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Nile knew something was wrong when she found Booker up to his elbows in the inner workings of the waste recycler. It wasn’t due for maintenance for another week, and Booker hated recycler duty. He usually spent the days before his turn making increasingly desperate bets, trying to get someone to swap with him. So why was he messing with it now?
She rapped a knuckle against the bulkhead to get his attention. “Something broken?”
He grunted without looking at her or pausing what he was doing. “It was making a noise I didn’t like. Figured I’d track it down before something went wrong.”
“Fair enough.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the wall, watching him. There was a tension in his face, the set of his shoulders, that went beyond a minor technical problem that he could have, and probably should have, passed along to someone with better knowledge of this particular model. (Until a few years ago that would have been Joe. Now it was probably Akhosa, if not Nile herself. They were still sorting it all out, building new habits that didn’t include Nicky and Joe. They hadn’t yet found a new equilibrium. Speaking of which…)
“You know we got a message from Joe and Nicky today?”
Booker grunted again. “I saw it.” He gave something a particularly vicious yank, then hissed in pain and pulled his hand back, muttering a stream of ancient French profanity. Nile waited while he cleaned up and confirmed the wound had closed, but started talking before he could get back to work.
“You ok? I don’t mean your hand.” She carefully kept her body loose and relaxed, her voice casual.
It didn’t seem to help. He looked at her sourly and asked, “Why wouldn’t I be?” She dropped the pretense of casualness and stared him down. He sighed, and some of the tension drained out of him. “All right. Yes, that was a stupid question. But I really am ok.” Nile raised a single skeptical eyebrow, and he laughed. “I need smaller hands, come over here and help me.”
Once she got a look inside, she could see what he was trying to do, and she snaked her hand around to the loose coupling. While she delicately manipulated it, to determine if it just needed to be tightened, she said, “You didn’t seem totally ok when I got here.” Booker sighed again.
“I mean I’m not upset. Not the way you think I am. I’m happy for them.” She didn’t think she reacted, but he started to sound defensive. “Really. I’m not envious, I’m not sad.” That was an outright lie, and he realized it before she could say anything. “Not about that, I mean. But… it’ll change things. How we take jobs. I don’t want to just stop by every five or ten years. Someone’s got to make sure that kid reads the right books. And I don’t trust those two idiots to teach a child how to kick a ball properly.”
“Uncle Booker to the rescue, huh?” The coupling still was loose, so she disconnected it and pulled it out into the open. They could see where some of the edges had been worn down, not enough to damage the connections but enough to make it rattle. Booker took the coupling from her, and picked up his alloy pen to fill out the worn places. But he didn’t start working, just stared at his hands for a few moments.
He looked up at her suddenly. “I’m gonna love that kid, Nile. We all are. Seeing them grow up, seeing Joe and Nicky happy like that… and then they’re gonna die. Nicky and Joe, and their children, and their children’s children…” Before she could respond, he took a deep breath and turned his focus to the damaged coupling. “And we’ll keep going.”
“Booker, I – “
“Sorry, I really need to finish this.” And though they replaced the coupling and reassembled the recycler together, she couldn’t get another word out of him.
Dinner was only mildly stilted. Booker was clearly doing his best to pretend nothing was wrong, and anyone who didn’t know him well would have believed it. Unfortunately for him, he was surrounded by people who knew him very well. Ro would never dream of prying, Abinash would dream of it but not do it unless he had to, and Akhosa, who would pry without a second thought, would always rather handle sensitive subjects privately. So they all talked excitedly about Joe and Nicky’s announcement, and how they would schedule the next few months so they could be sure to be there for the birth, and Abi asked Booker if he’d like to bet on whether the baby would get Joe’s curls or Nicky’s eyes (or Nicky’s nose). Only a few surreptitious glances were exchanged when Booker hesitated before accepting.
Nile watched them all leave afterward – Ro to bed, Abi to take first watch. Akhosa paused in the doorway, waiting to see if Booker would join them. When he didn’t even look up, they said good night to Nile, and “I’m going to read in my quarters for a while. I’ll leave the door unlocked,” to Booker. Then they too were gone.
Booker himself made no move to get up, which told Nile that even if he didn’t want to continue their earlier conversation, he at least accepted the inevitability of it. After a few moments, when he still hadn’t said anything, Nile asked, “What you were saying before… are you worried they’ll resent us? The kids and the grandkids?”
“Like mine did?” He shook his head sadly. “No, not really. I figure if anyone can teach grace and forgiveness, it’s Joe and Nicky. I’m worried… I’m afraid that it’ll be too much. What if I can’t do this?”
“Do… what, exactly?”
He shrugged. “Handle it? Live with it? Without giving in to the grief, the bitterness… I don’t want to be like that again. I don’t want the others to see me like that; I don’t want to hurt them. Not like what I did before.”
Nile looked at him, and compared the sad-faced man in front of her to the sad-faced man in her earliest memories. “You told me, way back at the beginning, that the only way is forward.”
“I was pretty full of shit back then.”
“Sure. But you were right about that. And you said it again this afternoon: we’ll keep going. Time only moves in one direction.”
“Technically, that’s not –“
“Hush.” She reached over to shove his shoulder. “Whatever the physicists say about time, we can only go forward. It means leaving things behind, but we leave our old selves too. Nothing can undo all the changes you’ve made. You might change again, in ways you don’t like. You might make new terrible decisions. But you’ll never go back. And this time…” She slid closer on the bench and put her hand on his arm; he jumped slightly, startled at the contact. “You won’t be alone. You won’t be the only one carrying all that grief.”
Booker squeezed her hand before shifting away. “Joe told me once that when we were dreaming about Abinash, he realized that he was going to be the ancient one from then on, the oldest person the new ones had ever met. And it scared him a little, to think that people would think of him the way he’d thought of Andy.”
“And now it’s your turn.”
“Crazy, huh?”
“I don’t know. I think you make a pretty good Wise Elder.”
Booker snorted. “Elder, my ass. I’ve only got 200 years on you. Abi and Ro don’t even see the difference.”
“The difference is, I’ve always been wise. You had to get old before you could get there.”
She was teasing and laughing, but he looked at her seriously. “It’s true, you know. Or, if not always, a hell of a lot longer than me.”
Now was not the time to let Booker sink into the doubt and recriminations that still plagued him occasionally. Fortunately, she had an easy redirection available. “Flattery will get you a lot of places, but it won’t get you out of kitchen clean-up duty tonight.”
Booker visibly paled. “I’m cleaning tonight?” Nile nodded. “But it was Abi’s night to cook.” Nile grinned and nodded again. He put his head in his hands. “Mon dieu. Who programmed this chore rotation? Oh right, it was me.” He swung his legs over the bench and stood. “Pray for me, I’m going in.”
Nile stood as well and saluted. “Godspeed, Sebastien.”
He started to walk toward the galley, then stopped and turned around. “Oh, and Nile. Thank you.”
If it were any of the others, there would likely be hugs and reassurances. But she’d learned early on that with Booker, there was a right time and a wrong time to be openly affectionate, and she’d pushed that boundary already. She nodded once, and he nodded back, and that was enough. He went to the kitchen, and she went to her quarters to record a message to Joe and Nicky.
“We’re all so happy for you,” she said. “Booker especially sends his love. We can’t wait to meet the baby. It’s going to be amazing.”