Chapter 91: Beside You

Enna had been staring at the same drawing for long enough that Dinraal began to worry about the drawing.

He stood in the doorway with a parcel Rhiannon had asked him to deliver.

“Should I come back?”

“No.”

“Should I put this down and leave?”

“Probably.”

He set the parcel on the clear end of the table.

Enna did not look at it.

Across the wall, the great wheel from Avalon lay in pieces.

Its little painted rooms had been removed. Sections of the supporting structure rested on temporary frames. Lines marked lifting points, restraints, connections, and the sequence by which the whole thing would be carried to the north field.

Dinraal had once believed moving a wheel meant rolling it.

He now understood that this opinion would have caused Enna considerable pain.

“What’s wrong?”

She tapped a point near the base of one temporary support.

“This carries the load while they remove the upper connection.”

“Yes.”

“This carries it after they move the section.”

“I see.”

“And this part of the drawing assumes the section becomes weightless while they change between them.”

Dinraal studied it.

“Does it?”

“No.”

“Could someone—”

She looked at him.

He stopped.

Enna turned back to the drawing.

“I would like,” she said, with dangerous calm, “for everyone involved to remain alive without needing a person with extraordinary abilities to stand under a wheel and apologize for the plan.”

Dinraal opened Rhiannon’s parcel.

Bread.

Something warm in a covered dish.

A folded note telling Enna to eat it while it was warm.

He placed the note where she could see it.

She read it.

Then took a piece of bread.

Eve entered from the adjoining room, checked the transmission queue, and looked toward Enna.

“Ready?”

Enna pointed at the drawing.

“Show me the load path.”

Eve nodded.

The message went out.

Dinraal pulled up a chair.

Somewhere on another world, Keir was going to have a difficult evening.

The reply arrived with three more views of the support.

Enna read them.

Then read them again.

Dinraal watched hope begin and end in Asha’s expression as she followed Enna’s face.

Finally, Enna said, “No. Again.”

Asha shut her eyes.

“Could we explain which part?”

“We will.”

“Before sending the first two words?”

Enna considered that.

“No.”

Eve, who had learned how to separate an engineer’s opinion from the useful portion of an engineering exchange, sent the brief answer and then attached the marked drawing.

Dinraal leaned closer.

The support arrangement was almost right.

Almost.

The problem was not the final position.

It was the moment between positions, when everyone would already be committed to moving a piece too large to catch if their assumptions failed.

He understood that kind of moment.

“You don’t think they’ve missed it,” he said.

Enna looked at him.

“What?”

“You think they know what needs to happen. They haven’t shown how.”

Her expression changed slightly.

“Yes.”

“Because Keir could manage it if he were there.”

“Keir is there. That is not the difficulty.”

She turned the drawing toward him.

“He understands the machine well enough to compensate for a poor instruction. Other people deserve an instruction they can use without becoming Keir first.”

Dinraal sat back.

On the screen, the great wheel remained scattered across the grass.

He remembered the picture of Luna in one of the little rooms.

The ribbon.

The view from the top.

Someone had wanted to bring that view to a wedding.

Now hundreds of people were moving iron, wood, and painted cabins because the wish mattered enough to become work.

Enna tapped the unclear connection.

“I am not telling him he cannot do it.”

“No.”

“I am telling him he has to let someone else understand how.”

Dinraal nodded slowly.

He stayed until the next drawing arrived.

That one was better.

Enna still sent it back.

The argument followed him to the orbital station the next morning.

Not literally.

Enna remained in Hearth, where the wheel continued to offend her from a distance.

Dinraal had agreed to observe a training exercise with Tiamat.

He went because she had asked him to observe.

She repeated that word twice before the shuttle left the ground.

“I remember,” he told her.

“You also remember how to repair a circulation assembly.”

“Yes.”

“And if someone in the exercise needs to work out how to isolate one?”

“I watch.”

She looked satisfied.

For almost an hour, he did exactly that.

The station crew moved through the exercise without urgency. A simulated fault appeared in one of the service sections. The first team identified the affected circuit. A second checked the neighbouring compartments. Someone requested a revised pressure reading.

Dinraal stood behind the watch supervisor and kept his hands folded.

The silver remained quiet.

Then a young technician looked at an instruction on her display and stopped.

“Which valve?”

Her partner checked the screen.

“The auxiliary.”

“There are two.”

“The one beside the transfer line.”

“They’re both beside transfer lines.”

Dinraal took a breath.

Tiamat touched his elbow.

He closed his mouth.

The technician looked toward the supervisor.

“We need to confirm against the local labels.”

“Do it.”

She moved closer to the equipment.

Her partner stayed at the control panel.

Together, they found the discrepancy.

The diagram used an old designation.

The physical label used the replacement part’s designation.

Neither was wrong enough to announce itself as an error.

Together, they could have made someone hesitate at a bad moment.

Dinraal felt Enna’s voice return with uncomfortable clarity.

Other people deserved an instruction they could use.

The team corrected the identification, isolated the simulated fault, and continued.

Nobody needed him.

He found that harder than he wanted to admit.

Tiamat noticed.

She did not say anything until the exercise ended.

Then she asked, “What did you see?”

Dinraal looked at the crew.

“A useful mistake.”

“And?”

He let out a breath.

“They found it.”

“Yes,” she said. “They did.”

Sera Venn was waiting near the shuttle when they prepared to leave.

Dinraal recognized her before she spoke.

There were people whose faces remained attached in his memory to the first place he had seen them.

For Sera, that place was the old anchorage.

Damaged corridors.

A hurried escape.

The sense that a life could narrow to a doorway and still somehow fit through it.

Now she stood in a station corridor with a work slate under one arm.

Her hair was tied back.

There was a small stain on one sleeve.

She looked uncertain about approaching him.

“Dinraal?”

He stopped.

“Of course.”

She glanced at Tiamat.

“I was told I could ask about the maintenance apprenticeship.”

Tiamat nodded.

“You can.”

Sera looked relieved.

Then she looked at Dinraal again.

He understood the problem a moment before she spoke.

“I don’t want you to think I’m ungrateful.”

The words landed badly.

Not because of anything she had done.

Because he could imagine too many reasons she might believe they were necessary.

“For what?”

“Everything.”

He waited.

She tightened her grip on the slate.

“The place here. The training. But I was offered a position in the survey section, and I said I wanted the workshop rotation first. Someone said I should speak to you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

Dinraal looked toward Tiamat.

Her expression had become very still.

“Who offered the position?” she asked.

Sera named a supervisor.

Not an accusation.

An answer.

Dinraal looked back at her.

“Do you want the workshop rotation?”

“Yes.”

“Then that is the important part.”

She hesitated.

“The survey post needs people.”

“So does the workshop.”

“But I’m good at spotting changes in the old systems.”

“That doesn’t mean you owe every future hour to doing it.”

Sera looked at him for a long moment.

Then she said, very quietly, “I like taking things apart when I know nobody is going to die if I take too long.”

Dinraal felt the words settle behind his ribs.

Tiamat stepped closer.

“I’ll speak with the training coordinator,” she said. “You don’t need to justify the preference again.”

Sera’s shoulders lowered.

Only a little.

Enough for Dinraal to notice.

He thought about her on the way down.

The shuttle crossed from the darkness above the planet into morning over the coast.

Clouds lay along the mountains.

Sunlight touched the river.

Tiamat sat opposite him.

“You’re quiet.”

“I didn’t know she thought she needed my permission.”

“Neither did I.”

“Did someone tell her that?”

“We’ll find out.”

He nodded.

Then looked toward the window again.

A memory returned.

Ilyra Sen at the western seal.

A message left because someone had needed the people coming after her to know there might still be lives beyond the place she could no longer reach.

Other names.

Other people whose ability to endure had been treated as a reason to require more endurance.

“I keep wondering how much of it we carry forward without noticing,” he said.

Tiamat did not ask what he meant.

“More than I would like.”

“We tell people they’re free.”

“Yes.”

“Then someone says they’re needed.”

“Yes.”

Dinraal looked at her.

Tiamat rested her hands on her knees.

“Being needed isn’t always a trap.”

“I know.”

“But sometimes we forget to make room for an answer other than yes.”

Below them, the landing field came into view.

People moved between sheds.

A small loader waited beside the shuttle’s assigned bay.

Nothing in the scene looked like a dangerous inheritance.

That was probably why it needed attention.

Dinraal thought about Sera wanting time to take something apart.

Then about the technician asking which valve.

People speaking before they were certain what the room would do with their words.

“I don’t want her to spend her life being grateful,” he said.

Tiamat nodded.

“Then keep behaving as though she doesn’t have to.”

Isolde was at her desk when he returned home.

The window was open.

The dark pebble from the coast held down a page near her elbow, its white vein catching the light.

She looked up as he entered.

“How was the exercise?”

“Good.”

“Did you interfere?”

“Not very much internally.”

“That sounds promising.”

He came to stand beside her.

On the page beneath the stone, she had written several names.

Children on Avalon.

Beside each were small details.

Something they had been told.

Something she wanted to remember.

Dory’s bird’s nest.

Harriet’s singing.

Corin at the arch.

Thessaly beside him.

The handwriting grew smaller where Isolde had run out of room and refused to begin a new page.

Dinraal smiled.

“You’re going to need another book.”

“I know.”

He looked more closely.

There were questions too.

Not requests waiting to be sent.

Things she hoped to ask when there was time.

Favourite foods.

Games.

What the children called the different places in the park.

What they thought of the plants and creatures everyone else had described through measurements.

“Why those?” he asked.

She followed his gaze.

“Because I know what several of them can do.”

He nodded.

“And I’d like to know what they like.”

Dinraal thought of Sera at the shuttle.

He sat on the edge of the bed and told Isolde about her.

His wife listened without interrupting.

When he finished, she looked toward the open notebook.

“There are things people learn about us in a crisis that make them think they know us afterward.”

“Yes.”

“Sometimes we think it too.”

He rubbed his hands together.

Outside, someone called a greeting along the road.

Isolde set her pen down.

“What would you like to do this afternoon?”

He nearly answered with the first unfinished task he could remember.

She saw it happen.

Waited.

Dinraal looked at the window.

Then at her.

“I’d like to stay here for a little while.”

She smiled.

“Then stay.”

The message arrived that evening.

Eve brought it herself.

There was no urgency in her knock, but Dinraal stood quickly anyway.

Some habits had become harder to notice because they were useful often enough.

He opened the door.

Eve held a tablet.

“From Dot. She said Lucas agreed she should tell you.”

Isolde came from the kitchen, wiping her hands.

“Is everyone all right?”

“As far as the message says.”

Eve turned the screen toward them.

A drawing of the house on the rise.

A small figure on the roof.

Looking outward.

Then the words.

A daughter.

Not born yet.

Already listening at the edge.

For a moment, neither Dinraal nor Isolde spoke.

Then Isolde looked up.

“Andraste?”

Eve nodded.

“The accompanying note identifies her.”

Isolde’s face warmed.

“Oh.”

She took the tablet.

Read the message again.

Dinraal watched the small figure on the roof.

The house was familiar now.

The line of the porch.

The height of the rise.

He could imagine where people sat even when the drawing did not show them.

But his attention kept returning to those last words.

Listening at the edge.

“What edge?” he asked.

Eve shook her head.

“We haven’t been given more detail.”

“Is there a request?”

“No.”

“A concern?”

“Not in the message. Dot described it as family news.”

Dinraal nodded.

He knew enough to stop there.

A phrase was not an instruction to begin searching for danger.

Isolde smiled down at the screen.

“A daughter.”

Eve glanced toward her notebook on the desk.

“I thought you’d want to add her.”

“Yes.”

Then Eve looked at Dinraal.

“Would you like to answer now?”

He opened his mouth.

Nothing came.

After a moment, he shook his head.

“Give us a little while.”

“Of course.”

She left the message with them.

Isolde added a new line to her notebook.

She did not write a name.

They had not been given one.

She wrote whose daughter she was.

Then the words Dot had sent.

Dinraal stood beside the window.

Outside, the garden was dark.

He could see the pale label beside Marian’s beans because light from the room reached that far.

Beyond it, the gate.

The road.

A few lit windows.

He had stood in other places looking out into darkness.

Hull plates beneath his feet.

A broken station behind him.

The edge of a damaged opening.

Sometimes someone had called his name through a communicator.

Sometimes he had been so intent on what lay ahead that the voice had seemed to come from a greater distance than the person speaking.

Isolde watched him for a while.

Then she closed her notebook.

“Where are you?”

He took time to answer.

“I’m thinking about being told what you are before you’ve had the chance to find out.”

She rose and came beside him.

“They didn’t say what she has to do.”

“No.”

“But that’s what you heard.”

“Not from them.”

He touched the silver at his wrist.

It was still.

He remembered how many descriptions of him had begun with it.

What remained.

What had been lost.

What he might become.

What others might need him to be.

Some of those descriptions had been offered with love.

That had not always made them light.

Isolde leaned against the desk.

“She has people waiting to meet her.”

“Yes.”

“A great many, from what we’ve seen.”

He smiled faintly.

“Yes.”

“And someone thought we should know she’s coming.”

That drew his eyes back to her.

Not a warning.

Not an assessment.

Someone on a porch had thought of the woman writing children’s names in a notebook across the silver.

Someone had asked whether she should be told.

Dinraal looked at the drawing again.

A small figure on a roof.

He had made it lonely in his mind without being asked to.

Aurelius had once found him at a viewport after a difficult watch.

Dinraal remembered that suddenly.

Not the date.

Not the ship’s exact position.

Only the glass, the dark beyond it, and the older man arriving without a report in his hand.

He had stood beside Dinraal.

For a while, neither had spoken.

Then Aurelius had asked whether he had eaten.

Dinraal remembered being irritated.

The question had seemed so small beside what he was trying to hold in his head.

Now, standing at his own window, he understood it differently.

Someone had come close enough to ask.

Someone had known there was a person there, not merely a watch being kept.

He turned toward Isolde.

“You’ve done that for me.”

“What?”

“Stood beside me.”

She did not answer immediately.

Then she reached for his hand.

“Yes.”

“I haven’t always made it easy.”

“No.”

He laughed softly.

She smiled.

The honesty steadied him.

“I don’t want to tell her what being at the edge means,” he said. “I don’t know what it means for her.”

“Then don’t.”

“And I don’t want to make their good news about the things I’m afraid of.”

Isolde nodded.

Outside, a light went out in the house across the road.

Someone going to bed.

A simple ending to a day.

Dinraal watched the dark square of the window.

Then he said, “Tell her it gets easier when someone stands beside you.”

Isolde’s fingers tightened around his.

He looked at her.

“That’s what I want to say.”

She nodded.

“All right.”

He glanced toward the tablet.

“How long has it been?”

Isolde checked.

Longer than he had realized.

Almost an hour.

He thought of Eve waiting for their answer.

Dot perhaps watching for the next response.

“Let’s send it.”

“In a moment,” Isolde said.

She was looking at the desk.

The notebook.

The stone holding the page open.

Then at him beside the window.

“I want them to see this too.”

Isolde drew quickly.

Not carelessly.

Quickly.

The room did not need to be measured to be recognizable.

The desk by the window.

The coast stone holding a page flat.

Dinraal standing beside it, looking into the dark.

He turned when he realized what she was doing.

“Should I move?”

“You already did.”

“Sorry.”

She smiled and kept drawing.

He watched the lines gather.

There was no armour.

No silver raised between him and the window.

The room contained the things they had begun leaving in places because they expected to return.

A folded cloth.

A book.

A cup beside the desk.

Most of those details did not enter the drawing.

They were there anyway.

When she finished, she held the page toward him.

He looked at it for a long time.

“That’s how you saw me?”

“That’s where you were.”

It was a gentler answer than he expected.

They went to the relay room together.

Eve looked up as they entered.

Asha sat near the receiver.

Enna was still considering the latest arrangement for the wheel.

The room smelled faintly of the food Rhiannon had sent earlier.

Ordinary things.

Dinraal felt grateful for them all.

“Sorry,” he said.

Eve shook her head.

“You said you needed a little while.”

Isolde handed her the drawing.

Eve placed it in the transmission field.

Then she waited for the words.

Dinraal spoke slowly.

“Dinraal says: he has stood at the edge too.”

Eve entered it.

“Dinraal says: tell her it gets easier when someone stands beside you.”

The old dictionary worked through the sentence.

Beside him, Isolde rested her hand on the table.

“Isolde says: congratulations.”

Eve smiled.

Then Isolde added, “Isolde says: Lucas should rest.”

Dinraal turned toward her.

She looked entirely serious.

“You know he should.”

He laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “I expect he should.”

The picture went first.

The room.

The desk.

The stone.

Then the words followed.

For a few moments, everyone watched the little silver cradle.

Then Enna’s next drawing arrived, and the room resumed its work.

On the following day, Tiamat brought news of Sera’s apprenticeship.

There had been no formal requirement that she consult Dinraal.

A supervisor had meant to reassure her that her request would be taken seriously.

Somewhere between the suggestion and the shuttle corridor, reassurance had become permission.

“The workshop rotation is confirmed,” Tiamat said.

Dinraal nodded.

“Good.”

“We’re changing the wording in the placement notes.”

“Because of her?”

“Because several people have read them the same way.”

He sat back.

Tiamat placed the document on the table.

It was a small change.

A clear place for the applicant’s preference.

A distinction between a recommendation and an assignment.

An explanation of who could alter the plan and how to ask.

Nothing dramatic.

No ceremony.

No declaration that they had finally solved the problem of people feeling obliged to be useful.

Dinraal read it twice.

Then he handed it back.

“Will she know she helped change it?”

“If she wants to know.”

Tiamat paused.

“I thought we should ask before turning her into an example.”

He looked up.

Then smiled.

“Yes.”

Later, Sera came to the workshop in Hearth with the first group of trainees.

Dinraal happened to be there returning a tool.

He considered leaving before she saw him.

Then decided that would be another way of making the interaction strange.

She noticed him.

Smiled cautiously.

“Thank you.”

He nodded toward the workbench.

“What are you starting with?”

“A pump.”

“Broken?”

“Very.”

“Good.”

Her smile widened.

For a moment, he saw the interest before he saw the survivor.

Then her instructor called the group together.

Sera turned toward the bench.

Dinraal returned the tool and left.

He did not stay to watch whether she was good at it.

She had time.

The wheel continued to move in pieces.

From Hearth, the process looked like an argument conducted through diagrams.

On Avalon, it involved two hundred Hyrrani, tools older than several of the systems Dinraal had repaired, and people who presumably wanted Enna to approve something before the seasons changed.

She had returned the drawings eleven times.

Asha had counted.

Enna said counting was not useful unless someone intended to count the consequences of accepting a bad arrangement.

Dinraal suspected she knew the number anyway.

The latest packet showed painted cabins laid on the grass.

Red.

Green.

Blue.

Yellow.

Little rooms removed from the sky and waiting to go back.

He studied one resting on its side.

It looked absurdly vulnerable there.

The same cabin that had carried someone above the trees could become awkward furniture if placed at the wrong angle.

Keir’s note concerned the next lifting sequence.

Enna read it.

Then leaned closer.

Dinraal watched her begin to smile.

Not much.

Enough.

“What?”

“He’s changed the order.”

“Is that good?”

“Yes.”

The difficult transfer now happened while the section remained supported in two directions.

A worker could see the connection before releasing the next one.

The drawing showed where the weight went at each stage.

Someone who had not helped invent the wheel could follow it.

Enna read the sequence again.

Then made a small mark beside one measurement.

“That needs confirmation.”

Dinraal sighed.

She looked at him.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You thought I would simply say yes.”

“I hoped you might.”

“I am trying to make yes mean something.”

He considered that.

Then he nodded.

Eve sent the marked measurement.

While they waited, Enna finally opened the meal that had been placed beside her half an hour earlier.

It was still warm.

Someone had changed the dish.

She looked toward the door.

Rhiannon was nowhere in sight.

For once, Enna did not complain about being managed.

Dinraal found Isolde in the garden late that afternoon.

She was tying a new support beside Marian’s bean plant.

The little leaves had grown.

He noticed it immediately now that he had stopped examining them every time he passed.

“There’s more of it.”

“That does happen.”

“I had heard.”

She held out the loose end of the tie.

He took it.

Together, they eased the stem into a position where it could find the support without being forced against it.

Dinraal’s hand remained under the leaves.

“Too tight?” he asked.

“A little.”

He loosened the loop.

“There?”

“Yes.”

They worked in silence for a while.

Then Isolde said, “I added her to the book.”

“Andraste’s daughter?”

She nodded.

“What did you write?”

“What we know.”

He looked toward the house.

“Nothing else?”

“A question.”

“What question?”

“What she’ll like looking at.”

Dinraal smiled.

There was a whole possible life inside that question.

A child on a porch.

A person watching rain.

Someone who might love heights or prefer to sit on the floor.

Someone who would be described in ways they could not yet imagine because she had not had the opportunity to surprise anyone.

He thought of the message they had sent.

Of how quickly he had filled its silence with his own history.

Isolde watched his face.

“What?”

“I’m glad you’re keeping the book.”

“So am I.”

“May I add something?”

She nodded.

Later, at the desk, he opened to the new page.

The stone held it flat.

Under the few things they knew, Dinraal wrote a question of his own.

What makes her laugh?

He sat back.

Then moved the stone carefully so it would not cover the words.

That evening, the family came for supper.

Not everyone.

Enough to make the kitchen feel smaller than its builders had intended.

Aurelius brought bread.

Aramaeis brought the repaired basket.

Rhiannon brought a dish that required an explanation of which serving spoon belonged with it.

Tiamat brought the explanation after Rhiannon became distracted correcting the placement of the plates.

Gilgamesh and Cleopatra arrived together.

Gilgamesh carried two chairs.

He had learned.

The First Weapon settled near the door and made access difficult in a familiar way.

For a while, conversation moved between the workshop, the garden lessons, and the wheel on Avalon.

Rhiannon wanted to know whether Enna was enjoying herself.

“Immensely,” Dinraal said.

“Has she said so?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“She keeps going back.”

Aramaeis smiled into his cup.

Isolde told them about Andraste’s daughter.

Only what they had been told.

The kitchen quieted.

Then Rhiannon smiled.

Tiamat reached for her hand beneath the table.

Aurelius looked toward Dinraal.

Dinraal nodded slightly.

He did not explain the hour beside the window.

He did not need to.

Gilgamesh asked whether the child had a name yet.

“No,” Isolde said.

“Or none they’ve told us.”

“Then we should send something when she does.”

“What?” Cleopatra asked.

He considered.

“Something useful.”

Rhiannon began to speak.

Dinraal raised a finger.

“Let him finish.”

Gilgamesh looked around the kitchen.

The basket.

The bread.

The crowded chairs.

Then at the First Weapon occupying the doorway.

“I don’t know yet,” he admitted.

Aurelius nodded.

“There’s time.”

The answer seemed to please everyone.

They returned to supper.

Later, when a serving bowl reached Dinraal, he realized he had been listening to an argument about whether the new school shelter needed another bench without once checking his communicator.

He passed the bowl to Isolde.

She noticed.

She said nothing.

After the others left, they cleaned the kitchen together.

Chairs returned to their usual places.

Plates stacked.

The repaired basket set beside the door for the next gardening lesson.

Rhiannon had left enough food for another meal.

Possibly two.

Dinraal had stopped attempting to calculate her intentions.

When the work was finished, Isolde opened the window.

Cool air moved into the room.

From the relay building, across the field, came a faint change in light as another drawing appeared on the wall.

Enna was still there.

So was someone beside her.

Dinraal could not tell who.

He found himself thinking of Keir at the other end.

Aster nearby.

Other people looking at the same structure from different directions, keeping one another from accepting an answer merely because it was convenient.

He thought of the station crew.

One technician beside the equipment.

Another at the controls.

The supervisor giving them time to ask.

Sera entering the workshop.

Tiamat walking down the ridge with him.

Aurelius at a viewport, asking whether he had eaten.

The things he remembered as solitary had often contained someone else, just outside the part of the memory he revisited most.

Isolde came to stand beside him.

“Will you sleep?”

“Yes.”

She looked up.

He smiled.

“That was a complete answer.”

“Good.”

They stood at the window for another minute.

On the desk, the coast stone held the page open.

A new child’s place in the book.

Two questions beneath it.

Dinraal reached over and turned off the desk lamp.

The silver at his wrist caught the last of the light.

Then it was dark enough to see the stars more clearly.

He looked out once.

Not searching.

Then he took his wife’s hand and went with her.