“Thank you,” Jin said, and the back of his neck blushed.
“And if you were a member of my congregation, I’d have you call me Pastor Anna. Buddhist?”
“Only when I’m at my grandmother’s house,” Jin said with a wink. “The rest of the time I’m a navy man.”
“Is that a religion now?” Anna asked with a laugh.
“The navy thinks so.”
“Okay.” She laughed again. “So why don’t you just call me Anna?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jin said. He stopped at a gray door marked OQ 297-11 and handed her a small metal card. “This is your room. Just having the card on you unlocks the door. It will stay locked when you’re inside unless you press the yellow button on the wall panel.”
“Sounds very safe,” Anna said, taking the key from Jin and shaking his hand.
“This is the battleship Thomas Prince, ma’am. It’s the safest place in the solar system.”
Her stateroom was three meters wide by four meters long. Luxurious by navy standards, normal for a poor Europan, coffinlike to an Earther. Anna felt a brief moment of vertigo as the two different Annas she’d been reacted to the space in three different ways. She’d felt the same sense of disconnection when she’d first boarded the Prince and felt the full gravity pressing her down. The Earther she’d been most of her life felt euphoric as, for the first time in years, her weight felt right. The Europan in her just felt tired, drained by the excessive pull on her bones.
She wondered how long it would take Nono to get her Earth legs back. How long it would take before Nami could walk there. They were both spending the entire trip back pumped full of muscle and bone growth stimulators, but drugs can only take a person so far. There would still be the agonizing weeks or months as their bodies adapted to the new gravity. Anna could almost see little Nami struggling to get up onto her hands and knees like she did on Europa. Could almost hear her cries of frustration while she built up the strength to move on her own again. She was such a determined little thing. It would infuriate her to lose the hard-won physical skills she’d developed over the last two years.
Thinking about it made Anna’s chest ache, just behind her breastbone.
She tapped the shiny black surface of the console in her room, and the room’s terminal came on. She spent a moment learning the user interface. It was limited to browsing the ship’s library and to sending and receiving text or audio/video messages.
She tapped the button to record a message and said, “Hi Nono, hi Nami!” She waved at the camera. “I’m on the ship, and we’re on our way. I—” She stopped and looked around the room, at the sterile gray walls and spartan bed. She grabbed a pillow off of it and turned back to the camera. “I miss you both already.” She hugged the pillow to her chest, tight. “This is you. This is both of you.”
She turned the recording off before she got teary. She was washing her face when the console buzzed a new-message alert. Even though it didn’t seem possible Nami could have gotten the message and replied already, her heart gave a little leap. She rushed over and opened the message. It was a simple text message reminding her of the VIP “meet and greet” in the officers’ mess at 1900 hours. The clock said it was currently 1300.
Anna tapped the button to RSVP to the event and then climbed under the covers of her bed with her clothes on and cried herself to sleep.
“Reverend Doctor Volovodov,” a booming male voice said as soon as she walked into the officers’ mess.
The room was laid out for a party, with tables covered in food ringing the room, and a hundred or more people talking in loose clumps in the center. In one corner, an ad hoc bar with four bartenders was doing brisk business. A tall, dark-skinned man with perfectly coiffed white hair and an immaculate gray suit walked out of the crowd like Venus rising from the waves. Anna wondered how he managed the effect. He reached out and took her hand with his. “I’m so happy to have you with us. I’ve heard so much about the powerful work you’re doing on Europa, and I don’t see how the Methodist World Council could have chosen anyone else for this important trip.”
Anna shook his hand, then carefully extricated herself from his grasp. Doctor Hector Cortez, Father Hank on his live streamcasts that went out to over a hundred million people each week, and close personal friend and spiritual advisor to the secretary-general himself. She couldn’t imagine how he knew anything about her. Her tiny congregation of less than a hundred people on Europa wouldn’t even be a rounding error to his solar system–wide audience. She found herself caught between feeling flattered, uncomfortable, and vaguely suspicious.
“Doctor Cortez,” Anna said. “So nice to meet you. I’ve seen your show before, of course.”
“Of course,” he said, smiling vaguely and already looking around the room for someone else to talk to. She had the sense that he’d come to greet her less out of the pleasure of her arrival than as a chance to extricate himself from whatever conversation he’d been having before, and she didn’t know whether to be relieved or insulted. She settled on amused.
Like a smaller object dragged into some larger gravity well, an elderly man in formal Roman Catholic garb pulled away from the central crowd and drifted in Doctor Cortez’s direction.
She started to introduce herself when Doctor Cortez cut in with that booming voice and said, “Father Michel. Say hello to my friend Reverend Doctor Annushka Volovodov, a worker for God’s glory with the Europa congregation of Methodists.”
“Reverend Volovodov,” the Catholic man said. “I’m Father Michel, with the Archdiocese of Rome.”
“Oh, very nice to meet—” Anna started.
“Don’t let him fool you with that humble old country priest act,” Cortez boomed over the top of her. “He’s a bishop on the short list for cardinal.”
“Congratulations,” Anna said.
“Oh, it’s nothing. All exaggeration and smoke.” The old man beamed. “Nothing will happen until it fits with God’s plan.”
“You wouldn’t be here if that were true,” Cortez said.
The bishop chuckled.
A woman in an expensive blue dress followed one of the uniformed waiters with his tray of champagne. She and Father Michel reached for a glass at the same moment. Anna smiled a no at the offered champagne, and the waiter vanished into the crowd at the center of the room.