Author's Preface
They'd taken to working late, some nights, long after the science wing had emptied of everyone else, the two of them alone with a projection of a dying star and the particular, comfortable silence of two people who no longer needed to fill every gap in conversation with words.
"You should go home," Ava said, one such night, not looking up from the catalyst model she was refining. "It's late, even by my reckoning, and I know you've had a difficult few days."
"You should take your own advice," Rachel said, and Ava's mouth twitched, the closest thing to a smile she allowed herself when she was deep in a problem.
"I don't sleep well regardless. Might as well be useful while I'm awake for it."
Rachel let that sit a moment, recognizing something in the phrasing that snagged at her — the particular, worn-in shape of a sentence a person says so often it's stopped sounding like a confession to them, even though it plainly still was one. "Do you want to talk about that?"
"Not particularly." Ava kept working, but something in her posture had gone slightly more guarded. "It's not a secret, if that's what you're asking. I simply don't find it especially interesting to discuss."
"I didn't ask if it was interesting. I asked if you wanted to talk about it."
Ava looked up at that, something flickering across her face — surprise, maybe, at being asked so plainly, without the careful diplomatic padding most conversations in Oris Norma seemed to require. "You're very direct," she said, finally. "I don't think I've entirely adjusted to that yet."
"Sorry. Bad habit from six years of testifying in front of people who'd have talked circles around a direct question if I let them."
"Don't apologize. I think I like it, actually. Most people here have learned to be careful with me. I've come to find careful rather exhausting."
She didn't say anything else about the sleep for a while, and Rachel didn't push, returning her attention to the model in front of her, the two of them working in companionable silence until, unprompted, almost as if the silence itself had finally worn a path toward it, Ava spoke again.
"My mother worked in this same division," she said, quietly, not looking up. "Before me. She held this position for nearly thirty years, and before her retirement, she told me something I've never quite been able to shake. She said she'd spent her whole career trying to make people care about a problem that wouldn't kill them in their own lifetime, and that she'd failed, and that failing at that particular task was the loneliest kind of failing there was, because nobody around you ever really understood what you'd lost. You can't grieve a war you didn't win if nobody else believed the war was happening."
Rachel set down her own instrument, giving Ava her full attention. "Is that why you took the position? Because of her?"
"Partly. I told myself, when I was young, that I could succeed where she hadn't — build a better model, make a more compelling case, find the argument that would finally break through. I've been in this role for eleven years now. I don't know that I've done any better than she did." Ava's voice had gone quieter, rawer, the careful administrative composure thinning in a way Rachel had only seen once before, in the first meeting, before it had closed back over almost immediately. "I sleep badly because I lie awake doing the math on how many more generations we have before the numbers stop being theoretical. I've been doing that math for eleven years. I don't think I'll ever fully stop."
"That sounds like an enormous thing to carry alone," Rachel said, gently.
"It is. I don't say that seeking sympathy — it's simply accurate." Ava finally looked up from the model, meeting Rachel's eyes directly. "I've never told anyone that, about my mother, about the loneliness of it. Not because it's secret. Because nobody's ever asked in a way that made it feel like they actually wanted to know, rather than simply being polite."
"I actually want to know."
"I'm beginning to understand that." Something eased in Ava's face, a tension Rachel hadn't fully registered until she watched it start to lift. "You're an unusual person, Rachel Trust. I don't say that as flattery. I mean it as observation. You arrived here having lost everything a person can lose, and instead of retreating into that loss, you've spent every day since throwing yourself at a problem that has nothing to do with you, purely because you believe it's worth solving. I don't fully understand how you do that."
"I don't know that I do it well," Rachel said. "Some days I think I'm just avoiding my own grief by burying myself in yours."
"Perhaps. I don't think that makes the work less real, even if the motive's complicated." Ava considered her a moment longer. "Did your mother do work like this? Or your father. I find myself curious whether this instinct in you is inherited or simply chosen."
"Neither, really. My mother was a nurse. My father drove trucks for most of my childhood, then sold insurance after his back gave out." Rachel smiled, faintly, at the memory of them, distant now in a way that still ached but had softened at the edges. "Neither of them understood the mission, not really. They were proud of me, but I don't think either of them ever quite grasped why I'd give up a stable life to chase something that might not pay off for decades, if it ever did. I used to resent that a little. Now I think I understand it better — they'd built something solid, and solid mattered more to them than reaching. I don't think that makes them wrong. Just different from me."
"I think I would have liked to meet them," Ava said, quietly. "That's a strange thing to say about people who died four million years before I was born. I mean it anyway."
"They'd have liked you," Rachel said. "My mother especially. She always had a soft spot for stubborn people who cared too much about things nobody else understood."
"May I ask you something personal, in return for what I've told you?"
"Go ahead."
"Your fiancé. Marcus. Do you regret it? Coming on this mission, knowing what it would eventually cost you?"
Rachel turned the question over carefully before answering, giving it the same weight she'd have given a difficult calculation. "No," she said, finally. "I've thought about that a lot, especially since the archive told me he remarried. I keep waiting to feel regret, and it doesn't come. I think — I think if I hadn't gone, I'd have spent the rest of my life wondering. Six years of fighting for this mission, and if I'd stepped back at the last moment out of fear of exactly what happened, I don't think I'd have ever forgiven myself for the wondering. Even knowing how it turned out. Even knowing I lost him completely instead of just for six months."
"That's a very particular kind of courage," Ava said. "Choosing a grief you understand over a regret you'd have had to live with not knowing the shape of."
"I hadn't thought of it that way. But yes. I think that's exactly right." Rachel studied her a moment. "What about you? Do you have anyone? A family, waiting on you the way mine waited on me, before all this?"
Something crossed Ava's face, quick and complicated, gone before Rachel could fully read it. "No," she said. "Not in the way you mean. I made a choice, some years ago, to devote myself entirely to this work, and it hasn't left much room for anything else. I don't regret that either, most days. But I'd be lying if I said your question didn't land somewhere uncomfortable."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry."
"You didn't. I offered the door by asking about Marcus. It's only fair you get to walk through your own version of it." Ava's voice had gone quiet, careful again, though not in the guarded way from before — something closer, Rachel thought, to simple vulnerability, unpracticed and a little raw. "I think, some nights, about what it might have been like to have someone waiting the way your Marcus waited, even briefly. I've never let myself want that in any serious way. There's never been room, and I've told myself that was a fair trade for the work. I don't know that I fully believe that anymore, if I'm honest. I'm not certain when I stopped believing it."
Rachel didn't say anything right away, letting the honesty of it sit in the room between them, unhurried. "For what it's worth," she said, finally, "I don't think devoting yourself to something enormous and devoting yourself to a person have to be opposites. I spent six years married to a fight nobody else believed in, and I still found room to love Marcus in the middle of it. Maybe the trade you made wasn't as fair as you told yourself it needed to be."
Ava was quiet a long moment, something working behind her careful expression. "That's a generous thing to say to someone who spent the first three days of your presence here arguing you should be sent away."
"You were doing your job. I don't hold that against you. I don't think anyone who's watched you work this closely could hold it against you." Rachel reached over, tentative, and set her hand briefly over Ava's on the console — a small gesture, easily withdrawn if it landed wrong, but Ava didn't pull away. "I think you've spent eleven years being the only person willing to say the hard truths in that council chamber, and I think that's cost you more than anyone there has ever bothered to notice. I notice. For whatever that's worth."
"It's worth more than you probably realize," Ava said, quietly, and for a moment neither of them said anything else, the projection's soft light washing over both their faces, the dying star's slow curve still hanging patient in the space between them.
"I should let you go home," Ava said, eventually, though something in her voice suggested she wasn't in any particular hurry for Rachel to leave. "You've had a long few days. Xavier's news, the conversation with your crew. I imagine you're carrying quite a lot right now."
"I am. But this helped. Talking, I mean. Not just the model." Rachel gathered her things slowly, reluctant, in a way she hadn't fully examined, to end the evening. "Thank you. For telling me about your mother. I know that wasn't easy."
"Thank you for asking in a way that made it possible to tell you." Ava hesitated a moment, then added, quieter, "For what it's worth, I don't think my mother would have known what to make of you either. She spent her career believing the only way to be taken seriously was to keep everyone at exactly the same careful distance, myself included. I think she'd have found it strange, watching me sit here at this hour, telling a stranger from four million years in the past more than I've told most people I've known my whole life."
"Would she have disapproved?"
"I don't know. I like to think not. I think, toward the end, she was tired of the distance too. She just didn't know how to put it down after so many years of holding it up." Ava's voice had gone soft, contemplative. "I think about that sometimes. Whether I'm already halfway to becoming her, whether this is just what happens to anyone who takes this work seriously enough, for long enough. I'd like to believe I still have time to choose differently. I'm not always certain that's true."
"I think you already are choosing differently," Rachel said. "Tonight is proof of that, if nothing else."
Ava looked at her for a long moment, something unguarded and grateful in her expression, and didn't answer right away. After a moment she rose, and walked Rachel to the entrance of the science wing, and they paused there together, the settlement's dark towers and lit ones both stretching out beyond the doorway, patient under a sky that held, somewhere in its depths, a sun slowly running out of time and a second star building toward a choice none of them had fully made yet.
"Rachel." Ava's voice had gone careful again, weighing something. "Whatever you and your crew decide, about the window — I want you to know that whatever role I've played in this, whatever I've asked of you, it was never meant to trap you here. I believe in this work. I believe in what we might be able to do together. But I don't want you staying out of obligation to me, or to this settlement, if staying isn't what you actually want."
Rachel looked at her for a long moment, something warm and complicated settling in her chest. "I know," she said. "I don't think I'm staying out of obligation. If I stay — and I haven't decided, Ava, I want to be honest about that — it'll be because I want to. Because of the work, and because of this." She gestured, faintly, at the space between them, unable to fully name what she meant and trusting Ava to understand anyway.
Something shifted in Ava's face — relief, maybe, or something quieter and more fragile than relief — and she didn't say anything else, only nodded, and watched Rachel go, standing a long while in the doorway of the science wing after Rachel had disappeared into the settlement's soft evening light, alone again with a dying star and, for the first time in longer than she could easily account for, the small, dangerous warmth of not feeling quite so alone with it.