Chapter 2

"Sky, where would you like to go, now that you're leaving the school? Grandma Cor asked. She had come to 'fetch' me, not my parents, oddly enough, but then again they really didn't like leaving Arbor, and they had my new little brother to keep them busy. Mock had been born last year, and was six months old now.

"You mean if I could pick my destination?" I asked, then without waiting, answered. "Earth, I guess."

"Any particular reason?"

"Dunno, just always felt a sort of connection, but haven't had much of a chance to explore it."

"Earth?"

"The connection, I guess, if that make sense?"

"I think so. Andy and I have that sort of connection to Arbor. So do your mom and dad, but they're too immersed in it to see it that way, I think. Andy and I both have very large parts of ourselves invested in Earth and our friends there too though, so we feel both those connections pulling on us."

"Then you do understand."

"Yes we do. Grandpa Dave understands too."

Lots of McKessons understood, apparently. A few weeks after grandma picked me up, I found myself on Earth with Great Aunt Serenity. She seemed like an odd choice to be giving me a tour of Earth, as I didn't really think of her as having much to do with it. Perhaps she had a neutral perspective that folks felt would serve me best.

There were now a lot of McKessons living on Earth, but most of them were sort of pseudo-McKessons, really. With Great-great grandpa A.J. And Great-great uncle Ambrose supposedly dead for decades, and Great-great uncle Aaron supposedly deceased of old age for a couple decades now, the aunts and uncles were mostly Hallidays, Aillards and other McKesson clan-kin rather than blood relatives. Great Uncle Michael was still on Earth, or at least in that facet. He spent a lot of time on Islandia though, or in space. There were lots of others, Andersons, Pooles, Parkins, the list was long, and they were 'family', but they weren't really McKessons. Some of the greats were really great-greats, but I didn't like to bother with keeping track that close. Family is family, and so was near-family.

In that soup of family and near-family, the search for a place for me shouldn't have been all that big a deal. I was Skye Elizabeth McKesson, acknowledged granddaughter of Dave McKesson. My name was spelled with an E on Earth, as in the Isle of Skye, and I kind of liked it that way. I adopted the spelling, except on Arbor. I was a member of a family as rich and famous as any on Earth and I was offered a place at all the prestigious private schools. I could have literally gone anywhere. The question was where?

"This is where it all began," Aunt Serenity announced when we pulled up in front of the old, somewhat disheveled house with an overgrown lawn in front and a faded picket fence wrapping most of it. "This was where your Grandpa Dave grew up."

I had some memories, cobbled together out of fleeting impressions left over from my mind-to-mind sessions with Grandpa Dave and Grandma Ginny, but they weren't distinct enough to generate an emotional response over the changes I saw. The house was still in the family, but it had been let 'go to seed' on purpose, to make it less of a magnet to those for whom it had become something of a mecca. The McKesson family fans and the conspiracy theorists alike.

I had stronger memories of the little garden in the back and I found myself not wanting to go back there and shatter them, even if they weren't my memories to begin with.

"It doesn't seem like much," I said softly.

"It's not, in and of itself. The people were the important part, not the place. That's usually true anywhere you go."

"I suppose," I admitted. "What's next?"

"The Green Horn Creek house." Serenity did a careful but quick 180 degree turn in place. The Obsidian Arcturus was Obsidian Motors latest in their long line of high-powered street-to-orbit private grav cars. It had been waiting for us at the gravport when we'd arrived a few hours earlier. I'd already had a tour of beautiful downtown Angels Camp. Some of the places here were McKesson family legends. Mike's Pizza sounded intriguing, this I knew.

I knew that as Obsidian Motors, Obsidian Aerospace, Guardian Gravitics and the other McKesson family businesses centered around the original DeWitt Road properties had prospered, so had Angels Camp. It had become a bedroom community for a good number of the people who worked for the new companies. Over the years since Grandpa Dave had masterminded the revelations they sprang up out of, a lot of the work had moved away to more industrialized areas and then into space. Angels Camp had gone back to being a sleepy community at the fringes of the larger hustle and bustle of the world.

A lot of changes had taken place in Angels Camp and the surrounding area during those years. Some of them were specific to the area and the people who lived here, while others were just indicative of the times and the technology. Grandpa Dave had complained about how hard it was to get a driver's license when he was a teenager here. These days you could get your surface permit at thirteen. Antigravity and gravitic shielding had been responsible for those changes. Well mostly. The fact that your grav car was part of the local, regional and global Q-nets and the onboard computers constantly monitored you and your surroundings, ready to step in and override the controls to prevent accidents or high-risk maneuvers that could lead to accident or injury had a lot to do with it too.