Babylon's Ashes (Expanse 6)
“Do you think Pa will take the job?” he asked. He sounded almost wistful.
“Yes, eventually,” Naomi said. And then, a moment later, “How long have you been planning that?”
“The idea of the union, or Pa in particular?”
“Pa.”
Jim shrugged. “It was pretty clear early on that having an Earther be the head of it wasn’t going to work. I thought Fred would be able to find someone. So I guess I started looking at her for it right around then. Consciously, anyway. She was kind of perfect, though. She broke with the Free Navy in order to help the Belt. No one else did that, or at least not as openly. And she won every fight she led her people into. I think the ones who need to take her seriously, will.”
Naomi sat on the edge of the crash couch. It shifted with the change in the center of their combined weight, moving Jim a few centimeters closer to her. He stretched out an arm as invitation, and she settled back into it. “Do you think she’ll enjoy it?”
“I don’t know. I’d hate it, but maybe she’s different enough from me she’ll find something to redeem the process. The important thing is I think she’ll be good at it. Plays to her strengths. At least I don’t know anyone who’s likely to do better.”
“I hope you’re right,” she said. “You really think you couldn’t have done it?”
“I was never an option. There’s too much history. Maybe an Earther can do it in a generation or three when things have been different for a while.”
Naomi laughed, moved her head to rest beside his. “By then something else will have happened.”
“Yeah,” Holden said. “That’s true. But in the short term, I really do think she’s the best one for the job. I’m just glad she was here. My second choice for the job would have been you.”
She sat up, looking into his eyes to see whether he was joking. A long way away, Amos laughed just loud enough for the echoes to reach her. Jim’s expression was somewhere between chagrin and amusement.
God, he’d been serious.
“You could have done it,” Holden said. “You’re smart. You’re a Belter. Your opposition to the Free Navy’s as good or better than Pa’s. You have a track record that Earth and Mars would have been comfortable with, and enough connection to the Belt to make you plausible to them.”
“You know I wouldn’t have done it, right?”
“No,” Jim said, and there was something almost like sorrow in his voice. “I know you wouldn’t have wanted to. I know you would have hated it. But you would have, if you had to. If there wasn’t someone else. Too many people would have needed you for you to turn them all away.”
She lay back down, considered the idea, and shuddered.
“I know, right?” Jim said. “And how are you doing?”
She took the hand of the arm she was lying across in hers, drew it gently around her like he was a blanket. He had asked her that every few days since the war ended. How was she doing? It sounded like an innocuous question, but it carried more than its own weight. She’d killed her old lover, her old friends. She wished with a longing as powerful as thirst that there had been a way to save her son. Jim wasn’t asking if she was all right so much as how bad was it. There was no good answer for that. I will carry this guilt and sadness for the rest of my life was just as true as I lost my son years ago. Her comfort was that she was still alive. That Jim was. And Amos and Alex. Bobbie and Clarissa.
She was as much a monster as Clarissa or Amos had ever been. She was someone who’d found a way to save her little chosen family when everything seemed lost. The two didn’t balance, but they existed together. Pain and relief. Sorrow and contentment. The evil and the redeeming could sit together in her heart, live together, and neither one take the edge off the other.
And Jim knew that. He didn't ask because he needed an answer. He asked because he needed her to know the answer mattered to him. That was all.
“I’m all right,” she said. The way she always did. Jim reached out his other hand and dimmed the lights. Naomi closed her eyes. They felt very comfortable that way. She could hear from Jim’s breath that he wasn’t asleep. That he was thinking about something.
She kept herself awake, just a little. Waited for him. Little flickers of dream danced in at the edge of her mind, and she lost track of her body every now and again.
“Do you think we should go out to the colonies?” he said. “It seems like maybe we ought to. I mean, we’ve been to Ilus. And if we can sort of blaze the trail? Make it normal? Maybe it’ll be easier for Pa to get more Belt ships to take the risk.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“Because the other thing we could do is stay here. There’s just a lot of work that’s going to need to happen here. Rebuilding. Beefing up Medina for when Duarte comes back. Because you know whatever he’s doing is going to be a problem eventually. I don’t know where we should go next.”
Naomi nodded. Jim rolled in closer to her. The warmth of his body and the smell of his skin were consoling.
“Let’s just stay here for a minute,” she said.
Epilogue: Anna
As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth’s fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one’s own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: “It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,” so also in history the new view says: “It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.”