It spread over the wall behind the head of the mattress, across the corner, over to the adjoining wall. Twisted ropes of wire and fabric, reaching to affix themselves to the shorn bolts of the scrap barricade, and propping their weight on its bent posts, like the trees in the park. And like real branches, they feathered out into increasingly intricate twigs and delicate fabric leaves. The sculpture ended only where the top edge of the walls gave into the space of the larger room.
I was standing beside it, peering up, before I even noticed I’d come closer. Tiny pictures curled within the ecstatically-dripping underpainting on the bare metal, sprayed and traced. They appeared almost to chase each other across the surface and around the stout limbs of the fabric tree.
It was like old Earth cave paintings done by the first humans. Intricate and violent, they spiralled up and up—little figures and faces, the elongated branches of a trunkless tree, stylised waves and wind. It seemed almost to move as I studied it.
I realised I was holding my breath, so as to focus better. I let it out in a slow sigh. The imagery and vibrant colours filled my vision, swirling like a story in front of me, all the way down to the mattress and its single pillow.
Katiat stood almost shyly aside, while Jas and I looked at details. "This is amazing," I breathed. He agreed. I wished he'd made me find a better word. The longer I tried to think of one, the more I saw. I had vague memories -- the way thin fabric layered in front of light, a small attic room -- and finally I just turned to stare at her.
She smiled and said nothing, moving away to collect a few mismatched crystal glasses, and dig around in a prefab cabinet for a corkscrew. Her sundress looked dusty rose in the low light of the room. She put a splash of white wine in each of three cups. "To persistence," she said, handing one to Jasha and me.
My thoughts had landed on a different image entirely. But I toasted both of them and drank.
Kat clicked on some low music and a few scattered lamps, and we all found places to sit. Jasha stretched out on a legless chaise that had been carefully placed on an antique rug, and I sat down on the edge of her bed. She pulled up a chair that looked as if it had been made entirely of pillow.
"I like your house, Katiat," said Jasha. "You'll have so much room to work."
"Thank you. It took forever to clean, and I had to patch a hole in the roof. But it's perfect." She nodded to me. "I'm still keeping the other place as long as they'll let me. For shows, though, I couldn't have found a better spot."
"Your next show, it's three months past Perihelion, right?" I asked her.
"Yes. I have plenty to do. How about you?" she asked Jas. "Is science treating you well? What did you end up studying?"
"Plant psychobiology," Jas replied. "Though I've spent the past year studying post-Adjustment sealife migration, out on the other side."
He was referring to the continent on the far side of the globe, almost opposite the much larger bulk of Damor. It had a name -- Angkarn -- but almost no one lived there, save for a small herd of peculiar scientists.
Some parts of Daltia were still being adjusted.
"It's a miserable rock," Jas said. "The storms won't let it be. There is some hope that various seagrasses could be altered and planted, which might start soil collection. Their tendrils grip stone better than roots could." He took a drink of his wine. "It was a good apprenticeship to take, but that place was unnerving."
Kat gave one of those careful nods that Jasha was always receiving from his bewildered audience. He was used to it.
"Speaking of plants," she said. "I've got some Number Six. If you're not sick of it by now, it would be an honour to share it."
He was already grinning, halfway through her words. "I'm definitely not sick of it. You're kind."
She searched about in another paint-splattered cupboard, shook a tiny bottle thoroughly, and measured three careful drops into each of our glasses. We silently toasted again, and downed it.
"I always thought this was one of your best ones," Kat said, snuggling down more into her pillowed chair. "The perfect kind of almost asleep."
"Matter of fact, I might have a better idea pretty soon," Jas said, with a pointed glance in my direction.
She caught it. "Oh, are you working together?"
"Are we?" I murmured. He had a familiar look in those big hazel eyes.
Jas laughed. "Is that a protest?"
I made a big show of equivocating, but it was a foregone conclusion. We both knew it. Jasha tended to come to me for a very specific type of feedback, typically on his less mainstream experiments. I didn't mind. So far, there hadn't been any lasting damage, at least that he could measure.
"My schedule is fairly open," I told him.
"Understatement."
"Hey, I get a year off, and I'm going to enjoy it. Anyway, I want to help Kat with her show," I went on. "So don't ruin me before that."
"I could use the help," she admitted. "Every time I turn around I have a new idea, and I've only got two hands. Don't think I'll be bored for a few years. Especially if this area picks up like I think it will."
"They're letting more people in," Jas said. "They've got to set up somewhere, at least until they figure out where their land is."
She nodded. "Even the camp out west is getting bigger. It makes me happy. I hate to be away from it, but this stipend I got for the shows is just too great a chance."
"Are you still doing your sewing?" I asked her.
"Yeah," she said, and smiled. "Much bigger than the last time you saw. I helped put velvet walls in a theater a few weeks ago." She blew a bit of hair out of her eyes. "It was so hot in there. I couldn't do that every day, forever. I don't think I could do any one thing my whole life."
"I could," said Jasha. "But it's got to be the perfect thing."
We were quiet for a while, all three of us feeling the drug beginning to put soft shivers into our thoughts and bodies. It would be a short-lived fourth companion, like a dragonfly lighting upon us and then dissolving gradually into calm. As it took hold of me, though, there was a difference. Unlike all the other times I'd come to this shimmering point, some part of me resisted. Not on purpose. But try as I might, it couldn't let go.
"That's why I talked my way into the underwater project," Jas was telling Kat. "One of the reasons. Despite it not technically being what I'd trained for. They still had a lot more freedom in what questions they could try and answer."
"Did you ever go deep?" she asked. "Like in a submersible?"
"Once or twice. Fortunately, I was mostly allowed to stay on the land, testing samples of whatever they hauled back."
Katiat got much of Jasha's story out of him, and I was amazed at how subtly she did it. He knew, of course -- he was nearly impossible to manipulate -- but he liked her, and it was good to see him loosen up. She was less forthcoming about her own tale, though, to him. She always had been. The present always seemed more interesting to her.
To be honest, I was sick of the past, myself. I'd been trying to add it up to a rational total since the week after my last graduation party, months ago. The intensity of the capstone year of an engineering degree. All those nights in my messy student lab, determined to finish that horrible final project, even after everything fell apart with Rai. Then it was done. And here I was, still coming up for air.
Still doing what it felt like I'd spent so much of my life doing: relaxing with people I loved, listening to some unfamiliar-but-pleasing music, and talking in a way that stretched my mind just enough. I couldn't even blame this disorientation on a drug, one I'd done countless times since Jas invented it. I wished it would drop me into that space I missed, the one that seemed like it used to be much easier to disappear inside. Or else take me somewhere new entirely.
I wanted what Jasha had described, too. Not necessarily to see kelp. To have an adventure, something to consume me, that matched the sleepless drive that had developed in my heart.
"What about you, Jess?" Her voice came from a long way away, over in the pillows. "Anything new?''
I couldn't add much, owing to my still-unemployed state. The question of what I wanted to do with my life was just as puzzling as it had been the previous summer.
Well, not so much what I wanted to do, as what I was capable of doing. Nobody dared to put it that bluntly. They told me to rest, to take this gap year and think it over. But starships were a dream I'd gotten used to having.
"I love what I do now," I said to Kat and Jasha.
It was true. Very few people knew how incomplete it all was. And two of them were sitting here with me.
Kat nodded. "It fits you."
"I don't say it enough, I'm glad you got that degree. I know you had chances to do -- " Jasha glanced at me, from where he'd stretched out on the chaise. "Things that might have paid off quicker," he went on. "Some days out there on the base, I'd wonder if I made a mistake. Then I'd hear about something you finished, or won. It would remind me. We love hard things, that's all."
This was high praise from him. "I need to arrange my apprenticeship soon. It looks bad."
"I don't want you to worry tonight," Katiat said.
I gestured around at the room. "This fits you. Not the warehouse, I mean. The art. That tree." In the lowering light of evening, I could see errant rays of sun hit a few random sparkling accents in its fabric leaves. "Why did you make it here?" I asked her. "Why not out where everyone can see?"
She shrugged. "It just grew."
Jasha smiled. "Looks like some of the things we'd see out there. In the water. They'd stretch great branches to the surface, and they'd sparkle like that."
"I wish I could go there," Kat said wistfully. "Something like one of those great trees at camp, but underwater. Full of fish."
"It's scarier in person."
She disagreed. "The oceans on this planet, I never thought I'd see anything like them."
"We're not a planet yet," I pointed out.
Jas made an exasperated face, but not at my comment. "I hope those fools on Luna make their minds up soon."
My thoughts began to drift, and I pondered the artwork above me on the wall. I thought of the things I knew about Katiat, and the things I'd never learned. This shifted slowly to the idea of life as a series of branches, and whether leaves at the end of different twigs wondered why they were separate. Does a tree remember its own decisions? Would its own branches act as a diary of its life?
I laid back on the cushions of Kat's bed and mulled it over. I'd always travelled cleanly through existence, and with a few exceptions, not gathered much outside of what I needed. I'd felt oddly proud of that. But If I travelled lightly, why did it feel like I carried a lot?
And unlike the things you could store in a bedroom or a studio, there never seemed to be anywhere to put it down and rest. Even this. This thinking, right now. Where was the kid who'd always swallowed his drops, or his pills, and swan-dived carelessly into whatever glide they brought?
The thought made me uncomfortable. I knew that what I'd accumulated wasn't tangible -- but it still felt heavy.
I wasn't really seeing the cup in my hands anymore, or Kat and Jas. I was seeing the past year of my life, as if I were looking at an actor in an entertainment. To persistence. I had not stopped, even through the end of a relationship and graduating from university. I needed a place to land my mind.
My thoughts chased, even as the sounds of my friends' happy conversation floated by me. I watched my chain of reasoning split, almost into versions that faced each other. The desire for freedom, and the passion for knowledge. I saw the mistakes I'd made with both, while rigidly trying to choose one over another. Was balance possible?
Only if I gave them both what they craved: to do everything I pleased, and also to know everything about it.
I laughed at the stupid impossibility of it -- then that door opened into wherever the best ideas generate, and I saw that I was already trying out that exact compromise. This record I'm keeping, that I started on a whim, what if I treated it as a lab journal?
I could do as I liked, as long as I recorded it, and looked at it critically, and learned.
I sat very still, until the insight faded. Then it was gone, leaving me only with its instructions. I memorised them, as Katiat's and Jasha's voices grew in clarity. Then I opened my eyes and looked at my friends.
Kat and Jasha barely knew each other. We'd all been at secondary school together, technically. They had rarely met, despite having me in common. And yet in this room, under these soft red and blue lights, they talked like old companions. Things change.
Kat looked over at me and smiled easily. "Are you sleepy?" she asked.
"Think so," I said. "You've got a great bed."
"Stay here tonight," she told us. "There's a cafe we could eat at in the morning. I have credit."
Jasha made polite sounds of protest, though I could tell he didn't feel like flying home.
"Come on," Kat said. "Let's take some more, and keep talking. It will be just like we used to do. Right, Jess?"
"Not exactly like," I murmured, and she laughed.
Some cloud seemed to part in my mind. And once more, the memory of how hard I'd worked this previous year raised itself like an ache, and was discarded again in favour of whatever strange bargain I'd just chosen. I felt the beginnings of a lightness I'd missed, one I'd lost so gradually it had barely been evident.
In and out of sleep I floated, feeling uncommonly safe.