Providence - Max Barry Page 0,114

out what you really did. I didn’t appreciate that for a long time.”

Her teeth chattered. The jetpod was cold. She couldn’t postpone the next part much longer.

“Anyway,” he said. “I should go. I hope you get this.”

She dragged herself to a locker. She pulled free a medbag and forced herself into it. She peeled the film from her face. She had to zip the bag all the way up, which was not the greatest sensation, being basically suffocated by a bag, but as it pressed around her body it gave a kind of comfort. She could feel them with her, Gilly and Anders and Jackson and the ship. She closed her eyes and let the engines carry her home.

THE RETURN

When the escort fighters break out of the cloud, people clap and cheer. They’re tightly packed all around you, crackling with excitement, these people who were drawn together like they’ve congregated all over the world, in New York and London, S?o Paulo and Bombay, every town large enough to erect big screens in an open space. Like you, they’ve come to watch with as many fellow human beings as possible, because that’s what you’re celebrating today, the thing that unites you. For the last few hours the screens have been playing backstories, feed clips, and mission highlights. But now it’s happening. She’s here.

The fighters bank and turn in opposite directions. From the cloud behind, the jetpod emerges. People start yelling. You’re struck by how small it is: a toilet paper tube with a rounded nose. It moves slowly, with no visible engine exhaust, and a moment later you see why, as a big helicraft comes out of the cloud, four rotors blasting. It’s lowering the jetpod to the ground. Because, of course, that little ship isn’t well designed to land by itself; that’s not its main job. Its job is to bring her home.

A man to your left throws out an arm. Suddenly you’re hugging. Together you watch the jetpod descend until the helicraft’s rotors are blasting dust across the Vandenberg tarmac. Cables detach, fall to the ground. The helicraft peels away.

Now there’s a minute where the jetpod is just lying there. The crowd quietens.

The thought crosses your mind: Something’s gone wrong. After all this, there’s been a fatal mistake. But that can’t be right. You know this moment must have been engineered down to the smallest detail—that Talia Beanfield returned eight days ago, and since then has been in low orbit, being cared for, debriefed, and, you assume, told how to act once she makes it down. You know she was packed back into the jetpod for show, even though a shuttle would have made more sense. You know that a lot of what you’re told isn’t the plain truth—and not lies, either, but rather satisfying stories wrapped around cold facts. Everyone understands that you only get to see the best side of these things: that Providence crews aren’t really that noble; the ships not as infallible; Service and its corporate partners not as uncompromised.

But so what? People don’t care about the cold facts. If the salamanders weren’t really driven by a hatred of humanity; if Jackson, Anders, Gilly, and Beanfield didn’t have quite as much agency in the destruction of the hive planet as has been suggested—hell, if the whole thing really was providence, and once the ships were built, nothing any mere human did at any stage made the slightest difference to the ultimate outcome at all—that doesn’t matter. You don’t want a universe of absent gods. You want meaning and purpose. What happened to those people matters because that’s the part of the story you care about. And so when Talia Beanfield comes home, it’s because she deserved to.

There’s a puff of white smoke on the jetpod. A hatch shifts, opens. The screens zoom in.

She pulls herself out. You’ve seen her image more times than you can count but in this moment she’s unearthly. Her eyes are calm and clear and take in the wide ring of people and equipment around her. Then she looks straight into the camera. It could be planned, but it doesn’t matter: It feels as if she’s looking right back at you. You know her. The journey she’s been on, it’s been your journey, too. In that way, you