Ioan and May walked hand-in-paw along the rim of a lake. It had settled neatly into a bowl formed by three peaks, and around it wound a deer-trail, which was only wide enough to permit them to walk side by side half the time. For the rest of the hike, Ioan walked in front, guiding May, pointing out roots, and eventually helping her clamber up onto a rock out-cropping at the point where the lake drained into the lands below through a chattering creek.
They sat in silence for a while, the sun warming their backs as it slid down toward the peaks that ey supposed must be west.
"Why did you bring me out here, Ioan?"
Ey lazily scanned the far shore of the lake, picking out the places where the deer trail dipped shyly down to the edge of the water before darting back up into the trees.
"I needed to focus on something further away than a piece of paper," ey said at last. "Further than the lilacs in the yard."
"And the interviews you have done have not helped?"
Ey shrugged.
"Cabin fever, perhaps?"
"Maybe, yeah."
"Ioan, I am not the one who is supposed to be asking questions," she chided.
"Right, sorry. It's a little bit cabin fever, I guess. I've spent an awful lot of time cooped up in the house and just sending forks out to run the interviews. It's one thing to remember being outside, but another still to have to make that memory align with not having left the house in days."
The skunk nodded, picking a pebble from near her paw and tossing it into the lake. "I understand. It think that I am perhaps more comfortable inside than you are, but I am still happy that you brought me here.
"Glad you like it. It's an abandoned sim that I visited decades back and still had the coordinates to. It reminded me of how my grandfather described his time in Slovenia." Ey crumpled of the wrapper to eir sandwich and returned it to the backpack that ey'd brought with. "It's just good to get out and change contexts, I guess."
May nodded.
"It's just..." Ey frowned, hunting for the words. "It's just that we have limitless time and limitless space and all the creativity we could hope to use, and still I sometimes feel trapped, as though I'm stuck in this tiny, constrained space where I can barely move and can't hope to stretch out. Does that make sense?"
"It is not a feeling I share, but I can see how one might," May said, carefully shifting the backpack from between them to the other side of her so that she could lean against em. "It is the feeling one gets when one asks "is that all there is?" and the answer comes back "yes, of course"."
"Yeah," ey murmured. As May rested her head against eir shoulder, ey turned eir head to place a kiss between her ears. Ey did not remember when ey had first started doing that, but it had long since become habit. Every time ey remembered that it had been an act that was out of character for em until May moved in, some part of em raced around in circles to try and find out what had changed and why.
"It's been happening more and more since the idea of the launches first started to take off. It happened before, too, but I think coming to the understanding that this *isn't* all there is, that there's also stuff outside the System and far away from the Sun...well, it just kind of rubbed my face in it. "You're stuck here, Ioan Bălan," it says. "You're not going to be on the launch, and even if you were, that wouldn't be you. There'd be no merging of experiences"."
May laughed. "I find freedom in that. Not only will I not have to do any of that work, but I will also get to be one of the shitheads that stays behind."
"Do not think too hard, Ioan. I can tell you now that it was before you uploaded." She sounded as though speaking from a dream. "That was the last time that you could have made the choice to stay behind. It is some of Dear's beloved irreversibility. You cannot un-upload. You cannot upload part of the way. There is no going and there is no back, remember? Now, though, you are here. If you are busy working and a friend is throwing a party, why, just fork! You do not need to worry about whether or not you need stay behind or join them. You can do both."
"But with the launch, you had the decision to stay behind."
"Yes, it was a new experience. New in these last two centuries."
"You're so weird," ey said, then laughed as she elbowed em in the side.
"We are both weird." She poked at eir thigh with a claw. "That includes you, my dear. We both stayed behind, and we both sent along cocladists so far diverged from us that they might as well have become new individuals."
"Of course," May said, sitting up and swinging her legs up onto the rock so that she could sit cross-legged, facing em. "He was brilliant. Intensely, incredibly brilliant. I am sure that he still is, but that brilliance is now coiled all around itself in the way that happens with prophets throughout the ages."
Ey turned to face May in turn. "Who do you think that weighed more on, though? Dear or Codrin?"
The skunk dipped her muzzle. "That is difficult to say. They are each sensitive in their own ways. Dear, I imagine, is feeling a lot of old fears confirmed, and old memories come to roost. I worry that, some day, that fox will spin itself into a whirlwind and dissipate into the atmosphere."
"I expect ey's struggling, in eir own way. Were I confronted with something like that, I'd be able to keep it together throughout the interview, but afterwards, I'd have to spend a lot of time just decompressing."
"You spend all your time up here--" Ey tapped at eir temple. "--and being confronted by the ways in which that can go wrong to someone who was, as you say, brilliant, can really mess with you. I bet ey holed himself up in that office for a while and paced a ring into the floor."
If ey had been expecting a laugh or a smile from the skunk, ey was disappointed. She simply nodded and looked off into the water again. "There is nothing wrong with that, Ioan. We have known that disconnect. We have known the feeling of a mind coiled in on itself. That is frightening to all of us. It *should* be frightening."
Suspecting that May would appreciate it and not knowing what to say to that, ey simply reached out and took one of her paws in eir hands.
Ey didn't know how long they sat there like that. Ey didn't remember what ey was thinking, or where ey looked. All ey remembered was the satiny feeling of May's pawpads against eir skin, and the sound of a quiet lake.
May broke the silence first. "Ioan, my tail is falling asleep. Can we go back?"
Ey nodded, levering emself up onto eir knees, then onto eir feet so that ey could help the skunk to her feet.
She laughed and winced once she stood, rubbing at the base of her tail. "All pins and needles."
"I can't even begin to imagine how that must feel in a tail."
"And I cannot imagine how to describe it. Help me down, and we can walk back."
"Walk? You don't want to just leave?"
"If you are going to drag me out on a hike, then so help me God, take me on the hike, Ioan."
They walked back along the deer trail, back the way they came. The water was now to their left, and where their eyes had been drawn to it before, they were now drawn to the pine forest that rimmed the lake. Trees reached straight for the sky from their brown bed of needles.
And as they walked, faster than before, May talked. "I worry about them. Both launches, both families. I worry about me and you. The interview with Ezekiel, yes, but both of them, both Castor and Pollux, are starting to circle around the center of it all."
"All three of us --- Dear#Castor, Dear#Pollux, and I --- have warned all three of you Bălans that there is a lot behind this." She was panting now as she walked, faster and faster. She had taken the lead, and was drawing em along behind her as she spoke. "We couch it in humor and jokey language as though they are riddles for you to solve, but Ioan, I worry that all it will do in the end is sow distrust between our two clades."
Ioan worked to keep up with May as she nearly jogged around the last bend in the path. "We can stop, May. If you don't think it'll lead to anything good, then we can just stop. We can look elsewhere. We can go back to interviewing musicians and astronomers and shitty authors. There are still stories to tell, and I'm sure that they will lead to just as many myths."
She shook her head. Or at least Ioan thought she did. It was hard to tell, with the two of them jouncing along down the path.
"May, please, at least slow down! You're going to pull me over."
Rather than slowing down, the skunk skidded to a stop, leading Ioan to nearly collide with her. As it was, ey had to stumble to the side to keep from bowling her over.
Ey frowned at the stricken expression on her face, the tear-tracks in cheekfur. "Do you want us to stop? Stop talking to Odists? If you want to help guide us to better places to look, we can take a break from it."
She was already shaking her head. "You are not going to be able to avoid it, Ioan. I am worried, and I will not stop being worried, but you will not be able to avoid the inevitable end of this line of thought. You did not know it, but you were not even able to avoid the beginning of it."
