James Corey - Babylon's Ashes

“I was never an option. There’s too much history. Maybe an Earther can do it in a generation or three when things have been different for a while.”

Naomi laughed, moved her head to rest beside his. “By then something else will have happened.”

“Yeah,” Holden said. “That’s true. But in the short term, I really do think she’s the best one for the job. I’m just glad she was here. My second choice for the job would have been you.”

She sat up, looking into his eyes to see whether he was joking. A long way away, Amos laughed just loud enough for the echoes to reach her. Jim’s expression was somewhere between chagrin and amusement.

God, he’d been serious.

“You could have done it,” Holden said. “You’re smart. You’re a Belter. Your opposition to the Free Navy’s as good or better than Pa’s. You have a track record that Earth and Mars would have been comfortable with, and enough connection to the Belt to make you plausible to them.”

“You know I wouldn’t have done it, right?”

“No,” Jim said, and there was something almost like sorrow in his voice. “I know you wouldn’t have wanted to. I know you would have hated it. But you would have, if you had to. If there wasn’t someone else. Too many people would have needed you for you to turn them all away.”

She lay back down, considered the idea, and shuddered.

“I know, right?” Jim said. “And how are you doing?”

She took the hand of the arm she was lying across in hers, drew it gently around her like he was a blanket. He had asked her that every few days since the war ended. How was she doing? It sounded like an innocuous question, but it carried more than its own weight. She’d killed her old lover, her old friends. She wished with a longing as powerful as thirst that there had been a way to save her son. Jim wasn’t asking if she was all right so much as how bad was it. There was no good answer for that. I will carry this guilt and sadness for the rest of my life was just as true as I lost my son years ago . Her comfort was that she was still alive. That Jim was. And Amos and Alex. Bobbie and Clarissa.

She was as much a monster as Clarissa or Amos had ever been. She was someone who’d found a way to save her little chosen family when everything seemed lost. The two didn’t balance, but they existed together. Pain and relief. Sorrow and contentment. The evil and the redeeming could sit together in her heart, live together, and neither one take the edge off the other.

And Jim knew that. He didn't ask because he needed an answer. He asked because he needed her to know the answer mattered to him. That was all.

“I’m all right,” she said. The way she always did. Jim reached out his other hand and dimmed the lights. Naomi closed her eyes. They felt very comfortable that way. She could hear from Jim’s breath that he wasn’t asleep. That he was thinking about something.

She kept herself awake, just a little. Waited for him. Little flickers of dream danced in at the edge of her mind, and she lost track of her body every now and again.

“Do you think we should go out to the colonies?” he said. “It seems like maybe we ought to. I mean, we’ve been to Ilus. And if we can sort of blaze the trail? Make it normal? Maybe it’ll be easier for Pa to get more Belt ships to take the risk.”

“Maybe,” she said.

“Because the other thing we could do is stay here. There’s just a lot of work that’s going to need to happen here. Rebuilding. Beefing up Medina for when Duarte comes back. Because you know whatever he’s doing is going to be a problem eventually. I don’t know where we should go next.”

Naomi nodded. Jim rolled in closer to her. The warmth of his body and the smell of his skin were consoling.

“Let’s just stay here for a minute,” she said.

Epilogue: Anna

A s with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

Anna savored the moment, then closed the text window and made the same, small sound that she always did when she finished the book. Anna loved the Bible and felt comforted and lifted up by what she found in it, but Tolstoy was uncontested for second place.

The accepted etymology of the word religion was that it came from religere , meaning “to bind together,” but Cicero had said its true root was relegere , “to reread.” The truth was, she liked both answers. What brought people together in a sense of love and community and the impulse to go back to beloved books weren’t that different for her. Both of them left her feeling calmer and renewed. Nono said it meant she was an introvert and an extrovert at the same time. Anna couldn’t really argue against that.

Officially the ship was the Abdel Rahman Badawi operated by Trachtman Corporation out of Luna, but everyone on board called her the Abbey . The complex history of the ship was written in her bones. The hallways were different shapes, depending on the style when they’d been added in or what salvaged ship they’d been taken from. The air always smelled like new plastic from the recyclers. The thrust gravity was kept at a thin tenth of a g to conserve reaction mass. The cargo decks far below Anna now were cathedral-high and piled with all the things that the new colony on Eudoxia—shelters, food recyclers, two small fusion reactors, and a wealth of biological and agricultural materials—would need. There were already two other settlements on Eudoxia. It was one of the most populous of the colony worlds with almost a thousand people on it.

When the Abbey arrived, that population would triple, and Anna and Nono and Nami would be part of it. Would live out the rest of their lives, chances were, finding ways to raise food they could eat, learning about their new, broad, and problematic Eden. And hopefully, building the spaces and institutions that would shape humanity’s presence on that world forever. The first university, the first hospital, the first cathedral. All the things perched just outside reality, waiting for Anna and her fellow colonists to bring them into being.

It wasn’t the retirement Anna had expected or hoped for. Some nights she dreaded it. Not for herself so much as for her daughter. She’d always thought of Nami growing up in Abuja with her cousins, going off to university in Saint Petersburg or Moscow. She felt wistful now, knowing that Nami would likely never have the experience of living in a huge, sprawling urban environment. That she and Nono wouldn’t grow old together in the little house near Zuma Rock. That her own ashes, when she passed, would be scattered on unfamiliar water. But Abuja also had a few thousand less mouths to feed. Out of the remaining billions on Earth, it was nothing, except that enough nothings together might add up to something after all.