The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord Read Free Book Online

Delarua, at one stage you
     suggested that I had complicated your life by asking for you to be assigned to this
     mission. Is it now the case that you are beginning to enjoy the complications?”
    “That’s an almost Cygnian streak of smug-bastardness you’re displaying there, Dllenahkh,”
     I warned with a small, rueful grin of acknowledgment.
    He straightened slightly, and his eyebrows rose by a fraction at the sly insult. Then
     the train pulled out and we were off to start our grand adventure, around the world
     in one Standard year.
    Zero hour plus eleven months twenty-eight days
    Standard Time was invented by Sadiri pilots. Most Sadiri procedures and quantification
     followed straight lines and linear progressions, created for the convenience of the
     ten-fingered. But Time … Time belonged to a higher realm. It could not be carried
     in human hands, not while it constantly carried human minds. It was all circles, wheels
     within wheels, a Standard year of three hundred sixty Standard days coiled up in twelve
     months, which in turn were composed of the small whirlings of twelve hours day and
     twelve hours night, tiny spinning minutes and seconds, ever-cycling breaths and blinks
     and beats.
    To be described as having a pilot’s mind was both curse and compliment; it could mean
     being unable to tell the difference between prophecy, memory, and mere déjà vu.
    Dllenahkh knew that it was almost one Standard year since the destruction of his home
     and his life. He knew it not like a memory but like the vague dread of a possible
     death, a death yet to come. He left the thought and the feeling while he could still
     breathe and focused instead on the present. The train vibrated gently, its windows
     filled with the rich black of a moonless night in deep country. Delarua had already
     retired to the sleeping car, leaving them to continue their work. Dllenahkh looked
     into the soothing darkness, then made himself examine his handheld screen once again.
     The ambient light was too dim and the screen overbright, but perhaps, he admitted,
     that was notwhere the fault lay. The minute tension around his eyes might be caused by the fact
     that he was staring too intently at the reports and briefs, as if willing them to
     create the world he wanted to exist.
    Behind closed doors, the council had wrangled over the mission proposal with a pettiness
     and lack of direction to rival the callow youths they claimed to represent and govern.
     Then again, from what he had heard and seen, the Government of New Sadira was hardly
     doing any better, something that he found reassuring and dismaying in equal measure.
     If the Cygnian Government’s response had been the least bit lukewarm, the mission
     would have been dropped for good, but they had been enthusiastic, offering specialists,
     funding, and resources until the project gathered unstoppable momentum and even the
     most cynical councillors softened.
    Hope: that was the key. They were all clutching at straws, despairing and drowning,
     then clutching at a fresh set of straws. It was exhausting. It was all they had. Naraldi
     said it was important to keep moving forward—yes, forward, one clutched straw at a
     time. Highly ironic advice, considering, but useful nonetheless and something to hold
     on to now that Naraldi was off on his own mission, beyond the reach of any comm or
     courier. His last words, perhaps? No, never that. He expected that Naraldi would have
     a safe journey and a safe return. What was one more straw to add to all the rest?
    “First Officer Delarua is not what I expected,” Joral mused.
    Dllenahkh kept his head bent over the mission schedule. Sometimes it was best not
     to engage when Joral indulged in his habit of thinking aloud.
    “She kissed me.”
    Dllenahkh glanced up at the young man. As a statement itwas innocuous, but Joral’s face held that anxiously pondering expression he used whenever
     women were being discussed.
    “She is too old