Place of Departure

The plant had done nothing for three weeks and Ivy had come to see it anyway.

It resembled a grey artichoke the size of a chair and stood in a raised bed a third of the way down the hall. According to the card, it came from a world where the local year lasted nine of Sylir's, and it flowered once in that span. Nobody could tell her when. The gardeners had a guess, and so did Ivy.

This was the Rioghan's hall, a garden under glass where the elected sovereign of the Morlencir Empire received representatives from beyond its borders. Water ran the length of it in an open channel, loud in the quiet. Beyond it, the beds were thick with plants Ivy did not recognize: broad leaves, stiff fans, jointed stalks, and fronds fine as hair. Most were green. Here and there she saw copper leaves, yellow blades, or flowers the deep blue of glazed pottery. The air smelled of wet stone and soil, with a sharp sweetness underneath. Sunlight poured through the high roof without making the hall hot or close; the air against her face stayed mild. At the far end, small with distance, stood a chair with nobody in it. The diplomatic missions occupied rooms along both walls. One door stood open, another shut; at a third, somebody leaned in the frame and spoke to someone inside. There were maybe three dozen people in a garden big enough to land a plane in. Most of it was empty.

Citizens usually met their government on the network. Ivy came for the plants. She had a short list of beds she checked, and a long list of things she'd been told she could look up and hadn't. The artichoke had been on the short list since the day she'd seen a gardener stand in front of it for ten minutes doing nothing, and she'd decided that whatever a Syliri gardener waited for was worth waiting for.

For the last hour, the skylight had laid a band of shade across the bed and path while the rest of the garden remained in sun. Ivy stood beside the bed and studied the plant.

Her cysuit fitted close in matte charcoal from its high collar to its bronze boots. Bronze panels reinforced the shoulders, forearms, knees, and shins. Thin amber lights traced seams across the chest and limbs. The sun slid a finger's width along the paving and reached her outer arm, warming a narrow strip of bronze. She moved her arm back into the shade.

The suit gave her the ground behind her. Without turning, Ivy saw a woman coming fast across it, behind her left shoulder, and knew the woman's speed and line as plainly as if she had looked. Her body answered before she turned: weight balanced, hands loose and ready.

Ivy turned. The woman was short and compact, with olive skin, brown eyes, and dark hair cropped close and greying at the temples. She wore the plain dark clothes of the mission staff. Her broad hands were empty, but she was not slowing. She had come out of the third door down, the one with the long parlor window. She followed the paths when she could and cut between beds when she couldn't, looking at Ivy the entire way. Her speed looked like trouble until Ivy saw her face.

The woman was human. Back home, Ivy would have guessed Mediterranean. There were humans outside the Empire. They lived among the Ashlan, along the Empire's border, and Ivy had known that for years and never met one. And the woman was staring. Nobody in the Empire stared at her; what anyone wanted to know about her, they could learn without looking. This woman had the look of somebody who had finally found something she'd wanted all her life and wasn't sure she was allowed to approach.

The suit caught her language on the first word. Ivy felt the familiar pressure of translation behind her ears, and then she heard the woman speaking fast and bluntly in words she understood.

"Oh, no. No, hang on. You're a, you're wearing one. You're wearing one. A human Princess? A human Princess of the Morlencir Empire? How? Why have I never heard of you?" She stopped a pace away, visibly forcing herself not to come closer. "Sorry. I'm so sorry, I've broken every rule they gave me, they're going to send me home in a box. I thought I was the first one here! I've been walking around for three months thinking I was the first one of us on this planet, I was going to put it in the, never mind. Hello." Both hands went out and came back. "Hello. I'm sorry. Hello."

Ivy fell back on the one procedure she knew for a first meeting.

"Ivy Cunningham." She put her hand out.

The woman's face changed when the words reached her. She flinched as though the voice did not match the face. She looked at Ivy's mouth and then at the rest of her.

"You talk like them," she said. "Sorry. You talk like them!"

Two beds over, a gardener's head turned and turned back.

"Starborn," the woman said. "You're Starborn. You're wearing one and you're in here, that's, you've done the Rites."

"Yes."

"How?"

The proctors had read the memories held by her cysuit and found all Four Great Rites in the life she had already lived: valor, wisdom, devotion, empathy. They had accepted those memories as proof. Ivy had not. She had asked to face the trials again, this time knowing what they were and what they would make of her. The proctors had refused. More suffering would not make the proof better, they told her. It would only make her suffer twice.

She could tell the woman that. It would not answer the question in her face. How had a human become a Princess here without the woman's people ever hearing of her?

That answer began with Earth: that the Empire had found it and had told nobody outside its borders, and that Ivy had come from there herself, years ago. She had agreed with the silence the night she heard the reasons for it, for Earth's sake, and in all the time since, nobody outside the Empire had asked her anything that led there. The woman stood in front of her, asking. Ivy wanted to give her the answer, and it would not have stopped with her.

"It's a big Empire," she said.

The woman looked over the cysuit once more, then back at Ivy.

"It's not that big," she said.

Then she seemed to hear herself.

"Nell Crispin." The woman looked at the hand Ivy had offered with the expression of somebody who had forgotten the step that came after hello, and Ivy let it drop. "Port Ansel mission. I'm the second. I do the, I'm supposed to be the calm one." She took a breath. "Cunningham. That's a roll-name. Which line?"

Ivy had the word roll and nothing to hang it on. She kept it and waited for more.

"Which port?" Nell said. "Your line, the place of departure. I can find you. I did twelve years at the Corbin Registry, I can find anyone, give me the port."

A place of departure. A roll that listed people by the port they had left from. Ivy understood the idea before she found the word for it. Manifest. The word came from a classroom in a different life. She kept that too.

"San Francisco."

Nell showed no recognition.

"California."

Nothing.

"The United States." For the first time since she'd arrived, Ivy said a name from home and watched it mean nothing. "It's on a bay. The port's on a bay."

"I don't know it," Nell said, and it was an apology. "That's not on any roll I've read and I've read them all. Okay. Okay, that's fine, that happens, lines get lost." She moved on. "Mine's Ostia. Crispus, of Ostia, third venture, there's a date but it's in their reckoning." She said the port the way you say your own street. "You've never heard of it."

Ivy hadn't. She could have looked it up in a breath; the suit would have given her a coast and a year and a picture of what was there now. Then she'd have known something about this woman's family that the woman didn't. She chose not to look.

"No," she said.

Ivy put her hand out again.

Nell reached past Ivy's hand and closed on her forearm above the wrist, a firm grip, the thumb on the inside of the arm where the amber ran. Ivy's hand had nowhere to go and closed on Nell's forearm in answer before she had decided anything. They stood like that, each holding the other's arm, and neither of them adjusted, and neither of them laughed.

The grip was older than a handshake. Ivy couldn't have said by how much, and didn't ask.

"Okay," Nell said, and let go. She studied Ivy for another moment, still trying to fit the facts together.

"The Annex," Nell said.

She said it the way Ivy used to say a suspect's name out loud in the car, trying it on the air.

"You came through the Annex. As a kid. They lose the papers, the Annex, it's not their fault, people come in with nothing, a child comes in with nothing and the line's gone. That's why there's no port. You came in with nothing and they raised you and you did the Rites." She was looking at Ivy and not seeing her, which Ivy recognized, because it was what a person looked like building a case. "That's how."

The Annex was the station on the Empire's border where it took in refugees from the Ashlan systems. Ivy had read about it. It was a good story. It explained the voice, and the suit, and the missing port, and it was the story Nell wanted. Only the Rites were true.

Ivy didn't say anything.

Nell took the silence for the answer she wanted. Hope spread across her face, sudden and unguarded. Ivy had seen that expression across interview tables. She had never seen it from this side. Nell looked at the suit again, and at the hall, and at the chair at the far end with nobody in it.

"Then it's possible," she said, mostly to herself. She focused on Ivy again. "What's it like? Your San Francisco. Your bay."

Ivy could answer that.

"Fog," she said. "Most mornings. It comes in over the water in the afternoon and sits on the hills all night and burns off by ten, or doesn't. There's a bridge across the mouth of the bay, and it's the color of rust, on purpose, so you can see it in the fog. You hear horns off the water when you can't see anything. It's cold in the summer. Everybody who visits gets that wrong."

Nell listened like a person who was going to write it down later.

"A red bridge," she said.

"Rust. Orange. People call it red."

"I'm putting red," Nell said, and then, as if one landmark had reminded her of the other, "Come and see ours. You have to see ours." She had Ivy's arm again, the ordinary way this time, above the elbow, and was walking her along the channel toward the sunlit end of the hall. "They put it by the water. We asked for it to be in the middle and the gardeners said no, it wants the light off the water, and they were right, look at it."

Ivy knew which one it was before they got there.

It stood alone in a bed near the channel, in full sun, with a trunk like twisted rope and leaves that were grey underneath and green on top. It had been on her short list since her first week in the hall. She had recognized it as an olive as easily as she would have recognized a eucalyptus back home. She had been walking past it for years without asking whose gift it was.

"From the holds," Nell said. "The seed came with us. Somebody kept it in their clothes for the whole crossing, nobody knows who, and it came up in the first settlement, and every tree we have is from that one. It's the only thing that came with us. That's ours. That's all of ours." She looked from the tree to Ivy.

Ivy kept her eyes on the olive and said nothing. Nell watched her while the sun came down through the skylight onto the grey leaves and the water went by at their feet.

"There," Nell said softly. "See. I knew it."

That evening, Ivy read the records on a screen.

The suit would have given them to her as memory, so that she'd have known the rolls the way she knew her own badge number, without the sense of ever having learned them. She didn't want that. She went to the room off the Rioghan's residence where she kept her old San Francisco cases, sat at the terminal, and asked for the transport rolls of the Ashlan Commonwealth. The screen filled.

They were manifests. Seeing the names arranged in columns was different.

The Empire had authenticated its copies long ago, when Imperial ships first took in people fleeing the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth demanded them back. A venture's name headed each roll. Beneath it ran one line per person: a name as the venture had heard it, a place of departure, and a date in the venture's own reckoning. Ivy did not recognize the heading on the final column and looked it up. It meant price. She closed the lookup, opened it again, and left it on the screen.

She found the third venture's roll and then the port. Crispus, of Ostia was there, listed as a man. Beneath his entry were two more lines with the same port and no name. When Ivy understood what the blanks meant, she sat with her hands flat on the desk for a while.

She read the petition next. It sat beside the rolls and had been authenticated the same way. The people on the rolls and their descendants had told the Commonwealth that they would not be owned. The record said one of the people on the rolls had written it. Ivy couldn't read the language, so the screen translated it for her. She read it twice. It read like a verdict.

The count was a range. The ventures had kept their own books. The records were incomplete, and some of the books had burned with the Commonwealth. Nobody would ever know the number. Under the range, the record gave its status: Unresolved. Ivy had closed files with that word on them.

She pushed the screen back, pulled a pad and a pen across the desk, and worked the problem the only way she knew how.

First the case as the record held it. She made herself write it out in order, the way she would have written it for a prosecutor who knew nothing.

In 1940, by Ivy's calendar, Imperial explorers had found her world and left a monitor in the system. At first the Empire had no reason to connect it to the humans of Ashlan space. Five years later, the monitor began recording nuclear detonations. They continued after the war as weapons tests. Their repetition brought the Empire back for a closer look. Earth's human history reached farther into the past than any human record in Ashlan space. The transport rolls, route fragments, and genetic records confirmed the rest: every place of departure in the rolls belonged to the world Ivy called Earth.

The descendants of the people named in those rolls now lived as citizens across the states that had replaced the Commonwealth. They had an Ashlan name for their ancestral world and records of the ports their families had left. They did not know where it was.

The Empire did. The Rioghan had chosen the course she judged least harmful: prepare Earth for contact without revealing the Empire until its people could survive that contact and choose what came after. The operation worked through companies and clinics and television, over generations. Its end was open contact and the choice of whether to seek membership. Ivy had been a homicide detective in San Francisco when one of the Rioghan's people turned out to be the Rioghan.

Part of preparing Earth was keeping everyone else away from it. The Empire kept a ring of sensors and patrol ships around Earth's system, farther out than anything on Earth could see, and turned back whatever came near: traders, probes, anyone. That was the perimeter.

Earth's location was classified inside the Empire and appeared on no chart the Empire shared. The silence covered the successor states and the humans who lived among them, whom the Empire's files called the diaspora. The Starborn Assembly had set the perimeter by a standing order called the Mandate and had renewed it every few years since. In the same order it had entered that the diaspora was being kept from its ancestral world without its consent, and had called that an injury of the Empire's own making.

All of it was on the record. She'd read that last sentence when she started on the operation's files, and it had been only a sentence then.

Then what the record didn't have, beginning with Nell's face.

She started with the question she always asked: who had agreed to this? Earth had not agreed to the path being laid for it, and the diaspora had not agreed to be kept from it. Her job was to catch plans that made people pay costs they had never agreed to. She had been reading the operation's files since she'd arrived and had never once pulled this one, because there hadn't been a case, and because she hadn't wanted to. She admitted that and went on.

Then she tried to beat it.

Tell them. She ran it the way it would actually travel, starting with Nell, because Nell was the one who'd carry it home. Tell the mission's second, who tells the mission, who tells the ancestry associations. The associations kept the rolls and matched families to them; that was what they were for. Once the mission knew, the information would not stay inside it. Millions of people across a dozen states, every one of them with a cousin. A week. Then the region knows that the Empire has found a living world of humans and will not say where. Every chart-house in former Commonwealth space starts looking. Government fleets, prospectors, pirates, and families looking for home all start moving. The perimeter could stop any one ship. It would have to stop all of them, forever, and every patrol committed to Earth would be unavailable when somebody else called for help. One missed ship or one signal sent ahead would be enough.

The silence kept Earth off the map of everyone Nell's people lived among. Nell's people paid for it because they were the ones with the claim. The argument was sound. Ivy had taken arguments like it apart before, whenever a plan put the risk onto people who had never agreed to carry it. She hated this one and still could not disprove it.

Tell them less. Found, alive, not yet. The result was the same within a week; only the first sentence was kinder. Tell the associations in confidence. They could not keep this secret. Tell one government. Which one, why would it keep the secret, and what would it want in return? She wrote down each answer and stopped wanting to write them.

By the end, she had one suspicion she couldn't prove: nobody had ever sat down and tried to design a way through. The perimeter was hard work, but it was work the Empire already knew how to do. Disclosure needed a plan that could survive one failure without ruining Earth. Nell's people had kept better books than anyone and waited.

She also had to account for what she'd done in the hall. She had told Nell the truth: fog, a bridge, horns off the water. Without the one fact Ivy couldn't give her, Nell had no way to connect those details to a real place. She had walked away with true particulars and no way to turn them into a place. Ivy had thought she was being kind. The Empire's record called what it did to Nell's people an injury, in plain words, on a page Nell's people would never see. Ivy had done the same thing in the hall, and nobody had asked her to.

Her title made her a member of the Assembly, though she had never intended to use it. That night she opened the Assembly's record of the Mandate. It held the first setting, every renewal, and the reasoning recorded with each.

She had expected to find that nobody had thought about it.

They had thought about it. A committee of the Assembly had prepared the Mandate at its first setting and at every renewal since, and each time its members had modeled full disclosure, partial disclosure, a confidential telling, and disclosure to a single government. They had modeled two paths she hadn't thought of: a staged release through the border world of Adelon, and a route offered to one escorted delegation. The delegation failed at both ends. Somebody had to choose the delegates, which meant telling a government or the associations what there was to send them to. And the delegates would come home knowing the one thing that mattered, that Earth was alive and could be reached, and the old venture charts still sitting in a few archives would become a search instead of a curiosity. Every path spread the news of Earth through the region within a week and placed first contact in the hands of a foreign government or private crew. The cost was recorded in plain language: the diaspora was denied an ancestral world and excluded from the decisions about it. The Empire listed it as an injury it had caused. The record also preserved what members had felt during deliberation. Many members had believed the exclusion was wrong and deferred to the models when they voted.

It was thorough, which was worse. She had come looking for negligence she could put in front of the Rioghan. Instead she found fifty years of careful work that had reached the same answer she had.

No human who had grown up on Earth appeared anywhere in it. For most of that time, there had been no one to ask. Ivy had been available for the last few years, and nobody had asked her.

It was late when Ivy went down to the kitchen. The garden door stood open to the night air.

Aleena was there. She was Syliri, and the Rioghan, and Ivy's partner. They had met years earlier in San Francisco, when Aleena was pretending to be an executive and Ivy was a detective who noticed. She had tea going, the citrus kind, which meant she had been in session and hadn't fully come out of it. She stood at the counter with her back to the door, doing something to a lemon that didn't need doing. Her suit had settled into soft indoor clothes. Her hair was down. Ivy could usually feel other people at the edge of Aleena's attention, the advisers who sat with her when she worked. Tonight nobody was there but Aleena.

Aleena spoke without looking up from the lemon. "I was having thoughts. You got stared at."

"I got stared at."

"I felt it from the other end of the palace. You went very still." She set the knife down. "I didn't look. I wanted to, and I didn't."

She could have. Ivy's mind was open to her, and had been for years, and she had left it alone.

"I know you didn't." Ivy came in and leaned on the table. "I read it."

"I know."

"All of it. The rolls. The petition. I read the deliberation. Every renewal."

"I know," Aleena said again, and turned around. Her ears lay flat. "Tell me."

"I can't beat it."

Aleena waited.

"I tried. I ran every way there is to tell them and every way ends on Earth with somebody's ship in orbit that isn't yours. I know what we'd do down there. I'd have been the one answering the phone. So I can't beat it, and I'm not going to stand in your kitchen and pretend I can." She had meant to stop there. "The part I can beat is the part where you had someone to ask and didn't."

"Hmm."

"Your law says don't answer suffering by making it worse. Fine. But you didn't only keep others away. You set a road for Earth: contact with the Empire, and maybe membership. No human who grew up on Earth appears anywhere in the record. I've been here for years. I advise the operation. It's been renewed since I got here, and you never asked me. Not once, not on the record."

The water gates changed pitch somewhere below the terrace, sending the night flow down toward the lower gardens, and the sound came in through the door.

"No," Aleena said. "I didn't."

"Why?"

"Because you are one person. Asking you to consent for Earth would have been dishonest. Asking you to carry its refusal would have been cruel."

"Those are reasons not to call my answer Earth's. They aren't reasons not to ask."

"No."

Her voice dropped.

"The silence is not where the operation ends. Contact is. Membership too, if Earth wants it. I want them to reach that choice alive and still able to make it. One failure at the perimeter would be enough, and nothing I did afterward could put Earth back where it was."

She picked up the cup and didn't drink.

"Earth did not consent to the path I chose for it," she said. "That is an injury too. Non-Abandonment would not let me stand aside while they moved toward collapse. The Doctrine would not let me answer by exposing them to contact they could not survive. Of the paths I could find, this one did the least harm and left them the most choice."

She put the cup back on the counter.

"The diaspora's exclusion is another injury. I am responsible for it. I made sure it is on the record, because the reason for the silence does not make the injury disappear. If I could make disclosure safe now, I would do it."

"You should have asked me."

"Yes."

"I can't tell them that we've found Earth."

"I know."

"You can carry their claim into the deliberation."

Ivy didn't move.

"The Mandate comes up for renewal in the spring. Declare an interest and join the committee that prepares it. Every time they enter the cost, make them look at you while they do it. Bring Nell's name with you. You'd be very good at it. They'd hate it and they'd thank you." Aleena exhaled. "That was almost a speech."

"You stopped."

"I stopped."

Ivy looked at the lamp on the table, then through the open door into the dark.

"Her name is Nell Crispin," she said. "She's from Corbin. She thought she was the first one here. She did twelve years at a registry finding people's lines and she couldn't find mine, and she decided I was a refugee's kid you'd raised, and I let her. She's going to write it home. They're going to hang a flag on it. The first human Princess. One of theirs."

Aleena said nothing.

"I can account for it," Ivy said. "All of it. Don't ask me to call it fine."

"I won't."

Aleena came around the table without touching Ivy and tilted her head to offer the nearer ear.

Ivy met her eyes. "Later."

In the morning Ivy sat at the kitchen table with the garden door open and declared an interest in the committee that would take up the Mandate in the spring. Any Assembly member could do it, and nobody had to approve her. Her name was in the record now. When the time came, whatever she felt during the deliberation would remain there whether the vote reflected it or not.

Then she opened the cheap notebook she'd brought down from the room off the residence. It was where things went when they got too heavy to carry in her head. She found the next clean page and wrote the name.

Nell Crispin. Corbin. Crispus, of Ostia.