World Engines: Creator by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473223257
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2020-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

39

It was a full day later when Malenfant, Deirdra and Emma began the digging of the latest grave, in the shadow of the wrecked Elektrod, in the little cemetery that was growing in the ground of Persephone.

The earth was heavy just here, faintly moist, like clay. Malenfant seemed to feel the extra gravity with every shovel-full he lifted with his ageing back.

Shut up and dig, Malenfant.

‘So no British at all left down here now,’ Emma said as she shoved her own spade into the ground. ‘Poor Geoff, stranded in space. The last survivor.’

Deirdra said, without looking up, ‘Everybody’s stranded. Up there, down here. We all are.’

Malenfant and Emma shared a glance.

Emma said to Deirdra, ‘You know, it’s OK to feel – whatever it is you are feeling.’

Deirdra frowned. ‘Such as?’

‘Grief. Loss.’ She sighed. ‘Even relief. I know your relationship with Josh was complicated.’

‘My relationships with everybody are complicated.’

‘You know what I mean. It seems crass to say it now he’s dead. But he clearly had a crush on you.’

Deirdra half-smiled. ‘Well, I know that. But I never took it too seriously. I mean, what choice was there? I’m the only person here remotely near his own age.’

Emma smiled, tiredly, as she dug. ‘Be blunt, why don’t you?’

‘You and Malenfant are together.’

That caused Emma and Malenfant to share a glance. Together? Refugees from different realities? It felt like they were together, Malenfant thought, and yet not, at the precise same time . . .

He parked that.

Deirdra went on, ‘And the Russians have their own little web of relationships that were established long before we came here. That’s not going to change . . .’

And now Malenfant thought about that, it was a puzzle. He’d seen no sign of sexual relationships between Anna, Vasily, and Nadezhda – of Irina with anybody. And there had been no tension since the westerners had shown up, as far as he could tell. You might think shipwrecked Vasily would be dribbling over Emma, or Deirdra. It had just been eroded out of them. Their humanity flattened on this super Earth. Like their compromised morality, he thought.

‘So,’ Deirdra said, ‘Josh and I . . . It’s hard to know how I would have felt about Josh, or he about me, if it hadn’t been for this . . . situation pushing us together.’

Emma smiled. ‘Oh, I think Josh would have liked you on any world you two happened to come together.’

Deirdra looked away. ‘I suppose we are living more like a community of Hams,’ she said now. ‘The ones we encountered with Irina during the trek. A handful of people, adults and kids, an extended family, stuck together. Isolated. Though in their case by choice.’

‘Yeah,’ Malenfant said. ‘But we humans generally don’t choose to live like that.’ He looked down at himself, at his battered, dirt-covered coveralls, the spade in his hand on which new calluses were growing over the old. ‘If our Fourth of July rocket doesn’t work after all—’ He looked at them. ‘We’ve not really discussed this.

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