Den booked the fastest passage to Nacre, then spent the evening composing a message that did not mention how fast he meant to come.
Ada had written six words: If you come, come before winter.
She had attached a picture of her house. A blue climbing plant had reached the upstairs window. He enlarged the window until the image broke into squares. There was nothing in it that told him whether she lived alone.
They had surveyed routes together eighteen years earlier. At the end of the third expedition, she had asked him to stay on Nacre. He had taken the next contract instead. They had remained good correspondents, which was easier when each could set down a message and go elsewhere before answering it.
Now he had retired. He owned enough money for one very long holiday and had begun calling it a new life without telling anybody whose life he meant.
The pilot met him beside a ship small enough to look privately owned. It was privately owned. Joss pointed to a dent in the loading ramp.
“My first landing. I’m better now.”
He asked about the transit time.
“Orion says eleven days.”
Every port had an Orion terminal. Children learned its constellation of branching routes before they learned the actual constellations. Ships carried local copies, updated with signals from survey stations. Den had supplied several of those signals. His name appeared nowhere in the software, which had once annoyed him and now saved him explaining obsolete work to strangers.
They left the following morning. For five days he ate at the folding table and helped Joss compare beacon returns with the routes stored aboard. She let him do it because she could see he knew how, and because it left her time to repair a cupboard that opened whenever they turned.
On the sixth day, the short route disappeared.
It remained on the screen as a thin grey line. Its far beacon had missed three scheduled reports. Orion would no longer count it as verified.
“We can wait,” Joss said. “Or go round by Venn.”
“That adds thirty days.”
“Twenty-seven if the cargo shuttle’s still there. It was there last week.”
Den enlarged the grey line. Nothing new appeared.
“The beacon may only be broken.”
“Yes.”
“I laid that course.”
“Then you know how old it is.”
He did. A region of drifting debris lay beyond the beacon. Eighteen years was a long time for a rock to cross a line on a map.
Joss pulled the cupboard shut with a strap. “I’ll refund the unused fuel if we go home. I won’t fly through there with you aboard.”
He disliked her use of you, as if an unoccupied ship were free to enjoy his route.
He sent Ada a message from the last relay: Delayed. Could be a month. He almost added Is that too late? Instead he asked Joss to show him the Venn route.
Orion offered four versions. One required a cargo transfer, one a colder ship, one a fare he could not pay. The fourth was a succession of ordinary crossings between inhabited places. He had always thought of inhabited places as interruptions.
At Venn he waited nine days for a berth. His luggage slept under a bunk; he slept above it. A woman in the next bunk sold knitted sleeves for cups. He bought one, then bought a cup that fitted it.
At the second port, Joss accepted a shipment of flowering bulbs. Den helped secure the crates and learned that the dent in her ramp had been made on Nacre, where she had been trying to impress her mother.
Ada’s answer caught them at the third relay.
Still come. I leave on the nineteenth.
He read it beside a window overlooking a station garden. A man was cleaning individual leaves with a cloth.
Den called her. The delay between questions and answers was long enough to make interruption impossible.
“Where are you going?”
“Venn. They need someone for the outer survey.”
“You have a house.”
“I’ve rented it to my sister.”
He waited through the silence he had made.
“I wanted to see you before I went,” she said. “I should have told you why.”
“I should have asked.”
Neither sentence restored any of the money spent or days travelled. After another pause, she asked how the journey was. He told her about the sleeves for cups.
They reached Nacre on the seventeenth. Ada was at the port with a borrowed cart, her hair shorter and her boots much newer than the boots he remembered. She hugged him, then made him take one end of his case.
He stayed two nights. The blue plant was real. Her sister’s furniture had already arrived; they ate supper between a chest of drawers and an enormous chair Ada disliked.
On the second evening he offered to accompany her to Venn.
“As far as the port?”
“All the way.”
She put down her spoon.
“Den, I accepted a six-month contract. I’ll be working.”
He had imagined the invitation coming from her. Hearing himself supply it was unpleasant.
“I know,” he said, although he had not thought about that at all.
They washed the dishes. She handed him each plate without examining his face. Later they went outside and sat beneath the climbing plant. He told her he had thought retirement would leave him with no decisions to get wrong. She laughed, then asked which places on his journey he would choose to see again.
In the morning they took the cart to the port. Ada boarded her survey ship. Den watched until the ramp closed, then went to the Orion terminal.
He selected the garden station. Its routes opened, brilliant and familiar.
He checked the price of a room for a month against the money he had left. He could afford it. He booked a berth and a room with a window over the garden, then went to find Joss.
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