Diamonds in the Sky (11 page)

I leaned against the wall of the nesting house and rocked my baby teddy. They really do look like teddy bears, you know. Especially when they are young and about the right size. The illusion vanishes when they open their mouths, of course, and the three lobes of flesh part, right along the lines of the threads of a stuffed bear’s mouth. But even that was a source of utter fascination to me. Her long coiled tongue looked like a pink seashell or party favor and it quested out of her mouth for the fruit paste as if it were an extra arm. If only she had come with a spare.

* * *

Mom and Dad came out later and crowded into the nesting house with us. I had spent the intervening time memorizing the features of my teddy. Kali was asleep in my arms, and her whole body pulsed with her breath. I was imagining it, of course, but it seemed as if she were already bigger than when she had come out of the egg. Teddies grow at a monstrous rate, nearly reaching their full size in their first year. I wouldn’t try to ride her until she was two, of course, but she’d be nearly large enough for me to by next Top Day.

Dad cleared his throat. “Jaiden, we need to talk to you about the teddy.”

Without even looking at him, I knew something bad was coming, the way his voice was careful and neutral.

“I earned her.” At the time, the only thing I could figure was they were going to complain again about having the teddy at all. “I earned money to buy her egg and I’ll earn money to pay for her keep.”

Dad tried again. “Your mother said the teddy is deformed.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Sure she was missing a leg, but one look at her perfect face would tell you that deformed was the wrong word to use.

Into my silence, Mom said, “We spoke to the man who sold the egg to you. He said he’d replace the egg.”

Now two thoughts went through my head at the same time. One was that they couldn’t have spoken to him, because he was a neo-Luddite and didn’t give out his number. The second and more pressing thing was that Mom had said, “replace.”

“She’s mine.” I clutched her tighter. I’d fallen in love, you see? It didn’t matter one whit that she was missing a leg. She had seven more and wasn’t she the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen? If you look at a picture of her face, I’d defy you to find a teddy bear spider with a more perfect set of features.

Mom and Dad looked at each other like they were trying to double their strength. “She needs to be put down.”

I don’t remember which of them said that. It might as well have been both of them.

“No!”

Dad held out his hands. “I’ll take care of it honey. She won’t feel a thing. The man will send you another.”

“No. Kali is mine and I love her.” Now you might argue about what a thirteen-year-old could know about love or whether it was possible to learn to love something in the span of time I’d held Kali, but what you can’t argue about is how deeply I felt it. I’d loved Kali since before I saw her, since the first moment I held that egg in my hands. She represented all of my hopes and efforts for the last year, and she might be flawed, but no other egg would be as thoroughly mine.

Mom opened her mouth to try again but I cut her off. “I earned her and I can choose what to do with her, can’t I?”

“But she’ll never weave and won’t be able to carry you up the cliffs. What good is she?” Dad gestured at the leftover fruit paste. “She’s going to be a burden. An expensive pet.”

“She’s mine.” I glared at them.

To my amazement, Mom put her hand on Dad’s arm. “Ken, let her keep it.”

You’ve never met my parents but all my experience with them told me that Dad was the softie and Mom was the rule maker. Later I asked her why she let me keep Kali. She said, “You were looking at her like she was your firstborn. I knew you’d never forgive us if we took her away.”

And she would have been right.

* * *

The funny thing was, Kali had no idea she was missing a leg. She scrambled up hills as if she were meant to be seven-legged. When she got old enough, I’d ride her and we’d ramble through the mountains for hours, exploring all the places I wanted to go but couldn’t on my own. She loved nothing better than to climb to the top of the mountain and look out at everything around us. I’d lean between her legs and she’d rest her head on my shoulder, chirruping with contentment.

She even helped around the farm. We spent one summer helping Dad string irrigation lines between the terraces of the farm. It would have been tricky work with the jetpack, or just climbing by human power, but Kali could cling to the cliffs like they were level ground.

And then, when she was three, and the sun entered the ring heading toward winter, Kali started to weave, as they do. I guess the weaving is something that’s genetically encoded in them, because all teddies follow the same pattern and I don’t know how else they’d learn it.

Kali’s now, Kali’s was different. The missing leg, you see? It’s the first time I think she knew something was wrong with her, because she had that pattern in her head, but she didn’t have the equipment to make it go right. My beautiful girl tore out three weaves and snapped at me when I tried to help. I wished we spoke a common language, but there was no way I could explain to her that she was deformed. In fact, it was the first time I’d thought it since she hatched. My heart broke all over again, watching her try to weave and fail.

* * *

On Bottom Day, I went outside before my parents were up, to take Kali her present. She met me at the front door the way she did every morning, her whole body vibrating and dancing with delight. If I’d had my way, she would have slept inside with me, but even I had to admit a full-grown teddy bear spider was just too big for a house.

She had this funny little hop she’d do when she was excited where she’d bounce about a foot off the ground. I had wanted to get out to her nesting house with the gift before she woke, but that was clearly a vain hope. I gave her the honeyed fruitroll and let her wrap her long tongue around it.

Chirruping, she took it and bounded toward her nesting house. Evidently I didn’t follow fast enough because Kali came back and nudged me from behind.

“Hey!” I laughed. “Cut it out. I haven’t got any more.”

She pushed me again and I started to get the sense she had something to show me. Now, you’ve probably already guessed it, but I’ll tell you I hadn’t an inkling.

Kali had figured out how to weave.

The sun hadn’t risen high enough to get into the nesting house, but the weaving seemed to make its own light. Normally, a teddy will just make one per season, but it was like Kali had gotten so excited to finally sort out how, she had made two. Each of them had the thousands of dense strands of golden silk you think about when you think about a teddy’s weaving, but instead of being in the traditional pattern, Kali had made a spiral galaxy of her own invention. The arms rotated out in a pinwheel with thinner, gossamer sections in between. She’d incorporated bits of the landscape into the weavings, like they always do, but one of them took my breath away so fast I had to sit.

Embroidered into the fabric was a weathered strand of red wool. She’d found that old hat Mom had made me, out in the fuzzywyrm’s tree, and built it into her weaving. I started to cry, until I realized Kali didn’t understand how happy she’d made me. Jumping up, I rubbed her soft ears and told her over and over what a good girl she was, until she shimmered with happiness.

We sold one of the weavings online at auction for a ridiculous sum on account of it being unique.

The other one? The one with my hat woven in.

That one’s got my past and my future woven in it. I’d sooner stop breathing than sell either.

Afterword:
In the summer of 2008 I was fortunate enough to attend the Launchpad Writer’s workshop, run by Mike Brotherton. While there, Jerry Oltion gave us a tour of the solar system and I learned that besides Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune also have rings. It’s quite possible that Pluto has them as well. I innocently asked the question, “Could a habitable planet have rings, too?” The answer was “yes” and this story was born. One of the things that you notice when looking at pictures of Saturn is the strong shadow cast by the rings across the planet’s surface. What would it be like to live on a world where that was part of your daily life? So many of our holidays and rituals are based on the stars or the moon that it seems likely that having an arch in the sky would have an enormous impact on the culture of a ringed planet. You might miss the solstice if you aren’t paying attention, but there’s no way you could fail to notice Bottom Day.

©
Mary Robinette Kowal

Saving the world is expensive and time-consuming. To say nothing of the sweat and toil. The troubles began with the doctors who drained a few liters of your blood every day, not to mention the other types of body fluids. God forbid you showed the faintest sign of weakness or illness. Sneezing in front of the wrong people would reduce your chances to fly by orders of magnitude.

Then, you had to undergo the weightlessness training — just a fancy name for the
vomit comet
flights. They put you on a jet transport, and mind you, this was a Russian banger long past its retirement age. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gagarin himself trained on the same aircraft. This thing chattered more than my wife and her sister over the phone on a Sunday afternoon. Oh, just forget it. So, one morning they loaded you and the other wannabe supermen, and took off. It was scary, I know. The worst came after the plane started diving to the ground. Even then the pilots had to squeeze every last horse power from the engines because the air resistance slowed the bird down. Your free fall exercise was nothing
but
free.

All the trainees rolled to the front end after every dive when the pilots leveled the machine — thanks God the bowels of the cargo bay were covered with thick layers of rubber and plastic. You could swear that the wings were falling off. We all could. This was when the real fear hit. Each session lasted for an hour, and there were way too many of them. After the first climb I asked myself why I was doing this. Three flights later I was having fun, actually.

You are about to save the world, remember? And on your own nickel too, so I hope you enjoyed the weightlessness training, because the afternoons after the flights were much worse. And I mean,
much
worse. The Russians locked you up in a classroom to study the
matchast
, or the material part, as they call the equipment. You listened to tedious lectures about the ship systems, sitting at a wooden desk covered with carvings: names, dates and cartoons worthy of a certain well-known gentleman’s magazine. Who said Russian art was dead?

Professor Kuznetsov, that was the name of the torturer, walked among the desks. He was fat, short and bald. It was hard to decide which of the three had made him hate the world and you in particular. The professor carried a long stick to poke the students who couldn’t answer the questions he shouted at them as if they were criminals. Or stupid, which in his opinion was infinitely worse.

“You pity supermen!” Kuznetsov liked to yell. Apparently, the concept of gender equality had bypassed him because he just ignored the last two remaining women in the class. The other six had left after the first week of his schooling. “You think you know everything!” His accent thickened. “You know nothing! You kill your comrades in space because you no reading manual.”

At least you knew which era this dinosaur came from — the era of the comrades.

Just like the guys who had created the hardware we would be using. True, only part of it (albeit the largest) originated in the Soviet times. For example, the paint sprayers were new, but the zero-g lavatory looked like it had been put together by the grandfather of Dr. Kuznetsov. And the spacesuits… They were knock-offs from the Soviet Moon Program that had failed around the time my father was born.

It was small wonder the passing of the
matchast
qualification exams felt like a successful revolution. I don’t know much about your class, but in mine nobody dropped out. Perhaps it had to do with the Russian general who came on a tour of inspection in the middle of that horrible month. He looked genuinely surprised to hear we had complaints. The Russians never whine, they go straight to a full-scale revolution, if they are unhappy. Before leaving, he wished us luck and mentioned that we might be forced to retake the class if our grades were lower than eighty percent. I am sure this remark accounted for our success more than the efforts of Dr. Kuznetsov. To our surprise, the old prof made it a point to shake hands with each and every one of his former students after the exam. We let him; we were feeling generous that day.

We might have actually considered sitting in that class for another term should we have known more about the survival training. It must have been based on requirements undoubtedly predating the Gagarin flight. What do you mean? No, I didn’t know for sure, it was just a gut feeling.

They airdropped us — same as you, I guess — in Northern Canada, which was a better option than Siberia, only logistics-wise. In terms of cold, it was the same. Then, they airdropped us in Saudi Arabia, because this was the only desert country that kept a semi-resemblance to a government after the Big Bad News. Finally, they airdropped us in the Black Sea off the Crimean coast. Unlike the American astronauts who trained off the Hawaiian coast, we didn’t have to face any sharks. A week at each of these wonderful places bleaches your skin, strengthens your spirit and makes you hate extreme tourism until the end of your days, which may be quite close anyway. Right?

They woke you up at five in the morning on the launch day. You ate your breakfast of choice. Nine out of ten Americans who take the Russian flights to The Hammer have bacon and eggs. I don’t know about the others, perhaps it made them feel more like Glenn or Armstrong, but I ordered it because it was low on residue. Which probably was the reason why the Apollo astronauts had been fed bacon and eggs in the first place.