citizen. As you are, yes?
Forgive me but I'm not sure how old you are.
I was two years old when the sunstorm hit, Ellie snapped. So she was twenty-nine now. I do not remember the storm. I do remember the refugee camps where my parents and I spent the next three years. My parents discouraged me from following my vocation, which was an academic career. After the storm there was much reconstruction to be done, they said. I should work on that, be an architect or an engineer, not a physicist. They said it was my duty.
I guess you won the argument.
But I lost my parents. I think they wished me to suffer as they had suffered, for the sunstorm had destroyed their home, all they had built, their plans. Sometimes I think they wished they had failed, that the storm had smashed everything up, for then they would not have raised ungrateful children who did not understand.
This torrent of words took Myra aback. When you open up, you open up all the way, dont you, Ellie? And is that why youre here, working on this Eye? Because of what the sunstorm did to your family?
No. I am here because the physics is fascinating.
Sure you are. Ellieyou havent told anybody else about the cage symbology, have you? None of your crewmates here. Then why me?
Unexpectedly Ellie grinned. I needed to tell somebody. Just to see if I sounded completely crazy. Even though you arent qualified to judge the quality of the work, or the results.
Of course not, Myra said dryly. I'm glad you told me, Ellie. An alarm chimed softly in her helmet, and her suit told her she was due to meet Hanse for her ride back to the surface. Let me know when you find out something more.
I will. And Ellie turned back to her work, her cage of instruments, and the invisible gravitational battle of alien artifacts.
PART 3 REUNIONS 35: POSEIDONS BARB
Bisesa, Emeline White, and the young Abdikadir Omar were to cross the Atlantic Ocean aboard a vessel called Poseidons Barb. She was, to Bisesas eyes, an extraordinary mixture of Alexandrian trireme and nineteenth-century schooner: the Cutty Sark with oars. She was under the command of an English-speaking Greek who treated his passengers with the utmost respect, once Abdikadir had handed over a letter of safe conduct from Eumenes.
They had to spend weeks at the rudimentary port at Gibraltar, waiting for a ship. Transatlantic travel wasnt exactly common yet in this world. It was a relief when they got underway at last.
The Barb cut briskly through the gray waters of an Atlantic summer. The crew worked with a will, their argot a collision of nineteenth-century American English with archaic Greek.
Bisesa spent as much time as she could on deck. She had once flown choppers, and wasnt troubled by the sea. Nor was Emeline, but poor landlubber Abdikadir spent a lot of time nursing a heaving gut.
Emeline became more confident in herself once they had cast off from Gibraltar. The ship was owned by a consortium of Babylonians, but its technology was at least half American, and Emeline seemed glad to shake off the dirt of the strange Old World. We found each other by boat, she told Bisesa. We Chicagoans came down to the sea by the rivers, all the way to the Mississippi delta, while the Greeks came across the ocean in their big rowboats, scouting down the east coast and the Gulf. We showed the Alexandrians how to build masts that wouldnt snap in an ocean squall and better ways to run their rigging, and in turn we have their big rowboats traveling up and down the Mississippi and the Illinois. It was a pooling of cultures, Josh liked to say.
No steamships, Bisesa said.
Not yet. We have a few steamboats on Lake Michigan, that came with us through the Freeze. But we arent geared up for the ocean. We may need steam if the ice continues to push south. And she pointed to the north.
According to the phone s star sightingsit grumpily complained about the lack of GPS satellitesthey were somewhere south of Bermuda, perhaps south of the thirtieth parallel. But even so far south, Emelines pointing finger picked out an unmistakable gleam of white.
During the voyage, on the neutral territory of the sea, Bisesa tried to get to know her companions better.
Abdi was bright, young, unformed, refreshingly curious. He was a unique product, a boy who had been taught to think both by his modern-British