The first person Mara saw through Bellwether's docking window was carrying a chair over his head.
It was a handsome chair, blue at the back and green on one arm, and she knew its owner was going to insist it had always been that color. Behind the man, two children pulled themselves along the hub wall. One held an empty bowl. Mara remembered Ivo carrying bowls from room to room, collecting whatever people had left behind. On Earth she still reached for a dish to put his lost things in.
She pressed her feet beneath the ship's restraint and let the chair go past.
“You know him?” Commander Keon Baird asked.
“The chair. Alma made it. She promised it to the families going to Earth.”
“The allowance isn't particularly strict.”
“It isn't particularly small.”
Keon looked again. “We may be meeting some very large furniture.”
Mara smiled before she was ready to. On her screen the final boarding list stood open: one hundred and eighty-four residents, each a place aboard Traverse. Ivo's name was in the middle, between people she remembered only as somebody's neighbor. She had brought a printed slip for him. He disliked looking at plans on screens while somebody waited for him to say yes.
Seven days. That was what Traverse could give Bellwether: seven days of docking support before the loaded ship's supplies, cooling margin and onward rendezvous required it to leave. The ring's remaining safe life was less definite. Eight days, perhaps ten, perhaps a failing seal before either. Mara had watched the inspection images on Earth. Fatigue in the pressure shell. Leaks that moved faster than repairs. Nothing strange enough to justify hope.
But everyone had a place. She had said that to herself during the entire approach.
Keon waited until the docking attendant confirmed their passage was ready. “You have what you need?”
“Tools. Old records. An unreasonable quantity of useful knowledge.”
“And the person who knows where the old records are wrong.”
“That would be me.”
She took her shutdown case into Bellwether.
The hub smelled of warm metal and onions. She had forgotten the onions. The ring kitchens sent their air through paths nobody had designed for cooking, and for twelve years every arrival had been greeted by dinner being prepared somewhere else.
A hand closed on her shoulder.
“Mara! You look expensive.”
Suri An had cut her hair almost to the scalp. Everything else was familiar: the bitten thumbnail, the compact body braced between two handholds, the expression of someone interrupted on purpose.
“That's travel,” Mara said. “It makes a person mostly trousers.”
Suri hugged her sideways around the case. Neither found a dignified place for her feet.
“You came,” Suri said, more quietly.
“Of course.”
She had missed being able to answer so easily.
Suri tapped the case. “You can look at the east circuit tomorrow. I stopped asking it to behave.”
“I saw.”
“No. You saw reports. Now you get the full experience.”
Suri went back to directing the chair. Mara carried on toward the ring transfer, along railings polished by the thumbs of people she knew.
As the inhabited ring received her, weight arrived in stages. Her bag ceased floating, then pulled against her wrist. The pressure of her shoes became a pleasure. Beyond the transfer she descended through terraces: first a climbing passage where a child could pull herself upward with two fingers, then the long shallow stairs beneath the ferns. Near the outer homes, a bowl could sit on a table and dinner stay inside it. Nearer the axis, in the commons, people could do things with their bodies that made Earth seem personally grudging.
She turned back up the stairs toward the commons. Before she reached it, she heard Ivo.
“Not harder. Later. You're trying to persuade the room.”
A young woman released the dance net and swung outward. Her partner caught her wrist; instead of falling they described a long, nearly horizontal circle, two human beings briefly making a hinge out of joined hands.
“There,” Ivo said. “Let it be strange.”
He wore gray practice trousers and a shirt repaired at the shoulder in yellow. Mara had done the first repair. This was somebody else's.
For a moment she had no useful thought. His hair had gone silver at the temples. He was thinner than when he visited her on Earth, happier in the movement of his face. She had expected the visit; she had not expected to feel like a visitor.
“Mara.”
He came across the commons too fast, pushing off a net junction, and she lifted her hand. He caught it. She gave the inward turn that had once been as ordinary as opening a door for him. His momentum passed into her arm; her feet left the floor. For a breath they turned together above the worn mats.
Her case thumped against her hip.
“I brought something heavy,” she said.
“I noticed.”
He brought them down, laughing, and kissed her cheek. The wrong cheek at first: both had turned the way they used to turn. The collision nearly undid her.
“Look at you,” he said.
“Don't. I've been sitting for days.”
“I like your sitting face.”
Nessa, at the edge of the commons, made a sound of polite disbelief. Mara remembered meeting her at sixteen, furious at having to begin a turn slowly. Eleven years of lessons and dinners lay between that girl and the woman winding a net strap around her hand. After eighteen months away, Mara was struck by the steadiness in Nessa's shoulders.
“There's dinner later,” Nessa said. “If he offers to cook it, refuse.”
“I can cook,” Ivo said.
“You can encourage ingredients.”
Mara laughed. People went on rolling mats. Nobody gathered to see the returning wife. She loved them for that, and disliked the relief with which they took her arrival.
She brought the boarding slip out of her pocket.
“I've got your place. You can take things up as soon as you've packed. The last day will be crowded, so—”
Ivo looked at the paper without taking it.
“Mara.”
It was a careful voice. Her fingers tightened.
“There's room,” she said. “For everybody. You don't have to wait for someone else.”
“I know.”
Then she noticed Nessa had stopped winding the strap.
“Ivo?”
“I'm not going.”
From beyond the commons came a clatter and somebody complaining about a borrowed pot. Around her, this dreadful sentence had already become part of an ordinary afternoon.
She had returned with tools for an empty station, arrangements for a husband, and a home on Earth that still contained a drawer she had never used.
The paper trembled once in her hand.
“What do you mean?” she said, although his meaning was plain.