by Peter Medeiros
Lauren Chen didn’t think the crinoline would cause any trouble. It seemed innocuous enough when her stepdaughter Delwyn, almost fifteen now, pointed to a shop window and said, “That’s what I was telling you about! It’s from France. They used to make them with horsehair, but now they’re all supported with a kind of a–“
“A cage,” Lauren said. “Ingenious.”
“Oh, mother, don’t be so dramatic. It’s not a cage.”
“I’m sorry, darling.” Delwyn often accused Lauren of being dramatic, but she couldn’t help it. Earth’s peoples invariably complained that alien speech possessed an unsettling lack of inflection. “It is quite clever. There is a spring steel skeleton in the petticoats–“
Delwyn laughed. “It’s just like you to find how it is clever! All the society ladies are wearing it because it’s lovely, not because it’s clever.”
“Hm. Perhaps we could be fitted together.”
Lauren had spoken in jest, but she saw Delwyn’s shoulders droop at the idea of doing anything so public with her stepmother. The girl was cheerful and precocious, yet she was increasingly distant from Lauren.
It wasn’t hard to explain why. Lauren spied her own reflection in the shop’s window and asked herself, again, how it could be any other way. She was, after all, terrifying to most humans: she stood head and shoulders above their men, her limbs thin and triple-jointed and packed with muscles they did not possess, her skin the deep blue of this planet’s twilight sky. This last attribute was particularly troubling for Earth’s peoples; many of them adhered to an artificial system of subspecies categorization based around skin tone. Delwyn was still taunted, even by her friends, for being “half-Oriental.”
Lauren had discussed the matter with her husband at length, but Rufford did not enjoy explaining such human prejudice to his alien wife. “It doesn’t matter as much,” he said, “now that we’re part of the wide universe, hm? But I suspect such prejudices arise in most societies. Hatred.” He waved a hand back and forth in front of his face. “Fear.”
It was one of the things Lauren, as an ambassador of the Viaduct’s mission to Earth, hoped to fix. To guide this planet into the galactic community. To “planetary uplift”–was the term they used in the newspapers, anyway.
Delwyn sighed glumly. “You’re thinking about your work again, aren’t you?”
“I was,” Lauren said. “My head was in the sky. In the stars.” It was an old joke, one she had used many times since she married Rufford five years ago and took Delwyn
as her own daughter. She could not remember when Delwyn stopped laughing at her jokes, but she took it as a personal failing: Lauren had stopped making Delwyn laugh.
“Are you back with us now?” Delwyn said. Lauren could not tell if she was being sarcastic or not. Some humans might be unsettled by Lauren’s lack of inflection; but she hoped, as an ambassador, she made herself understood when it mattered. Delwyn, on the other hand, was increasingly a mystery to her stepmother. Worse, Lauren suspected the girl wanted it that way.
“Well, let’s go inside and take a look, shall we?”
The shopkeeper was a nervous little woman, young and prematurely gray. “Oh, Ambassador! I assure you, there is nothing untoward here! That is, I mean…we have no unregistered technology! None of those factory machines, nothing the Viaduct won’t let us–” She stammered for a moment, fear in her eyes. She looked ready to cry. Suddenly, so did Delwyn.
“Ma’am,” Lauren said firmly, “I’m not here on inspection. We’re here to look at your clothes.” She realized how this might sound to the terrified owner and added, weakly, “The clothes you’re selling.”
Once the shopkeeper collected herself, she showed Delwyn around the store, working hard to avoid Lauren’s eyes. It wasn’t difficult for her, given their difference in height. Lauren got the distinct impression both this woman and her stepdaughter wanted her to leave.
Inspecting the crinoline up close, Lauren wasn’t so sure the skirts were “lovely,” but she could see that her stepdaughter thought so. They lived in Manchester; and though Delwyn did not complain about this, she followed the London trends and societies papers with a youthful longing that Lauren could not fail to notice. This fashion-mania seemed rare and important, when there were so few aspects of Delwyn’s childhood Lauren could truly understand. Lauren’s extensive training with the Viaduct’s Exploration and Preservation Initiative covered trans-galactic linguistics, exploratory sociology, and other courses to help in her role as an Ambassador of planetary uplift. Broadly speaking, this meant Lauren and her colleagues would guide the planet away from its current course towards predictable resource exhaustion, ecosystem erosion, and eventual inhabitability. The Earth was still in its early stages of industrialization, with steam-powered travel outside of metropolitan areas and draught vehicles within, crude visual-recording technology they called daguerreotypes, a rudimentary precursor to long-distance communication tech in the form of the telegram. The Viaduct planned to make sure these trends developed in a way that did not damage the planet’s long-term habitability.
Lauren’s work involved lengthy meetings with political leaders in the more temperate continents, at every level. Last year, she convinced Queen Victoria to endorse a number of sanctions on rubber production. The Queen had her to tea twice since then, socially.
Still, Lauren struggled. On Earth, as one most every planet the Viaduct had ushered into the galactic community, there was some violent resistance. But Lauren could deal with that. There were textbooks and models and experts she could consult.
But no training she had received prepared her for falling in love with Rufford. There was no preparatory program for raising a fifteen year-old Earth girl who still violently missed her dead mother, who was uncertain of her place in her planet (let alone the galaxy) and who seemed each day to grow colder and more inscrutable in her movement from exuberant childhood to chilly adolescence–like a comet off its orbit, its brilliant trail slowly disappearing from the sky.
So Lauren found herself excited by the crinoline, how its appeal was readily analyzed. The material was pleasantly airy between her fingers. Chiffon and tulle, she heard the shopkeeper whisper. And it took up a lot of space. As she had expected from a planet on the cusp of a disastrous industrial awakening, most cultures still placed great value on constructed sexual disparities. A woman with a wide crinoline like this, Lauren figured, subtly defied these norms by occupying more space than she was normally afforded.
“You’re right, Del,” Lauren declared. “It’s lovely.”
“Please don’t call me Del. No one calls me that anymore.”
“Why don’t we get you fitted, so you’ll have something new to show Madeleine and Ethel when they come for tea?”
“Oh,” Delwyn said quietly. “You’re very kind.” She sounded suspicious, like Lauren might be trying to trick her. When did that start, that distrust? It was as if Delwyn suspected that her stepmother could wish to show her simple kindness, simple gifts.
“Darling,” said Lauren, “don’t pretend like I just thought of this on my own. You have your father’s knack for making a request without exactly asking for anything. Even I could not miss it.” Lauren smiled, to show this was a joke.
“Well,” Delwyn said, smiling a little in return, “I am good at getting what I want. I should be, with your diplomatic engineering and father’s business acumen.” Acumen was a new word for her, and she laughed quietly when she said it. Lauren wanted to pick her up and twirl her in the air, but sometime in the last year Delwyn said she had grown too big for that. She had not; Lauren could heft most adult Earth males. She feared that if she tried it with Delwyn now, the girl would push her away.
Lauren paid in banknotes. When her fingers brushed the shopkeeper’s, the woman flinched from Lauren’s blue-brown skin. But Delwyn didn’t seem to notice, she was so intent on the crinoline. Even in the hansom, Delwyn could not stop running her hands over the material like she was petting an animal. Lauren watched her intently, unwilling to speak and ruin the moment.
The moment was ruined anyway when something heavy and wet splashed against the side of the cab. The driver hollered and one of the horses whinnied in excitement.
“Free people, free countries, free tech!” Some loony, an anti-Viaduct nativist, must have recognized Lauren and hurled the object in anger.
“Was that a gunshot?” Delwyn cried. “Was someone shooting at us?” Her hazel eyes were wide in fear, her hands buried in her sheet of black hair like her head might fly away.
“No, my dear, no! It must have been a vegetable. A tomato, perhaps.” Lauren peered out of the cab to see a squat man with a blue scarf and an oversized slouch cap and limp suspenders waving his fist at them.
His shabby jacket was open to the waist, and Lauren thought she caught the glint of metal off an object sticking out of an inside pocket. Before she could make a guess at what it was, the man had turned away. A compatriot clapped him on the back, as though he had won an award. There was no telling if he was a simple-minded malcontent or one of the more active anti-Viaduct agitators rumored to be stealing and modifying restricted technologies in the city.
Lauren pulled herself back into the hansom. “A gunshot? My gracious! Why would you ask that, my dove?”
Delwyn looked at her hands. “I read the papers, you know. You always say I should read more than the socials. And some people talk about you like they’d like to shoot you.”
Lauren did not ask what her stepdaughter meant by “you”–Lauren personally or the Viaduct at large.
#
Rufford was not happy about the crinoline. Lauren could tell the moment he laid eyes on it. She sent Delwyn to her room, in case an argument was about to ensue. Delwyn climbed the stairs sullenly, clutching her crinoline like she knew it would soon be taken away.
“I wanted to get Delweyn something nice,” Lauren said, by way of explanation. She could have said more. How she wanted to see her stepdaughter smile at her again, how Delwyn perhaps had doubts about Lauren’s mission on Earth. The embarrassment and the shame that seemed to have sprouted up overnight, turning Delwyn as opaque as a window grown over with ivy. “Tell me what’s wrong, Rufford.”
“Perhaps all this planet’s fashions seem all the same to you,” said Rufford, “but for a young woman in this society, so much depends–” He grasped at the air, trying to describe a reality he understood but, clearly, had not experienced.
Rufford was a short man, even by Earth standards, but broad in the shoulders and very dapper in his double-breasted morning jacket, an outfit he completed with a purple cravat. When he and Lauren began seeing each other years ago, he confessed that he thoroughly loved the English’s stiff, dark dress. He needed far fewer clothes than when he represented his family’s importing business in Hong Kong. He had been handling their affairs in Manchester for more than a decade; whenever the Viaduct cleared a new piece of sustainable energy tech for Earth use and rolled out the blueprints–always in public libraries available for anybody–they joked that they were both importers, in a sense.
“All right, my love,” she said, “try to tell me what bothers you about Delwyn’s new dress. But do not raise your voice at me.” She’d told him before her hearing was more sensitive than his own.
Rufford took a deep breath. He said that this new “crinoline craze” was nothing but trouble for young women. It promoted vanity and extravagance and impracticality. Furthermore, it received no small amount of derision in the popular press. Though he did not make a habit of reading Punch himself, he said, he had seen ladies’ crinolines derided in cartoons and editorials. Delwyn will be the butt of a joke! How could Lauren miss how the crinoline was one of those–what did she call it?–tools of policing the sexes that was such a problem for the planet’s slow entry into the galactic community.
Galactic community. Her husband was throwing her own Viaduct jargon back at her! Lauren restrained herself, refusing to engage in this debate. “Wait and see, dear,” she said. “Wait until the other girls come over for tea.”
Delwyn’s friends, Madeleine Claremont and Ethel Bainbridge, arrived a little before four o’clock. All three young women retired to the library. Lauren and Rufford agreed that young ladies deserved some time to themselves. She’d had to explain the idea of learning to operate in one’s peer group, unsupervised, and Rufford had admitted this had been important to his own rearing as a boy–and it was strange that girls were so rarely left alone.
Today, however, Lauren and Rufford came to look on the girls under the pretext of bringing their tea and sandwiches. They all sat on the floor like much younger girls, Delwyn’s new crinoline billowing around her. Madeleine and Ethel sat on either side of Delwyn and, though they were discussing some sensational novel or other, they both held bits of Delwyn’s skirts, idly running the material between their fingers. Anyone could see they were delighted with the crinoline; and their delight brought them, literally, closer together.
Once they had set down the silver trays stacked with sandwiches, Lauren bid Rufford to linger in the library door with her. “Look,” she said. “There is so little I do anymore…that makes her happy.”
“That’s not true. She’s a young woman now, she doesn’t know what she wants.”
“My dear, what any young adult most desires–and she is nearly an adult now!—is to feel that she belongs. You can see that I present something of a problem for Delwyn.”
She gestured at herself, raising her hands and letting them drop. “My job is to help the planet find its place in the galaxy, but I have put her out of place with her peers.”
“I could say the same,” said Rufford. “She has my hair, my eyes, and children can be so cruel. She said that Ethel, even, called her skin ‘yellow.’ A passing remark, thoughtless. They were talking about jewelry, and skin tone…” He sighed heavily, a very deep sound for so small a man.
“But she loves you,” Lauren said, whispering now, “and does not hesitate to say so. She said the skirts were lovely, and I thought if I got her one she would say–” She stiffened, embarrassed beyond reason. Lauren never felt embarrassed about her emotions before coming to Earth. But Earth’s civilizations, like so many at such an early developmental stage, associated frank and empathic discussion with gender; and as an Ambassador she was wary of confirming any Earth civilization’s unfounded biases. “The crinoline may be impractical,” she said at length, “but impracticality can have a practical purpose when it comes to fostering good will between two parties.”
“Very well,” said Rufford. “But it remains a hazard and a danger to her health. The popular magazines–“
“Such as Punch, which you don’t read.”
“Precisely. They say these crinolines are exceptionally flammable.” Rufford shuddered at the thought of his daughter in flames. “And they discourage proper posture. One can hardly walk.”
Lauren considered this. “I believe I can manage that, my dear. Another opportunity, perhaps, to–” She cut herself short before she knew what she meant to say. To win back Delwyn’s affection? To be a better, more present mother? “I can improve the design. She would be delighted, wouldn’t she?”
Rufford raised his eyebrows. “You intend to make your own modifications? I would not encourage you to use Viaduct resources. I know how seriously you regard such matters.”
“Do not worry, Chen Ru.”
Rufford smiled at her use of his formal name. One of their earliest conversations had been about the difficult matter of taking on a new appellation. He had chosen “Rufford” when he first came to Manchester to handle his family’s investments, moving silk and furniture and rare instruments; and Lauren had taken her Earth name when she boarded the Viaduct’s first Earth-bound ship. When Rufford had asked her given name, Lauren told him he would not be able to pronounce it. She did not know if this was true, but she felt no need to find out. Besides, she had said, it would be easier for Delwyn to accept an alien stepmother if she was not intimidated by the size of her name as well as her physique.
They both gave up parts of their identity for expediency, for goals greater than themselves. Rufford liked to say that his business’s aim (beyond turning a tidy profit) was to foster among England’s intelligentsia an appreciation for Chinese culture. And Lauren would reply–it was part of a routine, a back-and-forth they deployed at balls and other social functions–that her job with the Viaduct was to foster an appreciation for all Earth’s cultures. “And the changes,” she would add, “social and material, required to save those cultures from themselves. So the galaxy may enjoy them as well!”
Most people laughed. Delwyn never did. And sometimes the joke would move a moody aristocrat, someone they didn’t know, to gather his walking stick and excuse himself. It was to be expected. All the Viaduct’s models accounted for some amount of native resistance.
#
Lauren did not tell Rufford about the man who threw the fruit–or whatever it was–at the hansom. She did not mention the gleam of metal within his coat. But neither did she forget about it.
#
Gil Harp had also changed his name when he came to Earth. He was one of the Viaduct engineers charged with determining what technologies Earth’s peoples were prepared to accept. Lauren, whose work as an ambassador and diplomat consisted of explaining these decisions, had little say in making them, and relied on Gil for insight into Viaduct committee happenings.
Lauren would also need to his approval to get what she needed for Delwyn’s crinoline.
Gil was a kind soul, but he was also a stickler for the rules, for order. He still lived in the embassy, even after the Viaduct made it clear that comingling with Earth’s people would do more for normalizing their presence and their mission than a million pamphlets or seminars. So Lauren had to travel into the heart of the city to visit Gil and appeal to him, face to face.
She left for the Embassy early, while the sun was just breaking through the wind farms on the city’s edge. She had barely slept all night, instead lying awake and imagining Delwyn’s face when she tried on the new crinoline.
You wish to follow the trends, my girl? Lauren thought. I will put you ahead of the trends–by a few centuries’ technology. A gift so extravagant, it would be accepted without suspicion.
The Viaduct’s embassy and research center in Manchester looked, to Englishmen at least, like a giant pitchfork–a symbol with unfortunate associations in local religion, to the Viaduct’s embarrassment. But the design was an efficient one, meant to be as unobtrusive as possible to ground traffic. The building had one central tower of gleaming metal; which branched out, once above the level of surrounding buildings, into four taller towers. Despite the pitchfork-like appearance, the embassy had the effect of legitimizing the Viaduct’s promises of eventual technological advancement; Earth people had no concept of localized stasis fields or how they could be used in architectural design, so the four tall towers supported by a single narrow base seemed quite impossible to natives.
Lauren rode the elevator to the top of the central tower, felt it shift to the side and resume its ascent. She stepped out into Gils’ laboratory. Long tables of burnished metal were littered with prototypes of Viaduct technology being re-engineered for Earth use.
Today it looked like Gil was working on a common sonic oncology device, working to make it more closely resemble a hypodermic needle, though there was no injection needed.
“They’re completely opposed to anything that’s not familiar,” said Gil, when he caught Lauren inspecting his work. Gil was the sort of person who assumed you were more or less familiar with what he’d been thinking a moment before; he had no use for greetings or farewells. “Which is hilarious, given how much they praise ‘ingenuity’ and ‘invention.'”
“Well,” said Lauren, “they prefer their own ingenuity, their own inventions. They have planetary pride. We’ve encountered worse.” The Viaduct’s uplift program had only abandoned two planets in its long history, but they still served as cautionary tales for Viaduct members.
“Their own ingenuity? We couldn’t have come a moment sooner! They’d just begun with petroleum, and they had no idea what to do with it. Do you know how little time they had before full civic collapse? How close they had come?”
“Gil, I’m here. I took the same tests as you. I was hoping to make a requisition–“
He spoke like he hadn’t heard her: “Eight generations, give or take, before they go over the edge. Not just emissions, either. They’ve got no plan for the population explosion, diminished biodiversity, all that. You know what that is in local years?”
“About two hundred,” Lauren sighed.
Gil frowned. “That’s right.”
“So we arrived without much time to spare. I will grant you that, Gil. But I was hoping you had a moment to spare for me.”
Gil remembered himself and straightened up. “Of course, Ambassador.”
“It’s going to seem silly after all this talk about the timeline, but I was trying to make a requisition. A personal requisition.”
“Whatever for?”
“Concentrated anti-gravitational cells.”
Gil blinked. “We’re rolling out the first tidal generator in Fragrant Harbor in two months. Like you said, you took the same tests as me. You know that on our timeline, we don’t release anti-gravity for another, what, six generations? In the models, if we release too soon, the natives go nuts over the stuff, migratory pollinators get messed about, we start losing flowering flora.”
“I’m not asking for a release,” Lauren said. “Will you listen, please? It’s for personal use. It’s…for my daughter.”
Gil was already shaking his head. “If we start making allowances for personal usage, where does that get us? We could live like gods here, but that’s not how the Viaduct operates.”
“I know that. We could make a film telling them anything, really, and they would have to believe us. But nobody will know about this, I promise.” Lauren explained, as best she could, what she would do with the cells, how they would remain hidden within a veil of fabric. Gil was intensely uncurious about Earth fashions or tastes–the entire planet’s population was basically hypothetical to him–and his eyes seemed to glaze over when Lauren began talking about Delwyn, her friends, her petticoats, negotiation of public space and potential advances in local gender dynamics.
“I’m not sure I understand how this benefits our mission,” Gil said, “or even how it benefits your daughter. This crinoline matter sounds awfully…impractical. Should we be encouraging this?”
Lauren bristled. Delwyn was her daughter; we wouldn’t be encouraging anything.
Her anger rendered her blunt. “It’s important to her,” she said gravely. “And there isn’t much I can help her with, Gil. Give me this.”
“As long as the girl understands to keep them hidden,” Gil muttered.
Lauren beamed. “Thank you, Gil-na-shicon’ur.”
“Nobody calls me that,” Gil said quietly. “I don’t think any of us use our names anymore.”
#
Lauren took a dozen of the anti-grav cells and brought them to her dressmaker.
She held them up and explained what they did, and what she wanted done. The seamstress, who always tried so hard not to stare at Lauren’s wide calves or her long neck or her blue and speckled skin, threw up her hands and let out a little moan when Lauren rubbed two of the cells together and let go, to leave them hanging in the air. But she overcame her fears when Lauren produced her checkbook.
On her way out of the store, Lauren nearly knocked over a pale man with an uneven and a tight bowler cap. She apologized profusely, but the man only stared at her with his mouth open, like he couldn’t decide what to say. Then he grabbed his own lapels, bent forward, and hurried away.
Curious, thought Lauren. Why was the fellow lingering outside a dressmaker’s shop? But her mind was occupied with the prospect of giving Delwyn something no one else could give her; and she had a meeting with a German industrialist later that afternoon, and did not think of the rude little man again. Not for some time.
#
The dress was complete a week later. It was a pale green, Delwyn’s favorite color, soft and gauzy. And, most importantly, the anti-grav cells held the skirts out wide, giving the appearance of a genuine crinoline, but with none of the cumbersome architecture beneath.
Lauren gave it to Delwyn in the morning after breakfast. Delwyn immediately found a glass where she could examine herself. She turned round and round, inspecting crinoline from every possible angle, like she might miss some important detail. “I’m not being vain,” she said, laughing, “I’m appreciative of mother’s work. Oh, it’s lovely.”
“There’s no cage underneath,” Lauren explained to Rufford. “There are a dozen small pieces of metal which are repulsed by each other and the Earth itself. Not unlike magnets with negative polarities.”
“You’re making it sound simpler for my benefit,” Rufford observed, “and being far too modest. You’re absolutely brilliant.”
Normally Lauren discouraged this kind of talk about her or any members of the Viaduct, claims that they were genius or charitable or equitable or brilliant. She tried to explain that their project was merely the result of an older civilization with different resources. It was a hard concept for Earth’s people to understand. Now, she only smiled and held Rufford to her bosom.
She had a small, savage thought, which she regretted in the same instant it crossed her mind: Delwyn, dear, that other woman could never give you this.
Delwyn was, undeniably, the happiest Lauren could remember her. But when she finally tired of looking at herself, she turned to Lauren and held her hands behind her back and looked down at the floor. “It’s so very special. The only one. I don’t know what to say.”
Lauren did not know, either. She wanted to tell Delwyn that she deserved to feel special, she deserved the world–a world I have come to save!–and she should not let anyone tell her otherwise. But she was paralyzed with a sudden fear, feeling the fragility of the moment. She feared that anything she could say would seem patronizing, or that Delwyn would find some fault in it. And so she kept wordlessly grinning at her stepdaughter until Delwyn excused herself.
Later, Lauren would remember her own self-satisfied smile and think, How silly I must have looked. How silly I must look to them now.
#
The season’s rains had come and gone, and for once the sun shone down on Manchester with a light so thick and tangible it seemed you could catch it with your hands. Lauren was still getting used to the heat, but Delwyn, excited to show off her crinoline, immediately planned a girls’ picnic for the coming Saturday.
“To celebrate the turn in the weather,” Delwyn said. “Or at least that’s what I will tell them. And if I get the chance to show off mother’s gift?” She giggled mischievously; the sound so beautiful that it broke Lauren’s heart.
Ethel’s father, a quiet and boring man who owned a nail factory, would chaperone.
Lauren and Rufford stayed at home; it was not easy for them to find time alone together.
But late that Saturday afternoon, a messenger boy came with urgent news from the picnic group. While nibbling sandwiches on Elijah’s Green, the girls had been set upon by a band of rowdies. Ethel’s father was knocked down, suffering a long cut across his forehead and two broken ribs. The ruffians seemed to have been targeting Delwyn in particular, and she had been sent to the hospital along with Ethel’s father.
Lauren and Rufford hailed a hansom and went to St. Catherine’s Hospital. Lauren urged the driver faster and faster; and he cracked the whip, eager to be rid of her. For once she was grateful that her size made her fearful to most people on this planet.
Next to her, Rufford wept with impotent rage. “If those men–” He choked. “I don’t understand this at all. In the middle of the day! I’ll kill them, Lauren. I’ll have their heads.”
No, thought Lauren, you won’t. It would be a diplomatic crisis for my husband to be involved in something like that. The Viaduct would be set back, who knows how long. Whoever did this won’t be killed. They will simply disappear.
Their worst fears, however, were unfounded. They discovered Delwyn sitting upright in her hospital bed reading a novel to Madeleine and Ethel, who sat on either side of her looking like they were the ones who’d been attacked. She was wearing a plain white shift a size too large.
“Did they hurt you?” Rufford said.
“How are you feeling?” Lauren asked.
“They were rough,” Delwyn said evenly, “but they did not hurt me. And I’m feeling mortified. They tore up my lovely dress. I thought maybe it had to do with your special work–” She glanced nervously at her friends. “So I boxed one of their ears, but I couldn’t–oh, they hurt Mr. Bainbridge, and I couldn’t…” Only now did she choke back a sob, but she ran a hand threw her dark curls. She would not meet Lauren’s eyes. “They tore out all the discs in my crinoline! It was so embarrassing, and I couldn’t stop them. Why did they–“
Lauren threw her arms around Delwyn’s shoulders. “It’s not your fault, love. It’s my fault.”
Delwyn wrung her hands. She did not return her mother’s embrace. To Lauren’s ears, the silence sounded like agreement.
#
Rufford agreed as well: it was Lauren’s fault. That night, once Delwyn was in bed, he threw aside his usual rules of propriety and poured them each a large glass of port, apparently with the intention of telling her exactly this.
“From Delwyn’s description,” he said, “they were some kind of separatist group.
Blue scarves and farmer’s slouch caps pulled low, that lot. Operating incognito, the craven bastards. You’ve had trouble with them before? You knew something like this could happen?”
“Historically speaking,” Lauren said cautiously, “there are always elements resistant to planetary uplift. There is also the possibility of industrial espionage. The Viaduct has a timeline for the release of certain technologies–“
“Ah, yes, the almighty timeline.” Rufford had finished his port and was already pouring more. “So you knew that men like these might have been watching the embassy, or you, or your family, trying to steal or destroy any of your magic gadgets.”
“I do hate when you call them magic.”
“I hate when my daughter is violated,” Rufford roared, “in broad daylight by a band of terrorists!”
“She was not violated,” Lauren protested.
“Her skirts all torn up! Their grubby hands!” he seethed, unable to continue.
Lauren could hardly recognize her husband. At their wedding she had joked that she married him because he had a non-Earth temperament: the more agitated he became, the calmer he acted. Now, with his face flushed and his hands clenched, she thought Rufford looked like every other man on this planet; and this thought filled her with guilt.
“I will pursue the men who attacked our daughter,” Lauren said evenly, “with every resource at my disposal. Every resource at the Viaduct’s disposal.”
“And what good will that do? Drag this dreadful business into the society pages?
Compromise your business here–and mine too, by association? You’ve already done enough! She’s distraught. You were worried she was chilly towards you? Now she’ll barely speak a word to me as well. She barely touched her supper!”
“I wanted to–“
“I don’t care what you want! I want what’s best for her, and I think I can decide that for myself.” Suddenly and completely, Rufford deflated. His gaze dropped to the floor. “You people, you meddle. Please, don’t do anything else. I need time. We all need some time. Especially Delwyn.”
There was nothing more to say, nothing that could span the space between them.
#
Lauren left for the embassy, to sleep in one of its spare rooms. She could see the stars through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and she heard the night-song of birds and crickets. The air was so much cleaner in Manchester than it had been when she arrived. Men still traveled mostly by horse-drawn carriages, yet every other building was topped with slanting solar panels, giving them the appearance of temples, and warm electric streetlamps hung like party decorations over the streets. So far, the Viaduct’s operations on Earth were a success. She had never felt such a failure.
#
When she woke the next morning, Lauren decided, with the benefit of hindsight, that Rufford was being unreasonable. He had given in to prejudice; she had thought better of him, but the fact remained he lacked perspective. He supported her work with the Viaduct, but he didn’t truly appreciate what they could do, the enormity of their project; and he didn’t appreciate what she could do for Delwyn, even when she tried to show him.
But perhaps it was not too late to illustrate, definitively, how much she loved Delwyn. And she would show the men responsible for this new schism in her family what the Viaduct showed every planet it welcomed into the wider universe of civilized, star-faring worlds: how small they were.
First, Lauren logged the paperwork for the stolen anti-grav cells. Gil was furious, of course, and tried to give her a lecture about the incident. Who knew what nativists might do with the anti-grav cells, if they were able to reverse engineer them? But he shut his mouth when he saw his own anger was nothing next to hers.
Next, Lauren met with the embassy’s special investigator in charge of recovering stolen Viaduct technology. The investigator was a short, red-skinned woman from some small, cool planet on the edge of the Viaduct’s influence. She met with Lauren in her office and introduced herself as Su-Et-Teju.
“That’s not an Earth name,” Lauren observed. “Most of us take one. To make it easier on them.”
“Locals call me Sue,” the investigator said, and smiled. She didn’t have a notebook or a recorder. “We’re already looking into the usual suspects, but it will take real detective work to recover these anti-grav cells–“
“They’re unique,” said Lauren, “in a city like Manchester, on this planet. There’s nothing else emitting that kind of electrical signature. Do a flyover.”
The detective kept smiling. “I’ll schedule one for this afternoon. Then we will, of course, make some inquiries.”
“No inquiries,” Lauren snapped. “This is a matter of interplanetary importance. The technology in question is class W-700. You know what the means?” Of course she did, but Lauren was building up steam and would not be interrupted. “It means those anti- grav cells could be weaponized. This entire planet would be threatened. It also means I have clearance to request an entry and recovery team. I’ll brief them myself. Immediately.”
“Ambassador, you realize this could problematize native opinion of the Viaduct’s mission, if the operation requires use of force–“
“Allow me to worry about public opinion,” Lauren interrupted. In the moment, the only opinion she cared about was her family’s. “My main priority is bringing these men to justice. And I want to be there when the team goes in.”
It was a flagrant lie. Lauren’s main priority was finding some way back into her daughter’s heart, a way to win Rufford’s forgiveness. And if she was risking years of painstaking diplomacy? Well, what of it? Those men had attacked her daughter. Maybe those ungrateful blackguards didn’t deserve planetary uplift. Maybe they didn’t deserve the universe.
Sue put her hands together very softly. They looked like strong hands. “With all due respect, Ambassador, there is no precedent for your presence, if we do launch this operation as you suggest. W-700 categorization only calls for action on the part of the recovery team. No one else.”
“I’m well aware my presence would be unorthodox,” Lauren said. “But so am I. I’ve been organizing the complete abandonment of fossil fuels on this planet, and it seems like we’re finally making headway. I have educated this planet’s leaders on the dangers of artificial subspecies categorization, which our models show to be one of the primary roadblocks between a civilization and its expansion into the galactic community. You must know that if anybody else let this sort of technology slip, they would already be dismissed and aboard on a ship home. What does that tell you about me, and how I get what I want?”
Still, Sue’s smile never faltered. “Of course. Are all your shuttle certifications up to date?”
“Does it matter?”
Sue rolled her eyes and stood up. Lauren saw that she carried a policeman’s truncheon, nothing but painted wood, like a local lawman. “I’ll be in touch about the launch,” she said wearily. She was probably used to dealing with bullheaded politicos, and Lauren felt some sympathy–but not enough that she wouldn’t see this to its end.
The shuttle left before teatime. The recovery team strapped in and eyed Lauren nervously. It was funny, that they were intimidated; they wore repulsion harnesses and utility vests and bulky black headsets complete with combat visors. In short, they looked terrifying. Sue herself didn’t wear a helmet. It was like she wanted Lauren to see the disapproval on her face.
They found the culprits inside of an hour, hunkered down in a warehouse between the docks of a canning factory. The recovery team went in with nonlethal sonic rifles and subdued about twenty men. Lauren recognized their type from the Viaduct’s models, profiles put together from hundreds of worlds: young males, single, largely of the supposed subspecies from the most temperate and resource-rich continent, low-level anti- social disorders she diagnosed at a drop.
During the brief firefight, their leader urged his soldiers on with rally cries about planetary autonomy, independence, all that. He was an older man with a shaved head and an unruly beard. “Uplift is downfall! Earth is free!” Not industrialists then, but idealists.
The recovery team found banners and pamphlets and foodstuffs and sleeping rolls and hand-drawn pornography–and, finally, in a trunk next to wrong-headed blueprints attempting to replicate Viaduct transport ships, the anti-grav cells.
Lauren and Sue watched all this from the shuttle’s viewer, which linked up to cameras on the recovery team’s gear.
“I want to talk to that one.” Lauren tapped the viewer’s screen, indicating the leader.
“Ambassador,” Sue began, putting deferential weight on Lauren’s title, “the Viaduct’s policy is to release individual violators of the treaty to local authorities–“
“Local authorities allowed these men to establish a base of operations within a ten-minute walk of a police station,” Lauren said, “and far too close to the embassy. They can’t handle these men.” She did not say that she wanted to talk with this man face-to-face, so there would be no mistaking her words. So she would be fully understood by this one miscreant, at least, even if her own daughter did not understand her.
Sue started to object, but Lauren decided she didn’t have the patience for any more talk. She stood and went for the door. Sue hustled after her, but Lauren’s long legs carried her quickly down the shuttle’s ramp. Outside the warehouse, the recovery team was milling around with their sonic rifles held down at the floor. The nativists were huddled in a miserable circle, their hands bound behind them, occasionally hurling half- hearted rhetoric at their captors.
“Earth resources for Earthmen!” one of them shouted at Lauren. She recognized him–the little man with a bowler hat, spying on her outside the dressmaker’s–and felt a wave of guilt.
“Sweet Kla-aren-du’s wings!” one of the recovery team cursed at the nativists. “We’re going to give you dogs flying cabs in a few years, when now you get along on those smelly beasts! No gratitude, that’s the matter with you lot.”
Lauren strode up to the older man with the bristling, root-like beard. He shuffled backwards on his rear-end. She grabbed his shoulders and squeezed till he barked in pain, then hauled him to his feet. Strangely, she thought of making love to Rufford, his sweet face smiling up at her–but she pushed the thought aside. Instead, she focused on Delwyn, and everything became simple. She shook the nativist leader and heard herself speaking, shouting, barely coherent to herself:
“Are there others like you, you nitwit? Where? Why don’t you see we’re trying to help? What did we do wrong, to offend you bastards? Why would you attack my daughter?”
The bearded man’s fear drained from his face, replaced by confusion: “Your daughter? We never touched your daughter! I never touched no alien girl!”
“My stepdaughter!” Lauren clarified. “Do you understand that? Do you primitives understanding anything?” Primitives. Such language was discouraged in the Viaduct.
She was interrupted by a sudden burst of light, followed by a sound like a hundred insects smashing into a window. Lauren ducked her head and turned around. The recovery team turned with her, weapons raised. For a moment Lauren thought they had somehow failed to clear the area of combatants, and another firefight was about to break out, an ambush. She was going to die in a pathetic gun battle on this backwoods planet she’d sworn to stop from destroying itself. What would it do to Delwyn, to lose another mother?
But it was only a gaggle of Earth men and women holding bulky black boxes. “This is gold,” one of them said. “Hold it right there! Stay still! No, no, keep the guns up!”
“What in the blazes are those?” Lauren asked the nearest member of the recovery team.
“Image capture, ma’am. They’re with the newspapers.”
“They’re taking photographs?” Lauren had forgotten they cleared photography for Earth use, replacing their clunky daguerreotypes. She remembered now: it had been a concession when the Viaduct maintained, despite Earth government protests, that video capture–Earth men called it moving paintings–would not be implemented for several more decades.
“I can see the headlines now,” one of the photographers muttered, snapping off another picture. “Viaduct brutality! Alien gunfight in factory!” Flash. Click. “Say, isn’t that the ambassador?”
“This is a disaster,” Lauren mumbled. She found Sue, who was speaking into a comm pinned to her vest. “Detective, we need to confiscate those cameras.”
“Hold on, Lao, I’ll be right back.” Sue clicked off the comm. “On what grounds, ma’am?”
Lauren gestured at the miserable-looking nativists. One of them had got a bloody nose in the skirmish. Cameras kept flashing. “Look at all this! The Viaduct works hard to make it clear that we’re here on an uplift mission, we’re not looking to oppress anybody.” She stopped herself from adding that they were, in fact, working to do away with the many forms of systematic oppression already in place on Earth. “This…altercation presents entirely the wrong image.”
“You ordered the recovery, ma’am. We were only following orders.”
Another camera flashed, now much closer to Lauren. She raised a hand to shield her eyes. The photographer stumbled back like he thought she was going to lunge for the camera, tripped on the curb, and cut open his shirt. His bloodied elbow showed through the torn fabric. Lauren looked down at him. She didn’t help him up. No one helped him up.
#
Lauren did not sleep much during the next week. Newspaper coverage of the firefight made it clear that the nativists never stood a chance. They made the Viaduct’s raid seem ruthless, disproportionate to whatever offense the nativists might have done. (There was no mention, thank goodness, of the attack on Delwyn.) And what was the Ambassador doing there? Did this seem like the work of a benevolent, diplomatic mission? Did this look like “uplift?”
The city was rocked by a series of riots, which the Viaduct left to local law to subdue. A Viaduct engineer at a smelting plant was attacked, though she escaped with only a broken arm. Earth crowds assembled around the embassy, and security was heightened around the clock. In her bed in the central tower, Lauren tossed and turned. When they first arrived, she had thrilled at the idea of so many natives watching the ship descend, watching her arrive. All those hopeful eyes. Now it was an unpleasant sensation, being observed.
She was beginning to despair when Rufford sent a boy with a note: Come home, my love. Your husband and daughter miss you dearly. She stared at the words a long time, trying to decide if there was some subtext in the words that she was missing.
She took a shuttle back to Rufford’s estate, north of the city. The pilot was a rookie, and he skimmed the ground so low the ship’s thrusters burned her flowerbed.
Walking up the lane, Lauren searched for what to say to her husband, an explanation or apology, but she knew nothing she could say would sound sincere. Everyone is sorry when they’re in the newspaper, and her guilt would not change a thing.
The front door opened to reveal Rufford himself, not the butler. He had been waiting. He ran out to meet her.
It was a mistake, she thought, or he changed his mind. He must not want me to step foot inside. He wants me off the property. Maybe he wants me off the planet, like those other men.
But Rufford threw his arms around her. His soft hair brushed her chin and he breathed into her neck. “Oh, darling,” he said. “I’m so glad you came home. I was so scared.” He had never admitted to being afraid before.
She put her hand on his back. “You don’t think I’m terrible? You asked me not to pursue those men. But after what happened, Rufford, I could not sit idle. Not after they attacked our daughter, and because of me.”
Rufford stood a step back so he could look in her face. His dark eyes were full of emotion–affection and relief, and something else she had not glimpsed in this brave, brilliant man. Maybe he was scared of what she could do; but more than this, he was scared for her. “If you are terrible, you are still my wife. I was cruel, earlier. I shouldn’t have left you alone after Delwyn was attacked by those brigands. We should have taken care of it together.”
“You’ve read the papers,” said Lauren. “You know what happened. They were nativists, terrorists. I–“
“I know you wanted what’s best for Delwyn. I said we needed time. But I’ve had time to see that whatever else, whatever people say about your work, I know that you love her.”
Lauren caught sight of movement in the doorway. Her stepdaughter stood there, as if summoned. Speak of the devil, wasn’t that the local saying? Delwyn stood with her hands crossed in front of her. She didn’t come to greet them, but waited patiently within the threshold. She was wearing a wide skirt; her silhouette resembled a massive bell.
“Does she know that?” she asked. “That I want what’s best for her?”
“You’ll need to tell her,” Rufford said.
“What if she doesn’t understand? What if there are no words–?”
Rufford shook his head. “She’s a grown woman now,” he said, as if this answered her question. “I did not quite realize that, until very recently. She’s grown up.”
Lauren walked up the long path with her husband at her side. She took the front stairs three at a time, her long legs carrying her up steps meant for a much shorter woman, a dead woman. Delwyn stood straight-backed and serious in her comically wide skirts. Lauren thought she looked lovely and strong, stalwart as a lighthouse over an uncertain bay. She waited to hear what Delwyn would call her, wanting desperately to lift her daughter in her arms and hold her aloft, to see her face against a backdrop of clean and starlit sky.
Peter Medeiros teaches composition and research writing at Emerson College, fiction and poetry at the non-profit GrubStreet, and Kung Fu at Davis Square Martial Arts. His work has appeared in over a dozen publications, most recently in Children of the Sky, Bards and Sages, Strange Horizons, Bewildering Stories, Mirror Dance, Strangelet Journal, Strange Horizons, Spark IV: A Creative Anthology, among other speculative fiction magazines. He is particularly interested in SFF that explores issues of education and community. He is represented by Susan Valezquez at JABerwocky Literary Agency.