A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys

Author:Ruthanna Emrys
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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I’d been depending on Raven’s eventual exhaustion to limit our time at the party. But NASA had set up little cots in another conference room, and gotten a couple of carers in from the Chesapeake, so kids too big for slings could sack out as they reached their meltdown points. That meant my jetlag, and Dinar’s, would be a bigger factor. I was reluctant to make too poor a showing since I was still ostensibly leading our delegation. It was disturbing to have failed both so profoundly and so invisibly. Should I resign? But I still had all the advantages of being first in the ground with the Ringers, first to greet them as they thought they should be greeted, and I knew that still carried considerable weight with Cytosine despite her annoyance over the Zealand trip.

So, with my brain convinced that I should just be waking up, I forced myself to focus on discussions of ansible construction, interstellar trade, and hundreds of years of storytelling in two solar systems. I would’ve particularly liked to be more awake for that last, but the conversation I most wanted to have was the one we hadn’t been able to finish with Rhamnetin. The one I most needed to have was with St. Julien, sans corporate associates.

The Ringers were all in high demand, of course. So I wandered through the event rooms on my own, stroking Dori’s back. Mental fuzziness transmuted to something trancelike, a meditation on the cultures interwoven here, and what fabrics the Ringers might add to that tapestry. Out in the hall, the Smithsonian displays seemed to morph into the story that made humanity.

“One week,” said St. Julien. “It should have been impossible.” I jumped, absurdly surprised, then had to reassure Dori.

“What should have been impossible?” I asked.

She swayed as she talked, her own child fast asleep against her chest. I fell easily into sync. “The Smithsonian collections are among the best in the world, even now. I want to bring the Ringers through all of them, give them days to understand what we are. I suppose we’ll get to that, eventually. But we asked the head of each museum for the five most important items in their collection. Maybe we should have been more specific. Tried to coordinate the scientific specimens and the paintings and the souvenirs from the moon. I did my best.”

“I can see it,” I said. “The outlines of our truth, at least. I don’t know if they can. There’s so much you need to know to fill in the gaps; how could they? But it feels right to me.”

“It’s going to take us both time to understand each other’s stories,” said St. Julien. “You know what I was doing when they called me in?”

“No?”

“Binge-watching Star Trek. Every damn series. Perfect preparation for first contact, right? But now I’m thinking about how—some people devote their lives and careers to those shows. They write their own scripts, or collect ephemera, or analyze how the different captains reflect our changing ideals of leadership over the past century.

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