Yesterday's Kin by Nancy Kress Page A

personal, and she’d assumed it was his British reticence, but maybe she knew so little about him because of her limitations, not his. With everyone else aboard the Embassy , as with her university department back home, she exchanged only scientific information or meaningless pleasantries. She hadn’t seen her brother, to whom she’d never been close, in nearly two years. Her last close female friendship had been over a decade ago.
    Thinking this way felt strange, frightening. She was glad when Evan said, “Where’s Max? I’ll tell him about Gina.”
    “Gone to bed with a cold. It can wait until morning. What’s that?”
    Evan gave her a letter, addressed by hand. Marianne tore it open. “It’s from Ryan. The baby was born, a month early but he’s fine and so is she. Six pounds two ounces. They’re naming him Jason William Jenner.”
    “Congratulations. You’re a nan.”
    “A what?”
    “Grand-mum.” He kissed her cheek.
    She turned to cling to him, without passion, in sudden need of the simple comfort of human touch. Evan smelled of damp wool and some cool, minty lotion. He patted her back. “What’s all this, then?”
    “I’m sorry, I—”
    “Don’t be sorry.” He held her until she was ready to pull away.
    “I think I should write to Gina’s parents.”
    “Yes, that’s right.”
    “I want to make them understand—” Understand what? That sometimes children were lost, and the reasons didn’t necessarily make sense. But this reason did make sense, didn’t it? Gina had died because she’d been aboard the Embassy , died as a result of the work she did, and right now this was the most necessary work in the entire world.
    She had a sudden memory of Noah, fifteen, shouting at her, “You’re never home! Work is all you care about!” And she, like so many beleaguered parents, had shouted back, “If it weren’t for my work, we’d all starve!”
    And yet, when the kids had all left home and she could work as much as she wanted or needed without guilt, she’d missed them dreadfully. She’d missed the harried driving schedules— I have to be at Jennifer’s at eight and Soccer practice is moved up an hour Saturday! She’d missed their electronics, cells and iPods and tablets and laptops, plugged in all of the old house’s inadequate outlets. She’d missed the rainbow laundry in the basement, Ryan’s red soccer shirts and Elizabeth’s white jeans catastrophically dyed pink and Noah’s yellow-and-black bumblebee costume for the second-grade play. All gone. When your children were small you worried that they would die and you would lose them, and then they grew up and you ended up losing the children they’d been, anyway.
    Marianne pulled at the skin on her face and steeled herself to write to Gina’s parents.
    NOAH
    There were three of them now. Noah Jenner, Jacqui Young, Oliver Pardo. But only Noah was undergoing the change.
    They lounged this afternoon in the World garden aboard the Embassy , where the ceiling seemed to be open to an alien sky. A strange orange shone, larger than Sol and yet not shedding as much light, creating a dim glow over the three Terrans. The garden plants were all dark in hue (“To gather as much light as possible,” Mee^hao¡ had said), lush leaves in olive drab and pine and asparagus. Water trickled over rocks or fell in high, thin streams. Warmth enveloped Noah even through his energy suit, and he felt light on the ground in the lesser gravity. Some nearby flower sent out a strange, musky, heady fragrance on the slight breeze.
    Jacqui, an energetic and enormously intelligent graduate student, had chosen to move into the alien section of the Embassy in order to do research. She was frank, with both Terrans and Denebs, that she was not going to stay after she had gathered the unique data on Deneb culture that would ensure her academic career. Smith said that was all right, she was clan and so welcome for as long as she chose. Noah wondered how she planned on