The ferry from Maund orbital to the surface ran four times a day when the weather allowed and no times at all when it didn’t. The morning ferry had been cancelled for weather. This meant the afternoon ferry carried the morning’s passengers too, and the terminal at the orbital end held them all: ninety-odd people in a hall built for forty, and the storm that had cancelled the morning ferry sat over the groundside port and slowed the afternoon one to a crawl.
Bette had been in the hall since six. She and Renna had come up on the cargo shuttle the night before to collect a shipment of drive parts — two hours’ work at the depot, done by eight — and had planned to be home on the coast by noon. The weather had disagreed. It was now four in the afternoon, and the ferry was boarding, and the hall had emptied of everything except people and the things people leave.
The trouble was the water. The terminal’s facilities were in the ring corridor, past the gate desk, and the gate desk had been closing the corridor in stages all day — the ferry was overweight, the ferry was understaffed, the ferry would not board anyone until the manifest was re-counted. Twice Bette had gone back through for the facilities and been let back in with a look. The third time the desk clerk told her the corridor was closed until boarding. She was forty-one years old and she had argued with him, quietly, and lost, quietly, and come back to the bench by the pillar where Renna sat with their manifests and both their coats.
She had been nursing a fullness since noon that she had stopped calling minor around two. By three it had a schedule: a slow deep heaviness that kept its own time, and between the heavinesses a settled ache, low, that made sitting still a job she was doing with her whole abdomen. She had learned the shape of it the way you learn a strain — which angles cost, which cost nothing, how far forward she could lean before the weight shifted and announced what it weighed.
“You’re doing the leg thing,” Renna said, not looking up from the manifest.
“I’m not doing a leg thing.”
“You’ve crossed them four times since I counted.”
Bette uncrossed them. The uncrossing took effort now, actual effort, muscles she was borrowing from the job of holding. She crossed her ankles instead, lower, where it was quieter, and pressed her knees together under the coat, and read a poster on the far wall about Maund’s coastal restoration, which she had already read eleven times, and which took four minutes, and through all four minutes she did not move, because not moving was the whole trick. When a heaviness came she breathed high in her chest and let it pass through her like weather, and it passed, and the next one was already assembling.
The gate desk called boarding for the first two rows of the manifest. They were row six. Renna stood, gathered both coats, handed Bette hers. Bette stood, and the standing was a whole negotiation that her body conducted without her, and she won it, and walked.
The ferry was a wide-body descent glider, sixty passengers in the good rows, and the aisle to the facilities ran past every row of it. Bette counted the rows as she shuffled — eleven — and the shuffling was worse than standing had been, every half-step a small negotiation that she was no longer winning cleanly, the ache gone bright and total, her whole midsection one held thing. She had stopped breathing low. There was sweat at her hairline and under her coat, and the coat over her knees, and the aisle moved at the speed of ninety people finding their seats in a narrow tube, which was no speed at all.
She made it to row four. The woman in row three was stowing a bag overhead and the aisle stalled behind her, and the stall was six seconds, and that was the six seconds. There was no decision in it. Her body went ahead with what her dignity had refused to concede for six hours — a release so total and so physical that for one blind second it was only relief, hot and streaming and out of her control, before the rest of her caught up to where she was standing and who was there. It was loud in the way water is loud on a metal deck, which is completely. It ran down her stockings and pooled at her feet and kept going, her body emptying itself of every glass of terminal water she had drunk against her own judgment, and the relief and the horror arrived so close together that she could not have said which was which.
Nobody said anything. That was somehow the worst part, the shuffle continuing behind her, the woman in row three looking at her own hands, the noise going on for longer than she would have believed and then longer than that. Then it stopped, and Bette stood in the aisle of a full glider with her stockings dark to the ankle, and row three was four steps away, and she took the four steps and sat down in her assigned seat, which was by then a formality, and buckled the belt, and looked at the seatback in front of her, which had a safety card in a plastic sleeve, and read it.
Renna was in row six. There was no world in which the whole glider had not heard it.
The ferry pushed when it was full, and the descent took forty minutes through the storm, and Bette sat with her coat over her knees and read the safety card to the word SUPPLEMENTARY and back. When they were down and the aisle moved, she was the last one out of her row, and by the baggage rack Renna was waiting with both coats already on her arm and the manifest folded away, and she fell in beside her on the ramp without speaking, and they walked out into the rain.
The rain on the coast was the ordinary kind, straight down, warm. It soaked Bette’s clothes through and changed nothing, but it let her stand in it. Renna stood next to her under the terminal’s overhang with the coats over her arm and said, “Cargo’s on the late truck. I put our manifests on it. We can walk from here.”
They walked the coast road in the rain, the two of them, the way home from every run for eleven years, and Bette’s boots made a different sound than they had ever made, a squelch at each step that she could not hear over the rain and knew was there, and Renna matched her pace and talked about the drive parts, which were good parts, and the depot clerk, who was an idiot, and none of it required an answer.
At the door of Bette’s house, under the eave where the rain stopped, Renna handed her the coats and said, “Bin night’s Tuesday. I’ll take the liner cloth over to mine and wash it with the sail laundry, nobody looks at sail laundry.”
Bette took the coats. She had rehearsed several sentences on the walk and none of them survived the eave.
“It was a long hall,” Renna said. “And a longer ferry. I’d have gone on the ramp.” She said it the way she said the manifest numbers, and then she was walking off into the rain, and Bette stood under the eave with two coats and the door key already in her hand.