The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

I’m still not used to birds in the house. But, then, I’m not used to this house of my son’s, either. All the rooms open into an open central courtyard two stories high. Atop the courtyard is some sort of invisible shield that I don’t understand. It keeps out cold and insects, and it can be adjusted to let rain in or keep it out. The shield keeps in the birds who live here. What Lem has is a miniature, climate-controlled, carefully landscaped, indoor Eden. The bird watching me was bright red with an extravagant gold tail, undoubtedly genetically engineered for health and long life. Other birds glow in the dark. One has what looks like blue fur.

“Go away,” I told it. I like the fresh air; the genemod birds give me the creeps.

When Lucy returned, someone was with her. I put down my needlework, pasted on a smile, and prepared to be civil. The visitor used a walker, moving very slowly. She had sparse gray hair. I let out a little cry.

I hadn’t even known Kyra was still alive.

“Mom, guess who’s here! Your cousin Kyra!”

“Hello, Amy,” Kyra said, and her voice hadn’t changed, still low and husky.

“Where… how did you…”

“Oh, you were always easy to find, remember? I was the difficult one to locate.”

Lucy said, “Are they looking for you now, Kyra?”

Kyra. Lucy was born too soon for the new civil formality. Lem’s and Robin’s children would have called her Ms. Lunden, or ma’am.

“Oh, probably,” Kyra said. “But if they show up, child, just tell them my hearing implant failed again.” She lowered herself into a chair, which obligingly curved itself around her. That still gives me the creeps, too, but Kyra didn’t seem to mind.

We stared at each other, two ancient ladies in comfortable baggy clothing, and I suddenly saw the twenty-six-year-old she had been, gaudily dressed mistress to an enemy general. Every detail was sharp as winter air: her blue jumpsuit with a double row of tiny mirrors sewn down the front, her asymmetrical hair the color of gold-leaf. That happens to me more and more. The past is so much clearer than the present.

Lucy said, “I’ll go make some tea, all right?”

“Yes, dear, please,” I said.

Kyra smiled. “She seems like a good person.”

“Too good,” I said, without explanation. “Kyra, why are you here? Do you need to hide again? This probably isn’t the best place.”

“No, I’m not hiding. They’re either looking for me or they’re not, but I think not. They’ve got their hands full, after all, up at Celadon.”

Celadon is the aggressively new international space station. When I first heard the name, I’d thought, why name a space station after a color? But it turns out that’s the name of some famous engineer who designed the nuclear devices that make it cheap to hoist things back and forth from Earth to orbit. They’ve hoisted a lot of things. The station is still growing, but it already houses one hundred seventy scientists, techies, and administrators. Plus, now, two aliens.

They appeared in the solar system three months ago. The usual alarms went off, but there was no rioting, at least not in the United States. People watched their children more closely. But we had the space station now, a place for the aliens to contact, without actually coming to Earth. And maybe the New Civility (that’s how journalists write about it, with capital letters) made a difference as well. I couldn’t say. But the aliens spent a month or so communicating with Celadon, and then they came aboard, and a few selected humans went aboard their mother ship, and the whole thing began to resemble a tea party fortified with the security of a transnational bank vault.

Kyra was watching me. “You aren’t paying any attention to the aliens’ return, are you, Amy?”

“Not really.” I picked up my needlepoint and started to work.

“That’s a switch, isn’t it? It used to be you who were interested in the political and me who wasn’t.”

It seemed an odd thing to say, given her career, but I didn’t argue. “How are you, Kyra?”

“Old.”

“Ah, yes. I know that feeling.”

“And your children?”

I made myself go on stitching. “Robin is dead. Cross-fire victim. His ashes are buried there, under that lilac tree. Lucy you saw. Lem and his wife are fine, and their two kids, and my three great-grandchildren.”

Kyra nodded, unsurprised. “I have three step-children, two step-grandchildren. Wonderful kids.”

“You married again?”

“Late. I was sixty-five, Bill sixty-seven. A pair of sagging gray arthritic honeymooners. But we had ten good years, and I’m grateful for them.”

I knew what she meant. At the end, one was grateful for all the good years, no matter what their aftermath. I said, “Kyra, I still don’t know why you’re here. Not that you’re not welcome, of course, but why now?”

“I told you. I wanted to hear what you thought of the aliens’ coming to Celadon.”

“You could have comlinked.”

She didn’t say anything to that. I stitched on. Lucy brought tea, poured it, and left again.

“Amy, I really want to know what you think.”