Sea of Tranquility(15)
“Oh,” Olive said. “Thank you. I’m honored.” But in these moments honored always felt inadequate, which made it feel like the wrong word, which made Olive feel somehow fraudulent, like an actor playing the role of Olive Llewellyn.
* * *
—
“Everyone feels like a fraud sometimes,” Dad said the following day, on the drive from the Denver airship terminal to the tiny town where he lived with Olive’s mother.
“Oh, I know,” Olive said. “I’m not suggesting it’s an actual problem.” Olive’s understanding of her own life was that she didn’t have any actual problems.
“Right.” Dad smiled. “I’d imagine your life’s a little disorienting these days.”
“Perhaps just a little.” Olive had forty-eight hours to see her parents before the tour resumed. They were passing through an agricultural zone, enormous robots moving slowly over the fields. The sunlight here was sharper than at home. “I’m grateful for all of it,” she said. “Disorienting or not.”
“Sure. Must be hard to be away from Sylvie and Dion, though.”
Now they were in the outskirts of the little town where her parents lived, passing through a district of robot repair foundries.
“I just try not to think about it,” Olive said. The gray of the foundries was subsiding into brightly painted little shops and houses. The clock in the town square glinted in the sunlight.
“The distance is unbearable if you let yourself dwell on it.” Her father’s gaze was fixed on the road. “Here we are,” he said. They were turning onto her parents’ street, and there, so close, her mother stood in the doorway. Olive leaped down from the hovercraft the moment it stopped, and ran into her mother’s arms. If the distance is unbearable, she didn’t ask, then or in the two days she stayed with her parents, then why do you live so far from me?
* * *
—
Olive’s parents’ house couldn’t be called her childhood home—her childhood home had been sold a few weeks after she left for college, when her parents decided to retire on Earth—but there was peace here. “It was so good to see you,” her mother whispered when she left. She held Olive for just a moment, and stroked her hair. “Come back soon?”
A hovercraft was waiting outside the house, the driver hired by one of Olive’s North American publishers. She had an event at a bookstore in Colorado Springs that night, followed by an early-morning flight to a festival in Deseret.
“I’ll bring Sylvie and Dion next time,” Olive said, and stepped back into the tour.
* * *
—
A book tour paradox: Olive missed her husband and daughter with a desperate passion, but also she liked very much being alone in the empty streets of Salt Lake City at eight-thirty in the morning on a Saturday in the bright autumn air, birds wheeling in white light. There’s something to be said for looking up at a clear blue sky and knowing that it isn’t a dome.
* * *
—
In the Republic of Texas the next afternoon, she wanted to go for a walk again, because on the map, her hotel—a La Quinta that faced another La Quinta, a parking lot between them—was just across the road from a cluster of restaurants and shops, but what the map didn’t show was that the road was an eight-lane expressway with no crosswalk and constant traffic, mostly modern hovercraft but also the occasional defiantly retro wheeled pickup truck, so she walked along the expressway for a while with the shops and the restaurants shining like a mirage on the other side. There was no way to cross without risking her life, so she didn’t. When she got back to her hotel she felt something scratching her ankles, and when she looked down her socks were spiked with little burrs, astonishingly sharp black-brown stars like miniature weapons that had to be extracted very carefully. She set them on the desk and photographed them from every angle. They were so perfectly hard and shiny that they could’ve passed for biotech, but when she pulled one apart, she saw that it was real. No, real wasn’t the word for it. Everything that can be touched is real. What she saw was it was a thing that grew, a castoff from some mysterious plant they didn’t have in the moon colonies, so she wrapped a few of them in a sock and carefully stowed the sock away in her suitcase to give to her daughter, Sylvie, who was five and collected that kind of thing.
* * *
—
“I was so confused by your book,” a woman in Dallas said. “There were all these strands, narratively speaking, all these characters, and I felt like I was waiting for them to connect, but they didn’t, ultimately. The book just ended. I was like”—she was some distance away, in the darkened audience, but Olive saw that she was miming flipping through a book and running out of pages—“I was just like, Huh? Is the book missing pages? It just ended.”
“Okay,” Olive said. “So just to clarify, your question is…”
“I was just, like, what,” the woman said. “My question is just…” She spread her hands, like help me out here, I’ve run out of words.
* * *
—
The hotel room that night was all black and white. Olive had dreams about playing chess with her mother.