of greenery across the atrium and otherwise allowing her mind to fall out of gear entirely.

O'Halloran led Alexander and the President of Revi'i up to the room that had been set aside for the former without any indication there was anything strange about it. After assuring herself that Alexander's palm worked against the door lock, she bade them both good evening and headed down the hall, perhaps to her own room.

Alexander gestured zir parent into the room. Having not seen it before, ze was only guessing it would have reasonable space for the two to sit and have a grown-up conversation, and was relieved to find it was so. If nothing else, the desk had a chair for both the person working at it and a second person across, but there was also a sofa and an armchair. Compared to zir former quarters on Bellerophon, it was luxurious; but it was about on par with zir suite on Zephyr as executive officer.

The point being, neither of them would be obliged to sit on the bed.

Alexander let Robina choose which corner of the couch she wanted, having no preference in a room ze'd never been in before, and took the other. Despite twenty-five years apart, Alexander was not remotely surprised they took up mirror-image postures.

They spent a moment just looking at each other. Alexander genuinely had little sense of how the years had treated zir, but ze thought they'd treated Robina well. That led to a thought that amused zir, and let zir break the ice, snorting and saying, "Does the Admiral know?"

Robina caught the drift immediately and smiled slyly. "I certainly haven't told him."

"Good. I genuinely did not intend to surprise my captain, but Donato? Well..."

"I heard about the guff he pulled when you surfaced. He was still sporting a bruise from Ambassador Ellison's delivery of her government's official opinion of it when we met for the briefing."

Alexander snorted again, picturing it. But ze fumbled with how to follow up for a moment. But then, ze said, "Okay, this is all awkward, but I have to get one thing out of my system that never felt right to put in a letter, even when I was sending letters."

Robina visibly braced herself, expecting something dire. "All right...."

"All these people out here? With all their faces?! It's WEIRD, mother!" Ze deliberately put it in the same tones ze remembered expressing other forms of teenage outrage, the tone ze'd used for zir music teacher in eighth form who drove zir insane.

They both cracked up.

When they caught their breaths, Alexander said, "It's funny. I've spent years wondering what I'd say to you, or rant at you about, if I ever saw you again...and now I don't care about any of that. None of it matters in the face of...," ze waved at the wordless enormity of what they were facing.

Robina only nodded, but Alexander knew zir parent well enough to see it was mostly to avoid her voice breaking if she spoke.

Instead, once she recovered, Robina said, "You think highly of your captain, I gather." It was not at all accusatory. The opposite, in fact. Alexander had gotten the definite sense at dinner that Singer and zir parent had gotten along famously. Ze felt a little weird about that, but at least it meant ze didn't have to get defensive about something this early in the conversation.

Instead, ze said, "She held us together when the ship was literally coming apart. I don't even know how to set a value on that."

Robina got a thoughtful look, then said, "I remember one of the last letters you sent home—no, this isn't going anywhere bad—where you were talking about your Command class...was it 301? Karenski?"

Alexander nodded, but didn't otherwise interrupt, curious where this was going.

"You mentioned then that you were pretty sure command wasn't your path, although you were doing all right in the class. But you also mentioned a much more talkative, argumentative classmate named Singer. Was that...?"

Alexander started, having completely forgotten the letter. Then, ze laughed. "Yes! I'd forgotten all about it, but yes! She'd argue with Karenski, she'd argue with the other classmates, I thought for sure she was on a path to command. Except then, she made the same choice I did, although I didn't know it until we both found ourselves on Delta Shift on Bellerophon. I thought for sure she was already a captain somewhere."

"Well, she is now!"

"True. And now that she has it, I don't think she's letting it go, which is good, because I think the crew would mutiny if anyone tried to make her!"

That sobered them both for a moment, and Robina asked, "Think there's anyone left to do that?"

Alexander heaved a sigh. "I think I've already been thinking up new uniform designs for when we declare ourselves free traders or something."

"Now, see, here I was afraid you'd given up all your artistic endeavors when you went for engineering at the academy."

"I keep my hand in. So...you know how I got where I am now. How the heck did you wind up in your predicament?" Alexander allowed zir tone to leave it open to be a joke, if Robina chose to take it that way.

She did, and didn't, smiling, but answering directly, "Richard was a boring yutz. People got tired of him. And...," she broke off. She clearly needed a moment to think about the next part of the story. "Dammit, there's no way to put this that won't make it sound like I made hay out of tragedy. Not enough people thought that particular Richard was the right person to pull us through a time of crisis."

Alexander blinked. Ze had not really thought through the timing. The election would have come only a couple of local weeks after the Incident. Nobody here would have known the details—not until Zephyr got here—but the loss of contact with dozens of worlds, the ships that blew up in near space, all of that would have been enough to signal impending upheaval. If the race was already even close, it would have tipped the balance.

Ze took a moment to turn it all over in zir mind. Robina knew that one reason Alexander had put distance—physical as well as emotional—between them was how politics entered so many of Robina's calculations.

Before ze could say anything more about it, though, Robina said, "Can I tell you something that never made sense in a letter?"

It seemed a non sequitur, but Alexander knew zir parent better. "It only seems fair!"

"I know—because you said so—that you think I objected to your leaving for the TCTF because of the optics, because it would be a blemish on my career to have a child leave for the Above. That was never—never—true."

Now, Robina's voice did break. Alexander knew zir parent's ability to perform well enough not to take it entirely at face value, except there was nothing calculated about Robina's face. There was anger, sadness...and fear.

"What it was, was simply this: terror. Space terrifies me. I'm here, right now, because I need to be. It's my job. I had to take so many anti-anxiety meds getting on the upwell shuttle I'm surprised I'm not still high. I am a groundling, through and through. I have been terrified for you every single minute since you went upwell. And then, things started blowing up, and I didn't even know what ship you were on, and..."

There had been several times, growing up, when Alexander had actually felt like their roles were reversed, like ze was the parent, because Robina had seen, as many Revi'ini see in their same-line children, a mirror image and confidante. It wasn't always healthy, Alexander knew now, but it was probably healthier than not having anyone to talk to at all.

So Alexander did what ze'd done as a child—opened zir arms and let zir parent soak zir shoulder.

"I'm alive, mama. I'm right here."

"But you're going right back out again!"

"Wouldn't you? Set aside your fear of space a moment. Take that out of it. What would you do."

Robina took the required moment to think about it, then looked up at Alexander, face a smudged, tear-stained mess she would never have let anyone else—not even her partners in her mishpacha—see, and said, "Go right back out again. Find the fuckers who did this. Fight like a demon!"

"Where do you think I got that from?"

Robina's sob became a laugh. "Can't be from me. Everybody knows I'm quiet and demure. Must have been from our template. The Rob was an absolute menace."

"When I find them, I'm gonna show them how much of a menace The Rob's descendants can be."

They were quiet then together, parent and child, giving the emotions their time. Finally, Robina said, "I love you, Robin."

"I love you, too, mama."

"Give 'em hell."

"You know it."

Singer lost track of time. In fact, Singer lost track of just about everything, dissociating into the greenery and the ambient sounds of the atrium, until she heard the door to the veranda slide open.

While the sound was enough to bring Singer partly out of her...reverie? trance? dissociative episode?...Singer found she was still disinclined to respond much to stimuli. It was not a deliberate effort to snub whomever was coming into her space, so much as continuing to enjoy the distance she had put between herself and her thoughts and feelings.

Rachel O'Halloran sat down next to her on the bench, and although she was clearly trying not to disturb or startle Singer, it was enough to bring Singer more in touch with her surroundings. A moment or two later, and Singer was able to turn her head to see that O'Halloran was mimicking Singer's former posture, gazing out into the green space of the atrium.

Sensing Singer was returned to herself, O'Halloran said, "Forgive me if I'm intruding. Are you...all right?"

Singer could not have given a coherent reason why she chose not to prevaricate. She just shook her head slowly and said, "I'm really not."

"The museum?" O'Halloran asked.

"Yeah."

Singer felt O'Halloran shift and saw that she now had the other woman's full attention. The question, "What about it?" was there, but not asked. Now, Singer hesitated. She barely knew this person, really.

But Singer had spent too much of her life teaching herself to be honest with herself, even when it was uncomfortable. What she needed, right here, right now, was a friend, or at least an ear, who was not a part of her chain of command in any way. Not her subordinate, not her superior, not a senior official of her government. O'Halloran herself had said it on the train—what she really needed was a week-long therapy session. She was not going to get it, now or anytime soon.

But she could, at least, talk to someone who seemed to genuinely want to listen.

"The first moment was Espinoza dreaming of opening a museum to the engineering marvels of the station. It's the first time since the Incident that anybody's said a word in my hearing about 'after'. I can't even imagine 'after'. I can't imagine what comes after Tau Ceti. More investigation, maybe? Relief operations? Rescues? Rebuilding? What does any of that even look like?"

She fell silent again, not wanting to give rein to what felt like it could become an unhinged rant. It might feel good in the moment, but it wouldn't really help.

O'Halloran, for her part, treated the questions as rhetorical, which of course they were, and instead asked, "That wasn't all of it, though, was it?"

"No. The exhibit about Earth's final collapse...how literally nobody could figure out how to even investigate because it's so deep in its well. How the barges en route had to scrape to avoid being stranded and claw their way back to Jove...I knew the story from school, but...it was all two millennia ago. Now it's today. Tau Ceti's well is shallower—we can go downwell, although our orders caution against it. But...we'll be just as useless as any of those barges would have been!"

Now she was getting upset. The fears of the day were breaking loose at last. She remembered Ellison losing her grip after the briefing and felt she might be on the edge of something similar.

O'Halloran had an answer for this, though. "Cherryh's World isn't dome-dependent."

Singer blinked.

"By the time of Earth's catastrophe, the environmental degradation had already gone far enough that everyone was living in domes, like they do on Revi'i here, or on Fontana, or most other dirtworlds."

It was true. Cherryh's was actually kind of a miracle world, so much so that humans had distrusted it, and avoided settling it despite its obvious advantages, for centuries. But the air was perfectly breathable. The naturally growing analogs of fruits and vegetation required only easily synthesized supplemental enzymes to digest, and Terran-originated crops grew in its soil without much encouragement.

In short, of all the worlds in the TCTO, Cherryh was one of the least fragile. It was just...home. For Singer, at least.

And not just for Singer. O'Halloran continued, "Don't get me wrong. I'm a Union City girl. I have nightmares about what it might look like right now, too. But I've also had a lot of time to think it through and, unlike you, not a lot of time spent just holding a crew together."

Singer snorted almost involuntarily at that, then said, "Wait. What part of Union?"

"Lowertown!"

Singer shook her head and said "Northwest."

"Neighbors!"

That broke the mood, and they both laughed.

"Feeling better, Commander?"

"Elyah. I just unburdened myself in your direction, you get to use my name."

"Feeling better, Elyah?"

"Yes, I am...Rachel. Thank you." And then, she yawned. "What time is it, anyway?"

"Just about twenty-two hours."

Singer nodded. "Bedtime, then. Tomorrow's not going to be any easier if I sit here staring into space all night."

O'Halloran smiled, "Probably not. Good night, Elyah."

Singer tried to answer, but yawned again, instead, and stood up, finally saying, "Good night, Rachel. Thank you."

"You're welcome!"