Chapter Thirty-Two: Anna

The security force had come first, three soldiers in a shuttle with guns and restraints for Melba. Or Clarissa. Whoever she was. Then, much later, a medical evacuation had come, taking the Rocinante’s crew.

Anna’s own ride arrived almost a day later, not an afterthought, but not a priority. The way things had all come about, she thought not being a priority was probably a sign things were going well for her.

When she arrived on the Behemoth, she had expected to see someone from that ship’s security team. Or, if they were well enough, maybe Naomi and the other two crewmen from the Rocinante.

Hector Cortez stood in the shuttle bay. He smiled when he saw her and raised his hand in a little wave of greeting. The motion reminded her of her grandfather in his failing days: careful and a little awkward. She thought Cortez had aged a decade in a few days, then realized he must have been injured in the catastrophe.

“Anna,” he said. “I am so glad to see you.”

The Behemoth’s massive drum section was spinning now, creating a vertigo-inducing false gravity. Anna’s feet told her that she was standing on solid ground. Her inner ear argued that she was falling over sideways, and kept trying to get her to tilt her body the other direction. It wasn’t enough to make her steps unsteady, but it did make everything feel a little surreal. Having Hector Cortez, celebrity and minister to the powerful, kiss her cheek didn’t make things any less dreamlike.

“It’s good to see you too,” she said. “I didn’t know you were on the Behemoth.”

“We’ve all come,” he said. “They’ve left the smallest of crews on the Thomas Prince, and we’ve all come here. All of us that are left. We’ve lost so many. I attended services yesterday for the fallen. Father Michel. Rabbi Black. Paolo Sedon.”

Anna felt a little twinge of dread.

“Alonzo Guzman?”

Cortez shook his head.

“Neither alive nor dead,” he said. “They have him in a medical coma, but he’s not expected to survive.”

Anna remembered the man’s pleading eyes. If she’d only found help for him soonerc

“I’m sorry to have missed that service,” she said.

“I know,” Cortez said. “It’s why I wanted to meet you. May I walk with you?”

“Of course,” Anna said. “But I don’t know where I’m going.”

“Then I will give you the basic orientation,” the old man said, turning a degree and sweeping his hand toward the shuttle bay. “Come with me, and I will bring you to the glory of the lift system.”

Anna chuckled and let him lead the way. He walked carefully too. Not mincing, but not striding. He seemed like a different person than the one who’d called the three factions of humanity together to pass through the Ring and into the unknown. It was more than just how he held his body too.

“I thought it was important that those of us who were part of the petition speak at the service,” he said. “I wanted our regret to have a voice.”

“Our regret?”

He nodded.

“Yours. Mine. All of us who advised that we come to this darkness. It was hubris, and the innocent have suffered because of it. Died for listening to our bad advice. God has humbled me.”

His voice still had the richness of a lifetime’s practice, but there was a new note in it. A high, childlike whine underneath the grandeur. Sympathy for his distress and an uncharitable annoyance sprang up in her.

“I don’t know that I see it that way,” she said. “We didn’t come here to glorify ourselves. We did it to keep people from fighting. To remind ourselves and each other that we’re all together in this. I can’t think that’s an evil impulse. And I can’t see what happened to us as punishment. Time and chance—”

“Befall all men,” Hector said. “Yes.”

Behind them, a shuttle’s attitude rocket roared for a moment, then cut off. A pair of Belters in gray jumpsuits sauntered toward it, toolboxes in their hands. Cortez was scowling.

“But even given what grew from that seed? You still don’t think we were punished? The decision was not made out of arrogance?”

“History is made up of people recovering from the last disaster,” Anna said. “What happened was terrible. Isterrible. But I still can’t see God’s punishment in it.”

“I do,” Cortez said. “I believe we have fallen into a realm of evil. And more, Doctor Volovodov, I fear we have been tainted by it.”

“I don’t see—”

“The devil is here,” Cortez said. He shook his head at Anna’s protesting frown. “Not some cartoon demon. I’m not a fool. But the devil has always lived in men when they reach too far, when they fail to ask if they shoulddo something just because they cando it. We have— Ihave fallen into his trap. And worse, we have blazed the trail to him. History will not remember us kindly for what we have done.”

Anna knew quite a few members of the Latter-day Saints church. They agreed with the Methodists on a few minor things like not drinking alcohol, which gave them a sense of solidarity at interfaith conventions. They disagreed on some important things, like the nature of God and His plan for the universe, which didn’t seem to matter as much as Anna would have thought. They tended to be happy, family-oriented, and unassuming.

Standing in the belly of the Behemoth, Anna would never have guessed they would build something like the massive generation ship. It was so big, so extravagant. It was like a rebellious shout at the emptiness of space. The universe is too big for our ship to move through it in a reasonable time? Fine, we’ll stuff all the bits of the universe we need inside of our ship and then go at our own pace. The inner walls of the rotating drum curved up in the distance, Coriolis effect masquerading as mass, metal ribbing and plates pretending to be substrate, just waiting for soil and plants and farm animals. Through the center of the drum, half a kilometer over Anna’s head, a narrow thread of bright yellow light shone down on them all. The sun, stretched into a line in the sky. The entire idea of it was arrogant and defiant and grandiose.

Anna loved it.

As she walked across a wide empty plain of steel that should have been covered in topsoil and crops, she thought that this audaciousness was exactly what humanity had lost somewhere in the last couple of centuries. When ancient maritime explorers had climbed into their creaking wooden ships and tried to find ways to cross the great oceans of Earth, had their voyage been any less dangerous than the one the Mormons had been planning to attempt? The end point any less mysterious? But in both cases, they’d been driven to find out what was on the other side of the long trip. Driven by a need to see shores no one else had ever seen before. Show a human a closed door, and no matter how many open doors she finds, she’ll be haunted by what might be behind it.

A few people liked to paint this drive as a weakness. A failing of the species. Humanity as the virus. The creature that never stops filling up its available living space. Hector seemed to be moving over to that view, based on their last conversation. But Anna rejected that idea. If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they’d all still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another’s fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She’d looked up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She’d tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity, that had put her there.

Looking at the tiny world spinning around her, she knew one day it would give them the stars as well.

The refugee camp was a network of tents and prefabricated temporary structures set on the inner face of the drum, the long thin line of sun-bright light pressing down onto them all like a spring afternoon on Earth. It took her almost half an hour to find Chris Williams’ tent. The liaison from the Thomas Princelet her know that the young naval officer had survived the catastrophe, but had suffered terrible injuries in the process. Anna wanted to find him, and maybe through him the rest of the little congregation she’d formed during the trip out.