The Journal Entries

"Are you sure you can take the time out to do this?" Belle asked above the noise of the airplane. She wasn't sure where Linia had found this contraption nor was she sure it was a safe machine in which to entrust her new body. It had been only a week since she had awakened in it, but Linia had insisted. At least it was electric.

"Of course we can!" Linia shouted from the cockpit. "When we learned that the ship was late, the crew decided they were going to come here instead. So we have to wait for them to get here. It makes sense, and now we'll only be two weeks late getting to Indigo 161." She examined the screens before her and nodded briefly, then turned the little airplane to the left. "Ewan! We're coming in for a landing! Wake up." The young man in the back of the plane looked up groggily.

Belle said, "Won't Misuko miss you?"

Linia's face paused for a moment. "Of course she will. But this is important for her."

"How so?"

"She needs to be reminded that she can live without me. It's something that bothers her from time to time, the idea that she might become completely dependent on me. If I may speak as a companion— something I do from time to time— I have considered that five days without me will be stressful for her, but will also convince her that she can feed and clothe herself without my help. Especially since I left so many pre-made meals in her preserver." Linia turned just enough to give Belle a grin. "Buckle up. We're about to land."

Linia set the plane down on a lake in a bowl of land nestled among complex hills of a worn and ancient planetary mountain range. Only the vegetation was recent, Belle understood, if two thousand years could be considered "recent." That was enough time to turn over the biosphere at least once, according to Van. The water landing was rougher than Belle remembered water landings to be, but Linia taxied to the edge of the lake without more bumps or discomforts.

When Ewan and Linia had originally suggested this trip, Belle had thought they might take SDisks or some gravity-defying super-space-age miracle of science, but no. Linia had led her to a twin-motored waterplane, complete with pontoons. "I know how to fly one of these," she said. "Steven insisted I know. Funny, though, he never used me as a chauffeur." Belle had then received a long lesson in who Steven Steinroor had been, which had been more of an eye-opener than she'd expected. Her late, unlamented ex-husband Brad would have loved the kind of privilege Steven Steinroor had enjoyed.

The plane beached itself without incident. Linia gunned the motor and pressed up a little further onto the sand before turning off power to the motors. "Okay, everybody out."

Ewan was the first out of the plane. Belle followed. "I'll be out in a second," Linia said. "I want to make sure the plane's good."

Belle looked around. The air was much cooler than it had been down at sea level. Thinner as well. The lake was lined with a forest of pine and oak and ash, and the sand of the beach was a dramatic volcanic black. She listened for a moment and heard only the sound of the wind through the trees and the exultation of birds, and she felt at home. She hadn't thought of a world like this, unspoiled, untouched, in seventy years.

"I see you made it in one piece" a voice shouted from behind her as she stared out across the lake.

"Cori!" Ewan replied.

Belle knew from the conversation she'd had with Ewan on the flight over that his father had settled down about an hour's flight from San Daria and that he was living with a woman named Cori, but her expectations of what Ewan's parents should have looked like were torn asunder. Cori looked as young as any of them, a woman in her mid-20s with red tangles of hair about a face that was barely handsome. In a universe where one could have any biosculptured visage one desired, to own the face with which you were born was a statement of faith. Misuko had her born face, or so Linia claimed, as did Belle, but they were both lovely women. Cori's face was squared and strong and at odds with feminine descriptions of "pretty". "I was surprised when you called. You originally said you didn't have time."

"We were delayed," he said, walking up to give the woman a friendly embrace. "Misuko's been held up by two weeks. Gave me the time to stop by after all." He nodded to Belle. "Cori, I'd like you to meet Isabelle Karreigh Mannheim. Belle, this is Cori, my dad's— um, friend."

"I know all about umfriends," she said, laughing and holding out her hand. "I'm very pleased to meet you, Cori."

"Wait, where do I know that name from?" Cori said. "You're that woman! The one from the past! I read about you in the news!"

Belle nodded. "That... yes."

"I'm so pleased to see that your instantiation was so successful. I heard that it was technically challenging."

"I've heard that too," Belle said. "I wasn't around to see it."

Cori laughed. "Of course you weren't!" She glanced over at her... step-son? Belle wondered if the term was meaningful. "Ewan? Why did you bring her here?"

Ewan shrugged. "Dad cleared it. She seems to think—"

"Mom! Who is that?" A young girl came leaping out of the woods at the edge of beach. Belle saw for the first time the path cut through the trees floored with white stepping stones. The girl had Cori's hair, longer and restrained in a ponytail, but with a far prettier face. She was the first child Belle could recall having ever seen in the past week. She couldn't have been more than ten years old.

"Kay! This is..."

"Brother Ewwie!" The young girl ran across the sand and launched herself at Ewan, leaping into his arms and nearly knocking him over. "You're back!"

"Only for a while, little sis," he said, reeling under the impact and crossing his arm under her legs to hold her up. His wide grin showed his evident pleasure at the young girl's enthusiasm.

"Kay! Say hello to our other guests," Cori said. "This is Linia Ffanci, and this is Isabelle Karreigh Mannheim."

"Please," Belle said. "Call me Belle. I think people using my full name all the time will drive me a little insane."

Ewan put Kay down and she went to each of them and held out her hand, shook and bowed politely and said, "Very pleased to meet you."

Belle grinned at her, and Kay grinned back, then giggled. "Kay, why don't you run ahead and tell your father that the guests are coming?"

"Okay, Mom!" The child turned and ran for the trees.

"She bounces," Belle said. "Like a rabbit. Cute kid."

"Thanks," Cori said. "I made her from parts ordered from a catalog." Belle's shocked stare only caused Cori to laugh, covering her mouth with her hand. "Just kidding. She was made the old-fashioned way." She patted her belly. "All the way."

Ewan said, "As I was going to say, Cori. I brought Belle here knowing you had Kay about. She said we weirded her and I wondered if seeing a 'normal' family might make her feel better. You're not helping."

"And I thought you said you had brothers," Belle said.

"I do. Kay's not related to me, and came long after Mom and Dad had me, Beric and Val. Mom and Dad broke up after Val left." He shrugged as if that were not big deal.

Cori said, "And my lover at the time thought he might like having a child. He was 'mistaken'. We both were." She looked sad for a moment, then brightened. "I've been with Lyam for nearly eight years, and he's been wonderful. And he lives in the middle of nowhere. An important feature."

"For what?" Belle asked.

"For raising a child," Cori said, not answering the question. "Come on. Lyam will have coffee and tea waiting for us when we get in. It's going to rain tonight, but it'll be clear tomorrow and it's supposed to warm up."

To Belle, an offer of coffee was not to be missed, not after many decades of being unable to drink anything more challenging than carefully pH-balanced nutritional supplements. "Please," she said. "Lead on."

Cori led them up the path and into a beautiful house, a long A-frame construction with a high, sharply peaked roof that dropped to eaves low enough even Linia would have bumped her head against them. The front of the house, in contrast, was completely glassed, showing two levels of construction within. Inside, the smell of walnut, oak, and resins prominently announced themselves and then immediately faded into the background. The house was appointed in the same wood tones, a large, geometric rug dominating a space in front of a fireplace ringed by a couch and chairs. To the left stood a grand piano, and behind it was an open-bay kitchen. Belle glanced at Linia, who was looking at the kitchen with an expression of unabashed hope. Belle wondered what Linia would do with herself if she didn't have someone for whom to cook.

A man stood behind the couch. He looked like someone who could be Ewan's father: the face was similar, the hair just as blonde, but the skin had a weathered, aged look that was appropriate to an outdoorsman in his early 40s. He stood with a mug in hand and opened his arms in greeting as they walked through the door. "Ewan!"

"Dad!" Ewan smiled at his father and marched into the older man's embrace easily. "What did you do to yourself?"

"You don't like it?"

"Well, you didn't look like this when you raised me."

"Cori likes the look. Says it says good things to Kay, yes?" Cori nodded, and Lyam nodded back. Belle had the impression of two individuals well-suited to one another and she felt good watching them. She didn't understand what it meant to be part of a family in the 33rd century, but she sensed Ewan, Cory, Lyam, and Kay were part of one.

The sound of little feet came running down the stairs. Kay careered straight into Ewan's arms. "Put me on your shoulders!" she demanded.

"You're too heavy now, kid!"

"Get some implants!"

"For my whole back?" Ewan said. "Naw. That'd hurt."

"Ewan, do you still sail?" his father asked.

"'Course."

"You should consider them anyway. You could get hurt out there."

"Dad," Ewan said. Belle heard the resigned tones of an old conversation. Ewan tilted his head. "Guests?"

Lyam nodded, sighing. "Just looking out for my boy." He smiled. "It is good to see you. Introduce me, eh?"

Ewan made introduction. Lyam, like Cori, made noises about having heard of both Belle and Linia in the news. "Ewan moves in rare company these days, I see. He brings me beautiful, dangerous women from the mysterious past..." He glanced and saw Linia whispering to Kay. "Telling my daughter equally mysterious secrets." Kay turned and stuck her tongue out at him. "And teaching her rude manners." Kay's gestured became a raspberry. Lyam laughed. "Coffee?"

"I would love some," Belle said.

Lyam held out his hand. "I roasted the beans this morning. The Merryankh, a local variety of Sulawesi, I think. Light roast. Lots of flavor and caffeine. The real stuff, not that artificial gunk you get on starships."

Belle took the cup and inhaled. Unlike the cigarettes that Ewan had given her, this spoke to some deep and desperate part of her mind, a part of her that she had long forgotten. She suspected that the cup she had been given in the Resurrection House had been partially decaffeinated. This was the real thing, as fresh as Kay's face and as pure as the outside air. She tested the temperature briefly and found it tolerable, then took a sip. The sensation took a sharp turn down somewhere in the shallows of her throat and reached straight into her brain. "Oh!" she gasped. "I've missed this!"

"Been a while since you've had real coffee?"

"Forty years at least," Belle said. "Experiential," she added, using the same term Linia had used to describe the difference between being activated and her long period in storage.

"That would be...2030 or thereabouts?" Belle nodded. Lyam said, "Early Terran FTL experiments. The collapse of the China kleptocrary— amazing that it lasted so long." He paused for a moment. "Second African Renaissance, thanks mostly to Esther Mngembe." He seemed to be concentrating on something, then shrugged.

"You remember that history better than I do. Is everyone a historian on this planet?"

Lyam chuckled. "In a matter of speaking."

"I'm not a historian," Ewan protested. "Nor is Cori. And this one," he said, tapping Kay on the head, "is just trouble."

"What I mean," Lyam said, "Is that for the core of the population there's not a whole lot to do other than dust off the museum of history. Learning about the past is one of those hobbies that takes a lot of effort and can last a long time, so a lot of people are amateur historians of one flavor or another. It's only crazy people like my son here who push things by going to the edges of known space and looking for trouble pushing back. Even if he is going to expand our knowledge of ourselves, and not finally discover the forces that will destroy our universe." Belle thought he was only half-joking. "So, Ewan, have you found any good women— or men or other variants I suppose, although you never showed any interest in that sort before— to occupy your time? Or is it still sailing and swimming all the time that keeps you occupied?"

Ewan reached out for Belle's hand, and she gave it with only the briefest of pause. It surprised her: she and Ewan had slept together three times in the week since her resurrection but there had never been any kind of formal declaration of a relationship and she would never have thought of herself as dating the man. But she was willing to play along. "I've been looking around."

"Ah, that's how it is," Lyam said.

"Van vouched for them," Cori said. "And I'll take this little surprise out of your hide later."

"That's what love is all about," Lyam agreed with a smile. "And I understand that you, young lady, are something of a chef." He had turned to Linia.

"Yes, sir!" Linia said, grinning. "I teach the cooking life skill elective at the University of Hiroshi."

"Well, Cori, could you give up your domain to young Linia here?"

Cori smiled. "I think I could tolerate that."

Linia beamed at the opportunity. Kay wandered out of the house, a small silver ball no larger than a billiard chasing after her. It seemed to vanish into thin air, and Belle shook her head. Lyam gestured for them to sit and talk and pass the time.

By the time Kay came back, Linia had been in the kitchen for an hour. At one point, she had come out excitedly and asked Cori, "Are those things is the canvas bag what I think they are?" Cori had nodded, and Linia had squealed and jitter-danced like a schoolgirl when Cori said she could use however much she wanted.

Talking with Lyam, Belle realized just how little she knew of the world about her. Transcension machines, cornucopia limits, and femtotechnological authenticity signatures were a few of the terms he used in passing, and when he had tried to explain them to her she had had that same feeling of being lost she'd been trying to shake off for the past week. She had mostly talked herself, repeating the same story that she had started telling a week ago and had not yet grown tired of telling. She wondered if Nawazi had some way of recording her so that it could get every last detail if she dropped some new anecdote in any conversation. She realized that it had Linia. For all of two seconds, she minded.

"Dad!" Kay said on her return, throwing herself into the couch next to Belle. "I saw the bear again!"

"You did?" Lyam asked, apparently unaffected by this news.

"Uh-huh. He was at the stream. He wasn't fishing or anything, just taking a drink. He saw me and ran off. He was this big!" She held her hands as far apart as she could to try and communicate some sense of scale, then she giggled. "Van can show you how big he was!"

"He probably can," Lyam agreed.

"Dinner!" Linia shouted from the kitchen.

"Isn't it dangerous, going out into the woods like that?" Belle asked.

"Nah," Lyam said. "Not with a seccor packed with mesodrones. If there's a beast that can get past that, it's not walking in these woods." He rose and stretched. "Boys, now... that's another matter. Let's go eat."

Belle saw Kay's mouth twitch slightly, and then the three of them gathered with Cori and Ewan at the dinner table.

Linia's ecstasy had apparently been at finding fresh truffles. She had sliced them thin and provided a cream sauce that Belle found absolutely sinful. The truffles were accompanied by medallions of venison, cooked rare, and steamed broccoli. There was also a light, slightly sweet lager that went with the dinner. Lyam looked up at her. "Do you cook like this every night?"

"Yes, sir," Linia said. The "sir" was also something new to Belle. Linia had never used terms of respect such as that around anyone before. She wondered what made Lyam deserve it.

"It's amazing your friends don't get fat."

"Oh, I won't let them," Linia said, and she smiled. "I'm just as capable of balancing a diet as I am of abusing a palate." She took only one medallion for herself, two truffles, and some of the vegetables. She pointed at Ewan. "Drink your beer, young man, if you know what's good for you."

Ewan looked at her, puzzled, then drank his beer. Belle noticed that Kay drank water.

After dinner the six of them sat around the fireplace. They sat while Linia poured tall, narrow glasses of Madeira for the adults. It was quiet for a while, then Lyam offered Belle a game of cards. Belle responded with cribbage, and rounds were passed about.

Cori shuffled Kay off to bed soon afterward, and the adults settled back to more rounds of card games. It was, Belle thought, the idyllic view of family life: both adults pursuing their hobbies, always attentive to the needs of the child. "Kay seems like a nice girl."

"Better than most," Lyam agreed.

"What do you do, Lyam?" Belle asked.

"Well, today I..."

"No," Belle said, putting her cards down. She tried to remember the word Misuko and Linia had used to describe themselves. "I mean, what is your job?"

"I'm a father."

"That's a job?"

"It is around here," Lyam said. "I get LAU and LIU for doing it well."

"But..." Belle hunted for the right term.

Cori put her hand on Belle's knee briefly. "People don't have children often, Belle. Our generations last 20 times as long as yours did, and some people live thousands of years if they want. Shardik was around when you were born, and he's been alive all that time. There are other people like him around, too. It's a fortunate accident of evolution that wealthy people don't have children: they don't want children to interfere with their pleasures. We're a wealthy people by any primitive measure."

Lyam said, "Children are rare. Think about how few children there were in your era, and you had a rate of reproductive replacement. We do too, which means that we have only five percent the number of children you had. The public spaces that once had to accommodate children just don't exist anymore. Children don't represent an economic force either, so public spaces aren't built to cater to them at all.

"But the worst part is the adults. They don't know how to act around children. Many of them wouldn't even know what to make of Kay at first. Even if they did, some of them would expect a girl as young as Kay to be fully ready for the kind of introspection and consent capability that someone a century old would have. Many of them would treat Kay as a sort of exotic and try to seduce her. That's why my home is in the woods and the nearest SDisk is four hours away by air."

Cori nodded. "I learned that when I had Kay. Kitt— Kay's father— didn't know what to do with her, didn't understand what it meant to be responsible for someone else so completely. There's a frightening number of people in the Corridor who can't be responsible for themselves. The problem is getting better— the really bad ones tend to be too lazy and self-centered to get their birth controls reversed, so the genetic outlook is good, if it is genetic in nature, and I don't think anyone knows. Kitt wasn't as bad as some— he understood that there were some things you just couldn't do with a child. But he realized soon after she was born that being responsible for her, for her health, for her education, for her bodily functions, was not fun."

"For him," Lyam said, snorting.

Cori grinned at Lyam. "There are networks of families on Discovery, just like there are on most Corridor worlds, and for those of us who are still mostly biological, raising children is as hard as it ever was. The hardest part is getting someone like Kay to grow up and be ready to deal with adults on adult terms. Living in the middle of the forest helps us control the encounters she has, establish the peer group we think she should have, and protect her from that proportion of the population that has no ambition beyond their next high or orgasm."

Belle frowned. "But... that's not what I've seen. You make it sound so awful. I thought this century was so full of, well, wonderful people."

"You were in San Daria," Ewan said. "It's a small town filled with quiet people. Self-selected. If you go to a major city, you'll see a different kind."

"And university towns like Hiroshi, where Misuko and I live, have yet another kind," Linia said. "They're full of two kinds of people: those with longer ambitions, and young people getting socialized to have longer ambitions."

"Well," Cori said. "I think we've given Belle too much to think about for one night."

Belle nodded. She took a drink of her wine and stood. "I think... I'd like to go to bed."

"I'll take you," Ewan said, rising from his seat on the couch. "Come on." He guided her through the house to the guest bedroom. It was in the back of the house, across from the kitchen and, Belle realized now, as far from Kay's room as it could possibly be. "Where's Linia sleeping?"

"In the living room," Ewan said. "On the couch."

"Those couches didn't look very comfortable for sleeping."

"Linia will care?"

"Oh," Belle said softly. She looked at the bed, then at Ewan. "Are you staying?"

"I've got my old room upstairs," Ewan said. "Next to Kay's. If you want, I can use it."

"No," she said. "No, Ewan. I need you here." She reached out for him, pulled him close, pressed her body against his firm torso. "God, every time I feel like I'm starting to understand this place someone comes along and tells me how different it all is. The one thing I do understand is you. The way you make me feel. That hasn't changed in three thousand years, and I'm so glad. So glad."

"I'm just some dude," he said.

"You keep saying that, but it's not true," she said, looking up at him and cursing the sensation of coolness at the corners of her eyes, the tears she wished she weren't showing. "Does everyone have parents that love them as much as Lyam loves you?"

"Kay knows one of her biological parents doesn't love her. She might end up like him. Dad always said that, being a parent, what you are is more important than what you do. I hope I'm more like him than I am like Mom."

"Where is your mother?"

"She left when Val did. Said she was done 'doing her duty.' She did a good job of being a mother, but Dad... Dad's a dad, if that makes any sense."

"Can I... get pregnant?" Belle asked.

"You'd have to go to a clinic to get the control codes reversed, and they'd automatically reassert when you did get pregnant."

"Does it hurt? The clinic, I mean."

"Naw. They just wave a wand over you, but it's a specialized piece of equipment and they need a cheek swab to get your DNA and reverse-engineer the key. Takes about half an hour, most of it waiting. Why? Do you want children?"

Belle's arms tightened about his shoulders, her hands curving into claws of desperation. She remembered just in time to not stab Ewan with her fingernails. "Brad and I never had any." She reached down. "Were you serious about looking to me for a... relationship?"

"We're having one, aren't we? Even if it's just fuckbuddies, Belle." He shrugged. "I'm taking it as seriously as I can. If you want something more serious— if you want children— you'll have to wait until after the mission. I've already promised Misuko." He laughed. "That I'd be her engineer. Misuko's already married."

She held his tight body, felt his erection against her stomach. She giggled. "We should do something about this," she said, her hand pressing against its hardness through the fabric of his shorts.

"I could get to like you, Belle," he said. She knelt down suddenly. She knew she was good at fellatio, had always been, and she liked practicing on Ewan. But he stopped her. "Nuh-uh," he said. "Not so obvious." He reached down and in one swift motion lifted her. She threw her arms around his neck surprised, and he easily carried her to the bed, laid her down on it, and began to undo the buttons on the front of her summer dress. He pulled it aside, exposing the pale skin underneath, revealing her soft, small breasts, her flat tummy. He took off his own clothes and laid them on the floor without bothering to fold them as he usually did. She watched him with something like apprehension. He usually liked it when she gave him head. That skill was one of her best assets, and she was glad to know it hadn't atrophied in the decades since she had last practiced.

He lay next to her, propped up on one elbow, his hands caressing her chest. "Belle," he said softly, "Dad and Cori love each other. I don't know— I hope that you're just feeling incorporation shock because it will be a long time before I know if I love, if I can love, anyone the way they love each other."

It was one of the longest speeches about his own feelings Ewan had ever spoken in her presence. In his own way, he was just as vulnerable, just as lost in this universe. He had been born here, he had grown up here, but when it came to the world of his parents he had somehow become stuck halfway, neither emerging from it into a world of adult responsibility, nor returning to the niche and adopting the responsibility of parenthood. She pulled him close to her mouth and kissed him, hard, and he responded the way a man should. His kisses were strong and sure and she liked him that way. They rolled on the bed, naked, until he was on top of her, his strong form weighting her down. She spread her legs opened, trying to encourage him into her. He grinned and pressed his cock between her labia. His cock slipped down, then encountered resistance. "Dry," she whispered to him.

"Give it a moment," he said. He rocked back and forth gently, the head of his cock probing at her lips. She felt her moisture spread there, encouraged by what she knew he could do to her and by the physical motion of his cock, and after a minute he slipped into her. She felt the head of his cock ripple along the length of her cunt, descend into her depths and press up against the other end, occupying her. She liked the way he did that. His cock was mysteriously large: it looked bigger than her long-dead husband's, it felt bigger inside her cunt, but she had no more difficulty with it in her throat than she had Brad's, and she wondered if maybe that was a reflection of her skill, or if there was something special about Ewan's cock. She thought for a moment that maybe he had had it modified, but she doubted it. It wasn't the kind of thing he'd do.

And then he was taking her attention away from her, bringing it back to himself, bringing it back to the way his cock was deep inside her body, loving her, stroking at her. The soft impact of his hips against her mons, against the undersides of her thighs. She liked the way he did that. Such long, sure strokes. It was the kind of lovemaking she enjoyed the most, when he was confident, when he was strong, when he was sure. Brad often hadn't been. Not even with drugs. Ewan always was.

He smiled at her, his short blond hair and beach-bum studied expression as beautiful as anything she'd ever seen, his cock as perfect as anything she'd ever felt. There had been no preliminaries. She didn't even want to climax tonight. She wanted Ewan to come, and he was out to fulfill her one desire with no questions asked. He finally did come with a shudder and a muffled moan, his tempo unchanging. Only a slight upward shift in the pitch of his gasps told her he was coming closer. It was, she thought, the kind of thing her body could get to like.

She wondered, for a moment, if this was what Linia was like: independent, self-motivated, but always ready for those moments when she just "was" something, just was what Misuko needed her to be. She had heard that in bed Linia was usually the aggressor, so maybe that was something else she "was": the leader in making sure that Misuko's needs were met. Maybe even if Misuko herself didn't know what those needs were.

Ewan distracted her line of thinking. "You didn't give me a chance," he said.

"To what?"

"To... to please you."

She smiled. "You just did, Ewan. You just did."

He looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. He cuddled close, and she remembered the feel of his arm over her waist and the cooling seep between her thighs.

---

By the fourth day, Belle was simultaneously itching to put much of what she had been reading into practice and regretting that someday soon she would have to leave Lyam and Cori and Kay behind and go out into the world to take it on. She had started to agree with Ewan that her desire to have children with him was part of her incorporation shock (and she had read a lot about "incorporation shock"), but that the desire for children itself was not. She wanted to do something different with herself now that she was here.

Shortly before lunchtime, Linia appeared with a large backpack and an offer of a picnic, to which everyone automatically agreed. "You lead, Kay," Linia told the young girl.

They hiked for about two kilometers, maybe half an hour, before breaking out into a open oval space of packed dirt under the shade of overhanging maple and spruce trees. In the near distance, Belle could hear the soft roar of a river. The weather was much better behaved than the previous two days yet the air still smelled freshly scrubbed by lightning and rain.

Linia laid out the blanket and handed out plates with sandwiches. Belle got chicken salad with cranberries, celery and red onion (she had quickly learned that cranberries were an essential ingredient in Linia's cooking). Lyam sniffed at his curiously, then his eyes widened. "Dry pastrami?"

"Did you know you have real wasabi root growing in that stream behind your home?" Linia said. "I grated some onto your sandwich. Give it a try."

Lyam took a bite, and his eyes fluttered and he leaned back against a tree. "Grief," he said, "That's excellent."

"Dad! Gross!" Kay said cheerfully.

"Now, now, young lady. When you grow up you'll appreciate the finer things in life."

"If I haven't burned out my sense of smell by then," she chided.

"Given what I had to put up with from you nine years ago, burned-out sinuses are probably a benefit."

"Gross!" But everyone, Kay included, laughed gently. Belle's envy of their affection for each other had been growing. She liked this kind of interplay, where the rules were clear and the pleasures consensual.

"Uh, oh," Linia said, looking up. She turned her head in the direction of the stream. "I think we've got company." They all turned as a bear, black-furred and barrel-bodied, started to stalk cautiously up the tree-filled slope from the stream. The creature turned its head back and forth to sniff the air. Belle thought it was clear that it smelled their food and wanted it, but it also smelled them and wondered if they were a danger.

Four silvered spheres, each again about the size of a billiard ball, appeared out of the thin air and buzzed down the hillside. She watched in surprise as they seemed to waver, then grow in size even as their edges became fuzzy and indistinct. They grew further, then seemed to snap into vision as large, almost two-meter tall bears themselves. These new creatures roared at the black bear. Startled, it turned and ran for the trees, the loud pounding of its paws on the ground the only sound.

The four bears dissolved, collapsing into themselves until there were again four billiard balls of silver hovering in the air. One flew off to pursue the bear. The other three merely disappeared.

"Where did they go?" Belle asked.

"They're still here. Just stealthed," Lyam said. "Maintaining the illusion that we're not being watched all the time." He smiled as he said it, but Belle could detect an undercurrent of what if in the way he spoke.

"What are they?"

"Mesodrones," he said. "Hundreds of thousands of little robots, all interlinked. They can change their linkages and form any shape and color, and can manipulate the air around them. With that stream there they could use the water for momentum if they had to physically fight something. I imagine they could just form into weapons and slay the bear, but that wouldn't be humane. Or productive. That fourth one's just making sure it's keeping on running and not circling around."

"So why couldn't you use those against... 'boys'?"

"Well," Lyam said, "Because the AIs assume that human beings have the willpower to control themselves. They don't, or they don't know that they're supposed to, too much of the time, but that's not the AI's fault. That's just the way the rules of the game are written. On Discovery, human beings are still allowed to be threats to one another. And it wouldn't really do Kay any good to protect her from the big bad world."

"I'm big and bad enough to take it on!" Kay said with her sandwich to her face.

"Don't talk with your mouth full, young lady," Cori said. "And you most certainly are not. Maybe in another five or six years, but definitely not now."

"Mom."

"No," Cori said. "As long as tradition stands and you live in my house, you'll pay at least some attention to our experience and wisdom."

Kay fumed for a moment, then shrugged. Belle saw Cori and Lyam exchange knowing glances, then smile at one another.

Linia also cooked dinner that night. "I just wanted to thank you for allowing me to cook so many meals for a family. I've never done anything like this," she said. She offered real, old-fashioned hamburgers, kaiser buns, with all kinds of stuff to put on it, including slices of avocado and sauteed mushrooms and two varieties of salsa cruda.

"We'll miss your cooking," Cori assured her. "But I've asked Van to keep the recipes. I never thought of myself as a slouch in the kitchen, but you really go at it, don't you?"

"It's what I do," Linia said, grinning. "It's part of who I am. I love to cook for my wife and my friends, and I love to teach others how to cook in class or on a mission. But it's so different when it's for a family. It's so strange, like there's a different feeling to the effort." Belle gave Linia a curious look, but no one else at the table seemed to give Linia's confession to feelings any notice.

Later that evening, Belle sat and tried to answer as many questions as she could from Kay, who it seemed had spent the last three days reading up on the era from which Belle had come. Belle started to realize just how broad someone tended to assume an era of history was, and it became more broad the futher back in time that someone went. Kay seemed to expect that Belle had firsthand knowledge of both World War I and the Soviet FTL project, both of which were out of her experience.

Ewan and she were settling down to a routine already, not that she objected. She was thrilled to have the attention of such a handsome young man. She still wanted him, and she still liked him: his broad shoulders, his big goofy smile, his skilled hand and handsome endowment, but she knew it would be years before she decided on a father for the children she knew she was going to have someday. It certainly shouldn't be the first man she had sex with: she had made that mistake once already.

She snuggled close to him for warmth. That was one thing about Lyam and Cori's house: it was always chilly in the evenings. She kissed his back, and he murmurred something in his sleep. She smiled. It wasn't like her to want a toy, not the way Brad had collected his trophy case of mistresses, but she would keep Ewan for a while, as long as he kept her.