Page 28 of The Brightness Between Us

“No. Well, yes. In a way.” She gives a grim little laugh. “That turns out to be a surprisingly complicated question.”

“I don’t understand.” I desperately try to gauge her expression. “Am I still launching tomorrow?”

She doesn’t answer right away, and that’s all the answer I need for the ground to drop out from under me. My hands go to my face, then I force them down to the tabletop. “We’ve been delayed? More space junk, a solar storm, what?”

She’s only just sat down, but she stands again and goes to the window, looks out at the Euphrates. It’s blooming with jellyfish, the only animals thriving on the new Earth. They clogged up all the warships and freighters and fishing vessels, winning the seas to themselves. They’re a slow river of purple in the water below. “I’m about to tell you something that will be overwhelming. I want you to stay present. Ask me questions and I’ll give you answers. I’m about to shock you. There’s no way around that. But it’s important that you not act out impulsively.”

This all sounds considerate, but I know my mother better than that. She’s already deflecting my attention to my own behavior, implying I’m going to be a problem so that it doesn’t occur to me thatshe’sthe problem. This manipulation is a familiar experience, and it’s a familiar experience I do not like. “What is it?” I ask, willing my body to stillness. Just like she’s done.

She turns from the window and waits a long moment, gauging me. Then she speaks. “You look so handsome right now. Glowing and regal. Like the pride of the world. Which you are, of course.”

Mother smiles, like I’m supposed to thank her for the compliment. “Mother, whatis it?”

She straightens her suit. “Okay, here it is. There is no distress beacon. There never was. The base on Titan went dark and stayed dark, shortly after your sister arrived two years ago.”

I blink. “We were wrong? It was a simple Morse SOS. I listened to it. It was blindingly strong. How could we be wrong about that?”

“We weren’t wrong. We faked it. Mission control intentionally lied. I intentionally lied. We were sending that signal from a Cusk asteroid miner, with falsified signatures.”

What?

I mourned my sister once. Now I’ll have to mourn her all over again. She’s dead after all. My thinking mind makes the leap easily, but my emotions are surging in a thousand different directions. My eyes leak. “Minnie... is dead?”

“Presumably so. Yes, it’s hard to imagine any other outcome.” Mother clasps her hands, like she’s begging or praying. “She knew the risks, darling.”

I shake my head. Weirdly, the memory of Sri’s lips on mine comes to mind. It’s like my brain is shoving adistraction at me to lessen this torture. Or like I’m telling myself: here’s someone who would never do this to you. I still can’t feel the truth of what my mother’s told me. I sputter at her. “There’s a mission. We planned a mission. I’ve been on board theEndeavor.It’s docked in low orbit right above us. I’m supposed to give press conferences for the next fifteen hours about the importance of this rescue, uniting Dimokratía and Fédération alike, and then I’m supposed to go into orbit to get on theEndeavor, and then I’m supposed to go to Titan.That’swhat’s supposed to happen.”

“Yes. It was supposed to. But you are not going to Titan. You were never going to Titan.”

My body breaks out in sweat. “Why would you make everyone think I was? Why would you makemethink I was? Why hold out this hope for everyone, just to dash it?”

“That, my darling, was the point. Not dashing your hopes, of course. But making you think you were going to go.”

This makes no sense whatsoever. Over the course of my life, I’ve spent maybe a couple hundred hours with my mother, and this is pushing what I do understand of her to its limits. “All to get Dimokratía and Fédération back to the negotiating table? Explain this all to me straight out. Don’t keep teasing.”

She nods. “I owe you as much honesty as I can. I know that. Here it goes: there is a mission going out tomorrow.It is even more important than the mission to Titan would have been. You are an intimate part of it, and I don’t think I’m being dramatic when I say that you’ll be the author of the very future of humanity. Tomorrow theEndeavorwill launch and begin its journey out of our solar system, through the Oort cloud and beyond into open space, traveling thousands of light-years to Sagittarion Bb, a binary solar system at the edge of the Milky Way, which spectroscopy and radiography show to be our best candidate for human life.”

A stunned silence fills the room. It’s me. I’m the stunned part.

“So this mission isn’t just a ploy to bring Dimokratía and Fédération back together,” I finally manage to say.

She shakes her head. “It’s not—though it is also serving that function. People need a story to fill their minds and hearts. And the story will be about the renewed tragedy of Minerva, and that you’re making the best of her legacy by blessing the new mission for theEndeavor. With the peoples of both nations invested in every stage of that saga, they’ll be too united to go to war. And, by keeping both countries at the table, the Reunited Nations might delay war long enough for more traditional diplomacy to do its work. May it hold.”

“And Minerva is dead.”

My mother gets this look on her face like she’s realizedshe’s dealing with a deranged person now. She’ll be cutting this meeting off at any moment. My voice hitches, so I take a second before continuing. “Give me a sec. I’m adjusting, that’s all. So. My sister’s dead, and instead I’m going on this totally different mission? There’s no technology that can make that journey in a human life span. Have you—have the developer labs found a way to put me into cryostasis without killing me? How am I supposed to travel to an exoplanet?”

She shakes her head. “You’re not going on this mission, Ambrose.”

I put my hands over my face. “You just said I was. You are fucking kidding me.”

“I should clarify: you both are going and are not.”

I push back from the table, folding my arms. “That is not clarifying. Didn’t you just say that you owe me honesty? Why are you riddling me?!”

“I know it feels that way,” she says calmly, “but I’m not.” She instinctively checks her bracelet, even though hers is just as jammed here as mine. “Now listen to me carefully. As much of a shock as this is to you, because of your lateness we have only a few minutes before you need to attend the press junket—particularly important because that’s when we will be publicly announcing the change in mission structure from rescue to colonization. It might feel like we were tricking you, but your believing that you wereheading to Titan was the very point. During the medical exam you just woke from, we made a complete neural map of your synapses. Even as we speak, those neural pathways are being nanoteched into twenty cloned copies of you—”

My vision turns a crispy sort of white at the edges. “I’m sorry, what?”

---