Starlings by Jo Walton

Author:Jo Walton [Walton, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B073WG5J8N
Publisher: Tachyon Publications
Published: 2017-12-29T05:00:00+00:00

Jay snorted.

“We can’t lose Ballette,” I said. “It’s too important. We just can’t.”

“It’s inevitable,” Midge said.

“We’ll see about that,” I said.

I thought about it while I was eating. It was all tangled up with the fact that I wanted a future. I always had. I wanted children. And I wanted my children, and my grandchildren, and their children, to be able to watch Ballette, to be able to dance if they wanted to. I wasn’t planning to be one of those awful Ballette parents, pushing their kids harder than they wanted to be pushed. Marie, my best friend in Ballette school, had had a father like that, a father who lived for his daughter’s triumphs and wept at her setbacks. Marie gave up Ballette and opted Vietnamese, she went into navigation training and got married and had a baby when she was twenty-four. He’s the cutest thing. She lives up by Nav, which is hell to get to so I don’t see her very often. Her father tried to latch onto me when Marie dropped out, and I had to tell him in no uncertain terms to kagg off. I wouldn’t be like him. I wouldn’t force my children into Ballette, or anything else. It wasn’t that I wanted Ballette for them as much as I wanted it to be there for the kids like me, whoever they were, whoever their parents were. I didn’t want to live in a world without Ballette, and I didn’t want anyone to live in a world where that door was closed to them. I was really sure about that, as sure as I’d been about anything, ever.

Naturally, I turned to Jay. Two more courses had gone by—the carbonara and a spicy soup. On stage, Pulchinella was singing while some of the men clowned behind her. Teatro del Sale shook slightly as each lift went up the spur, and they were shuddering exaggeratedly every time and making it part of the act. “How could I make it so Ballette went on forever?”

“Well, Speranza would have to go on forever,” Jay said.

“Okay, how do I get that?” I asked.

“No, Fedra, it really is impossible,” Midge said. She had the faintest Chinese accent in English, it only showed when she was stressed. “We’ll reach—all right, our descendants will reach—the New World and that will be the end of the voyage.”

“What if we kept on going?” Jay asked.

“That would be crazy!” Mei Ju said. “What would be the point of that? Just going on and on forever?”

“We’d also run out of trace minerals and chemicals,” Midge said.

“Oh come on, we could get those from comets the same as we do extra water. We do that already,” Genly said. “Not that I’m necessarily endorsing this idea. But there’s no scientific reason we’d have to stop.”

“The scientists and the engineers want to get to the New World!” Midge said.

“They’re not going to,” Jay said. “And to answer Mei Ju’s very pertinent question, what’s the point of anything? We didn’t volunteer to be here, we’re here because our ancestors made certain decisions.

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