In the Company of Others Read Free

This is Pardell.”
    â€œOh.” Gabby eyed her husband with some alarm. He was neither a secretive nor a cunning man, traits she’d always appreciated. “Your grandparents must have had more credits once, then.”
    â€œNo.” Jer wiped his palms on his thighs before looking at her sideways. “Naming privilege.”
    After five years , Gabby thought, he finally surprises me. “You’ve been holding out on me, Jer. You didn’t tell me your family was famous.”
    â€œMy grandmother was a terraform engineer. She was first to live on Pardell—that gave her naming privilege. My father was born here.”
    Gabby felt a deep glow of rightness. With the exception of Earth, family members were almost never born on the same world. It made all their searching worthwhile. Then a worry trickled through her mind, an inconsistency. “Why didn’t we come here first? Why didn’t you tell me?”
    â€œMy family doesn’t talk about my grandmother.” Jer didn’t met her eyes. “And I didn’t know about this world until I looked in the old records. I thought my dad had wiped her tapes, but they were in the database. I don’t know if he missed these or somehow wanted me to find them one day.”
    â€œI’d think your father would have been proud of her. Terraforming—”
    â€œGabby ...” Jer looked at his wife with a confused sadness. “They fought before I was born. He refused to see her again—even changed our family name. Easy enough, since by then we were living on the ’Mate and hauling freight to whatever station was being built. So I never met her or knew she was alive back then. Mom told me about her, after my dad passed away. Turned out Grandma was about as big a celebrity as they come. Really famous. Mom didn’t want me to find out from a stranger.”
    All her instincts said to let him stop there, that she really didn’t want to know, but Gabby prodded: “Who was she, Jer?”
    â€œSusan Witts. My dad was born Raymond Alexander Witts-Pardell.”
    â€œ The Susan Witts . . . ?” Gabby felt her face harden into fierce lines, but couldn’t help that or the way her voice rose. “Susan Witts infected the terraformed worlds with the Quill! All those people, hundreds of thousands trapped on the stations—it’s her fault we’ve no place to go! It’s her fault old Mother Earth won’t take any of us back. Do you know how many curse her name every night?”
    â€œThey can curse her all they want—she’s hardly going to notice. Using her shuttle to give Titan a new crater wasn’t exactly an inconspicuous suicide, was it?” He paused. “Susan Witts was never part of my life, Gabby. I didn’t see any reason to make her part of ours. Maybe I’d have told you, once we’d started living on a world she’d helped prepare for us. But then the Quill changed all that. She couldn’t have known what they’d do, what would happen to all of us, out here. It didn’t matter—I couldn’t tell you whose grandson I was after that.” His defense seemed oddly automatic, as if used to himself so often he no longer heard the words.
    An abrupt shift by the baby under her ribs made Gabby swallow what she would have said. It gave her time to look at Jer, to see the new misery aging a face already drawn with stress. A face she knew better than her own by now. “Damn you, Jer,” she said, but more kindly. “This is a great time to bring skeletons out of stowage. Anything else I should know before I give birth to your baby? A sister prone to mass murder? Or maybe a great-uncle who believes the universe is carried on the back of a shellfish?”
    Jer leaned over to her, burrowing his face past the collar of her coveralls into the warm softness of her neck. His nose was cold. Muffled, he said, “We’ll be all right,