The Stars Blue Yonder Read online

  True to Osherman’s word, Jodenny spent much of the next few days sleeping. The most comfortable position was on her side, with a pillow wedged between her knees and another to keep her and Junior from rolling backward. Otherwise Junior’s weight and position made her back ache and her breathing grow short. The heat was relentless, but Osherman kept the curtains drawn and had a hand fan to move the air around. He was very attentive, bringing her food and drink whenever she was awake. But lethargy was her most constant companion, dragging her under for hours on end to nightmares about burning ships and Roon carriers. It wasn’t until the third morning that she woke up feeling as if she’d passed the worst of it.

  She blinked her eyes in the predawn light and wondered why someone was snoring down near the floor. Jodenny peeked over the bed and saw Osherman stretched out on a blanket and pillow. When he was awake, she asked him about that.

  “Well,” he said, looking embarrassed, “this was my room before you showed up. There aren’t any other spares. And everyone knows we’re man and wife.”

  “How long are you planning to sleep down there?”

  He ducked his head and didn’t answer.

  “We can share this bed,” Jodenny said. “Unless you’re afraid I might roll over and squash you.”

  “You’re comfortable with that?”

  Myell wouldn’t have been. Archly she said, “I’m comfortable as long as you stay on your side of the mattress, Commander.”

  He offered her a rare, small smile.

  Junior, meanwhile, was using all of Jodenny’s sleep time to grow at some mutant super-speedy exponential rate. Jodenny was getting so large, and so ungainly, that surely labor was about to descend upon her at any moment. Luckily she had the Digital Duola in her head. Every day she consulted her brain for what to do if the baby was breech, if the bleeding couldn’t be stopped, if the afterbirth didn’t come out. She felt fairly sure she could handle any problems, with Osherman’s help.

  Somewhat sure.

  Confident. That was the word, bitter on her tongue.

  She learned the routine of the house—breakfast, dinner, afternoon tea, and a light supper after dark. The girls went out every morning to do the shopping for the day. Lady Scott’s social and civic obligations had her out of the house much of the time. She also had a suitor, a history professor named Wallace who kept a house just down the street. Osherman spent most of his days out as well, on business or visiting “friends,” and from the latter he often returned with glassy eyes and his clothes smelling like tobacco and cologne. She wondered if he had a girlfriend somewhere in the city that he didn’t want to tell her about, or a men’s club where he was playing poker and drinking beer.

  “Sometimes I make some money at cards,” he admitted. “Mostly it’s business—meeting the right people, making the right deals. Sometimes I just listen to people. Jodenny, we’re travelers in an entirely different century. Aren’t you interested in what they think? What they’re going to do?”

  “Not especially.” She was sitting in the largest chair of the parlor with her hands laced over Junior, her swollen feet propped up on a stool. Her back ached and her lower legs had been cramping all day. Piano music from a neighbor’s house drifted on the breeze. Jodenny didn’t recognize the melody but the notes were slow and melancholy. If she listened too hard she might start thinking about Myell, and then she’d start crying again.

  His mouth twisted. “I don’t think that’s true. I think you do care. No matter where you go and what you do, it’s your nature to care.”

  “I won’t be here long enough to make friends, Sam. And you know that when we go, they’ll never even remember we were here. This world will evaporate. There’s no use growing attached to any of them.”

  It might be too late for him, having already spent eight months in this eddy. He was bound to have formed friendships and favorites. But their century awaited them like clouds on the horizon: Team Space, the Roon, Myell. Especially Myell.

  To distract herself from the hollow loneliness in her chest she tried helping Lilly and Sarah with the housework. They were aghast at the very idea. While they were outside pinning up wet laundry she snuck into the kitchen and was happy to discover it wasn’t crawling with maggots or bugs or other obviously unsanitary creatures. Still, there wasn’t any ice in summertime to keep things cold and electrical refrigerators had yet to make their debut. The food they ate every day was fresh but spoiled easily, so she resolved to eat only food that had been thoroughly boiled.

  “Your wife has a strange preoccupation with food,” she heard Lady Scott tell Osherman in amusement.

  Osherman said, “She’s had some unpleasant experiences.”

  That was a lie. But she’d worked in Food Service divisions aboard spaceships and knew that salmonella, E. coli, and other microscopic dangers lurked in raw or contaminated food. It was bad enough that she could smell sewage in the air, both day and night. The smell of it sank into her clothes and hair and she had to douse herself with some of Lady Scott’s perfume to keep her nose from turning up. Worse, perhaps, were the armies of flies, lice, nits, bedbugs, ticks, and rats crawling the streets and walls and air, all carrying bacteria and viruses, with nary an antibiotic or disinfectant in sight.

  “The bugs, they do bite,” Lilly said, unnecessarily, as she made Jodenny’s bed up one morning. “We boil the sheets once a week and that kills the little beasties. Tulip, now, he’s got himself a paste that he uses to keep the flies away. Lady Scott uses it, too.”

  Tulip, when cornered in the little yard behind the house, couldn’t tell her much about what was in the brown salve that he carried in a glass jar, other than he got it from his brother whenever he went to visit his people. Jodenny took a sniff and felt her eyes water. She wasn’t sure she wanted to spread something that powerful on her skin, where it could be absorbed into her bloodstream and then into junior.

  “Thanks anyway,” Jodenny said, handing back the jar. The day was hot but the yard was shadowed. Some flowers were wilting in a raised garden and there were rain buckets for water, but few other amenities. “Lilly says you sleep out here?”

  “On the grass,” he said. “Better than some stuffy-up house.”

  “Have you worked for Lady Scott long?”

  “Twenty years, missus.” He was seated on a stool, mending a bucket that Sarah had accidentally put a hole through. He didn’t say if they’d been happy years or sad ones, or if he liked being in Lady Scott’s employment, or if he’d rather be out in the bush somewhere. Osherman had told Jodenny that sometimes he disappeared for weeks or months on end, on walkabout, later showing up on the doorstep as casually as if he’d never left. His tribe was called the Eola. Like most Aboriginal Australians, they weren’t faring well under British rule. The convict ships had brought disease, pestilence, and the dangers of alcohol. The government treated them with disdain. Their culture, history, and way of life hadn’t been completely destroyed, but they had centuries of hardship still ahead of them.

  Jodenny wanted to tell Tulip all was not lost—the Alcheringa itself would be discovered by an indigenous astronaut, and in her time the injustices of the past would have been mostly righted. But she had no idea of how to broach such a conversation, or if it would bring comfort to him, or if he’d just think she was crazy.

  “Missus?” he asked, because apparently she’d been standing there and staring at him for several moments.

  “Nothing.” She took the jar back from him. “I think I will try a little after all. Thank you.”

  Osherman didn’t seem bothered by the heat, the smell, or the flies, but he patiently listened to her complaints about bugs, bacteria, germs, and viruses crawling over everything.

  “We’ve got plenty of vinegar,” Osherman said. He was sitting in her room. “It’s a natural disinfectant. And alcohol. Plenty of that, too. This isn’t the stone ages, Jodenny. There are doctors and medicines—morphine, laudanum, chloroform, lots of things.”

  “Painkillers.
Not antibiotics. I have no idea how you can stay calm with all these diseases running around,” Jodenny said.

  Osherman said, “I stay calm because freaking out is not going to help.”

  “I’m not freaking out.”

  “So does that mean you’re coming with us to Government House tomorrow? The farewell lunch for the governor?”

  “Absolutely not,” she said.

  Lady Scott, however, was not to be deterred. That evening she swept into Jodenny’s room with a new yellow dress over her arm, extolled the virtues of Sir FitzRoy, the governor, and promised that the event wouldn’t last very long at all. Best of all, it would do good for Osherman to be seen in public with his wife.

  “No one believes he’s married,” Lady Scott said. “It’ll do all the desperate women good to see the real live Mrs. Osherman. They’ll stop pestering him so.”

  “Pestering him how?” Jodenny asked curiously.

  “In the way desperate women will, my dear. You know what a handsome and intelligent man he is. Yours must be a very happy marriage.”

  “Many beautiful, intelligent people are unhappily married.”

  Lady Scott fingered the yellow dress, which she’d laid out on Jodenny’s bed. “Of course you’re right. But the way he looks at you! The devotion he shows. Surely you’ve noticed. That man would throw himself off a cliff if you asked him to.”

  Jodenny didn’t like that one bit.

  “It could mean very much to his career if you go,” Lady Scott said.

  “What career, ma’am?”

  “The import business, of course. He’s trying to establish himself as a broker. You need connections for that. If his lovely wife were to smile at the right people, to take tea with their wives, then surely more doors would open in his favor. Would you really disappoint him by sending him off with only silly old me for company?”

  Jodenny put on the damned dress and let Sarah pin up her hair. The pins hurt and the curls look ridiculous, but the end result was someone who looked like a Victorian lady, or at least like someone masquerading as one. Lady Scott insisted on lending her some jewelry to wear, including earrings and a thin string of pearls that felt cool against her skin. Jodenny was too bulky to lace her shoes properly and so Sarah helped her with that, and then a bell was jangling from their coach in the street below.

  Osherman had been waiting nervously in the parlor. He was resplendent in a crisp summer coat and matching trousers, hat, and tie. His hair had been slicked back and his sideburns recently trimmed. Quite the gentleman of the age, even if he wasn’t of this age at all.

  “You look lovely,” he told Jodenny.

  “I look like a beached whale,” she said.

  He winced.

  Jodenny regretted her asperity. “What I meant to say was ‘thank you.’ ”

  The ride in the carriage was worse than she’d feared—all that jostling and rocking back and forth, and the heat was horrible, and the streets were full of pedestrians, carts, Aboriginals, immigrants, sailors, and stray dogs, lots of stray dogs. Jodenny saw dirt-poor women with babies on both hips, and malnourished children darting through traffic. The squalor of it all made her ashamed in her fine dress. The stench of it had her sniffing through a handkerchief doused in perfume. Osherman had mused that her pregnancy made her more susceptible to smells but she told him that, on the contrary, his olfactory senses had obviously been burned out by prolonged exposure to Sydney’s sewers.

  “I can still smell the roses,” he’d said dryly.

  That was the old Osherman, one she hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Since before the destruction of the Yangtze, when they were lovers and he was using her to get information about the Supply Department—no, she told herself, she’d forgiven him for that on Providence, during the nights he’d lain shaking and terrified on their sofa as his Roon captivity played out in night terrors. He’d paid for his sins and paid more than he owed.

  The trip to Government House was soon over. Their carriage joined a line of coaches curving up the driveway to what looked like a stone castle hauled over from England and reassembled stone by stone. The Gothic stonework and crenellated towers reminded her of old romantic vids replete with dashing heroes, beautiful damsels in distress, and disputes resolved by swordfights. The finest citizens of Sydney disembarked their carriages or arrived by foot with parasols to protect the women from the hot summer sun. Footmen in finery stood at the ready, and somewhere nearby a string quartet was playing classical music.

  Jodenny accepted Osherman’s help stepping down. The salty breeze was steady and refreshing, the lawn wide and luscious, and she could see the beginnings of an ornate garden filled with shrubs and trees. Suddenly she didn’t regret coming.

  “I told you it wouldn’t be so bad,” Osherman said.

  Just a few steps inside the house, and Jodenny was changing her mind again. The ballroom was lovely—hand-carved wooden panels, high ceilings, beautiful paintings. The state apartments were closed but the dining room was open, with its ornate chandeliers and high windows full of light. The thick stonework kept the interior cool and there were sideboards full of fruits, desserts, and little appetizers. All in all, it was the finest Sydney had to offer.

  And all those citizens who also considered themselves the finest had turned out for the occasions. Too many of them, Jodenny decided. Hundreds of people had jammed their way inside, the women in their fancy gowns, the men in their tailored coats. Conversation and laughter bounced off the walls and contributed to a loud, confusing din. Lady Scott immediately disappeared into the fray, her face and voice a blur. Jodenny was afraid to move through the crowd—if not for her own sake, then for junior’s.

  “Captain!” a boisterous man said, gripping Osherman’s hand. “So good to see you.”

  A woman in a tight blue dress eyed Jodenny over the tip of her Oriental hand fan. “We thought you might not come.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” Osherman said. “May I introduce my wife, Josephine?”

  He made the introductions but Jodenny immediately forgot the other couple’s names. She forgot the next set of introductions as well, and the ones after that. The part of her that had once been able to memorize dozens of invoices and hundreds of names had evaporated like smoke into the blue Australian sky. She blamed junior for stealing away her brain cells but she supposed she wasn’t very motivated, either. All these people in their fine clothes, ignoring the poverty and problems of the colony outside Government House’s fine doors. They weren’t here to make Australia a better place for women or Aboriginals or immigrants. They were here for their own selfish interests, and the interests of commerce.

  “Did you hear me?” Osherman asked.

  Jodenny blinked at him. “What?”

  He steered her to a small corner alcove by the staircase. “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll get us something to drink. And there are some people you should meet.”

  He moved off into the crowds. Jodenny lasted all of two minutes, feeling huge and ridiculous and out-of-place, before she had to go out for fresh air. A pair of open side doors led her to a small water garden with an exquisite view of Sydney Harbor. Men and women glided by, arm in arm, smiling with their nineteenth-century dirty teeth and sweat-stained clothes. Jodenny headed for a marble bench and sat heavily, gripped the stone beneath her to keep steady.

  “Madam Scott?” a concerned voice asked. “Are you all right?”

  Jodenny looked up into a stranger’s face. “Osherman,” she said immediately. “That’s my name.”

  “My apologies.” The man tipped his hat. “I saw you arrive with Lady Scott and assumed you were her daughter, visiting from England.”

  “No.” Jodenny said. “And you are?”

  Again, a deferential tip. “Benjamin Cohen, Esquire, at your service.”

  He was about forty years old, maybe forty-five. He wore a dapper suit and hat and looked as uncomfortable in the heat as she was. He signaled a servant and sent the man to fetch fresh juice. Joden
ny was grateful for the kind gesture. She kept herself talking and focused on him. “Are you a native of Sydney, Mr. Cohen?”

  “Of London,” he said. “May I sit?”

  “Of course.”

  He sat with her on the bench and gazed across the lawn at the harbor. “I’ve been here thirty years, more or less. Long before this house was even built. The city’s changing faster than old men like me can keep track of it.”

  “I’m sure men of all ages say that,” Jodenny replied. She felt steadier now that she was sitting down. “Progress never stops.”

  “Sometimes it does,” he said. “The local tribes, for instance. We usurped their entire way of life by sending our convicts here. Destroyed it, for all intents and purposes.”

  “Are you a lawyer for native rights?”

  He blinked at her. “A what?”

  Jodenny supposed that was a concept yet to make its debut. “You could represent them in court.”

  Cohen made a harrumphing noise in the back of his throat. “You strike me as a lady of radical thought, Mrs. Osherman. How stand you in disposition to the Queen?”

  She sensed she might get herself in trouble. Australia belonged to England and Victoria was the sovereign. “I’ve never met her, Mr. Cohen. She has my loyalty, of course.”

  The words were thick on her tongue. Team Space had her loyalty, but it was an organization hundreds of years away. Fortune held her loyalty, but she had her doubts about ever seeing her home planet again. Most of Fortune’s colonists had come from Australia and the Pacific Rim and so she supposed she owed something to this century, to these people, but did it mean bowing before a monarch? She didn’t even know what rights she had as a citizen here.

  “Long live the Queen,” Cohen murmured.

  The servant returned with some apple juice for Jodenny. She inspected it for impurities and winced at the idea of how many germs might be crawling across the glass, but was too thirsty to turn it down. She was about to ask Cohen more about law and justice in Sydney when a middle-aged blond woman in a stunning green dress interrupted them.