The Blameless Bystander Ch 05
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Five kilometers above the night-darkened lake, the last set of fireworks launched themselves from the spindle of darkened moonline. As we watched, the tiny dots of light descended through the atmosphere, splitting into thousands, then millions of autonomous fragments, forming a spinning accretion disk of brilliant color that stretched across our home from one side to the other.
The vast display pulsed, colors rippling out through each fragment, reflected in the water below, illuminating the sculpted hills and dark forests of the habitat. Dark radial bars grew though the gigantic disk of light, branching outward. Over our heads the disk sizzled faintly, the sound generated by tiny glowing drones whipping above us at hundreds of kilometers per hour.
Colors cooled to white as the center of the disk bulged out towards the habitat’s caps, the drones at the edge coalescing into four spiral arms: an unmistakable portrait of our own Milky Way galaxy, seen from outside.
The galaxy rotated majestically for a moment before exploding into nova, seeming to light the habitat from one end to the other. Animals startled from their night haunts bellowed, screeched and howled, their cries echoing across the bowl of the landscape as the white-hot glare faded slowly from the sky. As its component colors dimmed the galaxy disintegrated into something like smoke, fragments climbing swiftly and silently back towards the hub for next year’s performance.
Our heads still craned upwards, we sighed in united pleasure as the display dissipated. “Happy Launch Day, children,” Mother said softly. Her eyes shone in the light from the galaxy slowly disintegrating above our heads. Our annual observance of Longshot’s launch was one of the very few times she would allow herself to visibly show emotion.
Her slim brown arm hugged Zuri, standing between us. “You outdid yourself this year, child. That was wonderful.”
From the other side I kissed my sister’s cheek. “It was beautiful, Zuri.” My twin’s smile glowed as her shoulders relaxed and fell, relieved that tonight’s performance had gone off without a flaw. Before us, the waters we had named Lake Numi returned to their usual dark glossy sheen under the moonline.
Entirely absent of any culture, our family had formed its own rituals, starting with the anniversary of Longshot’s launch, retrieved from the scrambled ship’s logs. Following the calendar of a planet trillions of kilometers behind us that none of us knew or remembered, we celebrated Launch Day here every year.
Mother didn’t know her birthday, so we’d made it coincident with Launch Day. Since the habitat’s factotums and the larger Makers hidden beneath the surface of the asteroid could create almost anything with the right instructions, we’d come to an early consensus that only personal pledges and things we made by ourselves truly counted as gifts. Zuri had written a symphony to accompany tonight’s performance; I’d crafted a small sculpture of one of the scimitar oryx that lived near the ship’s stern, using ringriver clay, dyed oxblood red and fired in a factotum’s fabricator kiln.
“Mama?” Zuri asked, her voice already sleepy.
“Yes, child?”
“Will we see Gaia?”
With the climax of the celebration over, we settled back on the blanket we’d laid out on the grassy bank of the lake, under a canopy of heart-shaped leaves from a bodhi tree. The laser waveguide returned to its normal moonline shine of faint cool blue light as the drones reassembled on its surface like tiny mites clinging to a plant’s stem. Left exhausted by the demands of conducting the performance, Zuri yawned, flexing her elbows back dramatically. I moved behind her, sliding my hands around her slim waist and hugging her close.
We already knew the answer; this was merely a variation on our favorite story. Longshot moved at a tiny percentage of the speed of light; it would be half a millennium before we made it to Eridani’s planetary system.
“Yes, sweetheart. You’ll both live a very long time.”
“Long enough to see it?” Zuri’s eyelashes were fluttering closed as she settled back against me, her bottom wriggling to find a comfortable spot.
“Oh, yes. Long enough to see your grandchildren a hundred times removed grow up there.”
Our children? That was a new thought. But it came late in the evening, after a long and exciting day, and I was tired too. I nuzzled my face gently against Zuri’s black curls and quickly fell asleep to the sound of waves softly lapping at the shore of the lake.
Floating three meters deep in water only slightly cooler than my own blood I rolled onto my back, squeezing the last bit of air out of my lungs and watching it rise towards the taut steel-grey surface of the lake as a stream of silvery bubbles as I sank deeper into the water.
Rising in a shimmer, the bubbles burst between the dark broad bellies of the two factos floating on the surface, half of the guard that had accompanied me on my pre-dawn swim. Looking up, I imagined that I could feel their ultra-low frequency scans washing back and forth across my body as it rocked in the lake’s slow stir. The automatons appeared utterly sedate bobbing on the surface, though I knew from experience that they could move faster than my eyes could follow if they sensed any threat to my safety. But they weren’t yet concerned. I could hold my breath a long time.
Starting at eye level and descending as far as I could see beneath me, the lake’s reef system teemed with life, fish darting in and out of a wall of coral that roughly followed the arc of the shoreline. Diffracted shadows drifted across every surface from the filtered dawn linelight, all moving with the slow surge of the lake. Spraying outwards from the reef wall, sharp fingerlings of orange and pink staghorn coral were nibbled on by tiny shrimp and crabs, and fanned slowly by white and yellow lace waving slowly with the current. Schools of fish turned and twisted as one around me, while silver barracuda cruised alone like fang-toothed snakes. Lower down, blue-white plates of coral stacked one on top of the other like poorly organized china until everything disappeared into a cerulean abyss beneath my feet.
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