Marce zoomed out and in again, back to End, which hovered on the screen, a blue-green marble, clouded in white. “That’s us. That’s End.”
“What about Earth?” one of the children asked, as one of them always did.
“Good question!” Marce said. “Earth is where humans originally come from, and like on End, you could walk around on its surface. But the Earth isn’t part of the Interdependency. We lost contact with the Earth over a thousand years ago when the single Flow stream to it disappeared.”
“How did that happen?” It was the adult again, who was immediately shushed by one of the other adults. Marce smiled at this.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “The best nontechnical answer I can give you is that everything in the universe is constantly moving, including star systems, and that movement sometimes affects the Flow. Basically, the Earth moved, we moved, and the Flow stream went away.”
“Can it happen again?”
“Bint!” someone said, to the adult asking questions, admonishing him.
“Look, I want to know,” Bint said.
“It’s all right,” Marce said, holding up a hand. “In fact, it did happen again, more than seven hundred years ago, when we lost contact with a system called Dalasysla. This was before the local Flow streams were as extensively mapped as they are now. The Flow stream to Dalasysla was apparently already collapsing when it was first colonized, it just took a couple hundred years to close entirely. Now, as it happens, the rest of the Flow streams in the Interdependency have been robust and mostly unchanged for the last several hundred years.”
This seemed to satisfy Bint, and Marce was happy this fellow hadn’t noticed he didn’t actually answer the question.
From a distance, a low crummp made it into the momentary silence of the planetarium. One of the adults in the audience started to take in a sharp breath, and then stopped.
“And I think that’s about all the time we have for today,” Marce said. “Thank you all for coming, and I hope you’ll come again another time. We’d love to see you.” A day when someone isn’t clearly shelling someone else only a few klicks away. He flicked up the house lights and waved good-bye to the children as the adults filed them out of the room. One of the adults looked back and mouthed the words thank you to him. Marce smiled and waved again.
“Still giving tours in the middle of a war,” said someone new, in the back of the planetarium. “That’s noble. Stupid, but noble.”
Marce looked up, saw who it was, and smiled again. “Well, technically, we are nobility, aren’t we, sis?”
Vrenna Claremont, in her full constable uniform, smiled back and started walking down toward her brother. “Being a noble on End is like being the richest person in a trash heap. It doesn’t mean much. Especially now, when the duke is about to get his ass handed to him and rebels are running about liberating his property. It’s not a stretch to assume other nobles will find their stuff similarly liberated.”
“My stuff is a bunch of books in graduate housing,” Marce said. “I think they’ll be disappointed.”
“You’re a professor now. You should move out of graduate housing.”
“I’m resident master. Saves on rent.”
“A count’s son, worried about rent,” Vrenna said.
“We are really unimpressive nobility, it’s true.”
There was another crummp somewhere in the distance, and it didn’t sound as distant as the last one.
“I’m doing a really good job of not panicking right now,” Marce said.
“I noticed that,” said Vrenna. “I mean, I wasn’t going to mention it. But I noticed it.”
“We can’t all have ice water in our veins.”
“I don’t have ice water in my veins. I just know how far away those explosions are, so I’m not going to worry about them right now.”
“How far away are they?”
“About five klicks. The docks, where the duke’s forces are trying to bury a contingent of the rebels under shattered cargo containers. It probably won’t work. Most of the rebels are long gone from there, moving to occupy strategic resources. You and I are going in the other direction anyway.”
“We are?”
“Yes. Dad sent me to collect you.”
“Why?”
“One, because there’s a war on, and although I don’t expect that shelling is going to get any closer, there’s no guarantee the university, including your graduate housing, isn’t going to be on fire by the time the sun sets today.”
“That bad,” Marce said.
Vrenna nodded. “Yup. You may not remember this, but the house has a watch set on it by the Imperial Marines. If a rebel comes within a klick of it they’re likely to be vaporized from space. That makes it the safest place on the surface of the planet right now.”
“Did Dad tell that to the duke?”
“You know, I think he might have skipped mentioning that to him.”
Marce grinned again at that.
“Two, Dad wants to show you something.”
“What is it?”
“Data.”
“Anytime you want to be less ambiguous, Vren, that’d be great.”
“He said you would know what it was, and that it wouldn’t be something we’d talk about out loud in public.”
“Oh,” Marce said.
“Yup.”
Another crummp.
“That sounded closer,” Marce said.
“It wasn’t. But we should leave anyway. We wait any longer, someone might take it into their heads to start taking potshots at the skimmer.”
*
Someone took a potshot at the skimmer anyway, several times during the flight.
“Go faster,” Marce urged his sister.
“Anytime you want to fly a skimmer just over the city rooftops, without crashing into some random chimney, you let me know,” she replied.
In lieu of bothering his sister further, Marce looked out the skimmer bubble at the streets of Opole. Most of the residential streets were untouched, with only a few glimpses of people carrying things out to their cars, as if packing for a move. The main streets, however, were clogged with cars, and several were jammed to a standstill.
That took effort; Marce suspected some drivers had disabled autodrive to take control of their cars directly, either in a panic or because they suspected the government was somehow going to disable their movement. The end result either way was that these newly independent cars were messing things up for everyone else.
And every now and again, Marce would see columns of soldiers moving along the streets, armored vehicles among them, off to secure and/or liberate one strategic element of the city or another.
“This isn’t going to end well,” Marce said to his sister.