The Stars Blue Yonder (24 page)

“Where's here?”

“Sydney, New South Wales,” he said.

She stared at him. “Sydney. As in Earth?”

“And it's the year 1855,” Osherman added. “January. Summertime in this part of the world. And damn hot.”

She didn't believe any of it. “How did we get here?”

“What do you remember?”

Bile rose up in her throat. The next thing she knew, she was vomiting into a ceramic pot that Osherman held for her. When she finally sagged back against the pillows, he held a wet cloth to her forehead.

“You've been sick,” he said. “But you're getting better.”

Slowly her senses came back to her. She remembered the Roon ambush at Kultana and seeing the carrier open fire—first at the Fleet, then
at Myell's fragile little shuttle. She had screamed at that. In the terrifying moments afterward she seen the
Confident
on fire, the
Melbourne
splitting amidships. Then nothing.

Myell wasn't dead. Couldn't be dead. Not now, not then. She squinted at the room and at the open windows, took a deep breath. The sky outside was blue, and the air was sweltering.

“You're talking,” she repeated, as if he didn't realize how momentous that was.

“I've had practice.” He stood up and paced to the window. His leather shoes made the wooden floorboards squeak. “I've been here about eight months. Homer brought me here. I was in the infirmary on the
Confident
when he showed up and introduced himself. He said he was taking me away ‘for safekeeping.' Next thing I knew, we were here. I haven't seen him since, not until yesterday, when he brought you.”

“But we were on the
Confident
just a little while ago.”

“It's been eight months for me,” he said. “Alone here, with no idea what happened to you or anyone else.”

Jodenny eased back on the pillows. They smelled strange, and she suspected they were stuffed with real feathers. She tried to imagine how lonely he must have been, how isolated, but her brain was still busy with denial. “Whose house is this?”

“Lady Elizabeth Scott.”

“Say that again.”

He peered out the windows at the street. “Lady Elizabeth Scott. Your great-great-great-something-grandmother, according to Homer. She's out shopping with her friends right now, but you'll meet her later. She doesn't know you're her whatever-granddaughter, of course. She thinks you're my wife. Are you hungry?”

Jodenny stared at him.

The tips of his ears blushed.

“This is the nineteenth century,” he said defensively. “We're in the respectable house of an English noblewoman. I couldn't very well tell her you're a lieutenant in Team Space.”

“Lieutenant commander,” Jodenny said. Might as well set the record straight.

He grimaced.

She studied the room further. “Homer didn't say anything about Terry?”

“No. I swear. Where did you last see him?”

“He was in a birdie,” she said. “The Roon attacked.”

Silence for a moment. Osherman said, “Well, then. How about something to eat?”

“Sure.” Jodenny heard the brittleness in her own voice but couldn't stop it. “We're hundreds of years in the past and I'm starving. Coffee and pancakes?”

“I can do tea and biscuits. Maybe some eggs.”

He went out the door, down a hall, then down some stairs. She heard the solid
thump-thump
of his retreat. Left alone, she swung her feet to the floor, tested her weight, and looked for a bathroom. She spied only a blue-and-white chamber pot.

“Homer, I'm going to kill you,” she said.

She waddled into the hallway, which was wallpapered with a pink-and-gray floral motif. Sunlight poured through a lace-curtained window. Three ajar doors led into dim bedrooms but no rooms with indoor plumbing. From downstairs she heard murmuring voices and the sound of water being poured. Standing on the landing above the stairs, clad only in the nightshirt with her bare feet on a handmade rug, she felt like an eavesdropper on a conversation she couldn't quite hear.

Sydney, 1855.

By the time Osherman returned, Jodenny had used the pot and was studying the cobblestoned street below. The houses along the narrow, sloping street were small mansions of sandstone brick and wood, congruent with the era. There were no power or telephone lines, or signs of any modern technology. The smell of sewage was strong in the air, and some kind of meat was burning nearby. How did people live like this? She was afraid to find out.

“The sky's blue,” she said, gloomily. The skies over Earth were no longer that color, not since the Debasement. “And it smells foul.”

“You get used to it.” He put a breakfast tray down on a side table. “Come eat.”

She wasn't very hungry, but Junior needed fuel to grow. Some warm
porridge tasted better than she thought it would, and there was toast with jam on it, and some kind of protein strip.

“Bacon,” he said.

Jodenny paused. “Pig bacon?”

He nodded.

She put it aside. The tea was lukewarm, which was a blessing. She didn't need hot liquids. Outside, the sound of hoofs clip-clopped on stone and a man shouted out something in a language she didn't understand.

“Australia,” she said.

He nodded again. “About seventy years since the first convicts were transported here from England. About fifteen years since they stopped sending them to Sydney. Five years since they struck gold in the mountains. It's the frontier, Jodenny. Edge of a whole nation beginning to rise up.”

She thought he was being very careful with her, as if she would fall to pieces with one inopportune word. It annoyed her to be treated like spun glass. But she wasn't so annoyed that she was going to call him on it. It was too much of a relief to hear him talking, and she was still trying to ignore the very real possibility that Myell was dead.

“Homer said he could only appear to his direct ancestors,” she said. “But you talked to him? You saw him?”

“Yes. Doesn't mean he's honest or reliable. Do you want to come downstairs? See what it's like here in 1855?”

“No.”

He looked surprised. “Why not?”

Jodenny cupped her belly. “Cholera. Tuberculosis. Lockjaw. God knows what else is out there. Doesn't smell like they've got much for sewers and I bet the medical care is just as shitty, pun intended. You think I'm going out there with junior? I'm staying right here.”

Osherman blinked. “Your immunizations are all up to date. We've got each other, and we've each had medical training.”

“Do you have any penicillin on you? Any antibiotics? A bone-knitter, any kind of scanner whatsoever? Pregnant women can get eclampsia, Sam. My blood pressure could soar through the roof and I could have a stroke. I could get gestational diabetes. Or a fistula. Do
you know what a fistula is? When a woman is in labor too long, her bladder—”

He held up a hand to forestall her. “You can't stay in this house forever, Jodenny. The world is dangerous but it's our world now.”

“It's not mine.” She cupped junior. “Terry's alive somewhere. If Homer saved us, he could have saved him. Or maybe the blue ouroboros did—it was on the
Confident
, and she was hit first. It could have broken free. But no matter where he is, what he's doing, he's not going to leave me here. He'll find both of us, rescue us.”

Osherman stroked his mustache. “You really think so?”

“Yes. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next month, maybe a year from now, but he'll come. You know he will.”

He said nothing.

She lifted the hem of her nightshift. “But in the meantime, you could at least find me something better to wear.”

After all, nineteenth-century recluse or not, she wasn't going to spend every day waiting for Myell in her underwear.

The dress was a catastrophe of lace and silk, with narrow sleeves and a tight-fitting bodice that wasn't going to fit around Jodenny's pregnancy-enhanced breasts. She wasn't even going to address the corset and petticoats under the full skirt.

“Maybe you should talk to the girls,” Osherman said, fleeing her dismay.

The “girls” were the two housekeepers of the residence. They were both tall and skinny, with dark hair, missing teeth, and freckled faces worn down from hard work. Lilly was the older sister, perhaps Jodenny's own age or so. Sarah, whose nose had been broken sometime in the past and was now unfortunately crooked, was barely out of her teens. Both had thick accents that Jodenny found hard to understand—old English, maybe, or whatever passed for the local dialect in a city jammed full of immigrants from across the world who'd come in search of mountain gold.

She supposed she was in turn hard for them to understand, but she was very clear about the dress.

“What do pregnant women wear around here?” she demanded. “Surely not corsets and hoops!”

Lilly gave her a curious look. “What's do they wear back where you come from, ma'am?”

Sarah added, “The Captain, he said you'd had a knock on the head and might be a bit confused.”

“The Captain?” Jodenny asked. “Who's the Captain?”

Lilly looked aghast. “You poor thing!”

Sarah wiped her hand across her crooked nose. “You don't remember your own husband! Here he's been, sitting by your beside so worried and weeping.”

Jodenny gazed down at her wedding ring. Myell's ring. “What's he a captain of?”

“The army, of course,” Lilly said. “Retired early from service to the Queen. Very brave man, he is. Now in the trade business.”

Osherman had obviously been busy spinning tall tales. Jodenny was afraid to ask anything more. Let them believe he was a general, for all she cared.

“Let's pretend I remember nothing about modern fashion,” she said, almost choking on the word
modern
. “If you were me, what would you be wearing?”

“If I were a fine lady,” Lilly mused, “I'd have some of that nice blue cotton from Mr. Johnson's shop on George Street.”

“I'd have a new summer hat and some white gloves,” Sarah said wistfully.

“And shoes with pointy toes,” Lilly added.

Jodenny sighed. It was going to be a long century.

The two sisters went off to brainstorm alternative clothing arrangements and came back a half hour later with a voluminous blue dress with ample room in the bodice and more than enough room for Junior. They pinned alterations in place, took the dress away for some first aid with needle and thread, and returned an hour later for a second fitting.

“Much better,” Lilly said, as Jodenny considered herself in a hand mirror. A Team Space uniform it was not.

Sarah beamed. “And hardly at all out of date. I think Her Ladyship will be happy.”

“Is this one of her dresses?” Jodenny asked.

“Was,” Lilly said. “It was supposed to go to the charity for the old transport girls.”

“The what?”

“Oh, you really did get a conk on the head,” Sarah said.

Lilly said, as if talking to a child, “You know, transport. From England. The convicts. They used to send them by the shipload.”

Jodenny had been born and raised on Fortune. Australia's history was a dim, distant chapter in a book she hadn't opened in years. She knew that England had spent several decades shipping off its convicts and other unwanted denizens to Australia, but surely that was over by now?

“Are you convicts?” she asked.

“Of course not!” Lilly said.

“England doesn't send them to New South Wales anymore,” Sarah said. “Just out West. Lilly and I and our eight sisters, we were all born here.”

Jodenny exclaimed, “Eight!”

Sarah added, “They didn't all live. My dad, he was free first. He got mum at the Female Factory in Parramatta.”

Jodenny tried to convince herself that Sarah had not just used the words
female
and
factory
in the same sentence, but horror must have shown on her face.

“That's enough,” Lilly said pointedly. She snatched up her sewing basket. “We've lunch to go make for Lady Scott, if that's all you'll be needing.”

Lilly swept off. Sarah curtsied and followed hastily. Jodenny wanted to call out an apology but the enormity of the situation—and the dress, which was heavier than expected—made her flop down in a side chair and cover her face with both hands.

She was a trained military officer—or had been, once—but now she was something else entirely. A castaway, maybe. A prisoner. A pregnant woman whose real husband was missing and whose fake husband was, until recent memory, a psychologically unbalanced mute severely traumatized by his captivity with the Roon.

A knock on the door brought her around to face Osherman.

“Nice dress,” he said.

She snorted. “You want to wear it?”

“I'm satisfied with what I've got,” he said. “Come downstairs? I'll show you the house.”

Jodenny hesitated.

“You won't get leprosy going downstairs,” he promised.

Reluctantly she followed him. She was no expert on Victorian architecture but the house was nicely done, with three bedrooms for the residents and a tiny one for the housekeepers. Everything smelled like wax and wood smoke and perfume. The kitchen had an enormous hearth, and the table in the dining room was a carved slab of mahogany imported from England along with most of the other furnishings. The hardwood floors were spotlessly clean. All of the wood in the staircase, wainscoting, and doorways had been carved by hand.

In the front parlor hung a large oil painting of Lord Scott, he of the stern countenance and steely eyes. His domain included an upright piano, Oriental rugs and small sofas, pastoral landscapes of the English countryside, and white curtains that billowed in the harbor breeze.

“Admiral Lord Scott,” Osherman said. “Dead twenty years ago in England. The week after the funeral, Lady Scott packed up her things and sailed here to start all over again. Left all her children and grandchildren behind, how's that for unsentimental?”