Sea of Tranquility(21)

—

In Cape Town, Olive met an author who’d been out on the road with his husband for a year and a half, touring in the service of a book that had sold several times as many copies as Marienbad.

“We’re trying to see how long we can travel until we have to go home,” the author said. His name was Ibby, short for Ibrahim, and his husband was Jack. The three of them were sitting together in the evening on the rooftop terrace of the hotel, which was filled with authors attending a literary festival.

“Are you trying to avoid going home?” Olive asked. “Or you just like traveling?”

“Both,” Jack said. “I like being on the road.”

“And our apartment’s mediocre,” Ibby said, “but we haven’t decided what to do about it. Move? Redecorate? Could go either way.”

There were dozens of trees up here, in enormous planters, with little lights sparkling in the branches. Music was playing somewhere, a string quartet. Olive was wearing her designated fancy tour dress, which was silver and went to her ankles. This is one of the glamorous moments, Olive thought, filing it carefully away so she could draw on it for sustenance later. The breeze carried a scent of jasmine.

“I heard some good news today,” Jack said.

“Tell me,” Ibby said. “I’ve been in a kind of book festival tunnel all day. Inadvertent news blackout.”

“Construction just began on the first of the Far Colonies,” Jack said.

Olive smiled, and almost spoke, but she was momentarily wordless. Planning for the Far Colonies had begun when her grandparents were children. She would always remember this moment, she thought, this party, these people whom she very much liked and might never see again. She’d be able to tell Sylvie where she was when she heard the news. When had she last experienced true awe? It had been a while. Olive was flooded with happiness. She raised her glass.

“To Alpha Centauri,” she said.



* * *



—

In Buenos Aires, Olive met a woman who wanted to show her a tattoo. “I hope this isn’t weird,” she said, and rolled up her sleeve to reveal a quote from the book: We knew it was coming, in a beautiful curly script on her left shoulder.

Olive’s breath caught in her throat. It wasn’t just a line from Marienbad, it was a tattoo in Marienbad. In the second half of the novel, her character Gaspery-Jacques had the line tattooed on his left arm. You write a book with a fictional tattoo and then the tattoo becomes real in the world and after that almost anything seems possible. She’d seen five of those tattoos, but that didn’t make it less extraordinary, seeing the way fiction can bleed into the world and leave a mark on someone’s skin.

“That’s incredible,” Olive said softly. “It’s incredible to see that tattoo in the real world.”

“It’s my favorite line from your book,” she said. “It’s just true of so much, isn’t it?”



* * *



—

But doesn’t everything seem obvious in retrospect? Blue dusk over the prairies, gliding toward the Dakota Republic in a low-altitude airship. Olive stared out the window and tried to find some peace in the landscape. She had a new invitation for a festival on Titan. She hadn’t been since she was a kid and retained only vague memories of crowds at the Dolphinarium and some oddly tasteless popcorn, the warm yellowish haze of the daytime sky—she’d been in a so-called Realist colony, one of the outposts whose settlers had decided on clear domes in order to experience the true colors of the Titanian atmosphere—and strange fashions, this thing all the teenagers were doing that involved painting their faces like pixels, big squares of color that were supposed to defeat the facial-recognition software but that had the side effect of making them look like deranged clowns. Should she go to Titan? I want to go home. Where was Sylvie at this moment? This is easier than having a day job, though, just remember that.



* * *



—

“I remember reading somewhere,” an interviewer said, “that the title of your first book actually came from your last day job?”

“Yes,” Olive said, “I came across it at work one day.”

“Your first novel was, of course, Swimming Stars with Goldflitter. Will you tell me about that title?”

“Sure, yes. I was working in AI training. So, you know, correcting awkward renderings from the translator bots. I remember sitting there by the hour in this cramped little office—”

“This was in Colony Two?”

“Yes, Colony Two. My job was to sit there all day, rewording unfortunate sentences. But there was one that stopped me cold, because it may have been awkward and error-ridden, but I loved it.” Olive had told this story so often that it was like reciting lines from a play. “It was a description of votive candles with little poems on the candleholders. The description had somehow been rendered as seven motives for verse, and then one of the candle descriptions was swimming stars with goldflitter. The beauty of those phrases, I don’t know, it just stopped me cold.”



* * *



—

Stopped me cold. Two days later she was on a panel with another writer at a festival in the city-state of Los Angeles, and the implication of that phrase had just occurred to her. What stops you, and turns you cold? Death, obviously. Olive couldn’t believe she’d never thought of this. Los Angeles was under a dome, but still the light through the windows was blinding. This meant she couldn’t see the audience, which was frankly ideal. All those faces staring at her. No, at them: the other writer’s name was Jessica Marley and Olive was glad Jessica was here with her, even though she didn’t actually like her very much. Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.