“The universe is a big place,” Dex replies mildly. “Planets and stars and nebulas and everything you can see from planetside—all of that makes up a tiny, tiny fraction of what’s out there, and the spaces in between are almost endless. There are definitely habitableplanets out there—thousands of them, probably millions. But the scale of just one galaxy, let alone the universe … Our brains sirsly can’t compren how far apart everything is. Even with countless places to enter the Storm, your odds of emerging anywhere near a star system with habitable planets are vanishingly, impossibly low. And we never have.”
“So …” Jules speaks slowly, quietly. “In all that time, everywhere you went using all the Storm anomalies, across the universe and back … ?”
Dex nods. “In three hundred years of searching, we never found a planet that could support life.” His lashes drop, and he gazes at the floor. “Earth is all we have. It’s all any of us have.”
My throat is tight, and I’m grateful for Jules at my side, because without him I’d feel so tiny, so insignificant and alone, that I’d curl up and cry. As if he can sense my thoughts, Jules arm tightens around me again.
“We did compren one thing, though.” Dex’s eyes are still on the floor, though the faded blue-gray carpet—with its myriad, unidentifiable stains—can’t be holding his attention. “All that time trying to use the Storm anomalies to travel, we comprenned how to harness them for our own use. How to create them.”
Neal leans toward him, a sudden spark igniting his excitement. “The portals.”
“The portals,” Dex confirms. “It wasn’t like we could just tell a portal ‘Take us Earthward!’ or anything, it had to be a link between two known places. Two artificial portals are linked to each other through the aether—the space between space, the space inside the Storm. It meant, though, that we could spread out—we could shift from ship to ship, the whole fleet staying together even when we were light-years apart. We could specialize. Mining ships, plantation ships, ships dedicated as schools and universities, hospital ships … We built a civilization. Wherever we were,whenever, we could visit another ship from our own time instantly.”
“It sounds like your people basically figured out how to live without a planet at all.” Neal’s voice is gently impressed. “So why did you all still want to come back to Earth?”
Dex glances at Neal sidelong. “Not all of us did.”
Jules leans forward. “What do you mean?”
Dex sighs. “If it were me? I’d be happy to live on the ship where I was born, among the stars, never shifting planetwards except to explore. And I’m not the only one. But most of us … humans aren’t built that way. People want a home, a place that’s theirs, and you have to understand … we all grew up thinking that had been taken from us forever, unless we could gohome. Our real home.”
“And Gaia?” Jules reveals very little in his voice. He’s so different from the boy he was. He’s cautious now. He’s driven in a way he wasn’t before, even when flying halfway across the universe to search an alien planet for his father’s freedom.
Dex lifts his head, meeting Jules’s gaze unflinchingly. “A little less than a hundred years before I was born, a woman named Verna Glasgow, an artist by trade, had an idea. The only thing stopping us from using the portals to shift homeward was that there was no matching portal on Earth. But if there was a way to make mankindbringa portal Earthward …”
My mind reels, trying to grasp all the pieces and assemble them, but every time I make one connection, three others seem to vanish like smoke. “So … but … why all the riddles? Why not just explain all this in the broadcast?”
“Because there was another problem, yeh? We were a race of thousands by then. We were centuries beyond protos—Earth humans—in technology. If we just went home, there’d be no place for us. Not among a people who abandoned us when our ancestors’ ship first broke down.”
“But theydidn’tabandon you,” Jules says, though the protest is gentle. “That was always the understanding—we put all our eggs in one basket. We bet everything on the Centauri ship. There was no second ship to send.”
“That’s not how our story goes,” Dex replies. “Our history says we called, and nobody came. And now, after all this time, we’d be shifting to a dying planet with no power to stop what was happening. We couldn’t just shift home. We had totakeour world back, as the rightful stewards of this paradise you don’t even realize you have.”
Neal says softly, “You had to save the world.”
Dex clears his throat. His fingers are twined tightly together in his lap. “At that point my people existed in a time about fifty thousand years before this present. That’s where they’d shifted through their most recent portals. The temples, the broadcast, the portal ship … it took decades to put together. By that time Verna Glasgow was in her late fifties. And as she watched her idea grow, and mutate, and grow again, and seed itself, and change into something she didn’t compren anymore, she realized she’d been wrong. That we’d survived for hundreds of years alone in space—that we didn’t just survive, wethrived. That we didn’t need to take Earth, we didn’t need to destroy our Earth counterparts so that we might live.”
Jules’s body has gone rigid next to me, but it isn’t until he speaks that I understand why. “She saw what she’d created, and changed her mind. She tried to warn them.”
“And she was dismissed as a sentimental fool talking a pile of lixo, causing hassle.” Dex knows why Jules’s voice has changed. The Undying know everything about Elliott Addison, after all. “An artist, after all, not a leader. They let her contribute to the murals and decoration of the temples, but when she refused and made a public appeal to all the ships in the fleet, she was shouted down. All she could do was pass along her misgivings to her children. Teach them that there was room in this universe for all of us. That what we were planning was murder and deception. That even if we saved the world, we’d be dooming ourselves.”
Artists and scientists, I think to myself.No one wants to believe either.
Jules is squeezing my hand, hard. I ease free, and curl my fingersthrough his instead. The gesture seems to restore him somewhat, and he takes an audible breath as Dex continues.
“Her children found others who were uncertain. Who didn’t accept this universally proclaimed truth that we were the superior, evolved version of humanity. Who didn’t want to destroy billions of lives for the sake of thousands. And some who simply didn’t want to give up life in the stars for life on the dirt.” His eyes lift. “It became a secret society, yeh? An underground resistance. Waiting until the day the Undying would return to take Earth, so that maybe they could stop what was happening from within. Just in case the warnings left by Verna Glasgow when she was decorating the temple weren’t enough.”
A strangled sound comes from Jules at my side, and when I look over at him, his eyes are wide with understanding and accusation both. Stricken, he sits unmoving as Dex gets slowly to his feet and unbuttons his shirt, peeling it down to reveal his bare shoulder.
Swirling around the joint, its arms outstretched to curl around the edge of his shoulder blade, alive with translucent gold and purple and deepest indigo, is the spiral galaxy.
“We call ourselves the Nautilus.”
I’M CLINGING TOMIA NOW, AS THOUGH SHE’S THE ONLY THING THATmight stop me from floating away. As if her weight beside me on the floor will somehow prevent me from breaking free of the Earth’s gravity and spinning away into space.
And why shouldn’t I fly free of the Earth’s grasp? Every other rule has been broken. Why not this one too?
“This is so elaborate.” My voice is husky, strained, the pressure my mind is under reflected in my body. “It’s justsoelaborate. Your language didn’t evolve into something unrecognizable in three hundred years. That doesn’t happen.”
