In the Company of Others (2 page)

We're alone, Raymond.

By the time I was old enough to join such an expedition, our mission had changed. If we wanted company, we were going to have to provide our own. We were to locate worlds with the right kind of sun, the right elements, and no indigenous life. Stage One engineers were pelting planets with ice even before we'd finished cataloging all the possibilities. It was . . .

Drat. McNab's on the comm. Sorry, Raymond. I'll add to this later.

Be well, my son.

And think of me out here, making you a brand-new world.

“WHAT about the next world, Jer?” Gabby asked with a careful lack of interest. Her hands were sore, having been clenched together too long under her sweater.

Her companion—business partner, captain of the
Merry Mate II
, and husband—keyed her request into the boards, his stubby fingers sure and quick. From where she sat, Gabby could see the red band staining the readout. “Posted,” the man said, the word merely echoing what they both expected. “They're everywhere, Gabby. We'll have to move on.”

Gabby opened her throbbing fingers, pressing them over the roundness they guarded. The ship was no place to give birth, not if they wanted a future for their child. She'd known the risks in this search, but they'd all seemed so distant in the beginning, the possibilities so endless. Time had a way of narrowing options. She gazed at her husband, seeing past the shadows of beard and fatigue to his gentle, round-cheeked face, and sighed softly, letting some of her tension out with her breath. “We could try a station—just for a little while.”

Jer Pardell winced, then covered the motion with a cough.
As though she wouldn't notice.
But of course she had. They'd been together too long, were so closely linked as a working team that one was forever finishing the sentences the other had begun. “There's no such thing as a ‘little while,' stationside,” he said almost harshly, but it was his fear for her. “Stations here would strip off our cargo and then make us pay for air rights—might even impound the ship. You know that, Gabby. They're as hard up as the rest of us, since the Quill.” He scowled at the red-stained screen, clearing it with a stab. “Stations don't need more people. You heard Raner, last stopover. Earth's clamped down—put holds on all travel vouchers and transports. Who knows how long that will last? And if you try to stay onstation? Head tax, sterilization for permanent residents, dowries to keep immigrant status ...” he took a deep breath. “We can't live like that. Our child won't live like that. Our baby will be born a citizen, under a sky.”

Despite her concern, Gabby's spirits rose a little.
A sky.
The ship, now home and livelihood, was supposed to have been temporary, merely their passage to a glorious new world. They were the lucky ones, to still have this much freedom when most had none.
Jer's doing.
He'd seen the way things were moving and kept independent, protecting them from the increasingly desperate hordes clinging to the stations and fading hopes.

If you were planet-born,
she reminded herself, as she had so many times in the past months,
you already had a home.
A citizenship no one could strip away.

Gabby rubbed her thumb in little circles against a protuberance firmer than the rest, smiling to herself as the push became harder and then disappeared with a tremble like a laugh. “What are they like?”

“The dreaded Quill?” Jer leaned back in his slingchair, relaxing himself, perhaps recognizing her familiar preoccupation. “Probably three-meter tall giants with googly eyes and long tentacles.”

Gabby raised one eyebrow. “That's not what you said yesterday.”

He chuckled. “I'll have a new one tomorrow, guaranteed correct, and just as wrong.” Speculation was a familiar game; the wilder the better. Not that anyone out here would dare claim to have really met a Quill, face-to-whatever—the mere suspicion of such contact guaranteed a ride out the nearest air lock.

Everyone knew what mattered: the sudden, fragmented reports . . . the stunning news that a non-Terran life-form—the Quill—had accidentally been released on the terraformed worlds . . . the way those reports had ceased almost immediately. Then, worse, the terrible discovery that rescue teams sent to those worlds died as well. Everyone did, whether they landed or hovered at low altitudes.

But what turned a reasonable fear of an unknown danger into outright hysteria was that no one, learned or otherwise, could determine the cause of death. Any bodies recovered by remotes appeared to be perfectly healthy, unblemished by attack or contagion.

It was as if their lives had simply been stopped by the Quill.

Gabby shuddered. “I didn't believe they'd been spread so far. Not to the unfinished worlds. But it must be true—Earth's posted this world! Does this mean the Quill can survive where we can't? What hope's left then, Jer?”

Jer reached across the distance between them and laid his hand on her shoulder. Gabby pressed her cheek against its warmth for a moment. “They can't spread on their own,” Jer reminded her. “All the xenos say so, Gabby. They're harmless now.”

“Harmless?” she echoed, unable to keep a rare bitterness from her voice. “How can anything be harmless that's ripped the very ground from under us? This was to be a human sector, Jer. More than a hundred new worlds being made ready for us—for our babies—not for those mindless things!”

Jer withdrew his hand, an unhappy look on his face. Gabby understood. They were a team, but, until now, she'd been the one always able to see through a tangled problem to its roots. Her loss of control obviously flustered him as much as it surprised her. Jer didn't know what to say or do to comfort her.
Neither did she
, she sighed to herself.

“There are other worlds,” he offered finally. “No one would transport a Quill now. They aren't going to spread any farther, Gabby. Earth was wrong to pull in the deep exploration fleet—everyone says so. There are other worlds out here,” he repeated, as if stating it made it so.

She eased herself from the slingchair with a practiced roll; Jer had tried to lighten the gravity in the ship from Earth-normal for her, but Gabby had detected his tampering and insisted her husband restore it.
He trusted her judgment
, Gabby thought, though it was her first child. Not his first, not technically. He'd contributed to three offspring according to his biospecs, born of women who opted for his sperm, probably drawn by his ship-suited smallness and childhood resistance to lar fever. Women were practical that way.
She'd be practical, too.

“I'll leave you to it, then,” she said calmly, stooping for a quick kiss. “Call me if something comes up.”

Jer Pardell watched Gabby waddle out the doorway to the passage with a mixture of pride, concern, and a hope he wouldn't let go.
It was different when you saw it happening
, he thought,
when the signs of new life were inextricably wrapped in the one life more important than your own.

When she was gone, Jer turned back to the console. He called up the nav-tapes, grunting as he reviewed the painstaking course they had followed over the past weeks, threading their way through space that was supposed to belong to humanity and now seemed exclusively the property of something else. He asked for alternatives, checking and rejecting courses based not on trade prospects or fuel, but on the timing of an event beyond their control.

Nothing.
Jer thought glumly of the stations, built to service the expansion of humanity and now bursting with homeless settlers. He shook his head once, hard. Then he unlocked a set of tapes older than the others—junk really, family records of no interest to anyone else. He began to read.

“There it is.” Jer stared at the readout on the system. For once, the numbers added up to Terran norm without the warning slash of red. But the little shiver that ran down Jer's spine did not escape Gabby's sharp eyes, despite the distraction of a birth more impending than either of them had thought. “What's wrong?” she asked.

Jer started at her voice. “It's possible nothing is,” he said, eyes still fixed on the numbers which measured atmosphere, moisture, and climate, his voice filled with wonder. “The readout's good—damn good. We don't have to be down long anyway. It's uninhabited.”

“Are you sure?”

“The terraform station is empty; vegetation's well in place. This had to be one of the first terraform experiments—it's way off the main lanes. We'll have to let Thromberg Station know as soon as we head back. Instant heroes, Gabby. That'll be us.”

Something in Jer's voice lacked conviction. Gabby froze and asked, “What about the Quill? I thought they'd contaminated every terraforming project. That's what Earth claims.”

“Guess not, Gabby.” His eyes flickered to hers and back. “This world's not posted. No warn-off beacons. Looks to be nothing on it at all beyond the standard. And,” this as she uttered a small involuntary sound, “I daresay we're past being fussy, if this impatient child of ours is to be born downworld.”

Gabby smiled at him as she eased herself into another position, her smile becoming fixed as another contraction rippled across her abdomen. “Impatient is the word, husband-mine.” She studied the readout, then snorted. “What's this? You've named it Pardell? Fool,” she said fondly. “We can't afford to apply for naming disposition. If every spacer's brat ended up with a world named for them—”

“I didn't name it.” Jer reddened. He didn't seem able to take his eyes from the readout, as though still finding their luck hard to believe. “I went through some old tapes. Family tapes. This
is
Pardell.”

“Oh.” Gabby eyed her husband with some alarm. He was neither a secretive nor a cunning man, traits she'd always appreciated. “Your grandparents must have had more credits once, then.”

“No.” Jer wiped his palms on his thighs before looking at her sideways. “Naming privilege.”

After five years
, Gabby thought,
he finally surprises me.
“You've been holding out on me, Jer. You didn't tell me your family was famous.”

“My grandmother was a terraform engineer. She was first to live on Pardell—that gave her naming privilege. My father was born here.”

Gabby felt a deep glow of rightness. With the exception of Earth, family members were almost never born on the same world. It made all their searching worthwhile. Then a worry trickled through her mind, an inconsistency. “Why didn't we come here first? Why didn't you tell me?”

“My family doesn't talk about my grandmother.” Jer didn't met her eyes. “And I didn't know about this world until I looked in the old records. I thought my dad had wiped her tapes, but they were in the database. I don't know if he missed these or somehow wanted me to find them one day.”

“I'd think your father would have been proud of her. Terraforming—”

“Gabby ...” Jer looked at his wife with a confused sadness. “They fought before I was born. He refused to see her again—even changed our family name. Easy enough, since by then we were living on the
'Mate
and hauling freight to whatever station was being built. So I never met her or knew she was alive back then. Mom told me about her, after my dad passed away. Turned out Grandma was about as big a celebrity as they come. Really famous. Mom didn't want me to find out from a stranger.”

All her instincts said to let him stop there, that she really didn't want to know, but Gabby prodded: “Who was she, Jer?”

“Susan Witts. My dad was born Raymond Alexander Witts-Pardell.”

“
The
Susan Witts . . . ?” Gabby felt her face harden into fierce lines, but couldn't help that or the way her voice rose. “Susan Witts infected the terraformed worlds with the Quill! All those people, hundreds of thousands trapped on the stations—it's
her
fault we've no place to go! It's
her
fault old Mother Earth won't take any of us back. Do you know how many curse her name every night?”

“They can curse her all they want—she's hardly going to notice. Using her shuttle to give Titan a new crater wasn't exactly an inconspicuous suicide, was it?” He paused. “Susan Witts was never part of my life, Gabby. I didn't see any reason to make her part of ours. Maybe I'd have told you, once we'd started living on a world she'd helped prepare for us. But then the Quill changed all that. She couldn't have known what they'd do, what would happen to all of us, out here. It didn't matter—I couldn't tell you whose grandson I was after that.” His defense seemed oddly automatic, as if used to himself so often he no longer heard the words.

An abrupt shift by the baby under her ribs made Gabby swallow what she would have said. It gave her time to look at Jer, to see the new misery aging a face already drawn with stress. A face she knew better than her own by now. “Damn you, Jer,” she said, but more kindly. “This is a great time to bring skeletons out of stowage. Anything else I should know before I give birth to your baby? A sister prone to mass murder? Or maybe a great-uncle who believes the universe is carried on the back of a shellfish?”

Jer leaned over to her, burrowing his face past the collar of her coveralls into the warm softness of her neck. His nose was cold. Muffled, he said, “We'll be all right, Gabrielle. I promise.”

Gabby rubbed his close-cropped hair fondly with one hand, her other stretched to the controls to replay the information on the world below them. All of a sudden, she needed all the reassurance she could get, unable to believe the work of the woman who had brought them to the brink of disaster could be their salvation now.