Babylon's Ashes

When Djuna’s shower water stopped, he poured the first pancake onto the grill, two eggs beside it. They took almost exactly the same time to cook, so that he could turn them both, one with either hand. It was showing off, but when Mei saw it, it always made her laugh. Djuna’s hectoring voice came from the hall, moving the girls through their morning rituals—washing faces, combing hair, getting dressed. When they all came to the table, Prax would be the only one not wearing his work clothes. The girls made fun of him for lazing around in his robe, even though he’d been the one to do the most, and he pretended to be offended even though he really wasn’t.

After breakfast, Djuna would take the girls to school on her way to work, leaving him alone to clean away the dishes, take his own shower, and prepare for the lab. It wasn’t something they’d ever discussed. It was just the way their own particular domestic habits had formed. Prax liked it like that. He’d had more than enough adventures in his life. He got more work done when things were predictable.

He sweetened his tea with the same syrup he drizzled over the pancakes, put the plates and glasses filled with food in their places, and was just sitting down with his rice and eggs when Djuna came in, driving the girls before her like a cattleman in the tradition of mothers all through history.

Mei was a little quieter than usual, Natalia a little brighter, but both within the error bars. Djuna turned down the music while they ate and talked. When the conversation turned dangerous, Prax didn’t notice.

“What does resistance mean?” Natalia asked. Her face was serious and sober, and on so small a person, vaguely comic.

“It’s a measure of how electrons flow through something,” Prax said. “You see, we think about current flowing through wires kind of the same way we think of water flowing through pipes. It’s actually more complicated than that when you get down to quantum levels, but it’s a very, very good model.”

“And models are how we make sense of things,” Natalia said. Proud of herself for remembering the catchphrase that he and Djuna had been using with the girls for so long. He didn’t think Natalia was old enough to understand it yet, but she would be. And Mei sometimes surprised him with her insights.

“Yes,” Prax said. “Exactly. So resistance is about how hard or easy it is for electrons to flow through something.”

Natalia’s little brow furrowed. Mei was looking away and Djuna had gone very still. Which was odd. But he could tell he wasn’t making sense to the girls, so he tried again.

“So imagine you’ve got a big straw,” he said, demonstrating with his hands. “And when you put it in your juice, it’s really easy to drink. But then you take a teeny little skinny straw, you have to try really hard to get the same amount of juice up out of the glass. The big straw is like something without much resistance, and the little straw is like something with a lot of resistance.”

Natalia nodded very seriously. It was like he could see her trying to solve the puzzle of it. “Is it a good thing or a bad thing?” she said.

Prax laughed. “It’s not good and it’s not bad. It’s just part of how the universe is. Now, if you had a circuit where you wanted really low resistance and you didn’t have it, that wouldn’t be a very good circuit. But only because it didn’t do what you wanted. If you had something where you wanted high resistance, maybe that very same circuit would be perfect. It’s not about right and wrong. Just how things work.”

“It’s time to go,” Djuna said, and her voice seemed sharp. It was the voice she used when something was bothering her. And there were still almost fifteen minutes before they really needed to be out the door. Maybe something was going on at the biofilms lab he didn’t know about.

When they’d left, he turned his music back on, cleared the dishes, showered, dressed himself for work. The rooms seemed wrong without them, and the extra time by himself empty and somehow ominous. All the way to the tube station, he worried about whether Mei had remembered to take her medicine. He’d planned to use the tube ride to review the new datasets on the harvester yeast, but his eyes kept skipping off his hand terminal and up to the screens across from him. A newsfeed was spooling, but he couldn’t hear the words over the rattling of the tube and the voices of the other commuters. Ships were fighting, but he couldn’t tell where. Earth. Iapetus. Pallas. Ceres. Mars. In the void between places, far distant from everything. They were all possible. The only thing he could be certain of was it wasn’t here, and that only because there weren’t any alerts blaring.