Nilis showed the ensigns to the room he had assigned them. Thankfully, it was without windows to the outside. Torec simply pulled off her uniform, threw it to the floor and climbed into the single wide bed.
Pirius followed her, a little more slowly. In this strange new place fear and curiosity warred in him, making him restless. But he held Torec until her trembling had stopped and she slept.
He woke after two hours. Torec was sleeping soundly; for now she had escaped from the strangeness.
Pirius watched her for a while. The curving skin of her shoulder was smooth, flawless, and her small face, turned away from him, was blank, as if she were a child, unformed. He felt a surging warmth toward her, an urge to hold her, so they could protect each other in this bewilderingly strange place.
If you’d asked him before they left Arches, he thought, he’d surely have said Torec was no more than a squeeze to him, and vice versa. Now she seemed a lot more. Was his feeling for her because they were alone here, the only bit of familiarity for each other so far from home? Had he felt this way about her, underneath, even before they had left Arches? Or maybe the crisis they had been through on the ship had drawn them together, as if they’d been through combat.
It was complicated. He wasn’t used to digging into his own emotions so deeply; in a Barracks Ball you didn’t get a lot of quiet time to think.
There was plenty to distract him here, of course. He slid carefully out of bed.
He explored the room. He found doors to a lavatory, and a shower room — not a clean-cloth store, but a place where running water came pouring out of a slot in the roof at his commands. Pirius tried it. Though it was hot and clear, the water left him feeling vaguely unclean; perhaps it came from the safety of a recycling tank, but it could have come from the river, or the ocean. He didn’t imagine he would ever enjoy this strange experience.
He dried off and dressed in a fresh uniform.
He stepped to the door and hesitated. He hadn’t come all the way to Earth itself to hide. He tapped the door; it slid open silently, and he left the room.
The apartment was astoundingly big, and astoundingly empty; Pirius thought you could have lodged five hundred ensigns in a space this size, but it was all devoted to one fat Commissary. As he wandered, small maintenance bots scuttled silently after him, scuffing at the carpet, removing all traces of his presence as he passed. The apartment was just under the outer skin of the dome, and large picture windows had been cut into the outer wall. The rooms were flooded with light that poured unfiltered from the parent star. Pirius, trying to acclimatize, shied away from the light.
Some of the rooms had functions that seemed obvious. One contained a long conference table, for instance, flanked by rows of chairs. Pirius touched the surface of the table. It was pale brown and textured with a kind of grain, a material he had never seen before. Other rooms seemed designed for leisure; typically, they had chairs and low tables set up before the windows.
Every room was cluttered, full of artifacts, memorabilia perhaps, or the objects of Nilis’s study. Some of this stuff was Virtual, complex three-dimensional sketches left half-finished, hovering in the air. But there were much older technologies, too. In one room Pirius even found a row of books — though he would learn that word only later — blocks of paper you held in your hand.
One room held a kind of display: certificates and plaques covered the walls, and in open cases medals and little statues shone. There was even a Virtual display, a double-helix representation that whirled and sparkled. Many of these items bore small plates marked with lettering. Pirius’s reading was poor — in his line of work, reading was just a backup data-access system — but he recognized Nilis’s name repeated over and over. It wasn’t hard to see that these artifacts were prizes, awards, certificates: tokens of achievement, of congratulation. Once again, this was horribly un-Doctrinal. You were supposed to do your duty for its own sake, not for recognition, not for pride. But the little tokens did not shout for attention; they were gathered here with a quiet, untidy pride, the marks of a life of achievement.
Indeed, the whole place was like a projection of Nilis’s personality: rich, cluttered, fusty, baffling.
At last Pirius came to a room where, between two vast windows, the wall was broken by an open door.
Pirius stood on the thick carpet, frozen, ingrained panic rising. But this was Earth, the only world in the Galaxy where you could walk out of a dome without so much as a skinsuit and expect to live. He remembered the little girl on the island, who had shown no fear.
In the open space beyond the door, Pirius glimpsed Nilis. Barefoot, his Commissary’s robe hitched up around his knees, he walked cheerfully through the bright light. He was carrying something green and complex, cradling it in his hands. Whistling, he passed on out of sight.
Pirius took a deep breath. After all, he must already be breathing the unprocessed air of Earth. It seemed fresh, a little cool, and there were strange scents: a sharp tang, like nothing he had smelled before, yet somehow familiar even so. A green scent: the thought came to him unbidden. He didn’t allow himself to hesitate further. He walked across the room, to the door, out onto the platform beyond.
The light blasted his face, hot, intense, coming from a sun so brilliant he couldn’t even bear to look toward it. But he made out something of the sky. It was blue, he saw, stunned. There were objects floating in that blue sky, fat, fluffy, irregular, shaded gray beneath. Surely the size of starships, they must be clouds, masses of water vapor.
Nilis was standing beside him. His hands, empty now, were grimy, black dirt trapped under his fingernails. He smiled. “You’re doing well, Ensign,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” Pirius glanced about. He was on a terrace, a broad rectangle of concrete. Much of the terrace was given over to a series of troughs, each of which contained heavy black earth. Things were growing in there: plants, Pirius supposed, with leaves of green, blood red, black. Small hand tools were scattered about. Though maintenance bots hovered hopefully, Nilis, barefoot, sweating, black-nailed, had evidently been tending this little garden himself.
Beyond the lip of the terrace the land fell away to the river, which swept by, its surface glistening like the hide of some immense animal. Pirius felt dwarfed, naked.
“So,” Nilis said. “What do you think?”
“The sky,” Pirius said.
“Yes?”
“It’s blue. I wasn’t expecting that.”
Nilis pondered that. “No, I suppose you wouldn’t.” He wiped his brow and lifted his face; the light of the sun seemed to smooth out the wrinkles etched in his brow. “You could know everything about the physics of light, Pirius, but you would never guess a sky might be blue. Earth, drained as she is, continues to remind us of our limits, our humility.”
“Drained?”
“Look again, Ensign. What else can you see, beyond the lid of sky?”
Pirius shielded his eyes from the sun. Everywhere he looked, sparks slid by. “Ships,” he said.
Nilis pointed to a drifting tetrahedral form, faintly visible, white against blue. “See that? It’s a Snowflake. Its builders, whom the Assimilators called ’Snowmen,’ lived far out in the halo of the Galaxy. A billion years ago they built their giant artifacts to record the slow cooling of the universe. We destroyed the Snowmen and confiscated their technology. Now Snowflakes orbit Earth in a great shell as deep as the Moon’s orbit: they are watch stations, I suppose, waiting for any threatening move from the Xeelee — and those huge eyes are turned on Earth, too, seeking out signs of insurgence from dissident human factions. Oh, don’t look so surprised, Ensign; in any age there are always plenty of rebels.