and beyond.
Which was how I met Tisha Rho. I’m from Coldwater, up on the northern edge of the Reclamation; we’re farm folks and shipbreakers from forever. Tisha was from Charity-the-city, and all her family worked in water. She was the first one to get her wires, first one to go into space since the family came to New Corinth, and they didn’t know quite what to make of her. They did know exactly what they made of me, and they didn’t like it one bit. It’s a funny thing, because Charity has a reputation for looseness, and the Edge Townships are generally hard-shell observant, but it was her family that got queasy about her loving a woman, and mine that shrugged and said, well, so long as you’re happy… We met on the work lines at Jefferston Port, both of us working nights so we could go to school days for the coding skills we’d need to go into space. When we graduated, the sorters paired us up right away, and we went up to the rock belts that had been the moon called Charity.
New Corinth had three moons, Faith, Hope, and the greatest, Charity, and the plan at settlement was to bring them all down and use them to build the systems that would reclaim the planet. We were one of the last planets where terraforming was begun, and one of the ones where terraforming was banned before it was finished, so what’s left of Charity-the-moon spangles New Corinth’s skies, and Charity-the-city straddles the artificial channels that tame the Big River, and send water and fertilizer north as needed. But there’s still a lot of raw minerals left in the debris ring that fills Charity’s old orbit, and there are plenty of companies willing to stake you to a job in the ring. Of course, with jump-and-jostle, JSTL, just-slower-than-light, you flip in and out of the sweet-not-yet, and every time you run the risk of getting time-lost.
Mostly we were lucky, or so my log says. We had our minor dyschronias, like the chronorrhea that made your hair fall out and finger and toenails shed; once a brief, scary bout of chronal sclerosis, where the old words and memories choked the new, so I could remember everything except the thing I wanted, but even that had faded fairly quickly. We had a good workhorse, out of the Petesider lines, and regular clients in Glasstown and Jefferston and Comfort, so we were able to make a steady job of it. Not a bad life, really, or at least that’s how the log showed it. There were other entries, too, that didn’t say anything outright, but somehow sent ripples of emotion through me, echoes of passion, of love, of simple comfortable togetherness. That’s the kind of achronic I was: I’d lost access to a bunch of forebrain memories, mostly recent ones, but the emotions were still there, feelings without context, and I had my log to give me most of that.
Tisha Rho was the other kind. I don’t know why it hit her harder—maybe it was that I’d been tied into the horse when the jump went wrong—but she’d come out of the sweet-not-yet full-blown achronic, unable to form new memories or access old ones without the help of a prosthesis. And while I was in the hospital, trying to get my own brain back in order, her family came and spirited her away, and when I saw her again, she looked through me like she’d never seen me before. I asked around, bribed a nurse’s aide, and found out her family had written me out of the prosthesis’s programming. They could do it, too, because they held her proxy, something that made me stop a bit when I found out about it. If Tisha Rho hadn’t given me her proxy—and I hadn’t given her mine, come to that—then maybe this relationship wasn’t all I thought it was. But when I went back and read the log, the feelings were all there, rolling and strong as a river under the surface of the words, and I knew what I had to do.
I hadn’t been out of rehab all that long myself when I heard from friends that Tisha Rho was out of the hospital and home with her family in
Which was how I met Tisha Rho. I’m from Coldwater, up on the northern edge of the Reclamation; we’re farm folks and shipbreakers from forever. Tisha was from Charity-the-city, and all her family worked in water. She was the first one to get her wires, first one to go into space since the family came to New Corinth, and they didn’t know quite what to make of her. They did know exactly what they made of me, and they didn’t like it one bit. It’s a funny thing, because Charity has a reputation for looseness, and the Edge Townships are generally hard-shell observant, but it was her family that got queasy about her loving a woman, and mine that shrugged and said, well, so long as you’re happy… We met on the work lines at Jefferston Port, both of us working nights so we could go to school days for the coding skills we’d need to go into space. When we graduated, the sorters paired us up right away, and we went up to the rock belts that had been the moon called Charity.
New Corinth had three moons, Faith, Hope, and the greatest, Charity, and the plan at settlement was to bring them all down and use them to build the systems that would reclaim the planet. We were one of the last planets where terraforming was begun, and one of the ones where terraforming was banned before it was finished, so what’s left of Charity-the-moon spangles New Corinth’s skies, and Charity-the-city straddles the artificial channels that tame the Big River, and send water and fertilizer north as needed. But there’s still a lot of raw minerals left in the debris ring that fills Charity’s old orbit, and there are plenty of companies willing to stake you to a job in the ring. Of course, with jump-and-jostle, JSTL, just-slower-than-light, you flip in and out of the sweet-not-yet, and every time you run the risk of getting time-lost.
Mostly we were lucky, or so my log says. We had our minor dyschronias, like the chronorrhea that made your hair fall out and finger and toenails shed; once a brief, scary bout of chronal sclerosis, where the old words and memories choked the new, so I could remember everything except the thing I wanted, but even that had faded fairly quickly. We had a good workhorse, out of the Petesider lines, and regular clients in Glasstown and Jefferston and Comfort, so we were able to make a steady job of it. Not a bad life, really, or at least that’s how the log showed it. There were other entries, too, that didn’t say anything outright, but somehow sent ripples of emotion through me, echoes of passion, of love, of simple comfortable togetherness. That’s the kind of achronic I was: I’d lost access to a bunch of forebrain memories, mostly recent ones, but the emotions were still there, feelings without context, and I had my log to give me most of that.
Tisha Rho was the other kind. I don’t know why it hit her harder—maybe it was that I’d been tied into the horse when the jump went wrong—but she’d come out of the sweet-not-yet full-blown achronic, unable to form new memories or access old ones without the help of a prosthesis. And while I was in the hospital, trying to get my own brain back in order, her family came and spirited her away, and when I saw her again, she looked through me like she’d never seen me before. I asked around, bribed a nurse’s aide, and found out her family had written me out of the prosthesis’s programming. They could do it, too, because they held her proxy, something that made me stop a bit when I found out about it. If Tisha Rho hadn’t given me her proxy—and I hadn’t given her mine, come to that—then maybe this relationship wasn’t all I thought it was. But when I went back and read the log, the feelings were all there, rolling and strong as a river under the surface of the words, and I knew what I had to do.
I hadn’t been out of rehab all that long myself when I heard from friends that Tisha Rho was out of the hospital and home with her family in
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